Betty, we know, was no staunch Jewess, and had her small personal ambitions to boot, so such opposition as there was to the abbé’s plainly given counsel to make a Catholic of the boy, and give him his chance, came probably from the stolid, steady-going father, to whom custom spoke in echoes resonant enough to deaden the muffled tones of religion. No question, however, of sentiment or sacrifice was permitted to complicate, or elevate, the question; no sense of voluntary renunciation was suggested to the boy; no choice between the life and good, and the death and evil, between conscience and compromise, was presented to him. On the broadly comprehensive grounds that Judaism and trade had been good enough for the father, trade and Judaism must be good enough for the son—the matter was decided.
But still before the lad’s prospects could be definitely settled, one important personage remained to be consulted, the banker at Hamburg, whose wealth had gained him somewhat of the position of a family fetich. What Uncle Solomon would say to a scheme had no fictitious value about it; for even were the oracle occasionally dumb, not seldom would its speech be silver and its silence gold. A rich uncle is a very solemn possession in an impecunious family, so Harry, and Harry’s poetry, and Harry’s powers generally, had to be weighed in the Hamburg scales before any standard value could be assigned to either one of them. For three years the balance was held doubtful; the counting-house scales, accurate as they usually were, could hardly adjust themselves to the conditions of an unknown quantity, which ‘young Heine’ on an office stool must certainly have proved to his bewildered relatives. One imagines him in that correct and cramping atmosphere, fretting as he had done in the old convent school-days against its weary routine, longing with all the half-understood strength of his poet nature for the green hills and the mountain lakes, and feeling absolutely stifled with all the solemn interest shown over sordid matters. He tells us himself of some of his ‘calculations’ which would wander far afield, and leave the figures on the paper, to concern themselves with the far more perplexing units which passed the mirky office windows, as he complains, ‘at the same hour, with the same mien, making the same motions, like the puppets in a town house clock—reckoning, reckoning always on the basis, twice two are four. Frightful should it ever suddenly occur to one of these people that twice two are properly five, and that he therefore had miscalculated his whole life and squandered it all away in a ghastly error!’ Many a poem too, sorrowful or fantastic, as the mood took him, was scribbled in office hours, and very probably on office paper, thence to find a temporary home in the Hamburg Watchman. What could be done with such a lad? By every office standard he must inevitably have been found wanting, and one even feels a sort of sympathy with the prosaic head of the house who had made his money by the exercise of such very different talents, and whose notion of poetry corresponded very nearly with Corporal Bunting’s notion of love, that it’s by no means ‘the great thing in life boys and girls want to make it out to be—that one does not eat it, nor drink it, and as for the rest, why, it’s bother.’ It always was ‘bother’ to the banker: all through his prosperous life this poet nephew of his, who had the prophetic impertinence to tell the old man once that he owed him some gratitude for being born his uncle, and for bearing his name, was an unsatisfactory riddle. Original genius of the sort which could create a bank-book ex nihilo, the millionaire could have appreciated, but originality which ran into such unproductive channels as poetry-book making was quite beyond him, and that he never read the young man’s verses it is needless to say. Even in his own immediate family and for his first book poor Harry found no audience, save his mother; and to the very end of his days Solomon Heine for the life of him could see nothing in his nephew but a dumme Junge, who never ‘got on,’ and who made a jest of most things, even of his wealthy and respectable relatives.
It was scarcely the old man’s fault; one can only see to the limits of one’s vision, and a poet’s soul was not well within Solomon Heine’s range. According to his lights he was not ungenerous. That Harry had not the making of a clerk in him, those three probationary years had proved to demonstration, and in the determination at which the banker presently arrived, of giving those indefinite talents which he only understood enough to doubt, a chance of development by paying for a three years’ university course at Bonn, he seems to have come fully up to any reasonable ideal of a rich uncle. It is just possible that a secondary motive influenced his generosity, for Harry, besides scribbling, had found a relief from office work by falling in love with one of the banker’s daughters, who would seem not to have shared the family distaste for poetry. The little idyl was of course out of the question in so realistic a circle, and the young lady, to do her justice, seems herself to have been speedily reconverted to the proper principles in which she had been trained. No unfit pendant to the ‘Amy, shallow-hearted’ with whom a more recent generation is more familiar, this Cousin Amy of poor Heine’s married and ‘kept her carriage’ with all due despatch, whilst he, at college, was essaying to mend his ‘heart broken in two’ with all the styptics which are as old and, alas, as hurtful as such fractures. Poetical exaggeration notwithstanding—and besides her own especial love-elegy, Amalie Heine, under thin disguises, is the heroine of very many of the love-poems—there is little room for doubt, that if not so seriously injured as he thought, Heine’s heart did nevertheless receive a wound, which ached for many and many a long day, from this girl’s weak or wilful inconstancy. Heartache is, however, nearly as much a matter-of-course episode in most young people’s lives as measles, and the consequences of either malady are only very exceptionally serious.
Heine’s youthful disappointment is of chief interest as having indirectly led to what was really the determining event of his life. When Amalie’s parents shrewdly determined on separation as the best course to be pursued with the cousins, and the university plan had been accepted by Harry, his future, which was to date from degree-taking, came on for discussion. Except in an ‘other-worldly’ sense there was, in truth, but a very limited ‘future’ possible to Jews of talent. The only open profession was that of medicine, and for that, like the son of Moses Mendelssohn, young Heine had a positive distaste. Commerce, that first and final resource of the race, which had had to satisfy Joseph Mendelssohn, like a good many others equally ill-fitted for it, was not possible to Heine, for he had sufficiently shown, not only dislike, but positive incapacity for business routine. The law suggested itself, as affording an excellent arena for those ready powers of argument and repartee which in the family circle were occasionally embarrassing, and the profession of an advocate, with the vague ‘opportunities’ it included, when pressed upon young Heine, was not unalluring to him. The immediate future was probably what most occupied his thoughts; the freedom of a university life, the flowing river in place of those bustling streets, shelves full of books exchanged for those dreary office ledgers, youthful comrades in the stead of solemnly irritated old clerks. Whether the fact that conversion was a condition of most of the delights, an inevitable preliminary of all the benefits of that visionary future; whether the grim truth that ‘a certificate of baptism was a necessary card of admission to European culture,’ was openly debated and defended, or silently and shamefacedly slurred over in these family councils, does not appear. No record remains to us but the fact that the young student successfully passed his examination in May, 1825; that he was admitted to his degree on July 20, and that between these two dates—to be precise, on the 28th of June—he was baptized as a Protestant with two clergymen for his sponsors. ‘Lest I be poor and deny thee’ was Agur’s prayer, and a wise one; for shivering Poverty, clutching at the drapery of Desire, makes unto herself many a fine, mean, flimsy garment. With no gleam of conviction to cast a flickering halo of enthusiasm over the act, and with no shadow of overwhelming circumstance to somewhat veil it, Heine made his deliberate surrender of conscience to expediency. It was full-grown apostasy, neither conscientious conversion, nor childish drifting into another faith. ‘No man’s soul is alone,’ Ruskin tells us in his uncompromising way, ‘Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand.’ For the rest of his life Heine was in the grip of the serpent, and that, it seems to us, was the secret of his perpetual unrest. Maimed lives are common enough; blind or deaf, or minus a leg or an arm, or plus innumerable bruises, one yet goes on living, and with the help of time and philosophy sorrow of most sorts grows bearable. Hearts are tough; but the soul is more sensitive to injuries, is, to many of us, the veritable, vulnerable tendo Achillis on which our mothers lay their tender, detaining, unavailing hands. Heine sold his soul, and that he never received the price must have perpetually renewed the memory of the bargain. He, one of the ‘bodyguards of Jehovah,’ had suffered himself to be bribed from his post. He never lost his sickening sense of that humiliation; it may be read between the lines, alike of the most brilliant of his prose, of the most tender of his poems, of the most mocking of his often quoted jests.
‘They have told thee a-many stories,
And much complaint have made;
And yet my heart’s true anguish
That never have they said.
‘They shook their heads protesting,
They made a great to-do;
They called me a wicked fellow,
And thou believedst it true.
‘And yet the worst of all things,
Of that they were not aware,
The darkest and the saddest,
That in my heart I bear.’[12]
And it was a burden he never laid down; it embittered his relationships and jeopardised his friendships, and set him at variance with himself. ‘I get up in the night and look in the glass and curse myself,’ we find him writing to one of his old Jewish fellow-workers in the New Jerusalem movement (Moser), or checking himself in the course of a violent tirade against converts, in which Börne had joined, to bitterly exclaim, ‘It is ill talking of ropes in the house of one who has been hanged.’ Wherever he treats of Jewish subjects, and the theme seems always to have had for him the fascination which is said to tempt sinners to revisit the scene of their sins, we seem to read remorse between the melodious, mocking lines. Now it is Moses Lump who is laughed at in half tones of envy for his ignorant, unbarterable belief in the virtue of unsnuffed candles; now it is Jehudah Halevi, whose love for the mistress, the Herzensdame, ‘whose name was Jerusalem,’ is sung with a sympathy and an intensity impossible to one who had not felt a like passion, and was not bitterly conscious of having forfeited the right to avow it. The sense of his moral mercenary suicide, in truth, rarely left him. His nature was too conscientious for the strain thus set upon it; his ‘wickedness’ and ‘blackguardism,’ such as they were, were often but passionate efforts to throw his old man of the sea, his heavy burden of self-reproach; and his jests sound not unseldom as so many untranslatable cries. He had bargained away his birthright for the hope of a mess of pottage, and the evil taste of the base contract clung to the poor paralysed lips when ‘even kissing had no effect upon them.’ And but a thin, unsatisfying, and terribly intermittent ‘mess,’ too, it proved, and the share in it which his uncle, and his uncle’s heirs, provided was very bitter in the eating. The story of his struggles, are they not written in the chronicles of the immortals? and his ‘monument,’ is it not standing yet ‘in the new stone premises of his publishers?’[13]
His biographers—his niece, the Princessa della Rocca, among the latest—have made every incident of Heine’s life as familiar as his own books have made his genius to English readers, and Mr. Stigand, following Herr Strodtman, has given us an exhaustive record of the poet’s life at home and in exile; in the Germany which was so harsh and in the France which was so tender with him; with the respectable German relatives, who read his books at last and were none the wiser, and with the unlettered French wife, who could not read a single word of them all, and who yet understood her poet by virtue of the love which passeth understanding, and was in this case entirely independent of it. This sketch trenches on no such well-filled ground; it presumes to touch only on the fault which gave to life and genius both that odd pathetic twist, and to glance at the suffering, which, if there be any saving power in anguish, might surely be held by the most self-righteous as some atonement for the ‘blackguardism.’
‘Oh! not little when pain
Is most quelling, and man
Easily quelled, and the fine
Temper of genius so soon
Thrills at each smart, is the praise
Not to have yielded to pain.’[14]