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 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 realization 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_, recognized 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 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
blonde and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm
of the oasis, 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.”[4]
[4] “C’est le Bible, plus que tout autre livre,” a well-known French
critic wrote, “qui a façonné le génie poétique de Heine, en lui
donnant sa forme et sa couleur. Ses véritables maîtres, ses vrais
inspirateurs sont les glorieux inconnus qui ont écrit l’Ecclesiaste
et les Proverbes, le Cantique des cantiques, le livre de Job et ce
chef-d’œuvre d’ironie discrète intitulé: le livre du prophète Jonas.
Celui qui s’appelait un rossignol Allemand niché dans la perruque de
Voltaire fut à la fois le moins évangélique des hommes et le plus
vraiment biblique des poètes modernes.”
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 realization 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 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, 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
rose-leaf 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 farther.
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 recognized and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of
this unequalled humour--“the smile of Mephistopheles passing over
the face of Christ”--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 seemed 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, across the 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.
WHITMAN.
I.
If we put aside imaginative writers--Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte,
and Mark Twain--America has produced three men of world-wide
significance.[5] These three belong to the same corner of the
continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they
complement each other. It is difficult to consider one of them without
throwing a glance at the others.
[5] The significance of Lowell, a great writer unquestionably, seems to
be chiefly national.
Emerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism
seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury
and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed
in finding adequate artistic expression for the joys that satisfied
them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the
sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a
set of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was carried over sea,
to germinate slowly and peacefully in New England, that at length
it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust
freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In
his calm and austere manner--born of the blood that had passed through
the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers--Emerson overturned
the whole of tradition. “A world in the hand,” he said, with cheery,
genial scepticism, “is worth two in the bush.” With gentle composure,
with serene hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses that
“make no mention of former roses,” he posited the absolute right of
the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State.
Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live by
self-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity, could not
always in his peaceful haunts at Concord recognize or allow the fruits
of his doctrines.
Emerson was a man of the study; he seems to have known the world as in
a _camera obscura_ spread out before him on a table. He never seems
to come, or to be capable of coming, into direct relations with other
men or with Nature. Thoreau, an original and solitary spirit, born
amid the same influences as Emerson, but of different temperament,
resolved to go out into the world, to absorb Nature and the health of
Nature: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not
wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its
lowest terms.” So he went into Walden Woods and built himself a hut,
and sowed beans, and grew strangely familiar with the lives of plants
and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes, and with much else besides.
This period of self-dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually been
regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau’s life. Doubtless it was,
in the case of a man who spent his whole life in a small New England
town, and made the very moderate living that he needed by intermittent
work at pencil-making, teaching, land-surveying, magazine-writing,
fence-building, or whitewashing. Certainly it was this experience
which gave form and character to the activities of his life, and the
book in which he recorded his experiences created his fame. But in the
experience itself there was nothing of heroic achievement. One would
rather say that in the Walden episode Thoreau has vindicated the place
of such an experience in all education. Every one, for some brief
period in early life, should be thrown on his own resources in the
solitudes of Nature, to enter into harmonious relations with himself,
and to realize the full scope of self-reliance. For the man or woman
to whom this experience has never been given, the world must hold many
needless mysteries and not a few needless miseries.
There was in this man a curious mingling of wildness and austerity,
which Mr. Burroughs, in the most discriminating estimate of him yet
made, traces to his ancestry. On the paternal side he was French; his
privateering grandfather came from Jersey: “that wild revolutionary
cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity and hirsuteness
are French.” But on the mother’s side he was of Scotch and New
English Puritan stock. In person he was rather undersized, with
“huge Emersonian nose,” and deep-set bluish-grey eyes beneath large
overhanging brows; prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding chin, “a
ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds one of some shrewd and honest
animal’s.” He was a vigorous pedestrian; he had sloping shoulders, long
arms, short legs, large hands and feet--the characteristics, for the
most part, of an anthropoid ape. His hands were frequently clenched,
and there was an air of concentrated energy about him; otherwise
nothing specially notable, and he was frequently supposed “a pedlar of
small wares.” He possessed, as his friend Emerson remarked, powers
of observation which seemed to indicate additional senses: “he saw
as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a
photographic register of all he saw and heard.”
It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of his admirers, never by
himself, that he was a man of science, a naturalist. Certainly, in some
respects, he had in him the material for an almost ideal naturalist.
His peculiar powers of observation, and habits of noting and recording
natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending his days and nights
in the open air, seem to furnish everything that is required. Nor would
his morbid dislike of dissection have been any serious bar, for the
least worked but by no means the least important portion of natural
history is the study of living forms, and for this Thoreau seems to
have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of
arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no
fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations
which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question
which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he
seems to have been absolutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare,
impersonal records of observations are always dull and unprofitable
reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not
realizing its significance, he never verifies it or follows it up.
His science is that of a fairly intelligent schoolboy--a counting of
birds’ eggs and a running after squirrels. Of the vital and organic
relationships of facts, or even of the existence of such relationships,
he seems to have no perception. Compare any of his books with, for
instance, Belt’s “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” or any of Wallace’s
books: for the men of science, in their spirit of illuminating
inquisitiveness, all facts are instructive; in Thoreau’s hands they are
all dead. He was not a naturalist: he was an artist and a moralist.
He was born into an atmosphere of literary culture, and the great
art he cultivated was that of framing sentences. He desired to make
sentences which would “suggest far more than they say,” which would
“lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across, not mere
repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground
or cattle to build,” sentences “as durable as a Roman aqueduct.”
Undoubtedly he succeeded; his sentences frequently have all the
massive and elemental qualities that he desired. They have more; if
he knew little of the architectonic qualities of style, there is a
keen exhilarating breeze blowing about these boulders, and when we
look at them they have the grace and audacity, the happy, natural
extravagance of fragments of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site
of a fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with the things that
are wildest and most untamable in Nature, and of these his sentences
often seem to be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side, “its
sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat colour,” or the
“ancient, familiar, immortal cricket sound,” the thrush’s song, his
_ranz des vâches_, or the song that of all seemed to rejoice him most,
the clear, exhilarating, braggart, clarion-crow of the cock. Thoreau’s
favourite reading was among the Greeks, Pindar, Simonides, the Greek
Anthology, especially Æschylus, and a later ancient, Milton. There
is something of his paganism in all this, his cult of the aboriginal
health-bearing forces of Nature. His paganism, however unobtrusive, was
radical and genuine. It was a paganism much earlier than Plato, and
which had never heard of Christ.