revolution, on account of those equal laws and free institutions which are very agreeable to the citizen spirit, but which yet leave much to be desired by the stomachs of the masses.
Meanwhile Alsace and Lorraine will again be attached to Germany when we accomplish that which the French have already begun; when we surpass them in action, as we have already done in thought; when we can exalt ourselves to the last consequence of such thought; when we rout out servility from its last corner of refuge- from heaven; when we free the God who dwells upon earth in humanity from Ms state of degradation; when we again restore to their dignity the people disinherited of its happiness, and genius and beauty brought to shame… Yea, not alone Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe, the whole world shall then fall to our share, the whole world shall become German! I often dream of this mission and universal dominion of Germany when I wander among the oak trees. Such is my patriotism!
Yet Heine poured deathless sarcasm on the worst faults of the German, the wooden, pedantical Prussians with their frozen conceit and on their behinds a coat of arms.
Heine saw life more deeply and fairly than any of his contemporaries:
What will be the end of this agitation to which, as ever, Paris gave the first signal? War, a most frightfully destructive war, which, alas! will call into the arena the two most noble nations of civilization-I mean Germany and France. England, the great sea serpent which can always creep back to its monstrous lair in the ocean; and Russia, which has most secure hiding places in monster pine forests, steppes, and ice-fields-these two would not be quite overthrown by the most decisive defeats; but Germany in such case is threatened with a far worse fate, and even France might have to part with its political existence.
Yet that would only be the first act of the great extravaganza — the prelude as it were. The second act is the European, the world revolution, the great duel of the destitute with the aristocracy of wealth, and in that there will be neither talk of nationality, nor of religion. There will then be only one nation, to wit, the world: and only one faith, to wit, prosperity upon earth…
And then the inevitable twinkle of the eye:
I advise our descendants to come into the world with a very thick skin to their backs.
Heine was just as wise and far-seeing about persons. The best portrait extant of Lassalle, the great socialist, is from Heine's pen, written when Lassalle was only a youth of nineteen.
My friend, Herr Lassalle, is a young man of the most distinguished intellectual gifts, of the most accurate erudition, with the widest range of knowledge, with the most decided quickness of perception which I have yet known; he combines an energy of will and an ability in conduct which excites my astonishment, and, if his sympathy for me does not deceive me, I expect from him the most effective assistance.
I can't help noticing here Heine's extraordinary prophecy of Lassalle's future.
'You will do great things in Germany,' Heine said to him, 'though I fear you will probably be shot by someone.'
Heine was always generous in encouragement and lavish in praise of contemporary writers-a rare quality with successful writers; and in the 'Romantic School' he has especially praised such young writers 'for not having divorced life from literature, and for making politics go hand in hand with science, art, and religion,' so that they were all at the same time artists, tribunes, and apostles.
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.'
