finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern
Italy, Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well
as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci,
the greatest of his successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and
despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists, there is little
modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European value. One of
the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars, Professor A. de
Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica (1874)
explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we
have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism;
and of Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) an orthodox historian declares
that his "religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of
which now deism, then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to
come forth." [1869] The naturalistic line is found to be continued
in Heinrich von Kleist, the unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der
Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of his time; and above
all in Heine, whose characteristic profession of reconciling himself
on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as "the Aristophanes of
heaven" [1870] serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of
his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient
clue to his serious convictions; and that "God is all that there is"
[1871] is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport
of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy
in Germany (1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit
of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany at once a literary
classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he himself said of the
return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that
a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a pathological phenomenon.
The use latterly made of Heine's deathbed re-conversion by
orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and
conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the
Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the context,
and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised
the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on
Börne--Werke, vii, 160). To the reader of the whole it is clear
that, while Heine's verbal renunciation of his former pantheism,
and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a "timid
atheism," might have been made independently of his physical
prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly
scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a
reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and
praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of
extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way
of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty
was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated
that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the
overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of
his poetic feeling--always as large a part of his psychosis as his
reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a
Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism "scarcely
distinguishable in any essential element from that of Voltaire
or Diderot" (Strodtmann, Heine's Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii,
386). "My religious convictions and views," he writes in the
preface to the late Romancero, "remain free of all churchism.... I
have abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I
have parted in love and friendship." In his will he peremptorily
forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on
that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in