that of idiot children--he speaks often, shrewdly indeed, yet with
peculiar sympathy. The most important expression of his opinions
on sexual morality is contained in the “Supplément au Voyage de
Bougainville.” Bougainville, the first Frenchman to sail round the
world, had visited the lovely island of Tahiti, and brought back a
strange and vivid picture of the idyllic innocence and frank license
that existed there. Diderot was aroused to set forth his views on
sexual questions with that union of fiery enthusiasm, uncompromising
thoroughness, and saving grace of humorous good sense which always
characterizes him. He imagines a dialogue between the chaplain of
Bougainville’s expedition and Orou, a Tahitian, who is anxious to know
why the chaplain refuses to conform to the customs of the country.
The worthy chaplain represents the morality of civilized Europe, and
Orou, with a few questions concerning this morality, easily succeeds
in confounding him and in pouring keen ridicule on the inconsistencies
of European morals. With reference to rules of conduct which vary
with the country and the time, Diderot makes Orou say, “We must have
a surer rule, and what shall this rule be? Do you know any other than
the good of the community and the advantage of the individual?” “You
were unhappy,” he remarks again to the chaplain, “when I presented
to you last night my two daughters and my wife; you exclaimed, ‘But
my religion! my office!’ Do you wish to know what in every time and
place is good and bad? Concern yourself with the nature of things and
of actions, and with your relations to your fellows. Consider the
influence of your conduct on yourself and on the community. You are
mad if you think that there is anything in the universe, above or
below, which can add to or take from the laws of nature.” That rule,
he explains, is the polar star on the path of life, and the invention
of crimes, punishments, and remorse will only obscure it. “In founding
morality on the relationships which must always exist between men, the
religious law becomes perhaps superfluous; and the civil law should
only be the enunciation of the law of nature, which we bear engraved
on our hearts, and which must always be the strongest.” At the end
Diderot intervenes with a counsel of moderation and practical wisdom:
“What shall we do, then? We will protest against foolish laws until
they are reformed: meanwhile we will submit. He who by his private
authority breaks a bad law, authorizes others to break good laws. There
is less inconvenience in being mad with the mad than in being wise by
oneself. Let us say to ourselves, let us proclaim incessantly, that
shame, punishment, and ignominy have been attached to actions which
in themselves are innocent. But do not let us commit them; for shame,
punishment, and ignominy are themselves the worst of evils.”
“Every century has its own spirit; that of ours seems to be liberty.”
So in 1776, when men were beginning to say that it was time to burn
philosophers instead of their books, and a boy of eighteen was actually
burned, Diderot wrote to Voltaire, in the famous letter in which he
announced that in spite of all he would stay in Paris, among the
enemies of liberty, to carry on his own mission. Timidity in political
matters was excusable in Diderot’s day, and existed even among the men
of his own set. Helvetius, for instance, advocated the advantages of
paternal government and benevolent despotism; with his usual keen and
vigorous good sense, Diderot shows how unreal these advantages are.
When we give a ruler absolute power to do good, we cannot prevent
him assuming also an absolute power to do evil. Moreover, as Diderot
insisted, it is not possible to make people good against their wills,
nor is it desirable to treat men like sheep. “If they say, ‘We are well
enough here,’ or if, even, they say, ‘We are not well here, but we
will stay,’ let us try to enlighten them, to undeceive them, to bring
them to saner views by persuasion, but never by force.” “The arbitrary
government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad.” He insists,
again and again, that we must never let our pretended masters do good
to us against our wills. “Whenever you see the sovereign authority in
a country extending beyond the region of police, you may say that that
country is badly governed.” Diderot, Goethe, Adam Smith, Beccaria,
Mill, to mention but a few typical names, threw all the weight of
their influence, sometimes with passionate emphasis, on the side
of individuality and freedom, and their teaching reached its final
consecration when Darwin accepted as his central theory the fruitful
idea of Malthus. They felt, and rightly felt, that they were taking
the step that was most needed. Those who advocated solidarity and
social co-operation mostly went to the wall. Now it is the turn of the
social instincts, and we must expect them to work themselves out to the
utmost. We have to see to it that the truth to which Diderot and the
rest fought their way is not meanwhile lost. The general will is itself
to-day in danger of becoming a benevolent despotism, and perhaps the
time will never arrive when such warnings as these will be quite out
of date. When it is a question of the oppression of our fellows, we
cannot always afford to wait until the offender listens to the voice of
persuasion; him, at least, we must bring within “the region of police:”
beyond that lies danger.
“Et si j’ai quelque volonté,
C’est que chacun fasse la sienne.”
So Diderot wrote in some impromptu verses at a convivial gathering
over which he once presided; it was a summary of his views on
many matters. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there can be no
true happiness for the human race except in a social state in
which there is neither king nor magistrate, nor priest nor laws,
nor _meum_ nor _tuum_, nor property in goods or land, nor vices
nor virtues.” This is the anarchism that stands at the end of
all social progress, but as an attainable social state it is
still certainly, as Diderot adds, “diablement idéal.” He had no
faith in moralization by Act of Parliament. “There will then be
prostitutes?--Assuredly.--Mistresses?--Why not?--Girls seduced?--I
expect there will.--Husbands and wives not always faithful?--I fear
so. But at least,” he adds, “I shall be spared all those vices which
misery, luxury, and poverty produce. The rest may be as it will be.”
Diderot’s robust faith in nature, that finest fruit of the scientific
spirit, comes out again and again, here and elsewhere. “The evil-doer
is one whom we must destroy, not punish”: that is the great truth,
held by a large number of the foremost men to-day, which is not even
yet accepted. “Never to repent and never to reproach others: these
are the first steps to wisdom.” And, again: “In the best and most
happily constituted man there remains always much of the animal; before
becoming a misanthrope, consider whether you have the right.” Not many
men have had so much reason as Diderot for becoming misanthropic; few
men have had in them less of the misanthrope. “My life is not stolen
from me,” he writes; “I give it.... A pleasure which is for myself
alone touches me slightly. It is for myself and for my friends that I
read, that I reflect, that I write, that I meditate, that I hear, that
I observe, that I feel.... I have consecrated to them the use of all
my senses, and that is perhaps the reason why everything is a little
enriched in my imagination and conversation; sometimes they reproach
me, ungrateful as they are. Ungrateful! would I could make hundreds
ungrateful every day!” He never seems to waver in his faith in men,
nor in the determination, with which, indeed, that faith must ever be
bound up, to look every fact of nature squarely in the face. The words
with which his letters to Sophie Voland close seem to be the constant
refrain throughout all his work: “There is nothing good in this world
but that which is true.”
It cannot be said that Diderot performed any one great and
paramount achievement. The most brilliant of his fragments--the
“Rêve de d’Alembert” or “Le Neveu de Rameau”--is but a magnificent
improvisation. He made no memorable contribution to our knowledge of
the world. Nor was his genius of what may be called the wedge-shaped
order--the genius of the man who, with every nerve strained to the
solution of one mystery, never rests until the heart of it is cloven.
His genius was essentially fermentative. He knew by a native instinct
every promising germ of thought, and he knew how to make it fruitful.
He was, as Voltaire called him, Pantophile, the man who loved and was
interested in everything. His extreme sensitiveness to impressions
was the source of his strength and of his weakness. In his sane,
massive, and yet so sensitive temperament, aspirations keen and
lyrical as Shelley’s seem to blend harmoniously with laughter broad
and tolerant as Rabelais’s. The latent elements in him of fantastic
extravagance were held in check by a _bourgeois_ good sense in which
we seem to recognize the shrewd old cutler of Langres. There is a
profound democratic instinct in him; his never-failing faith in nature
and man seems to be a part of this; it is a faith that may possibly be
foolish, but for all those who are born men it is the most reasonable
faith, and it has commended itself most to those who have been oftenest
disillusioned.
There can be no doubt that the immediate effect of the Revolution of
1789 was to kill the spirit that Diderot represented--the spirit of
scientific advance, active even to audacity, and allied with a firm
faith in man and in social development. The party of progress were
not able to recognize progress in the form of the Revolution, and the
more obviously dominating movement of the century that is now closing
has been the Counter-Revolution, corresponding in many respects to
that Counter-Reformation which dominated Catholic countries during
the seventeenth century. Putting aside a few stray enthusiasts,
like Shelley or Owen, attractive personalities with little grasp
of practical life, the men who have directed European thought,
especially in England, have been men whose imaginations were profoundly
impressed, and their mental equilibrium considerably disturbed, by
that brief convulsion of France; and they developed a curious timidity
and distrust, visible even when they had the courage to adopt a
short-sighted optimism. It is very interesting now to turn back to the
essay in which Carlyle, perhaps the most brilliant and distinguished
representative of the Counter-Revolution, recorded his estimate of
Diderot. How curiously old-fashioned seem to us to-day its mitigated
admiration, its vague mysticism, its sneers at Diderot’s loquacity,
his generosity, his dyspepsia--sneers that, in the light of Carlyle’s
own life, have aroused feelings of pain, and even indignation, among
some who in their youth looked up to Carlyle as to a sort of venerable
prophet--its absolute failure to perceive that here was a man not to be
stifled by a handful of transcendental phraseology. Yet this was at the
time accepted as an adequate and even generous account of the matter.
To-day we are again in the same position as Diderot, and we are able
to see in him the significance, hidden from Carlyle, of the light of
science fearlessly brought to illuminate the whole of life.
When men begin to say that everything has been done, the men come
who say that there has yet nothing been done. We have congratulated
ourselves that many sciences of nature and of man are in the main
settled, but we are always compelled to begin again, and on a larger
and perhaps simpler scale. In many fields of physical and social
knowledge--from electricity at the one end to criminology at the
other--we are now laying anew great foundations, and the walls are
being raised so rapidly that it is sometimes hard to know where we are,
or to realize what is being done. When science is thus renewing itself,
and men are on every hand seeking how, by means of science, they may
enlarge and ennoble life, the spirit that moved Diderot is again making
itself felt. It is worth while to realize his fellowship for a few
moments, and to sun ourselves, if we can bear it, in his inspiring
enthusiasm.
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; in the same way that fiercer and more ardent cries, as
from the East, 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 formula 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, may still spur and thrill 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 realized that the practical reforming
movements of his time were not those for which his early enthusiasm
had been aroused. With the slow steps of that consuming disease, and
after the revolution of 1848, he ceased to recognize 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 swift 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 the 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. The history of a dancing
bear who escapes from servitude, “Atta Troll” 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
child-like 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 immediate 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. 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.
For novels or poetry generally she cared little. She preferred logic
to sentiment, and was careful of the precise value of words. 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 blonde hair and beautiful hands; there was something
about him, said his son, a little characterless, almost feminine; “he
was a great child.” 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. From his rather
weak and romantic father came whatever was loose and unbalanced in
Heine’s temperament, and his ineradicable instinct for posing; it was
his mother, with her strong and healthy nature, well developed both
intellectually and emotionally, and her great ambitions for her son,
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 he 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 realized 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; 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 realized 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.