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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Continuator of Goethe<br />

Arnold, what he thought of Arnold's cool way of<br />

ignoring the inconvenient fact that his hero was<br />

obscene and impudent and addicted to facile untruth.2°<br />

Walt Whitman, on the other hand, felt that the<br />

best thing Arnold ever did was his essay on Heine.<br />

He confided to Horace Traubel that it was the<br />

one product of Arnold's pen that he liked unqualifiedly:<br />

"It's the only thing from Arnold that I have<br />

read with zest. Heine! Oh, how great! The more<br />

you stop to look, to examine, the deeper seem the<br />

roots; the broader and higher the umbrage. And<br />

Heine was free — was one of the men who win<br />

by degrees. He was a master of pregnant sarcasm;<br />

he brought down a hundred humbuggeries if he<br />

brought down two. At times he plays with you<br />

with a deliberate, baffling sportiveness." ^^<br />

James Thomson, the author of The City of<br />

Dreadful Night, wrote a lengthy article commending<br />

Arnold but expressing the behef that the latter<br />

had no need to introduce the terms Philistine and<br />

Philistinism from the German. Thomson suggested<br />

popularizing the expressions Bumble, Bumbledom,<br />

Bumbleism. These words were already available<br />

and their very sound — heavy, obese, rotund, awkward—<br />

echoed their meaning. They were inti-<br />

[79]

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