2 - Wise fools

Summary

British writers continue to figure in Heine's letters of the early 1820s. He asks his friend Moses Moser to send him some volumes of Gibbon (23 May 1823); quotes from Sterne's Sentimental Journey in the original English – ‘I am positive I have a soul’ (to Moser, 30 September 1823); acknowledges the acquisition of a luxury edition of Scott's Lady of the Lake (to Rudolf Christiani, 26 January 1824); wrily confesses that he knows the titles of Scott's novels better than those of the corpus juris (to Christiani, 7 March 1824); and names Walter Scott along with Goethe as the only living author to whose manuscripts a publisher should give priority over Heine's own (to F. W. Gubitz, 9 March 1824). Shakespeare is ubiquitous, and bent to a wide variety of purposes. He provides a standard of excellence against which one can measure the overweening ambition of less gifted men – ‘crazy, mannered, bombastic fellows who think themselves Shakespeares and Ariostos’ (to Karl Immermann, 10 June 1823) – and by reference to which one could assess the achievement of writers Heine admired. ‘You have that in common with Shakespeare’, he writes to Immermann in the same letter, ‘that you have taken the whole world into yourself; and if your writings have a fault, it is that you do not know how to concentrate your great riches. Shakespeare understands this better, and that is what makes him Shakespeare; but you will surely learn the art of concentration more and more.’