HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
valuable he was, nevertheless, as a poetic pioneer
whose thoughts ranged from the remote past to
the distant future: "He represents our period of
transition; he gazed, from what seemed the vulgar
Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was forever
closed, before on a Promised Land he should
never enter. While with clear sight he announced
things to come, the music of the past floated up to
him; he brooded wistfully over the vision of the
old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of
cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in the medieval wilderness;
he heard strange sounds of psaltries and
harps, the psalms of Israel, the voice of Princess
Sabbath, across the waters of Babylon." ^
Before the studies of Havelock Elhs and of William
Sharp, Heine's position as the poet of the modern
soul had been defined by Matthew Arnold
and this tradition had taken ever deeper routes.
Henry G. Hewlett, in Eraser's Magazine of November,
1876, had discerned in Heine an antagonism
between democratic convictions and aristocratic
tastes, and in Heine's works the first efforts
of science, commerce, and democracy to enter
upon the domain of poetry, where theology, chivalry,
and feudalism had so long held undisputed
sway. Charles Grant, in the Contemporary Re-
[131]