ON HEINE AND BRITISH PHILISTINISM

The best article, in the present " Cornhill," is the dissertation on Heinrich Heine, the German poet, philosopher and man of progress, on whom more than any other German author, " the largest portion of Goethe's mantle fell." Though an ardent revolutionist he could not, it seems, bear " the narrowness"—that is, the want of ideality— in British radicalism of the day ; for, as his critic chooses to express it. " The born lover of ideas, the born hater of common places, must feel that in this country the sky over his head is of brass and iron." So Heine could not stomach Cobbett :—

While I translate Cobbett's words, the man himself comes bodily before my mind's eye, as I saw him at that uproarious dinner at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, with his scolding red face and his radical laugh, in which venomous hate mingles with a mocking imitation at his enemies' surely approaching downfall. He is a chained cur, who falls with equal fury on every one whom he does not know, often bites the best friend of the house in his calves barks incessantly and just because of this incessantness of his barking cannot get listened to, even when he barks at a real thief. Therefore the distinguished thieves who plunder England do not think it necessary to throw the growling Cobbett a bone to stop his mouth. This makes the dog furiously savage, and he shows all his hungry teeth. Poor old Cobbett ! England's dog ! I have no love for thee : for every vulgar nature my soul abhors ; but thou touchest me to the inmost soul with pity, as I see how thou strainest in vain to break loose and to get at those thieves, who make off with their booty before thy very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine impotent howling.
Still Heine believed that "the Englishman loves liberty like his lawful wife, the Frenchman only loves her like his mistress, while the German loves her like his old grandmother." Here, not from Heine, but from Heine's critic, are some bold opinions respecting our modern "intellectualism":—

We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works of Heine's. And the reason is not far to seek. We find neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas that Philistinism—to use the German nickname— which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary epoch, that of the Elizabethan age, English society at large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique greatness in English literature of Shakspeare and his contemporaries ; they were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation ; they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas—the ideas of the Renaissance and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great English middle class, the kernal of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered the prison of Puritanism and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, says Job, and straiteneth it again. In the literary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century, the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by two members of the aristocratic class—Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas ; but their individual members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds ; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature ; they could not succeed in it ; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakspere and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley. What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their contemporaries ? The greatest of them—Wordsworth—retired (in Middle-Age phrase) in a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntary cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium. Scott became the historiographer royal of feudalism. Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for interpreting nature ; and he died of consumption at twenty five. Wordsworth, Scott and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect—they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life ; they constitute therefore, minor currents, and all other literary works of our day, however popular, which has the same defect also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will be long remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature ; their names will be greater than their writings ; stat magni nominis umbra. Heine's literary good fortune was greater than that of Byron and Shelley. His theatre of operations was Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her want of ideas, or in her inaccessibility to ideas, for she teems with them and loves them, but, as I have said in her feeble and hesitating application of modern ideas to life. Heine's intense mannerism, 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 there was in all Heine said to wound and affront Germany. The wit and ardent modern spirit of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the thought of Germany.

Empire 24 October 1863. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60550415
[Heines' critic appears to be Matthew Arnold]