Victor Hugo, for his
part, did not find it so: he says that the years 1831 and 1832 have,
in relation to the revolution of July, the aspect of two mountains,
where you can distinguish precipices, and that they embody "la
grandeur revolutionnaire." The cooler spectator from Hamburg inspects
at Paris "the giraffe, the three-legged goat, the kangaroos," without
much of the vertigo of precipices, and he sees "M. de La Fayette and
his white locks--at different places, however," for the latter were
in a locket and the hero was in his brown wig. Elsewhere he associates
"the virtuous La Fayette and James Watt the cotton-spinner." The age
of industry, commerce and the Citizen-King, in fact, was not quite
suited to the poet who celebrated Napoleon; yet was Heine's admiration
of Napoleon not such as an epic hero would be comfortable under:
"Cromwell never sank so low as to suffer a priest to anoint him
emperor," he says in allusion to the coronation. He respects Napoleon
as the last great aristocrat, and says the combined powers ought to
have supported instead of overturned him, for his defeat precipitated
the coming in of modern ideas. The prospect for the world after his
death was "at the best to be bored to death by the monotony of a
republic." Ardent patriots in this country need not go for sympathy to
the king-scorner Heine. For the theory of a commonwealth he had small
love: "That which oppresses me is the artist's and the scholar's
secret dread, lest our modern civilization, the laboriously achieved
result of so many centuries of effort, will be endangered I by the
triumph of Communism." We have drifted into the citation of these
sentiments because many conservatives think of Heine only as an
irreconcilable destroyer and revolutionist, and do not care to welcome
in him the basis of attachment to order which must underlie every
artist's or author's love of freedom. "Soldier in the liberation of
humanity" as he was, that liberation was to be the result of growth,
not of destruction. As for Communism, it talks but "hunger, _envy_
and death." It has but one faith, happiness on this earth; and the
millennium it foresees is "a single shepherd and a single flock, all
shorn after the same pattern, and bleating alike." Such passages are
the true reflection of Heine's keen but not great mind, miserably
bandied between the hopes of a republican future, that was to be the
death of art and literature, and the rags of a feudal present, wh