HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Hellenist and Cultural Pessimist
production of the original, such as Heine himself,
if master of the English language, would have
given."''
Stigand's Heine-biography of 1875 roused
Thomson's resentment because of its cringing to
Bumbledom, its overmuch reverence for the dehcacy
of the English public, its Philistine interpretation
of the splendid child of light. In contrast to
Stigand, Thomson wished to write a book on Heine
as the restless rebel, the fiery iconoclast, the tortured
genius whose closest affinity was with SheUey
and Leopardi. Death, in 1882, prevented the completion
of the planned volume. From essays on
Heine which appeared early in 1876, it is obvious
that the English Laureate of Pessimism intended to
emphasize the pessimistic Romancero-iptnod and
to dwell on Heine's long agony in the weird borderland
of Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death.
Thomson's legend of Heine bore many autobiographic
traits and his own troubled soul peered
from sentences such as the following: "In all moods,
tender, imaginative, fantastic, humorous, ironical,
cynical; in anguish and horror; in weariness and
revulsion; longing backwards to enjoyment, and
longing forward to painless rest; through the doleful
days and the dreadful immeasurable nights; this
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