HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Continuator of Goethe
lication. Cornhill Magazine was especially eager. In
February of that year it had carried an article on
The Sharpshooters of the Press: In England, France,
and Germany.^^ Heine did not fare ill in this survey
but he was in bad company. Arnold's essay
would rehabilitate him.
The essay appeared in the August issue and created
a sensation. It was reprinted in America and
in Germany. Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman,
James Thomson, and other noted contemporaries
reacted to it and English studies on Heine bear to
this day the mark of its influence.
Arnold distinguished between Heine, the poet,
and Heine, the soldier in the war of hberation of
humanity. He acknowledged that posterity would
express its preference for the pure lyricist. The nineteenth
century must, however, hail him primarily
as the liberator.
Arnold took issue with Carlyle because the latter
attached too much importance to the Romantic
School and gave too much prominence to Tieck,
Novahs, and Jean Paul. These writers were not, in
Arnold's opinion, the true heirs of Goethe, and the
main current of German literature did not flow in
their works. Heine, the destroyer of the Romantic
School, was the most important German successor
[75]