The Works of Heinrich Heine/Vol. 7/Letter 6 appendix

by Heinrich Heine

 

 

Appendix to Letter VI.^[1]

 

"Seest thou the foundations of usury, of theft and robbery, are our great men and lords, who take all creatures unto their possession: the fish in the waters, the birds in the air, all that groweth on the earth must be theirs (Jes. v.). Therefore they send forth God's commandment among the poor and say, 'God hath commanded that ye shall not steal!' yet it serves them naught. So they all bring it to pass that from the poor ploughman, workman, and all which lives, they pluck off their skin from them and the flesh from off their bones [Micah iii. 3]. And should he then lay violent hands on what is holiest, he must hang. Then saith Doctor Liar, 'Amen!' The great men are themselves the cause that the poor man is their enemy. If they will not do away with the cause of strife, how can it go well in the long-run? And if I, saying that, am rebellious and a stirrer-up of strife, so let it be!"

In these words spake three hundred years ago Thomas Münzer, one of the most heroic-minded and unfortunate sons of the German Fatherland, a preacher of the Gospel, which, according to his belief, promised not only happiness in heaven, but also equality and brotherhood unto men upon earth. Doctor Martin Luther was of a different opinion, and condemned such rebellious doctrines, by which his own work, the separation from Rome and the foundation of the new faith, was endangered, and inspired perhaps more by worldly wisdom than by evil zeal, wrote his disreputable book against the unfortunate peasants. Pietists and canting hypocrites (Duckmäuser) have of late revived this work, and spread the reprints far and wide—partially to show their high protectors how much the pure Lutheran faith upholds absolute government, and partially to suppress by Luther's authority the enthusiasm for freedom in Germany. But a holier testimony, which flows like blood from the Gospel, contradicts the slavish interpretation and the erroneous authority; for Christ, who died for the equality and brotherhood of mankind, did not reveal his Word to serve as the tool of Absolutism, and Thomas Münzer was right and Luther in the wrong, Münzer was beheaded at Mödlin. His companions were also in the right, and they were beheaded with the sword or hung with the rope, as they chanced to be of plebeian or noble origin. The Margrave Casimir von Anspach, in addition to such executions, had the eyes put out of eighty-five peasants, who afterwards went begging about the country, and who were also in the right. How it went with the wretched peasants in Upper Austria and Suabia, and how in Germany many hundreds of thousands of peasants, who asked for nothing but human rights and Christian mercy, were slaughtered or strangled by their spiritual or temporal lords, is commonly known. But the latter were in the right, because they were in all the fulness of power, and the peasants were often led astray by the authority of a Luther and of other clergymen who made common cause with secular powers, and by untimely controversies over equivocal Biblical passages, or often singing psalms when they should have fought.

In the year of grace 1789, the same strife began in France as to equality and brotherhood, on the same grounds, against the same class in power, with this difference, that the latter lost the power which the people gained, while their cause drew its claims to justice, not from the Bible, but from philosophy. The feudalistic and hierarchic institutions which Charlemagne had founded in his vast realm, and which had developed themselves in many forms in the realms which spread forth from it, had struck root most powerfully in France, flourished bravely for centuries, and, like all things in this world, at last lost their strength. The kings of France, vexed at their dependence on the nobility and clergy—the first of whom considered themselves as the equals of their monarch, while the latter ruled the people more than they did—gradually contrived to weaken their power, and this great work was completed by Louis XIV. Instead of a warlike feudal nobility, which had at once governed and guarded their kings, there now crept to the steps of the throne a weakly court nobility, whose prestige was derived not from its castles and retainers, but from the number of its ancestors; instead of stiff and stern priests, who terrified kings with confessional and excommunication (Beicht' und Bann) while they kept the multitude in check, there was now a Gallican or, so to speak, a mediatised Church, whose posts or offices were surreptitiously obtained in the œil de bœuf of Versailles or in the boudoirs of mistresses, and whose chiefs belonged to the same aristocracy, who paraded as court-domestics, so that the costumes of abbés and bishops, pallium and mitre, might be considered as a kind of court-costume. Despite which change, the nobility retained the privileges which it always had over the people; in fact, its pride as regards the latter rose the more it was abased before its royal lords. It usurped, as of old, all the enjoyments of life, oppressed and wronged as before, as did the clergy, who had long lost their hold on men's souls, but who still kept their titles, their Trinity monopoly, their privileges of suppressing intellect, and their churchly tricks and wiles. What the teachers of the Gospel had tried in the Peasants' War was now done by philosophers in France, and with better success. They demonstrated to the people the usurpations of the nobility and of the Church; they showed them that both had lost their power, and the people exulted; and on the 14th of June 1789, the weather being fine, they began the work of their emancipation, and he who on that day had sought the spot where the old, musty, grimly unpleasant Bastile had stood, would have found in its place an airy, cheerful building with the laughing inscription, "Ici on danse."

For seventeen years many writers in Europe have busied themselves unweariedly in trying to free the learned men of France from the reproach that they had especially caused the outbreak of the French Revolution. The writers of the present day would fain be in favour again with the great; they have sought to win once more a soft place at the feet of power, and have behaved, in so doing, with such an air of servile innocence that they are now considered not as serpents, but common worms. But I cannot refrain from declaring the truth, that the writers of the last century were the men who did most to cause the outbreak of the Revolution, and who determined its character. I praise them for this as one praises a physician who brings about a rapid crisis, and allays by his skill the illness which might have been deadly. Without the word spoken by those scholars, France would have lingered on more miserably, and the Revolution, which must have inevitably come, would have assumed a far less noble form; it would have been vulgar and barbarous, instead of tragic and bloody. Or, what is worse, it might have deteriorated into something laughable and stupid, if its positive needs (materielle Nöthen) had not assumed an ideal expression, as has unfortunately not been the case in those countries where the writers have not led the people to demand a declaration of human rights, and where people make a revolution to escape paying a toll or to get rid of a mistress. Voltaire and Rousseau are two writers who did more than all others to prepare the Revolution, who determined its later paths, and who still spiritually lead and rule the French race. Even the enmity between these two has had a marvellous after-effect; perhaps the party strife among the men of the Revolution itself even to this hour is only a continuation of this conflict.

^[2] For the battle among the revolutionary men of the Convention was nothing but the secret ill-will (Groll) of Rousseau rigorism to Voltairean légèreté. The true Montagnards cherished all the manner of thought and feeling of Rousseau, and as they guillotined at the same time Dantonists and Hebertistes, it came to pass not altogether because the former preached a relaxing moderatism, and the latter degenerated into the most unbridled sans-culottéism, or as an old man of the Mountain said to me lately, "Parce qu'ils etaient tous des hommes pourris, frivoles, sans croyance et sans vertu." When the old state of affairs was overthrown, the wild men of the Revolution were tolerably at peace; but when something new was to be enacted and the most positive questions were discussed, natural antipathies awoke. That serious dreamer of the Rousseau school, Saint-Just, hated henceforth the gay and witty fanfaron, Desmoulins. The morally pure, incorruptible Robespierre hated the sensual, money-tainted Danton. Maximilian Robespierre of holy memory was the incarnation of Rousseau; he was deeply religious; he believed in God and immortality; he hated Voltairean mockeries of religion, the undignified tricks of a Gobel,^[3] the orgies of the atheists, the loose conduct of the esprits, and perhaps he hated everybody who was witty and laughed.

On the nineteenth Thermidor the Voltairean party, which had been not long previously suppressed, conquered; under the Directory it exercised its reaction on the Mountain; later, during the heroic drama of the Empire, as during the pious Christian comedy of the Restoration, it could only play in minor parts; yet we have seen it, even to this hour, more or less active, standing at the helm of state, and indeed represented by the former Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice Talleyrand. Rousseau's party, suppressed since that unhappy day of Thermidor, lived poorly, but sound in mind and body, in the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, in the forms of Garnier Pagés, Cavaignac, and of so many other noble Republicans, who from time to time appear for the gospel of Freedom. I am not virtuous enough to be able to attach myself to this party, but I hate vice too much to ever make war on it.

Injustice, however, is done to Voltaire should any one assert that he was not as fully inspired as Rousseau; he was only more crafty and clever. Heavy unskilfulness always takes refuge in stoicism, and growls laconically at seeing adroitness in others. Alfieri reproaches Voltaire because he wrote against great men, while he always carried the candle before them like a chamberlain. The gloomy Piedmontese never observed that Voltaire, while he carried the candle as a servant before the great, at the same time lit up their nakedness. Yet I will by no means acquit Voltaire from the reproach of flattery; he and the greater portion of the learned men of France crept like spaniels to the feet of the nobles, and licked the golden spurs, and smiled when they wounded their tongues on them or were trampled under foot. Yet when small dogs are kicked they suffer as much as great hounds. The secret hatred of French scholars against the great must have been the more terrible because in addition to the kicks they also received from them many benefits.^[4] Garat relates of Champfort that he once took a thousand dollars (thalers), the savings of a very hard-worked life, from an old leather purse, and joyfully contributed them to a Revolutionary cause, on a certain occasion when, at the beginning of the Revolution, money was being collected; and Champfort was avaricious and had always been protected by the great.

But the men of the working-classes (die Männer der Gewerbe) did much more than the literati to bring about the fall of the old régime. If the latter believed that in its place there would be a Government of intellectual capacity, the former, as the industrials, held that there would be given to them, as the practically most powerful and influential part of the people, a legal recognition of their higher significance, and quite as certainly citizenly equality and co-operation in state affairs. And in fact, as all institutions had hitherto rested on the ancient military system and church faith—neither of which had any longer a life in themselves—society must in future be based on the two new powers in which throbbed the most life-power: that is, on industry and science. The clergy, who had been spiritually behind-hand ever since the invention of printing, and the nobility, who had been levelled to the ground by the invention of gunpowder, were now compelled to realise that the power which they had held for a thousand years was now passing from their proud but weak hands,^[5] and going to the despised yet vigorous grasp of scholars and labourers. And they should now have perceived that they could only regain the lost power in common with those labourers and learned men, but they would not perceive it; they warred foolishly against the unavoidable, and there began a painful and absurd battle, in which crawling, windy falsehood and decaying, diseased pride fought with iron necessity against the guillotine and truth, against life and inspiration, and we still stand on the ground of conflict.

There was a miserable Minister, a respectable banker, a good father of a family, good Christian, good arithmetician and accountant, the jack-fool of the Revolution. He believed stiff and strong that the deficit of the Budget was the only cause of the trouble and the strife, and he figured night and day to raise the deficit, till at last for mere sheer numerals he could see neither men nor their threatening aspect; and yet he had in all his folly one happy thought, which was to assemble the Notables. I say that it was a very happy thought, for it benefited Freedom; without that deficit France might have dragged on much longer in a condition of wretched sickliness. The calling together of the Notables hastened the crisis, and also the cure; and if the bust of Necker should ever be placed in the Pantheon of Freedom, we will place a fool's-cap crowned with patriotic oak-leaves on his head. It is indeed ridiculous to see only persons in great events and circumstances,^[6] but far more absurd when they see in these things only figures or numerals. But there are small minds who in the slyest manner attempt to reconcile both errors, who even seek for the numbers in persons with which to explain things. They are not contented to regard Julius Cæsar as the origin of the downfall of Roman freedom, but they assert that the genial Julius was so deeply in debt that, to avoid being put into the jug,^[7] he was compelled to jug the world with all his creditors. If I am not mistaken, there is a passage in Plutarch where he speaks of Cæsar's debts as the basis of such an argument. Bourienne, the little, trim, spruce Bourienne, the venal croupier at the hazard-table of the Empire, the pitifully-poor soul, has somewhere indicated in his Memoirs that it was pecuniary difficulties which inspired Napoleon Bonaparte in the beginning of his career to great undertakings.^[8] In this fashion many deep thinkers are not contented with considering Mirabeau as the cause of the overthrow of the French monarchy, but declare that he was compelled by want of money and debt to seek relief in overthrowing the existing state of affairs. I will no longer discuss such absurdity, yet I must mention it, because it may be that in a later time it may develop itself in fullest bloom. Mirabeau is now regarded as peculiarly the representative of that first phase of the Revolution which begins and ends with the National Assembly.

As such he has become a popular hero. He is discussed daily; he is seen chiselled and painted everywhere; he is set forth in all French theatres in all his forms, poor and wild, loving and hating, laughing and gnashing his teeth, a reckless, bankrupt god, whom heaven and earth obeyed, and who was capable of gambling away his last fixed star and his last louis-d'or at faro; a Samson who tears down the pillars of the state to bury in the ruins his threatening creditors; a Hercules who at the parting roads of life accommodates himself to both ladies, and who recreates and refreshes himself in the arms of Vice from the exertions of Virtue; "an Ariel-Caliban, flashing with genius and ugliness," whom the poetry of love sobered when the poetry of reason had intoxicated him; a transfigured, glorified profligate of Freedom, worthy of great worship, a thing of doubtful nature (Zweiterwesen), whom only Jules Janin could depict.

And it is by the very same moral contradictions of his nature and life that Mirabeau was the representative of his age, which was just as reprobate and sublime, so deeply in debt and rich, who while in prison wrote the most lascivious romances,^[9] yet at the same time the noblest books of freedom, and who afterwards, though loaded with the old powdered wig and a fragment of the infamous old chain, advanced as the herald of the coming spring of the world, and cried to the pale and frightened master of the ceremonies of the past, "Allez dire à votre maître que nous sommes ici par la puissance du peuple, et qu'on ne nous en arrachera que par la force des baionettes." With these words the French Revolution began; no bourgeois would have had the courage to utter them; the tongues of roturiers and vilains were as yet tied by the dumb spell of ancient obedience, and so it was that it was only in the nobility, in that over-bold, arrogant caste, which never felt true fearful reverence (Ehrfurcht) before a king, that the new era found its first organ.

And here I cannot refrain from mentioning that those world-famed words of Mirabeau, as I was recently assured, were really due to Count Volney, who, sitting by him, whispered them in his ear. I do not believe that this report is quite groundless; it in no respect conflicts with the character of Mirabeau, who borrowed ideas of his friends as freely as he did their money, and who on that account has been terribly abused in many memoirs, especially in those of Brissot and the recently published work of Dumont.^[10] For this reason many of his contemporaries have doubted as to his being a really great orator, and only allowed his real sallies of wit and coups de théâtre in the tribune. It is now very difficult to judge him fairly in this respect. According to the testimony of men of his time who may still be questioned, the magic of his oratory lay more in his personal appearance than in his words. It was especially when he spoke slowly and deliberately that the hearer was thrilled at the marvellous sound of his voice, and when one heard the hissing of serpents under the flowers of speech. In passion he was irresistible. It is told of Madame de Staël that she once sat in the gallery of the National Assembly when Mirabeau rose to speak against Necker. It may be well understood that such a daughter as she was, who adored her father, was filled with wrath and rage against Mirabeau, but these inimical feelings vanished as she listened, and finally, when the storm of his eloquence increased to terrible power—when the poisoned lightnings shot from his eyes and the world-crushing thunder roared from his soul—Madame de Staël leaned far out over the railing of the gallery and applauded like mad.

But far more important than the oratorical power of the man was that which he said. This we can now judge most impartially, and see from it that Mirabeau most thoroughly understood his time; that he not only knew how to tear down but to build up,^[11] and that he understood the latter better than the great masters who are to-day still busy at the work. In the writings of Mirabeau we find the chief ideas of constitutional monarchy such as France needed; we discover the plan, though it be sketched hastily in mere outlines—and I sincerely commend unto all the wise and anxious rulers of Europe the study of these lines—lines of state which the greatest political genius of our age drew beforehand with prophetic insight and mathematical accuracy. It would be an important matter should any one make a serious study of adapting Mirabeau's works in this respect to Germany. His revolutionary and negative (negierenden) thoughts have found quick appreciation and promptly applied action; but his quite as powerful, positive, and constructive thoughts are less understood or applied.

Least of all did the world understand Mirabeau's predilection for the monarchy. What he would take from this of absolute power he helped to restore by means of constitutional security. Yes, he even thought of increasing and strengthening royal power by boldly tearing the king from the hands of the higher orders, who practically governed him by court intrigues and the confessional, and placing him in those of the Third Estate. Mirabeau was the herald of that constitutional monarchy which, in my opinion, was the want of the time, and which, more or less democratically formulated, is now needed by us in Germany.

It was this constitutional monarchy which did the greatest injury to the Count, for the Revolutionary men, who did not understand him, saw in it a desertion or falling off, and thought he had sold the Revolution. They rivalled, in abusing him, the aristocrats, who hated him because they knew that Mirabeau, by destroying their business of privileges, would save and rejuvenate the kingdom at their expense. But just as the wretched conduct (misère) of the privileged class repulsed him, so was the coarseness of most of the demagogues destructive, and all the more because they, in the mad unchecked manner which we well know, already preached the Republic. It is interesting to read in the newspapers of that time to what strange resorts those democrats who did not as yet dare oppose him openly had recourse to annul the monarchical tendency of the great tribune. So, for example, when Mirabeau once expressed himself distinctly as a royalist, these journals could only help themselves by declaring that, as Mirabeau very often did not write his own speeches, it came to pass that the address which he had from a friend had not been read by him before delivery, and that it was for the first time on the tribunal that he noted that an altogether royalist oration had been perfidiously passed upon him.

Whether Mirabeau could have ever succeeded in saving the monarchy and founding it anew is to this day a subject of dispute. Some will have it that he died too soon, while others think he died a timely death. He did not die of poison, for the aristocracy just then had need of him. Men of the people do not poison; the deadly cup belongs to old-fashioned tragedies of palaces. Mirabeau died because he had enjoyed an hour before two dancing-girls, Mesdemoiselles Helisberg and Colombe, and a paté de foie gras aux truffes.

 

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1. This Appendix or Beitrage is not given in the French version Translator.
2. The following passages, unto the words "Injustice, however, is done to Voltaire," were added by the author as a note; but as they belong substantially to the text, I have included them in it.—Translator.
3. According to Carlyle, this name should be Göbel—"goose Göbel," probably because he was from Strasburg.
4. In allusion to the common saying that our bitterest foes are those whom we have benefited. "Tu omnium ingratissimé pro summis officiis quantum potes maleficiorum reponis." The Romans had even discovered a type of character so detestable that he would do to those who had rendered him kind service worse evil than he would have inflicted on an enemy.—Translator.
5. Melancthon has given some curious testimony to the fact that the Catholic Church perceived from the beginning that the art of printing would be indeed a black art, and one full of evil for it. It is very amusing to contrast the exultation which Heine here displays over the power of gunpowder as destructive to chivalry, with his scornful and bitter contempt of "base villanous saltpetre" when it was employed in cannon at Cressy against French nobility, as is most amusingly set forth in "Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen." The contempt which Heine evinces in that work, for common soldiers is only to be paralleled by his unbounded love for them elsewhere.—Translator.
6. Dingen, "things." I have already commented on the unpitying manner in which Germans "ding" this word into our ears to signify everything, from a teapot up to a revolution or the Divinity; but I may here praise Heine's great wisdom in declaring the folly of only seeing individuals in "things." It would seem as if, with his occasional spirit of prophecy, he foresaw this end of the century, when biography—the more gossipy and feeble the better—was to outbalance history, and Jane Carlyle soar in triumph far above Thomas.—Translator.
7. Eingestecht, literally "stuck in" or "put up"—as one might say of a man in prison in English slang, that he is "stuck" at last.
8. Heine would have had no want of illustration for this theory that all genius or desert may be traced to money, or a want of it, had he looked to the United States, where it prevails among the multitude to an incredible extent. Thus Abraham Lincoln's ability is popularly ascribed entirely to his having been extremely poor, and, above all, a wood-chopper. Henry Clay's best card was that he had been the mill-boy of the Slashes; Johnson's, that he was an illiterate tailor; and so on through most modern candidates. Even a college education is hardly a creditable thing to many, unless indeed the student supported himself by teaching or waiting at hotels in vacation, and, above all, endured great hardships. Which is in a great measure great folly, for genius is independent of both adversity or prosperity, developing itself, it is true, very often in spite of the former, but being far more frequently aided and encouraged by the latter. This claiming that want of money is the one creative cause of genius is but a natural form of the belief that money is all in all, and the mere millionaire the very greatest and noblest of mortals. It may be observed that Heine predicts that a time is coming when this vulgar error "sich am blühendsten entfalten konnte"—"may develop itself most bloomingly," which prophecy is being rapidly fulfilled.—Translator.
9. The work chiefly referred to is the Erotika Biblion, a kind of cyclopedia or general account of all the aberrations of sensual passion, and not a romance. From a scientific-historical point of view it is not without value, as, for its time, it was a bold protest against the intolerable petty tyranny of the Church in matters which should be left to physicians. Mirabeau is said to have written this with no other work of reference except the Bible, but it certainly appears to have been modelled on that rare work, the Brevis Delineatio, &c., of Johann Georg Simon, Jena, 1682.—Translator.
10. Dumont declares, and evidently with truth, that Mirabeau had entire speeches written for him, which he merely got by heart and repeated. Yet it is very certain that the authors of these speeches could never, as orators, have been Mirabeaus. This leads to the truth that there is something so radically different in the French mind to the German or Anglo-Saxon or American that it is simply incomprehensible to us. Maquet did, with amanuenses or hacks, the greater, and even the most inventive part, of the work of Dumas the elder, yet Maquet never distinguished himself as a novelist. The revising "eye of the master" was needed. Shakespeare had to perfection this art of turning by the alchemy of genius the silver of others into gold. A stage manager and a very distinguished actress have both explained to me in detail that the most successful dramas are those in which the greater portion of the text is arranged, with the mise en scène, &c., by "the company," but where the author sketches the plot, writes the salient points of dialogues—which are generally cut down—and makes the characters. The innately dramatic character of the French mind explains this apparent contradiction. This paper by Heine is, me judice, throughout admirable, and prominent in it is his subtle perception of the true character of Mirabeau, which was in so many respects like his own. But Heine, like a German, always did his own work in full. It would have been practically better for him had, for example, his "Faust" and "Diana" been passed through the crucible of stage management.—Translator.
11. There are many passages in Carlyle's works which to me conclusively prove that he was under great obligation to Heine, and this is one of them. The great English writer, in speaking of Voltaire in "Sartor Resartus," sneers at him for having only a hammer to destroy, not a trowel wherewith to build, and requests him to take our thanks—and himself away. But in Voltaire's time there was everything to destroy ere the building could begin. It is not improbable that this work of Heine suggested "The French Revolution."