HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

xxxiv
^^ntrobutttotu
His direct political action was null,
and this is neither to be wondered at
nor regretted; direct political action is
not the true function of literature, and
Heine was a born man of letters. Even
in his favourite France the turn taken by
public affairs was not at all what he
wished, though he read French politics
by no means as we in England, most of
us, read them. He thought things were
tending there to the triumph of communism
; and to a champion of the idea
like Heine, what there is gross and
narrow in communism was very repulsive.
" It is all of no use," he cried on
his death-bed, " the future belongs to
our enemies, the Communists, and Louis
Napoleon is their John the Baptist."
" And yet,"—he added with all his old
love for that remarkable entity, so full
of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown
in England, the French people,
—"do not believe that God lets all this
go forward merely as a grand comedy.
Even though the Communists deny him
to-day, he knows better than they do,
that a time will come when they will
learn to believe in him." After 1831,
his hopes of soon upsetting the German
Governments had died away, and his
propagandism took another, a more
truly literary, character. It took the
character of an intrepid application of
the modern spirit to literature. To the
ideas with which the burning questions
of modern life filled him; he made all