have not the word because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I
imagine, they did not talk of solecisms;[141] and here, at the very
headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have
adopted the term _épicier_ (grocer), to designate the sort of being whom
the Germans designate by the Philistine; but the French term--besides
that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and
susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried
long ago--is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive
than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some
term equivalent to _Philister_ or _épicier_; Mr. Carlyle has made
several such efforts: "respectability with its thousand gigs,"[142] he
says;--well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle
means, a Philistine. However, the word _respectable_ is far too valuable
a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are
ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of,--and so
prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that
even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word,--I think
we had much better take the term _Philistine_ itself.
_Philistine_ must have originally meant, in the mind of those who
invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the
chosen people, of the children of the light. The party of change, the
would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers
of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in
every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the
robust self-confidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as
children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum
people, slaves to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, but
at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that
Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains the preference
which he gives to France over Germany: "The French," he says, "are the
chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have
been drawn up in their language; Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the
Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from
the land of the Philistines."[143] He means that the French, as a
people, have shown more accessibility to ideas than any other people;
that prescription and routine have had less hold upon them than upon any
other people; that they have shown most readiness to move and to alter
at the bidding (real or supposed) of reason. This explains, too, the
detestation which Heine had for the English: "I might settle in
England," he says, in his exile, "if it were not that I should find
there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen; I cannot abide either."
What he hated in the English was the "ächtbrittische Beschränktheit," as
he calls it,--the _genuine British narrowness_. In truth, the English,
profoundly as they have modified the old Middle-Age order, great as is
the liberty which they have secured for themselves, have in all their
changes proceeded, to use a familiar expression, by the rule of thumb;
what was intolerably inconvenient to them they have suppressed, and as
they have suppressed it, not because it was irrational, but because it
was practically inconvenient, they have seldom in suppressing it
appealed to reason, but always, if possible, to some precedent, or form,
or letter, which served as a convenient instrument for their purpose,
and which saved them from the necessity of recurring to general
principles. They have thus become, in a certain sense, of all people the
most inaccessible to ideas and the most impatient of them; inaccessible
to them, because of their want of familiarity with them; and impatient
of them because they have got on so well without them, that they despise
those who, not having got on as well as themselves, still make a fuss
for what they themselves have done so well without. But there has
certainly followed from hence, in this country, somewhat of a general
depression of pure intelligence: Philistia has come to be thought by us
the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of
ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country, that
the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea,
for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values
them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumph
may obtain for him; and the man who regards the possession of these
practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself, something
which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason,
is, in his eyes, a Philistine. This is why Heine so often and so
mercilessly attacks the liberals; much as he hates conservatism he hates
Philistinism even more, and whoever attacks conservatism itself ignobly,
not as a child of light, not in the name of the idea, is a Philistine.
Our Cobbett[144] is thus for him, much as he disliked our clergy and
aristocracy whom Cobbett attacked, a Philistine with six fingers on
every hand and on every foot six toes, four-and-twenty in number: a
Philistine, the staff of whose spear is like a weaver's beam. Thus he
speaks of him:--
"While I translate Cobbett's words, the man himself comes bodily before
my mind's eye, as I saw him at that uproarious dinner at the Crown and
Anchor Tavern, with his scolding red face and his radical laugh, in
which venomous hate mingles with a mocking exultation at his enemies'
surely approaching downfall. He is a chained cur, who falls with equal
fury on every one whom he does not know, often bites the best friend of
the house in his calves, barks incessantly, and just because of this
incessantness of his barking cannot get listened to, even when he barks
at a real thief. Therefore the distinguished thieves who plunder England
do not think it necessary to throw the growling Cobbett a bone to stop
his mouth. This makes the dog furiously savage, and he shows all his
hungry teeth. Poor old Cobbett! England's dog! I have no love for thee,
for every vulgar nature my soul abhors: but thou touchest me to the
inmost soul with pity, as I see how thou strainest in vain to break
loose and to get at those thieves, who make off with their booty before
thy very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine impotent
howling."[145]
There is balm in Philistia as well as in Gilead. A chosen circle of
children of the modern spirit, perfectly emancipated from prejudice and
commonplace, regarding the ideal side of things in all its efforts for
change, passionately despising half-measures and condescension to human
folly and obstinacy,--with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude
behind,--conducts a country to the government of Herr von Bismarck. A
nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change,
attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient,
and attacking this as one body, "moving altogether if it move at all,"
[146] and treating children of light like the very harshest of
step-mothers, comes to the prosperity and liberty of modern England. For
all that, however, Philistia (let me say it again) is not the true
promised land, as we English commonly imagine it to be; and our
excessive neglect of the idea, and consequent inaptitude for it,
threatens us, at a moment when the idea is beginning to exercise a real
power in human society, with serious future inconvenience, and, in the
meanwhile, cuts us off from the sympathy of other nations, which feel
its power more than we do.
But, in 1830, Heine very soon found that the fire-engines of the German
governments were too much for his direct efforts at incendiarism. "What
demon drove me," he cries, "to write my _Reisebilder_, to edit a
newspaper, to plague myself with our time and its interests, to try and
shake the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his
hole? What good did I get by it? Hodge opened his eyes, only to shut
them again immediately; he yawned, only to begin snoring again the next
minute louder than ever; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to
sink down again directly afterwards, and lie like a dead man in the old
bed of his accustomed habits. I must have rest; but where am I to find a
resting-place? In Germany I can no longer stay."
This is Heine's jesting account of his own efforts to rouse Germany: now
for his pathetic account of them; it is because he unites so much wit
with so much pathos that he is so effective a writer:--
"The Emperor Charles the Fifth[147] sate in sore straits, in the Tyrol,
encompassed by his enemies. All his knights and courtiers had forsaken
him; not one came to his help. I know not if he had at that time the
cheese face with which Holbein has painted him for us. But I am sure
that under lip of his, with its contempt for mankind, stuck out even
more than it does in his portraits. How could he but contemn the tribe
which in the sunshine of his prosperity had fawned on him so devotedly,
and now, in his dark distress, left him all alone? Then suddenly his
door opened, and there came in a man in disguise, and, as he threw back
his cloak, the Kaiser recognized in him his faithful Conrad von der
Rosen, the court jester. This man brought him comfort and counsel, and
he was the court jester!
"'O German fatherland! dear German people! I am thy Conrad von der
Rosen. The man whose proper business was to amuse thee, and who in good
times should have catered only for thy mirth, makes his way into thy
prison in time of need; here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy sceptre
and crown; dost thou not recognize me, my Kaiser? If I cannot free thee,
I will at least comfort thee, and thou shalt at least have one with thee
who will prattle with thee about thy sorest affliction, and whisper
courage to thee, and love thee, and whose best joke and best blood shall
be at thy service. For thou, my people, art the true Kaiser, the true
lord of the land; thy will is sovereign, and more legitimate far than
that purple _Tel est notre plaisir_, which invokes a divine right with
no better warrant than the anointings of shaven and shorn jugglers; thy
will, my people, is the sole rightful source of power. Though now thou
liest down in thy bonds, yet in the end will thy rightful cause prevail;
the day of deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning. My Kaiser,
the night is over, and out there glows the ruddy dawn.'
"'Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou art mistaken; perhaps thou takest
a headsman's gleaming axe for the sun, and the red of dawn is only
blood.'
"'No, my Kaiser, it is the sun, though it is rising in the west; these
six thousand years it has always risen in the east; it is high time
there should come a change.'
"'Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou hast lost the bells out of thy red
cap, and it has now such an odd look, that red cap of thine!'
"'Ah, my Kaiser, thy distress has made me shake my head so hard and
fierce, that the fool's bells have dropped off my cap; the cap is none
the worse for that.'
"'Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, what is that noise of breaking and
cracking outside there?'
"'Hush! that is the saw and the carpenter's axe, and soon the doors of
thy prison will be burst open, and thou wilt be free, my Kaiser!'
"'Am I then really Kaiser? Ah, I forgot, it is the fool who tells me
so!'
"'Oh, sigh not, my dear master, the air of thy prison makes thee so
desponding! when once thou hast got thy rights again, thou wilt feel
once more the bold imperial blood in thy veins, and thou wilt be proud
like a Kaiser, and violent, and gracious, and unjust, and smiling, and
ungrateful, as princes are.'
"'Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, when I am free, what wilt thou do
then?'
"'I will then sew new bells on to my cap.'
"'And how shall I recompense thy fidelity?'
"'Ah, dear master, by not leaving me to die in a ditch!'"[148]
I wish to mark Heine's place in modern European literature, the scope of
his activity, and his value. I cannot attempt to give here a detailed
account of his life, or a description of his separate works. In May 1831
he went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his new
Jerusalem, Paris. There, henceforward, he lived, going in general to
some French watering-place in the summer, but making only one or two
short visits to Germany during the rest of his life. His works, in verse
and prose, succeeded each other without stopping; a collected edition of
them, filling seven closely-printed octavo volumes, has been published
in America;[149] in the collected editions of few people's works is
there so little to skip. Those who wish for a single good specimen of
him should read his first important work, the work which made his
reputation, the _Reisebilder_, or "Travelling Sketches": prose and
verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the mingling of these
is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere to be seen practised more
naturally and happily than in his _Reisebilder_. In 1847 his health,
which till then had always been perfectly good, gave way. He had a kind
of paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening of the spinal
marrow: it was incurable; it made rapid progress. In May 1848, not a
year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time; but
his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight
years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, wasted
almost to the proportions of a child, wasted so that a woman could carry
him about; the sight of one eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed,
and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid
lifted and held up by the finger; all this, and besides this, suffering
at short intervals paroxysms of nervous agony. I have said he was not
preëminently brave; but in the astonishing force of spirit with which he
retained his activity of mind, even his gayety, amid all his suffering,
and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last, he was truly
brave. Nothing could clog that aërial lightness. "Pouvez-vous siffler?"
his doctor asked him one day, when he was almost at his last gasp;--
"siffler," as every one knows, has the double meaning of _to whistle_
and _to hiss_:--"Hélas! non," was his whispered answer; "pas même une
comédie de M. Scribe!" M. Scribe[150] is, or was, the favorite
dramatist of the French Philistine. "My nerves," he said to some one who
asked him about them in 1855, the year of the great Exhibition in Paris,
"my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miserableness of
nature, that I am convinced they would get at the Exhibition the grand
medal for pain and misery." He read all the medical books which treated
of his complaint. "But," said he to some one who found him thus engaged,
"what good this reading is to do me I don't know, except that it will
qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on
earth about diseases of the spinal marrow." What a matter of grim
seriousness are our own ailments to most of us! yet with this gayety
Heine treated his to the end. That end, so long in coming, came at last.
Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight. By
his will he forbade that his remains should be transported to Germany.
He lies buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, at Paris.
His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered
at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of
literature, and Heine was a born man of letters. Even in his favorite
France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished,
though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us,
read them. He thought things were tending there to the triumph of
communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross
and narrow in communism was very repulsive. "It is all of no use," he
cried on his death-bed, "the future belongs to our enemies, the
Communists, and Louis Napoleon[151] is their John the Baptist." "And
yet,"--he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so
full of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French
people,--"do not believe that God lets all this go forward merely as a
grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows
better than they do, that a time will come when they will learn to
believe in him." After 1831, his hopes of soon upsetting the German
Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more
truly literary, character.
It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to
literature. To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life
filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the
great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed
the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a
wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares
most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany,--
so wide, so impartial, that it is apt to become slack and powerless, and
to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round
which to group all its other ideas. So the mystic and romantic school of
Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their
influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with
a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle
Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim,[152] Heine the chief romantic
poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet: he is a
great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a
talisman by which he can feel--along with but above the power of the
fascinating Middle Age itself--the power of modern ideas.
A French critic of Heine thinks he has said enough in saying that Heine
proclaimed in German countries, with beat of drum, the ideas of 1789,
and that at the cheerful noise of his drum the ghosts of the Middle Age
took to flight. But this is rather too French an account of the matter.
Germany, that vast mine of ideas, had no need to import ideas, as such,
from any foreign country; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from
France into Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to Newcastle.
But that for which, France, far less meditative than Germany, is
eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an idea,
when she seizes it, in all departments of human activity which admit it.
And that in which Germany most fails, and by failing in which she
appears so helpless and impotent, is just the practical application of
her innumerable ideas. "When Candide," says Heine himself, "came to
Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number of boys who were playing with
gold-nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine
that they must be the king's children, and he was not a little
astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold-nuggets are of no more
value than marbles are with us, and that the schoolboys play with them.
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came
to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at
the wealth of ideas which he found in them; but he soon remarked that
ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold-nuggets in Eldorado, and that
those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in
reality only common schoolboys."[153] Heine was, as he calls himself,
a "Child of the French Revolution," an "Initiator," because he
vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles,
to be played with for their own sake; because he exhibited in literature
modern ideas applied with the utmost freedom, clearness, and
originality. And therefore he declared that the great task of his life
had been the endeavor to establish a cordial relation between France and
Germany. It is because he thus operates a junction between the French
spirit and German ideas and German culture, that he founds something
new, opens a fresh period, and deserves the attention of criticism far
more than the German poets his contemporaries, who merely continue an
old period till it expires. It may be predicted that in the literature
of other countries, too, the French spirit is destined to make its
influence felt,--as an element, in alliance with the native spirit, of
novelty and movement,--as it has made its influence felt in German
literature; fifty years hence a critic will be demonstrating to our
grandchildren how this phenomenon has come to pass.
We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty
years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit,
as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the
reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas,
nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass
of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that
Philistinism,--to use the German nickname,--which reacts even on the
individual genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary
epoch, that of the Elizabethan age,[154] English society at large was
accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a
degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique
greatness in English literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation;
they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,--the ideas of
the Renascence and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great
English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose
intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of
Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred
years. _He enlargeth a nation_, says Job, _and straiteneth it again._
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