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Heinrich Heine, the great German writer, who was pro-Napoleon, has told a vivid story of how he visited the East India Docks, while he was in London, and there saw a large sailing vessel with a great number of coloured people on board, Mohammedans for the most part. He wished to speak to them but did not know their language.
Maurice was placed in the spring of 1833 at the College Henri IV., at Paris; thus she had now both son and daughter near her, and watched indefatigably over them, their childish illnesses and childish amusements, their moral and intellectual training absorbing a large share of her time and attention. Heine, a friendly visitor at her house, says:
For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred to it in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; my Spanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the age of twenty-six. My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitz editions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then and there.
We forget that the creation of the novel should be, to a certain extent, a synthetic process, and impart to human actions that ideal quality which we demand in painting. Heine regards Cervantes as the originator of the modern novel.
But it might not be too radical a view if one were to maintain that these books are the expression of something temporary and accidental, that they sustain a chronological relation to modern literature rather than an essential one. Matthew Arnold spoke of Heine as a sardonic smile on the face of the Zeitgeist.
She taught herself German, that she might read Heine and Goethe with him; and one evening, when she was little more than sixteen, he rushed her through the first part of "Faust," so that she lay awake the whole night afterwards in such a passion of emotion, that it seemed, for the moment, to change her whole existence.
As for the literary merit of these Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, it strikes one key with their political quality. One exquisite ballad of "The Stolen Child," by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.
Mathilde, as we know, was far from being Heine's first love. She was more important his last. Heine himself tells us that from his boyhood he had been dangerously susceptible to women. He had tried many cures for the disease, but finally came to the conclusion that "woman is the best antidote to woman", though "to be sure, this is driving out Satan with Beelzebub."
The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into which this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the white nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot! It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic Legend German sentimentality and Celtic romance need a Heine to deal with them!
He thought things were tending there to the triumph of communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in communism was very repulsive. "It is all of no use," he cried on his death-bed, "the future belongs to our enemies, the Communists, and Louis Napoleon is their John the Baptist."
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