IN keeping house with from two to seven bickering personalities treading on one another's toes within the castle of his bones Mr. Mencken resembles the rest of humankind. For the outside observer, as well as for the beleaguered spirits, the most interesting question about the housekeeping is which one of the inmates is finally going to rule the roost. In this case attention may well center on the long contention between a reckless, callous, two-fisted grobianism and a being with "immortal longings" remotely akin to Heinrich Heine, who enjoined his heirs and assigns to lay on his coffin a sword—"for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."
I am grateful to Mr. Mencken whenever he reminds me of Heine, and, as a matter of fact, he has done that more than once. If he did not, like Heine, live in mortal terror of betraying his "immortal longings," he would reveal them more frequently. Heine, my dogeared copy of his lyrics, my underscored copy of his travel books, his delicious book, "The Romantic School," his gay war on the professors, the preachers, the princelings of provincial Germany, his intoxicating sentiment, his tenderness toward the old traditions that he mocked—the grandmother sitting by the hearth; his infinite malice, his irony, his heart-breaking wit—Heine, the Jewish nightingale of Düsseldorf, the only
