“How can you speak of poetry in such a way — you who wrote such exquisite things?” asked Diana.
“You may be sure,” answered Heine, with that wonderful smile which drew strange angles about his sensitive mouth, “that if it were still in my power to make verses I would not laugh at my old trade. But the grapes which hang too high are eternally green — as perpetually sour as unrealised hope.”
“Which is very sour indeed,” remarked Augustus. “Nevertheless, you must have realised most of your hopes during your lifetime. You were brilliantly successful.”
“In exile,” answered the poet, sadly.
“In a perfectly voluntary exile, I believe?” returned Augustus.
“No — a fatal exile,” said Heine, almost passionately. “In Germany I was a Frenchman, in France I was a German — among Jews a Christian, among Christians a Jew, with Catholics a Protestant, with Protestants a Catholic. I was always in contradiction with my surroundings, I was in a perpetual exile. Had I been made like some people, full of raw fighting instincts, I would have fought. As it was, I was unhappy, sick in soul and ill in body, and so I became a poet and wrote verses. You say they were good? Yes, I believe they were, for I took pleasure in writing them; but had I possessed Mr. Chard’s sanguine constitution I would have been a leader of men instead of a writer of lyrics. I used to think I might play a political part — indeed, I often fancied that I did. Since I died I have learned what stuff is needed to play a part in the world of nations.”
“Broad shoulders and a rough fist,” said Augustus. “Soldiering is girl’s play compared with it.”
“You may well say that. Broad shoulders, a rough fist and a hard heart. I think my heart was never very hard. Even when I abused people it did not hurt them much. My shoulders are not broad and my fist — you see,” said the poet, glancing with a pathetic pride at his delicate fingers, “I have the hand of a woman, I was not made for a politician.”
“It is strange,” said Gwendoline, “that great poets so often believe themselves to be statesmen, or have opportunities of becoming statesmen thrust upon them.”
“Yes,” replied Heine, “there was Goethe, to begin with. Dante was another. Milton had the strongest political tastes. Victor Hugo was a type of the politician-poet. Horace refused to be political private secretary to Augustus. Catullus began as a writer of political squibs against Cæsar. Mickievicz was a furious patriot. Even Byron aspired to political fame and sacrificed his life heroically for an idea. Perhaps I should say for a principle, I do not like the word idea.”
“If you will pardon me, I think that is one of your amiable eccentricities,” remarked Augustus. “The great fights — or the great struggles of history, have either been fought for material advantage or for ideas. It seems to me nobler to fight for an idea than to fight for money — or for what practically results in money.”
“By all means,” answered Heine. “In my mind the word idea is associated with certain philosophical theories which I consider absurd, but if you use the word in the sense of a principle, and enthusiasm for that principle, I agree with you. That is what the sickness of modern times means. It is too long since the world has fought for a pure principle. Individual nations have had their struggles, chiefly internal, about what they considered right or wrong, but it is long since the joint enthusiasm of all humanity has been roused to shed blood and spend it in attacking and defending a purely moral cause. At present the thinking world is divided into two very distinct classes — those who say that principles are worth fighting, for, and those who say that there should be no fighting and that the principles will take care of themselves. Neither party has the full sympathy of the masses.”
“I always think,” said Lady Brenda, “that the world depends entirely on the thinking people. The masses are not of so much importance. They always follow, you know.”
“You and I, madam,” replied the poet, “may design a very good pyramid, as big and symmetrical as the pyramid of Cheops. But however perfect the design may be, we cannot build it unless the masses help us. Without the concurrence of the masses the noblest political schemes must fail.”
“Their failure does not make them any the less noble,” objected Lady Brenda.
“No. But it makes them less useful and therefore less important. The successful people are those who induce many to follow them, and that can only be done by presenting the many with ideas which they can understand. The thoughts of great poets are generally noble, but not easily understood by the masses. The poet, however, aims at elevating the people to his own level, and being carried away by the grandeur of his plans he thinks it a simple matter to make a poetic commonwealth of the whole world. He is of course disappointed; he dies fancying his life a failure, and after he is dead he is surprised to find that nobody ever thought anything of his political capabilities, whereas he has earned immortality by his verses. The great man of the future will be he who shall discover the idea — as you call it — for which mankind shall be willing to take up arms. If his idea succeeds he will be a very great man and will probably be murdered, like a gentleman; if he fails he will be the last of humanity and will most likely be hanged, like a thief. After all, it is better to be a poet. If people only knew and understood how much better it is to live out one’s life naturally! There is so little of it, and the remembrance of that little must serve one so long!”
“It is certainly best to be a poet,” said Diana, leaning back in her chair and looking from the moon to the dark water, and dreamily again from the water to the silver shield above. “But it is not everybody who can. They say there is but one good poet in a thousand million human beings.”
“The proportion is truly discouraging,” answered Heine. “It is even worse when you reflect that there is not more than one good poet in a thousand million poets of all kinds, any more than you will find two wise men in a milliard of puckery, peppery, self-satisfied scientists. It must therefore be difficult to be very wise or to be a very good poet — but be careful never to tell people so, for as yet nobody has found it out.”
“It cannot hurt people if they try to be either,” said Lady Brenda.
“The ultimate disappointment of being convinced of failure in the nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases is hardly ever felt in practice by poets, never by scientists. It follows that, at a comparatively small cost, thousands of millions are made perfectly happy in the belief that they are great. Even when idiots do not obtain appreciation, which rarely occurs, they find pleasant consolation in attributing their lack of success to the stupidity of others. There are more ways of believing oneself great than by obtaining praise from one’s contemporaries, or money for one’s works. I received forty copies, free of charge, as sole and entire payment for my first book of verses, after another publisher had refused to print it altogether; but when I was correcting the proofs I felt that I was a much greater man than before, and I have never since felt so great as on that day. I had a considerable reputation when my excellent uncle remarked of me to a friend that ‘if the silly boy had ever learned anything he would not have needed to write books.’ I had reputation, I say, and yet I was so much struck by the truth of the remark, that I would have accepted the post of theological adviser and attorney-general to the king of the cannibals, had it been offered to me — anything for a respectable profession, as I said to myself. But the last theological adviser had chanced to disagree with the king about an hour after the Sunday meal, and on taking medical advice and consulting the family butcher I lost confidence in myself and did not apply. Uncle Solomon Heine also thought there was truth in his saying and repeated it frequently. I was then a man of one book, but he was a man of one joke. I afterwards wrote other books, but my uncle’s jest did not multiply. Still, that one joke elevates him; he stood upon it as on a pedestal; and the pedestal bore to him about the same relation as the Vendome column bears to the statue of Napoleon.”
There was something so go
od-natured in his story of the facetious uncle Solomon, that all the party laughed a little, except Diana, who was dreaming of something very far away. Heine noticed her silence.
“What were you thinking of?” he asked, turning towards her.
“I will not tell you — you would be angry,” she answered.
“I? angry?” exclaimed the poet in some surprise. “Dead men are never angry. Anger is an emotion, and there are no emotions of that kind for us. We have lost the power of influencing our surroundings, and we perform no actions which can be influenced by them. We shed tears sometimes, and sometimes we laugh a little — but we are never angry. What were you thinking of?”
“I was thinking — wondering about the dead Maria,” said Diana in a low voice.
“Yes,” resumed Heine, softly, “I wonder too — I wonder why I suffered as I did. But no one knows the story. I regret the suffering now that it is gone, and I wish it were with me again. When I was alive I used to think that she came back from the dead in the silent evenings — evenings like this — and that she sat with me and spoke with me as she used to speak. Now that I am dead I cannot find her — I have long given up the search. I sometimes fancy I hear her voice singing — it is a strange, sweet voice, like a nightingale’s last notes, full of silky tones that make me tremble with a sort of creeping fear, tones that seem to come from a bleeding heart, that wind and spin themselves among my thoughts like soft, beseeching memories. And her dear face that seemed modelled by a Greek master out of the perfumed mist of white roses, delicate as though breathed into shape, noble beyond all thought —— and the passionate eyes illuminating the classic splendour of her beauty — I remember all. Her hand, too! There were little blue veins under the polished, high-born skin. It was not like a little girl’s vegetable-animal hand — half lamb, half rose —— thoughtless and fair; there was something spiritual in the white fingers, something that suggested a story of sympathy, like the hands of beautiful persons who are excessively refined or have suffered terribly — and yet it had a look of pathetic innocence, and if I touched it, it shrank delicately under the gentlest pressure. She was dead when I saw her last — she was so beautiful when she was dead, so terribly, so fascinatingly beautiful, as she lay among the roses on her bed. She died before I could reach her, but I saw her dead. She loved me once — I thought she loved me in the end, though she took another. They respected me — they left me alone with her. Old Ursula looked at me once, strangely I thought, and she went out. The shaded lamp stood on a table. A purple flower drooped in a glass beside it, and gave out a faint unnatural perfume. I stood by the bedside. I thought of the dark-robed knight who would have kissed his dead love to life again. I gazed long, and at last I bent down and I pressed my lips on her cold mouth. Suddenly the lamp was extinguished — it must have been the breeze from the open window, for I know I was alone — I felt cold, icy cold, arms go round my neck — I heard a name spoken. It was her voice, it was not my name. — The rest? I do not know the rest, for I fled from the house, from the town, from the country. They told me she was not dead. She was dead to me — dead as I am now. To me she is always dead, always, always! These are not tears, the moon casts queer lights on dead men’s faces.”
His voice trembled and ceased, and silence fell upon the little company that sat in the May moonlight over the sea. The story of human suffering is ever old, yet ever new — the dead man who had been telling his long-dead tale had himself said so, and it is true. Each of those who heard him, heard him differently; yet each felt in the story the whole depth of the pain for him which they could have felt had they stood beside him nearly seventy years ago when it all happened, when the woman he loved was suddenly restored to life with another’s name upon her lips, when he himself was wounded in the first spring of his youth with a wound that never healed.
But it was not his manner when alive to excite sympathy for his own sufferings, nor was he now willing to let his tale end thus.
“You are silent,” he said, “and you are sorry for me. I thank you. Sympathy exists in the human heart, unexplained by learned treatises about the pursuit of happiness. We shudder at the sight of a ghastly wound, and the tears rise to our eyes as we listen to the story of a broken heart. It is not for me that you are sad — it is for what I have told you. There are many sad stories — not all mine.”
“Tell us a sad story,” said Diana. “I love sad stories.”
“I saw a beggar die upon the high road. His story was sad enough. He had seen many misfortunes, many troubles; many pains had had their will of his racked body, many days and years of suffering had piled their load upon his aching shoulders; grief knew him and tracked him down, and sorrow, the pitiless driver of men, had stung each galled wound of his soul with cunning cruelty, goading and sparing not as he came near to the end. The silver hairs were few which hung straggling from beneath the torn brim of his battered hat, and the furrows were many and deep upon his colourless face. His dim eyes peered from their worn and sunken sockets as though still faintly striving, striving to the very last, to understand those things which it was not given him to understand. Feebly his two hands clasped his crooked staff, road-worn and splintered by the flints; upon one foot still clung the fragments of a shoe, the other had no shoe at all, and as he stood he lifted the foot that was bare and tried to rest it upon the scanty bit of dusty leather which only half covered the other, as though to ease it from the cruel road, while he steadied himself feebly with his stick. Had there been the least fragment of a wall near him, a bit of fence, even a tree, he would have tried to lean upon it; but there was nothing — nothing but the broad flinty road, with the ditch dug deep upon each side, nothing but the cold grey sky, the black north wind that began to whirl up the dust, scattering here and there big flakes of wet snow, and, far away behind, the barking of the dogs that had driven him from the gate while the churls who lingered there after their day’s work laughed and made rough jokes upon him. A little boy, the son of one of those fellows, had taken a stone and had thrown it after the old man — the missile had struck him in the back and he had bowed himself lower and limped away; he was used to it — people often threw stones at him, and sometimes they hit him. What was one blow more to him, one wound more? The end could not be far.
“So he rested his naked foot upon the other, now that he was out of reach of harm. He could hear the dogs barking still, but dogs never chased him long; they would not come after him now. The boy could not throw stones to such a distance either, and would not take the trouble to pursue him, though one of the men had laughed when the old man was hit, and another had said it was a good shot. He might rest for a while, if it were rest to lean upon his staff and feel the bitter wind driving the snowflakes through the rents in his clothing, and whirling up the half frozen flint dust to his sore and weary eyes. The night was coming on. He would have to sleep in the ditch. It would not be the first time — if only he could get a mile or two farther he might find some bit of arched bridge across the ditch which would shelter him, or a stone wall; or even perhaps, a farmhouse where he should not be stoned from the door and might be suffered to sleep upon the straw in an outhouse. Such luck as that was rare indeed, and the mere thought of the straw, the pitiful dream that if he could struggle a little farther he might get shelter from the wind and snow, was enough to bring something like a shadowy look of hope into his wretched face. With a great effort he began to walk again, bending low to face the blast, starving, lame, and aching in every bone, but struggling still and peering through the gathering gloom in the vain hope of finding a night’s resting-place.”
“I would, have killed the boy who threw the stone, if I had been you!” exclaimed Lady Brenda in ready sympathy.
“Alas, dear madam, I was dead myself,” said Heine. “It was only the other day. Well, as I said, he struggled on; but the end was at hand. The road grew worse, for it had been mended and the small broken stones lay thick together, rough and bristling. He could hardly drag his steps over
them. In the darkness he struck his naked foot against one sharp flint that was larger than the rest; he stumbled and with a low cry fell headlong upon the jagged surface. His hands were wounded and the blood trickled from them in the dark, wetting the stones more quickly than did the falling snow; his face, too, had been cut. For some moments he struggled to rise, but he was too weak, too utterly spent; then he rolled upon one side and rested his bruised face upon his torn hands and lay quite still, while the wind howled louder and the snow-flakes fell more thickly upon his rags and his wounds, upon the sorrows of his soul and the pains of his body. One long breath he drew — it was more than an hour since he had fallen.
“‘God be merciful to me!’ he murmured, and again, ‘God be merciful to me, for I think it is the end.’ And the Angel of the Lord came in the storm and the darkness and touched his forehead; and it was the end. The snow buried him that night and the north wind sang his funeral dirge.”
“How terribly sad!” exclaimed Diana in deep sympathy.
“To think that such things happen!” said Lady Brenda and Gwendoline in one breath.
“Do you think it is the fact, or the way the fact is told, which brings the tears to your eyes?” asked the poet. “If I had stated the fact thus: an old beggar died in a snow-storm; shortly before he died a little boy hit him with a stone — I say, if I put the thing in its simplest expression, would you feel as deep a sympathy? I believe not. I told you a long story — a true one, if you please — to show you that your sympathy could be commanded, could be excited, by my words. You asked me of a thing concerning myself — I was not willing to state it as a fact, I was obliged to state it with such accessories as should make you feel uncomfortable in my favour, so to say. All of which proves that man, living or dead, is a detestably selfish creature, and not very strong at that. When he has command of his audience he uses it unmercifully to rouse sympathy in others. When his audience has command of him, he generally makes a fool of himself. I once visited Goethe. In half an hour I could find nothing better to say to him than that there were good plums on the road from Jena to Weimar and that I was writing a Faust. I got no applause for my plums and no sympathy for my Faust; I never wrote the Faust, but I never ate plums from that day. So much for knowing how to manage one’s hearers.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 302