Mr. Heinzen is such an Ariostian giant in political literature. Endowed by nature with a churlish figure and huge masses of flesh he interpreted these gifts to mean that he was destined to be a great man. His weighty physical appearance determines his whole literary posture which is physical through and through. His opponents are always small, mere dwarfs, who can barely reach his ankles and whom he can survey with his kneecap. When, however, he should indeed make a physical appearance, our uomo membruto takes refuge in literature or in the courts. Thus scarcely had he reached the safety of English soil than he wrote a tract on moral courage. Or again, our giant allowed a certain Mr. Richter to thrash him so frequently and so thoroughly in New York that the magistrate, who at first only imposed insignificant fines relented and in recognition of Heinzen's doggedness he sentenced the dwarf Richter to pay 200 dollars damages. The natural complement to this great physique so healthy in every fibre is the healthy commonsense which Heinzen ascribes to himself in the highest possible degree. It is inevitable that a man with such commonsense will turn out to be a natural genius who has learnt nothing, a barbarian innocent of literature and science. By virtue of his commonsense (which he also calls his "perspicacity" and which allows him to tell Kossuth that he has "advanced to the extreme frontiers of thought"), he learns only from hearsay or the newspapers. He is therefore always behind the times and always wears the coat that literature has cast off some years previously, while rejecting as immoral and reprehensible the new modern dress he cannot find his way into. But when he has once assimilated a thing his faith in it is unshakable;it transforms itself into something that has grown naturally, that is self-evident, that everyone must immediately agree to and that only malicious, stupid or sophisticated persons will pretend not to believe. Such a robust body and healthy commonsense must of course have also some honest, down-to-earth principles and he even shows to advantage when he takes the craze for principles to extremes. In this field Heinzen is second to none. He draws attention to his principles at every opportunity, every argument is met by an appeal to principle, everyone who fails to understand him or whom he does not understand is demolished by the argument that he has no real principles, his insincerity and pure ill-will are such that he would deny that day was day and night night. To deal with these base disciples of Ahriman he summons up his muse, indignation; he curses, rages, boasts, preaches, and foaming at the mouth he roars out the most tragicomical imprecations. He demonstrates what can be achieved in the field of literary invective by a man to whom Bome's [40] wit and literary talent are equally alien. As the muse is, so is the style. An eternal bludgeon, but a commonplace bludgeon with knots that are not even original or sharp.
Only when he encounters science does he feel momentarily at a loss. He is then like that Billingsgate fishwife with whom O'Connell became involved in a shouting match and whom he silenced by replying to a long string of insults: "You are all that and worse: you are an isosceles triangle, you are a parallelepiped".
From the earlier history of Mr. Heinzen mention should be made of the fact that he was in the Dutch colonies where he advanced not indeed to the rank of general but to that of NCO, a slight for which he later on always treated the Dutch as a nation without principles. Later we find him back in Cologne as a sub-inspector of taxes and in this capacity he wrote a comedy in which his healthy commonsense vainly strove to satirise the philosophy of Hegel. He was more at home in the gossip columns of the Kölnische Zeitung , in the feuilleton where he let fall some weighty words about the quarrels in the Cologne Carnival Club, the institute from which all the great men of Cologne have graduated. His own sufferings and those of his father, a forester, in his conflicts with superiors assumed the proportions of events of universal significance, as easily happens when the man of healthy commonsense contemplates his little personal problems.
He gives an account of them in his Prussian Bureaucracy , a book much inferior to Venedey's [42] and containing nothing more than the complaints of a petty official against the higher authorities. The book involved him in a trial and although the worst he had to fear was six months in gaol he thought his head was in danger and fled to Brussels. From here he demanded that the Prussian government should not only grant him a safe conduct but also that they should suspend the whole French legal system and give him a jury trial for an ordinary offence.
The Prussian government issued a warrant for his arrest; he replied with a "warrant" against the Prussian government which contained inter alia a sermon on moral resistance and constitutional monarchy and condemned revolution as immoral and jesuitical. From Brussels he went to Switzerland.
