Heine is noteworthy, because he is the most important German successor and continuator of Goethe in Goethe’s most important line of activity.  And which of Goethe’s lines of activity is this?—­His line of activity as “a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.”

Heine himself would hardly have admitted this affiliation, though he was far too powerful-minded a man to decry, with some of the vulgar German liberals, Goethe’s genius.  “The wind of the Paris Revolution,” he writes after the three days of 1830, “blew about the candles a little in the dark night of Germany, so that the red curtains of a German throne or two caught fire; but the old watchmen, who do the police of the German kingdoms, are already bringing out the fire engines, and will keep the candles closer snuffed for the future.  Poor, fast-bound German people, lose not all heart in thy bonds!  The fashionable coating of ice melts off from my heart, my soul quivers and my eyes burn, and that is a disadvantageous state of things for a writer, who should control his subject-matter and keep himself beautifully objective, as the artistic school would have us, and as Goethe has done; he has come to be eighty years old doing this, and minister, and in good condition:—­poor German people! that is thy greatest man!"[138]

But hear Goethe himself:  “If I were to say what I had really been to the Germans in general, and to the young German poets in particular, I should say I had been their liberator.”

Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern.  In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational.  The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit.  The modern spirit is now awake almost everywhere; the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth, almost every one now perceives; it is no longer dangerous to affirm that this want of correspondence exists; people are even beginning to be shy of denying it.  To remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavor of most persons of good sense.  Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of working; what we have to study is that we may not be acrid dissolvents of it.

And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent in his age when there were fewer of them than at present, proceed in his task of dissolution, of liberation of the modern European from the old routine?  He shall tell us himself.  “Through me the German poets have become aware that, as man must live from within outwards, so the artist must work from within outwards, seeing that, make what contortions he will, he can only bring to light his own individuality.  I can clearly mark where this influence of mine has made itself felt; there arises out of it a kind of poetry of nature, and only in this way is it possible to be original.”