I had a wonderful time reading Heine! In my cheap edition the books cost three cents, or five. I wish I could have it over again!
My mother knew that I was good-for-nothing, so she did not try to make anything out of me. It was good sense on her part. She let me idle and read. In reading I was out of the way, quiet, and as usual, useless. At the same time I was the scandal of a reasonable, hard-headed family who liked to work, and who knew without doubt in which direction to go. When I was learning Russian minus a teacher, at eighteen, they, my aunts, cousins, used to peer at me through windows, door cracks, then whisper tragically to each other: “She has looked at one page an hour! No one but a fool would do that!”
To them I have remained a fool. My grandmothers loved me too much to call me that. I have since wondered if in love there be not wisdom, distilled genius of perception. Love always dwells somewhere in the realms of light. What was reading Russian at eighteen, in comparison with making buttonholes that were not round like hogs’ eyes at both corners, or cream puffs that did not split? When the women could not think of any fresh gossip, they fabricated a new story about me, my laziness. To them work was hand-work.
Happy days of life, however, were spent in a lonely, ugly, sun-and-wind-beaten, prairie village, reading in a dozen or more languages, the word-masters of the world, while the neighbors invented hair-raising tales of my laziness. I was scandal of the village! Sense of justice, very likely, is rare!
There I read Heine, all of him, every word. And over and over! I wish I could have the joy of it back. Those were memorable years in Europe when Heine, Goethe, Chopin, were in their prime.
Germany helped enlarge boundaries of the human mind, when she began putting out cheap editions of the world’s printed art. Here, for a few pennies, one can procure in scholarly renderings, classic writers of India. Kausika’s Zorn, (a play) by Kschemisvara; Savîtri, a dramatic story of the supremacy of love from the Mahabharata, Mudrarakschasa (The Chancellor’s Seal Ring), a play of the ancient Indian Drama, Malati u. Madhava, Urvasi, a dramatic piece by popular Kalidasa.
In reading these books, I found where Goethe procured short, surprising meters that do not belong to Germany, (despite the Stab-Reim), which he uses in Faust. They were a borrowing from Indian Drama. Goethe borrowed from Persian writers too. He was enchanted with this newly presented art of the East, this world of beauty and blazing light. And so was Heine! Heine was akin to it. The Orient was in his blood. The soul of him dwelled under its mighty sun. I fancy his dream of the Orient was more superb than realization could have been, had he had health and money at the same time, to make the journey. Blessed be poverty! Poverty is still the nobile donna, of the divine dream of Dante. Her road is straight. Her road is narrow. But it leads far.
Occasionally pages of Indian literature are richly studded with color, like their white lace-work marbles. The Peacock Throne, for example, with gems! The same lavishness! The same piling of richness upon richness, that not even their astounding sun could destroy, and which their black eyes, deep and disconcerting as pools of ebony, knew how to love.
Compare this, (to return to Goethe’s borrowing), from the Hitopadesa, with Faust: