rom which they
sprang.

_Heinrich Heine: A Jew at Heart_

Heinrich Heine is the one writer of the first rank that Germany can
boast between the death of Goethe in 1832 and the advent of the
younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann, Hauptmann, and the rest,
sixty years later. To free himself from such a limitation as his
Jewish birth seemed to him to be, and with the more specific object,
it is said, of securing a government position in Prussia, Heine
allowed himself to become a convert to Christianity. "Judaism," he
said, "is not a religion; it is a misfortune." His conversion,
however, failed to profit him. He lost the fellowship of his own
people, and was contemptuously called "the Jew" by his enemies. In a
sense, the designation was entirely just. A Jew at heart Heine
remained to the day of his death. On his death bed, speaking of the
Jews he said: "Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years,
weeping always, suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet
clinging to him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh,
if martyrdom, patience, and faith in spite of trial can confer a
patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond any other. It
would have been absurd and petty if, as people accuse me, I had been
ashamed of being a Jew."

Not only was Heine a Jew in his instinctive racial sympathies, but his
work bears the indelible impress of Judaism. It is a distinctively
Jewish product. In it appear the buoyancy of spirit which sustained
him under suffering that would have crushed a less resilient temper;
the intellectual arrogance; the proneness to censure rather than to
commend; and especially the excessive self-consciousness;--all these
distinctively Jewish traits were in him exaggerated and helped to make
his work what it was. It is his self-consciousness, in particular,
that made his _Buch der Lieder_ his best production. In that
remarkable collection of lyrics Heine appears at his best, because the
ability to compose songs that are the spontaneous utterance of
emotion, at one and the same time personal and representative, is a
Hebrew heritage. The Hebrew genius was essentially lyric, rather than
epic or dramatic; and in consequence, the lyrics of ancient Hebrew
literature are its chief glory. In proof of this, we have but to
recall the dirges and triumph songs, the reflective lyrics, and the
liturgical hymns that compose the collection we know as the Psalms.
The excellence of b