HEINRICH HEINE: A PLEA
‘That blackguard Heine.’—Carlyle.
‘“Who was Heine?” A wicked man.’
Charles Kingsley.
There are some persons, some places, some things, which fall all too easily into ready-made definitions. Labels lie temptingly to hand, and specimens get duly docketed—‘rich as a Jew,’ perhaps, or ‘happy as a king’—with a promptitude and a precision which is not a trifle provoking to people of a nicely discriminative turn of mind. The amiable optimism which insists on an inseparable union between a Jew and his money, and discerns an alliterative link between kings and contentment, or makes now and again a monopoly of the virtues by labelling them ‘Christian,’ has, we suspect, a good deal to do with the manufacture of debatable definitions, and the ready fitting of slop-made judgments. Scores of such shallow platitudes occur to one’s memory, some mischievous, some monotonous, some simply meaningless, and many of the most complacent have been tacked on to the telling of a life-story, brimful of contradictions, and running counter to most of the conventionalities. The story of one who was a Jew, and poor; a convert, without the zeal; a model of resignation, and yet no Christian; a poet, born under sternest conditions of prose, and with sad claims, by right of race, to the scorn of scorn and hate of hate, which we have been told is exclusively a poet’s appanage—surely a story hardly susceptible of being summed up in an epithet. It is a life which has been told often, in many languages, and in much detail; this small sketch will glance only at such portions of it as seem to suggest the clue to a juster reading and a kindlier conclusion.
It was in the last month of the last year of the eighteenth century, in the little town of Düsseldorf in South Germany, that their eldest son Heinrich, or Harry as he seems to have been called in the family circle, was born unto Samson Heine, dealer in cloth, and Betty his wife. That eighteenth century had been but a dreary one for the Jews of Europe. It set in darkness on Heine’s cradle, and on his ‘mattress grave,’ some fifty years later, the dawn of nineteenth century civilisation, for them, had scarcely broken. ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered the Jewish system. Warned off from the highroads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bye-paths, the banned and persecuted race, looking out on the world from their ghettoes, had grown to see most things in false perspective. Self loomed large on their blank horizon, and gold shone more golden in the gloom. God the Father, whose service demanded such daily sacrifice, had lost something of that divinest attribute; men, our brothers, could the words have borne any but a ‘tribal’ sound? Still, in those dim, dream-peopled ghettoes, where visions of the absent, the distant, and the past must have come to further perplex and confuse the present, one actuality seems to have been grasped among the shadows, one ideal attained amid all the grim realities of that most miserable time. Home life and family affection had a sacredness for the worst of these poor sordid Jews in a sense which, to the best of those sottish little German potentates who so conscientiously despised them, would have been unmeaning. Maidens were honourably wed, and wives honoured and children cherished in those wretched Judenstrassen, where ‘the houses look as if they could tell sorrowful stories,’ after a fashion quite unknown at any, save the most exceptional, of the numerous coarse, corrupt, and ludicrously consequential little courts which were, at that period, representative of German culture.
The marriage of Heine’s parents had been one of those faithful unions, under superficially unequal conditions, for which Jews seem to have a genius. It had been something of the old story, ‘she was beautiful, and he fell in love’; she, pretty, piquant, cultivated, and the daughter of a physician of some local standing; he, just a respectable member of a respectable trading family, and ordinary all round, save for the distinction of one rich relative, a banker brother at Hamburg.
Betty’s attractions, however, were all dangerous and undesirable possessions in the eyes of a prudent Jewish parent of the period, and Dr. von Geldern appears to have gladly given this charming daughter of his into the safe ownership of her somewhat commonplace wooer, whose chiefest faculty would seem to have been that of appreciation. It proved, nevertheless, a sufficiently happy marriage, and Betty herself, although possibly rather an acquiescent daughter than a responsive bride in the preliminaries, developed into a faithful wife and a most devoted mother, utilising her artistic tastes and her bright energy in the education of her children, and finding full satisfaction for her warm heart in their affection. Her eldest born was always passionately attached to her, and in the days of his youth, as in the years that so speedily ‘drew nigh with no pleasure in them,’ unto those latest of the ‘evil days’ when he lay so unconscionably long a-dying, and wrote long playful letters to her full of tender deceit, telling of health and wealth and friends, in place of pain and poverty and disease, through all that bitter, brilliant life of his, Heinrich Heine’s relations with his mother were altogether beautiful, and go far to refute the criticism attributed, with I know not how much of truth, to Goethe, that ‘the poet had every capacity save that for love!’ ‘In real love, as in perfect music,’ says Bulwer Lytton in one of his novels, ‘there must be a certain duration of time.’ Heine’s attachment to his mother was just lifelong; his first love he never forgot, nor, indeed, wholly forgave, and his devotion to his grisette wife not only preceded marriage, but survived it. Poor Heine! was it his genius or his race, or something of both, which conferred on him that fatal pierre de touche as regards reputation, ‘il déplait invariablement à tous les imbeciles’?
In the very early boyhood of Heine some light had broken in on the thick darkness, social and political, which enveloped Jewish fortunes. It was only a fitful gleam from the meteor-like course of the first Napoleon, but during those few years when, as Heine puts it, ‘all boundaries were dislocated,’ the Duchy of Berg, and its capital Düsseldorf, in common with more important states, were created French, and the Code Napoléon took the place for a while of that other, unwritten, code in which Jews were pariahs, to be condemned without evidence, and sentenced without appeal. Although the French occupation of Berg lasted unluckily but a few years (1806 till 1813), it did wonders in the way of individual civilisation, and Joachim Murat, during his governorship, seems really to have succeeded in introducing something of the ‘sweet pineapple odour of politeness,’ which Heine later notes as a characteristic of French manners, into the boorish, beerish little German principality. Although the time was all too short, and the conscription too universal for much national improvement to become evident, German burghers as well as German Jews had cause to rejoice in the change of rule. We hear of no ‘noble’ privileges, no licensed immunities nor immoralities during the term of the French occupation, and some healthier amusements than Jew-baiting were provided for the populace. With the departure of the French troops the clouds, which needed the storm of the ’48 revolution to be effectually dispersed, gathered again. Still the foreign government, short as it was, had lasted long enough to make an impression for life on Heinrich Heine, and its most immediate effect was in the school influences it brought to bear upon him. Throughout all the States brought under French control, public education, by the Imperial edict of 1808, was settled on one broad system, and put under the general direction of the French Minister of Instruction. In accordance with this decree some suitable building in each selected district had to be utilised for class-rooms, the students had to be put into uniform, the teachers to be Frenchmen, and all subjects had to be taught through the medium of that language. The lycée at Düsseldorf was set up in an ancient Franciscan convent, and hither, at the age of ten, was Heine daily despatched. A bright little auburn-haired lad, full of fun and mischief, and mother-taught up to this date save for some small amount of Hebrew drilling which he seems to have received at the hands of a neighbouring Jewish instructor of youth, Harry had everything to learn, and discipline and the Latin declensions were among the first and greatest of his difficulties. Poet nature and boy nature were both strong in him, and it was so hard to sit droning out long dull lists of words, which he was quite sure the originators of them had never had to do, for ‘if the Romans had had first to learn Latin,’ he ruminated, ‘they never would have had time to conquer the world’—so impossible he found it to keep his eyes on the page, whilst the very motes were dancing in the sunshine as it poured in through the old convent window, which was set just too high in the wall for a safe jump into freedom. One day the need of sympathy, and possibly some unconscious association from the dim old cloister, proved momentarily too strong for the impressionable little lad’s Jewish instincts; he came across a crucifix in some forgotten niche of the transformed convent; he looked up, he tells us, at the roughly carved figure, and dropping on his knees, prayed an earnest heterodox prayer, ‘Oh, Thou poor once persecuted God, do help me, if possible, to keep the irregular verbs in my head!’
‘Jewish instincts,’ we said, and they could have been scarcely more, for neither at home, at school, nor in the streets was the atmosphere the boy breathed favourable to the development of religious principles. The Judaism of that age was, superficially, very much what the age had made of it; and its followers and its persecutors alike combined to render it mightily unattractive to susceptible natures. Samson Heine, stolid and respectable, we may imagine doing his religious, as he did all his other duties and avocations, in solemn routine fashion, laying heavy honest hands on each prose detail, and letting every bit of poetry slip through his fat fingers, whilst his bright eager wife, with her large ideas and her small vanities, ruled her household, and read her Rousseau, and, feeling the outer world shut from her by religion, and the higher world barred from her by ritual, found the whole thing cramping and unsatisfying to the last degree. ‘Happy is he whom his mother teacheth’ runs an old Talmudic proverb; but among the mother-taught lessons of his childhood, the best was missing to Heinrich Heine—the real difference between ‘holy and profane’ he never rightly learnt, and thus it came to pass that Jewish instincts—an ineradicable and an inalienable, but alas! an incomplete inheritance of the sons of Israel—were all that Judaism gave to this poet of Jewish race.
One lingers over these early influences, the right understanding of which goes far to supply the key to some of the later puzzles. Oddly enough, the clouds which by and by hid the blue are discernible from the very first, and these early years give the silver lining to those gathering clouds. In view of the dark days coming one at least rejoices that Heine’s childhood was a happy one; at home the merry mischievous boy was quite a hero to his two younger brothers, and a hero and a companion both to his only sister, the Löttchen who was the occasion of his earliest recorded composition. It is a favourite recollection of this lady, who is living still,[11] how she, a blushing little maid of ten, won a good deal of unmerited praise for a school theme, till a trembling confession was extorted from her that the real author was her brother Harry. His mother, too, was exceedingly proud of her handsome eldest son, whose resemblance in many ways to her was the sweetest flattery. And besides the adoring home circle Harry found a great ally for playhours in an old French ex-drummer, who had marched to victory with Napoleon’s legions, and who had plenty of tales to tell the boy of the wonderful invincible Kaiser, whom one day—blest never-to-be-forgotten vision—the boy actually saw ride through Düsseldorf on his famous white steed (1810). Heine never quite lost the glamour cast over him in his youth; France, Germany, Judea, each in a sense his patria, was each, in the time to come, ‘loved both ways,’ each in turn mocked at bitterly enough when the mood was on him, but always with France, the ‘poet of the nations’ as our own English poetess calls her, the sympathies of this cosmopolitan poet were keenest—a perhaps not unnatural state of feeling when we reflect how fact and fiction both combined to produce it. The French occupation of the principality had been a veritable deliverance to its inhabitants, Christian and Jewish alike, and what boy, in his own person, led out of bondage, would not have thrilled to such stories as the old drummer had to tell of the real living hero of it all? And the boy in question, we must bear in mind, was a poet in posse.
In school, in spite of the difficulties of irregular verbs, Harry seems to have held his own, and to have soon attracted the especial attention of the director. The chief selected for the lycée at Düsseldorf had happened to be a Roman Catholic abbé of decidedly Voltairian views on most subjects, and attracted by the boy and becoming acquainted with his family, many a talk did Abbé Schallmayer have with Frau Heine over the undoubted gifts and the delightful imperfections of her son. It may possibly have been altogether simple interest in his bright young pupil, or perhaps Frau Heine, pretty still, and charming always, was herself an attraction to the schoolmaster, but certain it is, whether a private taste for pretty women or a genuine pedagogic enthusiasm prompted his frequent calls, our abbé was a constant visitor at Samson Heine’s, and Harry and Harry’s future a never-failing theme for conversation. What was the boy to be? There was no room for much speculation if he were to remain a Jew—that path was narrow, if not straight, and admitted of small range of choice along its level line of commerce.