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 those whose battle
they are fighting, and appear more than content to live among the
tyrants and oppressors they denounce. And we remind ourselves, further,
that what keeps the memory of William Morris sweet is not his
wall-papers, his beaten work of bronze or silver, his dreamy tapestries
of interwoven silks or verse, but just that strange attempt of his,
however vain, however often deceived, to convert the phrases of liberty
into realities, and to learn something more about democracy than the
spelling of its name.

Heine's first line of defence was quite worthless. It was the cheap and
common defence of the commonplace, fastidious nature that has hardly
courage to exist outside its nest of culture. His second line was
stronger, and it is most fully set out in the preface to his _Lutetia_,
written only a year before his death. He there expresses the artist's
fear of beauty's desecration by the crowd. He dreads the horny hand laid
upon the statues he had loved. He sees the laurel groves, the lilies,
the roses--"those idle brides of nightingales"--destroyed to make room
for useful potato-patches. He sees his _Book of Songs_ taken by the
grocer to wrap up coffee and snuff for old women, in a world where the
victorious proletariat triumphs. But that line of defence he voluntarily
abandons, knowing in his heart, as he said, that the present social
order could not endure, and that all beauty it preserved was not to be
counted against its horror.