HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
but he desired to preserve the higher rights of an
aristocracy of intellect.
Dowden warned against the tendency to oversimplify
the problem of Heine's unique genius. He
held that Matthew Arnold erred in calling the German
poet the sardonic smile, one of the moods of
the World-spirit. It was, on the contrary, Heine's
special characteristic that he expressed a multiphcity
of the moods of the World-spirit. His genius
could not be condensed into an epigram. Whoever
claimed that Heine was not tme to himself failed
to realize that there were many different selves,
many diverse souls, locked up in the one physical
frame: "To belong to the past and to the future,
to be romanticist and realist, to mingle Mephistopheles
with Faust, to be an aristocrat and a revolutionary,
to be of a tribe and of a nation, to be a
patriot and a cosmopolitan, to be a monotheist
through the emotions, a polytheist through the imagination,
a pantheist through the intellect, to see Jerusalem
through the atmosphere of Hamburg, to sit
at the feet of Moses and Aristophanes, to reckon
Brother Martin Luther and the Patriarch \^oltaire
among one's ancestry — all this makes fidelity to
one's true self a difficult and intricate affair." ^
Of Heine's many selves, the generation on the
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