That is the propaganda which makes the greatness of every work of realism, if it has greatness. And so we can understand the failure of this unhappy genius in his other writings. He went back to ancient Carthage, and following his rigid art theories, he laboriously accumulated knowledge of detail, and wrote what he meant to be another masterpiece of realism, “Salammbô.” He creates for us a whole gallery of Carthaginian characters; but he doesn’t know these characters, he doesn’t love them, he doesn’t make us know them or love them—and his would-be masterpiece is therefore as lifeless as any gallery of wax works. We read it with curiosity because of the historical detail, the pictures of a far-off and cruel civilization; but we seldom finish it, and we forget everything but what a history-book might have given us.
CHAPTER LXVI
THE MATTRESS GRAVE
We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two artists whom we are about to study are men who had to flee from Germany and spend a considerable part of their lives as political exiles in Paris.
Heinrich Heine was born in 1799, the same year as Balzac. He was a Jew, and it was a time when the Jews in Frankfort were penned up in a filthy ghetto and subjected to insults and outrages; the “Jew-grief” was one of the deep elements of this great poet’s soul. Another element was the shame of the “poor relation”; he had a rich uncle, a millionaire banker in the bourgeois city of Hamburg, who took the youthful genius into his office at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards kicked him out, telling him that he was “a fool.” Among other follies, the young genius had fallen in love with the rich banker’s daughter, and she toyed with him for a while, and then married respectably, and gave the poet’s heart a wound from which it never recovered.
To get rid of him the uncle set him to studying law; but he made a poor student and a worse lawyer. In order to be allowed to practice he had to be baptized as a Christian; this doesn’t really do one any harm, but it caused shame to Heine throughout his life. He had no real religion, being a child of Voltaire, a rebel, and in due course a revolutionist. He was a poet, a maker of exquisite verses, full of unutterable tenderness. Also he was a lover; he wandered here and there with his broken heart, trying many casual loves, and paying for his adventures a frightful penalty, as will appear.
We are back in the days of the “Holy Alliance,” and all the little princelings of Germany are holding the thoughts of their subjects in a vise. Heine put satirical and skeptical ideas into rhyme; he had a bitter wit, and his words flew all over Germany, and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia not merely suppressed one book, they paid him the compliment of prohibiting everything he might write. “Put a sword on my coffin,” he said, in one of his stanzas, “for I have been a soldier in the war for the liberation of humanity.” The revolution of 1830 came in France, and Heine was deeply stirred, and hoped for something to happen in Germany. But he had to wait a long time, nearly a hundred years; then, strange whim of history, three million American boys had to cross the ocean to win the political battle of this German-Jewish rebel!
Heine could stand Germany no longer, and went to live in Paris, where he was welcomed by the whole romantic school. He wrote letters, articles and verses, which went back to Germany and helped carry on the war for freedom. His genius and wit were such that all the efforts to bar his books only promoted their circulation. Fate played a queer prank upon the Prussian Junkerdom—their most popular sentimental songs, which they know by heart and sing on all possible occasions, were written by a rebel exile whom they had chased about the streets in a Judenhetze; the same man who wrote the terrible stanzas of “The Silesian Weavers,” picturing the starving wretches sitting in their huts and weaving a three-fold curse, against God, King and Fatherland—“Old Germany, we weave thy shroud—we weave, we weave!”
His was a strange, complex nature, with many contradictory qualities. He was called “the German Aristophanes.” He met in the end a ghastly fate; a spinal disease, the penalty of his casual loves, slowly ate him up, and for years he lay on what he called “a mattress grave.” First he could scarcely walk, then he could scarcely see, and all the time he suffered hideously. But his mind lasted to the end, and he saw all things clearly, including his own grim fate. “The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly, so-called German Aristophanes that his mightiest sarcasms are but feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in humor and in colossal wit.”
CHAPTER LXVII
SIEGFRIED-BAKUNIN
In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art works from the point of view of revolutionary economics.