In connection with Heine I must begin by relating one event that happened before 1890: I was lunching one day about 1889 with the Princess of Monaco at Claridge's when for some reason or other the talk fell upon Heinrich Heine, the Princess being a grand-niece of the famous poet. I had just been reading some things of his for the hundredth time with huge delight, and curiously enough, a morning or two before in a Vienna paper, I had come across the announcement that the poet's sister was still living and in full possession of all her faculties, though she was nearing ninety.
"Instead of editing a London review," I exclaimed, "I would give anything to go to Germany, get to know Heine's sister, and then write the best life possible of the great poet."
"How could she help you?" asked the Princess.
"It is the first manifestations of a great talent," I said, "that discover the secret, and show the heart. His sister would know his first successes and his first disappointments: all his beginnings; she could recall childish memories throwing light on his growth-unimaginable things-indicating how he came so early to maturity. What he tells of his visit to England as a young man is astounding, his condemnation of English pedantry, snobbishness, and cruelty is extraordinary. 'The figure of justice in England,' he said, 'had a naked sword on her knee, but was quite blind!' "
"Why don't you write his life," asked the Princess, "if you admire him so intensely?"
"It would cost me five thousand pounds to abandon my work here and go abroad for a year," I said, "and I haven't the money to spare."
"I'll give it you," she replied.
"In that case, Madame," I said, "I'll go and do the work without a moment's delay, for Heine's sister is certain to be able to throw new light on a myriad doubtful things, and assuredly she will be able to solve for us the inexplicable tragedy of his life: how did he come to suffer for years in his mattress-grave in Paris and die at six and fifty? Was it syphilis? Or merely sexual selfindulgence?
We know he was never very strong; but his sister must have heard the truth, and fancy being in a position to tell the true truth about Heine, the greatest German poet after Goethe; the first of the moderns, as I always call him, because he was a rebel at heart and soul-free of that respect for convention that maimed even Goethe."
The next weeks I spent reading Heine, his Reisebilder, his latest poetry and all the books I could get on his life and art; but I heard nothing from the Princess Alice. At length I thought of writing to her, but I couldn't do that.
"She may have spoken in haste," I said to myself, "and I should be forcing her perhaps to give me five thousand pounds which she could ill spare." I resolved to put the whole incident out of my mind.
Some time later I read in a German paper of the death of Heine's sister: she was ninety-odd. The very next day I was again lunching with the Princess at Claridge's and I told her of the death. "No one now," I said, "will ever be able to tell the true truth about Heine's long illness and death."
"I thought you were going to do it," said the Princess.
"I told you, Madame, it would cost five thousand pounds and I couldn't afford it."
"But I said that I would give you the money willingly," was her reply; "why didn't you ask me for it?"
"I was afraid it might embarrass you," I said. "However, it is now too late!"
I should have loved to write Heine's life, infinitely rather than the life of Oscar Wilde, because he was a far greater man and had new and true things to say on the vital problems of modern Europe.
What he has written on Italy and France and Germany constitutes the best criticism in literature, and his Fragments on England are almost as penetrating. I have here a personal confession to make. I knew that Heine had only been in England for a few weeks as a young man, and so, half- English as I was, I thought I could afford to neglect what he had written about it. When I went to New York in November, 1914, I was asked to lecture at the German Club, and I selected Heine as my theme; but the committee wanted me to speak on England as well, to say what I really thought of it, so I talked on England for some time. At the end of the evening, a man came over to me and said, "You never quoted the English Fragments of Heine, and yet you repeated almost word for word things he had said about the English people."
"How extraordinary," I exclaimed, "to tell you the truth, I never read the English Fragments, but I will read them at once."
I found that I had almost used Heine's very words; that my point of view on England and English faults was all but the same as his; but, though he saw all the weaknesses of the people with astonishing clearness and put them in a high light, some of the virtues of that strange folk seemed to have escaped him: for the true Englishman has a deep love for what is fair and large and kindly; he allows himself to maltreat Ireland for hundreds of years, but when his sin is brought home to him, he will give the Irish their freedom in a kindly and generous spirit. After the Civil War in America, eight or nine states contracted debts to England, but England has never called them in nor insisted on repayment; surely there is something nobly generous in such a people. Besides, their high poetry and astounding love of physical beauty should have endeared them to Heine. But Heine's view of English limitations and surface faults is astoundingly acute. It taught me that there was a strange likeness of view between us, and of judgment. Time and again I had been struck by some half-truth pungently expressed, only to find on wider reading that he had seen the other half just as clearly. Much of the piquancy of his writing comes from this peculiarity of his. I went on to read him completely; and the more I read, the more I grew to love and admire him.
The Germans always talk of Goethe and Schiller as their greatest, just as the English foolishly talk of Shakespeare and Milton, without realizing that in Hyperion Keats has written far better blank verse than anything ever reached by Milton. And in the same way Heine is a greater poet and a greater prose writer, too, than Schiller, who, like Milton, was rather a rhetorician than a master-singer. Both nations accept the Immortal reluctantly, but console themselves with what is related to them and commonplace.
I love Heine perhaps even more than Goethe, though I recognize that he is inferior to Goethe in philosophic range and deep-thoughted wisdom; he was almost as great a lyric poet as Goethe himself, though Goethe's best lyrics are the finest in all literature-and a far better prose writer. Besides, Goethe was in love with the conventional, whereas Heine was a born rebel, the first, indeed, to voice the revolt of the modern man against all the outworn and irrational forbiddings and prohibitions of our ordinary life.
And how lovable Heine was, and how human-charming, and what a friend of man! Can one ever forget the poem he wrote when Karl Heine, heir of old Solomon Heine, his banker-uncle, who had always allowed him five or six thousand francs a year, wrote to him that he heard he was writing his life and so wished to warn him that if he wrote anything derogatory of the Heines, he would immediately cut off his allowance.
Heine had already written three volumes of what would have been the most interesting autobiography in the world, but how could he continue it if it were to cost his beloved wife the little pension of five thousand francs a year, which would ensure his dear one comparative comfort after his death?
For sweet love's sake, Heine burnt his autobiography and wrote this poem on the incident:
Wer ein Herz hat und im Herzen
Liebe tragt, ist uberwunden
Schon zur Halfte und so lieg' ich
Jetzt geknebelt und gebunden.
Wenn ich sterbe wird die Zunge
Ausgerissen meiner Leiche
Denn sie furchten redend kam' ich
Wieder aus dem Schattenreiche.
Stumm verfaulen wird der Todte
In der Graft und nie verraten
Werd' ich die auf mir verobten
Lacherlichen Freveltaten.
Was there ever a greater poem written as comment on an actual occurrence?
With rare understanding Heine called himself the best of all the humorists; he is that, and something more, wittier even than Shakespeare, while Goethe, to judge by the scene in Auerbach's Keller in Faust, had hardly more humor than a pancake. It is Heine's humor that gilds all his books and makes them unforgettable-a possession of mankind forever. Who can ever forget the verses in the poem entitled Deutschland, which he calls "A Winter's Tale," in which he has set forth our modern creed better than anybody else:
Bin neues Lied, ein besseres Lied,
O Freunde, will ich euch dichten:
Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon
Das Himmelreich errichten.
Wir wollen auf Erden glucklich sein,
Und wollen nicht mehr darben;
Verschlemmen soil nicht der faule Bauch, Was fleissige Hande erwarben.
Es wachst hiernieden Brot genug
Fur alle Menschenkinder,
Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schonheit und Lust, Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.
Ja, Zuckererbsen fur jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
Den Himtnel uberlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.
Here for the first time is the modern gospel, complete in essentials and unforgettable in humor. It is indeed "a new song and a better song" that Heine sings to us: "the resolve to found the Kingdom of Heaven here in this world."
"We want to be happy on this earth," he says, "and no longer suffer want or allow the lazy belly to consume what industrious hands have created."
"There's enough bread for all the children of men," he cries, "and roses and myrtles and beauty and passion besides: ay, and sweet peas to boot-yes, sweet peas for all, and with full content we can leave Heaven to the angels and sparrows."
I would rather have written those four verses than all Schiller.
And in his history of religion, Heine has written our modern faith in prose even more perfectly than in his poetry:
The happier and more beautiful generations who are produced through free choice of love and who come to blossom in a religion of joy will smile sorrowfully over us, their poor ancestors who stupidly controlled ourselves instead of enjoying all the pleasures of this beautiful life, and by denying and killing our passions and desires made ourselves into pale ghosts of real men and women. Yes, I say it boldly, our descendants will be more beautiful and far happier than we are.
This, too, is the heart of my belief and of my hope for the future of mankind, and I have preached it even more boldly than Heine or Whitman and have been punished for it even more savagely.
How wise Heine was and far-sighted!
Think of what he wrote to a friend about Alsace-Lorraine thirty years before the war of 1870 and seventy-five years before the Great War:
I am the friend of the French, as I am the friend of all men who are good and reasonable. Rest quiet, I will never give up the Rhine to the French, and that for the very simple reason that the Rhine belongs to me. Yea, it belongs to me, through inalienable right of birth. I am of the free Rhine, the still freer son; my cradle stood on its banks, and I do not see why the Rhine should belong to any other than the children of the soil.
Alsace and Lorraine can I truly not so lightly incorporate with Germany as you are in the habit of doing, since the people in these countries are deeply attached to France, on account of the rights which they won at the great revolution, on account of those equal laws and free institutions which are very agreeable to the citizen spirit, but which yet leave much to be desired by the stomachs of the masses.
Meanwhile Alsace and Lorraine will again be attached to Germany when we accomplish that which the French have already begun; when we surpass them in action, as we have already done in thought; when we can exalt ourselves to the last consequence of such thought; when we rout out servility from its last corner of refuge-from heaven; when we free the God who dwells upon earth in humanity from Ms state of degradation; when we again restore to their dignity the people disinherited of its happiness, and genius and beauty brought to shame… Yea, not alone Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe, the whole world shall then fall to our share, the whole world shall become German! I often dream of this mission and universal dominion of Germany when I wander among the oak trees. Such is my patriotism!
Yet Heine poured deathless sarcasm on the worst faults of the German, the wooden, pedantical Prussians with their frozen conceit and on their behinds a coat of arms.
Heine saw life more deeply and fairly than any of his contemporaries:
What will be the end of this agitation to which, as ever, Paris gave the first signal? War, a most frightfully destructive war, which, alas! will call into the arena the two most noble nations of civilization-I mean Germany and France. England, the great sea serpent which can always creep back to its monstrous lair in the ocean; and Russia, which has most secure hiding places in monster pine forests, steppes, and ice-fields-these two would not be quite overthrown by the most decisive defeats; but Germany in such case is threatened with a far worse fate, and even France might have to part with its political existence.
Yet that would only be the first act of the great extravaganza — the prelude as it were. The second act is the European, the world revolution, the great duel of the destitute with the aristocracy of wealth, and in that there will be neither talk of nationality, nor of religion. There will then be only one nation, to wit, the world: and only one faith, to wit, prosperity upon earth…
And then the inevitable twinkle of the eye:
I advise our descendants to come into the world with a very thick skin to their backs.
Heine was just as wise and far-seeing about persons. The best portrait extant of Lassalle, the great socialist, is from Heine's pen, written when Lassalle was only a youth of nineteen.
My friend, Herr Lassalle, is a young man of the most distinguished intellectual gifts, of the most accurate erudition, with the widest range of knowledge, with the most decided quickness of perception which I have yet known; he combines an energy of will and an ability in conduct which excites my astonishment, and, if his sympathy for me does not deceive me, I expect from him the most effective assistance.
I can't help noticing here Heine's extraordinary prophecy of Lassalle's future.
"You will do great things in Germany," Heine said to him, "though I fear you will probably be shot by someone."
Heine was always generous in encouragement and lavish in praise of contemporary writers-a rare quality with successful writers; and in the "Romantic School" he has especially praised such young writers "for not having divorced life from literature, and for making politics go hand in hand with science, art, and religion," so that they were all at the same time artists, tribunes, and apostles.
Yea, I repeat the word "apostles," for I know no more distinguishing word. A new faith inspires them with a passion of which the writers of a previous period had no idea. This faith is faith in progress, a faith which springs from knowledge. We have measured the earth, weighed the powers of nature, calculated the resources of industry, and discovered that this earth is large enough for everyone to build therein the hut of his happiness.
It is his deeply moral and true view of life which places Heine forever with the highest, but it is his humor which puts the crown, so to speak, on that gracious smiling face: think of a few phrases taken from his school days:
You have no idea how complicated Latin is! The Romans would certainly never have had sufficient spare time for the conquest of the world if they had had first to learn Latin… And geography-I learnt so little of it that later I lost my way in the world (Shakespeare's phrase)…
I got on better in natural history. Some of the pictures of apes, asses, kangaroos, etc., remained fixed in my memory; and it happened subsequently very often that a good many people appeared to me at first sight like old acquaintances…
And then later flashes.
When Boerne, the democrat, observed that if a king had shaken him by the hand he would cut it off, Heine replied, "And I, when his majesty the mob takes my hand-shall wash it."
Speaking of Madame de Stael, Heine wrote:
"O Woman! we must forgive thee much, for thou lovest much-and many."
With one great magnate of the practical world in Paris, the Baron James de Rothschild, Heine was on terms of considerable intimacy; he was welcomed in the Rothschild family circle soon after his arrival in Paris, by means of a letter of introduction from his rich Frankfort uncle. The Baron's liking for Heine's society must have been founded on the latter's social qualities, for his intelligence extended only to financial matters, and his acquaintance with art and poetry was of the smallest. Rothschild treated him, he said, famillionairement; and one story illustrates their relations.
"You know everything, Heine," said Rothschild one day at dinner; "why is this wine called Lacryma Christi!"
"It is called Lacryma Christi," said Heine, "because Christ weeps when rich Jews drink it, while so many poor men are dying of hunger and thirst."
Heine was small in stature and even in youth anything but strong, though Gautier says that at thirty-five in Paris he appeared to be perfectly healthy and had color in his cheeks. Of his first days in Paris, Heine wrote in a continuous state of rapture. "One may regard Paris," he said, "as the capital of the world; a new form of art, a new religion, a new life coming into being here … mighty days are dawning and unknown gods reveal themselves; and at the same time there is everywhere laughing and dancing; everywhere the most cheerful tone of banter prevails and the lightest of jesting…"
He wrote a friend: "If any one asks how I find myself here, say 'Like a fish in water,' or, rather, say that when a fish in the sea asks another how he is, the reply is, 'Like Heine in Paris.' "
But the years of his joy and pleasure were few: from '48 till his death in '56, he suffered the long martyrdom of creeping paralysis. Whatever his shortcomings and his sins, Heine paid for them all in those dreadful years of his agony in Paris. Here is a description of him two years before the end by a lady:
He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet which covered him, the eyes closed, and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted Ecce Homo ever painted by some old German painter… When I kissed him, his beard felt like swan's down or a baby's hair, so weak had it grown, and his face seemed to have gained a certain beauty from pain and suffering… I never saw a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He complained of his sufferings and was pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once set to work to make me laugh heartily, which pleased him just as much. He neither paraded his anguish nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He was also far less sarcastic, more hearty, more indulgent, and altogether pleasanter than ever.
All Heine's work appeals to me intensely. He never perhaps reached the highest height of art and created ever-living figures such as Falstaff and Don Quixote: he used mainly his lyrical gift; yet his extraordinary endowment as "the best of all the humorists" gives him rank with the greatest, and he has lent more lightness and grace to German prose than any one else.
Let no one think I am intent on putting Heine higher than he was. In my mind he always comes immediately after Goethe, completing him. Our modern belief, I repeat, has come from Heine, at least was first stated by him; in this respect it is characteristic that he was born with the French Revolution.
Heine understood Christianity on its pathetic side, and if all his sayings and poems on the subject were put together, they would form as illuminating a commentary as Kenan's Life of Jesus. A great passage comes to mind in which he speaks of socialism as the religion of the modern world, and "it, too, has its Judases and its Calvarys."
I love to remember that Heine held Jesus in the highest reverence. "Eternal fame," he says, "is due to that symbol of a suffering God, of the Holy One with his crown of thorns, the crucified Christ whose blood like a soothing balsam has healed the wounds of humanity."
Heine was far more of a pagan than a Christian: he disliked all stupid conventions so heartily that he leaned perhaps too far away from them; he didn't realize that the chiefest reforming force of our time is just the new commandment which Jesus was the first to formulate. But this is really hyper-criticism, for the synthesis of perfect paganism and pure Christianity is not yet even adumbrated, and it is nearly a century since Heine went silent.
Yet he speaks of Stratford-on-Avon as the "northern Bethlehem," which shows, I think, profound understanding of Shakespeare-the understanding of kinship and kingship.
He was indeed, as he said himself, a "brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity," but he was much more than that: I regard him as the best leader we moderns could have had; as a rebel he won to perfect sanity and was able to destroy with his happy humor all the bug-bears, superstitions, conventions, and pruderies that maim and deform our life. If I could only translate him adequately I would make my readers love him as I do. Think of the poem he calls Enfant Perdu (A Lost Child); the stanzas bring tears to my eyes:
Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege, Hielt ich seit dreissig Jahren treulich aus.
Ich kampf te ohne Hoffnung, dass ich siege, Ich wusste, nie komm' ich gesund nach Haus.
In jenen Nachten hat Langweil' ergriffen Mich oft, auch Furcht-(nur Narren furchten nichts)- Sie zu verscheuchen hab' ich dann gepfiffen Die frechen Reime eines Spottgedichts.
Ein Posten ist vakant!-
Die Wunden klaffen-
Der eine fallt, die andern rucken nach-
Doch fall' ich unbesiegt, und meine
Waffen Sind nicht gebrochen-
Nur mein Herze brach.
Such was the courage of the man who died "broken hearted!" And this his creed, which has always been mine. Like Heine, who boasts that all his life he had been a Knight of the Holy Spirit of Truth, I, too, have always loved Truth more than her sisters, Beauty and Goodness; her figure is slighter and less voluptuous; her face, too, less flower-like and round; but the eyes are magnificent, and she is of passion all compact; her kiss-a consecration of sincerity. With her is neither doubt nor fear, and the entire confidence her worship inspires is worth more to her lover than any gift her sisters can bring.
Her chosen one must be a fighter who scorns odds; his course is always straight, forward and upward, and on the arduous road he will lose all friends and fellows and the sweet companionship of life; his beloved ones even will desert him. All his days will be days of strife, there is no respite for him, no rest and no reward save in the proud consciousness that he will always be in the forefront of the great battle, and is sure sooner or later to pay the penalty of his devotion, and die on the field unknown and unpraised, bleeding from a hundred wounds.
I admire all the greatest: Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes, but I love Heine: it is under his standard we must all fight for many a year to come till peradventure science gives us a new and higher creed.