As a youthful and militant Knight of the Holy Ghost

The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. HEINE

HEINE.

I.

Heine gathers up and focuses for us in one vivid point all those influences of his own time which are the forces of to-day. He appears before us, to put it in his own way, as a youthful and militant Knight of the Holy Ghost, tilting against the spectres of the past and liberating the imprisoned energies of the human spirit. His interest from this point of view lies, largely, apart from his interest as a supreme lyric poet, the brother of Catullus and Villon and Burns; we here approach him on his prosaic—his relatively prosaic—side.

One hemisphere of Heine’s brain was Greek, the other Hebrew. He was born when the genius of Goethe was at its height; his mother had absorbed the frank earthliness, the sane and massive Paganism, of the Roman Elegies, and Heine’s ideals in all things, whether he would or not, were always Hellenic—using that word in the large sense in which Heine himself used it—even while he was the first in rank and the last in time of the Romantic poets of Germany. He sought, even consciously, to mould the modern emotional spirit into classic forms. He wrought his art simply and lucidly, the aspira[69]tions that pervade it are everywhere sensuous, and yet it recalls oftener the turbulent temper of Catullus than any serener ancient spirit.

For Heine arose early in active rebellion against a merely passive classicism; in the same way that fiercer and more ardent cries, as from the East, pierce through the songs of Catullus. The mischievous Hermes was irritated by the calm and quiet activities of the aged Zeus of Weimar. And then the earnest Hebrew nature within him, liberated by Hegel’s favourite formula of the divinity of man, came into play with its large revolutionary thirsts. Thus it was that he appeared before the world as the most brilliant leader of a movement of national or even world-wide emancipation. The greater part of his prose works, from the youthful “Reisebilder” onwards, and a considerable portion of his poetic work, record the energy with which he played this part.

But whether the Greek or the Hebrew element happened to be most active in Heine, the ideal that he set up for life generally was the equal activity of both sides—in other words, the harmony of flesh and spirit. It is this thought which dominates “The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” his finest achievement in this kind. That book was written at the moment when Heine touched the highest point of his enthusiasm for freedom and his[70] faith in the possibility of human progress. It is a sort of programme for the immediate future of the human spirit, in the form of a brief and bold outline of the spiritual history of Germany and Germany’s great emancipators, Luther, Lessing, Kant, and the rest. It sets forth in a fresh and fascinating shape that Everlasting Gospel which, from the time of Joachim of Flora downwards, has always gleamed in dreams before the minds of men as the successor of Christianity. Heine’s vision of a democracy of cakes and ale, founded on the heights of religious, philosophical, and political freedom, may still spur and thrill us,—even now-a-days, when we have wearied of stately bills of fare for a sulky humanity that will not feed at our bidding, no, not on cakes and ale. Heine is wise enough to see, however imperfectly, that it is unreasonable to expect the speedy erection of any New Jerusalem; for, as he expresses it in his own way, the holy vampires of the Middle Ages have sucked away so much of our life-blood that the world has become a hospital. A sudden revolution of fever-stricken or hysterical invalids can effect little of permanent value; only a long and invigorating course of the tonics of life can make free from danger the open-air of nature. “Our first duty,” he asserted in this book, “is to become healthy.”

Heine confesses that he too was among the[71] sick and decrepit souls. In reality he was at no period so full of life and health, so harmoniously inspired and upborne by a great enthusiasm. He laughs a little at Goethe; he fails to see that the Phidian Zeus, at whose confined position he jests, was the greatest liberator of them all; but for the most part his mocking sarcasm is here silent. It was not until ten years later, when the subtle seeds of disease had begun to appear, and when, too, he had perhaps gained a clearer insight into the possibilities of life, that Heine realized that the practical reforming movements of his time were not those for which his early enthusiasm had been aroused. With the slow steps of that consuming disease, and after the revolution of 1848, he ceased to recognize as of old any common root for his various activities, or to insist on the fundamental importance of religion. Everything in the world became the sport of his intelligence. The brain still functioned brilliantly in the atrophied body; the swift lightning-like wit still struck unerringly; it spared not even himself. The “Confessions” are full of irony, covering all things with laughter that is half reverence, or with reverence that is more than half laughter—and woe to the reader who is not at every moment alert! In the romantic, satirical poem of “Atta Troll,” written at the commencement of the last period, this, his final altitude, is most completely revealed. It needs a little study to-day, even for a German,[72] but it is well worth that study. The history of a dancing bear who escapes from servitude, “Atta Troll” is a protest against the radical party, with their narrow conceptions of progress, their tame ideal of bourgeois equality, their little watchwords, their solemnity, their indignation at the human creatures who smile “even in their enthusiasm.” All these serious concerns of the tribunes of the people are bathed in soft laughter as we listen to the delicious child-like monotonous melody in which the old bear, surrounded by his family, mumbles or mutters of the future. “Atta Troll” is not, as many have thought, a sneer at the most sacred ideals of men. It is, rather, the assertion of those ideals against the individuals who would narrow them down to their own petty scope. There are certain mirrors, Heine said, so constructed that they would present even Apollo as a caricature. But we laugh at the caricature, not at the god. It is well to show, even at the cost of some misunderstanding, that above and beyond the little ideals of our immediate political progress, there is built a yet larger ideal city, of which also the human spirit claims citizenship. The defence of the inalienable rights of the spirit, Heine declares, had been the chief business of his life.

In the history of Germany, it was her two great intellectual liberators, Luther and Lessing, to whom Heine looked up with the most un[73]qualified love and reverence. By his later vindication of the rights of the spirit, not less than by his earlier fight for religious and political progress, he may be said to have earned for himself a place below, indeed, but not so very far below, those hearty and sound-cored iconoclasts.

II.

To reach the root of the man’s nature we must glance at the chief facts of his life. He was born at Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, then occupied by the French, probably on the 13th of December, 1799. He came, by both parents, of that Jewish race which is, as he said once, the dough whereof gods are kneaded. The family of his mother, Betty van Geldern, had come from Holland a century earlier; Betty herself received an excellent education; she shared the studies of her brother, who became a physician of repute; she spoke and read English and French; her favourite books were Rousseau’s “Emile” and Goethe’s elegies. For novels or poetry generally she cared little. She preferred logic to sentiment, and was careful of the precise value of words. Some letters written during her twenty-fourth year reveal a frank, brave, and sweet nature; she was a bright, attractive little person, and had many wooers. In the summer of 1796 Samson Heine, bearing a letter of introduction, entered the house of the[74] Van Gelderns. He was the son of a Jewish merchant settled in Hanover, and he had just made a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of commissary with the rank of officer, under Prince Ernest of Cumberland. He was a large and handsome man, with soft blonde hair and beautiful hands; there was something about him, said his son, a little characterless, almost feminine; “he was a great child.” After a brief courtship he married Betty, and settled at Düsseldorf as an agent for English velveteens. Harry (so he was named after an Englishman) was the first child. From his rather weak and romantic father came whatever was loose and unbalanced in Heine’s temperament, and his ineradicable instinct for posing; it was his mother, with her strong and healthy nature, well developed both intellectually and emotionally, and her great ambitions for her son, who, as he himself said, played the chief part in the history of his evolution.

Harry was a quick child; his senses were keen, though he was not physically strong; he loved reading, and his favourite books were “Don Quixote” and “Gulliver’s Travels.” He used to make rhymes with his only and much-loved sister Lotte, and at the age of ten he wrote a ghost-poem which his teachers considered a masterpiece. At the Lyceum he worked well, at night as well as by day. Only once, at the[75] public ceremony at the end of a school year, he came to grief; he was reciting a poem, when his eyes fell on a beautiful, fair-haired girl in the audience; he hesitated, stammered, was silent, fell down fainting. So early he revealed the extreme cerebral irritability of a nature absorbed in dreams and taken captive by visions. It was not long after this, at the age of seventeen, when his rich uncle at Hamburg was trying in vain to set him forward on a commercial career, that Heine met the woman who aroused his first and last profound passion, always unsatisfied except in so far as it found exquisite embodiment in his poems. He never mentioned her name; it was not till after his death that the form standing behind this Maria, Zuleima, Evelina of so many sweet, strange, or melancholy songs was known to be that of his cousin, Amalie Heine.

With his uncle’s help he studied law at Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin. At Berlin he fell under the dominant influence of Hegel, the vanquisher of the romantic school of which Schelling was the philosophic representative. Heine afterwards referred to this period as that in which he “herded swine with the Hegelians;” it is certain that Hegel exerted great and permanent influence over him. At Berlin, in 1821, appeared his first volume of poems, and then he began to take his true place.

At this period he is described as a good-natured[76] and gentle youth, but reserved, not caring to show his emotions. He was of middle height and slender, with rather long light brown hair (in childhood it was red, and he was called “Rother Harry”) framing the pale and beardless oval face, the bright, blue, short-sighted eyes, the Greek nose, the high cheek bones, the large mouth, the full—half cynical, half sensual—lips. He was not a typical German; like Goethe, he never smoked; he disliked beer, and until he went to Paris he had never tasted sauerkraut.

For some years he continued, chiefly at Göttingen, to study law. But he had no liking and no capacity for jurisprudence, and his spasmodic fits of application at such moments as he realized that it was not good for him to depend on the generosity of his rich and kind-hearted uncle Solomon, failed to carry him far. A new idea, a sunny day, the opening of some flower-like lied, a pretty girl—and the Pandects were forgotten.

Shortly after he had at last received his doctor’s diploma he went through the ceremony of baptism in hope of obtaining an appointment from the Prussian Government. It was a step which he immediately regretted, and which, far from placing him in a better position, excited the enmity both of Christians and Jews, although the Heine family had no very strong views on the matter; Heine’s mother, it should be said, was a Deist, his father indifferent, but the Jewish[77] rites were strictly kept up. He still talked of becoming an advocate, until, in 1826, the publication of the first volume of the “Reisebilder” gave him a reputation throughout Germany by its audacity, its charming and picturesque manner, its peculiarly original personality. The second volume, bolder and better than the first, was received with delight very much mixed with horror, and it was prohibited by Austria, Prussia, and many minor states. At this period Heine visited England; he was then disgusted with Germany and full of enthusiasm for the “land of freedom,” an enthusiasm which naturally met with many rude shocks, and from that time dates the bitterness with which he usually speaks of England. He found London—although, owing to a clever abuse of uncle Solomon’s generosity, exceedingly well supplied with money—“frightfully damp and uncomfortable;” only the political life of England attracted him, and there were no bounds to his admiration of Canning. He then visited Italy, to spend there the happiest days of his life; and having at length realized that his efforts to obtain any government appointment in Germany would be fruitless, he emigrated to Paris. There, save for brief periods, he remained until his death.

This entry into the city which he had called the New Jerusalem was an important epoch in Heine’s life. He was thirty-one years of age,[78] still youthful, and eager to receive new impressions; he was apparently in robust health, notwithstanding constant headaches; Gautier describes him as in appearance a sort of German Apollo. He was still developing, as he continued to develop, even up to the end; the ethereal loveliness of the early poems vanished, it is true, but only to give place to a closer grasp of reality, a larger laughter, a keener cry of pain. He was now heartily welcomed by the extraordinarily brilliant group then living and working in Paris, including Victor Hugo, George Sand, Balzac, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Gautier, Chopin, Louis Blanc, Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Quinet, Berlioz, and he entered with eager delight into their manifold activities. For a time also he attached himself rather closely to the school of Saint-Simon, then headed by Enfantin; he was especially attracted by their religion of humanity, which seemed the realization of his own dreams. Heine’s book on “Religion and Philosophy in Germany” was written at Enfantin’s suggestion, and the first edition dedicated to him; Enfantin’s name was, he said, a sort of Shibboleth, indicating the most advanced party in the “liberation war of humanity.” In 1855 he withdrew the dedication; it had become an anachronism; Enfantin was no longer ransacking the world in search of la femme libre; the martyrs of yesterday no[79] longer bore a cross—unless it were, he added characteristically, the cross of the Legion of Honour.

A few years after his arrival in Paris Heine entered on a relationship which occupied a large place in his life. Mathilde Mirat, a lively grisette of sixteen, was the illegitimate daughter of a man of wealth and position in the provinces, and she had come up from Normandy to serve in her aunt’s shoe-shop. Heine often passed this shop, and an acquaintance, at first carried on silently through the shop-window, gradually ripened into a more intimate relationship. Mathilde could neither read nor write; it was decided that she should go to school for a time; after that they established a little common household, one of those ménages parisiens, recognized as almost legitimate, for which Heine had always had a warm admiration, because, as he said, he meant by “marriage” something quite other than the legal coupling effected by parsons and bankers. As in the case of Goethe, it was not until some years later that he went through the religious ceremony, as a preliminary to a duel in which he had become involved by his remarks on Börne’s friend, Madame Strauss; he wished to give Mathilde an assured position in case of his death. After the ceremony at St. Sulpice he invited to dinner all those of his friends who had contracted similar relations, in[80] order that they might be influenced by his example. That they were so influenced is not recorded.

It is not difficult to understand the strong and permanent attraction that drew the poet, who had so many intellectual and aristocratic women among his friends, to this pretty, laughter-loving grisette. It lay in her bright and wild humour, her childlike impulsiveness, not least in her charming ignorance. It was delightful to Heine that Mathilde had never read a line of his books, did not even know what a poet was, and loved him only for himself. He found in her a continual source of refreshment.

He had need of every source of refreshment. In the years that followed his formal marriage in 1841, the dark shadows, within and without, began to close round him. Although he was then producing his most mature work, chiefly in poetry—“Atta Troll,” “Romancero,” “Deutschland”—his income from literary sources remained small. Mathilde was not a good housekeeper; and even with the aid of a considerable allowance from his uncle Solomon, Heine was frequently in pecuniary difficulties, and was consequently induced to accept a small pension from the French Government, which has sometimes been a matter of concern to those who care for his fame. As years passed, the enmities that he suffered from or cherished increased[81] rather than diminished, and his bitterness found expression in his work. Even Mathilde was not an unalloyed source of joy; the charming child was becoming a middle-aged woman, and was still like a child. She could not enter into Heine’s interests; she delighted in theatres and circuses, to which he could not always accompany her: and he experienced the pangs of an unreasonable jealousy more keenly than he cared to admit. Then uncle Solomon died, and his son refused, until considerable pressure was brought to bear on him, to continue the allowance which his father had intended Heine to receive. This was a severe blow, and the excitement it produced developed the latent seeds of his disease. It came on with symptoms of paralysis, which even in a few months gave him, he says, the appearance of a dying man. During the next two years, although his brain remained clear, the long pathological tragedy was unfolded.

He went out for the last time in May, 1848. Half blind and half lame, he slowly made his way out of the streets, filled with the noise of revolution, into the silent Louvre, to the shrine dedicated to “the goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo.” There he sat long at her feet; he was bidding farewell to his old gods; he had become reconciled to the religion of sorrow; tears streamed from his eyes, and she looked[82] down at him, compassionate but helpless: “Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and cannot help thee?”

“On eût dit un Apollon germanique”—so Gautier said of the Heine of 1835; twenty years later an English visitor wrote of him—“He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet which covered him—his eyes closed, and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted ‘Ecce Homo’ ever painted by some old German painter.”

His sufferings were only relieved by ever larger doses of morphia; but although still more troubles came to him, and the failure of a bank robbed him of his small savings, his spirit remained unconquered. “He is a wonderful man,” said one of his doctors; “he has only two anxieties—to conceal his condition from his mother, and to assure his wife’s future.” His literary work, though it decreased in amount, never declined in power; only, in the words of his friend Berlioz, it seemed as though the poet was standing at the window of his tomb, looking around on the world in which he had no longer a part.

He saw a few friends, of whom Ferdinand Lassalle, with his exuberant power and enthusiasm, was the most interesting to him, as the representative of a new age and a new social[83] faith; and the most loved, that girl-friend who sat for hours or days at a time by the “mattress-grave” in the Rue d’Amsterdam, reading to him or writing his letters or correcting proofs. To the last the loud, bright voice of Mathilde, when he chanced to hear it, scolding the servants or in other active exercise, often made him stop speaking, while a smile of delight passed over his face. He died on the 16th of February, 1856. He was buried, silently, in Montmartre, according to his wish; for, as he said, it is quiet there.

III.

Throughout and above all, Heine was a poet. From first to last he was led by three angels who danced for ever in his brain, and guided him, singly or together, always. They were the same as in “Atta Troll” he saw in the moonlight from the casement of Uraka’s hut—the Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the blonde and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm of the oasis, with all the fragrance of the East between her breasts: “O, you dead Jewess, I love you most, more than the Greek goddess, more than that fairy of the North.”[4]

[84]

Those genii of three ideal lands danced for ever in his brain, and that is but another way of indicating the opposition that lay at the root of his nature. From one point of view, it may well be, he continued the work of Luther and Lessing, though he was less great-hearted, less sound at core, though he had not that element of sane Philistinism which marks the Shakespeares and Goethes of the world. But he was, more than anything else, a poet, an artist, a dreamer, a perpetual child. The practical reformers among whom at one time he placed himself, the men of one idea, were naturally irritated and suspicious; there was a flavour of aristocracy in such idealism. In the poem called “Disputation” a Capuchin and a Rabbi argued before the King and Queen at Toledo concerning the respective merits of the Christian and Jewish religions. Both spoke at great length and with great fervour, and in the end the King appealed to the beautiful Queen by his side. She replied that she could not tell which of[85] them was right, but that she did not like the smell of either; and Heine was generally of the Queen’s mind. He sighed for the restoration of Barbarossa, the long-delayed German Empire, and his latest biographer asserts that he would have greeted the discovery of Barbarossa under the disguise of the King of Prussia, with Bismarckian insignia of blood and iron, as the realization of all his dreams. It is doubtful, however, whether the meeting would be very cordial on either side. It would probably be the painful duty of the Emperor, as of the Emperor of the vision in “Deutschland,” to tell Heine, in very practical language, that he was wanting in respect, wanting in all sense of etiquette; and Heine would certainly reply to the Emperor, as under the same circumstances he replied to the visionary Barbarossa, that that gentleman had better go home again, that during his long absence Emperors had become unnecessary, and that, after all, sceptres and crowns made admirable playthings for monkeys.

“We are founding a democracy of gods,” he wrote in 1834, “all equally holy, blessed and glorious. You desire simple clothing, ascetic morals, and unseasoned enjoyments; we, on the contrary, desire nectar and ambrosia, purple mantles, costly perfumes, pleasure and splendour, dances of laughing nymphs, music and plays.—Do not be angry, you virtuous republicans; we answer[86] all your reproaches in the words of one of Shakespeare’s fools: ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’” What could an austere republican, a Puritanic Liberal, who scorned the vision of roses and myrtles and sugar-plums all round, say to this? Börne answered, “I can be indulgent to the games of children, indulgent to the passions of a youth, but when on the bloody day of battle a boy who is chasing butterflies gets between my legs; when at the day of our greatest need, and we are calling aloud on God, the young coxcomb beside us in the church sees only the pretty girls, and winks and flirts—then, in spite of all our philosophy and humanity, we may well grow angry.... Heine, with his sybaritic nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a rose-leaf disturbs his sleep; how, then, should he rest comfortably on the knotty bed of freedom? Where is there any beauty without a fault? Where is there any good thing without its ridiculous side? Nature is seldom a poet and never rhymes; let him whom her rhymeless prose cannot please turn to poetry!” Börne was right; Heine was not the man to plan a successful revolution, or defend a barricade, or edit a popular democratic newspaper, or represent adequately a radical constituency—all this was true. Let us be thankful that it was true; Börnes are ever with us, and we are grateful: there is but one Heine.

[87]

The same complexity of nature that made Heine an artist made him a humorist. But it was a more complicated complexity now, a cosmic game between the real world and the ideal world; he could go no farther. The young Catullus of 1825, with his fiery passions crushed in the wine-press of life and yielding such divine ambrosia, soon lost his faith in passion. The militant soldier in the liberation-war of humanity of 1835 soon ceased to flourish his sword. It was only with the full development of his humour, when his spinal cord began to fail and he had taken up his position as a spectator of life, that Heine attained the only sort of unity possible to him—the unity that comes of a recognized and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of this unequalled humour—“the smile of Mephistopheles passing over the face of Christ”—he bathed all the things he counted dearest; to its service he brought the secret of his poet’s nature, the secret of speaking with a voice that every heart leaps up to answer. It is scarcely the humour of Aristophanes, though it is a greater force, even in moulding our political and social ideals, than Börne knew; it is oftener a modern development of the humour of the mad king and the fool in “Lear”—that humour which is the last concentrated word of the human organism under the lash of Fate.

And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern,[88] it can only be said that these discords out of which his humour exhaled are those which we have nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with a voice that seems to arise from the depth of our own souls. He represents our period of transition; he gazed, from what seemed the vulgar Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was for ever closed, before on a promised land he should never enter. While with clear sight he announced things to come, the music of the past floated up to him; he brooded wistfully over the vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in the mediæval wilderness; he heard strange sounds of psaltries and harps, the psalms of Israel, the voice of Princess Sabbath, across the waters of Babylon.—In a few years this significance of Heine will be lost; that it is not yet lost the eagerness with which his books are read and translated sufficiently testifies.

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