[7] Ask the ruby to explain its fiery glow, ask violet and rose to analyse their perfume, but never seek to know of what the passion-flower and her dead lover talk so caressingly in the pale moonlight. Heine rises here to a level with Shelley, the sublimest of modern lyric poets. This is Shelley's note--the violin strain of an Ariel, clear and spirit-like and full, and entirely modern in its trembling, thrilling, almost morbid tenderness. XVIII LITERATURE AND PARTY Börne and many later critics have maintained that Heine was never in earnest about anything, and have condemned him accordingly. Setting aside slighter and unimportant causes, Börne's resentment was really aroused by what appeared to him to be Heine's determination not to espouse the cause of any party. He himself, as far as it was possible in those unparliamentary days, was an extreme partyman in literature. It is now a generally accepted, trite axiom, that art is its own aim and end, but then people were accustomed to look upon it as the handmaid of the great general aims of the day; and in all German literary productions of that period, important and unimportant, we feel exactly what it was that induced the writer to take up his pen. Even an author as strongly actuated by a purpose as Heine was, did not satisfy those who, like Börne, lived for their convictions. They applied to him the expression "talented but characterless" ("wohl ein Talent, aber kein Charakter"), which he ridicules so unmercifully in _Atta Troll_. Even in the introduction he alludes jestingly to the consolation for the great majority which is contained in the doctrine that respectable people are as a rule bad musicians, while, to make up for this, good musicians are anything but respectable people--and every one knows that respectability and not music is the important thing in this world. Elsewhere Heine maintains that it is, as a rule, a sign of a man's narrowmindedness when he is straightway discerned and held in high esteem by the narrow-minded majority as a man of character; the chief reason for such distinction being that a narrow, superficial, but always consistent philosophy of life is what the multitude most easily understands. Stoic firmness was assuredly not one of the qualities of Heine's nature. Allowing that in certain given circumstances he showed want of character, we proceed to what is really the vital question: Ought the poet to be a party-man?