HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
view of September, 1880, had joined issue with
those admirers of the German lyricist, who preferred
the immature Book of Songs and the Travel
Sketches to the later, more substantial works. He
saw Heine as the poet of an age of doubt, of intellectual
ferment, of rapid spiritual transitions, of
infinite hope and infinite despair; an age which at
one moment clung lovingly and timorously to the
breast of the past, and at the next cried passionately
with outstretched hands for the baubles that
gleamed through the half-closed fingers of the future.
Charles Godfrey Leland, in his translation of
Heine's works, also noted the latter's startluig insight
into the future. Leland claimed that, even if
Heine did not solve the riddles of modern man, he
did state them better than any of his contemporaries.
A reviewer of this translation wrote, in
the Pall Mall Gazette of August 16, 1892, that the
taste for Heine, which was continually growing
in England, was in no small measure due to his
prophetic gift. Certainly there was nothing in his
character to make the typical Englishman love him.
He was a Jew, a renegade, a blasphemer, a voluptuary,
a satirist, and a foreigner. Nevertheless, England
acclaimed him, for he was so modern in his
[132]