His style is essentially modern--everything graphic, everything perspicuous. What is it that constitutes a great writer? The possession of the power to call forth mental visions or moods, visions by means of moods or moods by means of visions. It was especially the latter faculty that Heine cultivated in himself; he never fails in the matter of clear outline and picturesque effect. At his zenith he can no longer be compared with his teachers and contemporaries. To gauge the power and versatility of his style it was necessary to compare it with the greatest style of the age--with Goethe's. In the process he often, as we have seen, comes far short, but it not so very seldom happens that he establishes his right to almost equal admiration. It is, however, enough for him that it is possible, and now and again necessary, to compare him with Goethe. A style is the expression of a personality and a weapon in the warfare of literature. Goethe's style, with all its greatness, is not sufficiently complex to grapple with modern ideas. But Heine's, that weapon which in its best days was as finely tempered as those old Spanish blades which could be bent like osiers, but which no armour could snap, was better suited than any other to cope with modern life in its hardness and ugliness, its charm, its restlessness, and its wealth of glaring contrasts. It also possessed in the highest degree the power of working upon the nerves of modern readers, who have more inclination for spiced dishes and heating beverages than for plain food and pure wine. XVI HEINE There can be little doubt that nothing has been more injurious to Heine's general reputation than his indiscreet loquacity on sexual subjects. Whole groups of his poems are in ill repute on this account; those, for instance, which compose the collection _Verschiedene_ (Various), most of which have been unjustly condemned, although there are certainly some which are anything but sublime in their theme or refined in their treatment of it. In _Der Gott und die Bajadere_ ("The God and the Bayadere") Goethe had shown how even a very equivocal subject can be ennobled by sublimity of style. And even when, as in the Venetian epigrams, he treats of Bayaderes who are certainly not purified by love, and dwells upon the poet's relations with them, the antique metre in itself produces the effect of distance, and we are not offended by any objectionable word. These few epigrams, too, lie almost buried in the mass of Goethe's writings. Moreover, in reading them, we feel that he is the man whom nature created in order that she might learn from him what she is like in her entirety. With Heine, communicativeness on the subject of his relations with the other sex occupies too important a place, and is not always in good taste. It gains him ten readers for one whom it alienates, but it sometimes happens that the one thus lost was worth more than the ten gained.