HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
tude towards Germany and Germans, he often
followed in Carlyle's footsteps.^*
The early hostile approach to Heine ebbed in
the Eighteen-Forties. It ebbed but did not disappear.
Joseph Gostwick in his book on The Spirit
of German Poetry, published in 1845, still classified
Heine among the negative writers and satirists
who declaimed against all existing institutions,
while the objects for which these iconoclasts contended
were only vague generalities. Gostwick
translated poems that he believed to be morally
harmless and politically innocuous, such as The
Grenadiers and The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar, but he
warned that most of Heine was harmful, affected,
coarse, cynical, irreverent, profane, and that it
might be best not to meddle with the bitter jests
and the vile ironies of this German arch-fool and
harlequin. Gostwick, who was himself barren of
originality, merely followed in his strictures the
pre-Victorian tradition. A new attitude was, however,
coming to the fore. As the English became
more aware of Heine's unique qualities as poet,
thinker, and wit, admiration for him increased.
Young intellectuals took up his defense. Lord
Houghton and the Earl of Lytton, George Eliot
and Matthew Arnold were the weavers of the Vic-
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