Heinrich Heine [pp. 23-31]

APPLETONS' JOURNAL.
tender to his wife and mother. He had a sting fox
every virtue, and compassion for every suffering. A
thorough skeptic as to faith, he was a religionist in
art. Irritable and morbidly sensitive through life,
he bore years of absolute helplessness and supreme
pain with heroic fortitude. He so defied and derided
death that it seemed afraid to take him. When
saints might have murmured and moaned, this brill iant sinner was cheerful and jocose, and fairly con quered Fate by omnipotence of will. Entirely with out hope, he had a patience beyond hope, and, scorn ing resignation, he was more than resigned. Believ ing nothing, and expecting nothing, spiritually, he
supplied the place of belief and expectation with a
mystical philosophy and a sublime egotism as meas ureless as it was imperturbable.
It is as hard to say what he was as it is easy to
say what he was not, for he was stuffed with antago nisms, and his numberless kind acts were sarcasms
on the cynicism he professed. His nature embraced
the remotest eras: in soul he was an early Hebrew;
in spirit an ancient Greek; in mind a republican of
the nineteenth century. He misunderstood himself,
and misinterpreted life often; but he saw truths
which better men could not see, and was one of the
first to catch the deep undertone of his time. He
had great vices and great virtues mysteriously blend ed; he was completely secular, and so intensely hu man that he necessarily ignored the divine. Much
that he did was intolerable and inexcusable, and yet
-his worst behavior was relieved by exceeding good ness, which he would never have owned. He had
sovereign faith in the world and the flesh; but he
surrendered the devil, as he said himself, to the theo logians who invented him, and could never have got
on without him. Nothing, unless it were beauty,
was too sacred for his satire; he loved to drag the
accepted sanctities in the dust, and, when the public
was shocked, to shock it anew by showing that they
were not real jewels, only worthless bits of colored
glass.
Heine so completely discarded Germany, though
France never fully adopted him, that he may be said
to have been a man without a country, which he did
not need, since he considered the world as his native
land, and Paris as its capital and centre. "Give me
the boulevards and the Champs Elys6es," was one
of his speeches, "and you may do what you like
with the rest of civilization." Patriotism he declared
to be the weakness of stupidity, and the ass's ears
of provincialism. He had a happy faculty for making enemies, and he gave his faculty constant exercise.
"Never trust a man who has friends," is his
gibe; "he is certain to be a hypocrite, and will
some time betray you."
He was not content to turn individuals into foes;
his ambition extended to whole countries and entire
creeds. He exasperated Germany until it was at a
white heat of passion. He rendered Great Britain
hostile by ridiculing the conservatism of its subjects, and censuring the British Constitution itself;
and the person who would do that would, to their
mind, be capable of selling his own children, or of
mentioning with irreverence the Tropic of Capri corn. He offended the Jews by his apostasy, and
outraged the Christians by leaving them, and be coming an infidel. He angered the infidels by an
apparent moderation of his opinions in accepting a
peculiar form of theism, indefinite to himself, and
unintelligible to others. Inl fact, the persons and
causes he did not affront and shock were too few and
too insignificant to be mentioned. If he kept any
friends, it was not from lack of endeavor on his
part to get rid of them; for he was inclined to treat
them not as if they might some time be his enemies,
but as if they had already become such. His notion
of liberty was so extreme that he allowed it to de generate into licentiousness, and his passion for in dependence was so irregular that he permitted no
sense of gratitude, no claims of affection, to inter fere with it. " True independence," he avers,
"never looks back; never considers anything but
what belongs to itself."
Quotations from Heine, it may be here remarked,
are as contradictory as himself. Their great range
and inconsistency may be illustrated by saying that
they would excuse and condemn every act, noble
and ignoble, of his checkered career. They were
the offspring of impulse, and often merely the exer cise of his understanding to keep himself well in
practice.
This strange and gifted character was born in
Duisseldorf, January I, i8oo (different dates of his
birth are given, but this seems to be the correct one),
which is a significant fact, inasmuch as he so fully
embodied the spirit of the nineteenth century. He
came into the world the very last year of the past
age, as if he were specially designed to illustrate the
varied and opposing forces of the coming century
by his wayward and wandering genius. The poet
refers to his birthplace in the "Reisebilder:" " I first
beheld the light on the banks of that beautiful
stream (the Rhine), on whose emerald hills Folly
grows, and in autumn is pressed and gathered into
casks and sent to foreign lands. Yesterday, I assure
you, I heard a man talk folly, which, in my childhood, lay in a bunch of grapes that I saw growing
on the sunny slopes of the Johannisberg. Now I
am again a child, playing with other children on the
Satosplatz. There was I born. I mention this
lest, after my death, seven cities-Bockum, Dilken,
G6ttingen, Krihwinkel, Polkinitz, Schilda, and Schaffenstadt-should contend for the honor of presenting
me to the world. DItsseldorf is a town on the Rhine;
sixteen thousand people live there, and hundreds of
thousands have died there." His father was a Hebrew merchant in ordinary circumstances, and his
uncle the rich Jewish banker, Salomon Heine, distinguished for his philanthropy. His bias toward
literature was early shown. When he was in his
eleventh year, he wrote an encomium in verse to Napoleon Bonaparte on the occasion of the emperor's
visit to his native city. The visit greatly impressed
the boy-poet, who was to the last an enthusiastic
admirer of the wonderful Corsican. He has told us
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