the local and lesser poets of the last century have stayed at home—and yet in spite of this separation the mutual recriminations of these passionate poetical husbands and their obstinate national wives have never ceased. Again and again we hear the male partner making proposals to win his spouse to better and nobler ways, again and again he tries to "educate her up to himself" and endeavours to direct her anew, pointing out to her the danger of her unruly and stupid behaviour; again and again his loving approaches are thwarted by the well-known waywardness of the feminine character, and so all his friendly admonitions habitually turn into torrents of abuse and vilification. There have been many unhappy unions in the world, but the compulsory mésalliances of such great nineteenth-century writers as Heine, Byron, Stendhal, Gobineau, and Nietzsche with Mesdames Britannia, Gallia, and Germania, those otherwise highly respectable ladies, easily surpass in grotesqueness anything that has come to us through divorce court proceedings in England and America. That, as every one will agree, is saying a good deal.

The German Emperor, as I have said, had some justification for his action, some motives that do credit, if not to his intellect, at least to what in our days best takes the place of intellect; that is to say his character and his principles of government. The German Emperor appears at least to realize how offensive and, from his point of view, dangerous, the spirit of Heinrich Heine is to this very day, how deeply his satire cuts into questions of religion and State, how impatient he is of everything which the German Emperor esteems and venerates in his innermost heart. But the German people, on the whole, and certainly all foreigners, have long ago forgiven the poet, not because they have understood the dead bard better than the Emperor, but because they understood him less well. It is always easier to forgive an offender if you do not understand him too well, it is likewise easier to forgive him if your memory be short. And the peoples likewise resemble our womenfolk in this respect, that as soon as they are widowed of their poets, they easily forget all the unpleasantness that had ever existed between them and their dead husbands. It is then and only then that they discover the good qualities of their dead consorts and go about telling everybody "what a wonderful man he was." Their behaviour reminds me of a picture I once saw in a French comic paper. It represented a widow who, in order to hear her deceased husband's voice, had a gramophone put at his empty place at the breakfast table. And every morning she sat opposite that gramophone weeping quietly into her handkerchief, gazing mournfully at the instrument—decorated with her dead hubby's tasselled cap—and listening to the voice of the dear departed. But the only words which came out of the gramophone every morning were: Mais fiche-moi donc la paix—tu m'empêches de lire mon journal! (For goodness' sake, leave me alone and let me read my paper.) This, however, did not appear to disturb the sentimental widow at all, as little indeed as a good sentimental people resents being abused by its dead poet.

And how our poet did abuse them during his life! And not only during his life, for Heine would not have been a great poet if his loves and hatreds, his censure and his praise had not outlasted his life, nay, had not come to real life only after his death. Thus the shafts of wit and satire which Heine levelled at his age and his country will seem singularly modern to the reader of to-day. It is this peculiar modern significance and application that has been one of the two reasons for presenting to the English public the first popular edition of Heine's lyrico-satiric masterpiece "Atta Troll." The other reason is the fine quality of the translation, made by one who is himself well known as a poet, my friend Herman Scheffauer. I venture to say that it renders in a remarkable degree the elusive brilliance, wit, and tenderness of the German original.

The poem begins in a sprightly fashion full of airy mockery and romantic lyricism. The reader is beguiled as with music and led on as in a dance. Heine himself called it das letzte freie Waldlied der Romantik ("The last free woodland-song of Romanticism"); and so we hear the alluring sound of flutes and harps, we listen to the bells ringing from lonely chapels in the forest, and many beautiful flowers nod to us, the mysterious blue flower amongst them. Then our eyes rejoice at the sight of fair maidens, whose nude and slender bodies gleam from under their floods of golden hair, who ride on white horses and throw us provocative glances, that warm and quicken our innermost hearts. But just as we are on the point of responding to their fond entreaties we are startled by the cracking of the wild hunter's whip, and we hear the loud hallo and huzza of his band, and see them galloping across our path in the eerie mysterious moonlight. Yes, in "Atta Troll" there is plenty of that moonshine, of that tender sentimentality, which used to be the principal stock-in-trade of the German Romanticist.

But this moonshine and all the other paraphernalia of the Romantic School Heine handled with all the greater skill, inasmuch as he was no longer a real Romanticist when he wrote "Atta Troll." He had left the Romantic School long ago, not without (as he himself tells us) "having given a good thrashing to his schoolmaster." He was now a Greek, a follower of Spinoza and Goethe. He was a Romantique défroqué—one who had risen above his neurotic fellow-poets and their hazy ideas and wild endeavours. But for this very reason he is able to use their mode of expression with so much the greater skill, and, knowing all their shortcomings, he could give to his Dreamland a semblance of reality which they could never achieve. Only after having left a town are we in a position to judge the height of its church steeple, only as exiles do we begin to see the right relation in which our country stands to the rest of the world, and only a poet who had bidden farewell to his party and school, who had freed himself from Romanticism, could give us the last, the truest, the most beautiful poem of Romanticism.

It is possible, even probable, that "Atta Troll" will appeal to a majority of readers, not through its satire, but through its wonderful lyrical and romantic qualities—our age being inclined to look askance at satire, at least at true satire, at satire that, as the current phrase goes, "means business." Weak satire, aimless satire, humour, caricature—that is to say satire which uses blank cartridges—this age of ours will readily endure, nay heartily welcome; but of true satire, of satire that goes in for powder and shot, that does not only crack, but kill, it is mortally, and, if one comes to think of it rightly, afraid. But let even those who object to powder and shot approach "Atta Troll" without fear or misgiving. They will not be disappointed. They will find in this work proof of the old truth that a satirist is always and originally a man of high ideals and imagination. They will gain an insight into his much slandered soul, which is always that of a great poet. They will readily understand that this poet only became a satirist through the vivacity of his imagination, through the strength of his poetic vision, through his optimistic belief in humanity and its possibilities; and that it was precisely this great faith which forced him to become a satirist, because he could not endure to see all his pure ideals and the possibilities of perfection soiled and trampled upon by thoughtless mechanics, aimless mockers and babbling reformers. The humorist may be—and very often is—a sceptic, a pessimist, a nihilist; the satirist is invariably a believer, an optimist, an idealist. For let this dangerous man only come face to face, not with his enemies,