HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
character for that religious dualism, the changing
from faith to unbelief, which ended only with his
life.«
Matthew Arnold, in 1863, took note of the Jewish
strain in Heine and expressed his opinion that
the German poet derived a great force from it. "He
himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and
the spirit of Judea, both these spirits reach the infinite,
which is the true goal of all poetry and all
art, — the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew
spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary
form, by his love of clearness, by his untamableness,
by his 'longing which cannot be uttered,' he is Hebrew."
'
If Arnold saw in Heine the synthesis of Hellenism
and Hebraism, "Owen Meredith," the Earl
of Lytton, who praised Arnold as the most perceprive
and discriminating of English crirics, voiced,
in 1870, the contrary opinion, namely, that Heine's
work resulted from the conflict between these two
cultural forces and that he never succeeded in attaining
to an harmonious synthesis. Lytton characterized
Heine's lyric crown as a crown of thorns.
The poet was Lazarus, even before he wrote Lazarus,
that great epic of human suffering. Heine's
whole existence was passed in poetizing pain his
[HO]