But my pen refuses to go on. I cannot reconcile it to my principles as an author nor to my conscience as an honest student of genuine myths, to repeat here a story, which is altogether apocryphal, and which belongs much less to tradition than to mystification.
Now, this old man was Jupiter, and as I think it over, I come to the conclusion that Mr. Heine, who laughs at the most serious things, has skillfully concealed his irony under the cloak of an interesting story, for the mere purpose of telling us that the Chief of the Gods, dread Jupiter, has become—a dealer in rabbit skins!
I cannot follow his example.
Without wandering from my subject, for I am still speaking of false gods, I will substitute for this necessarily much curtailed account, another story which I can warrant as authentic.
“In Persia,” we are told by Count Gobineau, in a recently published book of great merit, “the Soufys, that is to say the savants and philosophers, reject all dogmatic religion and believe in the reunion of the soul with God in trances only. When this union is complete, the soul is transformed and becomes itself a participant in the nature of the uncreated essence, and Man is God.” Human folly is always a disease produced by human pride.
France, also, has produced a few gods of that kind; I do not mean to mention them, however, as belonging to the myths of the Rhine, which have special reference to Germany only. But among the Germans, also, there is a school of philosophers who without going as far as the Persians go, are utterly incredulous, and disregarding trances and immortal souls alike, have finally denied the existence of God altogether and made themselves gods. This shows how anxious savants as well as ignorant men are, in that beautiful country, to people the earth with deities of every kind!
It is the history of one of these earth-born gods which I propose to give here, before I close this long chapter. Alas! he is dead now, and that is a great pity; but he did live once; on that essential point there is no lack of evidence. I could even, like the Thuringian peasants when speaking of Frederick Barbarossa, say: “I have seen him!”
In the year 1800 there was born in Düsseldorf, in Prussia, a child in a Jewish family recently converted to Christianity. This child might well have been looked upon as of supernatural origin, so entirely different was it, from its earliest days, from all that had ever been seen before. Martin Luther no doubt, if the child had been one of his own, would have pronounced him to be a Killecroff.
He was not only noisy and troublesome, but he was also a pedant; he snubbed professors and listened to the advice of very young children. When his parents scolded him, he only laughed at them; when a grave event disturbed a neighbor’s household, he laughed; when the French took his native city, he laughed; in fine he was always laughing.
However, as he grew up, he gorged himself with logic, with mathematics, with Greek and Latin and Hebrew and all kinds of good things besides. He became even a philosopher before he was of age, but his philosophy consisted mainly in a sarcastic laugh. When they spoke to him of the position he might occupy in Düsseldorf, and of the wealth he might acquire, his only answer was a grimace.