"Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus,"
"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 Düsseldorf—seemed to flow through his comatose brain; his mother and brothers and sisters; the dancing-master he threw out of the window; the emancipation of the Jewry by the French conquerors; the joyous drummer who taught him French; the passing 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 passage 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 Passover nightHagadah? 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, theBible—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 God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss guards of Deism. God 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 Börne 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 passed 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 encyclopædic, 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 God 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 Hellenism—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 racesfresh 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 myConfessionsbuilt 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 God, 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, thathisname might be blotted out instead; and though God 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, Godlike figure, and yet so prone 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 Moshé 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 pagodas ofthe 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. Lassalle is a better pupil of the Master than the priests who denounce socialism. You have met Lassalle! No? You shall meet him here one day. A marvel. MeplusWill. 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 ofthe earth are always simple. Pomp and ceremonial, popes and kings, are toys for children. Christ rode on an ass, now the ass 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? AmInot 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.
"Mychef 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, laughingvenomously. "I have them here!" he repeated, "they will try to stop the publication of myMemoirs, 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 forthemthe 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 Börne!"
"Börne?" he said, softening. "Ach, what have I against Börne? 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 Börne, 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 apersifleur, 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 inthe 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 worship 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 gods. 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 God, 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, blushing painfully, she said quickly, "But how do you worship 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 wouldharden 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 Parnassus. 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 classic 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 thereisa 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 space! Let us trust, for the honor of God, 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, passing 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 shimmering 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 circumscribe yours, not by those that are smaller than yours. I tell you thatwhen 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 gods 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 God 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 noble 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 tiredyou. But I could not but tell youmy 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, God 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 Passover cakes at Easter. Every Friday night I should have come home from the labors of the week and found the table-cloth shining 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 God might make them like Ephraim and Manasseh, Rachel and Leah—persons of dubious exemplariness—and we should have sat down and eatenSchalet, 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 Halévi, of myHerzensdame, 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 runacrosticwise 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 saidKaddish. 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 compass. 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 morasses. 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 manhe'sdivine; 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 God 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 God, 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 intuitionthat 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 pass 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, God 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. God bless you, little Lucy, God bless you."
The puppet-show was shut up sooner than he expected; but the jester had kept his most wonderfulmotfor the last.
"Dieu me pardonnera," he said. "C'est son métier."
"Der Bahn, der kühnen, folgen wir,Die uns geführt Lassalle."
"Der Bahn, der kühnen, folgen wir,Die uns geführt Lassalle."
Such is the Marseillaise the Social Democrats of Germany sing, as they troop out when the police break up their meetings.
This Lassalle, whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah—the Saviour of the People.
But no man is a hero to his valet or his relatives, and on the spring morning when Lassalle stood at the parting of the ways—where the Thinker's path debouched on the Fighter's—his brother-in-law from Prague, being in Berlin on business, took the opportunity of remonstrating.
"I can't understand what you mean by such productions," he cried, excitedly waving a couple of pamphlets.
"That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said Lassallesuavely. "It takessomebrain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What have you there?"
"The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's gas-contract.
"Not so fast. There is my appeal yet before theKammergericht. And take care that you are not in gaol first; that pamphlet is either one of the suppressed editions, or has been smuggled in from Zürich, a proof in itself of that negative concept of the State which the pamphlet aims at destroying. Your State is a mere night-watchman—it protects the citizen but it does nothing to form him. It keeps off ideas, but it has none of its own. But the State, as friend Bœckh puts it, should be the institution in which the whole virtue of mankind realizes itself. It should sum up human experience and wisdom, and fashion its members in accordance therewith. What is history but the story of man's struggle with nature? And what is a State but the socialization of this struggle, the stronger helping the weaker?"
"Nonsense! Why should we help the lower classes?"
"Pardon me," said Lassalle, "it is they who help us. We are the weaker, they are the stronger. That is the point of the other pamphlet you have there, explaining what is a Constitution."
"Don't try your legal quibbles on me."
"Legal quibbles! Why the very point of my pamphlet is to ignore verbal definitions. A Constitution is what constitutes it, and the working-class being nine-tenths of the population must be nine-tenths of the German Constitution."
"Then it's true what they say, that you wish to lead a Revolution!" exclaimed Friedland, raising his coarse glittering hands in horror.
"Follow a Revolution, you mean," said Lassalle. "Here again I do away with mere words. Real Revolutions make themselves, and we only become conscious of them. The introduction of machinery was a greater Revolution than the French, which, since it did not express ideals that were really present among the masses, was bound to be followed by the old thing over again. Indeed, sometimes, as I showed inFranz von Sickingen(my drama of the sixteenth-century war of the Peasants), a Revolution may even be reactionary, an attempt to re-establish an order of things that has hopelessly passed away. Hence it isyoursentiments that are revolutionary."
Friedland's face had the angry helplessness of a witness in the hands of a clever lawyer. "A pretty socialistyouare!" he broke out, as his arm swept with an auctioneer's gesture over the luxurious villa in the Bellevuestrasse. "Why don't you call in the first sweep from the street and pour him out your champagne?"
"My dear Friedland! Delighted. Help yourself," said Lassalle imperturbably.
The Prague dignitary purpled.
"You call your sister's husband a sweep!"
"Forgive me. I should have said 'gas-fitter.'"
"And who are you?" shrieked Friedland; "you gaol-bird!"
"The honor of going to gaol for truth and justice will never be yours, my dear brother-in-law."
Although he was scarcely taller than the gross-paunched parvenu who had married his only sister, his slim form seemed to tower over him in easy elegance. An aristocratic insolence and intelligence radiated from the handsome face that so many women had found irresistible, uniting, as it did, three universal types of beauty—the Jewish, the ancient Greek, and the Germanic. The Orient gavecomplexion and fire, the nose was Greek, the shape of the head not unlike Goethe's. The spirit of the fighter who knows not fear flashed from his sombre blue eyes. The room itself—Lassalle's cabinet—seemed in its simple luxuriousness to give point at once to the difference between the two men and to the parvenu's taunt. It was of moderate size, with a large work-table thickly littered with papers, and a comfortable writing-chair, on the back of which Lassalle's white nervous hand rested carelessly. The walls were a mass of book-cases, gleaming with calf and morocco, and crammed with the literature of many ages and races. Precious folios denoted the book-lover, ancient papyri the antiquarian. It was the library of a seeker after the encyclopædic culture of the Germany of his day. The one lighter touch in the room was a small portrait of a young woman of rare beauty and nobility. But this sober cabinet gave on a Turkish room—a divan covered with rich Oriental satins, inlaid whatnots, stools, dainty tables, all laden with costly narghiles, chibouques, and opium-pipes with enormous amber tips, Damascus daggers, tiles, and other curios brought back by him from the East—and behind this room one caught sight of a little winter-garden full of beautiful plants.
"Truth and justice!" repeated Friedland angrily. "Fiddlesticks! A crazy desire for notoriety. That's the truth. And as for justice—well, that was what was meted out to you."
"Prussian justice!" Lassalle's hand rose dramatically heavenwards. His brow grew black and his voice had the vibration of the great orator or the great actor. "When I think of this daily judicial murder of ten long years that I passed through, then waves of blood seem to tremble before my eyes, and it seems as if a sea of blood would choke me. Galley-slaves appear to me very honorable personscompared with our judges. As for our so-called Liberal press, it is a harlot masquerading as the goddess of liberty."
"And what are you masquerading as?" retorted Friedland. "If you were really in earnest, you would share all your fine things with dirty working-men, and become one of them, instead of going down to their meetings in patent-leather boots."
"No, my dear man, it is precisely to show the dirty working-man what he has missed that I exhibit to him my patent-leather boots. Humility, contentment, may be a Christian virtue, but in economics 'tis a deadly sin. What is the greatest misfortune for a people? To have no wants, to be lazzaroni sprawling in the sun. But to have the greatest number of needs, and to satisfy them honestly, is the virtue of to-day, of the era of political economy. I have always been careful about my clothes, because it is our duty to give pleasure to other people. If I went down to my working-men in a dirty shirt, they would be the first to cry out against my contempt for them. And as for becoming a working-man, I choose to be a working-man in that sphere in which I can do most good, and I keep my income in order to do it. At least it was honorably earned."
"Honorably earned!" sneered Friedland. "That is the first time I have heard it described thus." And he looked meaningly at the beautiful portrait.
"I am quite aware you have not the privilege of conversing with my friends," retorted Lassalle, losing his temper for the first time. "I know I am kept by my mistress, the Countess Hatzfeldt; that all the long years, all the best years of my life, I chivalrously devoted to championing an oppressed woman count for nothing, and that it is dishonorable for me to accept a small commission on the enormous estates I won back for her from her brutal husband! Why, my mere fees as lawyer would havecome to double. But pah! why do I talk with you?" He began to pace the room. "The fact that I have such a delightful home to exchange for gaol is just the thing that should make you believe in my sincerity. No, my respected brother-in-law"—and he made a sudden theatrical gesture, and his voice leapt to a roar,—"understand I will carry on my life-mission as I choose, and never—never to satisfy every fool will I carry the ass." His voice sank. "You know the fable."
"Your mission! The Public Prosecutor was right in saying it was to excite the non-possessing classes to hatred and contempt of the possessing class."
"He was. I live but to point out to the working-man how he is exploited by capitalists like you."
"And ruin your own sister!"
"Ha, ha! So you're afraid I shall succeed. Good!" His blue eyes blazed. He stood still, an image of triumphant Will.
"You will succeed only in disgracing your relatives," said Friedland sullenly.
His brother-in-law broke into Homeric laughter. "Ho, ho," he cried. "Now I see. You are afraid that I'll come to Prague, that I'll visit you and cry out to your fashionable circle: 'I, Ferdinand Lassalle, the pernicious demagogue of all your journals, Governmental and Progressive alike, the thief of the casket-trial, the Jew-traitor, the gaol-bird, I am the brother-in-law of your host,' And so you've rushed to Berlin to break off with me. Ho, ho, ho!"
Friedland gave him a black look and rushed from the room. Lassalle laughed on, scarcely noticing his departure. His brain was busy with that comical scene, the recall of which had put the enemy to flight. On his migration from Berlin to Prague, when he got the gas-contract,Friedland, by a profuse display of his hospitality, and a careful concealment of his Jewish birth, wormed his way among families of birth and position, and finally into the higher governmental circles. One day, when he was on the eve of dining theéliteof Prague, Lassalle's old father turned up accidentally on a visit to his daughter and son-in-law. Each in turn besought him hurriedly not to let slip that they were Jews. The old man was annoyed, but made no reply. When all the guests were seated, old Lassalle rose to speak, and when silence fell, he asked if they knew they were at a Jew's table. "I hold it my duty to inform you," he said, "that I am a Jew, that my daughter is a Jewess, and my son-in-law a Jew. I will not purchase by deceit the honor of dining with you." The well-bred guests cheered the old fellow, but the host was ghastly with confusion, and never forgave him.
But Lassalle's laughter soon ceased. Another recollection stabbed him to silence. The old man was dead—that beautiful, cheerful old man. Never more would his blue eyes gaze in proud tenderness on his darling brilliant boy. But a few months ago and he had seemed the very type of ruddy old age. How tenderly he had watched over his poor broken-down old wife, supporting her as she walked, cutting up her food as she ate, and filling her eyes with the love-light, despite all her pain and weakness. And now this poor, deaf, shrivelled little mother, had to totter on alone. "Father, what have you to do to-day?" he remembered asking him once. "Only to love you, my child," the old man had answered cheerily, laying his hand on his son's shoulder.
Yes, he had indeed loved him. What long patience from his childhood upwards; patience with the froward arrogant boy, a law to himself even in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; patience even with his refusal to study law and medicine. "But what then do you wish to study, my boy? At sixteen one must choose decisively."
"The vastest study in the world, that which is most closely bound up with the most sacred interests of humanity—History."
"But what will you live on, since, as a Jew, you can't get any post or professorship in Prussia?"
"Oh, I shall live somehow."
"But why won't you study medicine or law?"
"Doctors, lawyers, and even savants, make a merchandise of their knowledge. I will have nothing of the Jew. I will study for the sake of knowledge and action."
"Do you think you are a poet?"
"No, I wish to devote myself to public affairs. The time approaches when the most sacred ends of humanity must be fought for. Till the end of the last century the world was held in the bondage of the stupidest superstition. Then rose, at the mighty appeal of intellect, a material force which blew the old order into bloody fragments. Intellectually this revolt has gone on ever since. In every nation men have arisen who have fought by the Word, and fallen or conquered. Börne says that no Europeansovereign is blind enough to believe his grandson will have a throne to sit on. I wish I could believe so. For my part, father, I feel that the era of force must come again, for these folk on the thrones will not have it otherwise. But for the moment it is ours not to make the peoples revolt, but to enlighten and raise them up."
"What you say may not be altogether untrue, but why shouldyoube a martyr,—you, our hope, our stay? Spare us. One human being can change nothing in the order of the world. Let those fight who have no parents' hearts to break."
"Yes, but if every one talked like that—! Why offer myself as a martyr? Because God has put in my breast a voice which calls me to the struggle, has given me the strength that makes fighters. Because I can fight and suffer for a noble cause. Because I will not disappoint the confidence of God, who has given me this strength for His definite purpose. In short, because I cannot do otherwise."
Yes, looking back, he saw he could not have done otherwise, though for that old voice of God in his heart he now substituted mentally the Hegelian concept of the Idea trying to realize itself through him, Shakespeare's "prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come." The Will of God was the Will of the Time-spirit, and what was True for the age was whatever its greatest spirits could demonstrate to it by reason and history. The world had had enough of merely dithyrambic prophets, it was for the Modern Prophet to heat with his fire the cannon-balls of logic and science; he must be a thinker among prophets and a prophet among thinkers. Those he could not inspire through emotion must be led through reason. There must be not one weak link in his close-meshed chain of propositions. And who could doubt that what theTime-spirit was working towards among the Germans—the Chosen People in the eternal plan of the universe for this new step in human evolution—was the foundation of a true Kingdom of right, a Kingdom of freedom and equality, a State which should stand for justice on earth, and material and spiritual blessedness for all? But his father had complained not unjustly. Why shouldhehave been chosen for the Man—the Martyr—through whom the Idea sought self-realization? It was a terrible fate to be Moses, to be Prometheus. No doubt that image of himself he read in the faces of his friends, and in the loving eyes of the Countess Hatzfeldt—that glorious wonder-youth gifted equally with genius and beauty—must seem enviable enough, yet to his own heart how chill was this lonely greatness. And youth itself was passing—was almost gone.
But he shook off this rare sombre mood, and awoke to the full consciousness that Friedland was fled. Well, better so. The stupid fool would come back soon enough, and to-day, with Prince Puckler-Muskau, Baron Korff, General de Pfuel, and von Bülow the pianist, coming to lunch, and perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had shaken off the yoke of the Law of Moses. Yes, the scaffold itself would have beenwelcome, could he but have made the Jews a respected people. How the persecution of the Jews of Damascus had kindled the lad of fifteen! A people that bore such things was hideous. Let them suffer or take vengeance. Even the Christians marvelled at their sluggish blood, that they did not prefer swift death on the battle-field to the long torture. Was the oppression against which the Swiss had rebelled one whit greater? Cowardly people! It merited no better lot. And he recalled how, when the ridiculous story that the Jews make use of Christian blood cropped up again at Rhodes and Lemnos, he had written in his diary that the universal accusation was a proof that the time was nigh when the Jews in very soothwouldhelp themselves with Christian blood.Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera.And ever in his boyish imagination he had seen himself at the head of an armed nation, delivering it from bondage, and reigning over a free people. But these dreams had passed with childhood. He had found a greater, grander cause, that of the oppressed German people, ground down by capitalists and the Iron Law of Wages, and all that his Judaism had brought him was a prejudice the more against him, a cheap cry of Jew-demagogue, to hamper his larger fight for humanity. And yet was it not strange?—they were all Jews, his friends and inspirers; Heine and Börne in his youth, and now in his manhood, Karl Marx. Was it perhaps their sense of the great Ghetto tragedy that had quickened their indignation against all wrong?
Well, human injustice was approaching its term at last. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth was beginning to announce itself by signs and portents. The religion of the future was dawning—the Church of the People. "O father, father!" he cried, "if you could have lived to see my triumph!"
There was a knock at the door.
His man appeared, but, instead of announcing the Countess Hatzfeldt, as Lassalle's face expected, he tendered a letter.
Lassalle's face changed yet again, and the thought of the Countess died out of it as he caught sight of the graceful writing of Sophie de Solutzew. What memories it brought back of the first real passion of his life, when, whirled off his feet by an unsuspected current, enchanted yet astonished to be no longer the easy conqueror throwing crumbs of love to poor fluttering woman, he had asked the Russian girl to share his strife and triumphs. That he should want to marry her had been as amazing to him as her refusal. What talks they had had in this very room, when she passed through Berlin with her ailing father! How he had suffered from the delay of her decision, foreseen, yet none the less paralyzing when it came. And yet no, not paralyzing; he could not but recognize that the shock had in reality been a stimulation. It was in the reaction against his misery, in the subtle pleasure of a temptation escaped despite himself, and of regained freedom to work for his great ideals, that he had leapt for the first time into political agitation. The episode had made him reconsider, like a great sickness or a bereavement. It had shown him that life was slipping, that afternoon was coming, that in a few more years he would be forty, that the "Wonder-Child," as Humboldt had styled him, was grown to mature man, and that all the vent he had as yet found for his great gifts was a series of scandalous law-suits and an esoteric volume of the philosophy of Heraclitus the Dark. And now, coming to him in the midst of his great spurt, thisletter from the quieter world of three years ago—though he himself had provoked it—seemed almost of dreamland. Its unexpected warmth kindled in him something of the old glow. Brussels! She was in western Europe again, then. Yes, she still possessed the Heine letter he required; only it was in her father's possession, and she had written to him to Russia to send it on. Her silence had been due to pique at the condition Lassalle had attached to acceptance of the mere friendship she offered him, to wit, that, like all his friends, she must write him two letters to his one. "Inconsiderate little creature!" he thought, smiling but half resentful. But, though she had now only that interest for him which the woman who has refused one never quite loses, she stirred again his sense of the foolish emptiness of loveless life. His brilliant reputation as scholar and orator and potential leader of men; his personal fascination, woven of beauty, wit, elegance, and a halo of conquest, that made him the lion of every social gathering, and his little suppers to celebrities the talk of Berlin—what a hollow farce it all was! And his thoughts flew not to Sophie but to the new radiance that had flitted across his life. He called up the fading image of the brilliant Helene von Dönniges whom he had met a year before at the Hirsemenzels. He lived again through that wonderful evening, that almost Southern episode of mutual love at first sight.
He saw himself holding the salon rapt with his wonderful conversation. A silvery voice says suddenly, "No, I don't agree with you." He turns his head in astonishment. O thepiquante, golden-haired beauty, adorably white and subtle, the dazzling shoulders, the coquettish play of thelorgnette, the wit, the daring, thediablerie. "So it's a no, a contradiction, the first word I hear of yours. So this is you. Yes, yes, it is even thus I pictured you." She is rising to begthe hostess to introduce them, but he places his hand gently on her arm. "Why? We know each other. You know who I am, and you are Brunehild, Adrienne Cardoville of theWandering Jew, the gold chestnut hair that Captain Korff has told me of, in a word—Helene!" The whole salon regards them, but what are the others but the due audience to this splendid couple taking the centre of the stage by the right divine of a love too great for drawing-room conventions, calling almost for orchestral accompaniment by friend Wagner! He talks no more save to her, he sups at her side, he is in boyish ecstasies over her taste in wines. And when, at four in the morning, he throws her mantle over her shoulders and carries her down the three flights of stairs to her carriage, even her prudish cousinly chaperon seems to accept this as but the natural manner in which the hero takes possession of his heaven-born bride.
So rousing to his sleeping passion was his sudden abandonment to this old memory, that he now went to a drawer and rummaged for her photograph. After the Baron, her father, that ultra-respectable Bavarian diplomatist, had refused to hear her speak of the Jew-demagogue, Lassalle had asked her to send him her portrait, as he wished to build a house adorned with frescoes, and the artist was to seek in her the inspiration of his Brunehild. In the rush of his life, project and photograph had been alike neglected. He had let her go without much effort—in a way he still considered her his, since the opposition had not come from her. But had he been wise to allow this drifting apart? Great political events might be indeed maturing, but oh, how slowly, and there was always that standing danger of her "Moorish Prince"—the young Wallachian student, Janko von Racowitza, the "dragon who guards my treasure," as he had once called him, and who, though betrothed to her, was the slave of her caprices, ready tosacrifice himself if she loved another better, a gentle, pliant creature Lassalle could scarcely understand, especially considering his princely blood.
When he at last came upon the photograph, he remembered with a thrill that her birthday was at hand. She would be of age in a day or two, no longer the puppet of her father's will.