HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Blackguard and Apostate
and hurled as a challenge to the existing order, was
not so very revolutionary. Nevertheless, it subjected
these writers to ostracism in Germany and
to intense vituperation in England. Blackguards,
atheists, apostates were some of the epithets flung
at those idealists, who, in pre-Victorian days, dared
to assert that the separation of body and soul must
yield to a joyful acceptance of the divinity of both
and that it was as undesirable to impose upon the
flesh the laws of the spirit as it would be to impose
upon the spirit the laws of the flesh. English reviewers
who still retained fresh in their memory
Shelley's assaults in prose and verse upon the moral
structure, could not look with complacence upon
Heine's wittier and hence more devastating attacks.
The only English journal to discuss Heine's book
on Germany with any degree of sympathy was
the Westminster Review, the same periodical in
which George Eliot was to champion Heine's
cause two decades later. Its issue of October, 1835,
devoted thirteen pages to a summary of De PAllemagne
and to a defense of its author against the
charge of anti-Germanism. The reviewer felt that
contemplation of the unfortunate state of Germany
had filled Heine with sorrow and caused
him to pen his barbed words. The poet was no
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