There are some persons, some places, some things, which fall all too easily into ready-made definitions. Labels lie temptingly to hand, and specimens get duly docketed—‘rich as a Jew,’ perhaps, or ‘happy as a king’—with a promptitude and a precision which is not a trifle provoking to people of a nicely discriminative turn of mind. The amiable optimism which insists on an inseparable union between a Jew and his money, and discerns an alliterative link between kings and contentment, or makes now and again a monopoly of the virtues by labelling them ‘Christian,’ has, we suspect, a good deal to do with the manufacture of debatable definitions, and the ready fitting of slop-made judgments. Scores of such shallow platitudes occur to one’s memory, some mischievous, some monotonous, some simply meaningless, and many of the most complacent have been tacked on to the telling of a life-story, brimful of contradictions, and running counter to most of the conventionalities. The story of one who was a Jew, and poor; a convert, without the zeal; a model of resignation, and yet no Christian; a poet, born under sternest conditions of prose, and with sad claims, by right of race, to the scorn of scorn and hate of hate, which we have been told is exclusively a poet’s appanage—surely a story hardly susceptible of being summed up in an epithet. It is a life which has been told often, in many languages, and in much detail; this small sketch will glance only at such portions of it as seem to suggest the clue to a juster reading and a kindlier conclusion.

It was in the last month of the last year of the eighteenth century, in the little town of DÜsseldorf in South Germany, that their eldest son Heinrich, or Harry as he seems to have been called in the family circle, was born unto Samson Heine, dealer in cloth, and Betty his wife. That eighteenth century had been but a dreary one for the Jews of Europe. It set in darkness on Heine’s cradle, and on his ‘mattress grave,’ some fifty years later, the dawn of nineteenth century civilisation, for them, had scarcely broken. ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered the Jewish system. Warned off from the highroads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bye-paths, the banned and persecuted race, looking out on the world from their ghettoes, had grown to see most things in false perspective. Self loomed large on their blank horizon, and gold shone more golden in the gloom. God the Father, whose service demanded such daily sacrifice, had lost something of that divinest attribute; men, our brothers, could the words have borne any but a ‘tribal’ sound? Still, in those dim, dream-peopled ghettoes, where visions of the absent, the distant, and the past must have come to further perplex and confuse the present, one actuality seems to have been grasped among the shadows, one ideal attained amid all the grim realities of that most miserable time. Home life and family affection had a sacredness for the worst of these poor sordid Jews in a sense which, to the best of those sottish little German potentates who so conscientiously despised them, would have been unmeaning. Maidens were honourably wed, and wives honoured and children cherished in those wretched Judenstrassen, where ‘the houses look as if they could tell sorrowful stories,’ after a fashion quite unknown at any, save the most exceptional, of the numerous coarse, corrupt, and ludicrously consequential little courts which were, at that period, representative of German culture.

The marriage of Heine’s parents had been one of those faithful unions, under superficially unequal conditions, for which Jews seem to have a genius. It had been something of the old story, ‘she was beautiful, and he fell in love’; she, pretty, piquant, cultivated, and the daughter of a physician of some local standing; he, just a respectable member of a respectable trading family, and ordinary all round, save for the distinction of one rich relative, a banker brother at Hamburg.

Betty’s attractions, however, were all dangerous and undesirable possessions in the eyes of a prudent Jewish parent of the period, and Dr. von Geldern appears to have gladly given this charming daughter of his into the safe ownership of her somewhat commonplace wooer, whose chiefest faculty would seem to have been that of appreciation. It proved, nevertheless, a sufficiently happy marriage, and Betty herself, although possibly rather an acquiescent daughter than a responsive bride in the preliminaries, developed into a faithful wife and a most devoted mother, utilising her artistic tastes and her bright energy in the education of her children, and finding full satisfaction for her warm heart in their affection. Her eldest born was always passionately attached to her, and in the days of his youth, as in the years that so speedily ‘drew nigh with no pleasure in them,’ unto those latest of the ‘evil days’ when he lay so unconscionably long a-dying, and wrote long playful letters to her full of tender deceit, telling of health and wealth and friends, in place of pain and poverty and disease, through all that bitter, brilliant life of his, Heinrich Heine’s relations with his mother were altogether beautiful, and go far to refute the criticism attributed, with I know not how much of truth, to Goethe, that ‘the poet had every capacity save that for love!’ ‘In real love, as in perfect music,’ says Bulwer Lytton in one of his novels, ‘there must be a certain duration of time.’ Heine’s attachment to his mother was just lifelong; his first love he never forgot, nor, indeed, wholly forgave, and his devotion to his grisette wife not only preceded marriage, but survived it. Poor Heine! was it his genius or his race, or something of both, which conferred on him that fatal pierre de touche as regards reputation, ‘il dÉplait invariablement À tous les imbeciles’?

In the very early boyhood of Heine some light had broken in on the thick darkness, social and political, which enveloped Jewish fortunes. It was only a fitful gleam from the meteor-like course of the first Napoleon, but during those few years when, as Heine puts it, ‘all boundaries were dislocated,’ the Duchy of Berg, and its capital DÜsseldorf, in common with more important states, were created French, and the Code NapolÉon took the place for a while of that other, unwritten, code in which Jews were pariahs, to be condemned without evidence, and sentenced without appeal. Although the French occupation of Berg lasted unluckily but a few years (1806 till 1813), it did wonders in the way of individual civilisation, and Joachim Murat, during his governorship, seems really to have succeeded in introducing something of the ‘sweet pineapple odour of politeness,’ which Heine later notes as a characteristic of French manners, into the boorish, beerish little German principality. Although the time was all too short, and the conscription too universal for much national improvement to become evident, German burghers as well as German Jews had cause to rejoice in the change of rule. We hear of no ‘noble’ privileges, no licensed immunities nor immoralities during the term of the French occupation, and some healthier amusements than Jew-baiting were provided for the populace. With the departure of the French troops the clouds, which needed the storm of the ’48 revolution to be effectually dispersed, gathered again. Still the foreign government, short as it was, had lasted long enough to make an impression for life on Heinrich Heine, and its most immediate effect was in the school influences it brought to bear upon him. Throughout all the States brought under French control, public education, by the Imperial edict of 1808, was settled on one broad system, and put under the general direction of the French Minister of Instruction. In accordance with this decree some suitable building in each selected district had to be utilised for class-rooms, the students had to be put into uniform, the teachers to be Frenchmen, and all subjects had to be taught through the medium of that language. The lycÉe at DÜsseldorf was set up in an ancient Franciscan convent, and hither, at the age of ten, was Heine daily despatched. A bright little auburn-haired lad, full of fun and mischief, and mother-taught up to this date save for some small amount of Hebrew drilling which he seems to have received at the hands of a neighbouring Jewish instructor of youth, Harry had everything to learn, and discipline and the Latin declensions were among the first and greatest of his difficulties. Poet nature and boy nature were both strong in him, and it was so hard to sit droning out long dull lists of words, which he was quite sure the originators of them had never had to do, for ‘if the Romans had had first to learn Latin,’ he ruminated, ‘they never would have had time to conquer the world’—so impossible he found it to keep his eyes on the page, whilst the very motes were dancing in the sunshine as it poured in through the old convent window, which was set just too high in the wall for a safe jump into freedom. One day the need of sympathy, and possibly some unconscious association from the dim old cloister, proved momentarily too strong for the impressionable little lad’s Jewish instincts; he came across a crucifix in some forgotten niche of the transformed convent; he looked up, he tells us, at the roughly carved figure, and dropping on his knees, prayed an earnest heterodox prayer, ‘Oh, Thou poor once persecuted God, do help me, if possible, to keep the irregular verbs in my head!’

‘Jewish instincts,’ we said, and they could have been scarcely more, for neither at home, at school, nor in the streets was the atmosphere the boy breathed favourable to the development of religious principles. The Judaism of that age was, superficially, very much what the age had made of it; and its followers and its persecutors alike combined to render it mightily unattractive to susceptible natures. Samson Heine, stolid and respectable, we may imagine doing his religious, as he did all his other duties and avocations, in solemn routine fashion, laying heavy honest hands on each prose detail, and letting every bit of poetry slip through his fat fingers, whilst his bright eager wife, with her large ideas and her small vanities, ruled her household, and read her Rousseau, and, feeling the outer world shut from her by religion, and the higher world barred from her by ritual, found the whole thing cramping and unsatisfying to the last degree. ‘Happy is he whom his mother teacheth’ runs an old Talmudic proverb; but among the mother-taught lessons of his childhood, the best was missing to Heinrich Heine—the real difference between ‘holy and profane’ he never rightly learnt, and thus it came to pass that Jewish instincts—an ineradicable and an inalienable, but alas! an incomplete inheritance of the sons of Israel—were all that Judaism gave to this poet of Jewish race.

One lingers over these early influences, the right understanding of which goes far to supply the key to some of the later puzzles. Oddly enough, the clouds which by and by hid the blue are discernible from the very first, and these early years give the silver lining to those gathering clouds. In view of the dark days coming one at least rejoices that Heine’s childhood was a happy one; at home the merry mischievous boy was quite a hero to his two younger brothers, and a hero and a companion both to his only sister, the LÖttchen who was the occasion of his earliest recorded composition. It is a favourite recollection of this lady, who is living still,[11] how she, a blushing little maid of ten, won a good deal of unmerited praise for a school theme, till a trembling confession was extorted from her that the real author was her brother Harry. His mother, too, was exceedingly proud of her handsome eldest son, whose resemblance in many ways to her was the sweetest flattery. And besides the adoring home circle Harry found a great ally for playhours in an old French ex-drummer, who had marched to victory with Napoleon’s legions, and who had plenty of tales to tell the boy of the wonderful invincible Kaiser, whom one day—blest never-to-be-forgotten vision—the boy actually saw ride through DÜsseldorf on his famous white steed (1810). Heine never quite lost the glamour cast over him in his youth; France, Germany, Judea, each in a sense his patria, was each, in the time to come, ‘loved both ways,’ each in turn mocked at bitterly enough when the mood was on him, but always with France, the ‘poet of the nations’ as our own English poetess calls her, the sympathies of this cosmopolitan poet were keenest—a perhaps not unnatural state of feeling when we reflect how fact and fiction both combined to produce it. The French occupation of the principality had been a veritable deliverance to its inhabitants, Christian and Jewish alike, and what boy, in his own person, led out of bondage, would not have thrilled to such stories as the old drummer had to tell of the real living hero of it all? And the boy in question, we must bear in mind, was a poet in posse.

In school, in spite of the difficulties of irregular verbs, Harry seems to have held his own, and to have soon attracted the especial attention of the director. The chief selected for the lycÉe at DÜsseldorf had happened to be a Roman Catholic abbÉ of decidedly Voltairian views on most subjects, and attracted by the boy and becoming acquainted with his family, many a talk did AbbÉ Schallmayer have with Frau Heine over the undoubted gifts and the delightful imperfections of her son. It may possibly have been altogether simple interest in his bright young pupil, or perhaps Frau Heine, pretty still, and charming always, was herself an attraction to the schoolmaster, but certain it is, whether a private taste for pretty women or a genuine pedagogic enthusiasm prompted his frequent calls, our abbÉ was a constant visitor at Samson Heine’s, and Harry and Harry’s future a never-failing theme for conversation. What was the boy to be? There was no room for much speculation if he were to remain a Jew—that path was narrow, if not straight, and admitted of small range of choice along its level line of commerce.

Betty, we know, was no staunch Jewess, and had her small personal ambitions to boot, so such opposition as there was to the abbÉ’s plainly given counsel to make a Catholic of the boy, and give him his chance, came probably from the stolid, steady-going father, to whom custom spoke in echoes resonant enough to deaden the muffled tones of religion. No question, however, of sentiment or sacrifice was permitted to complicate, or elevate, the question; no sense of voluntary renunciation was suggested to the boy; no choice between the life and good, and the death and evil, between conscience and compromise, was presented to him. On the broadly comprehensive grounds that Judaism and trade had been good enough for the father, trade and Judaism must be good enough for the son—the matter was decided.

But still before the lad’s prospects could be definitely settled, one important personage remained to be consulted, the banker at Hamburg, whose wealth had gained him somewhat of the position of a family fetich. What Uncle Solomon would say to a scheme had no fictitious value about it; for even were the oracle occasionally dumb, not seldom would its speech be silver and its silence gold. A rich uncle is a very solemn possession in an impecunious family, so Harry, and Harry’s poetry, and Harry’s powers generally, had to be weighed in the Hamburg scales before any standard value could be assigned to either one of them. For three years the balance was held doubtful; the counting-house scales, accurate as they usually were, could hardly adjust themselves to the conditions of an unknown quantity, which ‘young Heine’ on an office stool must certainly have proved to his bewildered relatives. One imagines him in that correct and cramping atmosphere, fretting as he had done in the old convent school-days against its weary routine, longing with all the half-understood strength of his poet nature for the green hills and the mountain lakes, and feeling absolutely stifled with all the solemn interest shown over sordid matters. He tells us himself of some of his ‘calculations’ which would wander far afield, and leave the figures on the paper, to concern themselves with the far more perplexing units which passed the mirky office windows, as he complains, ‘at the same hour, with the same mien, making the same motions, like the puppets in a town house clock—reckoning, reckoning always on the basis, twice two are four. Frightful should it ever suddenly occur to one of these people that twice two are properly five, and that he therefore had miscalculated his whole life and squandered it all away in a ghastly error!’ Many a poem too, sorrowful or fantastic, as the mood took him, was scribbled in office hours, and very probably on office paper, thence to find a temporary home in the Hamburg Watchman. What could be done with such a lad? By every office standard he must inevitably have been found wanting, and one even feels a sort of sympathy with the prosaic head of the house who had made his money by the exercise of such very different talents, and whose notion of poetry corresponded very nearly with Corporal Bunting’s notion of love, that it’s by no means ‘the great thing in life boys and girls want to make it out to be—that one does not eat it, nor drink it, and as for the rest, why, it’s bother.’ It always was ‘bother’ to the banker: all through his prosperous life this poet nephew of his, who had the prophetic impertinence to tell the old man once that he owed him some gratitude for being born his uncle, and for bearing his name, was an unsatisfactory riddle. Original genius of the sort which could create a bank-book ex nihilo, the millionaire could have appreciated, but originality which ran into such unproductive channels as poetry-book making was quite beyond him, and that he never read the young man’s verses it is needless to say. Even in his own immediate family and for his first book poor Harry found no audience, save his mother; and to the very end of his days Solomon Heine for the life of him could see nothing in his nephew but a dumme Junge, who never ‘got on,’ and who made a jest of most things, even of his wealthy and respectable relatives.

It was scarcely the old man’s fault; one can only see to the limits of one’s vision, and a poet’s soul was not well within Solomon Heine’s range. According to his lights he was not ungenerous. That Harry had not the making of a clerk in him, those three probationary years had proved to demonstration, and in the determination at which the banker presently arrived, of giving those indefinite talents which he only understood enough to doubt, a chance of development by paying for a three years’ university course at Bonn, he seems to have come fully up to any reasonable ideal of a rich uncle. It is just possible that a secondary motive influenced his generosity, for Harry, besides scribbling, had found a relief from office work by falling in love with one of the banker’s daughters, who would seem not to have shared the family distaste for poetry. The little idyl was of course out of the question in so realistic a circle, and the young lady, to do her justice, seems herself to have been speedily reconverted to the proper principles in which she had been trained. No unfit pendant to the ‘Amy, shallow-hearted’ with whom a more recent generation is more familiar, this Cousin Amy of poor Heine’s married and ‘kept her carriage’ with all due despatch, whilst he, at college, was essaying to mend his ‘heart broken in two’ with all the styptics which are as old and, alas, as hurtful as such fractures. Poetical exaggeration notwithstanding—and besides her own especial love-elegy, Amalie Heine, under thin disguises, is the heroine of very many of the love-poems—there is little room for doubt, that if not so seriously injured as he thought, Heine’s heart did nevertheless receive a wound, which ached for many and many a long day, from this girl’s weak or wilful inconstancy. Heartache is, however, nearly as much a matter-of-course episode in most young people’s lives as measles, and the consequences of either malady are only very exceptionally serious.

Heine’s youthful disappointment is of chief interest as having indirectly led to what was really the determining event of his life. When Amalie’s parents shrewdly determined on separation as the best course to be pursued with the cousins, and the university plan had been accepted by Harry, his future, which was to date from degree-taking, came on for discussion. Except in an ‘other-worldly’ sense there was, in truth, but a very limited ‘future’ possible to Jews of talent. The only open profession was that of medicine, and for that, like the son of Moses Mendelssohn, young Heine had a positive distaste. Commerce, that first and final resource of the race, which had had to satisfy Joseph Mendelssohn, like a good many others equally ill-fitted for it, was not possible to Heine, for he had sufficiently shown, not only dislike, but positive incapacity for business routine. The law suggested itself, as affording an excellent arena for those ready powers of argument and repartee which in the family circle were occasionally embarrassing, and the profession of an advocate, with the vague ‘opportunities’ it included, when pressed upon young Heine, was not unalluring to him. The immediate future was probably what most occupied his thoughts; the freedom of a university life, the flowing river in place of those bustling streets, shelves full of books exchanged for those dreary office ledgers, youthful comrades in the stead of solemnly irritated old clerks. Whether the fact that conversion was a condition of most of the delights, an inevitable preliminary of all the benefits of that visionary future; whether the grim truth that ‘a certificate of baptism was a necessary card of admission to European culture,’ was openly debated and defended, or silently and shamefacedly slurred over in these family councils, does not appear. No record remains to us but the fact that the young student successfully passed his examination in May, 1825; that he was admitted to his degree on July 20, and that between these two dates—to be precise, on the 28th of June—he was baptized as a Protestant with two clergymen for his sponsors. ‘Lest I be poor and deny thee’ was Agur’s prayer, and a wise one; for shivering Poverty, clutching at the drapery of Desire, makes unto herself many a fine, mean, flimsy garment. With no gleam of conviction to cast a flickering halo of enthusiasm over the act, and with no shadow of overwhelming circumstance to somewhat veil it, Heine made his deliberate surrender of conscience to expediency. It was full-grown apostasy, neither conscientious conversion, nor childish drifting into another faith. ‘No man’s soul is alone,’ Ruskin tells us in his uncompromising way, ‘Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand.’ For the rest of his life Heine was in the grip of the serpent, and that, it seems to us, was the secret of his perpetual unrest. Maimed lives are common enough; blind or deaf, or minus a leg or an arm, or plus innumerable bruises, one yet goes on living, and with the help of time and philosophy sorrow of most sorts grows bearable. Hearts are tough; but the soul is more sensitive to injuries, is, to many of us, the veritable, vulnerable tendo Achillis on which our mothers lay their tender, detaining, unavailing hands. Heine sold his soul, and that he never received the price must have perpetually renewed the memory of the bargain. He, one of the ‘bodyguards of Jehovah,’ had suffered himself to be bribed from his post. He never lost his sickening sense of that humiliation; it may be read between the lines, alike of the most brilliant of his prose, of the most tender of his poems, of the most mocking of his often quoted jests.

And it was a burden he never laid down; it embittered his relationships and jeopardised his friendships, and set him at variance with himself. ‘I get up in the night and look in the glass and curse myself,’ we find him writing to one of his old Jewish fellow-workers in the New Jerusalem movement (Moser), or checking himself in the course of a violent tirade against converts, in which BÖrne had joined, to bitterly exclaim, ‘It is ill talking of ropes in the house of one who has been hanged.’ Wherever he treats of Jewish subjects, and the theme seems always to have had for him the fascination which is said to tempt sinners to revisit the scene of their sins, we seem to read remorse between the melodious, mocking lines. Now it is Moses Lump who is laughed at in half tones of envy for his ignorant, unbarterable belief in the virtue of unsnuffed candles; now it is Jehudah Halevi, whose love for the mistress, the Herzensdame, ‘whose name was Jerusalem,’ is sung with a sympathy and an intensity impossible to one who had not felt a like passion, and was not bitterly conscious of having forfeited the right to avow it. The sense of his moral mercenary suicide, in truth, rarely left him. His nature was too conscientious for the strain thus set upon it; his ‘wickedness’ and ‘blackguardism,’ such as they were, were often but passionate efforts to throw his old man of the sea, his heavy burden of self-reproach; and his jests sound not unseldom as so many untranslatable cries. He had bargained away his birthright for the hope of a mess of pottage, and the evil taste of the base contract clung to the poor paralysed lips when ‘even kissing had no effect upon them.’ And but a thin, unsatisfying, and terribly intermittent ‘mess,’ too, it proved, and the share in it which his uncle, and his uncle’s heirs, provided was very bitter in the eating. The story of his struggles, are they not written in the chronicles of the immortals? and his ‘monument,’ is it not standing yet ‘in the new stone premises of his publishers?’[13]

His biographers—his niece, the Princessa della Rocca, among the latest—have made every incident of Heine’s life as familiar as his own books have made his genius to English readers, and Mr. Stigand, following Herr Strodtman, has given us an exhaustive record of the poet’s life at home and in exile; in the Germany which was so harsh and in the France which was so tender with him; with the respectable German relatives, who read his books at last and were none the wiser, and with the unlettered French wife, who could not read a single word of them all, and who yet understood her poet by virtue of the love which passeth understanding, and was in this case entirely independent of it. This sketch trenches on no such well-filled ground; it presumes to touch only on the fault which gave to life and genius both that odd pathetic twist, and to glance at the suffering, which, if there be any saving power in anguish, might surely be held by the most self-righteous as some atonement for the ‘blackguardism.’

Seven years on the rack is no small test of the heroic temperament; to lie sick and solitary, stretched on a ‘mattress grave,’ the back bent and twisted, the legs paralysed, the hands powerless, and with the senses of sight and taste fast failing. At any time within that seven years Heine might well have gained the gold medal in capability of suffering for which, in his whimsical way, he talked of competing, should such a prize be offered at the Paris Exhibition.[15] And the long days, with ‘no pleasure in them,’ were so drearily many; the silver cord was so slowly loosed, the golden bowl seemed broken on the wheel. His very friends grew tired. ‘One must love one’s friends with all their failings, but it is a great failing to be ill,’ says Madame SevignÉ, and, as the years went by, more and more deserted grew the sick-chamber. He never complained; his sweet, ungrudging nature found excuses for desertion and content in loneliness, in the reflection that he was in truth ‘unconscionably long a-dying.’ ‘Never have I seen,’ says Lady Duff-Gordon, in her Recollections of Heine, and she herself was no mean exemplar of bravely-borne pain, ‘never have I seen a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He neither paraded his anguish, nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He 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.’

‘Don’t tell my wife,’ he exclaims one day, when a paroxysm that should have been fatal was not, and the doctor expressed what he meant for a reassuring belief, that it would not hasten the end. ‘Don’t tell my wife’—we seem to hear that sad little jest, so infinitely sadder than a moan, and our own eyes moisten. Perfectly upright geniuses, when suffering from dyspepsia, have not always shown as much consideration for their perfectly proper wives as does this ‘blackguard’ Heine, under torture, for his. It is conceivable that under exceptional circumstances a man may contrive to be a hero to his valet, but, unless he be truly heroic, he will not be able to keep up the character to his wife. Heine managed both. Madame Heine is still living,[16] and one may not say much of a love that was truly strong as death, and that the many waters of affliction could not quench. But the valet test, we may hint, was fulfilled; for the old servant who helped to tend him in that terrible illness lives still with Madame Heine, and cries ‘for company’ when the widow’s talk falls, as it falls often, on the days of her youth and her ‘pauvre Henri.’ There are traditional records in plenty of his cheerful courage, his patient unselfishness, his unfailing endurance of well-nigh unendurable pain. ‘Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son mÉtier,’ the dying lips part to say, still with that sweet, inseparable smile playing about them. Shall man be more just than God? Shall we leave to Him for ever the monopoly of His mÉtier?