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
Börne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious
scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Börne'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 Börne 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