HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Ivi
^introduction.
money, or to write letters, or to compose
books. What a melancholy situation
!"
He died, and has left a blemished
name; with his crying faults, — his
intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness
in passion, his inconceivable
attacks on his enemies, his still more
inconceivable attacks on his friends, his
want of generosity, his sensuality, his
incessant mocking, — how could it be
otherwise ? Not only was he not one
of Mr. Carlyle's "respectable" people,
he was profoundly c?tsrespectable; and
not even the merit of not being a Philistine
can make up for a man's being
that. To his intellectual deliverance
there was an addition of something else
wanting, and that something else was
something immense; the old-fashioned,
laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance.
Goethe says that he was deficient
in love; to me his weakness
seems to be not so much a deficiency in
love as a deficiency in self-respect, in
true dignity of character. But on this
negative side of one's criticism of a
man of great genius, I for my part,
when I have once clearly marked that
this negative side is and must be there,
have no pleasure in dwelling. I prefer
to say of Heine something positive.
He is not an adequate interpreter of
the modern world. He is only a brilliant
soldier in the Liberation War of
humanity. But, such as he is, he is