HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Hellenist and Cultural Pessimist
the various aspects of the complex personality then
visible to English eyes:*
The most delicious master of the lash,
Most intricate in choice simplicity,
Sweetest in love-tilt, and in irony
Consummate, as the opposed perceptions clash,
And leave a tingling silence; bom to abash
The priest and acolyte, and half to free
The ponderous German mind with augury
Of coming storm and sunshine when the crash
Of lightning-hearted France shall penetrate
The air which knights and professors breathe;
Heine, the clarion of all brains which seethe
With bright revolt and swift iconoclasm;
Unvanquished martyr of his eight years' spasm;
French German Jew, immortal reprobate.
In this lyric portrait of Heine, Wilham Michael
Rossetti failed to list one trait which loomed to the
fore in the Eighteen-Seventies and which fascinated
the English mind throughout the late Victorian era.
This was Heine's Hellenism. Wilham Stigand, the
English biographer of Heine, frankly pleaded
guilty, in 1875, to some exaggeration in the exclusive
estimate he formed of the Hellenic or pagan
element in Heine's poetry. The Athenaeum of January
15, 1876, wrote that Heine was a Greek in his
love of the ideal, in his unquenchable thirst after the
beautiful, and in his unrivalled plastic power. It was
[831