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SHAKESPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN.
and views. It was not till later that the Puritans succeeded in plucking away flower by flower, and utterly rooting up the religion of the past, and spreading over all the land, as with a grey canopy, that dreary sadness which since then, dispirited and debilitated, has diluted itself to a lukewarm, whining, drowsy pietism. Nor had the kingdom, any more than the religion, in Shakespeare's time, suffered that heavy languid change now known to us as the constitutional form of government, which, however it may have benefited European freedom, has in no way advanced or aided Art.[1]
- ↑ In this passage we perceive to perfection Heine's great weakness, that is, his inconsistency and his real inability to be a leader in politics or thought. He was fond of assuming to be the first of the reformers of his time, but no London "æsthete" ever surpassed him in practically preferring "Art," or what he found personally agreeable, refined, and elegant, to great principles, or in being now one thing and then another. He was very vain of his intimate knowledge of everything English, but it did not go beyond superficial characteristics. He curses the Anglican in the beginning of this chapter as "the most repulsive race ever created by God in His wrath," apparently because he did not like their beer, cookery, and piety, and manifests in his amusing attempts at political economical criticism an incredible ignorance of, and indifference to, the real influence of the national debt and commerce. He was a genius within his sphere, but unfortunately he too often attempts to show himself as one without its limits. A brave and leading soldier of freedom who deserves the name does not regard it as inferior to "Art." In the next sentences the reader will find him bewailing the death of Charles I. as a great calamity and out-
