Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/135

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

Weigand 129 has almost subsided, tho he has not yet forgiven Hegel personally. In 1831 he outlined for the first time the parallelism between the development of the French revolutionary movement and that of German philosophy since Kant. 12 In this comparison Hegelianism is conceived as the final movement of the cycle, the synthesis of the preceding stages: "Kant war unser Robespierre nachher kam Fichte mit seinem Ich, der Napoleon der Philosophic unter Schelling er- hielt die Vergangenheit mit ihren traditionellen Interessen wieder Anerkenntnis, sogar Entschadigung, und in der neuen Restaura- tion, in der Naturphilosophie, wirtschafteten die grauen Emigran- ten, die gegen die Herrschaft der Vernunft und der Idee bestandig intrigiert, der Mystizismus, der Pietismus, der Jesuitismus, die Legitimitat, die Roman tik, die Deutschtiimelei, die Gemiitlichkeit bis Hegel, der Orleans der Philosophic, ein neues Regiment be- grundete, oder vielmehr ordnete, ein eklektisches Regiment, worin er freilich selber wenig bedeutet, dem er aber an die Spitze ge- gestellt ist, und worin er den alten Kantischen Jakobinern, den Fichtischen Bonapartisten, den Schellingschen Pairs und seinen eigenen Kreaturen eine feste, verfassungsmassige Stellung anweist" (VII, 281-2). Here we see Heine returning once more, in the main, to the point of view of the chapter of 'Le Grand' which we have been analyzing. His enumeration of the various types of "gray emigrants" in the passage of 1831, affords the best commentary on the member- ship composing the second class of fools of a higher order. It is unnecessary for our present problem to pursue Heine's relation to Hegelianism any further. Suffice it to say that for many years Heine continues faithful to the views expressed in 1831. During the years when he was under the sway of Saint-Simonian- ism (1831-35) he tried to give weight to the Saint-Simonian doctrine of pantheism by claiming it as identical with the essence of Hegel's thought, divested of its scholastic terminology. Hegel's own figure, too, waxes to greater and greater proportions in Heine's imagination. Just as in the case of Goethe and Napoleon, the temporal, the human-all-too-human elements of Hegel's personality are gradually obliterated and there remains little but his name 12 The idea of this comparison Heine owed to Menzel, tho the latter,

obviously, had given it a different turn. Cf. Menzel, I, 315.