HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
songs, belonged to Germany; but Heine, the liberator
and the keen satirist of aristocratic privilege,
of pohtical and ecclesiastical tyranny, of all kinds
of Philistine narrowmindedness, belonged to England
no less than to his native land.
The fighting Heine, the soldier of the pen, was
also stressed by Oscar Levy in 1913, in his introduction
to Hermann Scheffauer's translation of
Atta Troll. Levy urged readers to peer below the
surface of the mock epic and to penetrate to the
underlying satiric tone, which was ultramodern,
realistic, threatening, shrill, mocking, and insolently
discordant.
The legend of Heine as the poetic pioneer of
world democracy was becoming well-established
even before the outbreak of the First World War,
when it received its widest currency. But the other
aspects of his rich personality, upon which this
legend was superimposed, continued to persist in
the consciousness of English readers. As a result,
his literary portrait increased in complexity as the
decades wore on and as his popularity remained
undiminished. Englishmen in the course of time became
ever more tolerant of his faults as his uniqueness
and the wide span of his genius unfolded itself
to their gaze. The Saturday Review of December
[137]