READING HEINRICH HEINE

110 Reading Heinrich Heine
constitutional monarchy and the absence of any social revolution in British
history (ibid.) to the fashionable but superficial style of the luxury commodities
he admires in the shops. Heine’s critical reading of the city here
attains an insight that will return in his account of the fashion for renaissance
pastiche in the Paris of the 1840s. Recognizing the relevance of Gulliver
and of the polite parallel talking of the House of Lords goes beyond the
nod-and-a-wink of the mnemonics encouraged in Ideas: The Book of Le
Grand. The London experience takes to new heights Heine’s recognition
that traditional meanings have been lost to modernity. Now even supposedly
medieval practices are merely ‘fashionable’, and writing is threatened
by economic necessity. In realizing this, Heine’s last Reisebild faces up to the
situation of writing in this new condition of liberal economic and political
constraint by displaying the very methods that the English liberal economy
has devised for itself. Like London, England as read by Heine becomes
itself the instance of ‘naked earnestness’, undisguised, as it were unlayered,
its own parallel.