Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 43

"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 Judenstra.s.se. In my cradle lay my line of life marked out from beginning to end. My G.o.d, 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 Jew _and_ a 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 gla.s.s, 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 twine the 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 the _Hamburg Wachter_. Yes, I would even rather learn Latin again at the Franciscan cloister, and grind law at Gottingen. For, after all, I shouldn't have to work very hard; a pretty girl pa.s.ses, 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 young _Kellnerin_, who brought us our duck _mit Apfelkompot_, kissed me alone of all the _Herren Studenten_, because I was a poet, and already as famous as the professors. And then, after I should be re-rusticated from Gottingen, 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 my _Lyrical Intermezzo_), and the mad literary nights with the poets in the Behrenstra.s.se. And b.a.l.l.s, 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 my _Harzreise_: and the first night of _Freischutz_ would come once more, and I should be whistling the _Jungfern_ and sipping punch in the Casino, with Lottchen filling up my gla.s.s." 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 hoa.r.s.e, 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 pa.s.sed, there remained the overwhelming tragedy of a dead man l.u.s.ting 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 pa.s.sing 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:

"Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus,"

and his death-mask lit up with the wild joys of living. And then earlier memories still--of his childhood in Dusseldorf--seemed to flow through his comatose brain; his mother and brothers and sisters; the dancing-master he threw out of the window; the emanc.i.p.ation of the Jewry by the French conquerors; the joyous drummer who taught him French; the pa.s.sing of Napoleon on his white horse; the atheist school-boy friend with whom he studied Spinoza on the sly, and the country louts from whom he bought birds merely to set them free, and the blood-red hair of the hangman's niece who sang him folk-songs. And suddenly he came to himself, raised his eyelid with his forefinger and looked at her.

"Catholic!" he cried angrily. "I never returned to Judaism, because I never left it. My baptism was a mere wetting. I have never put Heinrich--only H--on my books, and never have I ceased to write 'Harry' to my mother. Though the Jews hate me even more than the Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren."

"I know, I know," she said soothingly. "I am sorry I hurt you. I remember well the pa.s.sage in which you say that your becoming a Christian was the fault of the Saxons who changed sides suddenly at Leipzig; or else of Napoleon who had no need to go to Russia; or else of his school-master who gave him instruction at Brienne in geography, and did not tell him that it was very cold at Moscow in winter."

"Very well, then," he said, pacified. "Let them not say either that I have been converted to Judaism on my death-bed. Was not my first poem based on one in the Pa.s.sover night _Hagadah_? Was not my first tragedy, _Almansor_, really the tragedy of down-trodden Israel, that great race which from the ruins of its second Temple knew to save, not the gold and the precious stones, but its real treasure, the Bible--a gift to the world that would make the tourist traverse oceans to see a Jew, if there were only one left alive. The only people that preserved freedom of thought through the middle ages, they have now to preserve G.o.d against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss guards of Deism. G.o.d was always the beginning and end of my thought.

When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world. Is not my best work, _The Rabbi of Bacharach_, devoted to expressing the 'vast Jewish sorrow,' as Borne calls it?"

"But you never finished it?"

"I was a fool to be persuaded by Moser. Or was it Gans? Ah, will not Jehovah count it to me for righteousness, that New Jerusalem Brotherhood with them in the days when I dreamt of reconciling Jew and Greek--the goodness of beauty with the beauty of goodness! Oh, those days of youthful dreams, whose winters are warmer than the summers of the after years. How they tried to crush us, the Rabbis and the State alike! O the brave Moser, the lofty-souled, the pure-hearted, who pa.s.sed from counting-house to laboratory, and studied Sanscrit for recreation, _moriturus te saluto_. And thou, too, Markus, with thy boy's body, and thy old man's look, and thy encyclopaedic, inorganic mind; and thou, O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian hocus-pocus.

Yes, the Rabbis were right, and the baptismal font had us at last; but surely G.o.d counts the will to do, and is more pleased with great-hearted dreams than with the deeds of the white-hearted burghers of virtue, whose goodness is essence of gendarmerie. And where, indeed--if not in Judaism, broadened by h.e.l.lenism--shall one find the religion of the future? Be sure of this, anyhow, that only a Jew will find it. We have the gift of religion, the wisdom of the ages. You others--young races fresh from staining your bodies with woad--have never yet got as far as Moses. Moses--that giant figure--who dwarfs Sinai when he stands upon it, the great artist in life, who, as I point out in my _Confessions_ built human pyramids; who created Israel; who took a poor shepherd family, and created a nation from it--a great, eternal, holy people, a people of G.o.d, destined to outlive the centuries, and to serve as a pattern to all other nations--a statesman, not a dreamer, who did not deny the world and the flesh, but sanctified it. Happiness, is it not implied in the very aspiration of the Christian for postmundane bliss? And yet, 'the man Moses was very meek'; the most humble and lovable of men. He too--though it is always ignored--was ready to die for the sins of others, praying, when his people had sinned, that _his_ name might be blotted out instead; and though G.o.d offered to make of him a great nation, yet did he prefer the greatness of his people. He led them to Palestine, but his own foot never touched the promised land. What a glorious, G.o.dlike figure, and yet so p.r.o.ne to wrath and error, so lovably human. How he is modelled all round like a Rembrandt--while your starveling monks have made of your Christ a mere decorative figure with a gold halo. O Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher indeed!

No, Christ was not the first nor the last of our race to wear a crown of thorns. What was Spinoza but Christ in the key of meditation?"

"Wherever a great soul speaks out his thoughts, there is Golgotha,"

quoted the listener.

"Ah, you know every word I have written," he said, childishly pleased.

"Decidedly, you must translate me. You shall be my apostle to the heathen. You are good apostles, you English. You turned Jews under Cromwell, and now your missionaries are planting our Palestinian doctrines in the South Seas, or amid the josses and paG.o.das of the East, and your young men are colonizing unknown continents on the basis of the Decalogue of Moses. You are founding a world-wide Palestine. The law goes forth from Zion, but by way of Liverpool and Southampton. Perhaps you are indeed the lost Ten Tribes."

"Then you would make me a Jew, too," she laughed.

"Jew or Greek, there are only two religious possibilities--fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count--the Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this world. The Jewish mission will never be over till the Christians are converted to the religion of Christ. La.s.salle is a better pupil of the Master than the priests who denounce socialism. You have met La.s.salle!

No? You shall meet him here one day. A marvel. Me _plus_ Will. He knows everything, feels everything, yet is a sledge-hammer to act. He may yet be the Messiah of the nineteenth century. Ah! when every man is a Spinoza, and does good for the love of good, when the world is ruled by justice and brotherhood, reason and humor, then the Jews may shut up shop, for it will be the Holy Sabbath. Did you mark, Lucy, I said, reason and humor? Nothing will survive in the long run but what satisfies the sense of logic, and the sense of humor. Logic and laughter--the two trumps of doom! Put not your trust in princes--the really great of the earth are always simple. Pomp and ceremonial, popes and kings, are toys for children. Christ rode on an a.s.s, now the a.s.s rides on Christ."

"And how long do you give your trumps to sound before your Millennium dawns?" said "little Lucy," feeling strangely old and cynical beside this incorrigible idealist.

"Alas, perhaps I am only another dreamer of the Ghetto, perhaps I have fought in vain. A Jewish woman once came weeping to her Rabbi with her son, and complained that the boy, instead of going respectably into business like his sires, had developed religion, and insisted on training for a Rabbi. Would not the Rabbi dissuade him? 'But,' said the Rabbi, chagrined, 'why are you so distressed about it? Am _I_ not a Rabbi?' 'Yes,' replied the woman, 'but this little fool takes it seriously,' _Ach_, every now and again arises a dreamer who takes the world's lip-faith seriously, and the world tramples on another fool.

Perhaps there is no resurrection for humanity. If so, if there's no world's Saviour coming by the railway, let us keep the figure of that sublime Dreamer whose blood is balsam to the poor and the suffering."

Marvelling at the mental lucidity, the spiritual loftiness of his changed mood, his visitor wished to take leave of him with this image in her memory; but just then a half-paralyzed Jewish graybeard made his appearance, and Heine's instant dismissal of him on her account made it difficult not to linger a little longer.

"My _chef de police_!" he said, smiling. "He lives on me and I live on his reports of the great world. He tells me what my enemies are up to.

But I have them in there," and he pointed to an ebony box on a chest of drawers, and asked her to hand it to him.

"Pardon me before I forget," he said; and, seizing a pencil like a dagger, he made a sprawling note, laughing venomously. "I have them here!" he repeated, "they will try to stop the publication of my _Memoirs_, but I will outwit them yet. I hold them! Dead or alive, they shall not escape me. Woe to him who shall read these lines, if he has dared attack me. Heine does not die like the first comer. The tiger's claws will survive the tiger. When I die, it will be for _them_ the Day of Judgment."

It was a reminder of the long fighting life of the freelance, of all the stories she had heard of his sordid quarrels, of his blackmailing his relatives, and besting his uncle. She asked herself his own question, "Is genius, like the pearl in the oyster, only a splendid disease?"

Aloud she said, "I hope you are done with Borne!"

"Borne?" he said, softening. "_Ach_, what have I against Borne? Two baptized German Jews exiled in Paris should forgive each other in death. My book was misunderstood. I wish to heaven I hadn't written it. I always admired Borne, even if I could not keep up the ardor of my St. Simonian days when my spiritual Egeria was Rahel von Varnhagen.

I had three beautiful days with him in Frankfort when he was full of Jewish wit, and hadn't yet shrunk to a mere politician. He was a brave soldier of humanity, but he had no sense of art, and I could not stand the dirty mob around him with its atmosphere of filthy German tobacco and vulgar tirades against tyrants. The last time I saw him he was almost deaf, and worn to a skeleton by consumption. He dwelt in a vast, bright silk dressing-gown, and said that if an Emperor shook his hand he would cut it off. I said if a workman shook mine I should wash it. And so we parted, and he fell to denouncing me as a traitor and a _persifleur_, who would preach monarchy or republicanism, according to which sounded better in the sentence. Poor Lob Baruch! Perhaps he was wiser than I in his idea that his brother Jews should sink themselves in the nations. He was born, by the way, in the very year of old Mendelssohn's death. What an irony! But I am sorry for those insinuations against Mme. Strauss. I have withdrawn them from the new edition, although, as you perhaps know, I had already satisfied her husband's sense of justice by allowing him to shoot at me, whilst I fired in the air. What can I more?"

"I am glad you have withdrawn them," she said, moved.

"Yes; I have no Napoleonic grip, you see. A morsel of conventional conscience clings to me."

"Therefore I could never understand your wors.h.i.+p of Napoleon."

"There speaks the Englishwoman. You Pharisees--forgive me--do not understand great men, you and your Wellington! Napoleon was not of the wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the G.o.ds. Let me tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos, but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant.

This Paris needs a scourge of G.o.d, and the moment France gives Germany a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has died out of Israel."

"_Qui vivra verra_," ran heedlessly off her tongue. Then, blus.h.i.+ng painfully, she said quickly, "But how do you wors.h.i.+p Napoleon and Moses in the same breath?"

"Ah, my dear Lucy, if your soul was like an Aladdin's palace with a thousand windows opening on the human spectacle! Self-contradiction the fools call it, if you will not shut your eyes to half the show. I love the people, yet I hate their stupidity and mistrust their leaders. I hate the aristocrats, yet I love the lilies that toil not, neither do they spin, and sometimes bring their perfume and their white robes into a sick man's chamber. Who would harden with work the white fingers of Corysande, or sacrifice one rustle of Lalage's silken skirts? Let the poor starve; I'll have no potatoes on Parna.s.sus. My socialism is not barracks and brown bread, but purple robes, music, and comedies.

"Yes, I was born for Paradox. A German Parisian, a Jewish German, a hated political exile who yearns for dear homely old Germany, a sceptical sufferer with a Christian patience, a romantic poet expressing in cla.s.sic form the modern spirit, a Jew and poor--think you I do not see myself as lucidly as I see the world? 'My mind to me a kingdom is' sang your old poet. Mine is a republic, and all moods are free, equal and fraternal, as befits a child of light. Or if there _is_ a despot, 'tis the king's jester, who laughs at the king as well as all his subjects. But am I not nearer Truth for not being caged in a creed or a clan? Who dares to think Truth frozen--on this phantasmagorical planet, that whirls in beginningless time through endless s.p.a.ce! Let us trust, for the honor of G.o.d, that the contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps humor--your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up its latent negation, pa.s.sing on to its own contradiction--gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in the cold white light, or in the s.h.i.+mmering interplay of the rainbow tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces and show how they contradict each other, and adjudge me, like a schoolmaster, so many good marks for this quality, and so many bad marks for that. Biographers will weigh me grocerwise, as Kant weighed the Deity. Ugh! You can only be judged by your peers or by your superiors, by the minds that circ.u.mscribe yours, not by those that are smaller than yours. I tell you that when they have written three tons about me, they shall as little understand me as the Cosmos I reflect.

Does the pine contradict the rose or the lotusland the iceberg? I am Spain, I am Persia, I am the North Sea, I am the beautiful G.o.ds of old Greece, I am Brahma brooding over the sun-lands, I am Egypt, I am the Sphinx. But oh, dear Lucy, the tragedy of the modern, all-mirroring consciousness that dares to look on G.o.d face to face, not content, with Moses, to see the back parts; nor, with the Israelites, to gaze on Moses. _Ach_, why was I not made four-square like Moses Mendelssohn, or sublimely one-sided like Savonarola; I, too, could have died to save humanity, if I did not at the same time suspect humanity was not worth saving. To be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, what a tragedy! No, your limited intellects are happier: those that see life in some one n.o.ble way, and in unity find strength. I should have loved to be a Milton--like one of your English cathedrals, austere, breathing sacred memories, resonant with the roll of a great organ, with painted windows, on which the shadows of the green boughs outside wave and flicker, and just hint of Nature. Or one of your aristocrats with a stately home in the country, and dogs and horses, and a beautiful wife. In short, I should like to be your husband. Or, failing that, my own wife, a simple, loving creature, whose idea of culture is cabbages. _Ach_, why was my soul wider than the Ghetto I was born in? why did I not mate with my kind?" He broke into a fit of coughing, and "little Lucy" thought suddenly of the story that all his life-sadness and song-sadness was due to his rejection by some Jewish girl in his own family circle.

"I tire you," she said. "Do not talk to me. I will sit here a little longer."

"Nay, I have tired _you_. But I could not but tell you my thoughts; for you are at once a child who loves and a woman who understands me.

And to be understood is rarer than to be loved. My very parents never understood me. Nay, were they my parents--the mild man of business, the clever, clear-headed, romance-disdaining Dutchwoman, G.o.d bless her? No, my father was Germany, my mother was the Ghetto. The brooding spirit of Israel breathes through me that engendered the tender humor of her sages, the celestial fantasies of her saints. Perhaps I should have been happier had I married the first black-eyed Jewess whose father would put up with a penniless poet. I might have kept a kitchen with double crockery and munched Pa.s.sover cakes at Easter. Every Friday night I should have come home from the labors of the week and found the table-cloth s.h.i.+ning like my wife's face, and the Sabbath candles burning, and the Angels of Peace sitting hidden beneath their great invisible wings, and my wife, piously conscious of having thrown the dough on the fire, would have kissed me tenderly, and I should have recited in an ancient melody: 'A virtuous woman, who can find her? Her price is far above rubies.' There would have been little children with great candid eyes, on whose innocent heads I should have laid my hands in blessing, praying that G.o.d might make them like Ephraim and Mana.s.seh, Rachel and Leah--persons of dubious exemplariness--and we should have sat down and eaten _Schalet_, which is the divinest dish in the world, pending the Leviathan that awaits the blessed at Messiah's table. And, instead of singing of cocottes and mermaids, I should have sung, like Jehuda Halevi, of my _Herzensdame_, Jerusalem. Perhaps--who knows?--my Hebrew verses would have been incorporated in the festival liturgy, and pious old men would have snuffled them helter-skelter through their noses. The letters of my name would have run acrosticwise down the verses, and the last verse would have inspired the cantor to jubilant roulades or tremolo wails while the choir boomed in 'Pom'; and perhaps many a Jewish banker, to whom my present poems make so little appeal, would have wept and beat his breast and taken snuff to the words of them.

And I should have been buried honorably in the 'House of Life,' and my son would have said _Kaddish_. Ah me, it is, after all, so much better to be stupid and walk in the old laid-out, well-trimmed paths, than to wander after the desires of your own heart and your own eyes over the blue hills. True, there are glorious vistas to explore, and streams of living silver to bathe in, and wild horses to catch by the mane, but you are in a chartless land without stars and compa.s.s. One false step and you are over a precipice, or up to your neck in a slough. Ah, it is perilous to throw over the old surveyors. I see Moses ben Amram, with his measuring-chain and his graving-tools, marking on those stone tables of his the deepest abysses and the muddiest mora.s.ses. When I kept swine with the Hegelians, I used to say, or rather, I still say, for, alas! I cannot suppress what I have published: 'teach man _he's_ divine; the knowledge of his divinity will inspire him to manifest it.' Ah me, I see now that our divinity is like old Jupiter's, who made a beast of himself as soon as he saw pretty Europa. Would to G.o.d I could blot out all my book on German Philosophy! No, no, humanity is too weak and too miserable. We must have faith, we cannot live without faith, in the old simple things, the personal G.o.d, the dear old Bible, a life beyond the grave."

Fascinated by his talk, which seemed to play like lightning round a cliff at midnight, revealing not only measureless heights and soundless depths, but the greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of a picnic, the listener had an intuition that Heine's mind did indeed, as he claimed, reflect or rather refract the All. Only not sublimely blurred as in Spinoza's, but specifically colored and infinitely interrelated, so that he might pa.s.s from the sublime to the ridiculous with an equal sense of its value in the cosmic scheme. It was the Jewish artist's proclamation of the Unity, the humorist's "Hear, O Israel."

"Will it never end, this battle of Jew and Greek?" he said, half to himself, so that she did not know whether he meant it personally or generally. Then, as she tore herself away, "I fear I have shocked you," he said tenderly. "But one thing I have never blasphemed--Life.

Is not enjoyment an implicit prayer, a latent grace? After all, G.o.d is our Father, not our drill-master. He is not so dull and solemn as the parsons make out. He made the kitten to chase its tail and my Nonotte to laugh and dance. Come again, dear child, for my friends have grown used to my dying, and expect me to die for ever--an inverted immortality. But one day they will find the puppet-show shut up and the jester packed in his box. Good-bye. G.o.d bless you, little Lucy, G.o.d bless you."

The puppet-show was shut up sooner than he expected; but the jester had kept his most wonderful _mot_ for the last.

"_Dieu me pardonnera_," he said. "_C'est son metier._"

THE PEOPLE'S SAVIOUR

I

"Der Bahn, der kuhnen, folgen wir, Die uns gefuhrt La.s.salle."