About no recent poet has so much been said and sung as about Heinrich Heine. The youngest writer, who for the first time tries his pen, does not neglect to sketch with uncertain outlines the portrait of this poet; and the oldest sour-tempered professor of literature, who turns his back upon the efforts of the present with the most distinguished disapproval, lets fall on the picture a few rays of light, in order to prove the degeneration of modern literature in the Mephistophelean features of this its chief. Heine's songs are everywhere at home. They are to [Pg 6573] be found upon the music rack of the piano, in the school-books, in the slender libraries of minor officers and young clerks. However difficult it may be to compile an editio castigata of his poems, every age, every generation has selected from among them that which has delighted it. Citations from Heine, winged words in verse and prose, buzz through the air of the century like a swarm of insects: splendid butterflies with gayly glistening wings, beautiful day moths and ghostly night moths, tormenting gnats, and bees armed with evil stings. Heine's works are canonical books for the intellectual, who season their judgments with citations from this poet, model their conversation on his style, interpret him, expand the germ cell of his wit to a whole fabric of clever developments. Even if he is not a companion on the way through life, like great German poets, and smaller Brahmins who for every day of our house-and-life calendar give us an aphorism on the road, there are nevertheless, in the lives of most modern men, moods with which Heine's verse harmonize with wondrous sympathy; moments in which the intimacy with this poet is greater than the friendship, even if this be of longer duration, with our classic poets. It is apparently idle to attempt to say anything new of so much discussed a singer of modern times, since testimony favorable and unfavorable has been drained to exhaustion by friend and foe. Who does not know Heine,—or rather, who does not believe that he knows him? for, as is immediately to be added, acquaintance with this poet extends really only to a few of his songs, and to the complete picture which is delivered over ready-made from one history of literature into another. Nothing, however, is more perilous and more fatal than literary tradition! Not merely decrees and laws pass along by inheritance, like a constitutional infirmity, but literary judgments too. They form at last a subject of instruction like any other; a dead piece of furniture in the spiritual housekeeping, which, like everything that has been learned, is set as completed to one side. We know enough of this sort of fixed pictures, which at last pass along onward as the fixed ideas of a whole epoch, until a later unprejudiced investigation dissolves this rigid-grown wisdom, sets it to flowing, and forms out of a new mixture of its elements a new and more truthful portrait.