HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
and continuator of the real Goethe, the criticallyminded
Goethe, the liberator from ancient dogmas
and inherited traditions, the dissolvant of the old
European system, the awakener of the modem
spirit. Heine, like Goethe, broke with routine thinking.
The fact that a custom or a principle had been
accepted for a thousand years did not prevent
Heine, as it did not prevent Goethe, from questioning
it and from subjecting it to the test of
his own rational faculties. Nothing could be
more subversive than such an attitude. But, while
Goethe contented himself with influencing deeply
a few superior minds and hoping for a gradual
process of liberation, Heine declared open war
against the supreme enemy. His weapon was the
pen. His chief enemy was Philistinism.
Philisti?iism/ — the word was httle known to
the English. Arnold took it over from Heine and
popularized it among the mid-Victorians. The Philistines,
in Arnold's characterization, were the selfsatisfied
humdrum people, the slaves to routine, the
narrow-minded enemies of enlightenment, the respectable
opponents of new ideas, the inertia-ridden
decent folk whom Ibsen two decades later was to
dub "the damned, compact, hberal majority."
According to Arnold, Heine sought to rouse
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