HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Itootmtttott.
XXXV
his subject-matter minister. He touched
all the great points in the career of the
human race, and here he but followed
the tendency of the wide culture of
Germany; but he touched them with a
wand which brought them all under a
light where the modern eye cares most
to see them, and here he gave a lesson
to the culture of Germany,—so wide,
so impartial, that it is apt to become
slack and powerless, and to lose itself
in its materials for want of a strong
central idea round which to group all its
other ideas. So the mystic and romantic
school of Germany lost itself in the
Middle Ages, was overpowered by their
influence, came to ruin by its vain
dreams of renewing them. Heine, with
a far profounder sense of the mystic
and romantic charm of the Middle Age
than Goerres, or Bretano, or Arnim,
Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany,
is yet also much more than a romantic
poet; he is a great modern poet,
he is not conquered by the Middle Age,
he has a talisman by which he can feel,
— along with but above the power of
the fascinating Middle Age itself,—the
power of modern ideas.
A French critic of Heine thinks he
has said enough in saying that Heine
proclaimed in German countries, with
beat of drum, the ideas of 1789, and
that at the cheerful noise of his drum
the ghosts of the Middle Age took to
night. But this is rather too French