Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/659

Gervais), and two scenes from the life of Vespasian (ordered by the king) attracted attention. In 1823 the Re-erection of the Royal Tombs at St Denis, the Martyrdom of St Laurence (Notre Dame), and several full-length por- traits increased the painter’s popularity; and in 1824, when he exhibited his great canvas, the Massacre of the Jews (Louvre), Heim was rewarded by the legion of honour. In 1827 appeared the King giving away Prizes at the Salon of 1824 (Louvre—engraved by Jazet)—the picture by which Heim is best known—and Saint Hyacinthe. Hein was now commissione1 to decorate the Gallery Charles X. (Louvre), work for which he was thought eminently fit. Like many other painters of this period, Heim retained only enough of the high-pitched ideal of David to make an awkward con- trast with the lively colour and movement by which he trie] to give interest to his subjects, and with the emptiness of form and expression which resulted from the hasty execution necessitated by the vast number of his commis- sions, Ridiculed by the romantists, Heim maintained his position, and replaced Regnault at the Institute in 1834, shortly after which he commenced a series of drawings of the celebrities of his day, which are of much interest. His decorations of the Conference room of the Chamber of Deputies were completed in 1844; and in 1847 his works at the Salon—Champ de Mai and Reading a Play at the Théatre Frangais—were the signal for attacks renewed with great violence. Yet something like a turn of opinion in his favour took place at the exhibition of 1851; his powers as a draughtsman and the occasional merits of his composition were recognized, and toleration extended even to his colour. Heim was awarded the great gold medal, and in 1855—having sent to the Salon no less than sixteen portraits, amongst which may be cited those of Cuvier, Geoffroy de St Hilaire, and Madame Hersent— he wis made officer of the legion of honour. In 1859 he again exhibited a curious collection of portraits, sixty- four members of the Institute arranged in groups of four; ani six years later, on 29th September 1865, he died, at the age of seventy-eight. Besides the paintings already mentioned, there is to be seen in Notre Dame de Lorette (Paris) a work executed on the spot; and the museum of Strasburg contains an excellent example of his easel pictures, the subject of which is a Shepherd Drinking from a Spring.

HEINE, Heinrich (1799–1856), poet and journalist, was born, according to the most trustworthy accounts, on the 13th December 1799, at Diisseldorf, of Jewish parents. His father, after various vicissitudes in busi- ness, had finally settled in that town, and his mother, who seems to have possessed much energy of character, was the daughter of a physician of the same place. Heine received the rudiments of his education at the gymnasium or lycée (as it was called during the foreign occupation) of his native town, and, although not an especially apt or diligent pupil, he acquired while there a good knowledge of French and English,—he tells us that Gulliver’s Travels in the original was one of the favourite books of his child- hood,—as well as some tincture of the classics and Hebrew. But if the influence upon him of his teachers and their teaching was unimportant, not so that of the public events amid which he grew up. His early years coincided with the most brilliant period of Napoleon’s career; and the boundless veneration which he is never tired of expressing for the emperor throughout his writings shows that his true schoolmasters were rather the drummers and troopers of a victorious army than the Jesuit fathers of the lycée; while, if to the vivid personal impression produced upon him by the pomp and circumstance of the imperial gar- rison in his birthplace there be added the public, and in a manner national, enthusiasm for Napoleon which he must often lave heard vented by his elder co-religionists— who hailed the conqueror as a temporal Messiah—the weighty bearing of his boyhood upon his subsequent fortunes becomes fully apparent. Upon his quitting school, attempts were made to engage him in commerce, but his father and uncle, the latter a wealthy banker of Hamburg, soon perceived that he was bent upon travelling a different path from that which they had followed. It speaks well for both these men that they should have refrained from coercion upon making this discovery ; and Solomon Heine, the banker, at once gave his nephew an earnest of the gener- ous treatment the latter was subsequently to experience at his hands, for he came forward with money to enable his young kinsinan to go to a university, his scle stipulation being that his protégé should study with the view of entering the legal profession. Heine gladly accepted his uncle’s terms, and entered the university of Bonn in the spring of 1819. During his stay there he was an eager student ; but the subjects to which he devoted himself had no connexion with the profession which had been chosen for him. He seems to have attended no lectures save those on literature and history—notably A. W. von Schlegel’s; and he not long afterwards acknowledged his obligations to Schlegel by dedicating a sonnet to him—a tribute which he re- called in later days by a wanton and outrageous attack upon the veteran critic in Die Romantische Schule. Why Heine left Bonn does not clearly appear, but it is at Gottingen that we find him in the autumn of 1820, His stay here was even shorter than at Bonn. In February 1821 the authorities of the “Georgia Augusta” rusticated him for some infraction of the duelling laws. Although from these beginnings Heine’s academical career promised to pursue no very even course, he nevertheless determined, after his resi- dence at Gottingen had been cut short, to seek a third uni- versity ; and it was to Berlin that he now repaired, where Hegel was at the zenith of his renown. Whether or not the lectures of this philosopher benefited him in any way —by giving hin, for instance, as some have supposed, a certain dialectical precision of style—he has himself con- fessed that he seldom understood them ; and in after years Hegel’s ultra-conservatism and orthodoxy made him the con- stant butt of his former pupil’s ridicule and sarcasm. But the interest of Heine’s life in Berlin was social and not academic. He enjoyed the privilege of mixing in the best literary circles of the capital. He was on terms of intimacy with Varnhagen von Ense and his wife, the celebrated Jewess, Rahel, and at their house—the rendezvous of Ger- many’s genius and learning—he frequently met such men as the Humboldts, Hegel himself, and Schleiermacher ; while he lived on a still more familiar footing with a number of his own co-religionists, who, without having acquired Euro- pean reputation, were men of varied and approved abilities. In an atmosphere of such geniality as this his gifts were rapidly displayed. He began ere long to contribute poems to the Berliner Gesellschafter, many of which were subse- quently incorporated in the Buch der Lieder, and in 1822 a volume came from the press entitled Cedechte von ITeinrich Heine, his first avowed act of authorship. He was still further employed at this time as the correspondent of a QNhenish newspaper, as well as in completing his tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff, which were pub- lished in 1823 with small success. He was now, indeed, fairly embarked upon his literary course. But he was still largely dependent upon his uncle; and in order so far to fulfil his engagements towards his benefactor, he returned to Géttingen in 1825, and shortly afterwards took his degree in law, having previously qualified himself for practice by publicly professing Christianity.

This act of “apostasy,” as it has been called, calls for something more than a mere passing reference ; for it not