Even in this world, loving-kindness is a key to most of the great doors. And though it was in England that I learned this good lesson, strange to say, all the while I worked and thought, England grew smaller to me and more provincial, while America seemed to expand with undreamed of possibilities.
But now and again some law case or some presidential or public announcement shamed me to the soul by flaunting some outworn brainless prejudice.
Little by little I turned to France as the motherland of my spirit, though there were Germans, too, and Italians and Spaniards that quickened and inspired me with enthusiasm similar to my own; cosmopolitan, I called myself from this time on, or perhaps it would suit English and American prejudice better if I invented a new French word and called myself cosmopolisson.
CHAPTER II
In connection with Heine I must begin by relating one event that happened before 1890: I was lunching one day about 1889 with the Princess of Monaco at Claridge's when for some reason or other the talk fell upon Heinrich Heine, the Princess being a grand-niece of the famous poet. I had just been reading some things of his for the hundredth time with huge delight, and curiously enough, a morning or two before in a Vienna paper, I had come across the announcement that the poet's sister was still living and in full possession of all her faculties, though she was nearing ninety.
"Instead of editing a London review," I exclaimed, "I would give anything to go to Germany, get to know Heine's sister, and then write the best life possible of the great poet."
"How could she help you?" asked the Princess.
"It is the first manifestations of a great talent," I said, "that discover the secret, and show the heart. His sister would know his first successes and his first disappointments: all his beginnings; she could recall childish memories throwing light on his growth-unimaginable things-indicating how he came so early to maturity. What he tells of his visit to England as a young man is astounding, his condemnation of English pedantry, snobbishness, and cruelty is extraordinary. 'The figure of justice in England,' he said, 'had a naked sword on her knee, but was quite blind!' "
"Why don't you write his life," asked the Princess, "if you admire him so intensely?"
"It would cost me five thousand pounds to abandon my work here and go abroad for a year," I said, "and I haven't the money to spare."
"I'll give it you," she replied.
"In that case, Madame," I said, "I'll go and do the work without a moment's delay, for Heine's sister is certain to be able to throw new light on a myriad doubtful things, and assuredly she will be able to solve for us the inexplicable tragedy of his life: how did he come to suffer for years in his mattress-grave in Paris and die at six and fifty? Was it syphilis? Or merely sexual selfindulgence?
We know he was never very strong; but his sister must have heard the truth, and fancy being in a position to tell the true truth about Heine, the greatest German poet after Goethe; the first of the moderns, as I always call him, because he was a rebel at heart and soul-free of that respect for convention that maimed even Goethe."
The next weeks I spent reading Heine, his Reisebilder, his latest poetry and all the books I could get on his life and art; but I heard nothing from the Princess Alice. At length I thought of writing to her, but I couldn't do that.
"She may have spoken in haste," I said to myself, "and I should be forcing her perhaps to give me five thousand pounds which she could ill spare." I resolved to put the whole incident out of my mind.
Some time later I read in a German paper of the death of Heine's sister: she was ninety-odd. The very next day I was again lunching with the Princess at Claridge's and I told her of the death. "No one now," I said, "will ever be able to tell the true truth about Heine's long illness and death."
"I thought you were going to do it," said the Princess.
"I told you, Madame, it would cost five thousand pounds and I couldn't afford it."
"But I said that I would give you the money willingly," was her reply; "why didn't you ask me for it?"
"I was afraid it might embarrass you," I said. "However, it is now too late!"
I should have loved to write Heine's life, infinitely rather than the life of Oscar Wilde, because he was a far greater man and had new and true things to say on the vital problems of modern Europe.
What he has written on Italy and France and Germany constitutes the best criticism in literature, and his Fragments on England are almost as penetrating. I have here a personal confession to make. I knew that Heine had only been in England for a few weeks as a young man, and so, half- English as I was, I thought I could afford to neglect what he had written about it. When I went to New York in November, 1914, I was asked to lecture at the German Club, and I selected Heine as my theme; but the committee wanted me to speak on England as well, to say what I really thought of it, so I talked on England for some time. At the end of the evening, a man came over to me and said, "You never quoted the English Fragments of Heine, and yet you repeated almost word for word things he had said about the English people."
"How extraordinary," I exclaimed, "to tell you the truth, I never read the English Fragments, but I will read them at once."
I found that I had almost used Heine's very words; that my point of view on England and English faults was all but the same as his; but, though he saw all the weaknesses of the people with astonishing clearness and put them in a high light, some of the virtues of that strange folk seemed to have escaped him: for the true Englishman has a deep love for what is fair and large and kindly; he allows himself to maltreat Ireland for hundreds of years, but when his sin is brought home to him, he will give the Irish their freedom in a kindly and generous spirit. After the Civil War in America, eight or nine states contracted debts to England, but England has never called them in nor insisted on repayment; surely there is something nobly generous in such a people. Besides, their high poetry and astounding love of physical beauty should have endeared them to Heine. But Heine's view of English limitations and surface faults is astoundingly acute. It taught me that there was a strange likeness of view between us, and of judgment. Time and again I had been struck by some half-truth pungently expressed, only to find on wider reading that he had seen the other half just as clearly. Much of the piquancy of his writing comes from this peculiarity of his. I went on to read him completely; and the more I read, the more I grew to love and admire him.
The Germans always talk of Goethe and Schiller as their greatest, just as the English foolishly talk of Shakespeare and Milton, without realizing that in Hyperion Keats has written far better blank verse than anything ever reached by Milton. And in the same way Heine is a greater poet and a greater prose writer, too, than Schiller, who, like Milton, was rather a rhetorician than a master-singer. Both nations accept the Immortal reluctantly, but console themselves with what is related to them and commonplace.
I love Heine perhaps even more than Goethe, though I recognize that he is inferior to Goethe in philosophic range and deep-thoughted wisdom; he was almost as great a lyric poet as Goethe himself, though Goethe's best lyrics are the finest in all literature-and a far better prose writer. Besides, Goethe was in love with the conventional, whereas Heine was a born rebel, the first, indeed, to voice the revolt of the modern man against all the outworn and irrational forbiddings and prohibitions of our ordinary life.
And how lovable Heine was, and how human-charming, and what a friend of man! Can one ever forget the poem he wrote when Karl Heine, heir of old Solomon Heine, his banker-uncle, who had always allowed him five or six thousand francs a year, wrote to him that he heard he was writing his life and so wished to warn him that if he wrote anything derogatory of the Heines, he would immediately cut off his allowance.