READING HEINRICH HEINE

In the diplomatic sense: reading Reisebilder 109
farthings whenever he has to pay over a large sum’ (B 2, 549) explicitly relates
literary method to aspects of the economy. The insight this yields seems to
be that modern communication, bereft of the meanings still available in the
Norderney communities of Nordsee III or among the miners of Klausthal in
the Harzreise,issimply mechanical and superficial, and ultimately cynical.
Heine’s ironic defence of Scott (essentially that ‘anyone can write a bad
book’) recognizes the collapse of his style under the pressure of economic
necessity. The perception that ‘a few red, blue and green words are scattered
in vain into the colourless workaday discourse’ (B 2, 551)isremarkably close
to Kraus’s attack on newspaper reporters who have to drag in ‘a scrap of
poetry’ in their relentless pursuit of ‘atmosphere’: ‘One sees green, the other
sees yellow – they all see colours’. 28
At another level, however, beyond the corruption of the aesthetic by the
changing economy, the idea that Scott writes for money is morally and
politically damning. Heine claims that Scott’s plan for a biography of the
Emperor was conceived simply to solve his own financial difficulties rather
than to honour his obligations to his creditors. 29 That Heine deliberately
pursues this coincidence of themes is, if anything, confirmed when S. S.
Prawer comments, ‘That Scott planned his biography before his bankruptcy
clearly cuts no ice with this stern critic.’ 30 According to Heine,
the Life of Napoleon came into being in hungry haste, in bankrupt enthusiasm, a
book that was to be well paid for by the needs of a curious public in general, and
of the English government in particular. (B 2, 549)
Scott has simply sold his rhetorical colours to reactionary powers. Heine,
however, can call upon an alternative tradition in English literature. Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels provides another ‘parallel history’ through which the possibilities
of a ‘diplomatic meaning’ can be opened up. Swift’s satire finds
anew application when the Lilliputians in particular are read as emblems
of British small-mindedness towards Napoleon (Gulliver). In this parallel,
a critical current from an earlier period and the political or moral
symbols that are proper to it can be harnessed with unexpected relevance
for the present; but that is because the ‘land of freedom’ Heine had
greeted on his arrival in London is itself caught up in the contradictions of
modernity.
England is both progressive and reactionary, and progress in trade and
industry is no guarantee of liberalism in politics or law. Even its political
institutions ‘persist in a medieval condition, or rather in the condition
of a fashionable Middle Ages’ (B 2, 597). The English word ‘fashionable’
appears here in Heine’s German, linking the traditionalism of the English