As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with "Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in 1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where ... the mob exercises its coarse dominion!" Meanwhile, as he tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think that I was better than other people."
Heine reached Paris in his thirty-first year; and never was the city better appreciated and enjoyed than by this young wanderer during the earlier time of his residence there. Everything in it pleased him: the intellectual life, the interest in ideas, not less than the gayety and charm. But he found much pleasure in the courtesy of Parisian manners. Parisian manners were then, as even now, distinguishable from Prussian by the careful observer. "Sweet pineapple odors of politeness!" he says, "how beneficially didst thou console my sick spirit, which had swallowed down in Germany so much tobacco vapor!... Like the melodies of Rossini did the pretty phrases of apology of a Frenchman sound in my ear, who had gently pushed me in the street on the day of my arrival. I was almost frightened at such sweet politeness—I who had been accustomed to boorish German knocks in the ribs without any apology at all." If any one jostled Heine roughly in the street, and made no apology, he would say, "I knew that that man was one of my countrymen."[6 ]
But Paris is somewhat more than a city of pleasure; it is a city of opportunity. To many Americans it is a stumbling-block, to many Englishmen foolishness; but Heine was one of the true children of Paris, though wandering at first far from the centre, and he found fitting work there. They were busy as well as joyous years, those that he first spent in that bright capital. O Paris, city of opportunity, how many other of thy children are still wandering far from the centre! Some of them live upon the sierras of Patagonia, some in the stonier streets of Askelon, some inhabit caves in the deserts of Maceria. Living an anchorite's life in German villages, in Pacific colonies, on Cape Cod or Kerguelen's Land, the delicate French spirit wastes itself away. And yet some of these exiles have found their way to that centre of blithe intellectual activity.
Heine was such a one; he spent in Paris the most productive and happy period of his life, the bright interval between his cloudy morning and the shadows that were to gather around him before their time; and how he glowed in the warmth and light of the capital! And while he carried his pleasures to excess, yet he did not go pleasuring like the vulgar. In a valid sense his very extravagances had an intelligible principle in them; one might say that he dissipated himself upon ethical grounds. Yet his were the reasons of a poetic, not of an analytic thinker. The popular religion, he said, has dishonored the flesh; let us restore it to honor. To restore joyousness to modern life, something of the antique innocence to pleasure, to make it reputable as well as delightful, to readjust the conscience of a community which looked upon pleasure as essentially wrong, and yet pursued it, so thinking, at the expense of its conscience, to relieve pleasure somewhat from the ban, to augment, in a word, the permitted happiness of life—that was Heine's aim; that was what he understood by his favorite doctrine of restoring the flesh to honor—la réhabilitation de la chair.
Do you call that an easy creed, a comfortable practice? I will not deny it, but do not let us lose the distinction, the trait by which Heine's doctrine was discriminated from that of some other easy-going apostles. Heine was intellectually sincere; he had a genuine purpose; he did not go to Paris, for instance, as some of our missionaries have gone of late years to Florence and Madrid, with commissions to labor among the "nominal Christians," as they call the Catholic residents of those comfortable capitals, to convert them to the true Christianity of American Protestantism. No; Heine had too much directness, too much intellectual verity for a situation of that sort: his mistakes were honest mistakes, and he paid an honest penalty for them.
And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be much bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching. But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all, and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent toward accurate knowledge, toward dispassionate observation and thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon the homestead of every poet, the fons Baudusiæ splendidior vitro. In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as the greatest poets have done—in meditation, in discipline, in dispassionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact being in any state of society yet established inexorably the reverse—namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had on demand.
But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the asking, and the propaganda already existed. "There was a little society of devotees, if I may call them so—Michel Chevalier, Olinde, Enfantin, and others—who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with assiduity to the pleasing cultus—with all the more assiduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that he had been content with a less many-sided experience of pleasure! For he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says: L'hameçon est évident, et néanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra toujours. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments, rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this man's life—of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul; and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of coarse experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with the cup that he pours out.
And his life was spent as wine is poured upon the ground. Heine ended where the ascetics began, in pain, privation, mortification of the flesh; and it was a mortification that had not even the consolation of being the sufferer's own choice, for it was involuntary. Better for him would it have been had he gone out to dwell in the wilderness, as St. Jerome left the Paris of his day, and retired into the desert of Chalcis. For a strange penalty was to be his—one of which the joyous apostle of pleasure could hardly have dreamed before the blow fell. A paralytic touch converted the man of pleasure into a man of pain, his bed a living tomb. No more for ever, for Heine, was there to be any reinstatement of the flesh.
This dark closing period of Heine's life has a fascination about it; it holds the attention like the background of a Rembrandt etching, with its dimly-seen forms that appear to stir in the gloom, ghostly, half-alive; such a contrast there is between his gloomy close and the bright projection of his earlier career. Shall we call his life a failure as regards himself, his personal success and happiness? Upon that point we may not pronounce too confidently. He would have chosen it had the choice been offered him with full knowledge of the alternatives; he would have preferred it to any commonplace existence. There will always be those who hold that such careers as Byron's or Heine's, such fitful careers, with their fierce tempests, their ecstatic sunshine, their "awful brevity," are preferable to any serener life, however long; and least of all may we pity Heine. With what scorn would he look down upon our pity!
Heine's life has a peculiar value for the student of modern life, in that it has what we may call an exemplary interest. For Heine made that costly sacrificial experiment of which the old examples never suffice us; the experiment which each new generation requires anew, in which nature in her wasteful way insists on consuming the finest geniuses. As Byron had attempted just before him, so Heine attempted to think and to live without reserves, to compass the round of sentiment and sensation, to touch the entire range of experience. Like Byron, he could not pass through the fire; he fell, the flame licked him up. And yet, far more truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not, indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant. They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a man."