HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
crawling reptile — ballads which hide under their
liveliness, as a woman under her veil, their evil
thoughts and their poisons. There are love songs,
which bear you encradled along their stream, to
drown you at last in one Satanic word — for it is the
original characteristic of this poet to make you
drink the gall and the lees of our times, in the form
of expression and the honey of primitive ages — the
age of Byron in the age of Hans Sachs." ^
Quinet's literary portrait of Heine was not unfriendly
or unjust. The German poet, during his
twenties and thirties, aspired to share Byron's laurels
and liked to see himself in the role of a modem
Mephistopheles. His clownish flirting with St. Simonian
sects in the early Eighteen-Thirties, his infatuation
with extreme radical doctrines, and at the
same time his revelation of their comic absurdities —
confused friends and foes ahke. Nor was this mystification
wholly displeasing to him. As a consequence
of the dubious light in which he was seen and apparently
wished to be seen, English journals were
at a loss in appraising his stand on any issue. The results
were often entertaining. Thus, the Foreign
Quarterly Review devoted a lengthy article in its
issue of August, 1832, to a defense of Heine, whom
it viewed as perhaps the ablest satirist of the radical
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