READING HEINRICH HEINE

Scheherazade’s snapshots: Lutetia 199
are presented walking on, arm in arm, they in their turn are moralized as
figures of reconciliation.
In Article XXXVII, Heine’s account of Léopold Robert’s painting ‘Les
Pêcheurs’ (‘The Fishermen’) elaborates both the details of the print and his
own view of the artist much more fully. To the extent that the fishermen of
the title represent ‘vassals of poverty’ (B 5, 377) and citizens of want, they
join the other representations of the working class in Lutetia as an emblem
of communism. Heine explicitly compares this last painting by Robert,
who had committed suicide shortly after its completion, with his earlier
painting of reapers. Its summery landscape and happy peasants are replaced
by the winter harbour of Chioggia and its poverty. Heine recalls seeing ‘Les
Pêcheurs’ for the first time when it was shown for the benefit of the poor
and in memory of the artist. Returning to his own memories of his death,
Heine conjectures that Robert committed suicide for aesthetic reasons – ‘he
died of a lacuna in his capacity for artistic representation’ (B 5, 379). This
provides a new account of the distinction between historical painting and
genre painting. In an earlier essay on Robert in Französische Maler, Heine
suggests that historical painting, based on biblical or mythological as well as
literally historical subjects, had traditionally given expression to a ‘profound
thought’ (B 3, 52); genre painting on the other hand had presented themes
from popular life which permitted picturesque local colour. Heine had
claimed that Robert’s work defeated the distinction between the immediacy
of genre and the intellectual seriousness mediated by historical paintings.
Robert’s peasants are seen as the focus of immense vitality, so that ‘Les
Moissoneurs’, as described in Französische Maler, becomes ideological – a
Saint Simonian celebration of the body (B 3, 54–6) –and hence attains
the dignity of historical painting through the representation of a profound
thought.
In Lutetia,however, Robert’s oeuvre is finally dismissed as genre painting.
The artist has been made desperate by his inability to emulate Raphael and
Michelangelo. In Heine’s view ‘Les Pêcheurs’ is merely composed from
finely executed details, but therefore lacks unity (B 5, 379) and higher
harmony. The same accumulation of detail and its relation to a significant
structure is in its turn a problem for Heine’s reconstruction of his Paris
journalism. Like the anecdote of Louis-Philippe’s letter to Charles X, the
blurring of the distinction between history and genre, and its subsequent
restoration in the Lutetia article provide an important commentary on
Heine’s own handling of ‘generic’ material. If Robert’s last picture lacks
the unity of a profound idea, it is because for him the scene of poverty
cannot be read as the emblem of an historical force. Heine recognizes its