Yea, I repeat the word "apostles," for I know no more distinguishing word. A new faith inspires them with a passion of which the writers of a previous period had no idea. This faith is faith in progress, a faith which springs from knowledge. We have measured the earth, weighed the powers of nature, calculated the resources of industry, and discovered that this earth is large enough for everyone to build therein the hut of his happiness.
It is his deeply moral and true view of life which places Heine forever with the highest, but it is his humor which puts the crown, so to speak, on that gracious smiling face: think of a few phrases taken from his school days:
You have no idea how complicated Latin is! The Romans would certainly never have had sufficient spare time for the conquest of the world if they had had first to learn Latin… And geography-I learnt so little of it that later I lost my way in the world (Shakespeare's phrase)…
I got on better in natural history. Some of the pictures of apes, asses, kangaroos, etc., remained fixed in my memory; and it happened subsequently very often that a good many people appeared to me at first sight like old acquaintances…
And then later flashes.
When Boerne, the democrat, observed that if a king had shaken him by the hand he would cut it off, Heine replied, "And I, when his majesty the mob takes my hand-shall wash it."
Speaking of Madame de Stael, Heine wrote:
"O Woman! we must forgive thee much, for thou lovest much-and many."
With one great magnate of the practical world in Paris, the Baron James de Rothschild, Heine was on terms of considerable intimacy; he was welcomed in the Rothschild family circle soon after his arrival in Paris, by means of a letter of introduction from his rich Frankfort uncle. The Baron's liking for Heine's society must have been founded on the latter's social qualities, for his intelligence extended only to financial matters, and his acquaintance with art and poetry was of the smallest. Rothschild treated him, he said, famillionairement; and one story illustrates their relations.
"You know everything, Heine," said Rothschild one day at dinner; "why is this wine called Lacryma Christi!"
"It is called Lacryma Christi," said Heine, "because Christ weeps when rich Jews drink it, while so many poor men are dying of hunger and thirst."
Heine was small in stature and even in youth anything but strong, though Gautier says that at thirty-five in Paris he appeared to be perfectly healthy and had color in his cheeks. Of his first days in Paris, Heine wrote in a continuous state of rapture. "One may regard Paris," he said, "as the capital of the world; a new form of art, a new religion, a new life coming into being here … mighty days are dawning and unknown gods reveal themselves; and at the same time there is everywhere laughing and dancing; everywhere the most cheerful tone of banter prevails and the lightest of jesting…"
He wrote a friend: "If any one asks how I find myself here, say 'Like a fish in water,' or, rather, say that when a fish in the sea asks another how he is, the reply is, 'Like Heine in Paris.' "
But the years of his joy and pleasure were few: from '48 till his death in '56, he suffered the long martyrdom of creeping paralysis. Whatever his shortcomings and his sins, Heine paid for them all in those dreadful years of his agony in Paris. Here is a description of him two years before the end by a lady:
He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet which covered him, the eyes closed, and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted Ecce Homo ever painted by some old German painter… When I kissed him, his beard felt like swan's down or a baby's hair, so weak had it grown, and his face seemed to have gained a certain beauty from pain and suffering… I never saw a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He complained of his sufferings and was pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once set to work to make me laugh heartily, which pleased him just as much. He neither paraded his anguish nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He was also far less sarcastic, more hearty, more indulgent, and altogether pleasanter than ever.
All Heine's work appeals to me intensely. He never perhaps reached the highest height of art and created ever-living figures such as Falstaff and Don Quixote: he used mainly his lyrical gift; yet his extraordinary endowment as "the best of all the humorists" gives him rank with the greatest, and he has lent more lightness and grace to German prose than any one else.
Let no one think I am intent on putting Heine higher than he was. In my mind he always comes immediately after Goethe, completing him. Our modern belief, I repeat, has come from Heine, at least was first stated by him; in this respect it is characteristic that he was born with the French Revolution.
Heine understood Christianity on its pathetic side, and if all his sayings and poems on the subject were put together, they would form as illuminating a commentary as Kenan's Life of Jesus. A great passage comes to mind in which he speaks of socialism as the religion of the modern world, and "it, too, has its Judases and its Calvarys."
I love to remember that Heine held Jesus in the highest reverence. "Eternal fame," he says, "is due to that symbol of a suffering God, of the Holy One with his crown of thorns, the crucified Christ whose blood like a soothing balsam has healed the wounds of humanity."
Heine was far more of a pagan than a Christian: he disliked all stupid conventions so heartily that he leaned perhaps too far away from them; he didn't realize that the chiefest reforming force of our time is just the new commandment which Jesus was the first to formulate. But this is really hyper-criticism, for the synthesis of perfect paganism and pure Christianity is not yet even adumbrated, and it is nearly a century since Heine went silent.
Yet he speaks of Stratford-on-Avon as the "northern Bethlehem," which shows, I think, profound understanding of Shakespeare-the understanding of kinship and kingship.
He was indeed, as he said himself, a "brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity," but he was much more than that: I regard him as the best leader we moderns could have had; as a rebel he won to perfect sanity and was able to destroy with his happy humor all the bug-bears, superstitions, conventions, and pruderies that maim and deform our life. If I could only translate him adequately I would make my readers love him as I do. Think of the poem he calls Enfant Perdu (A Lost Child); the stanzas bring tears to my eyes:
Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege, Hielt ich seit dreissig Jahren treulich aus.
Ich kampf te ohne Hoffnung, dass ich siege, Ich wusste, nie komm' ich gesund nach Haus.
In jenen Nachten hat Langweil' ergriffen Mich oft, auch Furcht-(nur Narren furchten nichts)- Sie zu verscheuchen hab' ich dann gepfiffen Die frechen Reime eines Spottgedichts.
Ein Posten ist vakant!-
Die Wunden klaffen-
Der eine fallt, die andern rucken nach-
Doch fall' ich unbesiegt, und meine
Waffen Sind nicht gebrochen-
Nur mein Herze brach.
Such was the courage of the man who died "broken hearted!" And this his creed, which has always been mine. Like Heine, who boasts that all his life he had been a Knight of the Holy Spirit of Truth, I, too, have always loved Truth more than her sisters, Beauty and Goodness; her figure is slighter and less voluptuous; her face, too, less flower-like and round; but the eyes are magnificent, and she is of passion all compact; her kiss-a consecration of sincerity. With her is neither doubt nor fear, and the entire confidence her worship inspires is worth more to her lover than any gift her sisters can bring.