without much of the vertigo of precipices, and he sees “M. de La Fayette and his white locks—­at different places, however,” for the latter were in a locket and the hero was in his brown wig.  Elsewhere he associates “the virtuous La Fayette and James Watt the cotton-spinner.”  The age of industry, commerce and the Citizen-King, in fact, was not quite suited to the poet who celebrated Napoleon; yet was Heine’s admiration of Napoleon not such as an epic hero would be comfortable under:  “Cromwell never sank so low as to suffer a priest to anoint him emperor,” he says in allusion to the coronation.  He respects Napoleon as the last great aristocrat, and says the combined powers ought to have supported instead of overturned him, for his defeat precipitated the coming in of modern ideas.  The prospect for the world after his death was “at the best to be bored to death by the monotony of a republic.”  Ardent patriots in this country need not go for sympathy to the king-scorner Heine.  For the theory of a commonwealth he had small love:  “That which oppresses me is the artist’s and the scholar’s secret dread, lest our modern civilization, the laboriously achieved result of so many centuries of effort, will be endangered I by the triumph of Communism.”  We have drifted into the citation of these sentiments because many conservatives think of Heine only as an irreconcilable destroyer and revolutionist, and do not care to welcome in him the basis of attachment to order which must underlie every artist’s or author’s love of freedom.  “Soldier in the liberation of humanity” as he was, that liberation was to be the result of growth, not of destruction.  As for Communism, it talks but “hunger, envy and death.”  It has but one faith, happiness on this earth; and the millennium it foresees is “a single shepherd and a single flock, all shorn after the same pattern, and bleating alike.”  Such passages are the true reflection of Heine’s keen but not great mind, miserably bandied between the hopes of a republican future, that was to be the death of art and literature, and the rags of a feudal present, whose conditions sustained him while they disgusted him.  If Heine fought, scratched and bit with all his might among the convulsions of the politics he was helpless to rearrange, he was equally mordant when he turned his attention to society, and perhaps more frightfully impartial.  He hated the English for “their idle curiosity, bedizened awkwardness, impudent bashfulness, angular egotism, and vacant delight in all melancholy objects.”  As for the French, they are “les comediens ordinaires du bon Dieu;” yet “a blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman.”  And Germany:  “Germany alone possesses those colossal fools whose caps reach unto the heavens, and delight the stars with the ringing of their bells.”  Thus shooting forth his tongue on every side, Heine is shown “in action” by this little cluster of “scintillations,” and the whole book is the shortest definition of him possible, for it makes the saliencies of his character jut out within a close compass.  It can be read in a couple of hours, and no reading of the same length in any of his complete writings would give such a notion of the most witty, perverse, tender, savage, pitiable and inexcusable of men.