(BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.)
Harry Heine, as he was originally named, was born in Duesseldorf on the
Rhine, December 13th, 1799. His father was a well-to-do Jewish
merchant; and his mother, the daughter of the famous physician and
Aulic Counlor Von Geldern, was, according to her son, a "_femme
distinguee_." His early childhood fell in the days of the occupation
of Duesseldorf by the French revolutionary troops; and, in the opinion
of his biographer Strodtmann, the influence of the French rule, thus
brought directly to bear upon the formation of his character, can
scarcely be exaggerated. His education was begun at the Franciscan
monastery of the Jesuits at Duesseldorf, where the teachers were
mostly French priests; and his religious instruction was at the same
time carried on in a private Jewish school. His principal companions
were Jewish children, and he was brought up with a rigid adherence to
the Hebrew faith. Thus in the very seed-time of his mental development
were simultaneously sown the germs of that Gallic liveliness and
mobility which pre-eminently distinguish him among German authors, and
also of his ineradicable sympathy with things Jewish, and his
inveterate antagonism to the principles and results of Christianity.
As the medical profession was in those days the only one open to Jews
in Germany, the boy Heine was destined for a commercial career; and in
1815 his father took him to Frankfort to establish him in a
banking-house. But a brief trial proved that he was utterly unsuited
to the situation, and after two months he was back again in
Duesseldorf. Three years later he went to Hamburg, and made another
attempt to adopt a mercantile pursuit under the auspices of his uncle,
the wealthy banker Solomon Heine. The millionaire, however, was very
soon convinced that the "fool of a boy" would never be fit for a
counting-house, and declared himself willing to furnish his nephew
with the means for a three years, course at the university, in order
to obtain a doctor's degree and practice law in Hamburg. It was
well-known that this would necessitate Harry's adoption of
Christianity; but his proselytism did not strike those whom it most
nearly concerned in the same way as it has impressed the world. So far
from this being the case, he wrote in 1823 to his friend Moser: "Here
the question of baptism enters; none of my family is opposed to it
except myself; but this _myself_ is of a peculiar nature. With my mode
of thinking, you can imagine that the mere act of baptism is
indifferent to me; that even symbolically I do not consider it of any
importance, and that I shall only dedicate myself more entirely to
upholding the rights of my unhappy brethren. But, nevertheless, I find
it beneath my dignity and a taint upon my honor, to allow myself to be
baptized in order to hold office in Prussia. I understand very well
the Psalmist's words: 'Good God, give me my daily bread, that I may
not blaspheme thy name!'"
The uncle's offer was accepted. In 1819 Harry Heine entered the
university of Bonn. During his stay in Hamburg began his unrequited
passion for a cousin who lived in that city--a passion which inspired
a large portion of his poetry, and indeed gave the keynote to his
whole tone and spirit. He sings so many different versions of the same
story of disappointment, that it is impossible to ascertain, with all
his frank and passionate confidences, the true course of the affair.
After a few months at Bonn, he removed to the university of Goettingen,
which he left in 1822 for Berlin. There is no other period in the
poet's career on which it is so pleasant to linger as on the two years
of his residence in the Prussian capital. In his first prose work, the
_Letters from Berlin_, published in the _Rhenish-Westphalian
Indicator_, he has painted a vivid picture of the life and gayety of
the city during its most brilliant season. "At the last rout I was
particularly gay, I was so beside myself, that I really do not know
why I did not walk on my head. If my most mortal enemy had crossed my
path, I should have said to him, To-morrow we will kill each other,
but to-night I will cordially cover you with kisses. _Tu es beau, tu
es charmant! Tu es l'objet de ma_ _flamme je t'adore, ma belle!_
these were the words my lips repeated instinctively a hundred times;
and I pressed everybody's hand, and I took off my hat gracefully to
everybody, and all the men returned my civilities. Only one German
youth played the boor, and railed against what he called my aping the
manners of the foreign Babylon; and growled out in his old Teutonic,
beer-drinking bass voice, 'At a _cherman_ masquerade, a _Cherman_
should speak _Cherman_.' Oh German youth! how thy words strike me as
not only silly, but almost blasphemous at such moments, when my soul
lovingly embraces the entire universe, when I would fain joyfully
embrace Russians and Turks, and throw myself in tears on the breast of
my brother the enslaved African!"
The doors of the most delightful, intellectual society of Germany were
opened to the handsome young poet, who is described in a contemporary
sketch as "beardless, blonde and pale, without any prominent feature
in his face, but of so peculiar a stamp that he attracted the
attention at once, and was not readily forgotten."
The daughter of Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron, has
given us a charming sketch of her mother's Thursday evening
receptions, which Heine regularly attended, and where he read aloud
the unpublished manuscripts of his _Lyrical Intermezzo_, and his
tragidies, _Almansor_ and _Ratcliffe_. "He was obliged to submit,"
writes Mlle. von Hohenhausen, "to many a harsh criticism, to much
severe censure; above all, he was subjected to a great deal of
chaffing about his poetic sentimentality, which a few years later
awakened so warm a response in the hearts of German youth. The poem,
ending, _Zu deinen suessen Fuessen_ ('At thy sweet feet'), met with such
laughing opposition, that he omitted it from the published edition.
Opinions of his talents were various; a small minority had any
suspicion of his future undisputed poetical fame. Elise von
Hohenhausen, who gave him the name of the German Byron, met with many
contradictions. This recognition, however, assured her an imperishable
gratitude on Heine's part."
Not only his social and intellectual faculties found abundant stimulus
in this bracing atmosphere, but his moral convictions were directed
and strengthened by the philosophy and personal influence of Hegel,
and his sympathies with his own race were aroused to enthusiastic
activity by the intelligent Jews who were at that time laboring in
Berlin for the advancement of their oppressed brethren. In 1819 had
been formed the "Society for the Culture and Improvement of the Jews,"
which, though centered in Berlin, counted members all over Prussia, as
well as in Vienna, Copenhagen, and New York. Heine joined it in 1822,
and became one of its most influential members. In the educational
establishment of the _Verein_, he gave for several months three hours
of historical instruction a week. He frankly confessed that he, the
"born enemy of all positive religions," was no enthusiast for the
Hebrew faith, but he was none the less eager to proclaim himself an
enthusiast for the rights of the Jews and their civil equality.
During his brief visit to Frankfort, he had had personal experience of
the degrading conditions to which his people were subjected.
The contrast between his choice of residence for twenty-five years in
Paris, and the tenacity with which Goethe clung to his home, is not as
strongly marked as the contrast between the relative positions in
Frankfort of these two men. Goethe, the grandson of the honored
chief-magistrate, surrounded in his cheerful burgher-life, as Carlyle
says, by "kind plenty, secure affection, manifold excitement and
instruction," might well cherish golden memories of his native city.
For him, the gloomy _Judengasse_, which he occasionally passed, where
"squalid, painful Hebrews were banished to scour old clothes," was but
a dark spot that only heightened the prevailing brightness of the
picture. But to this wretched by-way was relegated that other
beauty-enamored, artist-soul, Heine, when he dared set foot in the
imperial Free Town. Here must he be locked in like a wild beast, with
his miserable brethren every Sunday afternoon. And if the restrictions
were a little less barbarous in other parts of Germany, yet how shall
we characterize a national policy which closed to such a man as Heine
every career that could give free play to his genius, and offered him
the choice between money changing and medicine?
It was not till he had exhausted every means of endeavoring to secure
a remission of the humiliating decree that he consented to the public
act of apostasy, and was baptized in the summer of 1825 in the
Lutheran parsonage of Heiligenstadt with the name of Johann Christian
Heinrich. During the period of his earnest labors for Judaism, he had
buried himself with fervid zeal in the lore of his race, and had
conceived the idea of a prose-legend, the _Rabbi of Bacharach_,
illustrating the persecutions of his people during the middle ages.
Accounts vary as to the fate of this work; some affirm that the
manuscript was destroyed in a fire at Hamburg, and others that the
three chapters which the world possesses are all that were ever
completed. Heine, one of the most subjective of poets, treats this
theme in a purely objective manner. He does not allow himself a word
of comment, much less of condemnation concerning the outrages he
depicts. He paints the scene as an artist, not as the passionate
fellow-sufferer and avenger that he is. But what subtle eloquence
lurks in that restrained cry of horror and indignation which never
breaks forth, and yet which we feel through every line, gathering
itself up like thunder on the horizon for a terrific outbreak at the
end!
Would that we could hear the explosion burst at last! We long for it
throughout as the climax and the necessary result of the lowering
electric influences of the story, and we lay aside the never-to-be
completed fragment with the oppression of a nightmare. But a note of
such tremendous power as Heine had struck in this romance, required
for its prolonged sustention a singleness of purpose and an exaltation
of belief in its efficacy and truth, which he no longer possessed
after his renunciation of Judaism. He was no longer at one with
himself, for no sooner was the irrevocable step taken than it was
bitterly repented, not as a recantation of his principles--for as
such, no one who follows the development of his mind can regard
it,--but as an unworthy concession to tyrannic injustice. How
sensitive he remained in respect to the whole question is proved most
conspicuously by his refraining on all occasions from signing his
Christian name, Heinrich. Even his works he caused to appear under the
name of H. Heine, and was once extremely angry with his publisher for
allowing by mistake the full name to be printed.
The collection of poems in prose and verse known as the _Reisebilder_,
embraced several years of Heine's literary activity, and represent
widely-varying phases of his intellectual development. We need only
turn to the volumes themselves to guess how bitter an experience must
have filled the gap between the buoyant stream of sunny inspiration
that ripples through the _Harz-Reise_, and the fierce spirit of
vindictive malice which prompted Heine, six years later, to conclude
his third and last volume with his unseemly diatribe against Count
Platen. Notwithstanding their inequalities, the _Reisebilder_ remain
one of the surest props of Heine's fame. So clear and perfect an
utterance is sufficiently rare in all languages; but it becomes little
short of a miracle when, as in this case, the medium of its
transmission is German prose, a vehicle so bulky and unwieldy that no
one before Heine had dared to enlist it in the service of airy
phantasy, delicate humor and sparkling wit.
During the summer of 1830, while he was loitering at Helgoland, he was
roused to feverish excitement by the news of the July Revolution. He
inveighed against the nobility in a preface to a pamphlet, called
_Kahldorf on the Nobility_, which largely increased the number of his
powerful enemies. The literary censorship had long mutilated his prose
writings, besides materially diminishing his legitimate income by
prohibiting the sale of many of his works. He now began to fear that
his personal liberty would be restricted as summarily as his literary
activity; and in May, 1831, he took up his residence in Paris. He
perfected himself in the French language, and by his brilliant essays
on French art, German philosophy, and the Romantic School, soon
acquired the reputation of one of the best prose writers of France,
and the "wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire." He became deeply
interested in the doctrine of St. Simonism, then at its culminating
point in Paris. Its central idea of the rehabilitation of the flesh,
and the sacredness of labor, found an enthusiastic champion in him who
had so long denounced the impracticable spiritualism of Christianity.
He, the logical clear-headed sceptic in all matters pertaining to
existing systems and creeds, seems possessed with the credulity of a
child in regard to every scheme of human regeneration, or shall we
call it the exaltation of the Jew, for whom the Messiah has not yet
arrived, but is none the less confidently and hourly expected?
Embittered by repeated disappointments, by his enforced exile, by a
nervous disease which had afflicted him from his youth, and was now
fast gaining upon him, and by the impending shadow of actual want,
Heine's tone now assumes a concentrated acridity, and his poetry
acquires a reckless audacity of theme and treatment. His _Neue
Lieder_, addressed to notorious Parisian women, were regarded as an
insult to decency. In literary merit many of them vie with the best of
his earlier songs; but the daring defiance of public opinion displayed
in the choice of subject excluded all other criticism than that of
indignation and rebuke. There is but a single ray to lighten the
gathering gloom of Heine's life at this period. In a letter dated,
April 11th, 1835, occurs his first mention of his _liaison_ with the
grisette Mathilde Crescence Mirat, who afterwards became his wife.
This uneducated, simple-hearted, affectionate child-wife inspired in
the poet, weary of intellectual strife, a love as tender and constant
as it had been sudden and passionate. A variety of circumstances
having combined to reduce Heine to extreme want, he had recourse to a
step which has been very severely censured. He applied for and
received from the French government a pension from the fund set aside
for "all those who by their zeal for the cause of the Revolution had
more or less compromised themselves at home or abroad." Now that the
particulars of the case are so well known, it would be superfluous to
add any words of justification; it can only excite our sympathy for
the haughty poet doomed to drain so bitter a cup. He was pressed to
take the oath of naturalization, but he had too painful experience of
the renunciation of his birthright ever to consent to a repetition of
his error. He would not forfeit the right to have inscribed upon his
tomb-stone: "Here lies a German poet."
In 1844 his uncle Solomon died; and, as there was no stipulation in
the banker's will that the yearly allowance hitherto granted to
Heinrich should continue, the oldest heir Karl announced that this
would altogether cease. This very cousin Karl had been nursed by Heine
at the risk of his own life during the cholera-plague of 1832 in
Paris. The grief and excitement caused by his kinsman's ingratitude
fearfully accelerated the progress of the malady which had long been
gaining upon the poet, and which proved to be a softening of the
spinal cord. One eye was paralyzed, he lost the sense of taste, and
complained that everything he ate was like clay. His physicians
agreed that he had few weeks to live, and he felt that he was dying,
little divining that the agony was to be prolonged for ten horrible
years. It is unnecessary to dwell upon these years of darkness, in
which Heine, shriveled to the proportions of a child, languished upon
his "mattress-grave" in Paris. His patient resignation, his
indomitable will, his sweetness and gayety of temper, and his
unimpaired vigor and fertility of intellect, are too fresh in the
memory of many living witnesses, and have been too frequently and
recently described to make it needful here to enlarge upon them. In
the crucial hour he proved no recreant to the convictions for which he
had battled and bled during a lifetime. Of the report that his illness
had materially modified his religious opinions, he has left a complete
and emphatic denial. "I must expressly contradict the rumor that I
have retreated to the threshold of any sort of church, or that I have
reposed upon its bosom. No! My religious views and convictions have
remained free from all churchdom; no belfry chime has allured me, no
altar taper has dazzled me. I have trifled with no symbol, and have
not utterly renounced my reason. I have forsworn nothing--not even my
old pagan-gods, from whom it is true I have parted, but parted in love
and friendship."
"I am no longer a divine biped," he wrote. "I am no longer the freest
German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no
longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned
Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the title of a Grand
Ducal Wlimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent
Hellenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I
am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy
man."
Thus side by side flowed on the continuous streams of that wit and
pathos which he poured forth inexhaustibly to the very end. No word of
complaint or impatience ever passed his lips; on the contrary, with
his old, irresistible humor, his fancy played about his own privations
and sufferings, and tried to alleviate for his devoted wife and
friends the pain of the heart-rending spectacle. His delicate
consideration prompted him to spare his venerable mother all knowledge
of his illness. He wrote to her every month in his customary cheerful
way; and, in sending her the latest volumes of his poetry, he caused a
separate copy always to be printed, from which all allusions to his
malady were expunged. "For that matter," he said, "that any son could
be as wretched and miserable as I, no mother would believe."
Alas! if he had known how much more eloquent and noble a refutation
his life would afford than his mistaken passionate response to the
imputations of his enemies! Is this patient martyr the man of whom
Boerne wrote: "with his sybarite nature, the fall of a rose-leaf can
disturb Heine's slumber. He whom all asperities fatigue, whom all
discords trouble, let such a one neither move nor think--let him go to
bed and shut his eyes."
Only in his last poems, which were not to be published till after his
death, has Heine given free vent to the bitterness of his anguish.
During the long sleepless night when he lay writhing with pain or
exhausted by previous paroxysms, his mind, preternaturally clear and
vigorous, conceived the glowing fantasies of the _Romancero_, or the
Job-like lamentations of the _Lazarus_ poems. This mental exercise was
his protection against insanity: and the thought of his cherished
wife, he affirmed, was his only safeguard against the delirious desire
to seize the morphine bottle by his side, and with one draught put an
end to his agony. On the night of the 16th of February, 1856, came the
long-craved release--and on the 20th of February without mass or
"Kaddish," according to his express wish, he was buried in the
cemetery of Montmartre.