THE MATTRESS GRAVE
We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and
see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two
artists whom we are about to study are men who had to flee from Germany
and spend a considerable part of their lives as political exiles in
Paris.
Heinrich Heine was born in 1799, the same year as Balzac. He was a Jew,
and it was a time when the Jews in Frankfort were penned up in a filthy
ghetto and subjected to insults and outrages; the “Jew-grief” was one of
the deep elements of this great poet’s soul. Another element was the
shame of the “poor relation”; he had a rich uncle, a millionaire banker
in the bourgeois city of Hamburg, who took the youthful genius into his
office at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards kicked him out,
telling him that he was “a fool.” Among other follies, the young genius
had fallen in love with the rich banker’s daughter, and she toyed with
him for a while, and then married respectably, and gave the poet’s heart
a wound from which it never recovered.
To get rid of him the uncle set him to studying law; but he made a poor
student and a worse lawyer. In order to be allowed to practice he had to
be baptized as a Christian; this doesn’t really do one any harm, but it
caused shame to Heine throughout his life. He had no real religion,
being a child of Voltaire, a rebel, and in due course a revolutionist.
He was a poet, a maker of exquisite verses, full of unutterable
tenderness. Also he was a lover; he wandered here and there with his
broken heart, trying many casual loves, and paying for his adventures a
frightful penalty, as will appear.
We are back in the days of the “Holy Alliance,” and all the little
princelings of Germany are holding the thoughts of their subjects in a
vise. Heine put satirical and skeptical ideas into rhyme; he had a
bitter wit, and his words flew all over Germany, and the Hohenzollerns
of Prussia not merely suppressed one book, they paid him the compliment
of prohibiting everything he might write. “Put a sword on my coffin,” he
said, in one of his stanzas, “for I have been a soldier in the war for
the liberation of humanity.” The revolution of 1830 came in France, and
Heine was deeply stirred, and hoped for something to happen in Germany.
But he had to wait a long time, nearly a hundred years; then, strange
whim of history, three million American boys had to cross the ocean to
win the political battle of this German-Jewish rebel!
Heine could stand Germany no longer, and went to live in Paris, where he
was welcomed by the whole romantic school. He wrote letters, articles
and verses, which went back to Germany and helped carry on the war for
freedom. His genius and wit were such that all the efforts to bar his
books only promoted their circulation. Fate played a queer prank upon
the Prussian Junkerdom--their most popular sentimental songs, which they
know by heart and sing on all possible occasions, were written by a
rebel exile whom they had chased about the streets in a Judenhetze; the
same man who wrote the terrible stanzas of “The Silesian Weavers,”
picturing the starving wretches sitting in their huts and weaving a
three-fold curse, against God, King and Fatherland--“Old Germany, we
weave thy shroud--we weave, we weave!”
His was a strange, complex nature, with many contradictory qualities. He
was called “the German Aristophanes.” He met in the end a ghastly fate;
a spinal disease, the penalty of his casual loves, slowly ate him up,
and for years he lay on what he called “a mattress grave.” First he
could scarcely walk, then he could scarcely see, and all the time he
suffered hideously. But his mind lasted to the end, and he saw all
things clearly, including his own grim fate. “The Great Author of the
Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly,
so-called German Aristophanes that his mightiest sarcasms are but
feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in
humor and in colossal wit.”