This mingled attitude of Maimon the Fool towards Nathan the Wise continued till the death of the Sage plunged Berlin into mourning, and the Fool into vain regrets for his fits of disrespect towards one, the great outlines of whose character stood for ever fixed by the chisel of death. "Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis?" he wrote in his autobiography.
Too often had he lost his temper—particularly when Spinoza was the theme—and had all but accused Mendelssohn of dishonesty. Was not Truth the highest ideal? And was not Spinoza as irrefutable as Euclid. What! Could the emancipated intellect really deny that marvellous thinker, who, after a century of unexampled obloquy, was the acknowledged prophet of the God of the future, the inspirer of Goethe, and all that was best in modern thought! But no, Mendelssohn held stubbornly to his own life-system, never would admit that his long spiritual happiness had been based on a lie. It was highly unreasonableand annoying of him, and his formula for closing discussions, "We must hold fast not to words but to the things they signify," was exasperatingly answerable. How strange that after the restless Maimon had of himself given up Spinoza, the Sage's last years should have been clouded by the alleged Spinozism of his dear dead Lessing.
But now that the Sage himself was dead, the Fool remembered his infinite patience—the patience not of bloodlessness, but of a passionate soul that has conquered itself—not to be soured by a fool's disappointing career, nor even by his bursts of profligacy.
For Maimon's life held many more vicissitudes, but the profession of medicine was never of them. "I require of every man of sound mind that he should lay out for himself a plan of action," said the philosopher; and wandered to Breslau, to Amsterdam, to Potsdam, the parasite of protectors, the impecunious hack of publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understoodThe Critique of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the Kantians. Goethe and Schiller made flattering advances to him. Berlin society was at his feet. But he remained to the end, shiftless and feckless, uncouth and unmanageable, and not seldom when the taverns he frequented were closed, he would wander tipsily through the sleeping streets meditating suicide, or arguing metaphysics with expostulant watchmen.
"For all his mathematics," a friend said of him, "he never seems to think of the difference betweenplusandminusin money matters." "People like you, there's no use trying to help," said another, worn-out, when Maimon pleaded for only a few coppers. Yet he never acquired the beggar's servility, nay, was often himself the patron of somepoorer hanger-on, for whom he would sacrifice his last glass of beer. Curt in his manners, he refused to lift his hat or embrace his acquaintances in cold blood. Nor would he wear a wig. Pure Reason alone must rule.
So, clad in an all-concealing overcoat, the unshaven philosopher might be seen in a coffee-house or on an ale-house bench, scribbling at odd moments his profound essays on Transcendental Philosophy, the leaves flying about and losing themselves, and the thoughts as ill-arranged, for the Hebrew Talmudical manner still clung to his German writing as to his talking, so that the body swayed rhythmically, his thumb worked and his voice chanted the sing-song of piety to ideas that would have paralyzed the Talmud school. It was in like manner that when he lost a game of chess or waxed hot in argument, his old Judean-Polish mother jargon came back to him. His old religion he had shed completely, yet a synagogue-tune could always move him to tears. Sometimes he might be seen at the theatre, sobbing hysterically at tragedies or laughing boisterously over comedies, for he had long since learned to love Homer and the humane arts, though at first he was wont to contend that no vigor of literary expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded by the cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself with. And even if lodged in a nobleman's palace, his surroundings were no cleaner. In Amsterdam he drove the Dutch to despair: even German housekeepers were stung to remonstrance. Yet the charm of hisconversation, the brilliancy of his intellect kept him always well-friended. And the fortune which favors fools watched over his closing years, and sent the admiring Graf Kalkreuth, an intellectual Silesian nobleman, to dig him out of miserable lodgings, and instal him in his own castle near Freistadt.
As he lay upon his luxurious death-bed in the dreary November dusk, dying at forty-six of a neglected lung-trouble, a worthy Catholic pastor strove to bring him to a more Christian frame of mind.
"What matters it?" protested the sufferer; "when I am dead, I am gone."
"Can you say that, dear friend," rejoined the Pastor, with deep emotion. "How? Your mind, which amid the most unfavorable circumstances ever soared to higher attainments, which bore such fair flowers and fruits—shall it be trodden in the dust along with the poor covering in which it has been clothed? Do you not feel at this moment that there is something in you which is not body, not matter, not subject to the conditions of space and time?"
"Ah!" replied Maimon, "there are beautiful dreams and hopes—"
"Which will surely be fulfilled. Should you not wish to come again into the society of Mendelssohn?"
Maimon was silent.
Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was indeed as a fiery scourge. Too late he realized that the passion for Truth had destroyed him. Knowledge alone was not sufficient for life. The will and the emotions demanded their nutriment and exercise as well as the intellect. Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract formula, pale ghost of living realities.
"To seek for Truth"—yes, it was one ideal. But there remained also—as the quotation went on which Mendelssohn's disciples had chosen as their motto—"To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to do the best." Mendelssohn with his ordered scheme of harmonious living, with his equal grasp of thought and life, sanely balanced betwixt philosophy and letters, learning and business, according so much to Hellenism, yet not losing hold of Hebraism, and adjusting with equal mind the claims of the Ghetto and the claims of Culture, Mendelssohn shone before Maimon's dying eyes, as indeed the Wise.
The thinker had a last gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of fixedness—in opinions, in space. Soul and body had need of a centre, a pivot, a home.
He had followed the hem of Truth to the mocking horizon: he had in turn fanatically adopted every philosophical system Peripatetic, Spinozist, Leibnozist, Leibnitzian, Kantian—and what did he know now he was going beyond the horizon? Nothing. He had won a place among the thinkers of Germany. But if he could only have had his cast-off son to close his dying eyes, and could only have believed in the prayers his David would have sobbed out, how willingly would he have consented to be blotted out from the book of fame. A Passover tune hummed in his brain, sad, sweet tears sprang to his eyes—yea, his soul found more satisfaction in a meaningless melody charged with tremulous memories of childhood, than in all the philosophies.
A melancholy synagogue refrain quavered on his lips, his soul turned yearningly towards these ascetics and mystics, whose life was a voluntary martyrdom to a misunderstood righteousness, a passionate sacrifice to a naïve conception of the cosmos. The infinite pathos of their livestouched him to forgetfulness of his own futility. His soul went out to them, but his brain denied him the comfort of their illusions.
He set his teeth and waited for death.
The Pastor spoke again: "Yes, you have been foolish. But that you say so now shows your soul is not beyond redemption. Christ is ever on the threshold."
Maimon made an impatient gesture. "You asked me if I should not like to see Mendelssohn again. How do you suppose I could face him, if I became a Christian?"
"You forget, my dear Maimon, he knows the Truth now. Must he not rejoice that his daughters have fallen upon the bosom of the Church?"
Maimon sat up in bed with a sudden shock of remembrance that set him coughing.
"Dorothea, but not Henrietta?" he gasped painfully.
"Henrietta too. Did you not know? And Abraham Mendelssohn also has just had his boy Felix baptized—a wonder-child in music, I hear."
Maimon fell back on his pillow, overcome with emotions and thoughts. The tragedy latent in that smile of the sisters had developed itself.
He had long since lost touch with Berlin, ceased to interest himself in Judaism, its petty politics, but now his mind pieced together vividly all that had reached him of the developments of the Jewish question since Mendelssohn's death: the battle of old and new, grown so fierce that the pietists denied the reformers Jewish burial; young men scorning their fathers and crying, "Culture, Culture; down with the Ghetto"; many in the reaction from the yoke of three thousand years falling into braggart profligacy, many more into fashionable Christianity. And the woman of the new generation no less apostate, Henrietta Herz bringing beautiful Jewesses under the fascination ofbrilliant Germans and the romantic movement, so that Mendelssohn's own daughter, Dorothea, had left her husband and children to live with Schlegel, and the immemorial chastity of the Jewess was undermined. And instead of the honorable estimation of his people Mendelssohn had worked for, a violent reaction against the Jews, fomented spiritually by Schleiermacher with his "transcendental Christianity," and politically by Gentz with his cry of "Christian Germany": both men lions of the Jewish-Christian Salon which Mendelssohn had made possible. And the only Judaism that stood stable amid this flux, the ancient rock of Rabbinism he had sought to dislodge, the Amsterdam Jewry refusing even the civil rights for which he had fought.
"Poor Mendelssohn!" thought the dying Maimon. "Which was the Dreamer after all, he or I? Well for him, perhaps, that hisPhœdonis wrong, that he will never know."
The gulf between them vanished, and in a last flash of remorseless insight he saw himself and Mendelssohn at one in the common irony of human destiny.
He murmured: "And how dieth the wise? As the fool."
"What do you say?" said the Pastor.
"It is a verse from the Bible."
"Then are you at peace?"
"I am at peace."
["I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy, I am comedy—Heraclitus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a god.""God's satire weighs heavily upon me. The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly so-called German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery."]
["I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy, I am comedy—Heraclitus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a god."
"God's satire weighs heavily upon me. The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly so-called German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery."]
The carriage stopped, and the speckless footman, jumping down, inquired: "Monsieur Heine?"
Theconcierge, knitting beside theporte cochère, looked at him, looked at the glittering victoria he represented, and at thegrande damewho sat in it, shielding herself with a parasol from the glory of the Parisian sunlight. Then she shook her head.
"But this is number three, Avenue Matignon?"
"Yes, but Monsieur receives only his old friends. He is dying."
"Madame knows. Take up her name.'"
Theconciergeglanced at the elegant card. She saw "Lady"—which she imagined meant an EnglishDuchesse—and words scribbled on it in pencil.
"It isau cinquième," she said, with a sigh.
"I will take it up."
Ere he returned, Madame descended and passed from the sparkling sunshine into the gloom of the portico, with a melancholy consciousness of the symbolic. For her spirit, too, had its poetic intuitions and insights, and had been trained by friendship with one of the wittiest and tenderest women of her time to some more than common apprehension of the greater spirit at whose living tomb she was come to worship. Hers was a fine face, wearing the triple aristocracy of beauty, birth, and letters. The complexion was of lustreless ivory, the black hair wound round and round. The stateliness of her figure completed the impression of a Roman matron.
"Monsieur Heine begs that your ladyship will do him the honor of mounting, and will forgive him the five stories for the sake of the view."
Her ladyship's sadness was tinctured by a faint smile at the message, which the footman delivered without any suspicion that the view in question meant the view of Heine himself. But then that admirable menial had not the advantage of her comprehensive familiarity with Heine's writings. She crossed the blank stony courtyard and curled up the curving five flights, her mind astir with pictures and emotions.
She had scribbled on her card a reminder of her identity; but could he remember, after all those years, and in his grievous sickness, the little girl of eleven who had sat next to him at the Boulognetable d'hôte? And she herself could now scarcely realize at times that the stout, good-natured, short-sighted little man with the big white brow, who had lounged with her daily at the end of the pier, telling her stories, was the most mordant wit in Europe, "the German Aristophanes"; and that those nursery tales,grotesquely compact of mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny old French fiddler with a poodle that diligently took three baths a day, were the frolicsome improvisations of perhaps the greatest lyric poet of his age. She recalled their parting: "When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine!"
To which the little girl: "And who is Heinrich Heine?"
A query which had set the blue-eyed little man roaring with laughter.
These things might be vivid still to her vision: they colored all she had read since from his magic pen—the wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit. But, as for him, doubtless she and her ingenuous interrogation had long since faded from his tumultuous life.
The odors of the sick-room recalled her to the disagreeable present. In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in herserre-têtemotioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two engravings after Léopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty boudoir atmosphere of the artist-life she knew.
But this sordid impression was swallowed up in the vast tragedy behind the screen. Upon a pile of mattresses heaped on the floor lay the poet. He had raised himself a little on his pillows, amid which showed a longish, pointed, white face with high cheek-bones, a Grecian nose, and a large pale mouth, wasted from the sensualism sherecollected in it to a strange Christ-like beauty. The outlines of the shrivelled body beneath the sheet seemed those of a child of ten, and the legs looked curiously twisted. One thin little hand, as of transparent wax, delicately artistic, upheld a paralyzed eyelid, through which he peered at her.
"LucyLiebchen!" he piped joyously. "So you have found out who Heinrich Heine is!"
He used the familiar German "du"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were then painfully, prosaically true.
"Can it be that I still actually exist? My body is so shrunk that there is hardly anything left of me but my voice, and my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin, which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose tops shine like green flames to heaven. Oh, I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh waving. For over my mattress grave here in Paris no green leaves rustle, and early and late I hear nothing but the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of pianos. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books...."
And then she thought of that ghastly comparison of himself to the ancient German singer—the poor clerk of the Chronicle of Limburg—whose sweet songs were sung and whistled from morning to night all through Germany; while theMinnesingerhimself, smitten with leprosy, hooded and cloaked, and carrying the lazarus-clapper, moved through the shuddering city. God's satire weighed heavilyupon him, indeed. Silently she held out her hand, and he gave her his bloodless fingers; she touched the strangely satin skin, and felt the fever beneath.
"It cannot be my little Lucy," he said reproachfully. "She used to kiss me. But even Lucy's kiss cannot thrill my paralyzed lips."
She stooped and kissed his lips. His little beard felt soft and weak as the hair of a baby.
"Ah, I have made my peace with the world and with God. Now He sends me His death-angel."
She struggled with the lump in her throat. "You must be indeed a prey to illusions, if you mistake an Englishwoman for Azrael."
"Ach, why was I so bitter against England? I was only once in England, years ago. I knew nobody, and London seemed so full of fog and Englishmen. Now England has avenged herself beautifully. She sends me you. Others too mount the hundred and five steps. I am an annexe to the Paris Exhibition. Remains of Heinrich Heine. A very pilgrimage of the royaldemi-monde! A Russian princess brings the hateful odor of her pipe," he said with scornful satisfaction, "an Italian princess babbles ofheraches and pains, as if in competition with mine. But the gold medal would fall tomynerves, I am convinced, if they were on view at the Exhibition. No, no, don't cry; I meant you to laugh. Don't think of me as you see me now; pretend to me I am as you first knew me. But how fine and beautifulyouhave grown; even to my fraction of an eye, which sees the sunlight as through black gauze. Fancy little Lucy has a husband; a husband—and the poodle still takes three baths a day. Are you happy, darling? are you happy?"
She nodded. It seemed a sacrilege to claim happiness.
"Das ist schön!Yes, you were always so merry. Godbe thanked! How refreshing to find one woman with a heart, and that her husband's. Here the women have a metronome under their corsets, which beats time, but not music.Himmel!What a whiff of my youth you bring me! Does the sea still roll green at the end of Boulogue pier, and do the sea-gulls fly? while I lie here, a Parisian Prometheus, chained to my bed-post. Ah, had I only the bliss of a rock with the sky above me! But I must not complain; for six years before I moved here I had nothing but a ceiling to defy. Now my balcony gives sideways on the Champs-Elysées, and sometimes I dare to lie outside on a sofa and peer at beautiful, beautiful Paris, as she sends up her soul in sparkling fountains, and incarnates herself in pretty women, who trip along like dance music. Look!"
To please him she went to a window and saw, upon the narrow iron-grilled balcony, a tent of striped chintz, like the awning of a café, supported by a light iron framework. Her eyes were blurred by unshed tears, and she divined rather than saw the far-stretching Avenue, palpitating with the fevered life of the Great Exhibition year; the intoxicating sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees dappling with shade the leafy footways, the white fountain-spray and flaming flower-beds of the Rond Point, the flashing flickering stream of carriages flowing to the Bois with their freight of beauty and wealth and insolent vice.
"The first time I looked out of that window," he said, "I seemed to myself like Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy, when once again he beheld the stars. You cannot know what I felt when after so many years I saw the world again for the first time, with half an eye, for ever so little a space. I had my wife's opera-glass in my hand, and I saw with inexpressible pleasure a young vagrant vendor of pastry offering his goods to two ladies in crinolines, with a small dog. I closed the glass; I could see no more, forI envied the dog. The nurse carried me back to bed and gave me morphia. That day I looked no more. For me the Divine Comedy was far from ended. The divine humorist has even descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's coffin. I lie between the two Champs-Elysées, the one where warm life palpitates, and that other, where the pale ghosts flit."
Then it was not a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated divinity"? But his amusement thereat had been genial. "Like a mad harlequin," he had written of Byron, the man to whom he felt himself most related, "he strikes a dagger into his own heart, to sprinkle mockingly with the jetting black blood the ladies and gentlemen around.... My blood is not so splenetically black; my bitterness comes only from the gall-apples of my ink." But now, she thought, that bitter draught always at his lips had worked into his blood at last.
"Are you quite incurable?" she said gently, as she returned from the window to seat herself at his mattress graveside.
"No, I shall die some day. Gruby says very soon. But doctors are so inconsistent. Last week, after I had had a frightful attack of cramp in the throat and chest, 'Pouvez-vous siffler?' he said. 'Non, pas méme une comédie de M. Scribe,' I replied. So you may see how bad I was. Well, even that, he said, wouldn't hasten the end, and I should go on living indefinitely! I had to caution him not to tell my wife. Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And now he turns round again and bids me order my coffin. But I fear, despite his latest bulletin, Ishall go on some time yet increasing my knowledge of spinal disease. I read all the books about it, as well as experiment practically. What clinical lectures I will give in heaven, demonstrating the ignorance of doctors!"
She was glad to note the more genialnuanceof mockery. Raillery vibrated almost in the very tones of his voice, which had become clear and penetrating under the stimulus of her presence, but it passed away in tenderness, and the sarcastic wrinkles vanished from the corners of his mouth as he made the pathetic jest anent his wife.
"So you read as well as write," she said.
"Oh, well, De Zichlinsky, a nice young refugee, does both for me most times. My mother, poor old soul, wrote the other day to know why I only signed my letters, so I had to say my eyes pained me, which was not so untrue as the rest of the letter."
"Doesn't she know?"
"Know? God bless her, of course not. Dear old lady, dreaming so happily at the Dammthor, too old and wise to read newspapers. No, she does not know that she has a dying son, only that she has an undying!Nicht Wahr?"
He looked at her with a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his life-work, and morbidly conscious of his hosts of enemies.
"As long as the German tongue lives."
"Dear old Germany," he said, pleased. "Yes, as I wrote to you, foryouare theliebe Kleineof the poem,
'Nennt man die besten Namen,So wird auch der meine genannt.'"
'Nennt man die besten Namen,So wird auch der meine genannt.'"
She was flattered, but thought sadly of the sequel:
"'Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,[343]So wird auch der meine genannt'"
"'Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,[343]So wird auch der meine genannt'"
as he went on:—
"That was why, though the German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul, I would not become naturalized here. Paris has been my new Jerusalem, and I crossed my Jordan at the Rhine; but as a French subject I should be like those two-headed monstrosities they show at the fairs. Besides, I hate French poetry. What measured glitter! Not that German poetry has ever been to me more than a divine plaything. A laurel-wreath on my grave, place or withhold, I care not; but lay on my coffin a sword, for I was as brave a soldier as your Canning in the Liberation War of Humanity. But my Thirty Years' War is over, and I die 'with sword unbroken, and a broken heart.'" His head fell back in ineffable hopelessness. "Ah," he murmured, "it was ever my prayer, 'Lord, let me grow old in body, but let my soul stay young; let my voice quaver and falter, but never my hope.' And this is how I end."
"But your work does not end. Your fight was not vain. You are the inspirer of young Germany. And you are praised and worshipped by all the world. Is that no pleasure?"
"No, I am notle bon Dieu!" He chuckled, his spirits revived by the blasphemousmot." Ah, what a fate! To have the homage only of the fools, a sort of celestial Victor Cousin. One compliment from Hegel now must be sweeter than a churchful of psalms." A fearful fit of coughing interrupted further elaboration of the blasphemous fantasia. For five minutes it rent and shook him, the nurse bending fruitlessly over him; but at its wildest he signed to his visitor not to go, and when at last it lulled he went on calmly: "Donizetti ended mad in a galadress, but I end at least sane enough to appreciate the joke—a little long-drawn out, and not entirely original, yet replete with ingenious irony. Little Lucy looks shocked, but I sometimes think, little Lucy, the disrespect is with the goody-goody folks, who, while lauding their Deity's strength and hymning His goodness, show no recognition at all of His humor. Yet I am praised as a wit as well as a poet. If I could take up my bed and walk, I would preach a new worship—the worship of the Arch-Humorist. I should draw up the Ritual of the Ridiculous. Three times a day, when themuezzincalled from the Bourse-top, all the faithful would laugh devoutly at the gigantic joke of the cosmos. How sublime, the universal laugh! at sunrise, noon, and sunset; those who did not laugh would be persecuted; they would laugh, if only on the wrong side of the mouth. Delightful! As most people have no sense of humor, they will swallow the school catechism of the comic as stolidly as they now swallow the spiritual. Yes, I see you willnotlaugh. But why may I not endow my Deity—as everybody else does—with the quality which I possess or admire most?"
She felt some truth in his apology. He was mocking, not God, but the magnified man of the popular creeds; to him it was a mere intellectual counter with which his wit played, oblivious of the sacredaurathat clung round the concept for the bulk of the world. Even his famous picture of Jehovah dying, or his suggestion that perhapsdieser Parvenu des Himmelswas angry with Israel for reminding Him of his former obscure national relations—what was it but a lively rendering of what German savants said so unreadably about the evolution of the God-Idea? But she felt also it would have been finer to bear unsmiling the smileless destinies; not to affront with the tinkle of vainlaughter the vast imperturbable. She answered gently, "You are talking nonsense."
"I always talked nonsense to you, little Lucy, for
'My heart is wise and wittyAnd it bleeds within my breast.'
'My heart is wise and wittyAnd it bleeds within my breast.'
Will you hear its melodious drip-drip, my last poem?—My manuscript, Catherine; and then you can go take a nap. I am sure I gave you little rest last night."
The old woman brought him some folio sheets covered with great pathetically sprawling letters, and when she had retired, he began—
"Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin,Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke...?"
"Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin,Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke...?"
His voice went on, but after the first lines the listener's brain was too troubled to attend. It was agitated with whirling memories of those earlier outcries throbbing with the passion of life, flaming records of the days when every instant held not an eternity ofennui, but of sensibility. "Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils...." But the poet was still reading—she forced herself to listen.
"'Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes,Old faded gods, this brain is full;Who, for their most unholy rites,Have chosen a dead poet's skull.'"
"'Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes,Old faded gods, this brain is full;Who, for their most unholy rites,Have chosen a dead poet's skull.'"
He broke off suddenly. "No, it is too sad. A cry in the night from a man buried alive; a new note in Germanpoetry—was sage ich?—in the poetry of the world. No poet ever had such a lucky chance before—voyez-vous—to survive his own death, though many a one has survived his own immortality. Dicimiserante obitum nemo debet—call no man wretched till he's dead. 'Tis not till the journey is over that one can see the perspective truthfully and the tombstones of one's hopes and illusions marking the weary miles. 'Tis not till one is dead that the day of judgment can dawn; and when one is dead one cannot see or judge at all. An exquisite irony.Nicht Wahr?The wrecks in the Morgue, what tales they could tell! But dead men tell no tales. While there's life there's hope; and so the worst cynicisms have never been spoken. But I—I alone—have dodged the Fates. I am the dead-alive, the living dead. I hover over my racked body like a ghost, and exist in an interregnum. And so I am the first mortal in a position to demand an explanation. Don't tell me I have sinned, and am in hell. Most sins are sins of classification by bigots and poor thinkers. Who can live without sinning, or sin without living? All very well for Kant to say: 'Act so that your conduct may be a law for all men under similar conditions.' But Kant overlooked thatyouare part of the conditions. And when you are a Heine, you may very well concede that future Heines should act just so. It is easy enough to be virtuous when you are a professor of pure reason, a regular, punctual mechanism, a thing for the citizens of Königsberg to set their watches by. But if you happen to be one of those fellows to whom all the roses nod and all the stars wink ... I am for Schelling's principle: the highest spirits are above the law. No, no, the parson's explanation won't do. Perhaps heaven holds different explanations, graduated to rising intellects, from parsons upwards. Moses Lump will be satisfied with a gold chair, and thecherubim singing, 'holy! holy! holy!' in Hebrew, and ask no further questions. Abdullah Ben Osman's mouth will be closed by the kisses of houris. Surely Christ will not disappoint the poor old grandmother's vision of Jerusalem the Golden seen through tear-dimmed spectacles as she pores over the family Bible. He will meet her at the gates of death with a wonderful smile of love; and, as she walks upon the heavenly Jordan's shining waters, hand in hand with Him, she will see her erst-wrinkled face reflected from them in angelic beauty. Ah, but to tackle a Johann Wolfgang Goethe or a Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—what an ordeal for the celestial Professor of Apologetics! Perhaps that's what the Gospel means—only by becoming little children can we enter the kingdom of heaven. I told my little god-daughter yesterday that heaven is so pure and magnificent that they eat cakes there all day—it is only what the parson says, translated into child-language—and that the little cherubs wipe their mouths with their white wings. 'That's very dirty,' said the child. I fear that unless I become a child myself I shall have severer criticisms to bring against the cherubs. O God," he broke off suddenly, letting fall the sheets of manuscript and stretching out his hands in prayer, "make me a child again, even before I die; give me back the simple faith, the clear vision of the child that holds its father's hand. Oh, little Lucy, it takes me like that sometimes, and I have to cry for mercy. I dreamt Iwasa child the other night, and saw my dear father again. He was putting on his wig, and I saw him as through a cloud of powder. I rushed joyfully to embrace him; but, as I approached him, everything seemed changing in the mist. I wished to kiss his hands, but I recoiled with mortal cold. The fingers were withered branches, my father himself a leafless tree, which the winter had covered with hoar-frost. Ah, Lucy, Lucy,my brain is full of madness and my heart of sorrow. Sing me the ballad of the lady who took only one spoonful of gruel, 'with sugar and spices so rich.'"
Astonished at his memory, she repeated the song of Ladye Alice and Giles Collins, the poet laughing immoderately till at the end,
"The parson licked up the rest,"
"The parson licked up the rest,"
in his effort to repeat the line that so tickled him, he fell into a fearful spasm, which tore and twisted him till his child's body lay curved like a bow. Her tears fell at the sight.
"Don't pity me too much," he gasped, trying to smile with his eyes; "I bend, but I do not break."
But she, terrified, rang the bell for aid. A jovial-looking woman—tall and well-shaped—came in, holding a shirt she was sewing. Her eyes and hair were black, and her oval face had the rude coloring of health. She brought into the death-chamber at once a whiff of ozone, and a suggestion of tragic incongruity. Nodding pleasantly at the visitor, she advanced quickly to the bedside, and laid her hand upon the forehead, sweating with agony.
"Mathilde," he said, when the spasm abated, "this is little Lucy of whom I have never spoken to you, and to whom I wrote a poem about her dark-brown eyes which you have never read."
Mathilde smiled amiably at the Roman matron.
"No, I have never read it," she said archly. "They tell me that Heine is a very clever man, and writes very fine books; but I know nothing about it, and must content myself with trusting to their word."
"Isn't she adorable?" cried Heine delightedly. "I have only two consolations that sit at my bedside, my French wife and my German muse, and they are not on speakingterms. But it has its compensations, for she is unable also to read what my enemies in Germany say about me, and so she continues to love me."
"How can he have enemies?" said Mathilde, smoothing his hair. "He is so good to everybody. He has only two thoughts—to hide his illness from his mother, and to earn enough for my future. And as for having enemies in Germany, how can that be, when he is so kind to every poor German that passes through Paris?"
It moved the hearer to tears—this wifely faith. Surely the saint that lay behind the Mephistopheles in his face must have as real an existence, if the woman who knew him only as man, undazzled by the glitter of his fame, unwearied by his long sickness, found him thus without flaw or stain.
"Delicious creature," said Heine fondly. "Not only thinks me good, but thinks that goodness keeps off enemies. What ignorance of life she crams into a dozen words. As for those poor countrymen of mine, they are just the people that carry back to Germany all the awful tales of my goings-on. Do you know, there was once a poor devil of a musician who had set myZwei Grenadiere, and to whom I gave no end of help and advice, when he wanted to make an opera on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which I had treated in one of my books. Now he curses me and all the Jews together, and his name is Richard Wagner."
Mathilde smiled on vaguely. "You would eat those cutlets," she said reprovingly.
"Well, I was weary of the chopped grass cook calls spinach. I don't want seven years of Nebuchadnezzardom."
"Cook is angry when you don't eat her things,chéri. I find it difficult to get on with her, since you praised her dainty style. One would think she was the mistress and I the servant."
"Ah, Nonotte, you don't understand the artistic temperament." Then a twitch passed over his face. "You must give me a double dose of morphia to-night, darling."
"No, no; the doctor forbids."
"One would think he were the employer and I the employee," he grumbled smilingly. "But I daresay he is right. Already I spend 500 francs a year on morphia, I must really retrench. So run away, dearest, I have a good friend here to cheer me up."
She stooped down and kissed him.
"Ah, madame," she said, "it is very good of you to come and cheer him up. It is as good as a new dress to me, to see a new face coming in, for the old ones begin to drop off. Not the dresses, the friends," she added gaily, as she disappeared.
"Isn't she divine?" cried Heine enthusiastically.
"I am glad you love her," his visitor replied simply.
"You mean you are astonished. Love? What is love? I have never loved."
"You!" And all those stories those countrymen of his had spread abroad, all his own love-poems were in that exclamation.
"No—never mortal woman. Only statues and the beautiful dead dream-women, vanished with theneiges d'antan. What did it matter whom I married? Perhaps you would have had me aspire higher than agrisette? To a tradesman's daughter? Or a demoiselle in society? 'Explain my position?'—a poor exile's position—to some double-chinnedbourgeoispapa who can only see that my immortal books are worth exactly two thousand marksbanco; yes, that's the most I can wring out of those scoundrels in wicked Hamburg. And to think that if I had only done my writing in ledgers, the 'prentice millionaire might have become the master millionaire, ungalled by avuncularadvice and chary cheques. Ah, dearest Lucy, you can never understand what we others suffer—you into whose mouths the larks drop roasted. Should I marry fashion and be stifled? Or money and be patronized? And lose the exquisite pleasure of toiling to buy my wife new dresses and knick-knacks?Après tout, Mathilde is quite as intelligent as any other daughter of Eve, whose first thought when she came to reflective consciousness was a new dress. All great men are mateless, 'tis only their own ribs they fall in love with. A more cultured woman would only have misunderstood me more pretentiously. Not that I didn't, in a weak moment, try to give her a little polish. I sent her to a boarding-school to learn to read and write; my child of nature among all the little school-girls—ha! ha! ha!—and I only visited her on Sundays, and she could rattle off the Egyptian Kings better than I, and once she told me with great excitement the story of Lucretia, which she had heard for the first time. Dear Nonotte! You should have seen her dancing at the school ball, as graceful and maidenly as the smallest shrimp of them all. Whatgaieté de cœur! What good humor! What mother-wit! And such a faithful chum. Ah, the French women are wonderful. We have been married fifteen years, and still, when I hear her laugh come through that door, my soul turns from the gates of death and remembers the sun. Oh, how I love to see her go off to Mass every morning with her toilette nicely adjusted and her dainty prayer-book in her neatly gloved hand, for she's adorably religious, is my little Nonotte. You look surprised; did you then think religious people shock me!"
She smiled a little. "But don't you shock her?"
"I wouldn't for worlds utter a blasphemy she could understand. Do you think Shakespeare explained himself to Ann Hathaway? But she doubtless served well enough asartist's model; raw material to be worked up into Imogens and Rosalinds. Enchanting creatures! How you foggy islanders could have begotten Shakespeare! The miracle of miracles. And Sterne!Mais non, an Irishman like Swift,Ça s'explique.Is Sterne read?"
"No; he is only a classic."
"Barbarians! Have you read my book on Shakespeare's heroines? It is good;nicht wahr?"
"Admirable."
"Then, why shouldn't you translate it into English?"
"It is an idea."
"It is an inspiration. Nay, why shouldn't you translate all my books? You shall; you must. You know how the French editionfait fureur. French, that is the European hall-mark, for Paris is Athens. But English will mean famein ultima Thule; the isles of the sea, as the Bible says. It isn't for the gold pieces, though, God knows, Mathilde needs more friends, as we call them—perhaps because they leave us so soon. I fear she doesn't treat them too considerately, the poor little featherhead. Heaven preserve you from the irony of having to earn your living on your death-bed!Ach, my publisher, Campe, has built himself a new establishment; what a monument to me! Why should not some English publisher build me a monument in London? The Jew's books, like the Jew, should be spread abroad, so that in them all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. For the Jew peddles, not only old clo', but new ideas. I began life—tell it not in Gath—as a commission agent for English goods; and I end it as an intermediary between France and Germany, trying to make two great nations understand each other. To that not unworthy aim has all my later work been devoted."
"So you really consider yourself a Jew still?"
"Mein Gott!have I ever been anything else but an enemy of the Philistines?"
She smiled: "Yes; but religiously?"
"Religiously! What was my whole fight to rouse Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? Why did I edit a newspaper, and plague myself with our time and its interests? Goethe has created glorious Greek statues, but statues cannot have children. My words should find issue in deeds. Put me rather with poor Lessing. I am no true Hellenist. I may have snatched at pleasure, but self-sacrifice has always called to the depths of me. Like my ancestor, David, I have been not only a singer, I have slung my smooth little pebbles at the forehead of Goliath."
"Yes; but haven't you turned Catholic?"
"Catholic!" he roared like a roused lion, "they say that again! Has the myth of death-bed conversion already arisen about me? How they jump, the fools, at the idea of a man's coming round to their views when his brain grows weak!"
"No, not death-bed conversion. Quite an old history. I was assured you had married in a Catholic Church."
"To please Mathilde. Without that the poor creature wouldn't have thought herself married in a manner sufficiently pleasing to God. It is true we had been living together without any Church blessing at all, butque voulez-vous? Women are like that. But for a duel I had to fight, I should have been satisfied to go on as we were. I understand by a wife something nobler than a married woman chained to me by money-brokers and parsons, and I deemed myfaux ménagefar firmer than many a "true" one. But since Iwasto be married, I could not leave my beloved Nonotte a dubious widowhood. We even invited a number of Bohemian couples to the wedding-feast, and bade them follow our example in daring the last step of all. Ha! ha!there is nothing like a convert's zeal, you see. But convert to Catholicism, that's another pair of sleeves. If your right eye offends you, pluck it out; if your right arm offends you, cut it off. And if your reason offends you, become a Catholic. No, no, Lucy, I may have worshipped the Madonna in song, for how can a poet be insensible to the beauty of Catholic symbol and ritual? But a Jew I have always been."
"Despite your baptism?"
The sufferer groaned, but not from physical pain.
"Ah, cruel little Lucy, don't remind me of my youthful folly. Thank your stars you were born an Englishwoman. I was born under the fearful conjunction of Christian bigotry and Jewish, in the Judenstrasse. In my cradle lay my line of life marked out from beginning to end. My God, what a life! You know how Germany treated her Jews—like pariahs and wild beasts. At Frankfort for centuries the most venerable Rabbi had to take off his hat if the smallest gamin cried: 'Jud', mach mores!' I have myself been shut up in that Ghetto, I have witnessed a Jew-riot more than once in Hamburg. Ah, Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune. And to be born a Jewanda genius! What a double curse! Believe me, Lucy, a certificate of baptism was a necessary card of admission to European culture. Neither my mother nor my money-bag of an uncle sympathized with my shuddering reluctance to wade through holy water to my doctor's degree. And yet no sooner had I taken the dip than a great horror came over me. Many a time I got up at night and looked in the glass, and cursed myself for my want of backbone! Alas! my curses were more potent than those of the Rabbis against Spinoza, and this disease was sent me to destroy such backbone as I had. No wonder the doctors do not understand it. I learnt in the Ghetto that if I didn't twinethe holy phylacteries round my arm, serpents would be found coiled round the arm of my corpse. Alas! serpents have never failed to coil themselves round my sins. The Inquisition could not have tortured me more, had I been a Jew of Spain. If I had known how much easier moral pain was to bear than physical, I would have saved my curses for my enemies, and put up with my conscience—twinges. Ah, truly said your divine Shakespeare that the wisest philosopher is not proof against a toothache. When was any spasm of pleasure so sustained as pain? Certain of our bones, I learn from my anatomy books, only manifest their existence when they are injured. Happy are the bones that have no history. Ugh! how mine are coming through the skin, like ugly truth through fair romance. I shall have to apologize to the worms for offering them nothing but bones. Alas, how ugly bitter it is to die; how sweet and snugly we can live in this snug, sweet nest of earth. What nice words; I must start a poem with them. Yes, sooner than die I would live over again my miserable boyhood in my uncle Salomon's office, miscalculating in his ledgers like a Trinitarian, while I scribbled poems for theHamburg Wächter. Yes, I would even rather learn Latin again at the Franciscan cloister, and grind law at Göttingen. For, after all, I shouldn't have to work very hard; a pretty girl passes, and to the deuce with the Pandects! Ah, those wild University days, when we used to go and sup at the 'Landwehr,' and the rosy youngKellnerin, who brought us our duckmit Apfelkompot, kissed me alone of all theHerren Studenten, because I was a poet, and already as famous as the professors. And then, after I should be re-rusticated from Göttingen, there would be Berlin over again, and dear Rahel Levin and her salon, and the Tuesdays at Elise von Hohenhausen's (at which I would read myLyrical Intermezzo), and the mad literary nightswith the poets in the Behrenstrasse. And balls, theatres, operas, masquerades—shall I ever forget the ball when Sir Walter Scott's son appeared as a Scotch Highlander, just when all Berlin was mad about the Waverley Novels! I, too, should read them over again for the first time, those wonderful romances; yes, and I should write my own early books over again—oh, the divine joy of early creation!—and I should set out again with bounding pulses on myHarzreise: and the first night ofFreischützwould come once more, and I should be whistling theJungfernand sipping punch in the Casino, with Lottchen filling up my glass." His eyes oozed tears, and suddenly he stretched out his arms and seized her hand and pressed it frantically, his face and body convulsed, his paralyzed eyelids dropping. "No, no!" he pleaded, in a hoarse, hollow voice, as she strove to withdraw it, "I hear the footsteps of death, I must cling on to life; I must, I must. O the warmth and the scent of it!"
She shuddered. For an instant he seemed a vampire with shut eyes sucking at her life-blood to sustain his; and when that horrible fantasy passed, there remained the overwhelming tragedy of a dead man lusting for life. Not this the ghost, who, as Berlioz put it, stood at the window of his grave, regarding and mocking the world in which he had no further part. But his fury waned, he fell back as in a stupor, and lay silent, little twitches passing over his sightless face.
She bent over him, terribly distressed. Should she go? Should she ring again? Presently words came from his lips at intervals, abrupt, disconnected, and now a ribald laugh, and now a tearful sigh. And then he was a student humming: