Note 207 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe, 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.”207 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”208 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”209 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.