The Galaxy, April, 1877 Part 18

When the girl looked up again, the morning star shone over the sea, a fresh wind blew out of the yellowing sky, but she was alone upon the sands.

LOUISE STOCKTON.

ON BEING BORN AWAY FROM HOME.

Reading, the other day, in Mr. Stigand's interesting "Life of Heine,"

about the young poet's discontent in Germany, about his long desire to quit that country and to live in France, and of his final hegira to Paris, it occurred to me that he might be described, not too fancifully, as having been born away from home. How many have had the same fortune, whether for good or ill. But the happier cla.s.s is the contrasting one, that of persons who have never suffered from the stress of the migrating instinct; and surely it is a fortunate thing to be born in one's own place, as Lamb was born in London, to grow in the fit soil, to lose no time in striking root. Lamb was the happiest of men in this respect. A true child of the city, he held that London was a better place to be born in than any part of the country. "A garden,"

he writes to Wordsworth, "was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean boldness and felicity, luckily sinned himself out of it."

For _garden_ if we read _farm_ in this pa.s.sage, we have, perhaps, a statement of the feeling which prompts our own country people, and more and more with successive years, to leave the country and come to the city--to crowd the towns and desert the fields. Lamb says again--and one almost trembles to see him thus defying the "poet of nature" to his face--"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.... I do not envy you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything." But Wordsworth, the Laker, was quite as clearly born at home as Lamb, the Londoner; and, as we know, he came back to his native hills after no long wanderings, not to quit them again. It is because Lamb hardly wandered at all that he seems so truly autochthonous, so peculiarly a child of the soil. He struck deep root into the intellectual alluvium of London, and until he was fifty years old he suffered nothing from transplantation except when he changed his lodgings or paid his somewhat reluctant visits to friends in the country; and when, at fifty, he ventured away from London, it was no further than to the margin of the city of Paradise--to Enfield, Edmonton--the latter a place which he calls "a little teasing image of a town," where "the country folks do not look like country folks," and where "the very blackguards are degenerate." It was only in London that Lamb's spirit really nourished itself and grew.

And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices, bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood,"

such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright s.p.a.ces and pursuing swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wilts.h.i.+re!"

Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere, and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!

That, however, is but a melancholy _utinam_; there has been no lack of fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our painters, for whom the new country was not yet a quite satisfactory place, displayed perhaps the strongest homing tendency. Copley, West, and Stuart, for instance, all American born, had to seek an older home of art. West returned in youth to England, and Copley in early manhood; there they made their careers, there they lived and died; while Stuart, after pa.s.sing fifteen years in Europe, came back to settle in America.

But none of these artists quite severed himself from his native country. American themes served each of them for some of his best known works: as in Stuart's famous "Was.h.i.+ngton," West's "Death of General Wolfe," and Copley's first historical picture, so called, the "Youth Rescued from a Shark."[4]

[4] Now, I believe, in the Boston Athenaeum.

There, too, was Copley's son, born, like his father, in New England.

In 1774 he was taken to London, where he too made his career, a distinguished one; for the Boston boy lived to become Baron Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor. But as the eminent n.o.bleman to be, at the time of his demigration, was but two years old, it is difficult to point out any traits of distinctively American statesmans.h.i.+p in his career.

And that other American n.o.bleman, Count Rumford, of whom Mr. Ellis has recently written the first good biography--his was a notable case of birth away from home. It is a little odd to think of the famous Count Rumford, Franklin's compeer in genius, and born but a few miles from Franklin's birthplace, as plain Benjamin Thompson of North Woburn, Ma.s.sachusetts. His parents were plain New England people, but he was ambitious, and had a handsome person; he had, too, what his neighbors might have called "uppish" ways; for he pretended to peculiar knowledge, and was always making strange researches and experiments; in short, I fear that he was not quite enough of a democrat to suit his neighbors. There was a distinction about him that they did not like; he was too original in his character and tastes; and consequently he was a marked man in that community. His fortunes seemed well enough, I presume, when, at twenty, he quitted school-teaching to marry a rich widow, thirteen years older than himself, Sarah Rolfe of Concord, New Hamps.h.i.+re; appearing on the wedding day, it is noted, in a splendid scarlet suit, to the astonishment and scandal of the young man's friends. But that was in 1772, and his troubles were not far ahead. At the outbreak of the colonial quarrel he was accused of being a Tory, and charged with disloyalty to the American cause. He protested his innocence in vain. He was arrested, tried--and acquitted; for nothing could be proven against him. Indeed, there was nothing to prove; it was his character that was the real cause of offence to the good people of Concord. They were not tolerant of superiority; and there must have been an intolerable superiority in young Thompson's personal beauty, in his manners, in his pa.s.sion for study and scientific experiment. In spite of his acquittal, he remained _un homme suspect_; and finally the Concord mob visited his house to take their will of him; but he had fled, never to return. Had he not been forewarned, I fear there would never have been any Count Rumford. The patriots of Concord might not have put him to death, but one does not easily make n.o.blemen of persons who have been tarred and feathered. It is better to admit a tradesman now and then, or even a dentist, to the ranks of the n.o.bility, as it has happened to some of our countrymen more recently. Very luckily, then, young Thompson escaped the tar and feathers; at twenty-two he left family, home, and estate, and fled from the Concord mob, never to return. His property was confiscated, and in August, 1775, after having suffered imprisonment as a Tory, he decided to quit the country. One would think that he had sufficient reasons. He wrote thus to his father-in-law: "I am determined," he says, "to seek for that _peace_ and _protection_ in foreign lands, and among strangers, which is deny'd me in my native country. I cannot any longer bear the insults that are daily offered me. I cannot bear to be looked upon and treated as the _Achan_ of society." Thompson showed a true instinct for the opportunity in choosing this course. He entered the British service, and thenceforward, says Mr. Ellis, "the rustic youth became the companion of gentlemen of wealth and culture, of scientific philosophers, of the n.o.bility, and of princes." Perhaps it gives a wrong impression to speak of him as a "rustic youth"; for besides a winning address, we are told that he had "a n.o.ble and imposing figure,"

and that he was a natural courtier; so that the familiar story of his rapid promotion is not surprising. Under-Secretary of State at twenty-eight, he was knighted by George III. at thirty; and eight years later, by the pleasure of the King of Bavaria, Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn, Ma.s.sachusetts, was transformed into Count Rumford, having already taken rank as a European celebrity. But he did not forget his early home and friends, and it is pleasant to find him deriving his t.i.tle from the name given to Concord by the early settlers--a name, by the way, that these patriots misspelled from _Romford_, the village near London whence some of them came.

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the record of a singular experience--that of a bright but untrained New England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly; how she filled her father with consternation by making her best courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without inquiring the prices; how--but I see that this _nave_ young woman is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went away from home when she left New England.

As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's genial remark that second marriages are made to ill.u.s.trate "the triumph of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other; they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers being likely to arise!

Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war, for the opportunity of distinction in affairs. Nor did he have to wait until age, or even until maturity, for verification of the saying of his contemporary, Goethe, about the final fulfilment of the desires of youth. What Hamilton desired in boyhood came to him promptly, almost as by the rubbing of the lamp. We all know the story: how at fifteen he found his way to New Jersey, whence extricating himself he went to Columbia college; and how, while he was there, the Revolutionary war broke out, making the lad drop his books at once to accept his appointment as a major of artillery; and how naturally his career flowed from that initial point. And in our own times Thackeray was another product of a British colony, having been born in Calcutta, and spending the first seven years of his childhood there. I will not venture to say that I trace much colonial influence in his writings. He may have been a true Indian at heart, but his novels are certainly those of a club-man and a Londoner; and none of his essays disclose very much of the Hindoo. Sainte-Claire Deville, again, one of the truest of Frenchmen, was born, like Hamilton, in the Antilles.

But how many have there been who never found a real home, though they sought it painfully and with tears! Byron, the predestinate wanderer, and Rousseau, who never found rest, who complained that his birth was but the beginning of his misfortunes, _le premier de mes malheurs_--these are types of the less fortunate cla.s.s. But we need not multiply examples; it is the old story of wandering and homelessness. How often is the homing effort made in vain! One would fancy the air filled with piloting spirits that endeavor to find ways of escape for the languis.h.i.+ng body, spirits constantly coming and going between the rock of exile and the far distant home. Sometimes the effort succeeds, as we have seen; and sometimes it fails; the spirit wastes itself in vain endeavor, pa.s.ses away like the unnoticed melting of a cloud. To spirits thus aspiring, thus failing, life is indeed what old Desportes calls it, a bitter and th.o.r.n.y blossom, _une fleur espineuse et poignante_. For what is the loss of opportunity but the loss of the soul? and the conscious loss of opportunity may go on for a lifetime, a protracted martyrdom. Take the case of any intelligent exile, some wanderer in the Macerian desert, some refined person unluckily born in Patagonia, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, who no longer craves the most succulent of limpets gathered at the lowest tide: in our own comfort and satisfaction cannot we extend a little compa.s.sion to him? Not that I have the least prejudice against Patagonia; but we need some name for the better concentration of our sympathy. The intelligent but discontented Patagonian, then, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of Patagonia, whose ways are not Patagonian ways, he to whom even the most successful popular career in Patagonia would seem a humiliation, because it would a.s.sociate him with the Patagonian character, and so compromise him before the extra-Patagonian world--his, I say, is not a happy case. His exile must end like other banishments for life--either in escape or in death. For while he lives he must do without spiritual light and heat, without the intellectual climate that he needs.

Do you call this a morbid state of mind in the Patagonian? Well, it may be that he should imitate the repose, the serenity of the limpet; it may be his duty to rest contented with the beach at low tide, with the estate to which he was born; and yet I say that his feeling is not devoid of a certain distinction; it may be, indeed, very blamable, but it is a feeling that is no trait of ign.o.ble natures.

And there is, too, a sanative quality in that feeling. His critical att.i.tude may help the exile to keep before him higher standards, whether in thought or in conduct, whether in his "h.e.l.lenizing" or his "Hebraizing" tendencies, as Mr. Arnold calls them, than he might entertain were he living comfortably at the very centre. His privations may thus be more effective than the maceration of the recluse in keeping him in sympathy with culture, with the best things of the mind; and surely that is some compensation for living in Patagonia! There is still another: there is a fortunate exemption for such exiles--fortunate we may safely call it, though it is but a negative beat.i.tude--the exemption from envy. That is worth not a little. In Paris, in London, in Pekin, how many provocatives to envy beset even the philosopher! For in those cities he must see many undeniably superior persons about him--persons superior to himself not only in fortune, but in ability! There, in attainment of all sorts, he meets his rivals; and if he is a real philosopher, he will remember Creon's caution--"not to get the idea fixed in your head that what you say and nothing else is right."[5] Still, philosopher or not, he will be likely to envy some of the desirable things that he sees; and the fault is perhaps excusable: at any rate an occasional touch of the claw, an _effleurement_ now and then of the pa.s.sion, need not surprise us, even when we do not excuse it, in London or Pekin. But in the Patagonian civilization, however important it may be to the progress of the world, what does such a man find to envy? Surely the higher provocatives to that weakness are not abundant. Hereditary wealth, ancient family dignities, culture, scholars.h.i.+p, imposing genius--these do not surround him, these do not confront him with his inferiority as they do, let us say, in this country. It is we, then, who are the unhappy ones in this respect; but we can understand, at least, the weakness of brethren who may be a little shaken by the contemplation of all the desirable things in which the richer civilizations abound.

[5] [Greek: Me nyn en ethos mounon en sauto ph.o.r.ei, Hos phes sy, kouden allo, tout' orthos echein.]

--_Antigone_.

Yes, the careers which we may observe from day to day may certainly prove stumbling blocks to some of us. The thriving politician or contractor, for instance, Dives in his barouche, the blooming members of literary cliques, the fas.h.i.+onable clergymen and poets, chorusing gently to feminine audiences, who listen intent, perhaps even "weeping in a rapturous sense of art," as Heine tells us the women of his day wept when they heard the sweet voices of the evirates singing of pa.s.sion, of

Liebes fehnen, Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss--

how admirable are all these characters! These, indeed, are careers to move any but the steadfast mind.

And yet, even in Philistia, it is not every one that will yearn after successes like these. In Philistia, far from the promised land, the exile may yet contemplate without desire all these desirable things, envying neither them nor their possessors. He may even indulge in a saving scorn of them, a scorn of the main achievements, the popular men of the Philistine community; bathing himself in irony as a tonic against the spiritual malaria. Such a man I once knew, a man of Askelon. He lived in that rich city as a recluse, and according to any standard recognized in Askelon, he was not rich. On this text he would sometimes quote delightful old Rutebeuf:

Je ne sai par ou je coumance, Tant ai de matyere abondance Por parleir de ma povretei.

Yet this man was not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember, came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it, gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was "a Sunday's child," referring to some superst.i.tion not current in that community--and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was really there. But they were legends which would have startled the residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fas.h.i.+onable street in the place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and as we pa.s.sed slowly before the Greek houses he p.r.o.nounced, one by one, these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator, Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of our furtive men lives there--one of our men of three letters. We have as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for the palace, did not see the owner.

But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just men even in Askelon--upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon that he should do such a thing--that he, like others, should at any rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better: confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me that everybody there has now grown honest, and that n.o.body goes around any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in particular that he said I remember by the ant.i.thesis, the turn of it; he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.

Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic in his notions.

But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career.

Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking--Winckelmann and Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry, even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thus _serus studiorum_, as Horace phrases it--thus unluckily belated in his culture?

All the traits of these migrations of men of genius are interesting, and we may dwell for a moment, though at the risk of some digression, upon Winckelmann's disappointment on his arrival in the city of his desire. It was a pathetic disappointment, but one of a kind not infrequent with sensitive minds. Long detained by poverty in the north, it was not until the age of thirty-eight that he reached Italy; and when at last he arrived in Rome, the longed-for city wore a strange look for him--had an aspect for which he was not prepared. It was there that his emotion broke out as we have seen. We can understand his disappointment if we bear in mind the cruel treatment to which our fancies are commonly subjected at the hands of the fact. How swiftly, how silently, like the irrevocable sequence of images in a dissolving view, our premonitions vanish under the light of the reality! The actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we travel far to see--these dispel at once the preconception; a glance, and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor, familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them with the experience. Let me give a personal instance: I remember framing the distinctest image of the lakes of Killarney from my childhood readings in Peter Parley's veritable histories. There was the cool spring, shaded with bushes, and pouring out abundant waters; and there was the blessed Saint Patrick, standing by the rocky edge of the spring, clasping down the stout lid of an iron-bound chest upon the last of the unhappy serpents of Erin, and saying, "Be aisy, darlints!"

just before casting the box into the depths of the lake. It was a pleasant scene, a clear imaginative microcosm; never was a distincter picture in my mind than that of this fancied Killarney. The real Killarney I saw many years after reading those histories of Peter Parley, yet that first vivid picture did not vanish at the sight; the fancied lake held its place against the reality; nay, even at this day, I can call up the two pictures at will, the imagined and the real, and compare the two--the scene of my early fancies with the humorous Celtic saint standing beside the spring and snapping down the lid of his box upon the tail of the last snake, on the one hand, and the broader landscape of reality, in which there were no saints, but many Patricks.

But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him, and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to make that northward journey from which he was never to return.

How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home, Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For years, lingering in his cold city of the north, _verdammtes Hamburg_, as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to the south:

"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there, and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate not much kinder."

While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized people--the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible fate for a Persian poet that he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"

As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with "Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in 1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where ... the mob exercises its coa.r.s.e dominion!" Meanwhile, as he tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think that I was better than other people."

Heine reached Paris in his thirty-first year; and never was the city better appreciated and enjoyed than by this young wanderer during the earlier time of his residence there. Everything in it pleased him: the intellectual life, the interest in ideas, not less than the gayety and charm. But he found much pleasure in the courtesy of Parisian manners.

Parisian manners were then, as even now, distinguishable from Prussian by the careful observer. "Sweet pineapple odors of politeness!" he says, "how beneficially didst thou console my sick spirit, which had swallowed down in Germany so much tobacco vapor!... Like the melodies of Rossini did the pretty phrases of apology of a Frenchman sound in my ear, who had gently pushed me in the street on the day of my arrival. I was almost frightened at such sweet politeness--I who had been accustomed to boorish German knocks in the ribs without any apology at all." If any one jostled Heine roughly in the street, and made no apology, he would say, "I knew that that man was one of my countrymen."[6]

[6] I quote from the translations in Stigand's "Life."

But Paris is somewhat more than a city of pleasure; it is a city of opportunity. To many Americans it is a stumbling-block, to many Englishmen foolishness; but Heine was one of the true children of Paris, though wandering at first far from the centre, and he found fitting work there. They were busy as well as joyous years, those that he first spent in that bright capital. O Paris, city of opportunity, how many other of thy children are still wandering far from the centre!

Some of them live upon the sierras of Patagonia, some in the stonier streets of Askelon, some inhabit caves in the deserts of Maceria.

Living an anchorite's life in German villages, in Pacific colonies, on Cape Cod or Kerguelen's Land, the delicate French spirit wastes itself away. And yet some of these exiles have found their way to that centre of blithe intellectual activity.

Heine was such a one; he spent in Paris the most productive and happy period of his life, the bright interval between his cloudy morning and the shadows that were to gather around him before their time; and how he glowed in the warmth and light of the capital! And while he carried his pleasures to excess, yet he did not go pleasuring like the vulgar.

In a valid sense his very extravagances had an intelligible principle in them; one might say that he dissipated himself upon ethical grounds.

Yet his were the reasons of a poetic, not of an a.n.a.lytic thinker. The popular religion, he said, has dishonored the flesh; let us restore it to honor. To restore joyousness to modern life, something of the antique innocence to pleasure, to make it reputable as well as delightful, to readjust the conscience of a community which looked upon pleasure as essentially wrong, and yet pursued it, so thinking, at the expense of its conscience, to relieve pleasure somewhat from the ban, to augment, in a word, the permitted happiness of life--that was Heine's aim; that was what he understood by his favorite doctrine of restoring the flesh to honor--_la rehabilitation de la chair_.

Do you call that an easy creed, a comfortable practice? I will not deny it, but do not let us lose the distinction, the trait by which Heine's doctrine was discriminated from that of some other easy-going apostles.

Heine was intellectually sincere; he had a genuine purpose; he did not go to Paris, for instance, as some of our missionaries have gone of late years to Florence and Madrid, with commissions to labor among the "nominal Christians," as they call the Catholic residents of those comfortable capitals, to convert them to the true Christianity of American Protestantism. No; Heine had too much directness, too much intellectual verity for a situation of that sort: his mistakes were honest mistakes, and he paid an honest penalty for them.

And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be much bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching.

But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all, and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent toward accurate knowledge, toward dispa.s.sionate observation and thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon the homestead of every poet, the _fons Baudusiae splendidior vitro_.

In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as the greatest poets have done--in meditation, in discipline, in dispa.s.sionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact being in any state of society yet established inexorably the reverse--namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had on demand.

But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the asking, and the _propaganda_ already existed. "There was a little society of devotees, if I may call them so--Michel Chevalier, Olinde, Enfantin, and others--who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with a.s.siduity to the pleasing cultus--with all the more a.s.siduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that he had been content with a less many-sided experience of pleasure! For he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says: _L'hamecon est evident, et neanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra toujours_. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments, rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this man's life--of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul; and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of coa.r.s.e experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with the cup that he pours out.