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The Camelot Series.
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS.
HEINE'S PROSE WRITINGS.
THE PROSE WRITINGS OF
HEINRICH HEINE:
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,
BY HAVELOCK
ELLIS.
WALTER SCOTT
LONDON: 24 WARWICK LANE
PATERNOSTER ROW
1887
CONTENTS.
PAGE
REISEBILDER 1
LONDON 47
WELLINGTON 52
THE LIBERATION 57
JAN STEEN 65
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 68
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 142
FLORENTINE NIGHTS 179
DON QUIXOTE 243
GODS IN EXILE 268
CONFESSIONS 290
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 aspirations 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; just as fiercer and more ardent cries, as from the Orient,
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 thought 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 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, still
spurs and thrills 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 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 realised that the practical reforming movements of his
time were not those for which his early enthusiasm had been aroused. And
then he wrote _Atta Troll_.
With the slow steps of that consuming disease, and after the revolution
of 1848, Heine ceased to recognise 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
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
this last period, this, his final altitude, is most completely revealed.
It needs a little study to-day, even for a German, but it is well worth
that study.
_Atta Troll_, the history of a dancing bear who escapes from servitude,
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 childlike 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 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 unqualified
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.[1] 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. 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 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 blond hair and beautiful hands; there was something about
him, said his son, a little characterless and feminine. 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. While from his rather weak and romantic father came
whatever was loose and unbalanced in Heine's temperature, it was his
mother, with her strong and healthy nature, well developed both
intellectually and emotionally, 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 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 Heine is described as a good-natured 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 realised 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 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;[2] 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 realised 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, 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 many others, 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
realisation 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 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_, recognised 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 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 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 alarming 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
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 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 blond and
gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm of the
oasis, and 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."[3]
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 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 realisation 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 venerable 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 all your reproaches in the words of one
of Shakespeare's fools: 'Dost thou think that 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 roseleaf
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.
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 further. 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 recognised
and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of this unequalled
humour 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, 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 appeared 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, sounding across the remote 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.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
HEINE'S PROSE WORKS.
REISEBILDER.
IDEAS, OR THE BOOK LE GRAND.
[The _Ideas_, of which the chief portion is here presented, was
published in 1826 in the second volume of the _Reisebilder_, or
_Travel-Pictures_. The German title has been retained, as Heine
himself retained it in the French translation. The translation here
given is founded on Mr. Leland's; it has been carefully revised.]
CHAPTER I.
She was lovable, and he loved her. But he was not lovable, and she
did not love him.--_Old Play._
Madame, do you know the old play? It is quite an extraordinary play,
only a little too melancholy. I once played the leading part in it
myself, so that all the ladies wept; only one did not weep, not even a
single tear, and that was the point of the play, the whole catastrophe.
Oh, that single tear! it still torments my thoughts. When Satan wishes
to ruin my soul, he hums in my ear a ballad of that unwept tear, a
deadly song with a more deadly tune. Ah! such a tune is only heard in
Hell!
You can readily form an idea, Madame, of what life is like in Heaven,
the more readily as you are married. There people amuse themselves
altogether superbly, every sort of entertainment is provided, and one
lives in mere desire and delight. One eats from morning to night, and
the cookery is as good as Jagor's; roast geese fly round with
gravy-boats in their bills, and feel flattered if any one eats them;
tarts gleaming with butter grow wild like sunflowers; everywhere there
are brooks of _bouillon_ and champagne, everywhere trees on which
napkins flutter, and you eat and wipe your lips and eat again without
injury to your stomach; you sing psalms, or flirt and joke with the
dear, delicate little angels, or take a walk on the green
Hallelujah-Meadow, and your white flowing garments fit very comfortably,
and nothing disturbs the feeling of blessedness, no pain, no
vexation--even when one accidentally treads on another's corns and
exclaims, "_Excusez!_" he smiles as if enraptured, and assures, "Thy
foot, brother, did not hurt in the least, quite _au contraire_, a deeper
thrill of heavenly rapture shoots through my heart!"
But of Hell, Madame, you have no idea. Of all the devils you know,
perhaps, only the little Amor, the pretty _Croupier_ of Hell, Beelzebub,
and you know him only from _Don Juan_, and doubtless think that for such
a betrayer of innocence Hell can never be made hot enough, though our
praiseworthy theatre directors spend upon him as much flame, fiery rain,
powder, and colophonium as any Christian could desire in Hell.
But things in Hell look much worse than our theatre directors know, or
they would not bring out so many bad plays. For in Hell it is infernally
hot, and when I was there, in the dog-days, it was past endurance.
Madame, you can have no idea of Hell! We have very few official returns
from that place. Still, it is rank calumny to say that down there all
the poor souls are compelled to read, the whole day long, all the dull
sermons that are printed on earth. Bad as Hell is, it has not come to
that; Satan will never invent such refinements of torture. On the other
hand, Dante's description is too mild on the whole, too poetic. Hell
appeared to me like a great kitchen, with an endlessly long stove, on
which stood three rows of iron pots, and in these sat the damned, and
were cooked. In one row were placed Christian sinners, and, incredible
as it may seem, their number was anything but small, and the devils
poked the fire up under them with especial good-will. In the next row
were Jews, who continually screamed and cried, and were occasionally
mocked by the fiends, which sometimes seemed very amusing, as, for
instance, when a fat, wheezy old pawnbroker complained of the heat, and
a little devil poured several buckets of cold water on his head, that he
might realise what a refreshing benefit baptism was. In the third row
sat the heathen, who, like the Jews, could take no part in salvation,
and must burn forever. I heard one of these, as a burly devil put fresh
coals under his kettle, cry out from his pot, "Spare me! I was Socrates,
the wisest of mortals. I taught Truth and Justice, and sacrificed my
life for Virtue." But the stupid, burly devil went on with his work, and
grumbled, "Oh, shut up, there! All heathens must burn, and we can't make
an exception for the sake of a single man." I assure you, Madame, the
heat was terrible, with such a screaming, sighing, groaning, quacking,
grunting, squealing--and through all these terrible sounds rang
distinctly the deadly tune of the song of the unwept tear.