"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?"