The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine Part 9

...Truly, Jansenism had much more cause than Jesuitism to feel aggrieved at the delineation of Tartuffe, and Moliere would be as obnoxious to the Methodists of to-day as to the Catholic devotees of his own time. It is just because of this that Moliere is so great, for, like Aristophanes and Cervantes, he levelled his _persiflage_ not only at temporary follies, but also against that which is ever ridiculous--the inherent frailties of mankind. Voltaire, who always attacked only the temporary and the unessential, is in this respect inferior to Moliere.

...Then why my aversion to spiritualism? Is it something so evil? By no means. Attar of roses is a precious article, and a small vial of it is refres.h.i.+ng, when one is doomed to pa.s.s one's days in the closely-locked apartments of the harem. But yet we would not have all the roses of life crushed and bruised in order to gain a few drops of the attar of roses, be they ever so consoling. We are like the nightingales, that delight in the rose itself, and derive as delicious a pleasure from the sight of the blus.h.i.+ng, blooming flower as from its invisible fragrance.

...But there was one man at the Diet of Worms who, I am convinced, thought not of himself, but only of the sacred interests which he was there to champion. That man was Martin Luther, the poor monk whom Providence had selected to shatter the world-controlling power of the Roman Catholic Church, against which the mightiest emperors and most intrepid scholars had striven in vain. But Providence knows well on whose shoulders to impose its tasks; here not only intellectual but also physical strength was required. It needed a body steeled from youth through chast.i.ty and monkish discipline to bear the labour and vexations of such an office.

...Luther was not only the greatest, but also the most thoroughly German hero of our history. In his character are combined, on the grandest scale, all the virtues and all the faults of the Germans, so that, in his own person, he was the representative of that wonderful Germany.

For he possessed qualities which we seldom find united, and which we usually even consider to be irreconcilably antagonistic. He was simultaneously a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action. His thoughts possessed not only wings, but also hands; he could speak and could act. He was not only the tongue, but also the sword of his time.

He was both a cold, scholastic word-caviller, and an enthusiastic, G.o.d-inspired prophet. When, during the day, he had wearily toiled over his dogmatic distinctions and definitions, then in the evening he took his lute, looked up to the stars, and melted into melody and devotion.

The same man who could scold like a fish-wife could be as gentle as a tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that uproots oaks; and then again he was mild as the zephyr caressing the violets. He was filled with a reverential awe of G.o.d. He was full of the spirit of self-sacrifice for the honour of the Holy Ghost; he could sink his whole personality in the most abstract spirituality, and yet he could well appreciate the good things of this earth, and from his mouth blossomed forth the famous saying--

"Who loves not wine, women, and song, Will be a fool all his life long."

He was a complete man--I would say an absolute man, in whom spirit and matter were not antagonistic. To call him a spiritualist would, therefore, be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. How shall I describe him? He had in him something aboriginal, incomprehensible, miraculous.

...All praise to Luther! Eternal honour to the blessed man to whom we owe the salvation of our most precious possessions, and whose benefactions we still enjoy. It ill becomes us to complain of the narrowness of his views. The dwarf, standing on the shoulders of the giant, particularly if he puts on spectacles, can, it is true, see farther than the giant himself; but for n.o.ble thoughts and exalted sentiments a giant heart is necessary. It were still more unseemly of us to pa.s.s a harsh judgment on his faults, for those very faults have benefited us more than the virtues of thousands of other men. The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melanchthon, could never have brought us so far as the G.o.dlike brutality of Brother Martin.

...From the day on which Luther denied the authority of the Pope, and publicly declared in the Diet "that his teachings must be controverted through the words of the Bible itself, or with sensible reasons," there begins a new era in Germany. The fetters with which Saint Boniface had chained the German Church to Rome are broken. This Church, which has. .h.i.therto formed an integral part of the great hierarchy, now splits into religious democracies. The character of the religion itself is essentially changed: the Hindoo-Gnostic element disappears from it, and the Judaic-theistic element again becomes prominent. We behold the rise of evangelical Christianity. By recognising and legitimising the most importunate claims of the senses, religion becomes once more a reality.

The priest becomes man, takes to himself a wife, and begets children, as G.o.d desires.

...If in Germany we lost through Protestantism, along with the ancient miracles, much other poetry, we gained manifold compensations. Men became n.o.bler and more virtuous. Protestantism was very successful in effecting that purity of morals and that strictness in the fulfilment of duty which is generally called morality. In certain communities, indeed, Protestantism a.s.sumed a tendency which in the end became quite identical with morality, and the gospels remained as a beautiful parable only.

Particularly in the lives of the ecclesiastics is a pleasing change now noticeable. With celibacy disappeared also monkish obscenities and vices. Among the Protestant clergy are frequently to be found the n.o.blest and most virtuous of men, such as would have won respect from even the ancient Stoics. One must have wandered on foot, as a poor student, through Northern Germany, in order to learn how much virtue--and in order to give virtue a complimentary adjective, how much evangelical virtue--is to be found in an unpretentious-looking parsonage. How often of a winter's evening have I found there a hospitable welcome,--I, a stranger, who brought with me no other recommendation save that I was hungry and tired! When I had partaken of a hearty meal, and, after a good night's rest, was ready in the morning to continue my journey, then came the old pastor, in his dressing-gown, and gave me a blessing on the way,--and it never brought me misfortune; and his good-hearted, gossipy wife placed several slices of bread-and-b.u.t.ter in my pocket, which I found not less refres.h.i.+ng; and silent in the distance stood the pastor's pretty daughters, with blus.h.i.+ng cheeks and violet eyes, whose modest fire in the mere recollection warmed my heart for many a whole winter's day.

...How strange! We Germans are the strongest and wisest of nations; our royal races furnish princes for all the thrones of Europe; our Rothschilds rule all the exchanges of the world; our learned men are pre-eminent in all the sciences; we invented gunpowder and printing;--and yet if one of us fires a pistol he must pay a fine of three thalers; and if we wish to insert in a newspaper, "My dear wife has given birth to a little daughter, beautiful as Liberty," then the censor grasps his red pencil and strikes out the word "Liberty."

...I have said that we gained freedom of thought through Luther. But he gave us not only freedom of movement, but also the means of movement; to the spirit he gave a body; to the thought he gave words. He created the German language.

This he did by his translation of the Bible.

In fact, the divine author of that book seems to have known, as well as we others, that the choice of a translator is by no means a matter of indifference; and so He himself selected His translator, and bestowed on him the wonderful gift to translate from a language which was dead and already buried, into another language that as yet did not exist.

...The knowledge of the Hebrew language had entirely disappeared from the Christian world. Only the Jews, who kept themselves hidden here and there in stray corners of the world, yet preserved the traditions of this language. Like a ghost keeping watch over a treasure which had been confided to it during life, so in its dark and gloomy ghettos sat this murdered nation, this spectre-people, guarding the Hebrew Bible.

...Luther's Bible is an enduring spring of rejuvenation for our language. All the expressions and phrases contained therein are German, and are still in use by writers. As this book is in the hands of even the poorest people, they require no special learned education in order to be able to express themselves in literary forms. When our political revolution breaks out, this circ.u.mstance will have remarkable results.

Liberty will everywhere be gifted with the power of speech, and her speech will be biblical.

...More noteworthy and of more importance than his prose writings are Luther's poems, the songs which in battle and in trouble blossomed forth from his heart. Sometimes they resemble a floweret that grows on a rocky crag, then again a ray of moonlight trembling over a restless sea.

Luther loved music, and even wrote a treatise on the art; hence his songs are particularly melodious. In this respect he merits the name, Swan of Eisleben. But he is nothing less than a wild swan in those songs wherein he stimulates the courage of his followers and inflames himself to the fiercest rage of battle. A true battle-song was that martial strain with which he and his companions marched into Worms. The old cathedral trembled at those unwonted tones, and the ravens, in their dark nests in the steeple, startled with affright. That song, the Ma.r.s.eillaise of the Reformation, preserves to this day its inspiriting power.

...The expressions "cla.s.sic" and "romantic" refer only to the spirit and the manner of the treatment. The treatment is cla.s.sic when the form of that which is portrayed is quite identical with the idea of the portrayer, as is the case with the art-works of the Greeks, in which, owing to this ident.i.ty, the greatest harmony is found to exist between the idea and its form. The treatment is romantic when the form does not reveal the idea through this ident.i.ty, but lets this idea be surmised parabolically. (I use the word "parabolically" here in preference to "symbolically.") The Greek mythology had an array of G.o.d-figures, each of which, in addition to the ident.i.ty of form and idea, was also susceptible of a symbolic meaning. But in this Greek religion only the figures of the G.o.ds were clearly defined; all else, their lives and deeds, was left to the arbitrary treatment of the poet's fancy. In the Christian religion, on the contrary, there are no such clearly-defined figures, but stated facts--certain definite holy events and deeds, into which the poetical faculty of man could place a parabolic signification.

It is said that Homer invented the Greek G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. That is not true. They existed previously in clearly-defined outlines; but he invented their histories. The artists of the middle ages, on the other hand, never ventured the least addition to the historical part of their religion. The fall of man, the incarnation, the baptism, the crucifixion, and the like, were matters of fact, which were not to be intermeddled with, and which it was not permissible to remould in the least, but to which poetry might attach a symbolic meaning. All the arts during the middle ages were treated in this parabolic spirit, and this treatment is romantic. Hence we find in the poetry of the middle ages a mystic universality; the forms are all so shadowy, what they do is so vaguely indicated, all therein is as if seen through a hazy twilight intermittently illumined by the moon. The idea is merely hinted at in the form, as in a riddle; and we dimly see a vague, indefinite figure, which is the peculiarity of spiritual literature. There is not, as among the Greeks, a harmony, clear as the sun, between form and meaning, but occasionally the meaning overtops the given form, and the latter strives desperately to reach the former, and then we behold bizarre, fantastic sublimity; then, again, the form has overgrown itself, and is out of all proportion to the meaning. A silly, pitiful thought trails itself along in some colossal form, and we witness a grotesque farce: misshapenness is nearly always the result.

The universal characteristic of that literature was that in all its productions it manifested the same firm, unshaken faith which in that period reigned over worldly as well as spiritual matters. All the opinions of that time were based on authorities. The poet journeyed along the abysses of doubt as free from apprehension as a mule, and there prevailed in the literature of that period a dauntless composure and blissful self-confidence such as became impossible in after-times, when the influence of the Papacy, the chief of those authorities, was shattered, and with it all the others were overthrown. Hence the poems of the middle ages have all the same characteristics, as if composed not by single individuals, but by the whole people _en ma.s.se_: they are objective, epic, nave.

In the literature that blossomed into life with Luther we find quite opposite tendencies.

Its material, its subject, is the conflict between the interests and views of the Reformation and the old order of things. To the new spirit of the times, that hodge-podge religion which arose from the two elements already referred to--Germanic nationality and the Hindoo-Gnostic Christendom--was altogether repugnant. The latter was considered heathen idol-wors.h.i.+p, which was to be replaced by the true religion of the Judaic-theistic Gospel. A new order of things is established; the spirit makes discoveries which demand the well-being of matter. Through industrial progress and the dissemination of philosophical theories, spiritualism becomes discredited in popular opinion. The _tiers-etat_ begins to rise; the Revolution already rumbles in the hearts and brains of men, and what the era feels, thinks, needs, and wills is openly spoken; and that is the stuff of which modern literature is made. At the same time the treatment is no longer romantic, but cla.s.sic.

...The universal characteristic of modern literature consists in this, that now individuality and scepticism predominate. Authorities are overthrown; reason is now man's sole lamp, and conscience his only staff in the dark mazes of life. Man now stands alone, face to face with his Creator, and chants his songs to Him. Hence this literary epoch opens with hymns. And even later, when it becomes secular, the most intimate self-consciousness, the feeling of personality, rules throughout. Poetry is no longer objective, epic, and nave, but subjective, lyric, and reflective.

...The G.o.d of the pantheists differs from the G.o.d of the theists in so far that the former is in the world itself, while the latter is external to, or, in other words, is over the world. The G.o.d of the theists rules the world from above as a quite distinct establishment. Only in regard to the manner of that rule do the theists differ among themselves. The Hebrews picture G.o.d as a thunder-hurling tyrant; the Christians regard him as a loving father; the disciples of Rousseau and the whole Genevese school portray him as a skilful artist, who has made the whole world somewhat in the same manner as their papas manufacture watches; and as art-connoisseurs, they admire the work and praise the Maker above.

...From the moment that religion seeks a.s.sistance from philosophy her downfall is unavoidable. She strives to defend herself, and always talks herself deeper into ruin. Religion, like all other absolutisms, may not justify herself. Prometheus is bound to the rock by a silent power.

aeschylus represents the personification of brute force as not speaking a single word. It must be dumb.

...Moses Mendelssohn was the reformer of the German Israelites, his companions in faith. He overthrew the prestige of Talmudism, and founded a pure Mosaism. This man, whom his contemporaries called the German Socrates, and whose n.o.bleness of soul and intellectual powers they so admired, was the son of a poor s.e.xton of the synagogue at Dessau.

Besides this curse of birth, Providence made him a hunchback, in order to teach the rabble in a very striking manner that men are to be judged not by outward appearance but by inner worth. As Luther overthrew the Papacy, so Mendelssohn overthrew the Talmud; and that, too, by a similar process. He discarded tradition, declared the Bible to be the well-spring of religion, and translated the most important parts of it.

By so doing he destroyed Jewish Catholicism, for such is the Talmud. It is a Gothic dome which, although overladen with fanciful, childish ornamentation, yet amazes us by the immensity of its heaven-aspiring proportions.

...No German can p.r.o.nounce the name of Lessing without a responsive echo in his breast. Since Luther, Germany has produced no greater and better man than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. These two are our pride and joy. In the troubles of the present we look back at their consoling figures, and they answer with a look full of bright promise. The third man will come who will perfect what Luther began and what Lessing carried on--the third Liberator.

Like Luther, Lessing's achievements consisted not only in effecting something definite, but in agitating the German people to its depths, and in awakening through his criticism and polemics a wholesome intellectual activity. He was the vivifying critic of his time, and his whole life was a polemic. His critical insight made itself felt throughout the widest range of thought and feeling--in religion, in science, and in art. His polemics vanquished every opponent, and grew stronger with every victory. Lessing, as he himself confessed, needed conflict for the full development of his powers. He resembled that fabulous Norman who inherited the skill, knowledge, and strength of those whom he slew in single combat, and in this manner became finally endowed with all possible excellencies and perfections. It is easily conceivable that such a contentious champion should stir up not a little commotion in Germany,--in that quiet Germany which was then even more sabbatically quiet than now. The majority were stupefied at his literary audacity. But this was of the greatest a.s.sistance to him, for _oser_!

is the secret of success in literature, as it is in revolutions,--and in love. All trembled before the sword of Lessing. No head was safe from him. Yes, many heads he struck off from mere wantonness, and was moreover so spiteful as to lift them up from the ground and show to the public that they were hollow inside. Those whom his sword could not reach he slew with the arrows of his wit. His friends admired the pretty feathers of those arrows; his enemies felt their barbs in their hearts.

Lessing's wit does not resemble that _enjouement_, that _gaite_, those lively _saillies_, which are so well known here in France. His wit was no petty French greyhound, chasing its own shadow: it was rather a great German tom-cat, who plays with the mouse before he throttles it.

Yes, polemics were our Lessing's delight, and so he never reflected long whether an opponent was worthy of him,--thus through his controversies he has saved many a name from well-merited oblivion. Around many a pitiful authorling he has spun a web of the wittiest sarcasm, the most charming humour; and thus they are preserved for all time in Lessing's works, like insects caught in a piece of amber. In slaying his enemies he made them immortal. Who of us would have ever heard of that Klotz on whom Lessing wasted so much wit and scorn? The huge rocks which he hurled at, and with which he crushed, that poor antiquarian, are now the latter's indestructible monument.

It is noteworthy that this wittiest man of all Germany was also the most honourable. There is nothing equal to his love of truth. Lessing made not the least concession to falsehood, even if thereby, after the manner of the worldly-wise, he could advance the victory of truth itself. He could do everything for truth, except lie for it. Whoever thinks, he once said, to bring Truth to man, masked and rouged, may well be her pander, but he has never been her lover.

...It is heart-rending to read in his biography how fate denied this man every joy, and how it did not even vouchsafe to him to rest with his family from his daily struggles. Once only fortune seemed to smile on him; she gave him a loved wife, a child--but this happiness was like the rays of the sun gilding the wings of a swift-flying bird: it vanished as quickly. His wife died in consequence of her confinement, the child soon after birth. Concerning the latter, he wrote to a friend the horribly-witty words, "My joy was brief. And I lost him so unwillingly, that son! For he was so wise, so wise! Do not think that the few hours of my fatherhood have already made a doting parent of me. I know what I say. Was it not wisdom that he had to be reluctantly dragged into the world with iron tongs, and that he so soon discovered his folly? Was it not wisdom that he seized the first opportunity to leave it? For once I have sought to be happy like other men; but I have made a miserable failure of it."

...Lessing was the prophet who from the New Testament pointed towards the Third Testament. I have called him the successor of Luther; and it is in this character that I have to speak of him here. Of his influence on German art I shall speak hereafter. On this he effected a wholesome reform, not only through his criticism, but also through his example; and this latter phase of his activity is generally made the most prominent, and is the most discussed. But, viewed from our present standpoint, his philosophical and theological battles are to us more important than all his dramas, or his dramaturgy. His dramas, however, like all his writings, have a social import, and _Nathan the Wise_ is in reality not only a good play, but also a philosophical, theological treatise in support of the doctrine of a pure theism. For Lessing, art was a tribune, and when he was thrust from the pulpit or the professor's chair he sprang on to the stage, speaking out more boldly, and gaining a more numerous audience.

I say that Lessing continued the work of Luther. After Luther had freed us from the yoke of tradition and had exalted the Bible as the only well-spring of Christianity, there ensued a rigid word-service, and the letter of the Bible ruled just as tyrannically as once did tradition.

Lessing contributed the most to the emanc.i.p.ation from the tyranny of the letter.

Lessing died in Brunswick, in the year 1781, misunderstood, hated, and denounced. In the same year there was published at Konigsberg the _Critique of Pure Reason_, by Immanuel Kant. With this book there begins in Germany an intellectual revolution, which offers the most wonderful a.n.a.logies to the material revolution in France, and which to the profound thinker must appear equally important. It develops the same phases, and between the two there exists a very remarkable parallelism.

On both sides of the Rhine we behold the same rupture with the past: it is loudly proclaimed that all reverence for tradition is at an end. As in France no privilege, so in Germany no thought is tolerated without proving its right to exist: nothing is taken for granted. And as in France fell the monarchy, the keystone of the old social system, so in Germany fell theism, the keystone of the intellectual _ancien regime_.

It is horrible when the bodies which we have created ask of us a soul.

But it is still more horrible, more terrible, more uncanny, to create a soul, which craves a body and pursues us with that demand. The idea which we have thought is such a soul, and it allows us no peace until we have given it a body, until we have brought it into actual being. The thought seems to become deed; the word, flesh. And, strange! man, like the G.o.d of the Bible, needs but to speak his thought, and the world shapes itself accordingly: light dawns, or darkness descends; the waters separate themselves from the dry land, and even wild beasts appear. The universe is but the signature of the word.

Mark this, ye haughty men of action. Ye are naught but the unconscious servants of the men of thought, who, oftentimes in the humblest obscurity, have marked out your tasks for you with the utmost exact.i.tude. Maximilian Robespierre was only the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau--the b.l.o.o.d.y hand that from the womb of time drew forth the body whose soul Rousseau had created. Did the restless anxiety that embittered the life of Jean Jacques arise from a foreboding that his thoughts would require such a midwife to bring them into the world?

Old Fontenelle was perhaps in the right when he declared, "If I carried all the ideas of this world in my closed hand, I should take good heed not to open it." For my part, I think differently. If I held all the ideas of the world in my hand, I might perhaps implore you to hew off my hand at once, but in no case would I long keep it closed. I am not adapted to be a jailor of thoughts. By Heaven! I would set them free.

Even if they a.s.sumed the most threatening shapes and swept through all lands like a band of mad Bacchantes; even if with their thyrsus staffs they should strike down our most innocent flowers; even if they should break into our hospitals and chase the sick old world from its bed! It would certainly grieve me sadly, and I myself should come to harm. For, alas! I too belong to that sick old world; and the poet says rightly that scoffing at our own crutches does not enable us to walk any the better. I am the most sick among you all, and the most to be pitied, for I know what health is. But you know it not, you enviable ones. You can die without noticing it yourselves. Yes, many of you have already been dead for these many years, and you think that now only does the true life begin. When I contradict such madness, then they become enraged against me, and rail at me, and, horrible! the corpses spring on me and reproach me; and more even than their revilings does their mouldy odour oppress me. Avaunt, ye spectres! I am speaking of one whose very name possesses an exorcising power: I speak of Immanuel Kant.

It is said that the spirits of darkness tremble with affright when they behold the sword of an executioner. How, then, must they stand aghast when confronted with Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_! This book is the sword with which, in Germany, theism was decapitated.

To be candid, you French are tame and moderate compared with us Germans.

At the most, you have slain a king; and he had already lost his head before he was beheaded. And withal you must drum so much, and shout, and stamp, so that the whole world was shaken by the tumult. It is really awarding Maximilian Robespierre too much honour to compare him with Immanuel Kant. Maximilian Robespierre, the great citizen of the Rue Saint Honore, did truly have an attack of destructive fury when the monarchy was concerned, and he writhed terribly enough in his regicidal epilepsy; but as soon as the Supreme Being was mentioned, he wiped the white foam from his mouth and the blood from his hands, put on his blue Sunday coat with the bright b.u.t.tons, and attached a bouquet of flowers to his broad coat-lapel.

The life-history of Immanuel Kant is difficult to write, for he had neither a life nor a history. He lived a mechanical, orderly, almost abstract, bachelor life, in a quiet little side-street of Konigsberg, an old city near the north-east boundary of Germany. I believe that the great clock of the cathedral did not perform its daily work more dispa.s.sionately, more regularly, than its countryman, Immanuel Kant.

Rising, coffee-drinking, writing, collegiate lectures, dining, walking--each had its set time. And when Immanuel Kant, in his grey coat, cane in hand, appeared at the door of his house, and strolled towards the small linden avenue, which is still called "the philosopher's walk," the neighbours knew it was exactly half-past four.

Eight times he promenaded up and down, during all seasons; and when the weather was gloomy, or the grey clouds threatened rain, his old servant Lampe was seen plodding anxiously after, with a large umbrella under his arm, like a symbol of Providence.

What a strange contrast between the outer life of the man and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens of Konigsberg surmised the whole significance of these thoughts, they would have felt a more profound awe in the presence of this man than in that of an executioner, who merely slays human beings. But the good people saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy; and when at the fixed hour he sauntered by, they nodded a friendly greeting, and regulated their watches.