Heine’s genius, like that of Rückert, Platen, Chamisso, Kerner, Eichendorff, and other contemporaries mentioned in the preceding chapter, always tended a bit toward the morbid. These poets partook of the common malady of over-individualism. ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ The commonest and truest of truths is that man is a social animal. It is impossible for him to conduct his life except in company with others. The stories of hermits who have gone mad with loneliness have an excellent foundation in fact. And just as man seems meant to act socially, so he seems obliged to feel socially. It is a spiritual necessity to think a good deal of others. ‘Whoso saveth his soul shall lose it.’ The man who seeks to discover all the treasures within him usually ends by finding nothing there. And when it is the literary fashion (as it was in Schumann’s time) to look exclusively within one’s own soul, the age ends in helplessness with a moan of despair. This condition is implicit in the poetry of Heine. It is, as we have said, never the poetry of a hero. It can console us in our leisure; it can never inspire us in our labor. Yet the fault is not so serious as it may sound. Few people have contracted serious spiritual diseases from Heine’s poetry. The very simplicity and brevity of it prevent the reader from taking it too seriously. Read before the fire in the still hours of the evening Heine cannot harm the tenderest soul of a child of twelve. He was too genuine a humanist, as well as too excellent a literary man, to be utterly removed from health. He is a far more harmless amusement than Byron, for instance, just as he was a far greater poet than Byron. He was, of course, taken much more seriously in his day than we can take him in ours. Schumann in particular shows that he regarded his poet as a text for the highest tragedy and passion of which he as musician was capable. Yet even in his own time Heine’s influence must have been essentially healthy. For he had in abundance two qualities that always tend to keep men in the path of health, simplicity and humor. The mind that can think simply is not wholly diseased. And we need never fear the pessimist who can laugh at his own despair. I