an that, no
separation either, for a poet is--through his mother tongue--so
intimately wedded to his country that not even a separation can effect
any sort of relief in such a desperate case. All of them have tried
separation, all of them have lived in estrangement from their
country--we might almost say that only the local and lesser poets of the
last century have stayed at home--and yet in spite of this separation
the mutual recriminations of these passionate poetical husbands and
their obstinate national wives have never ceased. Again and again we
hear the male partner making proposals to win his spouse to better and
nobler ways, again and again he tries to "educate her up to himself" and
endeavours to direct her anew, pointing out to her the danger of her
unruly and stupid behaviour; again and again his loving approaches are
thwarted by the well-known waywardness of the feminine character, and so
all his friendly admonitions habitually turn into torrents of abuse and
vilification. There have been many unhappy unions in the world, but the
compulsory_ mesalliances _of such great nineteenth-century writers as
Heine, Byron, Stendhal, Gobineau, and Nietzsche with Mesdames
Britannia, Gallia, and Germania, those otherwise highly respectable
ladies, easily surpass in grotesqueness anything that has come to us
through divorce court proceedings in England and America. That, as every
one will agree, is saying a good deal._

_The German Emperor, as I have said, had some justification for his
action, some motives that do credit, if not to his intellect, at least
to what in our days best takes the place of intellect; that is to say
his character and his principles of government. The German Emperor
appears at least to realize how offensive and, from his point of view,
dangerous, the spirit of Heinrich Heine is to this very day, how deeply
his satire cuts into questions of religion and State, how impatient he
is of everything which the German Emperor esteems and venerates in his
innermost heart. But the German people, on the whole, and certainly all
foreigners, have long ago forgiven the poet, not because they have
understood the dead bard better than the Emperor, but because they
understood him less well. It is always easier to forgive an offender if
you do not understand him too well, it is likewise easier to forgive
him if your memory be short. And the peoples likewise resemble our
womenfolk in this respect, that as soon as they