"Börne?" he said, softening. "_Ach_, what have I against Börne? Two
baptized German Jews exiled in Paris should forgive each other in
death. My book was misunderstood. I wish to heaven I hadn't written
it. I always admired Börne, even if I could not keep up the ardor of
my St. Simonian days when my spiritual Egeria was Rahel von Varnhagen.
I had three beautiful days with him in Frankfort when he was full of
Jewish wit, and hadn't yet shrunk to a mere politician. He was a brave
soldier of humanity, but he had no sense of art, and I could not stand
the dirty mob around him with its atmosphere of filthy German tobacco
and vulgar tirades against tyrants. The last time I saw him he was
almost deaf, and worn to a skeleton by consumption. He dwelt in a
vast, bright silk dressing-gown, and said that if an Emperor shook his
hand he would cut it off. I said if a workman shook mine I should wash
it. And so we parted, and he fell to denouncing me as a traitor and a
_persifleur_, who would preach monarchy or republicanism, according to
which sounded better in the sentence. Poor Lob Baruch! Perhaps he was
wiser than I in his idea that his brother Jews should sink themselves
in the nations. He was born, by the way, in the very year of old
Mendelssohn's death. What an irony! But I am sorry for those
insinuations against Mme. Strauss. I have withdrawn them from the new
edition, although, as you perhaps know, I had already satisfied her
husband's sense of justice by allowing him to shoot at me, whilst I
fired in the air. What can I more?"
"I am glad you have withdrawn them," she said, moved.
"Yes; I have no Napoleonic grip, you see. A morsel of conventional
conscience clings to me."
"Therefore I could never understand your worship of Napoleon."
"There speaks the Englishwoman. You Pharisees--forgive me--do not
understand great men, you and your Wellington! Napoleon was not of the
wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the gods. Let me
tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos,
but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world
wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant.
This Paris needs a scourge of God, and the moment France gives Germany
a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has died out
of Israel."
"_Qui vivra verra_," ran heedlessly off her tongue. Then, blushing
painfully, she said quickly, "But how do you worship Napoleon and
Moses in the same breath?"
"Ah, my dear Lucy, if your soul was like an Aladdin's palace with a
thousand windows opening on the human spectacle! Self-contradiction
the fools call it, if you will not shut your eyes to half the show. I
love the people, yet I hate their stupidity and mistrust their
leaders. I hate the aristocrats, yet I love the lilies that toil not,
neither do they spin, and sometimes bring their perfume and their
white robes into a sick man's chamber. Who would harden with work the
white fingers of Corysande, or sacrifice one rustle of Lalage's silken
skirts? Let the poor starve; I'll have no potatoes on Parnassus. My
socialism is not barracks and brown bread, but purple robes, music,
and comedies.
"Yes, I was born for Paradox. A German Parisian, a Jewish German, a
hated political exile who yearns for dear homely old Germany, a
sceptical sufferer with a Christian patience, a romantic poet
expressing in classic form the modern spirit, a Jew and poor--think
you I do not see myself as lucidly as I see the world? 'My mind to me
a kingdom is' sang your old poet. Mine is a republic, and all moods
are free, equal and fraternal, as befits a child of light. Or if there
_is_ a despot, 'tis the king's jester, who laughs at the king as well
as all his subjects. But am I not nearer Truth for not being caged in
a creed or a clan? Who dares to think Truth frozen--on this
phantasmagorical planet, that whirls in beginningless time through
endless space! Let us trust, for the honor of God, that the
contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps
humor--your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up
its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction--gives truer
lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in
the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow
tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up
after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces
and show how they contradict each other, and adjudge me, like a
schoolmaster, so many good marks for this quality, and so many bad
marks for that. Biographers will weigh me grocerwise, as Kant weighed
the Deity. Ugh! You can only be judged by your peers or by your
superiors, by the minds that circumscribe yours, not by those that are
smaller than yours. I tell you that when they have written three tons
about me, they shall as little understand me as the Cosmos I reflect.
Does the pine contradict the rose or the lotusland the iceberg? I am
Spain, I am Persia, I am the North Sea, I am the beautiful gods of old
Greece, I am Brahma brooding over the sun-lands, I am Egypt, I am the
Sphinx. But oh, dear Lucy, the tragedy of the modern, all-mirroring
consciousness that dares to look on God face to face, not content,
with Moses, to see the back parts; nor, with the Israelites, to gaze
on Moses. _Ach_, why was I not made four-square like Moses
Mendelssohn, or sublimely one-sided like Savonarola; I, too, could
have died to save humanity, if I did not at the same time suspect
humanity was not worth saving. To be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in
one, what a tragedy! No, your limited intellects are happier: those
that see life in some one noble way, and in unity find strength. I
should have loved to be a Milton--like one of your English cathedrals,
austere, breathing sacred memories, resonant with the roll of a great
organ, with painted windows, on which the shadows of the green boughs
outside wave and flicker, and just hint of Nature. Or one of your
aristocrats with a stately home in the country, and dogs and horses,
and a beautiful wife. In short, I should like to be your husband. Or,
failing that, my own wife, a simple, loving creature, whose idea of
culture is cabbages. _Ach_, why was my soul wider than the Ghetto I
was born in? why did I not mate with my kind?" He broke into a fit of
coughing, and "little Lucy" thought suddenly of the story that all his
life-sadness and song-sadness was due to his rejection by some Jewish
girl in his own family circle.
"I tire you," she said. "Do not talk to me. I will sit here a little
longer."
"Nay, I have tired _you_. But I could not but tell you my thoughts;
for you are at once a child who loves and a woman who understands me.
And to be understood is rarer than to be loved. My very parents never
understood me. Nay, were they my parents--the mild man of business,
the clever, clear-headed, romance-disdaining Dutchwoman, God bless
her? No, my father was Germany, my mother was the Ghetto. The brooding
spirit of Israel breathes through me that engendered the tender humor
of her sages, the celestial fantasies of her saints. Perhaps I should
have been happier had I married the first black-eyed Jewess whose
father would put up with a penniless poet. I might have kept a kitchen
with double crockery and munched Passover cakes at Easter. Every
Friday night I should have come home from the labors of the week and
found the table-cloth shining like my wife's face, and the Sabbath
candles burning, and the Angels of Peace sitting hidden beneath their
great invisible wings, and my wife, piously conscious of having thrown
the dough on the fire, would have kissed me tenderly, and I should
have recited in an ancient melody: 'A virtuous woman, who can find
her? Her price is far above rubies.' There would have been little
children with great candid eyes, on whose innocent heads I should have
laid my hands in blessing, praying that God might make them like
Ephraim and Manasseh, Rachel and Leah--persons of dubious
exemplariness--and we should have sat down and eaten _Schalet_, which
is the divinest dish in the world, pending the Leviathan that awaits
the blessed at Messiah's table. And, instead of singing of cocottes
and mermaids, I should have sung, like Jehuda Halévi, of my
_Herzensdame_, Jerusalem. Perhaps--who knows?--my Hebrew verses would
have been incorporated in the festival liturgy, and pious old men
would have snuffled them helter-skelter through their noses. The
letters of my name would have run acrosticwise down the verses, and
the last verse would have inspired the cantor to jubilant roulades or
tremolo wails while the choir boomed in 'Pom'; and perhaps many a
Jewish banker, to whom my present poems make so little appeal, would
have wept and beat his breast and taken snuff to the words of them.
And I should have been buried honorably in the 'House of Life,' and my
son would have said _Kaddish_. Ah me, it is, after all, so much better
to be stupid and walk in the old laid-out, well-trimmed paths, than to
wander after the desires of your own heart and your own eyes over the
blue hills. True, there are glorious vistas to explore, and streams of
living silver to bathe in, and wild horses to catch by the mane, but
you are in a chartless land without stars and compass. One false step
and you are over a precipice, or up to your neck in a slough. Ah, it
is perilous to throw over the old surveyors. I see Moses ben Amram,
with his measuring-chain and his graving-tools, marking on those stone
tables of his the deepest abysses and the muddiest morasses. When I
kept swine with the Hegelians, I used to say, or rather, I still say,
for, alas! I cannot suppress what I have published: 'teach man _he's_
divine; the knowledge of his divinity will inspire him to manifest
it.' Ah me, I see now that our divinity is like old Jupiter's, who
made a beast of himself as soon as he saw pretty Europa. Would to God
I could blot out all my book on German Philosophy! No, no, humanity is
too weak and too miserable. We must have faith, we cannot live without
faith, in the old simple things, the personal God, the dear old Bible,
a life beyond the grave."
Fascinated by his talk, which seemed to play like lightning round a
cliff at midnight, revealing not only measureless heights and
soundless depths, but the greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of a
picnic, the listener had an intuition that Heine's mind did indeed,
as he claimed, reflect or rather refract the All. Only not sublimely
blurred as in Spinoza's, but specifically colored and infinitely
interrelated, so that he might pass from the sublime to the ridiculous
with an equal sense of its value in the cosmic scheme. It was the
Jewish artist's proclamation of the Unity, the humorist's "Hear, O
Israel."
"Will it never end, this battle of Jew and Greek?" he said, half to
himself, so that she did not know whether he meant it personally or
generally. Then, as she tore herself away, "I fear I have shocked
you," he said tenderly. "But one thing I have never blasphemed--Life.
Is not enjoyment an implicit prayer, a latent grace? After all, God is
our Father, not our drill-master. He is not so dull and solemn as the
parsons make out. He made the kitten to chase its tail and my Nonotte
to laugh and dance. Come again, dear child, for my friends have grown
used to my dying, and expect me to die for ever--an inverted
immortality. But one day they will find the puppet-show shut up and
the jester packed in his box. Good-bye. God bless you, little Lucy,
God bless you."
The puppet-show was shut up sooner than he expected; but the jester
had kept his most wonderful _mot_ for the last.
"_Dieu me pardonnera_," he said. "_C'est son métier._"