Fragments of an Autobiography

by Felix Moscheles

My father had given a concert for the benefit of the sufferers in Hamburg, and was able to contribute a sum of £643 to the relief fund raised.

On my arrival I was received with open arms by my relatives. My grandfather, Adolf Embden, had been staying with us more than once, and he was particularly partial to his grandson, because he had a marked predilection for England and everything that was English. He knew more about British politics than most men born and bred in the country; he read all the big speeches delivered in Parliament, identified himself with the Whigs, and was a fervent disciple of Cobden and Bright. He did his best to train me in the way I should go, and his methods were quite congenial to my taste. We often took long walks together, and his peripatetic teachings are pleasantly blended in my mind with the half-way house at the corner of the Jungfernsteg and the Alster Bassin, then occupied by Giosti Giovanoli, the confectioner. He trained me just once too often, but that was in London, in a shop near Oxford Circus, and it was a Bath bun that made me restless. That shop was painted green and gold, and to this day I would not eat on green and gold premises if I were starving.

In Hamburg I was welcomed, too, by uncles and aunts, first and second cousins, male and female, and by a strong contingent of grandaunts. I am aware that most people have quite as many relatives of their own as they need for home consumption, and that being so, they are not pleasantly disposed towards the family history of their friends. So I mean to use my relatives sparingly, and only to bring them in where they are associated with things I well remember. My mother has penned most characteristic sketches of many of those worthy personalities in a MS. she has entitled "Early Recollections," and the grandaunts hold a prominent place in those papers; but for the reason just given, I refrain from transcribing her graphic descriptions of their doings. I would, however, record my own boyish impressions, to the effect that one or two of my grandaunts were a caution to rattle-snakes. I have learned since to see that they were nothing of the kind, but just old ladies of marked originality. It took some time before I could get to like being loved by them; I preferred making faces behind their backs, a pastime which I was joined in by a cousin about my own age. Cousin Carl got into trouble oftener than I did, and had more reason to regret it, for in one of the drawers of an old-fashioned mahogany secretary his father kept an orthodox cane which he would produce on special occasions—such were the unchallenged methods of training in those days. My uncle was the best of men, anxious only to chastise for the good of the young delinquent, whom he tenderly loved, but he might have saved himself the trouble, for poor Cousin Carl was never to reap the benefit of his training. He had at no time been robust, and was not to live long. That winter of 1842 was looking about for victims. The fearful mornings, when we had to get up in the dark, and wash by the flicker of a tallow candle—wash, that is if we succeeded in hacking up the ice in the jug, and in finding some water at the bottom of it—those fearful mornings proved too much for him. Poor Carl's faces, as he made them behind people's backs, grew longer and longer, his cough grew hollower and hollower, and he soon went to rest where there are no canes and no tallow dips, and all is peace, and even one's grandaunts are seraphs.

The sad event did not, however, take place during my stay in Hamburg. I spent some six or eight months with my uncle and aunt. She, my Tante Jaques, was my mother's only sister, and was deeply attached to her; on me she lavished unvarying kindness and affection. My cousins, all older than myself, were delighted to have the "little Englishman" in the house, and the friendship we struck up then has lasted through life.

One of the grandaunts was a sister of Heinrich Heine, the poet. She had married into the Embden family, and so Heinrich was a sort of cousin of my mother's. They saw a good deal of one another when my mother was in her teens, and he was a dreamy youth whom she and the other girls of the family circle delighted to chaff. His frequent headaches they not incorrectly ascribed to his mode of living; to be sure, they said, he looked pale and interesting, but that was only because he had eaten too much at yesterday's dinner party. "Now, what is the matter with you again to-day?" said my mother as he sat down opposite her one morning and watched her shelling peas. "How pale you are! it's that head again, I suppose?" "Yes, Lottchen, I am ill; it is the head again." "That is what you are always saying, but I'm sure it is not as bad as you make it out to be. Come now, am I not right?" "O Lottchen," he said, "you do not know how I suffer;" and as he sat there musing, she had not the heart further to chaff him. When the next volume of his poems appeared shortly afterwards, she knew what had passed through his mind on that occasion, and perhaps on others when she had shown him friendly sympathy.

He writes:—

"When past thy house at morning

I take my way, to see

Thy face, child, at the window

Is deep delight to me.

Thy dark-brown eyes seem asking

As my sad, pale looks they scan,

Who art thou, and what ails thee,

Thou strange and woe-worn man!

'I am a German poet,

Through Germany widely known;

When they name the names that are famous,

With them they will name my own.

'And what I ail, oh many,

Dear little one, ail the same.

When they name the worst of sorrows,

Mine, too, they are sure to name.'"

Sometimes he was in livelier moods, as one day, when he, my grandfather, and my mother were walking through the fields together, and were joined by a remarkably dull doctor of philology, whose company was particularly distasteful to Heine. Pointing to half-a-dozen cows and oxen that were grazing close by, he said in an undertone: "I say, Lottchen, now there are seven doctors on the meadow."

Salomon Heine, the poet's uncle, was a millionaire who spent his money right royally and philanthropically; a man who owed his fortune to his own exertions, and who, when he had made a million of marks for each of his children—I forget how many he had—devoted the next million he amassed to the foundation of a hospital. He was a delightful specimen of an uncle, too, for he would spend his money philonepotically as well as philanthropically. The nephew was ever ready to dive into the uncle's purse; equally ready to make literary capital out of him and his friends. Gumpel, another rich banker—we know him as Gumpelino—was his pet aversion, and specially suggestive to him as a butt for his satire. Gumpel, too, was a self-made man, a fact of which, however, he did not like to be reminded, quite unlike old Heine, who loved to bring up the subject to the annoyance of his friend, shouting across the table stories of the early days when they came to Hamburg with their bundles slung across their shoulders. To his nephew he was ever indulgent; he was proud of his rising popularity, and as a rule was not appealed to in vain when the young genius had got into money troubles. On one occasion, though, he lost patience when he had given him a round sum wherewith to defray the expenses of a journey to Norderney, a summer resort on the coast of the North Sea. Instead of devoting the money to the purpose of improving his health, he managed in one night to roll the round sum into other people's pockets at the gaming tables. This time the uncle was indignant, and Heinrich would probably never have gone to Norderney, and consequently never have written the "Nordsee-Lieder," had not the well-known firm of Hoffman & Campe come to the rescue with the necessary funds, in consideration of which they stipulated he should write a volume of songs for them.

In Hamburg I was sent to the Johanneum, a large public school. It was rather hard, after having been called a German sausage in England, to be derided as an English "Rossbiff" or "Shonebool," which was meant for John Bull. The whole class roared with laughter when I rose for the first time to decline ἡ Μοὑσα, pronouncing the defunct Greek language as it was spoken in King's College, and the jeers of that whole class so galled and stung me that I wished I could kill all German boys at a stroke, or at least maim those despicable ones within my reach for life. It was well I could not act upon the impulse, for many a German boy of that day was to be a staunch friend to me in after life. I had my troubles in those Teutonic school-days, and I thought the proceedings monotonous, but still there was pleasurable excitement to be had occasionally, as when old Hummel came along—a half-witted water-carrier whom every bad boy in Hamburg knew and hooted. Three words we would shout in his face, three words that meant absolutely nothing, but that sounded worse than any bad language I had ever heard. He was a shaky old man, and the water-pails suspended from his shoulders prevented his running after us, and so we could indulge with impunity in the exhilarating sport of mocking him to the fullest extent our wicked little human hearts desired.