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might have been made independently of his physical prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of his poetic feeling--always as large a part of his psychosis as his reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism
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(Strodtmann, Heine's Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii, 386).
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My religious convictions and views, he writes in the preface to the late Romancero,
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In his will he peremptorily forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in 1850.
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If I could only go out on crutches! he exclaimed; adding:
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Do you know where I should go? Straight to church. On his friends expressing disbelief, he went on:
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Certainly, to church! Where should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin Mabille. The story is told in England without the conclusion, as a piece of
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Christian Evidence.
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God and
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declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose vultures he knows and respects.
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Opium is also a religion, he writes in 1850.
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Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for the sick it is a very good religion.
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If the German people in their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the personal God? And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero he writes in 1851:
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Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there what I wanted--namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet. A few weeks before his death he signs a New Year letter,
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Nebuchadnezzar II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer. At this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying pietist got from him the answer:
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God will pardon me; it is his business. The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero, that
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over him--that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak turncoat--it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his case, which may serve as a supreme example of