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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Heinrich Heine<br />

his imagination, his power of writing were declining;<br />

his originality of speculation was degenerating<br />

into mere paradox or audacious impiety, his strength<br />

and freshness of style into fantastic or startling impudence<br />

of expression, his pathos into a prolonged<br />

whine, his humor into convulsive and almost demoniacal<br />

grimaces.^<br />

If the publication of Travel Sketches was capable<br />

of stirring up such violent antagonism as has just<br />

been noted, it is not difficult to guess at the reactions<br />

of the English press to the more spectacular and<br />

sensational doctrines promulgated in Heine's essays<br />

on German philosophy, religion, and literature —<br />

essays which the Athenaeum had refused to print<br />

but which appeared in French organs in 1834 and<br />

then in book form in 1835 under the title De VAllemagne.<br />

Blackwood's Magazine in September, 1835, coupled<br />

Heine with Borne and with Joel Jacoby as<br />

the chief representatives of the modern German<br />

School of Irony, whose founder was Jean Paul. All<br />

three possessed playful fancy, passionate enthusiasm,<br />

deep feeling, wild wit, but they fell short of<br />

their prototype in literary quality, in brilliancy, and<br />

raciness. Borne and Heine were Siamese twins, the<br />

two most hyper-ultra-revolutionists of all existing<br />

[20]

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