neither at home, at school, nor in the streets was the atmosphere the
boy breathed favourable to the development of religious principles. The
Judaism of that age was, superficially, very much what the age had made
of it; and its followers and its persecutors alike combined to render
it mightily unattractive to susceptible natures. Samson Heine, stolid
and respectable, we may imagine doing his religious, as he did all his
other duties and avocations, in solemn routine fashion, laying heavy
honest hands on each prose detail, and letting every bit of poetry slip
through his fat fingers, whilst his bright eager wife, with her large
ideas and her small vanities, ruled her household, and read her
Rousseau, and, feeling the outer world shut from her by religion, and
the higher world barred from her by ritual, found the whole thing
cramping and unsatisfying to the last degree. ‘Happy is he whom his
mother teacheth’ runs an old Talmudic proverb; but among the
mother-taught lessons of his childhood, the best was missing to Heinrich
Heine--the real difference between ‘holy and profane’ he never rightly
learnt, and thus it came to pass that Jewish instincts--an ineradicable
and an inalienable, but alas! an incomplete inheritance of the sons of
Israel--were all that Judaism gave to this poet of Jewish race.
One lingers over these early influences, the right understanding of
which goes far to supply the key to some of the later puzzles. Oddly
enough, the clouds which by and by hid the blue are discernible from the
very first, and these early years give the silver lining to those
gathering clouds. In view of the dark days coming one at least rejoices
that Heine’s childhood was a happy one; at home the merry mischievous
boy was quite a hero to his two younger brothers, and a hero and a
companion both to his only sister, the Löttchen who was the occasion of
his earliest recorded composition. It is a favourite recollection of
this lady, who is living still,[11] how she, a blushing little maid of
ten, won a good deal of unmerited praise for a school theme, till a
trembling confession was extorted from her that the real author was her
brother Harry. His mother, too, was exceedingly proud of her handsome
eldest son, whose resemblance in many ways to her was the sweetest
flattery. And besides the adoring home circle Harry found a great ally
for playhours in an old French ex-drummer, who had marched to victory
with Napoleon’s legions, and who had plenty of tales to tell the
boy of the wonderful invincible Kaiser, whom one day--blest
never-to-be-forgotten vision--the boy actually saw ride through
Düsseldorf on his famous white steed (1810). Heine never quite lost the
glamour cast over him in his youth; France, Germany, Judea, each in a
sense his _patria_, was each, in the time to come, ‘loved both ways,’
each in turn mocked at bitterly enough when the mood was on him, but
always with France, the ‘poet of the nations’ as our own English poetess
calls her, the sympathies of this cosmopolitan poet were keenest--a
perhaps not unnatural state of feeling when we reflect how fact and
fiction both combined to produce it. The French occupation of the
principality had been a veritable deliverance to its inhabitants,
Christian and Jewish alike, and what boy, in his own person, led out of
bondage, would not have thrilled to such stories as the old drummer had
to tell of the real living hero of it all? And the boy in question, we
must bear in mind, was a poet _in posse_.
In school, in spite of the difficulties of irregular verbs, Harry seems
to have held his own, and to have soon attracted the especial attention
of the director. The chief selected for the lycée at Düsseldorf had
happened to be a Roman Catholic abbé of decidedly Voltairian views on
most subjects, and attracted by the boy and becoming acquainted with his
family, many a talk did Abbé Schallmayer have with Frau Heine over the
undoubted gifts and the delightful imperfections of her son. It may
possibly have been altogether simple interest in his bright young pupil,
or perhaps Frau Heine, pretty still, and charming always, was herself an
attraction to the schoolmaster, but certain it is, whether a private
taste for pretty women or a genuine pedagogic enthusiasm prompted his
frequent calls, our abbé was a constant visitor at Samson Heine’s, and
Harry and Harry’s future a never-failing theme for conversation. What
was the boy to be? There was no room for much speculation if he were to
remain a Jew--that path was narrow, if not straight, and admitted of
small range of choice along its level line of commerce.
Betty, we know, was no staunch Jewess, and had her small personal
ambitions to boot, so such opposition as there was to the abbé’s plainly
given counsel to make a Catholic of the boy, and give him his chance,
came probably from the stolid, steady-going father, to whom custom spoke
in echoes resonant enough to deaden the muffled tones of religion. No
question, however, of sentiment or sacrifice was permitted to
complicate, or elevate, the question; no sense of voluntary renunciation
was suggested to the boy; no choice between the life and good, and the
death and evil, between conscience and compromise, was presented to him.
On the broadly comprehensive grounds that Judaism and trade had been
good enough for the father, trade and Judaism must be good enough for
the son--the matter was decided.
But still before the lad’s prospects could be definitely settled, one
important personage remained to be consulted, the banker at Hamburg,
whose wealth had gained him somewhat of the position of a family fetich.
What Uncle Solomon would say to a scheme had no fictitious value about
it; for even were the oracle occasionally dumb, not seldom would its
speech be silver and its silence gold. A rich uncle is a very solemn
possession in an impecunious family, so Harry, and Harry’s poetry, and
Harry’s powers generally, had to be weighed in the Hamburg scales before
any standard value could be assigned to either one of them. For three
years the balance was held doubtful; the counting-house scales, accurate
as they usually were, could hardly adjust themselves to the conditions
of an unknown quantity, which ‘young Heine’ on an office stool must
certainly have proved to his bewildered relatives. One imagines him in
that correct and cramping atmosphere, fretting as he had done in the old
convent school-days against its weary routine, longing with all the
half-understood strength of his poet nature for the green hills and the
mountain lakes, and feeling absolutely stifled with all the solemn
interest shown over sordid matters. He tells us himself of some of his
‘calculations’ which would wander far afield, and leave the figures on
the paper, to concern themselves with the far more perplexing units
which passed the mirky office windows, as he complains, ‘at the same
hour, with the same mien, making the same motions, like the puppets in a
town house clock--reckoning, reckoning always on the basis, twice two
are four. Frightful should it ever suddenly occur to one of these people
that twice two are properly five, and that he therefore had
miscalculated his whole life and squandered it all away in a ghastly
error!’ Many a poem too, sorrowful or fantastic, as the mood took him,
was scribbled in office hours, and very probably on office paper, thence
to find a temporary home in the Hamburg _Watchman_. What could be done
with such a lad? By every office standard he must inevitably have been
found wanting, and one even feels a sort of sympathy with the prosaic
head of the house who had made his money by the exercise of such very
different talents, and whose notion of poetry corresponded very nearly
with Corporal Bunting’s notion of love, that it’s by no means ‘the great
thing in life boys and girls want to make it out to be--that one does
not eat it, nor drink it, and as for the rest, why, it’s bother.’ It
always was ‘bother’ to the banker: all through his prosperous life this
poet nephew of his, who had the prophetic impertinence to tell the old
man once that he owed him some gratitude for being born his uncle, and
for bearing his name, was an unsatisfactory riddle. Original genius of
the sort which could create a bank-book _ex nihilo_, the millionaire
could have appreciated, but originality which ran into such unproductive
channels as poetry-book making was quite beyond him, and that he never
read the young man’s verses it is needless to say. Even in his own
immediate family and for his first book poor Harry found no audience,
save his mother; and to the very end of his days Solomon Heine for the
life of him could see nothing in his nephew but a _dumme Junge_, who
never ‘got on,’ and who made a jest of most things, even of his wealthy
and respectable relatives.
It was scarcely the old man’s fault; one can only see to the limits of
one’s vision, and a poet’s soul was not well within Solomon Heine’s
range. According to his lights he was not ungenerous. That Harry had not
the making of a clerk in him, those three probationary years had proved
to demonstration, and in the determination at which the banker presently
arrived, of giving those indefinite talents which he only understood
enough to doubt, a chance of development by paying for a three years’
university course at Bonn, he seems to have come fully up to any
reasonable ideal of a rich uncle. It is just possible that a secondary
motive influenced his generosity, for Harry, besides scribbling, had
found a relief from office work by falling in love with one of the
banker’s daughters, who would seem not to have shared the family
distaste for poetry. The little idyl was of course out of the question
in so realistic a circle, and the young lady, to do her justice, seems
herself to have been speedily reconverted to the proper principles in
which she had been trained. No unfit pendant to the ‘Amy,
shallow-hearted’ with whom a more recent generation is more familiar,
this Cousin Amy of poor Heine’s married and ‘kept her carriage’ with all
due despatch, whilst he, at college, was essaying to mend his ‘heart
broken in two’ with all the styptics which are as old and, alas, as
hurtful as such fractures. Poetical exaggeration notwithstanding--and
besides her own especial love-elegy, Amalie Heine, under thin disguises,
is the heroine of very many of the love-poems--there is little room for
doubt, that if not so seriously injured as he thought, Heine’s heart did
nevertheless receive a wound, which ached for many and many a long day,
from this girl’s weak or wilful inconstancy. Heartache is, however,
nearly as much a matter-of-course episode in most young people’s lives
as measles, and the consequences of either malady are only very
exceptionally serious.
Heine’s youthful disappointment is of chief interest as having
indirectly led to what was really the determining event of his life.
When Amalie’s parents shrewdly determined on separation as the best
course to be pursued with the cousins, and the university plan had been
accepted by Harry, his future, which was to date from degree-taking,
came on for discussion. Except in an ‘other-worldly’ sense there was, in
truth, but a very limited ‘future’ possible to Jews of talent. The only
open profession was that of medicine, and for that, like the son of
Moses Mendelssohn, young Heine had a positive distaste. Commerce, that
first and final resource of the race, which had had to satisfy Joseph
Mendelssohn, like a good many others equally ill-fitted for it, was not
possible to Heine, for he had sufficiently shown, not only dislike, but
positive incapacity for business routine. The law suggested itself, as
affording an excellent arena for those ready powers of argument and
repartee which in the family circle were occasionally embarrassing, and
the profession of an advocate, with the vague ‘opportunities’ it
included, when pressed upon young Heine, was not unalluring to him. The
immediate future was probably what most occupied his thoughts; the
freedom of a university life, the flowing river in place of those
bustling streets, shelves full of books exchanged for those dreary
office ledgers, youthful comrades in the stead of solemnly irritated
old clerks. Whether the fact that conversion was a condition of most of
the delights, an inevitable preliminary of all the benefits of that
visionary future; whether the grim truth that ‘a certificate of baptism
was a necessary card of admission to European culture,’ was openly
debated and defended, or silently and shamefacedly slurred over in these
family councils, does not appear. No record remains to us but the fact
that the young student successfully passed his examination in May, 1825;
that he was admitted to his degree on July 20, and that between these
two dates--to be precise, on the 28th of June--he was baptized as a
Protestant with two clergymen for his sponsors. ‘Lest I be poor and deny
thee’ was Agur’s prayer, and a wise one; for shivering Poverty,
clutching at the drapery of Desire, makes unto herself many a fine,
mean, flimsy garment. With no gleam of conviction to cast a flickering
halo of enthusiasm over the act, and with no shadow of overwhelming
circumstance to somewhat veil it, Heine made his deliberate surrender of
conscience to expediency. It was full-grown apostasy, neither
conscientious conversion, nor childish drifting into another faith. ‘No
man’s soul is alone,’ Ruskin tells us in his uncompromising way,
‘Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the
hand.’ For the rest of his life Heine was in the grip of the serpent,
and that, it seems to us, was the secret of his perpetual unrest. Maimed
lives are common enough; blind or deaf, or minus a leg or an arm, or
plus innumerable bruises, one yet goes on living, and with the help of
time and philosophy sorrow of most sorts grows bearable. Hearts are
tough; but the soul is more sensitive to injuries, is, to many of us,
the veritable, vulnerable _tendo Achillis_ on which our mothers lay
their tender, detaining, unavailing hands. Heine sold his soul, and that
he never received the price must have perpetually renewed the memory of
the bargain. He, one of the ‘bodyguards of Jehovah,’ had suffered
himself to be bribed from his post. He never lost his sickening sense of
that humiliation; it may be read between the lines, alike of the most
brilliant of his prose, of the most tender of his poems, of the most
mocking of his often quoted jests.
‘They have told thee a-many stories,
And much complaint have made;
And yet my heart’s true anguish
That never have they said.
‘They shook their heads protesting,
They made a great to-do;
They called me a wicked fellow,
And thou believedst it true.
‘And yet the worst of all things,
Of that they were not aware,
The darkest and the saddest,
That in my heart I bear.’[12]
And it was a burden he never laid down; it embittered his relationships
and jeopardised his friendships, and set him at variance with himself.
‘I get up in the night and look in the glass and curse myself,’ we find
him writing to one of his old Jewish fellow-workers in the New Jerusalem
movement (Moser), or checking himself in the course of a violent tirade
against converts, in which Börne had joined, to bitterly exclaim, ‘It is
ill talking of ropes in the house of one who has been hanged.’ Wherever
he treats of Jewish subjects, and the theme seems always to have had for
him the fascination which is said to tempt sinners to revisit the scene
of their sins, we seem to read remorse between the melodious, mocking
lines. Now it is Moses Lump who is laughed at in half tones of envy for
his ignorant, unbarterable belief in the virtue of unsnuffed candles;
now it is Jehudah Halevi, whose love for the mistress, the
_Herzensdame_, ‘whose name was Jerusalem,’ is sung with a sympathy and
an intensity impossible to one who had not felt a like passion, and was
not bitterly conscious of having forfeited the right to avow it. The
sense of his moral mercenary suicide, in truth, rarely left him. His
nature was too conscientious for the strain thus set upon it; his
‘wickedness’ and ‘blackguardism,’ such as they were, were often but
passionate efforts to throw his old man of the sea, his heavy burden of
self-reproach; and his jests sound not unseldom as so many
untranslatable cries. He had bargained away his birthright for the hope
of a mess of pottage, and the evil taste of the base contract clung to
the poor paralysed lips when ‘even kissing had no effect upon them.’ And
but a thin, unsatisfying, and terribly intermittent ‘mess,’ too, it
proved, and the share in it which his uncle, and his uncle’s heirs,
provided was very bitter in the eating. The story of his struggles, are
they not written in the chronicles of the immortals? and his ‘monument,’
is it not standing yet ‘in the new stone premises of his
publishers?’[13]
His biographers--his niece, the Princessa della Rocca, among the
latest--have made every incident of Heine’s life as familiar as his own
books have made his genius to English readers, and Mr. Stigand,
following Herr Strodtman, has given us an exhaustive record of the
poet’s life at home and in exile; in the Germany which was so harsh and
in the France which was so tender with him; with the respectable German
relatives, who read his books at last and were none the wiser, and with
the unlettered French wife, who could not read a single word of them
all, and who yet understood her poet by virtue of the love which passeth
understanding, and was in this case entirely independent of it. This
sketch trenches on no such well-filled ground; it presumes to touch only
on the fault which gave to life and genius both that odd pathetic twist,
and to glance at the suffering, which, if there be any saving power in
anguish, might surely be held by the most self-righteous as some
atonement for the ‘blackguardism.’
‘Oh! not little when pain
Is most quelling, and man
Easily quelled, and the fine
Temper of genius so soon
Thrills at each smart, is the praise
Not to have yielded to pain.’[14]
Seven years on the rack is no small test of the heroic temperament; to
lie sick and solitary, stretched on a ‘mattress grave,’ the back bent
and twisted, the legs paralysed, the hands powerless, and with the
senses of sight and taste fast failing. At any time within that seven
years Heine might well have gained the gold medal in capability of
suffering for which, in his whimsical way, he talked of competing,
should such a prize be offered at the Paris Exhibition.[15] And the long
days, with ‘no pleasure in them,’ were so drearily many; the silver cord
was so slowly loosed, the golden bowl seemed broken on the wheel. His
very friends grew tired. ‘One must love one’s friends with all their
failings, but it is a great failing to be ill,’ says Madame Sevigné,
and, as the years went by, more and more deserted grew the sick-chamber.
He never complained; his sweet, ungrudging nature found excuses for
desertion and content in loneliness, in the reflection that he was in
truth ‘unconscionably long a-dying.’ ‘Never have I seen,’ says Lady
Duff-Gordon, in her _Recollections of Heine_, and she herself was no
mean exemplar of bravely-borne pain, ‘never have I seen a man bear such
horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He neither
paraded his anguish, nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical
airs. He 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.’
‘Don’t tell my wife,’ he exclaims one day, when a paroxysm that should
have been fatal was not, and the doctor expressed what he meant for a
reassuring belief, that it would not hasten the end. ‘Don’t tell my
wife’--we seem to hear that sad little jest, so infinitely sadder than a
moan, and our own eyes moisten. Perfectly upright geniuses, when
suffering from dyspepsia, have not always shown as much consideration
for their perfectly proper wives as does this ‘blackguard’ Heine, under
torture, for his. It is conceivable that under exceptional circumstances
a man may contrive to be a hero to his valet, but, unless he be truly
heroic, he will not be able to keep up the character to his wife. Heine
managed both. Madame Heine is still living,[16] and one may not say much
of a love that was truly strong as death, and that the many waters of
affliction could not quench. But the valet test, we may hint, was
fulfilled; for the old servant who helped to tend him in that terrible
illness lives still with Madame Heine, and cries ‘for company’ when the
widow’s talk falls, as it falls often, on the days of her youth and her
‘_pauvre Henri_.’ There are traditional records in plenty of his
cheerful courage, his patient unselfishness, his unfailing endurance of
well-nigh unendurable pain. ‘_Dieu me pardonnera_, _c’est son métier_,’
the dying lips part to say, still with that sweet, inseparable smile
playing about them. Shall man be more just than God? Shall we leave to
Him for ever the monopoly of His _métier_?
DANIEL DERONDA AND HIS JEWISH CRITICS
_George Eliot and Judaism._ An attempt to appreciate _Daniel
Deronda_. By Professor David KAUFMANN, of the Jewish Theological
Seminary, Buda-Pesth. Translated from the German by J. W. FERRIER,
1877. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.