In the same way he taught me modern history. I did not understand the words, it is true; but as he constantly drummed while speaking, I knew what he meant. At bottom this is the best method. The history of the storming of the Bastille, of the Tuilleries, and the like, we understand first when we know how the drumming was done. In our school compendiums of history we merely read: “Their excellencies the Baron and Count, with the most noble spouses of the aforesaid, were beheaded. Their highnesses the Dukes and Princes, with the most noble spouses of the aforesaid, were beheaded. His Majesty the King, with his most sublime spouse, the Queen, was beheaded.” But when you hear the red guillotine march drummed, you understand it correctly for the first time, and you know the how and the why. Madam, that is indeed a wonderful march! It thrilled through marrow and bone when I first heard it, and I was glad that I forgot it. One forgets so much as one grows older, and a young man has nowadays so much other knowledge to keep in his head—whist, Boston, genealogical tables, parliamentary data, dramaturgy, the liturgy, carving—and yet notwithstanding all jogging up of my brain, I could not for a long time recall that tremendous tune! But only think, Madam, not long ago I sat at table with a whole menagerie of counts, princes, princesses, chamberlains, court marshalesses, seneschals, upper court mistresses, court keepers of the royal plate, court hunters’ wives, and whatever else these aristocratic domestics are termed, and their under domestics ran about behind their chairs and shoved full plates before their mouths; but I, who was passed by and neglected, sat without the least occupation for my jaws, and I kneaded little bread-balls, and drummed for ennui with my fingers, and to my astonishment I suddenly drummed the red, long-forgotten guillotine march!
“And what happened?” Madam, the good people were not disturbed in their eating, nor did they know that other people, when they have nothing to eat, suddenly begin to drum, and that, too, very queer marches, which people thought long forgotten.
Is drumming, now, an inborn talent, or was it early developed in me? Enough—it lies in my limbs, in my hands, in my feet, and often manifests itself involuntarily. I once sat at Berlin in the lecture-room of the Privy Councillor Schmaltz, a man who had saved the State by his book on the Red and Black Coat Danger. You remember, perhaps, Madam, out of Pausanias, that by the braying of an ass an equally dangerous plot was once discovered; and you also know from Livy, or from Becker’s History of the World, that geese once saved the capital; and you must certainly know from Sallust that a loquacious putain, the Lady Livia, brought the terrible conspiracy of Cataline to light. But to return to the mutton aforesaid. I listened to international law in the lecture-room of the Herr Privy Councillor Schmaltz, and it was a sleepy summer afternoon, and I sat on the bench and heard less and less—my head had gone to sleep, when all at once I was wakened by the noise of my own feet, which had stayed awake, and had probably observed that the exact opposite of international law and constitutional tendencies was being preached; and my feet, which, with the little eyes of their corns, had seen more of how things go in the world than the Privy Councillor with his Juno eyes—these poor dumb feet, incapable of expressing their immeasurable meaning by words, strove to make themselves intelligible by drumming, and they drummed so loudly that I thereby nearly came to grief.
Cursed, unreflecting feet! They once played me a similar trick, when I on a time, in Göttingen, sponged without subscribing on the lectures of Professor Saalfeld; and as, with an angular activity, he jumped about here and there in his pulpit, and heated himself in order to curse the Emperor Napoleon in regular set style,—no, my poor feet, I cannot blame you for drumming then; indeed, I would not have blamed you if in your dumb naïveté you had expressed yourselves by still more energetic movements. How could I, the scholar of Le Grand, hear the Emperor cursed? The Emperor, the Emperor, the great Emperor!
The Emperor is dead. On a waste island in the Atlantic Ocean is his grave; and he for whom the world was too narrow lies quietly under a little hillock, where five weeping willows hang their green heads, and a little brook, murmuring sorrowfully, ripples by. There is no inscription on his tomb; but Clio, with a just pen, has written thereon invisible words, which will resound, like spirit tones, through thousands of years.
Britannia! the sea is thine. But the sea has not water enough to wash away the shame with which the death of that mighty one has covered thee. Not thy windy Sir Hudson—no, thou thyself wert the Sicilian bravo with whom perjured kings bargained that they might revenge on the man of the people what he had once inflicted on one of themselves. And he was thy guest, and had seated himself by thy hearth.
Strange! A terrible destiny has already overtaken the three greatest enemies of the Emperor. Londonderry has cut his throat, Louis XVIII. has rotted away on his throne, and Professor Saalfeld is still professor in Göttingen.
Heinrich Heine.
VERSES FROM HEINE.
IT makes a man happy, no doubt,