library. In the customs through which Prussia directed German commercial policy Heine saw the invention of Prussia for giving Germany the external, the so-called material unity needed for the Fatherland. The spiritual, the really ideal unity, unity of thought and feeling, she got from the censorship.

Coming to Aix-le-Chapelle, where Charlemagne lies buried in the great cathedral, he saw, in the little hour that he spent wandering through the streets, the real unchanged spirit of the Prussian soldier in the gray mantle with the high red collar of which the red still signified the blood of Frenchman, as Körner had sung in earlier days. He saw unchanged the wooden pedantic people with the frozen conceit in their faces, always moving at right angles, stalking around stiff and set-up, straight as candles, as if they had swallowed the sticks with which as children they had been beaten. In the long mustaches, he saw only a new phase of the pig tail that had once hung behind. He was not displeased with the new costume of the cavalry, especially with the pickelhaube, the helmet with the upstanding steel top, which was new in the Prussian uniform. That knightly innovation carried him back to the beginning of Romanticism beloved of Fouqué, Uhland, Tieck, to the pages and squires of the Middle Ages, to the crusades and the tournaments and the minnesingers, to the period of faith when as yet there were no newspapers. The only fault that he saw in the point of the helmet was that in time of thunder the most modern lightning of heaven might be attracted to this point on their romantic heads. At Aix-la-Chapelle, he saw again the hideous Prussian eagle still looking at him with poison-hate that he returned in full measure, promising that if it ever fell into his hands, he would tear out its feathers and hack off its claws and set it up high on a pole as a target for the Rhenish gunners. The Prussian eagle became for Heine the Prussian vulture that held him fast in its talons while it ate his heart out.

It is significant that Heine calls the Rhenish Sharpshooters to destroy the Prussian eagle. The Rhine provinces had never been in the full current of German life. The intellectual classes looked with ridicule and contempt on the ecclesiastical and feudal appanages of the Holy Roman Empire. The Jews had been freed by the Code Napoleon from the most humiliating mediaeval con

finement. The peasants had greatly benefited by the revolutionary land sales. All classes were ready to enjoy the obvious advantages of French rule, and to favor Napoleon's plans for the formation of a Confederation of the Rhine from which Prussia and Austria should be excluded. The Imperial Recess of 1803 gave Prussia twelve thousand square kilometres of new territory, but not the hearts of her five hundred thousand newly acquired subjects. Born at Düsseldorf, Heine was triply moved against Prussia, as the Rheinländer who resented Prussia's aggressive extension of her hegemony in the North, as the cosmopolitan who opposed the feudal obscurantism of the old Germany, as the Jew who hated the reactionary enemy of Napoleon who had brought to the Jews the new dispensation of his liberalizing and equalizing code.

Heine looked forward eagerly to the democratization of Germany, as of all Europe, to the freeing of the people from the bonds of hypocrisy in place of religion, tyranny in place of government, slavery in place of social restraint. He continually risked the punishment of censorship, litigation, confiscation, exile even for the privilege of freely expressing his free ideas. At the end of the chapters in Deutschland where he meets Barbarbossa, not dead through the centuries but holding ghostly court in the depths of the mountain Kyffhäuser, the poet, reviewing familiarly with the old King the sleeping soldiers with their steeds and ancient accoutrements, hearing the old man's atonishment at the lèse majesté of the treatment of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, suddenly forgets his own respect for majesty and breaks out with his deepest thoughts: "Sir Red Beard, you are an old fairy tale. Go to sleep. We shall free ourselves without you. The Republicans would laugh us to shame if they would see at our head such a ghost with sceptre and crown. The best thing for you would be to stay at home, here in the old Kyffhäuser. Now that I come to think the matter over carefully, we do not need any Kaiser." Thus Heine, in 1844, preparing for the great Revolution of 1848 that should shake the foundations of the thrones of Europe.

In Atta Troll, Heine's other great satirical cycle, which appeared in 1842, Heine attacks first, the moral-religiousTeutonic propaganda, the Tendenz-Poesie of the Suabian School, with its subordination of art to politics, second, the

new theories of communism always dear to the people who see themselves benefiting by the equal distribution of private property, and third, the degrading standards of the daily newspapers which were lowering to the comprehension and taste of the people the noble aristocracies of thought and art. The Suabian School set for itself as an ideal the exaltation of the Fatherland. Its ridiculous motto, "Frisch, from, fröhlich frei" tickled Heine's sense of humor even while it excited his anger. Heine never

failed to take advantage of the opportunity to poke fun at the Deutsch-tümler, who made a business of patriotism, to laugh at their Teutomania, their excision of Latin vocabulary, their scorn of Latin culture, so irritating to the cosmopolitan in Heine, their puffed up middle-class goodness, their monopoly of political and moral virtue, their boundless conceit, their absurd form, their praise of the unique and temperate virtues of Würtemberg, with its ideal in the cult of the Turngemeinde. Heine hated their politics; he hated the wolves and the donkeys who fluted songs of liberty, the patriotic ultra-nationalists of the ChristianPatriotic-New German School. Heine hated their politics but he laughed at their art. He never tired of ridiculing their iron larks and wooden lyres. He played maliciously with their cloudy thought, their empty metaphors, their bad Latin. As he himself says of Lessing, his polemics have kept many a poet from well-merited oblivion. Freiligrath would probably be utterly forgotten were it not for Heine's constantly recurring use of his unfortunate image of the princely Moor in battle array coming out of his shimmering white tent like the darkened moon out of the shimmering door of the clouds, an image that Heine slyly uses on every possible occasion, reaching the height of the ridiculous in the Twenty-sixth chapter of Atta Troll, when the princely Moor has become a negro who has acquired a fat, round belly which shows through his white shirt like the darkened moon appearing between the white clouds.

Tendenz behind everything German, the politicalpoetic, the political-religious, the political-sociological, the political-national satirized in Atta Troll, hateful to Heine as to Goethe and to all other great, liberal cosmopolitan souls who look beyond the narrow, national borders to the wide international fraternity, these leading to the Chris

tian-Germanic theory of state, would be as hateful to Heine were he living today-these causes and effects at once of the state of the German mind which culminated in the catastrophe of the world war and which the keenness of Heine's genius not only foresaw but spent and broke itself in attacking. The Kaiser and modern Germany would have had scant sympathy from the Hegelian Heine who believed in men become Gods through knowledge, of a God made self-conscious through men's knowledge of him, who would see in the haughty men of action but the unconscious servants of the men of thought. Heine living today would argue that it was highly sensible for a methodical people like the Germans to have had first their philosophy and then their war, realizing that the heads that had been useful for completing their philosophy could later be broken in battle, whereas the heads that were broken in battle would not be of much use later for philosophy. He would have launched the deadliest arrows of his unique and incomparable wit at that kultur-philosophy of hatred and exclusiveness and pride.

Heine's words written in the first half of the nineteenth century are true, for us in the first half of the twentieth century because he alone among the crowd of parasites, court poets, opportunists, journalists serving only the daily need and the low standard of the daily papers saw the truth in Germany and had the courage and the boldness to speak the truth in the face of censorship and exile. He was indeed a voice crying in the wilderness, and the world that has come through five years of agony reads again with solemn interest and profound conviction the words that won for him in his own day perpetual exile from the Germany that he loved in spite of her faults. In the words of his own "Lost Sentry " Heine saw himself truly as the last sentry in the battle for freedom, who held out faithfully for thirty years, who fought without a hope of victory, who knew that he would never come safe back home, who whistled his impudent, mocking rhymes to wile away the lonesomeness of the solitary nights-the lonesomeness and the fear. Wakeful, his weapon in his arms, he watched for the approach of the enemy, wounding him often, as often wounded, falling at last and leaving his post vacant, falling unconquered, with unbroken weapons but with a broken heart. BEULAH B. AMRAM.

"E. A."-A MILESTONE FOR AMERICA

BY PERCY MACKAYE

THEY do it another way, there-over there in the leisured isles where the beauty of English was born. There the imagemakers of our speech are more than isolated singers, hermits of unfocussed populations, hurried out of knowledge of one another and their goal in common; there, rather, they are neighbors in a timeless community of craftsmanship, where masters and apprentices are nudgingly conversant with one another's work, its motives and methods-conversant to the keen point of conversation, roaring hot or cooled in reminiscence, not seldom sly or malicious, yet always spoken, as it were, by the family fireside, on the flickering verge of which the General Public takes seat in the circle as a sort of poor relation.

So it has been, over there, time out of mind.

Such like talk there was at the Mermaid, about which far-distant poor relations are still gossiping in print. So the pens of a Boswell and a Lamb converse, rather than write, of poets who, by that token, are still living personalities. So Yeats, writing in our day, conveys-as by a rhythmic speaking aloud-the depth and charm of his friend and countryman, "A. E.”

No such intimate home-circle tradition exists for us in America, where the critic as neighbor and fellow-craftsman is overlorded by the critic as reporter and advertiser. Perhaps a million miles of metal wire somehow account for it. Perhaps, as our conversation has become largely telephonic, so our nutrition in literature grows accordingly Literary-Digestive, and our perspective of criticism takes its range from summits of the Weekly Supplements.

"And why have you come to our country?" asked the reporter of Cardinal Mercier at the dock. "I have come in hopes to know America better, especially of course the work of your sculptors and painters and poets."