HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
cease to be separate entities, and boundary lines
would lose their hitherto exaggerated importance.
Two factions would struggle for supremacy during
the coming years: one that monopolized all
the glories of the commonalty because it thought
itself privileged by birth, and another that vindicated
the rights of man and that in the name of
reason demanded the destruction of all hereditary
privileges. The latter was called Democracy and
Heine was its gifted bard.
Havelock Ellis, in an introductory essay to his
edition of Heine's Prose Writings (1887), an essay
reprinted five years later in the volume The New
Spirit, also focused attention upon Heine's restless
modernism: the youthful and militant Knight of
the Holy Ghost, tilting against the specters of the
past and liberating the imprisoned energies of the
human soul; the turbulent Greek-Hebre\^^ who
sought to mould the modern emotional spirit into
classic forms; the brilliant revolutionary leader of
a movement aiming at national or even world-wide
emancipation. Ellis, therefore, assigned great importance
to the History of Religion and Philosophy
in Germany, the book in which Heine touched the
highest point of his enthusiasm for freedom and
his faith in the possibility of human progress. In
[129]