A Free, True Poet
WERNER, ALFRED
A Free, True Poet The English Legend of Heinrich Heine. By Sol Liptzin. Bloch. 191 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Alfred Werner Few German authors have had as great an influence outside Central Europe...
...As early as 1828, the Foreign Quarterly Review, discussing his Travel Sketches, predicted that their author would "one day make a considerable figure in the world...
...The Poet of the Open Road confessed his admiration as follows: "Heine...
...even fewer have captured the imaginations of such multitudes...
...The English-speaking world, its temperament so utterly different from that of the excitable, moody Heine, was enchanted by this utterly puzzling writer...
...On the other hand, in 1946 an American writer, in the South Atlantic Quarterly, presented Heine as a staunch conservative, transforming him, as Liptzin puts it, "into a respectable Southern gentleman who believed that all sectors of the population, black and white, Jew and Christian, plebeian and aristocrat, should receive equal treatment before the law but who envisaged the destruction of all beautiful values on this globe if a compulsory system of social and cultural equality were introduced...
...On the whole, Heine has fared well in England and America, even though the Mephistophelian elements in his personality and work were not to the liking of more puritanical and self-righteous critics...
...And Heine was free—he was one of the men who win by degrees...
...Those in England who were sincerely impressed by his multi-faceted genius included Matthew Arnold (who hailed him as a foe of philistinism), Elizabeth Barrett Browning ("that brilliant, witty, true poet Heine"), George Eliot (for whom Heine's poetry was "pure feeling breathed in pure music") and Have-lock Ellis (who placed Heine beside Luther and Lessing as an intellectual liberator of Europe...
...Professor Liptzin in the present survey shows how, for a century and a quarter, British and American critics have been struggling to understand what the essential Heine was...
...Quarterly Review cited above) linked Heine with Communism: "Yes, Heine's wish is fulfilled, for in Russia Christian blood is being spilt in abundance...
...The only vicious attack on Heine was by Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed him as a "slimy and greasy Jew...
...Liptzin has examined the writings of more than 150 English and American poets, critics and translators whose efforts helped find a niche for Heine in the shrine of English literature...
...This is also the thesis of the recent book on Heine by Barker Fairley of Toronto University, which describes him as a genius of the theater for whom the world was one huge stage...
...This is not surprising: Heine was a fascinating, paradoxical figure—both lovable and loathsome, a genuine German but also a typical Jew, a first-rate lyric poet and an excellent journalist, a revolutionary and a conservative, an idealist and a coldly calculating schemer, a man of yesterday and a prophet of tomorrow...
...In 1920, when it was not uncommon in certain circles to view the Russian Revolution as the work of Jewish conspirators, a writer in the Quarterly Review (a different magazine from the Foreign...
...Written in a clear, unpretentious prose, and furnished with ample bibliographical notes, this small book appears in good time for use in 1956...
...The more you stop to look, to examine, the deeper seem the roots, the broader and higher the umbrage...
...How the application of political yardsticks can totally distort the field of letters is shown in two instances...
...Reviewed by Alfred Werner Few German authors have had as great an influence outside Central Europe as Heinrich Heine...
...In America, the Heine devotees included Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazarus and Whitman...
...he brought down a hundred humbuggeries if he brought down two...
...the year when lovers of immortal poetry and prose all over the world will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Heinrich Heine's death...
...Seemingly, Heine was, like a good actor, capable of appearing under many disguises...
...The reviewer astutely realized that one should not be misled by Heine's apparent carelessness and nonchalance, that he was "perfectly able to adopt a higher tone, when he thinks proper to use the requisite exertion...
...Oh, how great...
...He was a master of pregnant sarcasm...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
