Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (605 page)

“That statement of time and place was entirely correct.  I was actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went through a religious act.  But this act was no odious abjuration, but a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already performed, according to the civil law there received the ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony.  And I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”

For sixteen years — from 1831 to 1847 — Heine lived that rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of darkness,” and they were to be many.  In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering.  The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848:

“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal.  At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me.  The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”

Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have always “haunted like a passion,” has not descended from the second story of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as is derived from visitors to his sick-room.  The terrible nervous disease has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger.  Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills his pain.  We hardly know
whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit; for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering.  His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns.  In such moments he would narrate the strangest things in the gravest manner.  But when he came to an end, he would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger to see the impression he had produced; and if his audience had been listening with a serious face, he would break into Homeric laughter.  We have other proof than personal testimony that Heine’s disease allows his genius to retain much of its energy, in the “Romanzero,” a volume of poems published in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of his illness; and in the first volume of the “Vermischte Schriften,” also the product of recent years.  Very plaintive is the poet’s own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero:”

“Do I really exist?  My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven.  Alas!  I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming.  A grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books — that is a piteous condition.  Long ago the measure has been taken for my coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that the process is tedious for me as well as my friends.  But patience: everything has an end.  You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you.”

As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine’s illness a change had taken place in his religious views; and as rumor seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had
become a thorough pietist.  Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert.  Such a change in so uncompromising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that he was supposed to have joined.  In the second volume of the “Salon,” and in the “Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and ‘35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being.  Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity.  At length, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain negations:

“As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in politics; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since glowed with increasing fervor.  In theology, on the contrary, I must accuse myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I returned to the old superstition — to a personal God.  This fact is, once for all, not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning friends would fain have had it.  But I must expressly contradict the report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her lap.  No: my religions convictions and views have remained free from any tincture of ecclesiasticism; no chiming of bells has allured me, no
altar candles have dazzled me.  I have dallied with no dogmas, and have not utterly renounced my reason.”

This sounds like a serious statement.  But what shall we say to a convert who plays with his newly-acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does in the very next page?  He says to his reader:

“Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also mean to write thee better books.  I take for granted that my health will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me.  He relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peacefully carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done in this; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered, and that death will produce no particular change in our organic development.  Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our earth.  Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied themselves with the same things as formerly; they remained stationary, were old-fashioned,
rococo
— which now and then produced a ludicrous effect.  For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years daily written down the same mouldy arguments — just in the same way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the
Allgemeine Zeitung
one and the same article, perpetually chewing over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine.  But, as we have said, all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg in such a state of fossil immutability: many had considerably developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other world; and this gave rise to some singular results.  Some who had been heroes and saints on earth had
there
sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings; and there were examples, too, of a contrary transformation.  For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom; and he who here below withstood the most terrible temptations was now quite an impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig in rolling himself in the mud.  The chaste Susanna, from having been excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son of David.  On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time become
very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask.”

In his “Geständnisse,” the retractation of former opinions and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology.  Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the following passage!

“What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears?  What avails it me, that all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me?  Alas!  Shiraz is two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels.  Alas!  God’s satire weighs heavily on me.  The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.”

For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and mental privation — as a delirium of wit starved of its proper nourishment.  It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.

On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine’s personal history.  There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his native country.  Whatever ground may exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his writings.  He may not have much faith in German revolutions and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant
perspective; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompatible with true patriotism.  He has expressly denied the report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning toward his native land and the accents of his native language is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is sparing in such effusions.  We do not see why Heine’s satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as a crime of
lèse-patrie
, any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist.  The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are
personalities
.  That these offences have their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to honor does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case; unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of compensation — making up for our indulgence in one direction by our severity in another.  On this ground of coarseness and personality, a true bill may be found against Heine;
not
, we think, on the ground that he has laughed at what is laughable in his compatriots.  Here is a specimen of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince:

“Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German revolution.  Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Saviour — Freedom — lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of redeeming the world.  Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very harmless brute.  It was confidently believed that the German revolution would begin in Zweibrücken, and everything was there ripe for an outbreak.  But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking.  For example, among the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by
cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . . ‘What!’ cried the man, when this order was given him — ‘What! — me!  Can you expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me?  I —
I
, kill an innocent sentinel?  I, who am the father of a family!  And this sentinel is perhaps also father of a family.  One father of a family kill another father of a family?  Yes.  Kill — murder!’”