HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Continuator of Goethe
Germany from the drowsiness of Philistinism. He
was a pohtical and social incendiary. The fire engines
of the German governments, however, effectively
quelled his direct efforts at setting the old
system afire. He was driven into exile. But from
Paris, the new Jerusalem, he continued to direct his
arrows against the abodes of the Philistines. He
did not succumb to the lure of medievalism, as did
his Romantic contemporaries who came to ruin,
dreaming vainly of renewing the past. With a far
profounder sense of the mystic charm of the Middle
Ages than Gorres, or Brentano, or Arnim, he
sensed also the power of modern ideas and sought
to make literature minister to the burning questions
of modern hfe. He did for German letters
what Byron and Shelley had attempted for English
letters. The titanic efforts of these English poets
failed because the resistance of the Philistines was
too great and their own creative ability insufficient
to overcome all obstacles. Heine was more successful:
"Heine's intense modernism, his absolute freedom,
his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock
romanticism, his bringing all things under the point
of view of the nineteenth century, were understood
and laid to heart by Germany, through virtue of
her immense, tolerant intellectualism, much as
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