HEINRICH HEINE IN LONDON.

[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR.")

Sin,—Ben Jenson loved Shakespeare as much as mortal could love bia "on this side idolatry." Judging from the warmth of his delightful appreciation of the genius of Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine's worship had no limits set to it. It adds to our pride in our national poet to know that one of the keenest intellects and most charming writers that even Germany has produced continually refers to him as the world's greatest mind.

We English can forgive Heine his reflections on our nation,

.piquant and pungent as they often are, for the sake of his love of Shakespeare, for the splendid tribute he paid to him, 'and also for his own fascinating genius; long as the world shall haat, with Heine as with Shakespeare,

"Age cannot wither nor custom stale Their infinite variety."

It is never safe to take Heine too seriously : lie abused his own country at times oven more than he did us. In the chapter in which he says we are such a disagreeable people that Ocean would long ago have swallowed us only he feared such a terrible indigestion would be the result ; in the same chapter be describes his delight in finding, when he stayed in London, that everything everywhere reminded him of Shakespeare, so

much so that he seemed to be the presiding and all-pervading genius loci.

" Ueberall umrauscht uns dort der Fittig seines Genius, aus jeder bedeutenden Erscheinung gritsst uns sein klaros Auge, und boi grossartigen Vorflillen glauben wir ihn manehmal nicken zu Wien, leise nieken, leise und Iiichelnd."

We can also " gently nod and smile " when Heine flings at us his waspish-

" Mother Nature never entirely disinherits her creatures, so having refused to the English all that is beautiful and lovable, after endowing them with neither voice for song nor sense to enjoy it, after providing thorn perhaps with only leather porter- holders in place of human souls—well, to make up for it she allowed them a great lump of national freedom, a genius for home comforts, and William Shakespeare."

Somewhere Heine says the difference between our England and the merry England of Shakespeare's time is owing to

our having taken to drink heavy beer and gruesome porter in place of the inspiriting juice of the grape. He loved a glass of good wine, and once when dining with his excellent publisher Campe, whom he alternately flattered and abused, his grace before or after meat was :—

" We thank Thee, mighty Lord of All, With grateful and deep emotion,

For creating the Rhine wine on the land, And oysters in the ocean."

He goes on to give thanks for other good things, including the lemon to squeeze on his oyster, but most of all he thanks the Lord for giving him such a dear good publisher who can feed a poor poet so royally.

Even Carlyle is hardly a greater hero-worshipper, in this case of Shakespeare, than was Heine, who seems to have been unfortunate in the weather when he lived in London in the spring of 1827—our springs can be bad, but, thank God, nothing to those of Edinburgh ! Heine, writing to a friend from Craven Street, says he " felt ill and cross and cold and had no fire "—he hated our smoky stone-coal fires—and in another /lace adds : " I could stomach nothing in England, neither the people nor the cooking; the reason for it was really in myself. I brought a good stock of ill-temper with me from home, and I increased it among a people who can only kill their boredom in the whirlpool of political and mercantile activity." Heine's gibes often get home! It was this ceaseless mercantile activity that Heine found so distracting in London ; lie bays somewhere: "Let the philosopher go to study London, but no poet." As a poet he wanted to stop and muse in our streets, to see Shakespeare nodding to him quietly from sonic old building; then somebody banged him in the back and another body prodded him in the stomach. No place this busy Cheapside, he says, for a poor poet I So he goes off in his droll way and weeps on Waterloo Bridge.

"The certainty, the exactness, the great madness, and the punctiliousness of life in England made me not a little un- happy; for just as the machines in England appear like human beings, so do the human beings appear like

machines." All this made him so miserable that as he " stood one evening on Waterloo Bridge and looked down on the

waters of the Thames" he felt "so woebegone that the hot

tears gushed from my eyes. . . . They fell down into the Thames and were carried away into the great sea which has

already swallowed up so many human tears without noticing them." Some day, when England is a German province, his countrymen will erect a statue to Heine on Waterloo Bridge to greet the New Zealander, for it was Heine who called into

being the Pan-Germanic idea—lie says he saw the day coming when Germany would not only be "over all" but all. In the meantime there can be no reason why we should not, and every reason why we should, mark the house where Heine

lived in London, viz., No. 32 Craven Street, Strand, which is. just as it was in the spring of 1827, and when Benjamin Franklin dwelt in the same street.

It seems to me that nobody can feel any real resentment at the pawky sayings of Heine about us: they are so delightfully amusing, e.g., where he says that God, having denied us any natural sun for nearly twelve months in the year, more than

made up for it 'by giving us that great spiritual sun, Shake- speare. But for that we should, indeed, be in a bad way in.

our, as he calls it, "Isle of Damnation, that Botany Bay without its warm climate, that stone-cold, qualm-giving, machine-buzzing, church-going, bad be-drunken England."

It was Heine who started the mistaken idea that the Germans discovered Shakespeare, but unconsciously, perhaps,.

if one can ever think of him as in that state, Heine himself disproves the idea. He came to London, he tells us, filled to the. brim with Shakespeare lore, imbibed from his earliest youth (von frithester Tugend); and to his amazement he finds, "not only educated people (Gebildete), but even the common folk, in fact everybody here (i.e., in England) knows the i m mortal dramas, even the fat ' Beefeater,' who, with his red coat and red face, acts as your guide to th ; Tower, as he shows you the dungeon behind the middle gate where Richard had his nephews, the young princes, murdered, even this ' Beefeater' refers you to Shake- speare for the details of the bloody tragedy." Then at West- minster Abbey the vestryman or sexton who takes you round " spricht immer von Shakespeare." And in spite of this our Teutonic friends want to claim our poet as really a von Shakespeare! No, Heine knew well enough in his heart that, stupid as he pretended to find us, we can all of us appreciate his Shakespeare, at least to some extent and in parts. At times one feels Heine goes so far as, rather grudgingly, to lend him to us; but only Hazlitt, he thinks, really under- stands him here, and perhaps Kean. He admits his soul was " powerfully moved " when Kean rushed distracted across the stage crying,

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"

Heine was a poet and a dreamer, but he dreamed greab, things—some of which have come, or are coming, to pass. His Pan-Germanic idea, what does be think of it now ? II he could now do more " Reisebilder " in his native land, be would imagine he had got by mistake into that " Tele of the Damned," that " Eng," that " narrow " England, when his

astounded ears heard all Germany buzzing with machinery and the Hammer of Thor clanging ceaselessly, fashioning the great mailed fleet which is to force old Neptune to swallow us, whether he likes it or not.

To get funds to put up a modest memorial to Heine on the house he dwelt in when in London is the object of this letter to the Spectator. We have obtained the permission of the owners of the house, the London and South Eastern Railway Company. The London County Council approves the idea, and will affix the tablet, merely recording that (L.0 C.) HEINRICH HEINE German Poet and Essayist (1779-1856) Lived Here 1827

The cost, Sir L. Gomm, the Clerk of the L.C.C., tells me, will be under ten pounds. I think many British admirers of Heine would like to help to pay for this tablet. The German Hospital in London is an -excellent institution, and what I propose is that any subscriptions sent to me, as Editor of The Publishers' Circular, 19 Adam Street, Strand, London,. should be acknowledged in that paper, also direct to the senders, and that after the cost of the memorial is defrayedt any surplus is to be given to the German Hospital, Dalston, E.

Yes, I was coming to that. I am sure somebody has already begun a letter to the Spectator to ask what Heine would think. about it. He would certainly say something sarcastic, we. may be sure of that, possibly--

"What! did I ask you for bread when alive That you give me this stone when I am dead P Well I put it up and be damned,

Only put on it, 'Here Heine was miserable."

But he had a warm, loving heart ; ho would remember happier• months in the same year spent at Ramsgate. Writing to J. H. Detmold in a letter dated Ramsgate, July 28th, 1827, he eays, " I am high up at present, on the last cliff at Ramsgate, :and I am sitting in a high balcony, and as I write I look down. -over the lovely wide sea, whose waves clamber up the rooks 'and roar their most joyous music for my heart. I tell you this, so that you may know that my good advice comes ,down to you. from a good healthy height. I am on the point .of leaving England, where I. have been since April, and I am ,going to pass through Brabant. and Holland and return in a -few months to Germany." He had already had a foretaste of Dutch life. " I was like to die of laughing," he says, " when I kissed the first pretty Dutch girl, and she stood still ;phlegmatically and said nothing but a, long-drawn myn- .heerl ' "

If Heine thought that some poor countryman or woman of -his, condemned by fate to be ill in this "Isle of Damnation," 'would: have even one "hot tear" dried through him, he would 'shrug-his shoulders about this memorial and say, " Weill As you like it."—I am, Sir, &e., R. B. MARSTON. Surrey Lodge, Denmark. Hill, S.E.

P.S.—To make a long letter longer, I must just mention (and how: Heine would have laughed at it !) that when I was trying to find out who could give us permission to put up the memorial I asked at No. 32 Craven Street if anybody knew Heinrich Heine, and they said, "No, doesn't live here." Then. - I ventured to ask if they thought any one else in the house: -would remember Heine, and they asked, "What is he ?" I' eatid he was a poet. "No poets here." Just as they were shutting me out one of them said, "How long ago was he here?" and when I replied, "About 80 years," that was the limit, and their looks said, "This fellow must be mad--or ..at least a poet I "