Chapter II: Part 2

He seems to have been singularly destitute of the financial genius of his race, and the business career proved from the outset a fiasco. The real key, however, to the three years spent in Hamburg is supplied not by Money, but by Love. Having served his apprenticeship in Düsseldorf with his calf-attachment to the executioner's daughter, Heine proceeded straightway to a _grande passion_ for his uncle's pretty daughter Amalie. His love was not reciprocated, and in 1821 the beauteous Amalie married a wealthy landowner of Königsberg. This Amalie incident was one of the most important in Heine's life, and is largely responsible for his early cynicism. He was disillusioned with a vengeance, and could now with his own eyes inspect the flimsy material of which "Love's Young Dream" is wove. Though, however, a great personal blow, this abortive passion is also to be regarded as an invaluable æsthetic asset. The poet of necessity is bound to write of his own personal impressions and experiences; and it is obvious that the intenser are these experiences, the more vital will be his poetry. If Heine's love for Amalie was the accursed flame that seared his soul, it was also the sacred fire that kindled his inspiration, and it is to Amalie that we owe not only a great part of the _Book of Songs_, but also much which is characteristic of Heine's subsequent life-outlook.

In 1819, probably because Heine had given convincing proofs of his business inefficiency, it was decided that he should go to Bonn to study law. He neglected his studies, and it was not long before he fell foul of the authorities, owing to his anticipation in the proceedings of the Burschenschaften or student political unions.

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. At Göttingen his career was brief but thrilling, and he was rusticated after a few months on account of a proposed duel with an impertinent _junker_.

Transferring his quarters to Berlin, he now spent by far the most enjoyable period of his university career. The intellectual atmosphere of Berlin was quicker and less pedantic than that of Göttingen, and he plunged into his studies with considerable energy.

In 1821 Heine published the first volume of his poems, containing the _Dream Pictures_, some miscellaneous juvenile poems, and the _Lyrisches Intermezzo,_ which was inspired by the banker's, in the same way that the _Dream Pictures_ had been inspired by the executioner's, daughter.

The book was an immediate success, how great may be gauged by the numerous parodies and imitations which it almost instantaneously evoked. It was at this period that he wrote the two romantic tragedies of _Ratcliff_ and _Almansor_. Both failures and devoid of much merit, they served none the less useful purpose of advertising his fame.

In 1823 we see an echo of his passion for Amalie in his love for his younger cousin Therese, who seems in many respects to have been a replica of her elder sister. Therese, however, refused to be anything more than a cousin to him, and his heart was still further embittered as is shown by the poem:

"Wer zum erstenmale liebt
Sei's auch glücklos ist ein Gott
Aber wer zum zweitenmale
Glücklos liebt, er ist ein Narr
Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen
Und ich lache mit und sterbe."

In 1824 he decided to prosecute his studies for his doctorial degree with greater seriousness, and leaving behind him the distractions of the capital, went back once more to the more staid and prosaic Göttingen.

Heine intended not merely to take a degree for the sake of ornament, but also to practise seriously as a lawyer. How serious were these intentions may be seen from the fact that he went to the length of paying in advance the heavy entrance fee which the legal profession then exacted from Jews, and became baptized "as a Protestant and a Lutheran to boot" on June 28, 1825.

Heine's conversion has frequently been criticised with superfluous harshness. Let him, however, explain his position for himself:

"At that time I myself was still a god, and none of the
positive religions had more value for me than another; I
could only wear their uniforms as a matter of courtesy,
on the same principle that the Emperor of Russia dresses
himself up as an officer of the Prussian Guard when he
honours his imperial cousin with a visit to Potsdam."

After all, his apostasy brought with it its own punishment, not only in its deep-felt shame, but in the fact that he eventually threw up law for literature, and thus rendered so great a sacrifice of racial loyalty and his own self-respect consummately futile. After selling his birthright he found that he had absolutely no use for the mess of pottage which he had purchased.

In the summer of 1825, Heine, having just succeeded in passing his degree, proceeded to the little island of Norderney, off the coast of Holland, to recuperate. Living ardently the simple life and indulging to the full his passion for the sea, he now wrote not only the second part of the _Reisebilder,_ entitled _Norderney_, but the far greater _Nordsee Cyklus,_ which in its irregular swinging metre expresses with such marvellous efficiency the whole roar and grandeur of the ocean. Speaking generally, of course, Heine was too subjective to be a real nature poet. No writer, it is true, fills up so freely and with so fantastic an elegance the blank cheques of nightingales and violets, lilies and roses, stars and moonshine, yet none the less these rather served to grace his measure than as his real flame. His one genuine love was the sea. With the sea he felt a deep psychological affinity. The sea was the symbol of his own infinite restlessness, of his own divine discontent, and mirrored in the sea's ever-changing waters he beheld the incessant smiles and storms of his own soul.

"I love the sea, even as my own soul," he writes. "Often
do I fancy that the sea is in truth my very soul; and
as in the sea there are hidden water-plants that only
swim up to the surface at the moment of their bloom and
sink down again at the moment of their decay, even so
do wondrous flower-pictures swim up out of the depths
of my soul, spread their light and fragrance, and again
vanish."

In 1826 Heine published the _Heimkehr_, the _Nordsee Cyklus_, the airy and sparkling _Harzreise_, and the first part of the _Reisebilder_.

From Norderney Heine moved to Hamburg, avowedly to practise, though it does not appear that he took his profession with much seriousness. At any rate, until 1831, when he migrated to Paris, his career is excessively erratic. At one moment he is paying a flying visit to England, "the land of roast beef and Yorkshire plum-pudding, where the machines behave like men and the men like machines"; at another he is on the staff of the _Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_ and the _Morgenblatt_ of Munich; he is now in Hamburg, now in Frankfurt, and now in Italy, where his sojourn inspired the racy and brilliant _Italy_ and _Baths of Lucca_, both of which works obtained the gratuitous and well-merited state advertisement of prohibition, and achieved a most undeniable _succès de scandale_.

The departure to Paris marks an entirely new epoch in Heine's life, and offers a convenient stopping-place at which to give some account of his early poetry and prose, as exemplified in the _Book of Songs_, which was published in 1827, and the _Reisebilder_, the last part of which, the _Baths of Lucca_, was published in 1831.

Though neither the _Book of Songs_ nor the _Reisebilder_ is as great or as characteristic as the _Romanzero_ and _Poetische Nachlese_ on the one hand, or the _Salon_ on the other, they are yet by far the most popular of his works and contain some of his most delightful writing. One of the first traits that strikes us in the _Book of Songs_ is the Romantic tendency to bizarre and exotic themes. In the _Junge Leiden_ and _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ in particular we move in a ghostly atmosphere of apparitions, sea-maidens, skeletons, and midnight churchyards. Another interesting characteristic of these poems is his deep love of the East, a love which is to be probably ascribed more to the general eastward gravitation of the Romantic school than to the poet's Oriental blood. This tendency is responsible for two of the most charming poems in the book, the exquisite lyric starting:

"Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
Herzliebchen trag ich dich fort
Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges
Dort weiss ich den schönsten Ort."

"Dort liegt ein rotblühender Garten
Im stillen Mondenschein;
Die Lotosblumen erwarten
Ihr trautes Schwesterlein."

And--

"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kabler Höh',
Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die fern im Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand."

This latter poem in particular illustrates admirably the vague melting, infinite yearning which Heine at first experienced as deeply as did any of the Romanticists. There are not wanting, however, and especially towards the end of the book, examples of his later manner, of that note of rebellion which he was afterwards to strike with such inimitable precision. Occasionally his wistful pessimism suddenly changes into cynicism, and in reaction from his morbid sensitiveness he derives a sardonic satisfaction from probing his own wounds as in the already quoted "Wer zum erstenmale liebt," while in the mock-heroic _Donna Clara_ and in the _Frieden_ we see that artistic use of the anti-climax of which he was afterwards to acquire an even greater mastery. Even in the comparatively early _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ we see him constantly playing on that contrast between the Real and the Ideal, between Dream Life and Waking Life, which formed so integral a part of his subsequent life-outlook. Speaking generally, however, the _Book of Songs_ exhibits the sentimental rather than the cynical side of Heine's mind. It possesses moreover those qualities which remained in Heine throughout his life, the light, airy touch, the intimate personal note, the delicate lyric sweetness, and that concision which is found in poetry with such extreme rarity.

Let us turn now to the _Reisebilder_. Its most dominant characteristics are its inimitable swing and the absolute irresponsibility of its transitions. The grave, the gay; the lively, the severe; the sublime, the ridiculous; the reverent, the frivolous; the refined, the crude; the poetic, the obscene, all jostle pell-mell against each other in this most fascinating of literary kaleidoscopes. It is no mere guide-book, this record of his wanderings in the Harz, in Norderney, in England, and in Italy, but rather a description of those reflections on men and things which were suggested by his various adventures. In style the _Reisebilder_ marks a new epoch in German prose, or, as has been said, showed for the first time since Lessing and Goethe that such a thing as German prose really did exist. Heine was the first to show convincingly that a Gallic grace and flexibility could be imparted into the cumbrous and heavy-footed Teutonic language.

Psychologically the most interesting part of the _Reisebilder_ is the fervent Napoleonic worship which, combined with his love of liberty and revolt against reaction, largely contributed to mould his life. The general tone, moreover, of political, sexual, and religious freedom that characterises the latter part of the _Reisebilder_ rendered Heine not a little obnoxious to official Germany, not only because of the intrinsic heresy of the sentiments themselves, but of the joyous rollicking insolence with which they were paraded.

It is small wonder, then, that the Paris July Revolution of 1830 made the poet feel "as if he could set the whole ocean up to the very North Pole on fire with the red-heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that worked in him," and that in the spring of 1831 he migrated finally and definitely from Germany to Paris.

This migration to Paris marks the turning-point in Heine's life. His career in Germany had throughout been erratic, unsatisfactory, and hampered by political restrictions. In Paris he settled down, felt that now at last he was in a congenial element, and--found himself. It was at Paris that he wrote his most brilliant prose and found inspiration for his highest poetry, that he experienced his wildest joys and his intensest sufferings. The first ten years of his sojourn were probably the happiest in his life. His increased literary and journalistic earnings helped to solve the financial problem, while socially he was, as always, a pronounced success. He soon found his way into the centre of the artistic set of the capital, and was on a footing of intimacy with such writers as Lafayette, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Borne, Schlegel, and Humboldt. In social life Heine's most characteristic feature was wit--a wit so irrepressible as to burst forth impartially on practically all occasions, and to resemble that of the Romans of the early Empire, who preferred to lose their heads rather than their epigrams. Yet in private life he was a devoted son and brother, an ideal husband. The correspondence which he maintained up to his death with his sister Lotte and his mother show conclusively what stores of German _Gemut_ he treasured in his heart. Particularly significant is the fact that during the whole eight years in which he languished in his mattress-grave he assiduously concealed from his mother the real state of his health. Yet none the less "he could hate deeply and grimly with an energy which I have never yet met in any other man, but only because he could love with equal intensity," writes the poet's friend, Meissner. Heine disapproved on principle of swallowing an injury; when he was hit, he hit back. Not infrequently, as in his rather scandalous attack on Börne, he would _riposte_ with somewhat superfluous efficiency, though according to his own theories it must have been after all only a mistake on the safe side.

"Yes," writes Heine, "one must forgive one's enemies, but not until they have been hanged."

Heine's quarrel with Börne originally arose out of the abomination with which Börne, who was Radical to the point of fanaticism, regarded the somewhat poetic and elastic Liberalism of his fellow-Jew, and it is instructive to enter into an examination of the depth and strength of those views which supplied the real motive power which drove him from Germany to France. There can be no doubt that Heine himself took his Liberalism with perfect seriousness. "In truth I know not," he writes, "if I merit that my coffin should be decorated with a laurel wreath. However much I loved Poesy, she was ever to me only a holy toy or a consecrated means for heavenly ends. It is rather a sword that they should lay on my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity." It should be observed, however, that this Liberal had the most aristocratic contempt for the uncultured _δημος_, as is shown by passages such as the following: "The horny hands of the Socialists who will unpityingly break all the marble statues which are so dear to my heart"; and, "If Democracy really triumphs, it is all up with poetry."

Yet there can be no gainsaying that Heine's political orthodoxy was perfectly unimpeachable on that anti-clericalism which has always been one of the most cardinal points of Continental Liberalism.

He is rarely tired of tilting at Catholicism, and while he regarded ascetic mediæval Catholicism as the vampire which sucked the blood and light out of the hearts of men, he dubbed the modern Catholic reactionaries in Germany "the Party of lies, the ruffians of Despotism, the restorers of all the folly and abomination of the Past."

Yet, if his beliefs were too wide to admit of the narrowness of a consistent partisanship, his enthusiasm was deep and sincere for the joy, light, and liberty of a new era that was to sweep away all the unhealthy and plaguy humours of that blind, delirious, and anæmic mediævaldom, which, to use his own phrase, has spread over the countries like an infectious disease, till Europe was but one huge hospital. Politically, in fine, Heine is a brilliant freelance, who, too proud to wear the uniform of party, none the less fought valiantly for the army of Progress and Humanity, a forlorn outpost in the War of Freedom.[1]

Heine's polemical modernity manifested itself most efficiently in the _Deutschland_, which, together with its sequel, _The Romantic School_, was issued as a counter-blast to Madame de Staël's work of the same name. This history of the religion, literature, and philosophy of Germany is the masterpiece of Heine's extant prose. An academic philosophic treatise, of course, it neither is nor professes to be. As a description half-serious, half-flippant, however, of the main currents of modern and mediæval Germany by a writer who sees life from the bird's-eye view of the combined poet, journalist, thinker, and man of the world, it is unrivalled. It contains some of Heine's loftiest and most sublime flights, some of his most brilliant and trenchant epigrams.

Particularly happy is the comparison drawn between the furious onslaughts made by the French Revolutionists under Robespierre and the German philosophers under Kant on respectively the divine rights of kings and the divine rights of God.

How delicious is the conclusion of the parallel between the two men: "Each eminently represents the ideal middle-class type--Nature had decreed that they should weigh out coffee and sugar, but Fate willed that they should weigh out other things, and in the scales of the one did she lay a King and in the scales of the other a God....

"And they both gave exact weight."

As, however, has been previously pointed out, Heine's chief characteristic as a prose writer is that marvellous elasticity which can rebound from the frivolous to the sublime with the most consummate ease and celerity. Interspersed with the bright flash-light of the epigrammatic pyrotechnics lie really great passages, and pieces in particular like those on Luther and Goethe possess the clear golden ring of the grand style.

Heine's political ideals were subjected to the inevitable disillusionment. The Revolution of July, which he had fondly hoped would complete the work of the great movement of 1793, merely resulted in the anti-climax of the establishment of a bourgeois constitution under a bourgeois monarch. He tended to become generally embittered. Money matters, too, began to irritate him, and his health to give him trouble, and though he found a devoted sick-nurse in Matilde Crescenzia Mirat, a grisette whom he married in 1841, the lady with whom "he quarrelled daily for six years in that life-long duel at the termination of which only one of the combatants would be left alive," yet none the less his condition began to deteriorate. "The damp cold days and black long nights of his exile" oppressed him, and he began to yearn for the old German soil. He gratified his _Heimweh_ by a flying and surreptitious visit to Germany that inspired the well-known _Germany_ or a _Winter Tale_, which, together with the somewhat similar _Atta Troll_, constitutes his most sustained poetic achievement. These two poems are about as characteristic as anything which he wrote. They represent admirably his wild classic Dionysiac fantasy, his sudden dips from the most extravagant Romanticism to the harsh, crude facts of reality, the marvellous swing and sweep of his Aristophanic humour.

Very typical is the following satire on the intimate relation between anthropo- and arctomorphism.

"Up above in star-pavilion,
On his golden throne of lordship,
Ruling worlds with sway majestic,
Sits a Polar bear colossal."

"Stainless, snow-white shines the glamour
Of his skin, his head is wreathed
With a diadem of diamonds,
Flashing light through all the heavens."

"Harmony rests in his visage,
And the silent deeds of thought,
Just a whit he bends his sceptre,
And the spheres they ring and sing."

The above quotation shows excellently the essentially poetic quality by which Heine's wit is illumined. A satirist as keen and vivid as Voltaire, he possesses all the logical aptness of the Frenchman without his dryness. His chief characteristic, in fact, is the method by which in his imaginative flights he combines the maximum of this logical aptness with the maximum of humorous incongruity. No humorist dives for his metaphors into stranger water or brings up from the deep more bizarre and fantastic gems. A charming example of Heinean humour is the following passage from one of his prefaces: "A pious Quaker once sacrificed his whole fortune in buying up the most beautiful of the mythological pictures of Giulio Romano in order to consign them to the flames--verily he merits thereby to go to heaven and be whipped with birches regularly every day."

One of the most cardinal traits of Heine's wit and humour is a phenomenal freedom of tone and language, a freedom that is occasionally not always in the most unimpeachable taste. Heine, in fact, is a writer who admits the public gratis to his psychological toilette, where he exposes with studied recklessness his most private thoughts. This question cuts too deep into Heine's life-outlook to be lightly passed over, and necessitates some examination. In the first place even Heine's most enthusiastic admirer will admit that a great deal of this licence is sheer gaminerie; Heine is the mischievous schoolboy of literature who thoroughly revels in being naughty, grimacing by an almost mechanical instinct, so soon as he catches a glimpse of the sacred figures of religion and sex. Like Baudelaire, he loves, almost indeed as a matter of conscientious principle, to make the hairs of the philistines stand on end. His one excuse, however, is that even when he causes the hairs of the philistines almost to spring from their roots, as indeed he does not infrequently, he conducts the operation with so light a touch, so exquisite a grace, that the offence is almost redeemed. Let him speak in his own defence, in the lines from the great Jewish poem, "Jehudah Halevy":

"As in Life so too in poetry
Grace is aye Man's highest Good;
Who has grace, he never sinneth
Not in verse nor e'en in prose."

"And by God's grace such a poet
Genius we do entitle,
King supreme and uncontrolled
In the great desmesne of thought."

Not unnaturally his coarseness grew apace with the virulence of his disease, and he himself explains his cause to his friend "La Mouche": "Vois-tu c'est la faute de la mort qui arrive à grands pas, et quand je la sens ainsi tout près de moi comme à present j'ai besoin de me cramponner la vie ne fût ce par une poutre pourrie." This final phase in fact was simply a reaction against his fate, and is not altogether without analogy to that same psychological principle which dictated much of the crude buffoonery of Swift and Carlyle by way of an heroic protest against their own helplessness.

Far more important, however, is the fact that this particular trait of Heine is profoundly symbolic of his outlook on life, especially where an obscene jest marks the climax of a genuinely poetical flight. Circumstance turned him into a cynic, who saw frequently in Liberty but the uprising of a squalid proletariate, who heard in the "sweet lies of the nightingale, the flatterer of spring," merely the "harbingers of the decay of its queenliness," and who beheld in love but a mere illusion of the senses that vanishes so soon as the beloved one utters a syllable. Held fast in the grip of the great World-paradox, Heine is forced to look at life as a glaring phantasmagoria of blacks and whites, in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the grotesque, the refined and the crude, dance along hand in hand till they become so confused that it is impossible for the observer to distinguish the individual partners, and he is reduced to describing, in pairs, the giddy, whirling couples that make up the fantastic medley.

This incessant antithesis makes Heine one of the most complete of modern writers.

The poet's world is composed of two hemispheres: one is the abode of the beautiful, the grand, the tragic; the other of the ugly, the petty, the comic. Most poets confine their efforts to only a small portion of one of these hemispheres. Heine, however, is the Atlas of poetry, who supports both of the half-spheres of the world, and who, by way of proving how easily his burden sits upon him, suddenly turns juggler, and after showing his audience one side of the magic globe, will, _hey presto_! whisk the whole world round, and before they know where they are smilingly confront them with the other.

In 1848 the spinal affection from which he suffered became so acute that Heine was compelled to take to that mattress-grave where, paralytic and half-blind and racked intermittently by the most agonising spasms, he dragged out the eight most ghastly years of his life. At first the death-chamber was one of the favourite rendezvous of fashionable Paris, but as the novelty wore off, his circle of friends grew narrower and narrower, until eventually a visit from Berlioz seemed only the crowning proof of the musician's inveterate eccentricity.

Heine, however, rose manfully to the occasion, and did all that he could under the circumstances. Always a passionate lover of the paradoxical, he now began to appreciate with an intense and unprecedented relish the infinite humour of the great Life-farce, one of the most effective scenes of which was even now being enacted in the person of the poet of _joie de vivre_, who, enduring all the agonies of the damned, lay dying in La Rue d'Amsterdam to the quick music of the piano on the story underneath, while only a few feet away shone all the glow and glitter of Parisian life.

The chief occupation and solace of the dying man was the writing of his Memoirs, the great _Apologia pro vitâ suâ_ which was to square his accounts with the world, and win for him the future as his own.

Yet at times the greatness of his sufferings would soften his heart. He would find in the Bible the magic book which had power to dispel his earthly torments; the "_Heimweh_ for heaven" would fall upon him, and again would he know his God. It would seem, however, that Heine's death-bed reconversion is simply to be regarded as one of the numerous instances of the Prince of Darkness exhibiting monastic proclivities under the stress of severe physical _malaise_. For eight years Heine lay a-dying, and with the skeleton of Death assiduously serving the few bitter crumbs that yet remained of his feast of life, he was, as a simple matter of pathology, almost bound to believe once more, even if he had been the most hardened infidel in existence. Heine, however, was no cynical atheist. The current religions, it is true, he considered pretty poetry, but bad logic, yet none the less he was genuinely imbued with the ethical idea.

"I am too proud," he writes, "to be influenced by greed for the heavenly wages of virtue or by fear of hellish torments. I strive after the good because it is beautiful and attracts me irresistibly, and I abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me."

What, in fact, served Heine in the stead of a theology was his fervid enthusiasm for Progress and Humanity. His real religion was the religion of Freedom, the religion of the poor people, the new creed of which Jean Rousseau was the John the Baptist and Voltaire the chief apostle; Heine's Madonna was the red goddess of Revolution, who exacted from her worshippers innumerable hecatombs of human victims; the Man-god whom he revered as the Saviour of Society was Napoleon, the Son of the Revolution, the drastic reorganiser of the world, who, unappreciated by the pharisees and reactionaries of his time, and finding his Golgotha on the "martyr-cliffs of St. Helena," endured for more than five years all the agonies of a moral crucifixion; while to complete our version of the Heinesque theology, his _Heilige Geist_ was the Holy Spirit of the Human Intellect which he says "is seen in its greatest glory in Light and Laughter," and the Revelation which inspired him most deeply was, to use once more his own phrase, "the sacred mystic Revelation that we name poesy."

It is interesting to trace the influence of these last ghastly years on Heine's writings. His almost complete physical prostration brought with it its own compensation in the shape of a marvellous psychic exaltation, and the _Romanzero_ and the _Poetische Nachlese_ contain some of his greatest and most moving poems. Nowhere do we see more clearly his most characteristic excellences, his delicacy, his power of antithesis, his concision.

It is Heine's compression, in fact, which is one of the most pronounced features of his poetic style. The whole quintessence of joy and pain, of love and sorrow, is frequently distilled into one short poem. This Heinesque condensation is a variant of the same theory that can be traced in the old Impressionist school of painters which is concerned with the outline and the proper light and shading of the outline to the exclusion of minor details, and in the journalistic cult of the "story" in which the ideal aimed at is "the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point." Heine, in fact, is unique among the poets for narrating a tale with the minimum of space and the maximum of effect, for narrating it in such a way that each line serves to heighten the level of intensity, till at length the edifice is crowned by the climax. This feature of his style is well illustrated by the end of the frequently quoted poem, "The Asra," in the _Romanzero_:

"And the slave spake, I am called
Mohammed, I am from Yemen,
And my stock is from those Asras,
_They who die whene'er they love_."

Though, moreover, he protested to the last against his fate, his tone in the _Romanzero_ and the earlier _Poetische Nachlese_ is more mellow than in his earlier writings. His cry from the heart is not the cry of defiance but rather of the pathetic wistfulness of impotence. Yet before the candle of his life became extinguished it leapt up in one final flicker, the most marvellous of all. A characteristic caprice of fate made him acquainted during the last months of his life with his one true soul-affinity, the charming woman who is known under the pseudonym of Camille Selden or La Mouche.

Is it then to be wondered at that when the rich feast of a perfect love, for which he had craved Tantalus-like all his life, was offered to him almost at the very minute that his lips were being sealed by the cold kiss of death, the whole soul of the man should leap up in indignant protest, and that such poems as "Lass die heiligen Parabolen," and the even more wonderful series of stanzas with the refrain, "O schöne Welt du bist abscheulich," should exhibit the cold insolent shrug of the man convinced of the righteousness of his plea that of all the places in the universe this human earth "where the just man drags himself along beneath the blood-stained burden of his cross, while the wicked man rides in triumph on his high steed," is the most iniquitous?

Heine died at four o'clock in the morning of February 17, 1856. He was buried by his own directions in Montmartre, "in order to avoid being disturbed by the crowd and bustle of Père Lachaise."

His writings form an incessant stream of paradoxes, but his life is the greatest paradox of all. The prophet of the new religion of liberty, he was repudiated by his country, and his happiest days were spent in the land of exile; throughout his life he sought for love, to live years of the most healthy prosaic domesticity with his mistress, and to find his one true romance on his death-bed; he imagined that he was a great political force, but it is rather as a poet that he survives; as a poet his chief theme was the Joy and Light of Life, and he drew his truest inspiration from the darkest depths of his agony; even as a great writer he has been chiefly known by the comparatively inferior _Book of Songs_ and _Reisebilder,_ while his masterpiece, the _Memoirs_, the great highly barbed Parthian arrow shot from the grave to transfix his enemies for all eternity, lay mouldering for many years amid the dusty archives of the Vienna Library.

His message, too, the core and kernel of his philosophy, is again a paradox. To the sphinx-like riddle with which every thinker is confronted, "Is Life poetry or prose, tragedy or farce?" Heine made answer that the pathos and poetry of life were contained in the fact that life was so essentially grim and unpoetical, and that the real tragedy of the world lay in the ghastly farce of it all.

[Footnote 1: _Cf._ the poem "Enfant perdu," beginning "Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheits Kriege."]

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISRAELI

The recent centenary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli renewed our interest in the most striking figure in the English history of the last century. Throughout his life Disraeli made it an important part of his _métier_ to be interesting, and it is certainly a convincing proof both of his great natural fascination and of the adroitness with which he worked his pose, that even beyond the grave his character should still exercise our curiosity and blind us with the various facets of its brilliancy. He fairly bristles with paradoxes, this cynic, who was also a sentimentalist, this Oriental mystic, who was one of the most finished dandies in London, this shameless adventurer, with his pathetic and chivalrous devotion to his sovereign, this political Don Juan, who provided a classic example of conjugal affection. Many have essayed to solve the riddle of the "Primrose Sphinx"; but the best testimony to their almost universal failure is that nearly every biographer has produced a completely different version of his character. Mr. Hitchman, "one of the helpless, somnambulised cattle whom he led by the nose," to use Carlyle's phrase, portrays him (in _The Public Life of the late Lord Beaconsfield_) with charming _naïveté_ as the "disinterested and patriotic statesman." Mr. T. P. O'Connor, on the other hand, who, when still sowing his literary wild oats, painted Disraeli even blacker than the Prince of Darkness himself, in a book unworthy of any serious biographer, simply overshoots the mark. Froude, in his _Life_, comes nearer to the truth, but is hampered by being forced to compress the history of a crowded life and the psychology of a complex character into a narrow and inadequate compass. Both Froude, however, and Mr. Sichel, who has given us an interesting volume on Disraeli's personality, lay too much stress on his imaginative and idealistic features.

The reason for this inability to comprehend a character, in many respects singularly typical of his age, lies not so much in the alleged inadequacy of the materials as in the incapacity of most English writers for handling general ideas. The English mind is too concrete for social psychology; it delights in the almost mechanical work of classifying animals, but fails to produce any classification of characters worth the name. The Disraeli problem is admittedly difficult; the secrecy which until recently kept us from all knowledge of the greater portion of his papers and correspondence is undoubtedly a handicap, but the difficulty is by no means insuperable, nor the material so scanty as is usually supposed. Let us take Disraeli in relation to his age, his environment, his ancestry, then what would otherwise have struck us as strange, not to say impossible, stands out clear and inevitable. Another valuable source of information is to be found in his novels, though it is always difficult to discriminate between what is and what is not autobiographical in these works.

A vigorous and imaginative mind, when writing about its own history, will naturally not stint itself in its licences; it will abandon itself to all kinds of hypotheses; it will take a certain phase of itself, frame circumstances to suit its development, and proceed on the fictitious assumption; it will indulge freely both in caricature and idealisation. In _Vivian Grey_, for instance, Disraeli has slightly exaggerated the more cynical side of his nature; _Sidonia_, on the other hand, is an idealised version of Disraeli; it is Disraeli raised to a higher power; it is what he would have liked to have been, but was not, any more than the actual Byron was as brave, as romantic, and as fascinating as the ideal Byron who is portrayed in _Conrad, Childe Harold_, and _Don Juan_.

Yet, none the less, _Sidonia, Fakredeen, Vivian Grey,_ and _Contarini Fleming_ possess a strong family likeness, and strike a genuine autobiographical note. With regard to the two latter, Mr. Sichel, in his study of Disraeli, is unwarranted in his attempted depreciation of their evidence, on the theory that they represent merely a distorted and transient phase of Disraeli's development, to be ascribed to ill-health and immaturity. On the contrary, the contortions of great men in adolescence are peculiarly instructive. It is then that the very elements of the future man are fermenting in the crucible; and is not growth more significant than maturity? It is not a paradox, but a fundamental truth, to say that a man is never more himself than when he is not himself; it is in periods of violent upheaval that the conventional superstructure is destroyed and the innermost foundations of character are laid bare. It is far easier to tone down than to touch up, and the unrestrained sincerity of these early novels, written under the impetus of intense emotion, throws far more light on Disraeli's real character than a book like _Endymion_, the official pronouncement of his maturer years. A prudent use, then, of the novels, and an examination of his relations to his age, environment, and ancestry should enable us to construct a psychology of Disraeli that should be at once convincing and consistent, and adequate to shed light on many of the obscure points of his character.

The _Sturm und Drang_ age of the Revolution in which Disraeli was born marked the passing of Europe from childhood to manhood, from mediævalism to modernity. Like all transition periods, it was peculiarly complex; the tendencies being so varied, and were so frequently accompanied by the reactions against themselves, that it requires considerable care to disentangle the principal threads.

It was an age of progress where reaction was frequently to be seen at work; it was an age significant for a violent outburst of scientific materialism, and the consequently inevitable mysticism of a religious revival. It was an age at once scientific and romantic, individual and cosmopolitan. It was an age where circumstances produced strange mixtures, so that in England we are brought face to face with the paradox that Gladstone, the founder of democratic idealism, obtained his seat under the old system of close boroughs, while Disraeli, the most brilliant example of the new democratic theory of _la carrière ouverte aux talentes_, found his way to power as the head of the aristocratic and conservative party. The predominant note, however, was one of democratic individualism. With the French Revolution the yoke of responsibility, political and religious, was violently thrown off; new and wide fields had been opened out to commerce by the extended communications and the new mechanical inventions. A quickened life broke in upon the lethargy of the previous century. The struggle for existence entered on a sharper and intenser phase. Ambitious men vehemently dashed themselves against the social barrier, which day by day became more easy to climb. In every department it was the age of the clever and ambitious parvenu. In war and in politics Napoleon, in poetry Burns, in fiction Balzac, give convincing testimony to the power of the new régime. It was the age of the French Revolution and of the Holy Alliance, of Condillac and of Chateaubriand, of Laplace and of Shelley, of Godwin and of Tom Paine.

But equality is a medal with two faces: on the one side is written, "I am as good as, if not better than, everyone else"; on the other, "Everyone else is as good as, if not better than, myself." The first was the motto of the rampant individualism and vigorous national policy of Disraeli, the latter of the hesitating Christian spirit and sentimental cosmopolitanism of Gladstone. Gladstone, indeed, is such an excellent foil to Disraeli that we may well be permitted the following quotations, where the rift in Gladstone's lute, between the churchman and the politician, stands in pointed contrast to the unity of purpose that from his earliest years actuated his rival. Gladstone, torn between his missionary impulse and yearning for apostolic destination on the one hand, and healthy ambition on the other, writes to his father: "I am willing to persuade myself that in spite of other longings, which I often feel, my heart is prepared to yield other hopes and other desires for this: of being permitted to be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to set before the eyes of man the magnanimity and glory of Christian truth. Politics are fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating. My temper is so excitable that I should fear giving up my mind to other subjects, which have ever proved sufficiently alluring to me, and which I fear would make my life a series of unsatisfied longings and expectations." Disraeli is less undecided, as is clear from the following quotation from _Contarini Fleming_: "I should have killed myself if I had not been supported by my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the desire of distinction and of astounding action raged in my soul, and when I realised that so many years must elapse before I could realise my ideal, I gnashed my teeth in silent rage and cursed my existence," Disraeli will give up anything rather than his chance of being a great man. At a time when most clever young men of his age were thinking of a scholarship he had finally decided to go in for a premiership. He has planned his campaign, he will fool the world to the top of its bent. When yet a boy Disraeli says, as Vivian Grey: "We must mix with the herd, we must sympathise with the sorrow that we do not feel and share the merriment of fools. To rule men we must be men, to prove that we are strong we must be weak. Our wisdom must be concealed under folly, our constancy under caprice."

None the less, Disraeli had too vivid an imagination, too keen a sense of the picturesque, not to be affected to a certain extent by the current Romanticism. We see this in the Eastern novels of _Tancred_ and _Alroy_, also in _Contarini Fleming_, the English Wilhelm Meister, which exhibits the weaker and more morbid side of the author's character, and is a useful supplement to Vivian Grey. But it is the latter, however, who represents most accurately the ideals and aspirations of the young Disraeli, and, taken generally, is a broad adumbration of his subsequent career. But the Disraeli of Vivian Grey was not so unique as is usually considered, and an analogy between him and the celebrated Frenchman, who wrote a novel about the same period, and one, moreover, singularly typical of his age, proves instructive. Benjamin Disraeli and Henri Beyle were in all superficial details so absolutely different that one might well hesitate before making the comparison, yet they were radically similar in many of their larger outlines, and in particular their characters, as revealed in the heroes of two novels, _Vivian Grey_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_, show an extraordinary resemblance. Both Julien Sorel and Vivian Grey are impelled by a violent and overwhelming ambition; both, originally excluded by their status from participation in the great prizes of the world, set out undaunted to conquer, the one as a priest, the other as a politician. Cynical, with that extreme and savage species of cynicism which is the reaction from intense sensitiveness, they both wage war on society in their passion for success, while the nobler and more generous instincts with which nature had endowed them perish in the struggle.

But this Time-Spirit of individualism was no mere cold-blooded philosophy of egoism. It was, after all, an age of genuine poetry, of fresh ideals. The halo of romance played around the most abandoned sinners. Individualism found, in addition, an æsthetic sanction, as was seen in the prodigious vogue of Byron, where the picturesque pose of the one man pitted against society appealed strongly to the popular imagination. How deeply Disraeli was imbued with Byronism is evidenced not only by the whole tone and manner of his early life, but by his resuscitation of the Byronic legend in _Venetia_.

This spirit of combined idealism and intense practical energy is met with again in Disraeli's race and ancestry. The Jewish race is a compound of materialism and idealism. The Jew is the dreamer in action, combining fluid imagination with adamantine purpose. These two phases of the Jewish character are seen excellently in Disraeli's father and paternal grandfather. The latter, an Italian Jew, came over to England about the middle of the eighteenth century, and quickly made a fortune by dint of his shrewd business talent and fixity. His son Isaac was gifted with an unfortunate superfluity of the poetic temperament. His youth was erratic and unhappy, but when close on thirty he found a secure refuge in the quiet waters of literature. To his Semitic blood is also to be traced Disraeli's prodigious tenacity of purpose. He came of a stiff-necked people, so that opposition stimulated him, and his early failures served but to render sweeter his eventual success. He had, too, the calculating foresight of the Jew, and could pierce the future, if not with prophetic vision, at any rate, with marvellous intuition. His Oriental strain of mysticism served him in good stead. He never forgot that he was a scion of the Chosen People, and came of a race which had never sullied its purity of lineage by changing its blood. Was he not the chosen man of the chosen race? Could he not read his future, if not in the stars, "which are the brain of heaven," yet in his own brilliant and meteoric brain? He had a full measure of the pride of race, and plumed himself to the last on what he may well have called "the Oriental ichor in his veins." If his enemies dubbed him a parvenu he would fling the wretched taunt back in their faces, bidding them realise that they came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe. How keen was this genealogical Judaism we can see from the classic letter to O'Connell, where he wrote that "the hereditary bondsman had forgotten the clank of his fetters," and from his masterpiece of character-drawing, Sidonia, who, with wealth, intellect, and power at his command, yet found his chief "source of interest in his descent and in the fortunes of his race." Disraeli's Judaism, however, did not extend to the religious tenets of the creed. Few, no doubt, are the instances of a converted Jew proving a genuine Christian, but Disraeli had too much of the mystic in him to be an atheist, and if we take into account the elasticity of his imagination, there is little reason to doubt that he was at any rate reasonably sincere in his belief that Christianity was merely completed Judaism, Calvary but the logical corollary of Sinai; he would also, no doubt, find a malicious joy in reminding those who taunted him with his origin, that "one half of Christendom worships a Jew and the other half a Jewess." Anyway, the Christian religion played nothing approaching an integral part in his life; while an amiable acquiescence in its dogmas was, at the best, as it has been with so many, but an intellectual habit. His Jewish origin helped him, moreover, in that he approached the problems of politics with a mind free from conventional British prejudices. He was never a thorough Englishman, and was proud of the fact, instead of thanking God "that he was born an Englishman," as do many of his race, who betray in their every word and action their Jewish nationality. His admirable expert knowledge of the English character was throughout professional, not sympathetic.

When we turn to Disraeli's early environment, we find that it was one calculated to foster both ambition and a literary imagination. He breathed from his earliest days the atmosphere of books, and almost from the cradle imbibed avidly the many volumes of Voltaire. Nothing is so stimulating to the youthful mind as the unchecked run of a library, with its delightful excursions into the unexplored country of literature. His natural sensitiveness was hardened by his experiences at school, where his nationality and cleverness rendered him unpopular. The reaction intensified his already precocious ambition, and gave him that consciousness of semi-isolation which formed one of the chief parts of his strength. His ambition was further heightened by the smart literary set which he met constantly at his father's house, and his early glimpses of the great world. Disraeli is palpably exaggerating when he says, _apropos_ of Vivian Grey, that "he was a tender plant in a moral hot-house," but the following passage is significant:

"He became habituated to the idea that everything could
be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of
conduct except success; to be ready to advance any
opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a
tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite
though circuitous purpose."

It is this trait of doing things with an object which supplied the true clue to Disraeli as a man of letters. We admit, of course, the _verve_ and brilliancy of the novels, their claim to rank as classic, but it is impossible to arrive at a correct appreciation of them unless they be taken in the closest conjunction with their author's political career. _Vivian Grey_, for instance, no doubt afforded an excellent outlet for the fermenting passion of Disraeli's youth; it was itself one of the best society novels ever written, but it was something more. Before that time the future Premier had been hiding his light. How could he obtain a free field for the exercise of his gifts? His father's Bohemian clique scarcely answered his purpose. How could he burst open the doors of society? The bombshell was supplied by _Vivian Grey_. It was a case of self-advertisement raised to the level of a fine art, and Disraeli introduced himself to the public with a bow of most elaborate flourishes. _Contarini Fleming_ strikes a slightly different note, exhibiting the more poetic side of its author's character; but we must not forget that at the time when it was published Disraeli's long absence in the East had temporarily obscured his fame in London, and that it was the success of _Contarini Fleming_ which secured for him once more the _entrée_ into society. Similarly, _Coningsby, Sybil_, and _Tancred_ were, in the main, but the gospels in which, in the rôle of a political saviour, he propagated the new creed of Young England. _Lothair_ and _Endymion_ were partly written to replenish his empty exchequer. The protagonists, moreover, in all his chief novels were fashioned in the image of himself, and even Lord Cadurcis in _Venetia_, who is theoretically Byron, is portrayed with the physical features of the author, so as to ensure a vivid impression on the public mind of his own personality. Not that Disraeli did not experience a genuine joy in the wielding of the pen. He could soar high in his flights of mysticism and romance; could describe the picturesque and the beautiful in passages of inspired rhetoric, though it was in the dash and brilliancy of his satire which at its best equalled that of Heine, or Voltaire, or Byron, that he was most himself. His style is redolent of his race. It possesses the genuine Oriental glamour, the Oriental love of gorgeous and grandiose magnificence, the Oriental lack of symmetry and proportion. His prodigious genius for sarcasm was also Semitic, if we are to believe Mr. Bryce, who considers that gift a peculiar property of the race, instancing, as examples, Lucian and Heine, the greatest satirists of ancient and modern times.