"Religiously! What was my whole fight to rouse Hodge out of his
thousand years' sleep in his hole? Why did I edit a newspaper, and
plague myself with our time and its interests? Goethe has created
glorious Greek statues, but statues cannot have children. My words
should find issue in deeds. Put me rather with poor Lessing. I am no
true Hellenist. I may have snatched at pleasure, but self-sacrifice
has always called to the depths of me. Like my ancestor, David, I have
been not only a singer, I have slung my smooth little pebbles at the
forehead of Goliath."
"Yes; but haven't you turned Catholic?"
"Catholic!" he roared like a roused lion, "they say that again! Has
the myth of death-bed conversion already arisen about me? How they
jump, the fools, at the idea of a man's coming round to their views
when his brain grows weak!"
"No, not death-bed conversion. Quite an old history. I was assured you
had married in a Catholic Church."
"To please Mathilde. Without that the poor creature wouldn't have
thought herself married in a manner sufficiently pleasing to God. It
is true we had been living together without any Church blessing at
all, but _que voulez-vous_? Women are like that. But for a duel I had
to fight, I should have been satisfied to go on as we were. I
understand by a wife something nobler than a married woman chained to
me by money-brokers and parsons, and I deemed my _faux ménage_ far
firmer than many a "true" one. But since I _was_ to be married, I
could not leave my beloved Nonotte a dubious widowhood. We even
invited a number of Bohemian couples to the wedding-feast, and bade
them follow our example in daring the last step of all. Ha! ha! there
is nothing like a convert's zeal, you see. But convert to Catholicism,
that's another pair of sleeves. If your right eye offends you, pluck
it out; if your right arm offends you, cut it off. And if your reason
offends you, become a Catholic. No, no, Lucy, I may have worshipped
the Madonna in song, for how can a poet be insensible to the beauty of
Catholic symbol and ritual? But a Jew I have always been."
"Despite your baptism?"
The sufferer groaned, but not from physical pain.
"Ah, cruel little Lucy, don't remind me of my youthful folly. Thank
your stars you were born an Englishwoman. I was born under the fearful
conjunction of Christian bigotry and Jewish, in the Judenstrasse. In
my cradle lay my line of life marked out from beginning to end. My
God, what a life! You know how Germany treated her Jews--like pariahs
and wild beasts. At Frankfort for centuries the most venerable Rabbi
had to take off his hat if the smallest gamin cried: 'Jud', mach
mores!' I have myself been shut up in that Ghetto, I have witnessed a
Jew-riot more than once in Hamburg. Ah, Judaism is not a religion, but
a misfortune. And to be born a Jew _and_ a genius! What a double
curse! Believe me, Lucy, a certificate of baptism was a necessary card
of admission to European culture. Neither my mother nor my money-bag
of an uncle sympathized with my shuddering reluctance to wade through
holy water to my doctor's degree. And yet no sooner had I taken the
dip than a great horror came over me. Many a time I got up at night
and looked in the glass, and cursed myself for my want of backbone!
Alas! my curses were more potent than those of the Rabbis against
Spinoza, and this disease was sent me to destroy such backbone as I
had. No wonder the doctors do not understand it. I learnt in the
Ghetto that if I didn't twine the holy phylacteries round my arm,
serpents would be found coiled round the arm of my corpse. Alas!
serpents have never failed to coil themselves round my sins. The
Inquisition could not have tortured me more, had I been a Jew of
Spain. If I had known how much easier moral pain was to bear than
physical, I would have saved my curses for my enemies, and put up with
my conscience--twinges. Ah, truly said your divine Shakespeare that
the wisest philosopher is not proof against a toothache. When was any
spasm of pleasure so sustained as pain? Certain of our bones, I learn
from my anatomy books, only manifest their existence when they are
injured. Happy are the bones that have no history. Ugh! how mine are
coming through the skin, like ugly truth through fair romance. I shall
have to apologize to the worms for offering them nothing but bones.
Alas, how ugly bitter it is to die; how sweet and snugly we can live
in this snug, sweet nest of earth. What nice words; I must start a
poem with them. Yes, sooner than die I would live over again my
miserable boyhood in my uncle Salomon's office, miscalculating in his
ledgers like a Trinitarian, while I scribbled poems for the _Hamburg
Wächter_. Yes, I would even rather learn Latin again at the Franciscan
cloister, and grind law at Göttingen. For, after all, I shouldn't have
to work very hard; a pretty girl passes, and to the deuce with the
Pandects! Ah, those wild University days, when we used to go and sup
at the 'Landwehr,' and the rosy young _Kellnerin_, who brought us our
duck _mit Apfelkompot_, kissed me alone of all the _Herren Studenten_,
because I was a poet, and already as famous as the professors. And
then, after I should be re-rusticated from Göttingen, there would be
Berlin over again, and dear Rahel Levin and her salon, and the
Tuesdays at Elise von Hohenhausen's (at which I would read my _Lyrical
Intermezzo_), and the mad literary nights with the poets in the
Behrenstrasse. And balls, theatres, operas, masquerades--shall I ever
forget the ball when Sir Walter Scott's son appeared as a Scotch
Highlander, just when all Berlin was mad about the Waverley Novels! I,
too, should read them over again for the first time, those wonderful
romances; yes, and I should write my own early books over again--oh,
the divine joy of early creation!--and I should set out again with
bounding pulses on my _Harzreise_: and the first night of _Freischütz_
would come once more, and I should be whistling the _Jungfern_ and
sipping punch in the Casino, with Lottchen filling up my glass." His
eyes oozed tears, and suddenly he stretched out his arms and seized
her hand and pressed it frantically, his face and body convulsed, his
paralyzed eyelids dropping. "No, no!" he pleaded, in a hoarse, hollow
voice, as she strove to withdraw it, "I hear the footsteps of death, I
must cling on to life; I must, I must. O the warmth and the scent of
it!"
She shuddered. For an instant he seemed a vampire with shut eyes
sucking at her life-blood to sustain his; and when that horrible
fantasy passed, there remained the overwhelming tragedy of a dead man
lusting for life. Not this the ghost, who, as Berlioz put it, stood at
the window of his grave, regarding and mocking the world in which he
had no further part. But his fury waned, he fell back as in a stupor,
and lay silent, little twitches passing over his sightless face.
She bent over him, terribly distressed. Should she go? Should she ring
again? Presently words came from his lips at intervals, abrupt,
disconnected, and now a ribald laugh, and now a tearful sigh. And then
he was a student humming:
"Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus,"
and his death-mask lit up with the wild joys of living. And then
earlier memories still--of his childhood in Düsseldorf--seemed to flow
through his comatose brain; his mother and brothers and sisters; the
dancing-master he threw out of the window; the emancipation of the
Jewry by the French conquerors; the joyous drummer who taught him
French; the passing of Napoleon on his white horse; the atheist
school-boy friend with whom he studied Spinoza on the sly, and the
country louts from whom he bought birds merely to set them free, and
the blood-red hair of the hangman's niece who sang him folk-songs. And
suddenly he came to himself, raised his eyelid with his forefinger and
looked at her.
"Catholic!" he cried angrily. "I never returned to Judaism, because I
never left it. My baptism was a mere wetting. I have never put
Heinrich--only H--on my books, and never have I ceased to write
'Harry' to my mother. Though the Jews hate me even more than the
Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren."
"I know, I know," she said soothingly. "I am sorry I hurt you. I
remember well the passage in which you say that your becoming a
Christian was the fault of the Saxons who changed sides suddenly at
Leipzig; or else of Napoleon who had no need to go to Russia; or else
of his school-master who gave him instruction at Brienne in geography,
and did not tell him that it was very cold at Moscow in winter."
"Very well, then," he said, pacified. "Let them not say either that I
have been converted to Judaism on my death-bed. Was not my first poem
based on one in the Passover night _Hagadah_? Was not my first
tragedy, _Almansor_, really the tragedy of down-trodden Israel, that
great race which from the ruins of its second Temple knew to save, not
the gold and the precious stones, but its real treasure, the Bible--a
gift to the world that would make the tourist traverse oceans to see a
Jew, if there were only one left alive. The only people that preserved
freedom of thought through the middle ages, they have now to preserve
God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss
guards of Deism. God was always the beginning and end of my thought.
When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your
Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world. Is
not my best work, _The Rabbi of Bacharach_, devoted to expressing the
'vast Jewish sorrow,' as Börne calls it?"
"But you never finished it?"
"I was a fool to be persuaded by Moser. Or was it Gans? Ah, will not
Jehovah count it to me for righteousness, that New Jerusalem
Brotherhood with them in the days when I dreamt of reconciling Jew and
Greek--the goodness of beauty with the beauty of goodness! Oh, those
days of youthful dreams, whose winters are warmer than the summers of
the after years. How they tried to crush us, the Rabbis and the State
alike! O the brave Moser, the lofty-souled, the pure-hearted, who
passed from counting-house to laboratory, and studied Sanscrit for
recreation, _moriturus te saluto_. And thou, too, Markus, with thy
boy's body, and thy old man's look, and thy encyclopædic, inorganic
mind; and thou, O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian hocus-pocus.
Yes, the Rabbis were right, and the baptismal font had us at last; but
surely God counts the will to do, and is more pleased with
great-hearted dreams than with the deeds of the white-hearted burghers
of virtue, whose goodness is essence of gendarmerie. And where,
indeed--if not in Judaism, broadened by Hellenism--shall one find the
religion of the future? Be sure of this, anyhow, that only a Jew will
find it. We have the gift of religion, the wisdom of the ages. You
others--young races fresh from staining your bodies with woad--have
never yet got as far as Moses. Moses--that giant figure--who dwarfs
Sinai when he stands upon it, the great artist in life, who, as I
point out in my _Confessions_ built human pyramids; who created
Israel; who took a poor shepherd family, and created a nation from
it--a great, eternal, holy people, a people of God, destined to
outlive the centuries, and to serve as a pattern to all other
nations--a statesman, not a dreamer, who did not deny the world and
the flesh, but sanctified it. Happiness, is it not implied in the very
aspiration of the Christian for postmundane bliss? And yet, 'the man
Moses was very meek'; the most humble and lovable of men. He
too--though it is always ignored--was ready to die for the sins of
others, praying, when his people had sinned, that _his_ name might be
blotted out instead; and though God offered to make of him a great
nation, yet did he prefer the greatness of his people. He led them to
Palestine, but his own foot never touched the promised land. What a
glorious, Godlike figure, and yet so prone to wrath and error, so
lovably human. How he is modelled all round like a Rembrandt--while
your starveling monks have made of your Christ a mere decorative
figure with a gold halo. O Moshé Rabbenu, Moses our teacher indeed!
No, Christ was not the first nor the last of our race to wear a crown
of thorns. What was Spinoza but Christ in the key of meditation?"
"Wherever a great soul speaks out his thoughts, there is Golgotha,"
quoted the listener.
"Ah, you know every word I have written," he said, childishly pleased.
"Decidedly, you must translate me. You shall be my apostle to the
heathen. You are good apostles, you English. You turned Jews under
Cromwell, and now your missionaries are planting our Palestinian
doctrines in the South Seas, or amid the josses and pagodas of the
East, and your young men are colonizing unknown continents on the
basis of the Decalogue of Moses. You are founding a world-wide
Palestine. The law goes forth from Zion, but by way of Liverpool and
Southampton. Perhaps you are indeed the lost Ten Tribes."
"Then you would make me a Jew, too," she laughed.
"Jew or Greek, there are only two religious
possibilities--fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count--the
Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the
sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was
a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always
spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad,
a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered
from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the
empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same
time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an
apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this
world. The Jewish mission will never be over till the Christians are
converted to the religion of Christ. Lassalle is a better pupil of the
Master than the priests who denounce socialism. You have met Lassalle!
No? You shall meet him here one day. A marvel. Me _plus_ Will. He
knows everything, feels everything, yet is a sledge-hammer to act. He
may yet be the Messiah of the nineteenth century. Ah! when every man
is a Spinoza, and does good for the love of good, when the world is
ruled by justice and brotherhood, reason and humor, then the Jews may
shut up shop, for it will be the Holy Sabbath. Did you mark, Lucy, I
said, reason and humor? Nothing will survive in the long run but what
satisfies the sense of logic, and the sense of humor. Logic and
laughter--the two trumps of doom! Put not your trust in princes--the
really great of the earth are always simple. Pomp and ceremonial,
popes and kings, are toys for children. Christ rode on an ass, now the
ass rides on Christ."
"And how long do you give your trumps to sound before your Millennium
dawns?" said "little Lucy," feeling strangely old and cynical beside
this incorrigible idealist.
"Alas, perhaps I am only another dreamer of the Ghetto, perhaps I have
fought in vain. A Jewish woman once came weeping to her Rabbi with her
son, and complained that the boy, instead of going respectably into
business like his sires, had developed religion, and insisted on
training for a Rabbi. Would not the Rabbi dissuade him? 'But,' said
the Rabbi, chagrined, 'why are you so distressed about it? Am _I_ not
a Rabbi?' 'Yes,' replied the woman, 'but this little fool takes it
seriously,' _Ach_, every now and again arises a dreamer who takes the
world's lip-faith seriously, and the world tramples on another fool.
Perhaps there is no resurrection for humanity. If so, if there's no
world's Saviour coming by the railway, let us keep the figure of that
sublime Dreamer whose blood is balsam to the poor and the suffering."
Marvelling at the mental lucidity, the spiritual loftiness of his
changed mood, his visitor wished to take leave of him with this image
in her memory; but just then a half-paralyzed Jewish graybeard made
his appearance, and Heine's instant dismissal of him on her account
made it difficult not to linger a little longer.
"My _chef de police_!" he said, smiling. "He lives on me and I live on
his reports of the great world. He tells me what my enemies are up to.
But I have them in there," and he pointed to an ebony box on a chest
of drawers, and asked her to hand it to him.
"Pardon me before I forget," he said; and, seizing a pencil like a
dagger, he made a sprawling note, laughing venomously. "I have them
here!" he repeated, "they will try to stop the publication of my
_Memoirs_, but I will outwit them yet. I hold them! Dead or alive,
they shall not escape me. Woe to him who shall read these lines, if he
has dared attack me. Heine does not die like the first comer. The
tiger's claws will survive the tiger. When I die, it will be for
_them_ the Day of Judgment."
It was a reminder of the long fighting life of the freelance, of all
the stories she had heard of his sordid quarrels, of his blackmailing
his relatives, and besting his uncle. She asked herself his own
question, "Is genius, like the pearl in the oyster, only a splendid
disease?"