Part 9 (1/2)
One has only to turn over the pages of his _Romancero_,[164]--a collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the air of his _Matrazzen-gruft_, his ”mattress-grave,”--to see Heine's width of range; the most varied figures succeed one another,--Rhampsinitus,[165] Edith with the Swan Neck,[166] Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of _Mabille_, Melisanda of Tripoli,[167] Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the Cruel[168], Firdusi[169], Cortes, Dr. Dollinger[170];--but never does Heine attempt to be _hubsch objectiv_, ”beautifully objective,” to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the _Spanish Atridae_[171] in which he describes, in the character of a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare[172] at Segovia, Henry's treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel. Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbor, strolls after dinner through the castle with him:--
”In the cloister-pa.s.sage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the king's hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long way off where they are,
”There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong iron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage.
”Two human figures sate therein, two young boys; chained by the leg, they crouched in the dirty straw.
”Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other not much older; their faces fair and n.o.ble, but pale and wan with sickness.
”They were all in rags, almost naked; and their lean bodies showed wounds, the marks of ill-usage; both of them s.h.i.+vered with fever.
”They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery; 'Who,' I cried in horror to Don Diego, 'are these pictures of wretchedness?'
”Don Diego seemed embarra.s.sed; he looked round to see that no one was listening; then he gave a deep sigh; and at last, putting on the easy tone of a man of the world, he said:--
”'These are a pair of king's sons, who were early left orphans; the name of their father was King Pedro, the name of their mother, Maria de Padilla.
”'After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of Transtamare had relieved his brother, King Pedro, of the troublesome burden of the crown,
”'And likewise of that still more troublesome burden, which is called life, then Don Henry's victorious magnanimity had to deal with his brother's children.
”'He has adopted them, as an uncle should; and he has given them free quarters in his own castle.
”'The room which he has a.s.signed to them is certainly rather small, but then it is cool in summer, and not intolerably cold in winter.
”'Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the G.o.ddess Ceres had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine.
”'Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them with garbanzos,[173]and then the young gentlemen know that it is Sunday in Spain.
”'But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do not come every day; and the master of the hounds gives them the treat of his whip.
”'For the master of the hounds, who has under his superintendence the kennels and the pack, and the nephews' cage also,
”'Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced woman with the white ruff, whom we remarked to-day at dinner.
”'And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband s.n.a.t.c.hes his whip, and rushes down here, and gives it to the dogs and to the poor little boys.
”'But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of such proceedings, and has given orders that for the future his nephews are to be treated differently from the dogs.
”'He has determined no longer to entrust the disciplining of his nephews to a mercenary stranger, but to carry it out with his own hands.'
”Don Diego stopped abruptly; for the seneschal of the castle joined us, and politely expressed his hope that we had dined to our satisfaction.”
Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finis.h.i.+ng with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly and truly modern.
No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him. His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renascence,--a h.e.l.lenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence--and how both have been great powers ever since.
He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art,--the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his ”longing which cannot be uttered,”[174] he is Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like this?--”There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker's Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump; all the week he goes about in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few s.h.i.+llings; but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking themselves off; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, t.i.tus, and all such people, are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and daughter; and I can tell you, Doctor, the fish is delicate and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he sits contented in his religion and in his green bedgown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will snuff for himself; and I can tell you, if the candles burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say: 'Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted you';--Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: 'Snuff me those candles!' and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with admiration: 'If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump.'”[175]
There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side; in the poem of the _Princess Sabbath_[176] he shows it to us by a more serious side.