A Study of Three Modern Men of Letters
By Edward Chauncey Baldwin
EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN (born in Cornwall, Conn., 1870), Assistant Professor of English in the University of Illinois, has taken a special and scholarly interest in the contributions of the Jews to civilization, on which subject he has written a notable book entitled "Our Modern Debt to Israel," besides articles in various periodicals. He is an honorary member of the Illinois Menorah Society, evincing a warm sympathy with the Menorah aims and actively coöperating in the Menorah work.
A STUDY of great Jewish names in modern literature has impressed me with the fact that every Jewish man of letters has attained his fame by virtue of qualities that are essentially Jewish. In other words, we cannot fully understand the work of even modern Jewish literary men unless we know the fundamental qualities of Jewish genius. To illustrate what is meant by this assertion, we may consider briefly the work of three nineteenth century Jewish authors—Heine, Beaconsfield, and Zangwill. These men are apparently wholly different; and yet they attained literary eminence through qualities or mind and heart which we have learned to associate with the race from which they sprang.
Heinrich Heine: A Jew at Heart
HEINRICH Heine is the one writer of the first rank that Germany can boast between the death of Goethe in 1832 and the advent of the younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann, Hauptmann, and the rest, sixty years later. To free himself from such a limitation as his Jewish birth seemed to him to be, and with the more specific object, it is said, of securing a government position in Prussia, Heine allowed himself to become a convert to Christianity. "Judaism," he said, "is not a religion; it is a misfortune." His conversion, however, failed to profit him. He lost the fellowship of his own people, and was contemptuously called "the Jew" by his enemies. In a sense, the designation was entirely just. A Jew at heart Heine remained to the day of his death. On his death bed, speaking of the Jews he said: "Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years, weeping always, suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet clinging to him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom, patience, and faith in spite of trial can confer a patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond any other. It would have been absurd and petty if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of being a Jew."
Not only was Heine a Jew in his instinctive racial sympathies, but his work bears the indelible impress of Judaism. It is a distinctively Jewish product. In it appear the buoyancy of spirit which sustained him under suffering that would have crushed a less resilient temper; the intellectual arrogance; the proneness to censure rather than to commend; and especially the excessive self-consciousness;—all these distinctively Jewish traits were in him exaggerated and helped to make his work what it was. It is his self-consciousness, in particular, that made his Buch der Lieder his best production. In that remarkable collection of lyrics Heine appears at his best, because the ability to compose songs that are the spontaneous utterance of emotion, at one and the same time personal and representative, is a Hebrew heritage. The Hebrew genius was essentially lyric, rather than epic or dramatic; and in consequence, the lyrics of ancient Hebrew literature are its chief glory. In proof of this, we have but to recall the dirges and triumph songs, the reflective lyrics, and the liturgical hymns that compose the collection we know as the Psalms. The excellence of both the old Hebrew lyrics and of Heine's Lieder is to be found in the extraordinary subjectivity of the Hebrew temper—the racial fondness for impassioned, yet artistic, self-expression.
Yet Heine's Jewish traits are evident not only in the subjectivity of his lyrics, but in the new and richer character that he gave to the German Lied. This, hitherto vague and dreamy, became in his hands startlingly concrete and definite. And this is true even when he expresses the most subtle feelings. Always the most evanescent Stimmung, not less than moods more primitively simple, find expression in metaphors so sensuously material as to recall Solomon's Song. Compare a typical lyric of Heine, such as the following:
| Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne |
| Die liebt' ich alle in Liebeswonne, |
| Ich lieb' sie nicht mehr, ich liebe allein |
| Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine; |
| Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne, |
| Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne |