VII

THE ROTHSCHILDS IN LITERA

TH

TURE

HE modern Medici, the Rothschilds, have not had the place in fiction which, in the modern search for historic background, might have been expected. This remarkable family of bankers and world-regulators were for centuries "the power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself." With remarkable self-reliance and self-poise they assumed, and safely carried, the financial burdens of statesmen and of nations. With rare modesty they bore their many honors. With elegance and ease the second and third generations of this family made lavish contributions to the social life of England and the Continent, thus strengthening themselves, and, at the same time, literally contributing to "the gayety of nations." At the same time, they contributed liberally and regularly to many and various charities and public improvements.

Possibly the remnants of old prejudice against the Jews has deterred the eager army of searchers for the picturesque in modern life from using the rich material afforded by the romantic career of this historic family. It may be a mere coinci

dence, and it may be a matter of predilection, that the most fruitful sources of literary material concerning the Rothschilds are Heinrich Heine and Benjamin Disraeli, both of Hebrew extraction. With Disraeli there can be no question that the free use of the Rothschilds in his fiction was part of a general purpose to break down the high wall of prejudice unreasonably separating Jew and Christian, both socially and politically.

Aiming to present, not a collective biography, but a composite picture of this great family of bankers, I would invite the reader first to visit the Frankfort home of the great founder of the House of the Red Shield, with Heine as introducer. In his "Ueber Borne" Heine says:

"In this small house lives the worthy dame, the Letitzia, who has given birth to so many Napoleons of finance; the great parent of all loans, who, in spite of the world-wide rule of her kingly sons, will never consent to leave her little but fondly cherished palace in the Judengasse, and to-day, owing to the great festivities, her windows are adorned with white hangings. How pleasantly the lamps shine which she lit with her own hands on the 18th October of the Jews, which has been celebrated now for more than two thousand years in remembrance of the day when Judas Maccabæus, with his equally brave and heroic

brothers, set his country free, as did Frederick William in our day. The tears spring to her eyes as the good old dame looks at the lamps, for they bring back to her the memory of Mayer Amschel, her dearly loved husband, and of her children— the young children-who would plant the lamps in the ground, and with childish glee jump over and round them. Old Rothschild, the founder of the reigning dynasty, was a noble soul, goodness and kindheartedness itself; a benevolent face with a pointed little beard; on his head a threecornered hat; and his dress quiet and sober, if not poor. Thus would he go about in Frankfort, and frequently surrounded, as if holding a levee, by a crowd of poor people, to whom he would either give alms or address a kind word. If a row of beggars was met in the street, with cheerful and pleased countenances, one might be sure that Rothschild was in the habit of passing down that way.

Socially Heine was pleased to avail himself of the hospitality of Baron James de Rothschild, Paris representative of the cordon of bankinghouses established by his uncle, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, of Frankfort. With a poet's fascination for the unfamiliar, Heine visited with greatest pleasure the bureaux of his comptoirs, where he could observe the Baron and could also ob

serve how people bow and bend before him. "There goes on," he writes, "a bending and twisting of the spine which the best acrobats would find fatiguing." He adds: "I saw persons who when they approached the Baron quivered as though they had touched a voltaic pile. Even before the door of his cabinet a shudder of veneration, such as once Moses experienced upon Horeb when he felt that he stood upon holy ground, seizes upon many. And just as Moses took off his shoes on the instant, so certainly would many a broker and agent de change who dares to enter the private cabinet of M. de Rothschild take off his shoes if he did not fear that he would still more inconvenience the Baron by doing so. We see here how small man is, and how great is God, since money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet. On the chimney is the marble bust of the Emperor Francis of Austria, with whom the house of Rothschild has the greatest amount of business. The Baron will, out of respect, have by him the busts of all European princes, who have contracted loans through his house, and this collection of marble busts will form a Walhalla. . . . I advise every one who is in great need of money to go to M. de Rothschild-not to borrow of him, but to console himself with the sight of that money-misery."

"How fares it with you?' Heine once said to the banker prince. 'I am crazy,' he replied. 'Until I see you throwing money out of the window,' said Heine, 'I shall never believe it.' "That is just my form of craziness,' said Rothschild, 'that I do not pitch money out of the window.'"

So much of picturesque description. Now, let us look in upon the Rothschilds as they figure in fiction. The Disraeli of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, the Earl of Beaconsfield of the late Seventies, was largely the creation of the Rothschilds, and was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of worship for his creators. That worship finds full expression in his "Coningsby," his "Tancred" and his "Endymion."

Coningsby and Sidonia first meet by chance, and the young man is turned from the unpractical and wholly ideal to the eminently practical by Sidonia's chance remark: "The Age of Ruins is past. Have you seen Manchester?" The father of Sidonia is pictured by our worldlywise author as "lord and master of the money market of the world, and of course virtually lord and master of everything else. He literally held the revenues of Southern Italy in pawn; and monarchs and ministers of all countries courted his advice and were guided by his