Throughout and above all, Heine was a poet. From first to last he was led by three angels who danced for ever in his brain, and guided him, singly or together, always. They were the same as in “Atta Troll” he saw in the moonlight from the casement of Uraka’s hut--the Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the blonde and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm of the oasis, with all the fragrance of the East between her breasts: “O, you dead Jewess, I love you most, more than the Greek goddess, more than that fairy of the North.”[4]
[4] “C’est le Bible, plus que tout autre livre,” a well-known French critic wrote, “qui a façonné le génie poétique de Heine, en lui donnant sa forme et sa couleur. Ses véritables maîtres, ses vrais inspirateurs sont les glorieux inconnus qui ont écrit l’Ecclesiaste et les Proverbes, le Cantique des cantiques, le livre de Job et ce chef-d’œuvre d’ironie discrète intitulé: le livre du prophète Jonas. Celui qui s’appelait un rossignol Allemand niché dans la perruque de Voltaire fut à la fois le moins évangélique des hommes et le plus vraiment biblique des poètes modernes.”
Those genii of three ideal lands danced for ever in his brain, and that is but another way of indicating the opposition that lay at the root of his nature. From one point of view, it may well be, he continued the work of Luther and Lessing, though he was less great-hearted, less sound at core, though he had not that element of sane Philistinism which marks the Shakespeares and Goethes of the world. But he was, more than anything else, a poet, an artist, a dreamer, a perpetual child. The practical reformers among whom at one time he placed himself, the men of one idea, were naturally irritated and suspicious; there was a flavour of aristocracy in such idealism. In the poem called “Disputation” a Capuchin and a Rabbi argued before the King and Queen at Toledo concerning the respective merits of the Christian and Jewish religions. Both spoke at great length and with great fervour, and in the end the King appealed to the beautiful Queen by his side. She replied that she could not tell which of them was right, but that she did not like the smell of either; and Heine was generally of the Queen’s mind. He sighed for the restoration of Barbarossa, the long-delayed German Empire, and his latest biographer asserts that he would have greeted the discovery of Barbarossa under the disguise of the King of Prussia, with Bismarckian insignia of blood and iron, as the realization of all his dreams. It is doubtful, however, whether the meeting would be very cordial on either side. It would probably be the painful duty of the Emperor, as of the Emperor of the vision in “Deutschland,” to tell Heine, in very practical language, that he was wanting in respect, wanting in all sense of etiquette; and Heine would certainly reply to the Emperor, as under the same circumstances he replied to the visionary Barbarossa, that that gentleman had better go home again, that during his long absence Emperors had become unnecessary, and that, after all, sceptres and crowns made admirable playthings for monkeys.