Heine had his full share of love of fame, and cared quite as much as his brethren of the genus irritabile whether people praised his verses or blamed them.  And he was very little of a hero.  Posterity will certainly decorate his tomb with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the emblem of the sword.  Still, for his contemporaries, for us, for the Europe of the present century, he is significant chiefly for the reason which he himself in the words just quoted assigns.  He is significant because he was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant, a most effective soldier in the Liberation War of humanity.

To ascertain the master-current in the literature of an epoch, and to distinguish this from all minor currents, is one of the critic’s highest functions; in discharging it he shows how far he possesses the most indispensable quality of his office,—­justness of spirit.  The living writer who has done most to make England acquainted with German authors, a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one quality of justness of spirit is perhaps wanting,—­I mean Mr. Carlyle,—­seems to me in the result of his labors on German literature to afford a proof how very necessary to the critic this quality is.  Mr. Carlyle has spoken admirably of Goethe; but then Goethe stands before all men’s eyes, the manifest centre of German literature; and from this central source many rivers flow.  Which of these rivers is the main stream? which of the courses of spirit which we see active in Goethe is the course which will most influence the future, and attract and be continued by the most powerful of Goethe’s successors?—­that is the question.  Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school of Germany,—­Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter,[137]—­and gives to these writers, really gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue prominence.  These writers, and others with aims and a general tendency the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors and continuators of Goethe’s power; the current of their activity is not the main current of German literature after Goethe.  Far more in Heine’s works flows this main current; Heine, far more than Tieck or Jean Paul Richter, is the continuator of that which, in Goethe’s varied activity, is the most powerful and vital; on Heine, of all German authors who survived Goethe, incomparably the largest portion of Goethe’s mantle fell.  I do not forget that when Mr. Carlyle was dealing with German literature, Heine, though he was clearly risen above the horizon, had not shone forth with all his strength; I do not forget, too, that after ten or twenty years many things may come out plain before the critic which before were hard to be discerned by him; and assuredly no one would dream of imputing it as a fault to Mr. Carlyle that twenty years ago he mistook the central current in German literature, overlooked the rising Heine, and attached undue importance to that romantic school which Heine was to destroy; one may rather note it as a misfortune, sent perhaps as a delicate chastisement to a critic, who—­man of genius as he is, and no one recognizes his genius more admirably than I do—­has, for the functions of the critic, a little too much of the self-will and eccentricity of a genuine son of Great Britain.