HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
ligned poet. Furthermore, the reasons that caused
many Germans and Englishmen to be sparing in
their praise of Heine were not likely to carry any
weight with her. Heine's blasphemies and irreligious
raillery were no blemish in the eyes of the
authoress, who in her early twenties had broken
with her father because of her refusal to attend
church and who had won her first literary laurels as
translator of the iconoclastic theologian, David
Friedrich Strauss, and of the materialistic philosopher,
Ludwig Feuerbach. Heine's immorality, condemned
by all righteous critics, could not damage
his reputation with her, for she herself had just been
the victim of general opprobrium, which had
forced her and her companion, George Henry
Lewes, to flee to Germany. Finally, Heine's Jewish
origin, that brought down upon his head much hostility
in some quarters, merely added to his eminence
in the estimation of the novelist who was to
paint in Daniel Deronda the most ideal portrait of a
Jew in English literature.
The work of the German poet in his Parisian
exile was an inspiration to the Enghsh novelist in
her Berlin exile and she often read his lyrics aloud
to George Henry Lewes during the long winter
evenings of 1855. Many of the ideas expressed by
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