woman; but the true revolutionist must be the modern monk.  It is no good asking the revolutionist out to dinner; he will neither say anything amusing, nor know the difference between chalk and cheese.  But Heine’s good sayings went the round of Parisian society, and he loved the subtleties of wine and the table.  “That dish,” he said once, “should be eaten on one’s knees.”  Only on paper, and then rarely, was his heart lacerated by savage indignation.  Except for brief periods of poverty, in the Zion of exile he lived very much at ease, nor did the zeal of the Lord ever consume him.  Did it not seem that a true revolutionist was justified in comparing him to a boy chasing butterflies on the battle-field?  Here, if anywhere, one might have thought, was one of those charming poets whom the Philosopher would have honoured, and feasted, and loaded with beautiful gifts, and then conducted, laurel-crowned, far outside the walls of the perfect city, to the sound of flutes and soft recorders.

To such scorn Heine attempted the artist’s common answer.  He replied to Boerne’s revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet’s fastidious scorn of the smudgy revolutionist.  He tells us of his visit to Boerne’s rooms, where he found such a menagerie as could hardly be seen in the Jardin des Plantes—­German polar bears, a Polish wolf, a French ape.  Or we read of the one revolutionary assembly he attended, and how up till then he had always longed to be a popular orator, and had even practised on oxen and sheep in the fields; but that one meeting, with its dirt, and smells, and stifling tobacco smoke, sickened him of oratory.  “I saw,” he writes,

“I saw that the path of a German tribune is not strewn with roses—­not with clean roses.  For example, you have to shake hands vigorously with all your auditors, your ’dear brothers and cousins.’  Perhaps Boerne means it metaphorically when he says that, if a king shook him by the band, he would at once hold it in the fire, so as to clean it; but I mean it literally, and not metaphorically, when I say that, if the people shook me by the hand, I should at once wash it.”

We all know those meetings now—­the fraternal handshake, the menagerie smell, the reek of tobacco, the indistinguishable hubbub of tongues, the frothy violence, the bottomless inanity of abstract dissensions, that have less concern with human realities than the curve of the hyperbola through space.  We all know that, and sometimes, perhaps, at the sight of some artist or poet like Heine—­or, shall we say? like William Morris—­in the sulphurous crater of that volcanic tumult, we may have been tempted to exclaim, “Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!” But we had best restrain such exclamation, for we have had quite enough of the artistic or philanthropic temperaments that talk a deal about fighting the battle of the poor and the oppressed, but take very good care to keep at a clean and comfortable distance from