HEINRICH HEINE.
Somewhat more than twenty years have elapsed since Heine's death. Had he lived to the present time he would have been little past the age of eighty, and there are many of his contemporaries and associates who are still alive. Though an exceptionally isolated figure in the world of letters, he serves to connect us in a great measure with the heroic age of German literature; and not in point of time only, but by the nature of his work, which exhibits certain elements of the Goethe-and-Schiller period, combined with others of the school of "Young Germany," so called. This, at least, is the position always assigned him; and the following pages may not be uninteresting in showing to some extent, and by means of a few of the more striking points of his character and genius, how far he really occupies this place in literature.
How came Heinrich Heine to be a product of German soil at all? is the first question which naturally arises in regard to him—that "son of the Revolution," as he somewhere styles himself, who made France his adopted country for nearly half his life; with his ardent sympathy for French ideas; with his wonderful wit, which laid presumptuous claim to the mantle of Voltaire and Aristophanes; with such rapid and facile powers of expression for his thought as makes even Lowell, who greatly amuses himself at the expense of German composition in general, admit that "Heine can be airily light in German;" with his intense belief in the progressive spirit of his own time, and his intense hatred of its accompanying advance of utilitarianism and philistinism? Even the poet's laurel, the closest tie that bound him to his own people, he would have been willing to lay aside. "I do not know," he writes, "if I fairly deserve to have my grave adorned with the poet's laurel. Poetry, however much I loved her, was always but a sacred plaything to me, or a consecrated means to divine ends. I have never laid much stress on the poet's fame, and care little if my songs get praise or blame. But ye may lay a sword upon my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the War of Liberation for humanity." And yet, in spite of it all, by his culture, by his sentiment and by his real sympathies, Heine belonged to the land of his birth rather than to the land of his adoption.
But there is one circumstance which must be regarded at the very outset in treating of him—a circumstance of race, which colors more deeply than any other his intellectual as well as his worldly career, and leaves its mark on almost everything that comes from his hand: Heine was a Jew, possessing certain indelible characteristics of his race. This we must never forget, for Heine himself never forgot it. His Jewish origin was always a mingled source of bitterness and pride. His deification of the chosen people and the pitiless mockery which he bestows on them would be hard to reconcile in another. He gloried in what their past could show, but spared no words of ridicule and scorn for the days of their weakness and infirmity: he became unfaithful to their traditions, and was baptized a Christian in order to obtain a university degree; and yet he never escaped what he himself calls "the ineradicable Jew in him."
To be a Jew in Germany in the early part of the present century meant, if not actual physical persecution, a political and social one of the crudest kind for all whose intellectual and spiritual necessities carried them beyond the barriers imposed by legislation and by society. It is true that in Berlin there had gathered a brilliant circle of cultivated Israelites who had risen to the highest intellectual attainments; but they were excluded, as well as their less-enlightened brethren, from all national existence, and even from all the learned professions except that of medicine. They had formed, what was called a "Society for the Promotion of Culture and Progress among the Jews," in which Heine himself was at one time much interested, but after his baptism he seems to have mingled as little as possible with his own people.
Heine's conversion to Christianity—or rather his baptism, for the word "conversion" cannot be applied to the renunciation of one form of religious dogma and the adoption of another for purely material ends—has been the cause of more controversy than any other incident of his life, and has always been used as a main stronghold and point of attack by his enemies. There is not much defence to offer for the act, for Heine, in spite of a Voltairean scorn of dogma and creed, possessed a deep tinge of religious feeling, and that he felt keenly the humiliation of his position—to use no harsher term—can be seen by the following expression regarding it. "Is it not foolish?" he writes to a friend. "I am no sooner baptized than I am cried down as a Jew: I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike." And again, in speaking of another converted Jew who is engaged in preaching his newly-acquired doctrine: "If he does this from conviction, he is a fool: if he does it from hypocritical motives, he is worse. I shall not cease to love Gans, but I confess I had far rather have learned instead of this that he had stolen silver spoons. That you, dear Moser," he continues, "should think as Gans does I cannot believe, although assured. I should be very sorry if my own baptism should appear to you in any favorable light. I assure you if the laws permitted the stealing of silver spoons I should not have been baptized." The jest has its pathos as well as its wit, for Heine's pecuniary prospects were always precarious, and the fatal baptism, which only brought upon him the pity and contempt of his friends and doubled the insults of his enemies, defeated its own ends and contributed nothing to his material needs.
Heine's personal history is unusually obscure. An interesting and valuable Life of him has been written by Herr Adolph Stroeltmann, but the author's materials are avowedly scanty, and the Heine memoirs, which have long been watched for with hungry eyes by the critics and biographers, are still withheld from publication by members of the family, with the prospect that they will never be given to the public. He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine December 13, 1799. "On my cradle," he writes, "fell the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning-glow of the nineteenth"—words not a little significant of the lifelong sense within him of the genius of a bygone age and the spirit of a coming one. His boyhood was passed during the time of Napoleon's supremacy in the Rhine provinces, and among other changes wrought under French jurisdiction was the establishment by imperial decree of certain state schools called "lyceums," at one of which Heine received the greater part of his school-education. The town was garrisoned by French troops, and here it was that the boy became acquainted with the old French drummer whom he afterward commemorates so charmingly in the sketch of his childhood known as the "Buch Le Grand." These early influences must certainly have been at the root of that passion for French ideas and French manners which characterized his later years, just as his boyish visions of the Great Emperor as he passed through Düsseldorf never quite lost their enchantment in after life, and long blinded him to the real meaning of Bonapartism.
Twice he saw Napoleon—once in 1811, and again in the following year—and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when I saw him with my own favored eyes!—himself, hosannah! the emperor! It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!—
Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!
Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me whether I have really seen him, whether we really were his associates; and then it seems to me as if his image, snatched from the meagre frame of the present, melts ever more proudly and more imperiously into the twilight of the past. His name already sounds like a voice from the ancient world, and as antique and heroic as the names of Alexander and Cæsar." Even to Heine, Napoleon was the representative of the great principles of the Revolution: moreover, he assumed at one time the rôle of liberator of the Jews by conferring on them civil and political rights, while in his armies positions of the highest distinction, dependent only on personal merit, awaited them. But this too ardent hero-worship did not last. "Take me not, dear reader, I pray, for an unconditional Bonapartist," he says sorrowfully on the battle-field of Marengo. "My homage does not touch the actions but the genius of the man, whether his name be Alexander or Cæsar or Napoleon. I did love him unconditionally until the Eighteenth Brumaire: then he betrayed liberty." And again, later: "It is true, it is a thousand times true, that Napoleon was an enemy of freedom, a crowned despot of selfishness:" "he could deal with men and personal interests, not with ideas; and that was his greatest fault and the reason of his fall." "At bottom he is nothing but a brilliant fact, the meaning of which is still half a secret."