To such a mood, how consolatory must be the vision of that muffled figure, with the two-handed engine, always following close!  And to Heine himself the consolation came with especial grace.  He had been virulently assailed by the leaders of the party to which he regarded himself as naturally belonging—­the party for whose sake he endured the charming exile of Paris, then at the very height of her intellectual supremacy.  The exile was charming, but unbearable dreams and memories would come.  “When I am happy in your arms,” he wrote, “you must never speak to me of Germany, I cannot bear it; I have my reasons.  I implore you, leave Germany alone.  You must not plague me with these eternal questions about home, and friends, and the way of life.  I have my reasons; I cannot bear it.”  All this was suffered—­for a quarter of a century it was suffered—­just for an imaginary and unrealised German revolution.  And, if Heine was not to be counted as a German revolutionist, what was the good of it all?  What did the sorrows of exile profit him, if he had no part in the cause?  He might just as well have gone on eating, drinking, and being merry on German beer.  Yet Ludwig Boerne, acknowledged leader of German revolutionists, had scornfully written of him (I translate from Heine’s own quotation, in his pamphlet on Boerne): 

“I can make allowance for child’s-play, and for the passions of youth.  But when, on the day of bloody conflict, a boy who is chasing butterflies on the battle-field runs between my legs; or when, on the day of our deepest need, while we are praying earnestly to God, a young dandy at our side can see nothing in the church but the pretty girls, and keeps whispering to them and making eyes—­then, I say, in spite of all philosophy and humanity, one cannot restrain one’s indignation.”

Much more followed, but in those words lay the sting of the scorn.  It is a scorn that many poets and writers suffer when confronted by the man of action, or even by the man of affairs.  When it comes to action, all the finest words ever spoken, and all the most beautiful poems and books ever written, seem so irrelevant, as Hilda Wangel said of reading.  “How beggarly all arguments appear before a defiant deed!” cried Walt Whitman.  “Every man,” said Ruskin, “feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world count less than a single lovely action.”  The powerlessness of the word—­that, as I said, has been the burden of speakers and writers.  That is what drove Dante to politics, and Byron to Greece, and Goethe to the study of bones.

But Heine laid himself open more than most to such scorn as Boerne’s.  There was little of the active revolutionist in his nature.  About the revolutionist hangs something Hebraic (if we may still use Heine’s own distinction, never very definite, and now worn so thin), but Heine prided himself upon a sunlit cheerfulness that he called Greek.  He loved the garish world; he was in love with every