he was profoundly disrespectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can make up for a man’s being that.  To his intellectual deliverance there was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was something immense:  the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance.  Goethe says that he was deficient in love; to me his weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in self-respect, in true dignity of character.  But on this negative side of one’s criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part, when I have once clearly marked that this negative side is and must be there, have no pleasure in dwelling.  I prefer to say of Heine something positive.  He is not an adequate interpreter of the modern world.  He is only a brilliant soldier in the Liberation War of humanity.  But, such as he is, he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the European poetry of that quarter of a century which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably the most important figure.

What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature!  With what prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power, content to gather almost always little result from it, sometimes none!  Look at Byron, that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, I cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare.  And what became of this wonderful production of nature?  He shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism.  But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and with no ideas.  Well, then, look at Heine.  Heine had all the culture of Germany; in his head fermented all the ideas of modern Europe.  And what have we got from Heine?  A half-result, for want of moral balance, and of nobleness of soul and character.  That is what I say; there is so much power, so many seem able to run well, so many give promise of running well;—­so few reach the goal, so few are chosen. Many are called, few chosen.

MARCUS AURELIUS[182]

Mr. Mill[183] says, in his book on Liberty, that “Christian morality is in great part merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active.”  He says, that, in certain most important respects, “it falls far below the best morality of the ancients.”  Now, the object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of