HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Hellenist and Cultural Pessimist
A greater master of prose than Buchanan, however,
felt deeply the impress of Heine's neo-paganism
during the late Victorian era. As early as 1869,
Walter Pater came in contact with Heine's fancies
of the survival of the Greek gods in the Middle
Ages and, until 1893, the influence of this contact
was discernible in essay after essay.^ Thus, in Pico
della Mirandola, published in 1871, Pater quoted
extensively from Heine's Gods in Exile and followed
Heine's precedent in describing an earlier and
simpler generation, which saw in the Hellenic divinities
so many malignant spirits or demons, the
defeated but still living centers of the religion of
darkness, struggling, not always in vain, against
the kingdom of hght. Pater portrayed in the Itahan
scholar of the fifteenth century the representative
of a later generation, which was impressed by the
beauty and power of pagan mythology and \\ hich
attempted to reconcile Christianity with the religion
of ancient Greece. For to Pater, as to Heine,
the gods of Greece were not dead. He held that
nothing which had ever interested living men and
women could wholly lose its vitality, no language
once spoken, no oracle once heeded, no dream once
dreamed, no faith once fervently entertained. The
rehabilitation of the old gods was a passion with
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