Lassalle: The Power of Illusion and the Illusion of Power 1494087669, 9781494087661

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Translators’ Prelude (Testimonies of Authors)
Part One
Chapter One. Thirty Thousand New Citizens
Chapter Two. Strong Measures
Chapter Three. Applied Trinity
Chapter Four. Commercial Academy
Chapter Five. Herr Schulz on Punctuation
Chapter Six. God’s Soliloquy
Chapter Seven. The Dandy of the Revolution
Chapter Eight. Gladiators
Chapter Nine. The Three Musketeers
Chapter Ten. The Rebellion of the Kings
Chapter Eleven. The Graveyard of Illusions
Chapter Twelve. Intermezzi
Part Two
Chapter One. Berlin!
Chapter Two. Miscarriage of the Tragedy
Chapter Three. Blank Cartridge and Ball Cartridge
Chapter Four. Time For the Heart
Chapter Five. Soap-Bubbles
Chapter Six. What Next?
Chapter Seven. The Theses Are Posted Up
Chapter Eight. Conspirators
Chapter Nine. Last Battles
Chapter Ten. An Idyll and Its Upshot
Chapter Eleven. The Murder of a Dead Man
Chapter Twelve. Ritournelle
Index

Citation preview

LASSALLE

Lassalle as a young man From a pastel in the possession of the German Social Democratic Party

LASSALLE THE

POWER OF I L L U S IO N AND T H E IL L U S IO N OF POW ER by

ARNO SGHIROKAUER TRANSLATED BY

EDEN & CEDAR PAUL ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK T H E CENTURY COMPANY 1932

The German original of this work, entitled “Z assalle, die Macht der Illusion, die Illusion der Macht", was published in 192& FIRST

P U BL I S H E D

IM THB

U.S.A.

IM I 9 3 2

A ll rights reserved PRINTED UNW IN

IN

GREAT

BROTHERS

BRITAIN

LTD .,

BY

WOKING

CONTENTS FACS t r a n sl a t o r s' p r e l u d e

( t e s t im o n ie s

PART

of

a u t h o r s)

II

ONE

CHAPTER ONE

THIRTY THOUSAND NEW CITIZENS

23

CHAPTER TWO

STRONG MEASURES

32

CHAPTER THREE

APPLIED TRINITY

43

CHAPTER FOUR

COMMERCIAL ACADEMY

50

CHAPTER FIVE

HERR SCHULZ ON PUNCTUATION

64

CHAPTER SIX

GOD’S SOLILOQUY

73

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE DANDY OF THE REVOLUTION

82

CHAPTER EIGHT

GLADIATORS

93

CHAPTER NINE

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

I0 8

CHAPTER TEN

THE REBELLION OF THE KINGS

12 5

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GRAVEYARD OF ILLUSIONS

13 5 15 1

CHAPTER TW ELVE INTERMEZZI

PART

TWO

CHAPTER ONE

BER LIN !

165

CHAPTER TWO

MISCARRIAGE OF THE TRAGEDY

183

CHAPTER THREE

BLANK CARTRIDGE AND BALL CARTRIDGE

19 6

CHAPTER FOUR

TIME FOR THE HEART

208

CHAPTER FIVE

SOAP-BUBBLES

226

CHAPTER SIX

W HAT NEX T?

242

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE THESES ARE POSTED U P

25O

CHAPTER EIGHT

CONSPIRATORS

259

CHAPTER NINE

LAST BATTLES

276

CHAPTER TEN

A N IDYLL AND ITS UPSHOT

286

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MURDER OF A DEAD MAN

299

CHAPTER TW ELVE

RITOURNELLE

308

INDEX

312

ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece

l a s s a l l e a s a YOUNG m a n

From a pastel in the possession of the German Social Demo­ cratic Party FACING PACK

HOUSE IN BRESLAU W HERE LASSALLE WAS BORN

48

LAS8ALLE AS PUPIL AT THE

49

LEIPZIG COMMERCIAL ACADEMY

After a picture in the possession of Professor Gustav Mayer LASSALLE A T TWENTY-SEX

80

During the Hatzfeldt trial LASSALLE

8l

After an oil-painting in the possession of the Vienna "Arbeiter­ zeitung” COUNTESS SOPHIE HATZFELDT IN 1 8 4 0

128

From a painting 12 8

COUNTESS SOPHIE HATZFELDT

From a woodcut LASSALLE

I2g

HEGEL

I76

After a painting by Sebbers CARICATURE ILLUSTRATING THE HATZFELDT AFFAIR, s h o w in g

Lassalle, Countess H atzfeldt, an d her son C ount Paul

177

KARL MARX

192

GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

19 3

From the ‘‘Bibliothek wertvoller Memoiren” A LITTLE-KNOWN PORTRAIT OF LASSALLE

256

In the possession of the Herwegh family HELENE VON DÖNNIOES IN 18 6 4

257

HELENE VON DÖNNIOES IN 1 8 7 2

257

HELENE VON DÖNNIOES

304

After a painting by Franz von Lenbach DEATH-MASK OF LASSALLE HEAD FROM THE LASSALLE MONUMENTIN VIENNA

305

Tailpiece

The illustrations facing pages 5, 49, 80-1, 128, 256-7, 304-5 are reproduced, by Per mission of Messrs. R. L. Prager, Berlin, from their publication “Ferdinand Lassalle”

TRANSLATORS’ PRELUDE (TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS)

K arl M arx, in a letter to Schweitzer, under date October 13, i 860 As regards the Lassallist Union, it was founded during a period of reaction. When the labour movement had been slumbering in Germany for fifteen years, Lassalle wakened it once more, and this was his imperishable service. But he made great mistakes. He was unduly influenced by the cir­ cumstances of the time. . . . With the demand for State-help on behalf of associations, he combined the Chartist demand for universal suffrage. He overlooked the difference between German and English conditions. Also from the very start, like every one who believes that he has in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, he gave a religious sectarian character to his agitation. . . . Being the founder of a sect, he repudiated all natural connexion with the earlier movements. He . . . did not seek his concrete foundations in the actual elements of the class movement, but wished to prescribe its course to the class movement in accordance with a doctrinaire prescription of his own.

G eorge M eredith , in The Tragic Comedians (1880) i (In Chapter II, before “ Clotilde” meets “Alvan” ) “Who is the man they call Alvan?” She put the question to an aunt of hers. Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was comforting ; she saw that he was a celebrity indeed. “Alvan ! My dear Clotilde ! What on earth can you want to know about a creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a Jew ?”

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Glotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. “ Is he clever?” “ He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions : th at is what he is.” “But is he clever?” “Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous bad man. You could not have been curious about a worse one.” “ Politically, you mean?” “ O f course I do.” The lady had not thought of any other danger from a man of that station. The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him. . . . n (In Chapter III, when “Clotilde” meets “Alvan” ) “The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably magnificent was the first she had noticed. . . . This m an’s face was the bom orator’s, with the light-giving eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness and enterprise, of Cicero’s rival in the forum before he took the leadership of armies and marched to empire. The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. . . . One could vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he talked pictured itself in passing, and was like the play of sheet-lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing outpour. Looking on him was listening. Yes, the looking on him sufficed. Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men. . . . Could that be the face of a Jew? She feasted. It was a noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of the Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as well

TRANSLATORS’ PRELUDE

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as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gen­ tiles a majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery Eastern blood, and in his manhood he is, ay, what you see there ! a figure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and be tempered by the intellect.

P rince Bismarck, speaking in the Reichstag on April 2, 1881 Lassalle . . . wanted urgently to enter into negotiations with me. . . . Nor did I make it difficult for him to meet me. I saw him, and since the first few hours* conversation with him, I have never regretted my action. . . . O ur relations could not possibly take the form of political negotiations. What could Lassalle offer or give me? He had nothing to back him up, and in all political negotiations “do ut des*' is implied, even though it be felt more seemly to leave this unexpressed. Now, when one party is forced to say to him­ self regarding the other “You poor devil, what have you to give?*' this formula has no bearing. There was nothing which he could give to me, the minister of State. What he had was something which I found extraordinarily attractive as a private person. He was one of the most intellectual and amiable men with whom I have ever had to do, ambitious in the grand style, and by no means a republican. His sympathies were unmistakably national and monarchical, and he aimed at the establishment of a German empire. Here, then, we had a point of contact. Being, I repeat, ambitious upon a grand scale, Lassalle was perhaps not quite sure whether the ruling dynasty in the German empire was to be that of Hohenzollern or that of Lassalle [laughter], but at any rate he was thoroughly monarchical. . . . He was extremely able and remarkably energetic, and I found it most instructive to converse with him. O ur talks lasted for

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hours, and I was always sorry when they came to an e n d . . . . As to negotiation, there was none, for in truth I found it very difficult to get in a word edgewise [laughter]. He bore the whole burden of the conversation, but most agreeably, as anyone who knew him will agree.......... I am sorry that our respective positions made prolonged association impos­ sible, and I should be only too delighted to have a man of like genius as one of my near neighbours in the country [laughter]. William H arbutt D awson, in German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle (1888) Lassalle . . . was a sort of political Mahomet, the attachment of whose followers was not without a fanatical side. Genuine affection implies, not only lovingness in the subject but lovableness in the object, and, let us be as indulgent as we may, Lassalle’s was not a very lovable nature. In private life none had so many admirers with so few true friends, and in public life no one, perhaps, received so much adula­ tion and caressing and so little real love. . . . I f . . . Lassalle was not so inordinately ambitious as people try to make out, he was inordinately vain. This was one of the most striking, though at the same time most harmless, traits in his character. His vanity was of the kind that neither hurts nor offends. Vanity seemed natural to him as it is to the peacock, and if he had been less vain he would have been less interesting. . . . W hat was i t . . . that gave Lassalle his marvellous power as a demagogue? Let it be remembered that the subjects on which he spoke were for the most part scientific and technical. His addresses dealt largely with dry theories of political economy, which often have little interest for the educated, and might be expected to have still less for the uneducated. Eloquence, enthusiasm, and deep earnestness account for a good deal of Lassalle’s success, but all these advantages in lids favour would have failed to win the masses had he not joined to them a great qualification which dis­ tinguished him from all popular orators of the day. This was

TRANSLATORS»

PRELUDE

15

his rare capacity for presenting scientific truths and theories in such a form that they could be “ understanded of the people” . His speeches never assumed prior knowledge. He took up a subject at the beginning, discussed and examined it thoroughly, and only left it when he had reached the logical end. . . . He hardly ever spoke for a shorter time than two hours, but he once reached four hours. This was at Frankfort on May 17, 1863. . . . His figure stands forth upon the canvas of modern history clear and prominent with its light and shade, its attractive and its repellent features. ‘‘He is great” , says Emerson, “who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.” Tried by the test, Lassalle must clearly be awarded the laurels of greatness.

E duard Bernstein, in Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer (1891), translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling (1893). Lassalle no more created Social Democracy than any other man. We have seen how great were the stir and ferment among the advanced German workers, when Lassalle placed himself at the head of the movement. But even though he cannot be called the creator of the movement, yet to Lassalle belongs the honour of having done great things for it, greater than falls to the lot of most single individuals to achieve. Where at most there was only a vague desire, he gave con­ scious effort ; he trained the German workers to understand their historical mission, he taught them to organise as an independent political party, and in this way at least accel­ erated by many years the process of development of the movement. His actual undertaking failed, but his struggle for it was not in vain ; despite failure, it brought the working class nearer to the goal. The time for victory was not yet, but, in order to conquer, the workers must first learn to fight. And to have trained them for the fight, to have, as the song says, given them swords, this remains the great, the undying merit of Ferdinand Lassalle.

i6

LASSALLE

E lizabeth E. E vans, in Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von Dünniges, a Modem Tragedy (1897) Lassalle possessed the faults, as well as the virtues, of a strong character, together with weaknesses which appertain to feebler natures. He was exceedingly obstinate and dic­ tatorial, unable to bear the slightest opposition from his co-workers, or to see any glimpse of reason in the arguments of his opponents. He was very vain, and therefore open to flattery of the grossest kind ; he was disposed to curry favour with persons in office and in high places, in order to obtain their recognition of his plans and purposes ; and, finally, he was strongly influenced by women. But, on the other hand, he possessed many admirable characteristics ; he had proved himself bold and tireless in the people’s cause ; and even if personal motives and a false estimate of the consequences of his agitation influenced his conduct, still, his coming forward as he did was brave and noble ; and his party should hold his worthy service in grateful remembrance. G eorge Brandes, in Ferdinand Lassalle (1910) His attractive personality displays an inward inconsistency which is often noticeable in the case of prominent intellects. By instinct, and as a result of his first principles, Lassalle was a worshipper of intelligence, of reason, and a passionate opponent of and scorner of public opinion and of numbers. O n the other hand, by conviction and as the result of his political and practical principles, Lassalle . . . was a most decided champion of popular power, a persistent and suc­ cessful supporter of universal suffrage, and a pioneer in the service of democratic power such as history had never yet seen. An intellectual aristocrat and a social democrat! The human heart may contain yet greater contradictions than these, but not without loss can they form part of a m an’s disposition. The phenomenon that here meets us is, in the world of thought, precisely that contrast which was out­ wardly apparent when Lassalle in his dandified clothes, his

TRANSLATORS’ PRELUDE

17

fine linen, and his patent-leather boots, spoke formally or in­ formally among a number of grimy, horny-handed mechanics. With regard to social questions, he has seen into the future to a point beyond any that we have yet reached, and so far he belongs, not to the present, but to the future. Beneath the political and social surface of Europe is fermenting a great and comprehensive idea which many years ago Lassalle announced to a few thousand men, and which is now [1910] supported by four millions of German voters—the idea that our present economic system cannot be maintained, that it must be remodelled, and that in place of the domination now supported by brutality and injustice, conditions must supervene under which our accumulated and as yet untried economic science can be used in the service of liberation and order; and the fact that this has become a universal sentiment is due to Lassalle more than to any one else. Nature had endowed Lassalle with great and fine capaci* ties ; she had given him a will of Spartan strength, intellec­ tual and oratorical talent ; like a youth from Athens of old, he had the bow and the lyre. But from the harmony of these great gifts arose a character unequally developed. There was an impure deposit of pride and haughtiness— a “Hybris” , to use the Greek term—and this pride became his ruin. Circumstances granted the opportunity which his capacities demanded in theory only and not in practice. Throughout his life, in freedom or in prison, he was a caged eagle, and under stimulus his force of will rose and became overstrained until it overpowered his other abilities and destroyed the equilibrium of his nature. O ther men might die of undue greatness of heart. Lassalle died of undue greatness of will, but this will or self-confidence, excess of which caused his death, had at the same time maintained him throughout his life. He stands in history as a monument to will-power. The romantic school had found employment for their self-confidence in caprices and tricks of humour. The revolutionary political school satisfied their self-con­ fidence in a struggle for freedom conducted with genius, but necessarily without political purpose. Lassalle’s selfB

i8

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consciousness obliged him to provide within this period a great and memorable example of personal energy, dispersed and concentrated in a manner wholly characteristic of him. For these reasons all that he has done will ever arouse an interest which is purely human, and partially independent of scientific considerations. E mil L udwig, in Bismarck, the Story o f a Fighter (1926) At that time Bismarck had no rival in Europe for intelli­ gence. . . . Only in Prussia was there yet another political genius. His name was Ferdinand Lassalle. . . . It was the magnetism of genius, nothing else, that drew Bismarck and Lassalle together. Massive and heavily built both in body and m ind; a dome-shaped head; a man who had come to the front slowly, looking forward to many decades, . . . curbing imagination by realism, weighing words and preparing deeds, reckoning by preference with magnitudes rather than with ideas—such was Bismarck . . . on the threshold of his great work, when he was on the verge of fifty. Slender, elegant, quivering, like an Arab steed but half broken in, was the m an of Semitic stock who confronted him ; a man with a long and narrow head; scintillating; not yet forty, but approaching the end of an impetuous career; a great draughtsman, whose formative impulse exhausted itself in dazzling sketches ; an imaginative and thoughtful man ; an escapee from the school of ideas into the world of deeds ; fighting even in this world of deeds with words rather than blows ; his eyes directed towards the future—such was Las­ salle. . . . Lassalle was a Jew, a man without nationality, who had scrambled his way upwards in a strenuous youth, who fought his class and was in conflict with his heritage, his emotional nature inflamed for the cause of the nation to which he did not belong by race, and for the cause of the class to which he did not belong by station. . . . Bismarck was compelled to life-long service by the career he had chosen; he had chosen to serve the king, whereas

TRANSLATORS’ PRELUDE

*9

Lassalle had chosen to serve the many. Although Bismarck dwelt in a strong castle, he always heard over his head the footsteps of a man under whom it was his destiny to live. Lassalle heard no one over him, but his castle was built of air, and his nerves trembled more in the wind of the future than through the frictions of reality which were so deadly to Bismarck’s nerves. While both men were of the artistic temperament, the elder was playing chess against the other powers, whereas the younger was rather an actor contemplating his own performance. T hat was why Bis­ marck was influenced chiefly by ambition, Lassalle by vanity. Thus it was that Lassalle could luxuriate in successes and prospects in which he visioned a more distant future than Bismarck could see; whereas Bismarck wanted less, but wanted tangible realities, and therefore he cultivated patience. T hat was why Bismarck lived twice as long as Lassalle, and also why Lassalle was richer than Bismarck in moments of happiness. No sooner did they meet, than they recognised one an­ other’s worth before that worth had become known to the world. O tto R ühle , in Karl Marx, criticising Marx’s criticism of Lassalle (1928) Marx’s judgment . . . contained no syllable about the enormously important fact that Lassalle . . . had actually appeared in history, and, at this particular epoch, had conjured the labour movement out of the ground. It is of minor importance how much in Lassalle’s theory and in his method of agitation may have been sound or unsound, how much he may have borrowed from Bûchez, taken over from Malthus, understood in Ricardo, or misunderstood in Marx. The decisive thing was that he succeeded in marshalling the proletariat in a politically independent formation upon the battlefield of history. Mehring rightly points out that at a later date, when the proletarian movement began to develop in the United States, Engels, writing to Sorge anent the

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criterion of achievement in a particular historical situation, said : “ The first great step when, in any country, the move* ment makes its appearance, is the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no m atter how, so long only as it is a separate labour party” . T hat was the sense in which Lassalle acted; and, in that sense, Lassalle*s achievement was a historical deed of supreme importance.

PART

ONE

H ow docs m an grow? From below upw ards, or from above dow nw ards? From below upw ards ! For below they are all alike; but above, one is greater and another is smaller. Jewish Apophthegm

CHAPTER

ONE

THIRTY THOUSAND NEW CITIZENS At the little town of Loslau in the district of Rybnik in Upper Silesia, the schoolmasters were not of the persuasion of Pestalozzi, but of that of General Zieten and Marshal Schwerin. Twenty years after the publication of the famous educational work Leonard and Gertrude, their principles of instruction were still based upon the drill-book, the Lord’s Prayer, and the guardroom regulations. They were veterans and disabled warriors of Old Fritz, of pedagogy, and of grammar. They taught spelling in accordance with Schatz’s Introduction to German Orthography. They were as thoroughly planted on their feet as a “rocher de bronze” and they ruled with the aid of a cane with which day by day they kept their pupils in order, speaking of their use of the instru­ ment as “stimulation” , “revelly” , and “ the painful military tattoo” . This school abounded in painful experiences, being thus a school of life ; and they taught the soldierly rather than the civic virtues. In the elementary schools, slaves were trained to serve the lords of the earth, their contemporaries, now being brought up in military academies. “Youngsters exist for the king” , thought the school­ masters, whose seminaries had been at Torgau, Hohenfriedberg, Kunersdorf, and Leuthen. “For the king” was a euphemism. It really meant “for war”—a view which was not only patriotic but also prophetic, and the prophecy was to be fulfilled during the decade 1806-1815. At Loslau, in the year 1791 “of the ordinary reckoning” , there was born to a certain Feitel Beraun, to his great satis­ faction, a son. This boy, named Chajjim Wolfssohn, being a Jew, was excluded from the elementary school. He learned Hebrew in the synagogue and German in the street. For the rest, a little Jew living between R atibor and Kattowitz had plenty of opportunities for learning what life meant to him, and of acquiring the art of choosing at the right moment between compliance or defence, obedience or defiance.

«4

LASSALLE

Chajjim, being endowed with excellent powers of observa­ tion, was thus able even without the elementary school to pick up all the necessary elements of schooling except the “ tattoo” , the “stimulation” , and the “revelly” . For him, thinking and even calculation were rather slow processes, but he could manage them well enough. He grew up to be a good Jew and a good merchant, whereat God Almighty and his father were both duly pleased. He could pray and could keep accounts, and experience taught him that when the former fails the latter is always helpful. In the district of Rybnik, little had been heard of the new rights of man which were being upheld in Paris by setting the guillotine to work in the name of reason and humanity. At Rybnik, therefore, the old order of things persisted un­ challenged, the order in virtue of which the Gojim [Gentiles] ruled badly, and the Jews obeyed badly, each after their kind. Life at Loslau was not luxurious, but was fairly com­ fortable. When Chajjim was fifteen years of age, Prussia’s misfortunes began. Jen a and Auerstädt were lost; Berlin was occupied; the centre of gravity of the Prussian State moved eastward; the eastern provinces of Prussia became substantially Prussia. Königsberg, Breslau, and Tilsit were the heirs of Berlin, Potsdam, and Magdeburg. Hither streamed from the west the government officials, the refu­ gees, the turbulent, the freebooters, the windbags, the petty adventurers, and the great political gamesters. The friend­ ship between Prussia and Russia opened the frontiers, and from Poland and Posen there was an influx of enterprising persons making their way into Silesia. The spring freshets of this disturbed period swept little Chajjim along with them to Breslau. The corpse of the Prussian army provided abundant food for the worms. When in January 1807 Breslau capitulated because the commanding officer, General von Thiele, knew no more about modem methods of war-making than the Loslau schoolmasters knew about modern methods of education (one cannot rule a fortress as one can perhaps

THIRTY

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rule a class, with the drill-book and the Lord’s Prayer) ; when the disarmament of the Prussian troops was taking place and the army storerooms were being emptied—there began a lively trade in blankets, saddles, and boots; and Hebrews with a keen eye to business were able to help the soldiers rid themselves of their encumbrances. It would seem that these philanthropists (who also hastened to contract for the supply of the French army with meat) must have got a little out of hand now and again, for we find that in May 1808 the French commandant at Breslau had to issue an army order “threatening the usurers with a flogging” . The seat of punishment is mentioned in plain terms, so that one might almost imagine that the general had gained his experience under the Loslau schoolmasters. After the withdrawal of the French, Breslau became one of the most important places in Prussia. It was the centre of all the districts which were striving to reorganise the country, and became a university town simultaneously with Berlin. Tauentzien worked here; and it was here that the threads between Warsaw and Berlin formed a node. Here Chajjim stayed. There is nothing which favours lavishness more than does insecurity of life, a labile political situation, one which opens the door to every hope and excludes no possibility. In such circumstances, the morrow must take care of itself. There is neither poverty nor wealth. Values fluctuate and cease to have a stable foundation. Now that Europe had become one vast battlefield, a sword was just as solid a possession as a house. The gold galloons of the uniform of one of Napoleon’s officers were worth as much as a landed estate. Since money had no assured value, it passed readily from hand to hand. Luxury grew side by side with want. Thus, though it is difficult to say who during the years 1810 to 1830 can have been in a position to buy silks, it is certain that Chajjim Wolfssohn sold them. Chajjim, in fact, did well for himself among the vigorous and efficient persons who lived in or visited the metropolis of the border province. More people, more possibilities ! He kept

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LASSALLE

his eyes wide open, and was quick to seize every opportunity, however small. When old Feitel received a letter from Breslau, he greatly enjoyed reading the first three pages. God’s blessing rested on his house ; to read his son’s letters was as sweet as to read the Thora [the Pentateuch]. But the fourth page of the letter was always inclined to put him out of humour. It was sent by his daughter-in-law Rosalie, who had an ungainly handwriting, and a sour habit of mind which prevented her from seeing the funny side of life. Feitel—who was always delighted to note that in his son’s letters, even though the spelling might be at fault, the arithmetic was invariably sound—was naturally annoyed when Rosalie would carp even at her husband’s calculations. For Central Europe in general, the Middle Ages came to an end with the close of the fifteenth century, but for the Jews of that part of the world the medieval epoch lasted well on into the nineteenth. Luther accustomed the Germans to the Hebrew Bible by translating it for them, but the Bible itself did not accustom the Germans to the Hebrews. Whereas among British Protestants an acquaintance with Holy Writ aroused love and veneration for the people which God had singled out for paternal retribution, in Germany there prevailed an antipathy towards a nation which declared that the Messiah had not yet come—an opinion which seemed fully justified to them by their own circumstances. The history of the translation of the Bible, which in all other European countries is the history of the rehabilitation of the Jews, is in Germany a history of iconoclasm, intolerance, fanaticism, and thirty years of incendiarism. Luther gave a book to a populace that had not yet learned to read. The upshot was that these illiterates, pitchfork in hand, plundered the cathedrals and minsters, and fired the seats of the gentry. Never was a book more peaceful, and never did a book have bloodier effects. This Jewish Iliad whose Odysseus was called Moses, its Patroclus being Solomon, and its Ajax being Samson—this Jewish Iliad which came to an end with the

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crucifixion of the divine Achilles while his mother ThetisMary stood by weeping—was misunderstood. Thus Luther, though he freed the German Christians from Rome, did not free the German Jews from the horrors of the ghetto. He brought about the most remarkable shuffling among the twenty-three upper grades of the feudal society of the Middle Ages, but the Jewish estate still remained the twenty-fourth and the lowest. I t was to two reputed Frenchmen, who were not really Frenchmen, that the Jews owed their deliverance from an unworthy situation. One was Rousseau, the other was Napoleon. Rousseau prepared the way for the great revolu­ tion by demanding liberty, equality, and fraternity, in the name of the rights of man ; Napoleon ended this revolution by realising its demands. The common fosses in which the myriads slaughtered in his battles were entombed were the most convincing of memorials to an equality whose only defect was that it had to be attained through the gateway of death. Napoleon made men equal by slaying them. Through his instrumentality they became brothers in death ; and he at least set their souls free, since the souls were delivered from the bodies by his musketry fire. He ended the revolution by making himself its emperor. It had known how to deal with kings, but an emperor was too strong for it. The German princes hated Rousseau, the father of the revolution ; but they detested Napoleon, the assassin of the revolution, no less. This inconsistency passes by the name of politics, a word which can usefully mask graver offences than those against mere logic. But (to stick to our Napoleon) the German Jews have every reason to regard the great emperor as their liberator. The fact was that the Prussian government made such a complete job of the war of liberation that it actually freed the Jews. No one who is familiar with the mental state of legislators will be surprised that Lessing, Voltaire, and Moses Mendels­ sohn had no traceable influence upon anti-Jewish legisla­ tion. It is true that in 1787 the Jewish poll-tax was abolished, but in December 1789 the petition of the Prussian Jews to

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be granted civil rights was scornfully rejected. The storming of the Bastille took place on a foreign meridian, and the Prussian State philosopher Fichte wrote : “The Jews must have human rights. But as for giving them civic rights, I see only one way of doing that, namely to cut off all their heads in a single night and to provide them with new heads con­ taining not a single Jewish idea.*’ Unfortunately for the Jews, there has always been a scarcity of heads in the world, so that the best thing that could be done was to apply the first half of Fichte’s prescription. This process, also known as a pogrom, had the effect on the Jews of making their children’s heads a little more Jewish than before. Napoleon, meanwhile, had transferred the venue of history from the green tables of the royal council chambers and studies to the green slopes of the battlefields, where decisions were much speedier and far more radical. Unfortunately, the god of history imitates the devil in this, that he prefers to write in human blood. With the blood of thirty thousand slaughtered Prussians, he wrote the edict which freed thirty thousand Prussian Jews. On March n , 1812, the Middle Ages ended for the Jews. They became citizens at the moment when the citizens were beginning the attempt to make themselves rulers of the State. O f the 62,000 inhabitants of the Upper Silesian capital, at least five per cent were Israelites. They wept for joy, embraced one another, praised King and God and Minister Hardenberg ; they jubilated, they prayed, they sacrificed, they sang psalms of joy. One of them was Chajjim Wolfssohn, silk merchant of Breslau, who, in virtue of the new law, took to himself an official name, which he obtained by a slight modification of the name of his native town. In this way Chajjim of Loslau became the Prussian citizen Heymann Lassai. To this handsome name belonged a handsome man, and to this handsome man belonged a handsome sum of money. We cannot speak of the man without speaking of his money, for he himself had the disagreeable habit of talking about money. Lassai kept a very good table, but at meals, as soon as a blessing had been invoked, he would begin a series of

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pointed observations concerning waste of money, unfor­ tunate purchases, and stagnant sales. The family circum­ stances were not straitened, but it was otherwise with their souls ; the family life stood under the sign of the ducat, which brought peace and broke it, and was the cause of intolerable scenes. Human rights can be granted by others, but human dignity cannot. The State can give titles of honour and can take them away, but it cannot bestow honour. The liberation of the Jews had taken place too rapidly. For centuries they had been oppressed, and the ground became unsteady beneath their feet when this pressure was too suddenly removed. In the newly enriched circles of the Berlin and Königsberg Jews there now began a ridiculous imitation of Christian customs, baptism included. Since they regarded Judaism as synonymous with backwardness and lack of culture, they abandoned Judaism. But “Jewry” stuck to them whether or no. They remained what they had been, but became something which they had not hitherto been— hypocrites and upstarts. In Breslau, however, where Jewry was persistently and powerfully recruited from the hinterland, Heymann Lassai found it easy enough to remain true to the faith of his fathers. Somewhere about 1820, Rosalie presented him with a daughter. A few years later, on April 11, 1825, she gave birth to a son. In the midwives’ register at Breslau the date of this birth is given as April 13th. The girl had been born on the i ith, and it was the custom in the Lassai household to make one festival of the two birthdays—on the 1ith. It is, perhaps, a superstition which makes us think that the midwife was more to be relied upon as to the date than the mother (who perhaps was not thoroughly versed in the Christian calendar). Anyhow the boy was given an imposing name, with three syllables to it, a king’s name, Ferdinand. He remained the only son. He was crown prince. These Jews, who in 1812 had from pariahs become citizens as suddenly as chrysalids become butterflies, had the most extravagant hopes, not so much for themselves as for their

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offspring. They looked upon themselves as the foundations and dark cellars on which the coming generations would build upwards gloriously into the sunlight. They had been granted freedom, but to them freedom seemed (as do all gifts) a burden and a responsibility. Their generation had been admitted to freedom ; it had not been free born. They had been nominated citizens, promoted to full manhood, and they looked upon the bestowal as an act of clemency. Thus they came to set the most preposterous hopes upon their sons. Their feeling when they first adopted their new civic names was that it behoved them to be the progenitors of a new generation. Their concern was for the race. Since they had been enslaved, their sons should become masters. The education of their sons suffered in consequence. It seemed to them neither necessary nor desirable to curb the selfishness, the obstinacy, the arrogance of the younger generation. They themselves had been thralls, and they knew that unruliness was appropriate to the master caste; they themselves had been subordinates, and it seemed to them that uppishness was lordly. What could they know of the inward conditions of lordship? They were too optimistic to be good teachers. One day Ferdinand comes home with a bloody nose. This catastrophe almost reduces his father to tears. Not only must the “patient” stay at home from school, but that evening the doctor is called in, and orders a vinegar compress to be applied to the swelled organ. Next day a second doctor is summoned in consultation, to help decide whether Ferdinand may leave the house, and since it is thought that the cold air of his unheated bedroom may retard recovery, his bed is moved into his father’s room. Ferdinand, who is now fifteen years of age, keeps a diary, and that evening he records with satisfaction the evidence of his father’s doting fondness. But he is not free from anxiety. “ I am very much alarmed that my nose may remain per­ manently swollen. If that should happen, my poor face will be spoiled, but I think that in the long run I should not therefore be greatly troubled. O f this much, however, I am

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certain, that I should shun ladies* society, for at the sight of any woman the idea would rise in my mind : ‘W hat triumphs you might have had if this accursed accident had never happened*.” It was not his nose which first threatened to interfere with his “triumphs’*. Before he was thirteen, his tutor, looking through his copy-books, found in one of them a formal challenge to a duel. The offended party was one of his school­ fellows, and the offender was Ferdinand Lassai. The trouble was about a dear little maiden of fourteen, for whose favour the two champions were to fight. The tutor was clever enough to convince this cavalier in search of triumphs that a duel between schoolboys would be universally regarded as ridiculous. Dread of the ludicrous sufficed, where dread of punishment might have been inoperative. The duel was called off. The rivals, zealous rather than jealous, came to a friendly understanding, the one who renounced any claim to the fair maid’s charms being consoled by a liberal supply of sweets and other dainties.

CHAPTER

TWO

STRONG MEASURES Algebra is an Arabic word used to denote the art of trans­ forming numerical values by conjuring them from one side of an equation to the other. They seem to disappear, apparently turn up again as negatives ; but in reality their values are unchanged. This oriental jugglery writes letters but means numbers. The sign of equality is the rope, and the numbers are the weights with whose aid the rope-dancer keeps his balance. He shifts the numbers to and fro, but all the while the balance remains undisturbed. Algebra is a highly developed Talmudic art, and in the Lassai household it played a notable part. Here it was called ledger and day­ book, and even God himself (insofar as he had to do with the house of Lassai) made use of this ciphering language. For in 1812 out of the Jew Chajjim there had developed the Prussian citizen Heymann Lassai. Thirteen years later, probably on April 13th, was born his only son, who thirteen years later stUl, in accordance with the custom of the synagogue, became a “bar mizrah” , that is to say a respon­ sible member of society and a full member of the synagogue. In 1851, and therefore thirteen years later, when Ferdinand was in prison, the reaction nullified his political existence by sending all the radicals to the penitentiary or into exile and thus putting them out of action. In 1864, after the lapse of another thirteen years, Ferdinand destroyed himself. At thrice thirteen years of age, he fell in a duel. This is not mysticism, but one of the cases by means of which life tries to make us believe that it is an algebraic calculation. The equation of life, however, contains too many unknown elements to be solved in any other way than by guessing. Since even a lucky guess is not yet a solution, we may leave this m atter of the thirteens to the consideration of the curious. Anyhow, on Ferdinand’s thirteenth birthday he was the central figure in an important ceremony, the attainment of

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his majority at the synagogue. With this ceremony, a Jewish boy passes from boyhood to manhood, becoming fully adult in all matters of religion. To Ferdinand it was easy enough, thenceforward, to play the grown-up at home as well as in the religious life. His mother was petty, quarrelsome, ill-humoured, and disagree­ able, with a strong taste for scandal, and her chief trouble was that the most spicy items of information about her neighbours often escaped her. She was a deaf gossip, which means that she was a peculiarly irascible one. People had to shout when they were telling her things which ought only to have been whispered if their full venom were to be preserved. For her favourite pastime, she needed a sharp tongue and good ears, whereas she was only ill-mannered and hard of hearing. H er daughter Friederike was said to be pretty, which meant little more than that the girl was not burdened with brains. In fact, she was stupid enough to write com­ promising letters, although her lover lived only a few streets away and was apparently more interested in a liaison than in a correspondence. Furthermore, she was so blind as to be unable to see that he was the kind of scamp who makes no bones about showing his sometime fiancée’s love-letters to all and sundry. The brother’s diary throws a glaring light upon the deficiencies in this beauty’s intelligence. The brother, then, so soon as in the synagogue he had acquired the emblems of manhood (the tallith or prayingshawl, the phylacteries or prayer-boxes with their long straps), assumed the vice-presidency of the household. From that time on, the Lassai family comprised the two men, Heymann and Ferdinand, and the two women, Rosalie and Riekchen. The women accepted their subordination without resistance, and the father was only too delighted to note his son’s precocious adoption of hectoring ways. It seemed right to Heymann that Ferdinand should invariably dominate the conversation. Their history has taught the Jews to stand on their own feet when they are still quite young. Their childhood is short ;

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need curtails the age of irresponsibility. They have always had to grow up as quickly as possible, this meaning th at they must develop acquisitiveness at a very early age, and must learn that an invincible logic can replace armour and walls. Almost before they had ceased to wear swaddling-clothes, they, being perpetually subject to attack, had adopted the defensive organs of those who are weaponless, namely logic­ chopping and imagination. They were men as soon as, with the aid of these, they were able to look after themselves. Thus the Lassai family had two presidents and four mem­ bers. The vice-president kept the minutes of meetings which were often stormy. He was, indeed, the only one of them competent to act as minute-secretary. Although he was a participant, he was well gifted with the power of reflection. He could contemplate himself as one of the actors ; he could look on at the scene in which he was himself playing a part. By the time he was fourteen, he had completely lost the child’s lack of self-consciousness. The simplest way of understanding the lad’s nature is to realise that he lived in front of a mirror. If I might describe a “ too much” as a “ too little” , I should say that he lacked simplicity. “ In this book I propose to inscribe all my doings, my mistakes, my good deeds. With the utmost conscientiousness and uprightness, I shall record in it, not only what I do, but also the motives of my actions. For every man it is extremely desirable that he should become acquainted with his own character. Shall I not blush, when, having done something unjust, I record the fact here? And shall I not blush even more deeply, when I subsequently re-read what I have written? It is with this twofold moral purpose that I have undertaken to keep a diary. F erdinand L assal.” January i, 1840. Ferdinand may, indeed, have had good grounds for blushing if he ever re-read this earliest literary effort. T hat is not so much to say anything against the lad’s character, as

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to emphasise the unsparing frankness of the record. No one need make much to-do about the minor and major misdeeds of a callow youth; but while it is easy to commit such offences, it is hard to report them without illusions. Fer­ dinand, however, is the faithful reporter of his days and his doings ; of his actions, and of his reactions to the actions of his companions. He has frequent clashes with Riekchen, whose temper has been rendered very unstable by her love-troubles. The mother nags, the father thumps the table, Ferdinand sneers, Riekchen sniffs. On one occasion, when the father is not present, there is an open quarrel between brother and sister. Riekchen angrily defends herself, Ferdinand seizes her by the arm and tries to push her through the doorway. Riekchen^ resists so abrupt an ending of the dialogue. JLÎ2 3 8 • 0 Tears flow down her cheeks; she sobs, thrashes the air, storms, saying : “How dare you raise your hand against your sister?” The mother intervenes, separating the pair. Riekchen rushes off to her own room, throws herself into a chair, screams and howls, stamps and rages—in a word, has a fine fit of hysterics. Ferdinand is quick to realise that unless he takes prompt action things may turn put ill for himself, since his father will soon be back to dinner. He has only a few moments, so he ventures a master-stroke. He bursts into his sister’s room. Foaming with rage, he flings himself on his knees, wrings his hands madly, and then (having made sure that his father is not yet on the stairs, and that the situation can still be saved) he begins to speak in a raucous voice, shouting as if possessed : “O God, O God, grant that I may ever bear this in mind, grant that I may never forget this hour. . . . And you, snake, with your crocodile tears . . . you, . . . ah you shall rue this hour. In God’s name, in God’s name, I swear it! Even should I live fifty or a hundred years, . . . on my death­ bed I shall still remember ! ! ! Nor shall you ever forget it.” Riekchen is terrified into sobriety, so that she stops weeping and wailing. Alarmed and confused, without another word

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she withdraws into a back room. Ferdinand writes in his diary : “Ju st as peace can only be secured through war, so my excessive anger was the means of bringing about tranquillity” . This attack with the aid of the great curse, supported by the kneeling posture of prayer, by wringing of the hands, by appeals to God, by exclamations, by allusions to the death­ bed; this sudden transformation of a surprise attack into an impulsive outburst of wrath ; the presence of mind with which so outrageous a bluff was staged—fully deserved the success they achieved. War is the last, the strongest, and the most disagreeable of political methods. Lassai was fond of using strong measures, and it was inevitable that this fondness should in the long run drive Lassai into politics. W hat is politics but a perpetual readiness to use the strongest measures against the weakest adversaries? Ferdinand knew this by the time he was fourteen. Fränkel has lost sevenpence halfpenny to Ferdinand at cards. The loser has no inclination to pay, and this is a familiar situation in the political world, where the great powers are accustomed to go to war in order to avoid paying their gambling debts—if the sum be big enough to make war worth while. Ferdinand mobilises his forces : “Look here, I ’ll teach you to play for money and not to pay up. If you don’t pay, I shall claim the money from your uncle, and at the same time I shall tell him that you left his shop unwatched in order to come and play cards with me. Nor shall I forget to tell him that you tried to cheat.” The minute in the diary concludes as follows : “I frightened him so much that he paid me” . Again, his sister threatens to tell tales of him for playing truant at school and spending his time in a billiard-room instead. He writes : “ I needed all my presence of mind and (not to put too fine a point on it) all the brazenness I could command, to outface her” . To-day there is a science much in favour known by the name of psychoanalysis, which trades upon the knowledge

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that the mind has its seat, not in the brain, but in the region of the lower belly; and this science has a very instructive variant, which passes by the name of individual psychology. Both these sciences are able, with the assistance of involved terms such as repression, complex, over-compensation, and the like, to explain certain very simple things. O f course one can explain them also without having recourse to these sciences. Ferdinand’s start in life was an extraordinarily good one ; the boy’s whole environment and all the members of his family had made great headway ; Ferdinand was leader in the race; all we need now is that a psychologist should explain to us why the leader in a race puts on a spurt as soon as he sees his leadership threatened, and then we shall fully understand the boy’s character. But the house of Lassai was not an easy school of life for the growing boy. The mother, being suspicious like all the deaf, was difficult to handle ; the sister, who was perpetually being urged to marry but saw little chance of finding a husband, and who suffered from her ambiguous position without being able to change it, was extremely irritable; the father, eager to see his daughter settled in life, was tetchy and querulous : the whole atmosphere was tense and unrestful. In this household, conversation turned upon two things, money and a ‘‘good match” . To shine, one must be successful as a man of business or as a marriage broker ; and to hold one’s place in the world one must be a good arithmetician and of a calculating turn of mind. Family life was an affair of algebra or rule of three, and if the nerves made irrational incursions they must cold-bloodedly be put back under control. If you should, in spite of everything, find yourself in a tight place, you must extricate yourself by an egg-dancing movement, by elaborate sophistry, and make your retreat look as if it were an onslaught. In many cases it was enough to react to punishment within twelve hours by falling ill. “ Vexation on account of this chastisement made me quite sick by afternoon. At once he was the loving father again, anxious, much concerned. I had to go to bed with a fever.” His mother could not leave

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his bedside, Riekchen scoured the town and collected all the relatives, and Ferdinand, securely entrenched among his nearest and dearest, won one game of écarté after another, pocketing a penny on each game. When his finances had been sufficiently restored, and when his prestige had been re-established, he would get well again. At a wedding party the bride and bridegroom usually form the centre of interest, but this was mortifying to Ferdinand. He could not bear to play second fiddle, were it but for a day or only for an hour or two. O n all social occasions there was apt to be friction between him and some other guest less well equipped for a combat, the invariable result being that Ferdinand would come off with flying colours, whilst the other would be made to look ridiculous and would be com­ pelled to sue humbly for peace. Proposing a toast to the bride, he says: “Never shall I forget, Madam, how you looked when plighting your troth. Your soulful eyes, half-opened, half-downcast, glistening with tears which threatened to dim their brightness, a myrtle wreath in your bridal hair, a rustling white satin robe on your charming limbs.” “T hat will do, Ferdinand, you are becoming too poetical !” broke in the father, somewhat late, with mingled admiration and reproof. “A clever fellow that brother of yours, very clever” , said Dr. S. aside to Riekchen. “ O f course he is” , answered the girl, preening herself. This happened when Ferdinand was fourteen years old. He is ambitious ; he wants to shine, he wants to dominate. He can only think of himself as leader, as chief. He thinks of himself as leader, but he does not think much about those whom he is to lead. They are the led, a formless mass ; they are the people whom he will lead. Sometimes it is his “favourite notion” to place himself “sword in hand at the head of the Jews, and to make them nationally independent” . He has scarcely any friends at school, being made not for collaboration, but for command. He speaks of those whom he can order about as his friends, and of those who oppose him

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as his enemies. Persons who obey him blindly are his com­ rades; those who insist upon their own independence are rascals. He prefers to keep company with people much older than himself, for this tickles his vanity ; and when he hobnobs with those of his own age it is only because he finds them useful. “ I like to associate with Hahn at school, in order to improve my knowledge of human nature.” It is as well that he should see the need for practice in this field, for he is too fond of looking at his own image in the mirror, and his mind is continually occupied with his own pos­ turings. This handsome, narrow-cheeked, pale-faced fellow, with a small and rather vain-looking mouth, a well-moulded and expressive forehead surmounting the almond-shaped blue eyes, and with an abundant mane of brown hair which he dresses in Byronic fashion, is as much in love with his own features as was Narcissus, and has no eyes for the outer world. Seeing that the eyes of his associates are directed towards himself, he naturally makes himself the centre of his own gaze. These eyes of his are sharp enough to pierce through externals. He sees himself through and through. Thereupon he at once begins to pomade his mind, to brush and comb it, to manicure it, to titivate it, to curl and iron it, and to equip it with the elegant ruthlessness of Byronism. “ I t is a fault of mine that I do not blindly obey my father's orders, as perhaps I ought to do, but instead think them over and ask myself, Why does father tell me to do this? Having done so, I come to the conclusion that my father does not seriously object to my spending a leisure hour playing billiards, and that his real reason for forbidding me must have been to prevent billiards from becoming a passion with me as might well happen in view of my sanguine temperament. But gambling is no longer a passion with me, and can never become this. Consequently I can play billiards without infringing the spirit of my father's orders. When I transgress the letter of this command I do not transgress the spirit, the inner meaning ; I do not run counter to my father's true aims. Whether I am right or wrong in behaving thus, I do not know.”

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But as soon as he loses money, he knows perfectly well that he Is doing wrong. Where he finds it so difficult to decide between right and wrong is when he succeeds in winning money. A day comes when his income from écarté amounts to a whole sixpence. O ur keen man of business does not despise small profits ; he computes the risk and the advan­ tages ; he knows how to make the profits accumulate on his side and the losses accumulate on the side of his adversary ; registers his vote cold-bloodedly, where Riekchen’s loveaffairs are concerned ; and, instead of the young man after his sister’s heart, would prefer to have as brother-in-law one of whom it may be said to be a pity that he comes from Inowrazlaw, but who is greatly to be commended because he “speaks four languages, is of a very rich family, and owns from thirty to forty thousand talers” . So much excited is our Ferdinand about this possible suitor that the two relevant pages of the diary bristle with figures. The “minute-book” reveals to us a young gentleman whose Sabbath is spent as follows. To begin with, he plays six games of billiards with a friend ; then he visits a pastrycook’s ; his next remove is to another place of entertainment, where he has two games of bowls ; then three more games ; then at least three more with another opponent, until he has lost a shilling. After that he goes home, plays écarté with his mother (he likes playing with her when he is short of cash), and wins sevenpence. He rounds off the day with onze-etdemi. “We played for penny stakes. Father seemed a little annoyed that they were so high.” Speaking generally, the father had some ground for dissatisfaction. He had to earn his livelihood, to provide for his family, and on Friday evenings to pronounce the invoca­ tions. He was Chajjim from Loslau, who sold silks, and entertained fanciful expectations. He was incautious enough to make no secret of his affection for his son, as the embodi­ ment of his wishes and hopes ; he was foolish enough to beg when he ought to have commanded, and to explain when he ought to have issued his orders. “Stay at home with me, Ferdinand ! What shall I do if you go out? I can’t talk to your

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mother, for she does not hear well enough. Riekchen is only a girl, and not a very clever one. At any rate you and I can have a good talk together.” Ferdinand, who had learnt from this same father that everything in the world has its price, recognised the value of his own presence, and knew how to turn it to pecuniary account. Since the father showed that he needed the son, the son exploited the father. The father’s demand put up the price of the son’s love. The struggle for predominance between these two was hardly ever fought to the last extremity. The father dared not humiliate the son. But on one occasion they were within a hair’s-breadth of a catastrophe. The cause is typical, and so is the course of the affair. Ferdinand, who likes to be smartly dressed, changes his trousers at midday. But he finds that there are some buttons missing from the ones he has newly donned. Since it seems incredible to him that there should be no one on hand to serve him, he raises a tremendous hubbub. “Take those trousers off and put the old ones on again” , says his father. “ I can’t stand your vanity.” “Oh, well, they’re both of them no better than old clo* !” The father’s rejoinder to this disrespectful answer is given, not with the mouth, but with the hand. Ferdinand replies to each blow with a new citation from the lexicon of arrogance, and finally shouts : “I won’t let any one beat me !” It can well be imagined that this piece of impertinence does not diminish the severity of the flogging. But the reader will find it difficult to guess what the son does next. He promptly ceases blubbering, dries his tears, and makes a rude face. “Whatever my father said, I answered merely with a defiant and scornful smile, which made him want to slap me again. But he refrained.” Obviously, in drawing lots, Ferdinand has drawn the shorter straw. Scorn is only the answering grimace of the subordinate. But he has another shot in his locker. He puts on his old trousers once more, and, without saying another word, goes out into the street, makes his way to the bank of

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the Ohle and goes down the steps leading into the water, determined to drown himself. “Ferdinand,” cries the father, who has followed him, and now stands behind him pale and anxious, “what are you doing here?” “ I am looking at my face in the water.” “You needn’t go to school. Gome with me to my office.” Ferdinand nods curtly. This short traverse beside his father from the river-side to the office is a triumphal progress. Ferdinand is in the seventh heaven. He is listening to an imaginary flourish of trumpets, is watching imaginary banners. He is the crown prince. He is the victor. He accepts homage, and in case of need enforces it. He thirsts for recognition and admiration, he is always fishing for approval. In his diary he records with satisfaction the utterance of a schoolfellow in the upper sixth. “Look here, Lassai, you’re a spiteful young rascal, but a clever sort of chap all the same, much cleverer than might be expected at your age. When you are five years older, the world won’t be able to put up with you any longer.” The five years’ limit was not greatly exceeded.

CHAPTER

THREE

APPLIED T R IN IT Y The two worlds whose business it was, for the nonce, to put up with the boy, were the home and the school. To speak of his home means to speak of Ferdinand, who ruled it, who was its substantial content and meaning, and around whom it circled. To speak of his school means to speak of the teachers who ruled that institution. Although while he was still no more than a growing lad his hand lay heavy on his family, at school he was subor­ dinated by the school discipline. Compliance with its rules was felt by him as a disagreeable compulsion. The need for compliance with its regulations was a menace to his self­ esteem. Authority had him in its grip, and he reacted by defiance, arrogance, and laziness. H e was able to rule in the household of a merchant who had a wife and a daughter and a partner fourteen years of age. But at school he was tied and gagged ; he was only a fifth-form boy who had to do what he was told. When he came home from school to the midday dinner, when he unstrapped his books and flung them into the corner, he was conscious of being able to hold his own with his parents, whose respect for this pupil of the Talmudic college was bred in the bone. The father’s thoughts turned back sentimentally to his own impoverished childhood, when the wealthier Jews of the little town regarded it as a great honour to have a young student of the Talm ud as daily boarder, and if he married the daughter of the house so much the better. Among the Jews, learning is the only title to nobility. Ferdinand could write in the Greek alphabet, and this was obviously akin to the Hebrew. Ferdinand could read Homer, who had written in the Ionic dialect of Asia Minor, and the neighbours of the Ionians had spoken Hebrew. Aphrodite had been bora in Cyprus, and from Cyprus to Jaffa was but a step. From Adonis, the Greek

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god, to Adonai the Lord God of Sabaoth was an easy transition. The humanism of Friedrich August Wolf, Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, and Humboldt had discovered the Hellenes —and the Jews. Greece had been born again, and out of the ghettos the Jews had been resurrected, in both cases in the name of humanity. People spoke of “Hellas” , but Pales­ tine was tacitly included. The gymnasium became the school of the humanities ; the tongues of classical antiquity formed the centre of the humanist scholastic program ; and the sons of the ancient Jewish people were now repeating the lessons their fore­ fathers had pattered two thousand years ago—they learnt Latin and Greek. Humanism was love for classical antiquity. The Jews were a part of classical antiquity. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, the leading spirits among the Germans had been engaged in a cult of classical antiquity ; at the universities, professor­ ships of Hellenism had been established ; a vigorous revival of classical lore was in progress. But then, in 1824, Friedrich August Wolf and Lord Byron died. Wolf was the last champion of spiritual Hellenism; Byron was the first champion of political Hellenism. In 1824, the Grecian music was punctuated with drum-taps and rifle­ shots. In 1824, Greece, which had been an object of en­ thusiasm, fantasy, and philological study, became a country like any other on the map. The birth of modern Greece was the death of Hellenism. A new Balkan State came into existence, and another illusion was shattered. From about 1830 onwards, the professorships at the German universities passed into the hands of the second generation ; and in the gymnasia there were already by 1840 many teachers who must be termed the epigones of humanism. No further epochmaking discoveries were being made in the field of classical letters; the university professors had systematised their teaching, so that it could now be undertaken by persons of third-rate intelligence. Humanism, which had been a

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fine art, had become a rule-of-thumb occupation for small men. One of the teachers at the Magdalen Gymnasium in Breslau had died. The headmaster delivered the funeral oration. He spoke of the “ true Greek’* who had just passed away. This true Greek had been a little, crippled school­ master, but he had written a fine book on the syntax of Herodotus. In accordance with the prevailing doctrine, wherein Hellenism consisted in a mastery of Greek grammar, the title of the deceased schoolmaster to be regarded as a Hellenist was incontestable. There was a flaw in the argument, but it was regarded as sound at the gymnasium. Under this sign the pupils were taught Greek language and literature. The “true Hellenes” were a dwarfed posterity of Hum ­ boldt, Voss, and Hölderlin; they were stipendiaries, whose only share in Hellas was a bookshelf containing cheap editions of the classics and the commentators. Pedagogy was a Greek word ; and the knowledge of a few Greek words sufficed to entitle one to be styled a pedagogue. This was not humanism, it was not even philology or pedagogy; it was merely a vestige, an almost exhausted heritage. What forty years before had been vigorous and full of meaning, and had been organically interconnected with the whole of human life, had now become a method, a routine for teachers, and a weariness for the pupils. The school did not educate, it merely disciplined. The instruction at the military academies was said to be “humanistic” when the cadets had mastered the fifth de­ clension in the Latin Grammar and had made fair headway among the irregular verbs. Ferdinand Lassai had more taste for the argumentation of the sophists than for this grammatical drill: he found it more amusing to let his intelligence roam among complicated logical problems than to stay on the drillground and work at the rules of syntax. The child of the Talmud had much more of the spirit of Anaxagoras or Plato than had the “ true Greeks” who had passed

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an examination qualifying them to become higher-school teachers. The dead schoolmaster whose praises the head had sung, was for Ferdinand not so much a Hellene as an evil demon who had plagued him with the irregular verbs, had been nothing more than a crippled policeman, a guardian of the dubious treasures of a dead grammar. In his mind's eye, when the chief let fall that unhappy phrase about the “ true Greek", Ferdinand pictured the dead man as he would have looked with his misshapen form among the naked Greeks at the Olympic games, and he bit his lip till the blood came. At school next day the dead teacher’s place was taken by another Hellene, who came from Glogau, and continued to teach Greek after his predecessor’s manner. Ferdinand, who was used to playing first fiddle at home, found it hard to stomach that he should make so poor a show at school. He was asked there to display what was called “positive knowledge" ; the sort of stuff which, with a little industry, boys of no talent could furbish up. He was talented, but idle. His knowledge was not positive; it was fanciful, im­ provised. Real knowledge is not of the improvised order. He quoted with approximate accuracy, and could give a good translation of the spirit of the original; whereas the drill-book demanded accurate quotations and literal trans­ lations. “ It amazes me that some of my schoolfellows who, though I myself say it, are greatly inferior to me in talent, capacity, genius, power of judgment, understanding, wit, should nevertheless get good reports." The youth whose parents made him feel that he was the embodiment of all their hopes, found it very disagreeable when his schoolmasters made him feel that he did not come up to their expectations. He suffered the most humili­ ating reverses, and, being of a stormy temper, and unable to accept them meekly, he raged against fate. Unexpectedly transferred from the Reform Gymnasium to the Magdalen Gymnasium, he did no better at the new school than he had done at the old. He promptly came into collision with his Latin master, whom he annoyed by his impertinence, and

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who treated him with contumely. Hence the following entry in Ferdinand’s diary : “At this moment I could have drunk his blood” . When he gets a bad report, he quotes (and, of course, misquotes) that verse of Ovid’s in which the poet, banished to the shore of the Black Sea, relieves his feelings by writing : “Here I am called a barbarian because the barbarians do not know how to value me” . He writes as caption to the report: “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (Fiction and Fact). We may interpret this as meaning that Ferdinand regards his schoolmasters as persons who are chary of fact and are writers of bad fiction. It would seem that the masters thus reported on by their pupil as unsatisfactory, retaliated by describing the fifth-form boy as “unsatisfactory” in their reports—a tit for tat which was to have a lamentable sequel. Ferdinand, who does not believe that his father will be able to distinguish the small modicum of fact in the reports from the malicious fiction, thinks it expedient for the sake of domestic peace to forge the signatures which his parents are supposed to attach to these reports as testimony to their having seen them. He is disinclined to expose himself to the discomfort which may arise if his ill-success at school be­ comes known at home. He does not wish to endanger his domestic prestige. He therefore decides that his school life is a private affair, with which his parents have no right to interfere. At Easter 1840 the head gives him a bad report. Ferdinand protests. “ I am sure I don’t know, Sir, what I have done to deserve so bad a report.” “You must leave it to me, Lassai, to decide what are your ‘deserts’. By the way, I should like to know why, when you bring the reports back, they are always signed by your mother instead of by your father.” “Because my father is often away, Sir. Besides, he signs them sometimes.” “Sometimes?” replies the head. “ Look here he signed only one of them, and that was a year ago. Has your

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father been away for a whole year, or is he always away when you happen to get a bad report?” “No, Sir. But even when he is at home, he often gets my mother to sign the report.” “ Is that so? Let me tell you why. I t’s because you only show the report to your mother, and never to your father. Well, that’s against the rules. Your mother’s signature is worthless.” “You are mistaken, Sir, for my mother has a power of attorney!” answers Ferdinand defiantly. At least, that is what he would like to answer, but does not dare. He in­ scribes it in his diary as the repartee he had “thought of making” . We understand why, contrary to his usual custom, he suppresses this “ bon mot” , when we read the last entry in the minutes of the conversation : “The man did not know that my masterstroke had been not to show the report to any one” . Ferdinand thinks it as well to keep this fact to himself, since knowledge of it might have annoyed the headmaster. The latter, therefore, gets his way, and next morning Fer­ dinand brings back the report duly signed by his father. The comment in the diary runs: “ Signed by my father, that is to say by myself, for I, in case of need, am father, mother, and son” . You may regard this rather frivolous and certainly punish­ able persiflage about the Trinity as witty or as impudent or as silly. No m atter which, for, even as do the Gospels, it terminated in a sort of Ascension. The headmaster did not like Ferdinand’s methods, and Ferdinand did not like the expression used by the headmaster to characterise these methods. Ferdinand left school suddenly. It was a departure so effectively speeded by the school authorities that without exaggeration it may be called a “flight” . This Trinitarian doctrine of his was something which, were it only on the metaphysical plane, unfitted him to become a “ true Hellene” . It belonged to a different mythol­ ogy. Besides, Lassai had acquired his learning, not so much during school hours as out of school hours, when he had

House iu Breslau where Lassalle was -boni

Lassalle as pupil at the Leipzig Commercial Academy After a picture in the possession of Professor Gustav Mayer

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studied business methods. In school he had learned little; out of school he had learned a great deal. He had very vague ideas concerning the language of Homer, but he knew all the tricks and turns of business life. He made a mental comparison between the poor school­ masters, the guardians of classical antiquity, and the wealthy merchants of the business quarter. The former lived in lodgings, in the garrets of the great houses which belonged to the latter. Since Ferdinand was hungry for power, the outcome of his meditations was a transfer from the school of the humanities to a commercial academy.

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FOUR

COM M ERCIAL ACADEMY In the middle of May 1840, Heymann took his son to Leipzig and entered him as a student at the Commercial Academy there. A hunt was made for lodgings which would suit Ferdinand’s tastes, and the desired rooms were at length found. They cost 400 talers instead of the proposed 250. The son, however, was so delighted with the place that the father at length agreed to pay the extra 50 talers. Only 50 talers, for Heymann’s paternal tenderness did not prevent his bargaining until the price was knocked down by 100 talers. Ferdinand might well draw the inference that he could learn more about commerce from his father than at the new school ! August Schiebe, Lassal’s new headmaster, was thoroughly efficient, and was a man of upright and straightforward character. Having a strong bent of his own, he taught an honest commercial science. He had an inclination to enforce strict discipline, and an antipathy for the “windbags” of Berlin; he insisted upon order in class, and demanded un­ conditional obedience. In fact, his love of discipline was stronger than his love of justice, so that he was only just at intervals. He was wont to say that when school hours were over he would beg pardon on his knees for his injustice, but that during school hours he must always insist upon having his own way, even if it were an unjust way. (Some, of course, may hold that there is a serious flaw in a justice which is only manifest exceptionally.) Still, though he made a little god of himself, he was not often an angry one. His mind was full of the science of commerce, and he believed that commerce itself was only the application of this science. But commerce is the application of instincts which are not necessarily either scientific or markedly honest. The essen­ tial thing about these instincts is that they shall be powerful and unbridled. Now, his pupil Ferdinand Lassai had instincts which were

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formidably unscrupulous, and there seemed no reason why he should not become a good commercial scholar and a highly successful merchant. Everything went well to begin with. In the new environment, Ferdinand enjoyed a honey­ moon, felt happy, safe, and satisfied ; the only trouble was that during the second week at the academy he had a trifling dispute with Schiebe, which disturbed the harmony a little. Lassai wanted to borrow a work of Corneille’s from the school library. Schiebe expressed a doubt whether Lassai would understand this author. Two days later, Lassai applied to Schiebe for permission to take a course of English lessons. Schiebe refused, on the ground that English was not part of the curriculum for a lad in the lower forms. He added : “You seem to me rather conceited. You want to read Corneille before you can possibly understand him. T hat overrates the extent of your knowledge, Lassai.” “Excuse me, Sir, I can say with Socrates, I know that I know nothing.” “A merchant who talks about Socrates and Cicero will soon find himself in the bankruptcy court.” “What rot !” runs Ferdinand’s comment in his diary upon this unquestionably foolish utterance of the chief. “What rot!” is the answer conveyed by the scornful ex­ pression of Ferdinand’s mouth, though he keeps the words to himself. Schiebe marks the expression, and understands the tacit answer of his insubordinate pupil. He does not forget. The lad’s vanity annoys him. Lassai is kept in for some petty offence, and Schiebe addresses him sarcastically. Ferdinand is saucy enough to warn the chief “with a significant look, which implied: ‘Sir, you forget yourself!’ ” Schiebe rages inwardly: “ I must put this fellow in his place. I ’ll show him who is head here !” Ferdinand is forced upon the defensive, where he has no chance of success. At home in Breslau, he was able to find compensation in domestic life for his troubles at school, but

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here in Leipzig the people with whom he is boarding have no inclination to allow themselves to be bossed by Ferdinand Lassai. The mistress of the house is really mistress, and at school Schiebe reigns. Everywhere young Lassai encounters resistance to his will. His schoolmates regard him as dis­ agreeable or ridiculous. His self-esteem is threatened. “ I really cannot understand why a Becker or a Nathanson should make fun of me. Can it be that I am absurd? or is it only because they are fools?” “ I don’t know why I get on so badly with my school­ fellows. It almost makes me so foolish as to believe that I must be a fool.” Again : “After all, I need not trouble my mind about the opinion of any one who does not understand me, for if such a person has a bad opinion of me it is just as if a schoolboy, having opened a volume of Hafiz’ wise sayings, should con­ temptuously fling the book into the corner because he does not understand the language.” O ur fifteen-year-old Hafiz has a way of uttering his pro­ verbial wisdom at inappropriate times. An older schoolfellow gives him a kindly warning not to talk so much, saying that if he goes on letting his tongue run away with him, he will get into endless trouble—but it is in uncontrolled utterance that the boy finds relief from the environing restrictions. Things go from bad to worse. At the house where he boards, the housewife, to begin with “an extremely agree­ able, good-natured, and at the same time clever and witty woman” , has, five months later, become “a worm-eaten, faded rose of the centifolian species, one who commits ‘cent folies’, a hundred stupidities” . The husband is a contempt­ ible blockhead of the kind who ventures to call the budding Hafiz “pert, forward, absurd, conceited” . Ferdinand finds himself surrounded by adversaries. Schiebe, rough and level-headed, can overlook laziness and fits of temper, but cannot put up with pride. What they think of young Lassai where he boards, we have seen. In class, too, he has to take a back seat. He begins to suffer

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from a sort of mania of persecution. He feels himself to be a victim, and that every one’s hand is against him. He is the quarry of an organised hunt. Thrust back into himself, he takes refuge in an imaginary world. There his self-esteem swells and swells. Since all are against him, he must conceive himself as the master of all. He intoxicates himself with “a splendid and firm faith in himself” . He draws a comparison: “ I am like the dead eagle, whose eyes were picked out and whose flesh was stripped from his bones by crows, magpies, and other con­ temptible birds. But when, with a renewed impetus, I spread my rustling wings, the crows and the magpies flew away cawing, what time I soared sunward.” Here among strangers, threats of suicide will no longer prove effective, so he threatens his adversaries with his wrath in days to come. Having little opportunity for speaking, he reads a great deal. He is full of enthusiasm for Heinrich Heine: “ I love this Heine, he is my alter ego” . He devours Borne’s letters. “ I greatly admire Börne. W hat he says is true. True are his execrations against the tyrants of Germany and Europe, who are quite as bad as the despots of Asia.” In his struggle against the despotism exercised by grown­ ups, he finds allies in literature. The example of the youthful Goethe inspires him with the defiance of Prometheus. Over a secret debauch on champagne, he raves : “ Come, Apollo, come, drink with me, Spirit of poesy. You are subject to me, brother Apollo, and so is the thundering Jupiter.” In his diary next day, he does not forget to record the rhetorical ecstasy of this fit of drunkenness. He readily loses his self-control, but does not easily lose his self-esteem. He staggers, but never completely loses his balance. The process of mental self-inspection which has been forced upon him, develops him rapidly. The only connexion left with the outer world is that with his home. His parents visit him, and he visits them. He writes that he is short of money, and acknowledges the response they make with the arrogant rem ark: “ It is an act of love and justice that you should have nearly doubled

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my pocket money” . Being flush with money, he neglects his studies in Leipzig just as he had neglected them in Breslau ; he spends freely as long as the cash lasts, and he borrows as soon as it is exhausted. He takes tickets in the lottery, which is harmless enough. He gets theatre tickets on credit, which is almost harmless. With borrowed talers he buys champagne, which is no longer harmless. Sick of his “old clo* ” , he solves the dress problem in the most autocratic way, going impulsively to a tailor and a shoemaker, where he orders the finest coats, vests, trousers, and boots, and returns to his rooms to enter the self-approv­ ing comment in his diary: “ Clothes make the man, is the opinion of the nineteenth century. Certainly it is foolish for a m an who depends upon other men and wishes to live by their favour, to despise the judgm ent and even the pre­ judices of the world. Besides, it gives a man pleasure to be well dressed, and thus rigged to contemplate his own image in the mirror.” He is confident in his self-love ; but he wants also the love of others, to strengthen him in this self-confidence. “To-day I made the acquaintance of Zander’s sister Rosalie. She is a beautiful girl, eminently kissable ; unfortunately that is an art of which I am not yet master. Patience, my young friend, a time will come. Besides, I have done my utmost to make myself amiable.” This little idyll, which is a mere expression of the age he has now reached, is nothing more than an interlude. School life, the household life where he boards, outward circumstances in general, seem to him more and ever more designed to encircle him and to thrust him back upon him­ self. The mortifications, the censures, the discomfitures, the reverses increase ; and he realises that he will need stronger weapons unless he is to capitulate to his enemies. The diary records the date of his determination to con­ solidate his forces. “ May 2i, 1840. This evening they brought me the report concerning the Jews in Damascus. It is terrible to read, terrible to hear, so that one’s hair stands on end, and all

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the feelings in one’s heart turn to wrath. It is terrible that any nation should have to bear this, whether it takes revenge or whether it endures. True, fearfully true, is the following sentence in the report : ‘The Jews of this city have to suffer cruelties such as none but these pariahs of the world would suffer without making dreadful reprisals’. Even the Chris­ tians wonder at the sluggishness of our blood ; wonder that we do not rise in revolt, that we may die on the battlefield rather than in the torture chamber. If there should ever be a revolution, what could be a juster one than that the Jews in that city should rise, start incendiary fires everywhere, blow up the powder magazine, and destroy themselves together with their persecutors? Cowardly race, you deserve no better lot ! You are born to be enslaved !” Here for the first time we encounter the word “revolu­ tion” , and for the first time the word “pariah” . “July 19, 1840. I was at the theatre. Löwe was playing Fiesco. I don’t quite know how to explain it, for although my sentiments are now democratic and republican, I feel that had I been in the Count of Lavagna’s place I should have done just as he did, and should not have been con­ tent to be merely Genoa’s first citizen, but should have stretched forth my hand to seize a diadem. I t follows from this that I must be a pure egoist. H ad I been born of the blood royal, I should have been an aristocrat through and through. Since, however, I am the son of an ordinary cit, I shall be a democrat.” Here we have the record of the first youthful dreams of a Lassai dynasty. “August 24, 1840. Shall I be wise and virtuous? Shall I trim my sails to the wind, flatter the great, intrigue to secure advantages and prestige; or shall I, like the most defiant of republicans, cling to truth as my supreme virtue, dis­ regarding all else, and concerned only to give the death­ blow to aristocracy? Assuredly, although I have a talent that way, I shall never be a smiling and cowardly court flunkey. I shall proclaim liberty to the peoples even though I should perish in the attem pt. This I swear before God

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under the stars, and woe be on my head should I prove false to my oath ! ! !” H e doth protest too much! The words flow too readily from his pen ; and in the narrow retirement of his room, he lets his fancy roam freely about “peoples” and about “ God” , apostrophising the latter “ under the stars” . “August 26,1840. I t is now clear to me that I shall become an author. Yes, I shall appear before the German nation and before all nations, and with glowing words I shall call them to the struggle for freedom. I shall not be intimidated by the frowms of princes. I shall not let myself be corrupted by ribbons and tides. No, I shall not desist until they are pallid with fear.” In these emotional flights of fancy, the terror of princes, the liberator of the nations, the marshal of the unborn revolution, forgets the realities of his situation. He forgets the school, but the school does not forget him. Schiebe divines the sanguinary dreams of his pupil. Schiebe becomes aware of the threatenings of rebellion, and intensifies the pressure. Forgetting his dreams for the moment, Ferdinand rages in plain words : “ Good God, were it not that I have consideration for my father, how I would let myself go against the whole gang of them, all the masters, the fawning chatterboxes, the trimmers, the intriguers, the rascals! What plain truths I should tell Schiebe. Things that no one has ever told him before! His ears would burn finely. I should tell him the plain truth before the whole class, the whole school, the whole teaching staff! “ I should let him know how beloved he is by the school, how there is no one there who has not invoked curses on his head, and not one who has not cursed himself for being at the Commercial Academy. I should let him know how just he is, insisting as he does on having everything done exactly as he likes, not looking to knowledge and accomplishments, but only concerned to smile on those who flatter him, so that every one is lost who does not trim his sails to the breeze.

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I should go and shout in his ears, to let him know that among the 120 pupils at the Commercial Academy there are n o whose inmost longing it is that the whole academy should go to the devil. I should tell him that there is not one of us but has already with good reason stigmatised him as an unjust scoundrel. I should let him know, in plain terms, how he employs the whole teaching staff as spies, lickspittles, eavesdroppers, and talebearers ! how sedulously he keeps watch, as if it were his task to avert a conspiracy against the State, to discover some sinister plot, instead of merely having to prevent young fellows of sixteen from kicking over the traces. Oh, I would soon tell this despotic villain more truths than he has ever heard or will ever hear in his life. I would yell the truth into his ears until his eardrums burst ! I should tell him, and all my schoolfellows would confirm my words, that there is nothing to be learned at this academy except how to creep and crawl and pay court to those in authority. I should drive him through the eye o f a needle with the truthj and should not stop until I had made him deaf!” This first propaganda speech was never delivered, but it was the only one which remained undelivered. Six months later, in a letter to his father, written upon a greasy sheet of paper and therefore only legible in parts, we can decipher the following fierce words and phrases : “ . . . everything revolutionary, even the air which . . . k\ . . any day the revolt may break out . . . “ . . . formidable crisis . . . “ . . . where the people suddenly realises its power . . . . . great men seize . . . “ . . . usually . . . “ . . . and lead farther . . . “ . . . the part which I shall play in this . . . “ . . . about this you can hardly be in d o u b t. . . “ . . . the revolution . . . . . every day in class I, despite the . . . . . the most magnificent speeches . . . . , Robespierre, and inflame their minds • t t

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“ . . .fiery words . . . . . most glowing eloquence the chill. . . . . hearts o f our Germanyouth. . . The Commercial Academy had for him become a school of action. The headmaster, whose business it was to train young merchants, could no longer tolerate as a pupil one who made it his business to train young rebels. One of Ferdinand’s schoolmates was taken aside by the language-master Zeller, who said : “You don’t know Lassai. He is a very, very dangerous fellow. The headmaster and all of us are firmly resolved th at if Lassai does not leave on his own initiative, we shall clear him out of the school on any pretext or none, and at all costs. He is extremely dangerous. He already has fol­ lowers.” “Excuse me. Sir, but as far as I know his only chum is Becker.” “You don’t know what you are talking about. He has followers. In a word, he is very dangerous.” This conversation is reported to the sixteen-year-old con­ spirator. Martyrdom is agreeable to him. I t gives him prestige in the class. He extends his influence by all possible means. He enters into alliances. He gains adherents. “Hasselbach is being very badly treated by the other fellows. It seemed to me it would be a good move to sympa­ thise with him, so I protested openly and took him under my wing. W hat could be more natural than that he plumed himself on the fact that I should deign to associate with him, the oppressed, the despised, and that (as the fool believed) I should give him my friendship? No one knows my purposes, and how I shall make use of this fellow Hasselbach.” He strikes up a close intimacy with Becker. H e is also on friendly terms with Zander, because of Zander’s pretty sister Rosalie.

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He invites Kindermann to his diggings. “The great joke is that he believes I take his remarks at face value. The donkey! He thinks he is leading me by the nose, when it is really the other way about. He does not know that I only put up with him because I can make use of him.” Ferdinand Lassal’s spirit of calculation is not really so far-reaching as these words would imply. W hat he cannot bear is the thought that he should be humbugged or ex­ ploited by any of his schoolfellows, th at he should give more than he receives. He assumes the mask of the profiteer from dread lest he should appear in his own eyes as being bested by others. However this may be, he succeeds in arousing a revolutionary mood among these callow aspirants to a mer­ cantile career. He sows in their minds the ideas of revolt. He builds barricades within them. When confined to bed by an attack of influenza, he makes fierce speeches to all of those who visit him. The masters realise that Ferdinand’s revolutionary ferment is still working, and they try to render him harmless. O n some trifling pretext, he is summoned to the masters’ council room. Dr. Feller opens the ball. “ Gentlemen ! You must know that Lassai looks at every­ thing with the eye of a philosopher. We are not his superiors. He does not recognise any superiors. We are his subordinates, for we are paid. Love, respect, gratitude—Lassai knows nothing of these. Whatever comes from the heart is un­ meaning to him, and so is the very word ‘heart’. He loves no one. His principle is to feign love so long as he can make use of any one. [A voice: *A fine principle!’] He knows how to produce the semblance.” Turning to Lassai, Dr. Feller says : “ The best thing for you is to become an actor. Then you can play Shylock to-day, and to-morrow some other villain’s role, since you are fitted to play any role.” Lassai listens with stoical indifference. His face is set, and he does not disclose by any movement of his features the stormy feelings by which he is inwardly convulsed. “Hatred,

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contempt, scorn, wrath, sadness, fury, succeeded one an­ other within my breast. But I betrayed nothing of what was going on there, and I devoted all my energy to con­ trolling my countenance.” The council ended with the decision that Lassai was to be confined to his room for three weeks. Thenceforward the severest measures would be taken in the event of any breach of the regulations. If the order to keep his room was not strictly obeyed, “justice would be prom pt” . And the result as far as Lassai was concerned? “ Hitherto I had hoped to leave at Easter, but now I am firmly resolved to complete the course. I ’m not afraid of Schiebe.” Schiebe had ceased to be a terrifying figure. In imagina­ tion, Ferdinand has seized him like a chess-man, and is moving him hither and thither upon a fancied chess-board. A t Easter he receives his report from Schiebe. There is a truce. Lassai begins cautiously : “ I hope, Sir, th at next year I shall be able to give you more satisfaction than I have given you in the year that has just closed.” Schiebe sits up and takes notice. Lassai records in his diary : “ O f course it is rather hypo­ critical to talk about penitence when one’s heart is full of hatred, but as soon as I had begun in this vein it was easy to go on” . The sluices of eloquence had been opened. The freshets of verbiage swept away with their flood the rough but honest Schiebe, who was good-natured and easily touched. “Please accept my pledge to behave better.” Even if Schiebe has his doubts, he cannot very well refuse. The two part on the best of terms. The master revises his judgm ent of the pupil; the pupil revises his opinion that there is still anything to learn from this master. The year at Leipzig has clarified Lassal’s mind. Removal from the Breslau environment, the schooling of circum­ stances, a more direct contact in Leipzig with the events of contemporary history—all these things had contributed to develop his aptitudes.

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Nothing seemed to him more futile as a means of liveli­ hood than to buy goods in order to sell them again. No occupation seemed to him more trifling and subordinate than to act as middleman between producer and con­ sumer, himself neither the one nor die other. If he is a steam-engine, he wants to be either the coal or the steam, to be energy in one form or the other; he does not want to be mere water, a mere intermediary between coal and steam. He does not care a doit for the im portant function which the water exercises in this process. He does not recognise the momentous role played by the merchant in the economy of a nation. When his father revisits him, Ferdinand explains that he has formed an irrevocable resolution to study. The surprised parent asks time for consideration. The son remarks that no consideration is required, but only approval. The father gives way. He makes the old mistake of begging where he ought to command. Tearfully he evacuates the position of concrete objections. He says that he is old and tired, and longs for rest. I f Ferdinand is to devote himself to study, he, the father, will be condemned to go on toiling without pause. The son agrees that the situation is regrettable. But in this dilemma, since one or other of them must take up the burden, the best way will be, th at he, Ferdinand, shall follow his own bent, shall pursue his undeniable calling. This may sound rather callous, but is quite correct bio­ logically, seeing that a coming life has stronger claims than a going life. He turns a deaf ear to the sentimental stop. “ What do you want to study?” , asks the father. “The greatest, the most comprehensive study in the universe, the study that is most closely associated with the most sacred interests of mankind, the study of history !” (One who talked thus, meant Hegel.) “But how will you make your living? In Prussia, under present auspices, you cannot hold office, you cannot become

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a professor. Not unless you abandon the faith of your fathers. Which may God forfend !” “ I shall always be able to earn sufficient for my needs.” “Young people invariably make that mistake. I t is easy to talk. I f you really must study, then you had better study medicine or law.” “Doctors and lawyers are merchants who trade in their knowledge. I want to study for study’s own sake !” “ I don’t quite know what you mean. Do you fancy th at you can write, that you can become a man of letters?” “No, but I want to become a publicist. Now is the time, now, when people are fighting on behalf of the holiest aims of humanity. I t is a fight for the noblest purposes, and is conducted in the noblest possible way. O f course, in case of need, tru th must be backed up by force.” “My son, I do not fail to recognise the truth of what you are saying, but why do you wish to become one of the martyrs? You, our only hope, our only support. Liberty must be won by struggle, but it will be won even without your aid. Stay with us, minister to our happiness, do not throw yourself into this struggle. Even if you should be vic­ torious in it, we shall succumb. We have lived only for you. Let people fight who have nothing to lose, those in whose fortunes no parental hearts are bound up. Why should you, in particular, want to be a m artyr?” “Why? Because God has implanted in my breast a voice which summons me to battle. Because God has given me powers which fit me for battle. Because I can fight and suffer in a noble cause. Because I want to use the powers which God has given me for a definite purpose. Because, in a word, I can no otherwise !” “Well, let’s come to a compromise. We will leave the m atter open until the autumn. Meanwhile we will both of us think over what you have just been saying.” This conversation took place in May 1841. Ferdinand obeyed reluctantly; he worried, he fussed, he quibbled; he wanted to know why there should be a com­ promise. Then, suddenly making up his mind, without

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giving notice to the school authorities, and blindly following an impulse, he set out for Breslau. To the last report there were appended some remarks by Schiebe: “ Ought to do more than he does. Needs close watching. Stayed away August 1841. Respected neither by the masters nor by his schoolfellows/’

CHAPTER

FIVE

HERR SCHULZ ON PUNCTUATION When Ferdinand, on his own initiative, returned home thus prematurely, he had nothing and no one on his side except logic. It was, of course, unreasonable for his father to agree on principle to his adopting a life of study, and yet to insist upon his staying out his time at the Commercial Academy. It was illogical in his father, having abandoned all hope of making his son a successful silk merchant, not to let him quit the academy forthwith. But Ferdinand ought to have known that to have logic on one’s side means to have all human instincts and pre­ judices and sensations against one. Since man has a small head and a large heart, logic has very little power, whereas emotion has a great deal. Heymann felt that he had been cheated. His original wish had been for his son to adopt a life of study, but the son had wanted to go to the Commercial Academy. He had given way, and now, when he wanted Ferdinand to stick to the academy, Ferdinand wanted to adopt a life of study. All that Heymann could realise was Ferdinand's terrible contrariness. Was a lad of seventeen to decide such matters for himself? T hat was opposed to the laws of the family. “My father wants to force upon me a foolish waste of time. This is opposed to the laws of reason.” The father appealed to the natural law in accordance with which children must obey their parents. The son, on his side, appealed to Aristotle. In view of so venerable an authority, the elder Lassai wavered. Whenever he reflected upon his son's wishes, he agreed that Ferdinand was right. But whenever he stopped thinking and was content to feel, he was sure that he him­ self was right. And the more the battle raged within him as to which of the twain was right, the more angry did he become with his son.

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From this Ferdinand learned that logic is mainly created to irritate quiet folk and to transform their natural bene­ volence into wrath. Beyond question, however, the flight from Leipzig had been undisciplined! Inasmuch as the demand for logic is a purely individual affair, whereas the demand for discipline is general and many-headed, a sort of paternal ban was held over the disobedient youngster. He was forbidden an asylum in the innermost sanctum of the house ; the mother and the sister acted as intermediaries between the two obstinate principals, neither of whom would yield a jo t since there was really no longer a jo t to yield. The father luxuriated in the dangerous role of implacability, a course of inaction which allowed him to let events shape as they would while he withheld his gracious permission. Ferdinand devoted himself to preparation for the abiturient examination. He worked with the utmost concentration, never going out day after day. When his friends came to call, they found him surrounded by piles of books and papers. In addition, apart from the necessary schoolbooks, he devoured (now that he was seized by a fever for reading) literary and philosophical works. A few numbers of the “Halle Annual” had fallen into his hands ; from these he learnt a little Hegel, for they contained some very interesting essays by some of Hegel’s pupils. His study was untidy and looked rather desolate, but the lord of the apartment would receive his guests wearing an elegant and spotless satin dressing-gown. His papers were in con­ fusion, but his hair was carefully curled, and the dust which covered the books served only to set off the fact that his hands and finger-nails were carefully tended. Ferdinand, who had had enough of the Reform Gym­ nasium and the Magdalen Gymnasium, chose for his ex­ amination the Catholic Matthias Gymnasium. There the Wissowas ruled. They were excellent, benevolent, and in­ domitable men. Perhaps they did not live wholly in the present, which was to some extent alien to their spirit, but they were ardently devoted to the classical world. What they E

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specially valued in Jesus Christ was that he seemed to them almost as nude and almost as plastic as the gods of Hellas. They were humanists, and when, in the sixth form, they were marking translations from Thucydides, it delighted them to single out for praise the author of the best trans­ lation—who was often a Jew. “Jewry”, they would say, “has distinguished itself once more.” They were frank, just, efficient. There was no sancti­ monious humbug about them ; and if they did not clash with the constituted authorities quite so often as might have been anticipated, this was because they attached very little importance to the contemporary regime. They taught Greek remarkably well, and, without realis­ ing it, they at the same time inculcated the idea of liberty, whose essence had been made familiar to them by their study of the Greek republics. They taught what it behoved them to teach ; and they taught also whatever they knew— and this was more than they ought to have known. They were pleasure-loving, robust, and sterling fellows, who, liking to read Petronius and Apuleius, were equally familiar with the Priapian ways of Trimalchio’s supper party and the contemplative ways of the Last Supper, prizing both, and never confounding them. They were tolerant and always to the point, spoke Latin German and German Latin, and were all three of them (father, son, and grandson) the true heirs of the brothers Humboldt. Lassai then addressed himself to the Wissowas’ school. Here he would be safe from grudges ; here there would be no prejudice against him on religious grounds. Catholicism, being on the defensive in Protestant Prussia, regarded Mosaism as an ally against the official church; the two elder religions could make common cause against the up­ start creed of North Germany. Lassai entered for the Easter examination of the year 1842, but, having failed to observe some of the necessary formalities, was refused admission. Declining to accept this rebuff, he was bold enough to apply direct to the minister for public worship and education, with the incredible result

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that the previous decision was reversed and he was allowed to enter. In the examination he encountered Dr. David Schulz, ecclesiastical councillor and professor of Protestant theology, who as governmental commissary was conducting the examination. This crum bling11‘pillar of everyday rational­ ism in Silesia” had many reasons for regarding with dislike the future “pillar of everyday socialism” . Two epochs, two sections of universal history, two great religions (humanism and socialism), confronted one another. The past was “examining” the future. The upshot was that the past “ploughed” the future. It was at the commissary's instance that Lassai was re­ jected ; the “man of God” disapproved of the disciple of a new god. When called upon to justify his decision, the guardian of “ Protestantism” declared that Lassai “lacked maturity of character” for he had protested against the decision of the Father. The enemy of “pietism” reproached the candidate for “impiety” . But the new epoch speedily protested against this decision in a still more impious manner. There was an open scandal. The day before the examina­ tion, the good Wissowa had encouraged Ferdinand by saying : “Your written work is so admirable that unless you make a great bungle you will certainly pass” . The reports show that Lassai did best of all the candidates in the viva voce examination. The consensus of opinion among the examiners was that Lassai was fit for a pass. Words were exchanged between Schulz and Wissowa. “I cannot let Lassai through.” “I should like to hear your reasons.” “Lassai appealed against a properly constituted decision of the provincial examining board, appealed direct to the minister for public worship and education. It is distressing enough that he should have been successful in that appeal. His success here would encourage him to take other and similar steps. I need not enlarge upon the impression which passing an examination in such circumstances would have upon other young fellows. My own son, who was one of

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Lassal’s classmates at the Magdalen Gymnasium, has, though extraordinarily diligent, only just entered the sixth form.'* “ Sir, I must remind you that all Lassal’s examiners declare themselves satisfied with him. Since you are of another opinion, I should recommend you to report to the examining board that Lassal’s rejection is due to your own special intervention.” “Surely, Sir, you will not dare to appeal to the authorities. I am myself chief of the examining board. I take all the responsibility. If you encourage Lassai to appeal to the minister for public worship and education, I shall fight the m atter through at the ministry. I shall make it a personal affair.” “We, Sir, shall let the minister know what marks Lassai secured! We should be ashamed not to let this pupil through.” “I tell you he shall not pass! It seems to me that the teachers at this extraordinary school have been actually corrupted by the impudent young fellow !” All the masters, all the examiners, spring to their feet. Wissowa withdraws with the flush of anger upon his cheeks. Before leaving he says : “I make a formal protest against the affront offered to me and my teachers, men exercising their official duty. I wish the last utterance of the royal commissary to be entered in the minutes. I am of opinion that after this remark the only thing to do is to adjourn the meeting at once.” The meeting lasted three hours instead of the customary thirty minutes. The examiners were tired out. Lassai was ploughed, after all. Wissowa considered it his duty to inform Lassai regarding what had taken place at the meeting. Fair play is a jewel. He said: “Notwithstanding the concession we have had to make to the royal commissary, your marks are as good as they can be. Herr Schulz has not yet signed the certificate, but you shall have it this afternoon.” T hat afternoon, however, when Lassai went to see Wis-

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sowa, the latter said : “ I am sorry that I cannot yet give you your certificate. A new one will have to be drafted. Dr. Schulz has refused to sign it; your marks were exem­ plary, and he was afraid you might take further steps.” Ferdinand acted on this hint and appealed to the minister for public worship and education. Wissowa, for his part, felt it to be an intolerable humilia­ tion that he should be compelled to support an unjust and arbitrary act. In the name of all the examiners he wrote a report to the authorities: “The examining committee deplores the pitiful part it has been forced to play, because it allowed itself to be intimidated by violence and threats, and to be overawed by an alien opinion, to the forfeiture of its own dignity. The examining committee enquires how the authorities will think fit to describe the conduct of H err Schulz, who refuses to allow the examining teachers to grant Lassai a pass because his own son, a lad of the same age, has only just entered the sixth form.” The authorities were not slow to administer a reproof to this importunate headmaster, and to inform him that his disclosure to Lassai concerning the events at the meeting of examiners was likely to get him into trouble. To this Wissowa returned the manly and upright answer : “Regarding our own disgrace, I did not, so far as I know, say anything to Lassai, although I must own that my con­ science pricked me as far as he was concerned.,, Meanwhile Schulz had been looking into the marks ob­ tained by Lassai in the examination. A mathematical prob­ lem is either solved or unsolved ; a translation has a certain number of mistakes, upon which the marks depend. I t is upon these marks that success or failure in an examination primarily turns. Even Schulz could not alter the marks accorded by the various examiners. He turned, therefore, to consider the German essay. The subject for this had been chosen by Schulz himself. It was : “The Development of the Concept of Humaneness” . The general view of the examiners had been that this theme was beyond the competence of the examinees (and, indeed,

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in the private opinion of the examiners, Schulz had secretly wished to give a dig at Catholicism). Still, here were points open to attack. The decision of the examining committee ran : “ Influenced by the writing of many recent and especially Jewish authors, Lassai regards humaneness as identical with toleration and liberalism, and has introduced into his essay a number of modern ideas and fruits of his reading which have no very close connexion with the topic under consideration ; all the same, this essay is brilliantly and eloquently written, ex­ celling in these respects the essays of all the other candidates, and to that extent we consider it the best”. The ecclesiastical councillor erased these sentences, and wrote instead: “His German essay regarding the concept of humaneness is a mishmash of undigested and misunder­ stood phrases, devoid of a true understanding of the matter, lacking plan, and exhibiting numerous linguistic and ortho­ graphical errors ; especially defective is it in the matter o f punc­ tuation, as are his other examination papers !” The man whose conscience was so tender when the commas were wrongly placed, and so tough when justice was out of tune, gained the victory over Lassai. How could it be expected that the chief of the examining board should fail to get the better of this wretched abiturient, even though the latter had conducted his case with energy and excep­ tional skill? Nothing daunted, however, Lassai thereupon sent in a personal petition to the minister for public worship and education, with a covering letter in which he added certain information, “concerning which, in the interests of wise administration, Your Excellency ought to be made ac­ quainted” . These details were nothing other than a descrip­ tion of all the shifts and arbitrary acts to which Herr Schulz had had recourse against the teachers at the gymnasium. The petition was so brilliantly written a memorial, that one might think it alone ought to have outweighed and annihilated any objection made to the German essay. Here is an extract :

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“At first my German essay was declared to be the best of all those written by the abiturients, and yet my report says that the signs of immaturity are to be found precisely in my German essay. When it is further declared in my report that my personal account of myself contains mani­ fest indications of immaturity of character, I really do not know what this means. O r is it possible that the passage in question refers to the fact that in my personal account I said that I had been originally destined for a commercial career, but that an inner urge had diverted me to the pur­ suit of knowledge? Is it, then, so new, so unprecedented, that a youth, abandoning a prescribed course, should take a new direction, whither taste and inclination, vocation and sentiment, guide him? Why should that which is not only not disapproved of in others, but perhaps actually praised, be found so blameworthy in me? All the world has regarded it as a praiseworthy indication of firmness and ripeness of character, that Luther refused to sacrifice his favourite study, theology, to the study of law. Why, then, should it be a sign of unripeness of character in me that I want to abandon a commercial career for the pursuit of knowledge?” This appeal to Minister Eichhorn, brilliantly planned, brilliantly written, and supported by brilliant arguments, ends with flowing eloquence as follows : “I am convinced that Your Excellency will not tolerate that under your sagacious administration a blameless young man should be sacrificed to the arbitrariness and vanity of one official. This is not a matter of no moment ; it concerns the suppression of an individual who might one day be useful to the State and wants to devote his powers to the service of the State. W hat will people say, what will they think, if, in the most liberal and enlightened State of Ger­ many, if in Prussia which in educational matters has set an example to all the other countries of Europe—if in Prussia, under the distinguished administration of Your Excellency—such things as the aforesaid are possible?” The petition was directly handed by Lassai to Minister Eichhorn, who was at that time visiting Silesia in the king’s

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train. The newly crowned king had come to Silesia to emphasise the fact that he intended to rule by God’s grace and unaffected by the decisions of diets and estates of the realm, even though the Breslau municipal authorides should humbly venture to hold other views. The minister of this autocradc king was not disposed to grant the favour of justice to Lassai, a Jewish lad seventeen years of age, who appeared to be restless and insubordinate. Thus Eichhorn “cannot find that the decision to refuse you a pass was ungrounded, and must leave it to you to submit to re-examination by an examining committee whose choice s left to yourself” . Such is the State. Lassai had to give way, but he did not forget. At Easter 1843 Wissowa, with a kindly smile, handed him his pass certificate. Thank goodness the governmental commissary this year, Dr. Vogel, had not a son in the lower sixth !

CHAPTER

SIX

GOD’S SOLILOQUY The liberals had expected great things from Frederick William IV ’s accession to the throne. An amnesty was declared; Jah n was set at liberty; a few liberals were appointed to professorial chairs—but there was, of course, no liberalism. People have short memories, and they forgot that liberalism had only existed in Prussia so long as Napoleon was in Europe. On March i, 1815, Napoleon had landed at Cannes, so on May 22nd Frederick William III had promised Prussia a constitution. But on June 15th the Prussians had helped to defeat the emperor at Waterloo, and therefore in Sep­ tember their king joined the Holy Alliance. This was a society of sovereign princes who found it to their advantage to ascribe to the goodness of God the victory which had been won with the blood of their subjects. They therefore solemnly resolved to rule their respective peoples strictly in accordance with the doctrines of Holy Writ. It can well be understood that of all the continental potentates the pope alone had any objection to joining this all-too-Christian alliance. Holy Writ is quite as strongly opposed to breach of faith as it is to parliamentarism. Nevertheless the king of Prussia signed an agreement which made it incumbent upon him out of obedience to the Bible to be disobedient to the commandments of the Bible, to break faith out of respect for the Christian faith, and (although “ to give is better than to receive” ) to recall his given word and the almost given liberties. There are no obvious indications that God took pleasure in this alliance, although it was entered into in his honour. There are, however, abundant indications that the subjects of these sovereign princes took no delight in it. Those who ventured to express their impious disapproval soon found themselves behind fortress walls, As far as the Prussian Jews

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were concerned, the ruler of Prussia (once more out of piety towards the doctrine of the Jewish prophets, judges, and kings) resolutely withdrew the meagre rights which had been granted them in 1812. The result was that many of them, in view of the debatable trustworthiness of their sovereign, became untrustworthy subjects. Most of these malcontents had to take refuge in Paris. Now it is amusing to note that in the year 1818 the Prussian government summoned Hegel, the great writer upon the philosophy of history, to fill the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which had been vacant since the death of Fichte. He was the official State philosopher, and he behaved officially when he claimed for the State unrestricted autho­ rity over the individual. But the laws which he taught and the entire metaphysical system which he promulgated were out of harmony with the rigid absolutism of the Prussian court. To him universal history was an allegory of the absolute spirit. When history was, so to say, retranslated into its ideas, you reached spirit, that is to say, God. The course of history is an endless dialectical process, which proceeds according to law and is unalterable. Absolute spirit, which we may term God, converses as it were with itself, and the outcome of this soliloquy is the rather sad though not by any means hopeless monologue of universal history. History is the dialectic of the process of becoming ; the essence of the world is evolution, unceasing progress, and the self-augmenting pendulum swing from thesis to an­ tithesis after synthesis. T hat is to say, Darwinism in history. But the essence of the Prussian regime consisted in an obstinate maintenance of the old, in mulish rigidity. Hence the philosopher of this regime relegated evolution, the idea of development, to the abstract domain of metaphysics. His “movement” effected itself in the “spirit” . His philosophical instrument was dialectic; and this became the weapon which was in the future to overthrow absolutism. The State philosopher had certain disciples whose names were David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuer­ bach, Arnold Ruge, and K arl M arx; and, in order to

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inaugurate the revolution, all they had to do was to trans­ form metaphysics into physics. As soon as the “ absolute spirit” was transformed into “m an” , evolution was sancti­ fied all along the line, and conservatism of whatever kind was philosophically degraded and indeed rendered im­ possible. Thus did the official philosopher of the reactionary State found the school out of which the annihila don of this State was to proceed. Here we have an event through which dialectic gives a striking proof of itself. Hegel’s philosophy, with which at that time the best heads in Germany were busied, had already cast its spell over the abiturient Lassai. He looked upon himself as one of the Young Hegelians; as a follower of Hegel, whose radical writings filled him with enthusiasm. Since the Prussian State was inviolably “ Christian” , any criticism of Christianity was veiled rebellion. In 1835 was published Strauss* Life o f Jesus. Engels penned a heroic poem on “ the oppressed but miraculously liberated Bible” . Feuerbach’s Essence o f Christianity appeared in 1841, and here all could read that “the absolute spirit of Hegel” was nothing other than “ the departed spirit of theology” . Engels jubilantly declared: “No one who has not himself experienced the liberating influence of this book can form any idea of it. For the time being we were all Feuerbachians.” Marx was fascinated: “Who has annihilated the dialectic of concepts, the war of the gods which only the philosophers knew? Feuerbach! Who has put man in the place of the old rag-bag, in the place of the infinite consciousness? Feuerbach!” Lassai devoured Feuerbach, and what he later wrote to Marx was perfectly true: “ Since 1840 I have been a revolutionist, and since 1843 a convinced socialist” . Since 1840, Frederick William IV had been king, and since 1843 he had been an obvious and thoroughgoing reactionary. He cherished vague thoughts of establishing a Christian empire after the medieval and feudalist model. In the year 1842, when M arx in the “Rheinische Zeitung” was laying the foundations of economic materialism

LASSALLE 76 Frederick William IV was laying the “foundation-stone” for the completion of the medieval cathedral of Cologne. A symbolic action ! The “Rheinische Zeitung” was edited and published in Cologne, and in that city there was no room for the news­ paper and for the cathedral. So, early in the year 1843, at the king's instigation, the ministerial council suppressed the newspaper. Marx, with grim humour, promptly nominated Hegel patron of the class w ar: “ Philosophy cannot be realised without the uprising of the proletariat. The prole­ tariat cannot raise itself up without the realisation of philosophy. When all the internal conditions have been ful­ filled, the day of the German uprising will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.” It abated nothing from the truth of this astounding prophecy (written five years before 1848) that not a single proletarian understood its precise significance. Others, who were not proletarians, understood it all the better, and transmuted it into lyrical poems. One of these writers, Rudolf Gottschall, was a student at Königsberg. His lyric attracted the attention of the pro­ letarians and of the university authorities. The former sang Gottschall’s words, the latter sent the author down. These things, too, happened in 1843. But more things than these happened that year. In 1843, Frederick William, who fancied himself a Hohen­ staufen, though he was nothing more than a Hohenzoller, ordered a Te Deum to be sung and bells to be rung in commemoration of the year 843, when, through the infamy of Charlemagne's grandson, Pan-Europa was broken up into petty States, one of which was Germany. Directing his glance at a rather rusty imperial crown, Frederick William discovered the thousandth anniversary of Germany's birth. In 1843, Bruno Bauer discovered Christianity; but His Most Christian Majesty had Das entdeckte Christentum [Christianity discovered] seized before publication because it conformed too closely to the teaching of Christ. In 1843, the “ Schlesische Zeitung” discovered the exis­ tence of a Prussian proletariat.

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In 1843, “ Casemate Wolff” described the housing con­ ditions of the proletarians who were crowded together in the Breslau casemates. In 1843, there was formed in Breslau a society “for the education of the children of helpless proletarians” . In 1843, that the farcical element might not be lacking, His Most Christian Majesty, who, amid crises, ebullitions, and disorders, had most high though petty troubles of his own, issued a formal cabinet order to a certain Count Hatzfeldt exhorting this gentleman to be good enough to treat his countess better. The king did not, however, issue an order to the effect that the workers were to receive more humane treatment. Thus the reprimanded of the year 1843 were Marx, Bruno Bauer, Hatzfeldt, and Gottschall. After his expulsion from Königsberg, Gottschall came to Breslau, where he joined the radical burschenschaft “Raczeks” . This was a students’ association in which the members studied Ruge’s “Hallesche Jahrbücher” , Herwegh’s poems, and Feuerbach’s Essence o f Christianity ; in which they held discussions concerning the Hegelian philosophy; in which they cultivated a rather hazy communism which was revo­ lutionary in intent though lacking definiteness of aim. At the discussions, some of which lasted all through the night, Gottschall’s attention was attracted by a youthful Jew, pale but fiery, who was conspicuous for his sublime self-con­ fidence and for his amazing knowledge of even the obscurest passages of Hegel. “He looked like embodied defiance; and his aspect was so vigorous that it would not have been surprising to hear that he had conquered a throne.” This young member of the students’ association was Lassai. Hegel’s system had become his religion, dialectic his liturgy, which he had studied and mastered. The algebra of concepts, the balancing of theses and antitheses on the rope of syntheses, the formulation and counter-formulation of laws, the statement of propositions and counter-proposi­ tions—these were a delight to him. For Hegel, dialectic was no more than an instrument whereby he could gain specu-

LASSALLE 78 lativc control of the vast multiplicity of phenomena. It was natural that Ferdinand, being immature, should incline to hallow the instrument unduly. For him dialectic became a strainer through which he filtered his experiences. As a Jew he was a born dialectician; he had the millenary instinct for the polar palpation and investigation of things ; he had a racial insight into the conceptual algebra known as dia­ lectic, which had here become a systematised method for obtaining a knowledge of the universe. Lassai luxuriated in philosophy. Professor Braniss, one day, in a lecture, attacked Feuer­ bach and the Young Hegelians, whereupon the students expressed their disapproval after the manner of youth in ways that were not strictly philosophical. The demonstration aroused comment in the press, and the students summoned a meeting which the senate of the university, feeling bound to support Braniss, prohibited. It was held all the same, and the senate took further action. Max von Wittenburg, who as chairman of the “Raczeks” had called the meeting, was severely reprimanded, and Gottschall was ordered to leave Breslau. Another of those who had spoken at the meeting was left unreproved, although his utterances had been extraordinarily bold, and delivered in a voice charged with passion. But when this same youth headed a rout of students who conducted Gottschall in trium ph out of the town, the senate called the offender to account. Lassai pleaded his own cause with deliberate impudence, and showed such a mastery of the Hegelian dialectic (fortified by his own argumentative powers) that the authorities reserved the chief rigours of the law for the young m an’s confederates, and were content with ordering Lassai ten days’ detention on the ground that “he had been the stage­ coach for the committee, and had actually seated himself on the box” . These worthies were genuinely annoyed with the young man, for he had composed a memorial on behalf of Max von Wittenburg, which concluded with the following words : “ In the offence with which Wittenburg is charged we were

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all alike participators. Now, when the punishment for this offence has been visited on him, it seems to us that it would not become us to think only of our own safety, to stand aside, and to allow the disastrous consequences to fall upon his head alone. We acted heedlessly, but we do not wish to add a base action to a heedless one. We ask, therefore, either that Wittenburg should, like ourselves, go unpunished, or else that all the offenders should be punished alike.” The first of the fifteen names appended to this memorial was that of F. Lassai. While under detention, he had time to draw up the balance-sheet of the Breslau days. Three years lay behind him. They had been fruitful, inconspicuous, and of ines­ timable value. They had transformed him. They had taught him a new religion and had estranged him from the old. Henceforward Judaism ceases to be his main source of spiritual nutrim ent; henceforward the Hegelian doctrine begins for him to take the place of a religion. Hitherto, down to the moment of his return from Leipzig, he had been the heir of an ancient mythology instinct with the spirit of prophecy; henceforward he is the student of a philosophy which no longer interprets world happenings mythologically, but explains them by the light of reason. Theodor Creizenach had founded a society which aimed at “breaking the chains of a mouldering orthodoxy, at re­ establishing the independence of the hum an mind, and at restoring its inalienable rights (rights which, though inalien­ able, have, as far as the Jews are concerned, been sup­ pressed for thousands of years)” . Lassai had hastened to join the new organisation, for “it would be a sin to hold aloof from such a society, whose most direct result must be to reconcile Judaism with the present” . In the rabbinical disputes at Breslau between the orthodox and the liberals, he had taken his stand upon the side of the freethinkers ; but he speedily realised that it was beyond the competence even of Creizenach’s society to harmonise the laws of the Jewish religion with the laws of Hegelian philosophy. “We must carefully avoid holding back the

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dialectical flow of history ; must avoid digging-up from out the bed of its stream a long submerged and petrified mass in order to make of this the foundation of our living present. History resembles the human organism. It can never re­ incorporate into its destructive process a substance which has already been digested.” We see, then, that this eighteen-year-old disciple of Hegel regarded the reform of Judaism as a part of his Hegelianisation. He wanted to establish a Judaism which would make an end of the theology proper to the Hebrews ! While Lassai still fancied himself a Jew, he was really a Hegelian ; and while he was still engaged in correspondence concerning a Jewish reformation, he wrote for the journal of his burschenschaft his elements of a characterisation of the present time with especial reference to the Hegelian philosophy. With Hegel he was attacking a present which certainly could not be overcome by petitions or memorials. H e had learned this by experience. His relationship to the present may be summarised as follows: “petition to Eichhorn; memorial to the Ministry of Public Worship and Education ; petition to the senate ; memorial against the practices of the authorities; contradiction, opposition, defence, accusation” . Nothing could be done with this present. The only thing was to change it. Since he could see no prospect of becoming a good citizen of the extant State, the State must be altered. Before under­ taking to make a radical change in the State to which he belonged, he made a change in his own position. He had had enough of Breslau. Back to the centre of his country ! While still under detention, he made up his mind to go to Berlin. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the liberal Teutonist of Bres­ lau, had just been deprived of his professorship by the king, because his “ Unpolitical Lays” were neither Gothic nor Middle High German, and were not even composed in the metre of the Nibelungen Lied. Since, however, they were execrable verses, they were perhaps, in the last analysis, not altogether unpolitical.

Lassalle at Twenty-Six During the Hatzfeldt trial

Lassalle After an oil-painting in the possession of the Vienna „ Arbeiterzeitung*1

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Still, they were comparatively innocent. They were pious litanies as compared with the lay which in the spring of 1844 Ferdinand Lassai, on his journey northward, heard in the weavers* villages of Silesia. While the coach was changing horses at the posthousc, he listened for the first time to the lay of the weavers of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau : You rascals all, you Satan’s brood, Whose hellish spite amazes, You gobble up the poor man’s food, And curses take for praises. You are the source of all that comes As sorrow to the needy ; You snatch from them the very crumbs With clutching hand and greedy. Compassion you can’t understand ; As cannibals, you haven’t tried ; You want but one thing, all your band, To strip the poor of shirt and hide. These stanzas had been composed by the “folk”, which could not very well be sent down like a university student, or deprived of a chair like a university professor.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

TH E DANDY OF TH E R EV O LU TIO N Ferdinand was profoundly moved by the lay of the Silesian weavers. It was the prologue to the class struggle, which he was to lead. Arrived in Berlin, he promptly hired fine and costly rooms in Unter den Linden. Although he had decided to espouse the cause of the poor, he was also determined to lead the life of a well-to-do young man. As regards his studies, he shared the universal wisdom of students and believed that professors were a select race of ignoramuses. “At Trendelenburg’s, reflection ; at Schelling’s, intuition ; at the Hegelians’, boredom, trivialities to the nth degree, but never philosophy—so that it was enough to make a man go and hang himself. It was unthinkable that any one could give such fearfully dull lectures on Hegel. While attending these lectures, I was involuntarily murmur­ ing to myself the words Schiller puts into the mouth of Jo an of Arc : ‘Had he mine eyes, or stood I where he stands.. . . *” Since he finds it hard to bear that another should sit above him in the professorial chair, and that another than himself should hold forth, he decides in favour of private study. He works immoderately, he hurls himself upon his work. His day begins at four a.m. with the reading of Hegel, and does not come to an end until the evening is far ad­ vanced. Except for occasional outbursts of relaxation he works without ceasing. He stuffs packets of bills into the drawers of his writing-table. They bear witness to an unduly elegant and luxurious life, to the young m an’s taste for Medoc, Château Larose, champagne, and the driving of spirited horses. Though still in his student days, he is devoured with a longing for success in the world. Eager to play a great part, determined at all costs to be master, he sees that money is the cheapest instrument of dominion. He spends lavishly, and decks himself out as a dandy of the period—enslaving

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himself to dandyism in order to rule as a dandy. He likes to be seen in the company of fine ladies, and it is of no consequence to him that they are of questionable reputation so long as their wardrobes are adorable. He recognises the advertising value of a feudal boudoir. Rumours that he is engaged in a “distinguished love affair” feed his vanity. He conquers badly defended fortresses in order that, when crossing trenches which are little more than pretences, he can posture as a victor ; he writes mad love letters, charac­ terised in part by their extravagant passion, and in part by their extravagant length—letters in which the cooing note of the romantic lover is sounded with somewhat suspicious frequency. In truth, he does not “write” love letters so much as “compose” them. He never forgets to keep a reflective watch upon the storms of his own passion. In love, as everywhere else, he shows a marked preference for strong measures. He is a lover who has everything except love. One who is in love is humble. One who is loved is proud. He is proud, and dreads defeat. T hat is why he chooses easy conquests, wars without risks, weak adversaries who can easily be taken by surprise. Love is food for his self-esteem. He has no fondness for those whom he has subjugated ; what he takes delight in is the process of subjugation. He does not love the humble, but loves humiliating. He answers letters of refusal with a request for an interview ; and in his case an interview means opportunities for persuasion, for the use of the last and strongest weapons of suggestion. “ I have always had the gift of making people listen to my voice.” His vanity borders on lunacy. When a young woman has rejected him, he speaks of her heart as “ the temple which Apollo has deserted” . In the eyes of the women who yield to him readily, he reads their admiration for Apollo. He will spend an hour before the looking-glass to tie his necktie with the requisite studied negligence; he devotes almost as much attention to the art of producing a good appearance as to the

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cultivation of his m ind; and he expressly demands that others should pay as much attention to his looks as to his thoughts. It need hardly be said that this youthful knight, with his overweening self-satisfaction, his ostentatious elegance, and his sparkling wit, makes easy conquests among women. He learns early in life that the conquest of women is easier than the conquest of men. He is not yet experienced enough to draw the conclusion that the masses (whose attributes are feminine, although as the term is ordinarily used they consist chiefly of men) can be seduced by the same means as women. The erotic campaigns of this dandy are grotesque. “Think of that evening when for a whole hour, despite the suspicious glances of the onlookers, despite the contempt­ ible spying of your uncle, again and again I offered you the letter, hid it in your lap—ah, Goddess, what were not my sensations when my wandering fingers caressed your limbs !' —wrapped it-in your handkerchief; and then when you, cruelly leaving me to my torment, again and again refused to take it, and when you let this missive, into which I had transfused all the warm current of my life, when (good God !) you let it fall in the mire,—then my justified rage, hatred, and contempt overpowered me. The last vestiges of manli­ ness in me surged up, and I dashed away. For the first time I learned how powerless was my proud will. I must see you alone, were it only for an hour, or even for half an hour. I want to talk with you undisturbed. This is all I ask.” Posterity has not been informed as to the subsequent course of this love affair, and whether the assailed Emma was eventually taken by storm. Emma was an unmarried girl, and had as protector an uncle who kept his eyes open. Caution was expedient. The recipient of the next tirade is a young married woman, whose protector is an elderly husband, not so much a protector as a nuisance. Here both caution and forbearance are out of place. “ I lie in a fever, and my whole body is pervaded by a

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thrill, which transforms itself into the most consuming ardour ; my bloodvessels are tense to bursting ; my imagina­ tion is tortured with images of desire, is so intolerably racked that red wrath flashes from my eyes ; my whole life is merged in voluptuous passion, in an incredibly voluptuous longing for you. . . . “You will not refuse me the one night for which I crave. Woe to me and to you, if you do so. Do not plead prudish­ ness, or morality, or conjugal duties. I know you laugh them to scorn, these narrow-minded restrictions to which the bourgeois gives the name of virtue, these nursery tales of our grandmothers. “Either I have lost the art of reading the thoughts from the expression, or else the warmth of your gaze tells me that you are not satisfied with the hectic embraces of your grey­ beard. Come to me, come to me, and if our passions run a race, I will hunt yours to the death. “ If you are used to the effete courtship of our gallants, who make a profession of chivalric and knightly service, let me beg you to cultivate a new taste, for I seek happiness without these circumlocutions ! I have no time for the patient arts of a coxcomb. Do you really want to be wooed by a courteous knight? So be it, I will meet your wishes ; but, first of all, grant me this night, this one night ; thereafter I will level mountains for you. If you are cruel, if you refuse to meet my wishes, then, unhappy one, listen, I will answer with scorn, coldness, contempt, so that the fires of my love will be changed into the flame of a hatred whose fierce heat would melt an iceberg.” We have no information as to whether, in the end, the young wife showed herself to be prudish and narrow­ minded. It is hardly to be supposed, however, that she can have been so little prudish, so little narrow-minded, as to make her impatient lover happy “without circumlocution” . In fact, we know that she was not, for here is another letter : “Woman—a horrible thought flashes through my mind—is it conceivable that the itch of a miserable vanity tempts you to play with me, to play with my titanic passion? If you

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think to play with me—ha !—I wish you joy of the venture— just try ! If you do not answer this letter I shall stand behind you, a raging demon of vengeance, of wrath. Pitilessly I shall track you down. Everything you delight in shall wilt and wither in the fires of my hatred. I shall make it the one task, the one purpose, of my existence to destroy you utterly, slowly, and with a smile.” This dandy, whose thoughts keep watch on all his passions and who treasures up the thoughts as exhibits, this dandy shows us his impatience, his overweening pride, and his anxiety. He can neither wait, nor love, nor trust. Is his bluff about to be called? Has his posturing become the object of secret ridicule? Such are his tormented imaginings. Like every one who cheats at cards, he thinks his adversary may cheat likewise. He plays at love; and he loves the game. He fables feelings, and knows that these feelings are fabled. W hat he wants is to taste the intoxication of subjugating woman; this is what he miscalls love. His crowning fear is that his opponent will remain cool enough and will be discerning enough to see through him. In the storms of a passion which has really no kinship to love, his supreme dread is that his antagonist will remain self-possessed. He is an assailant by temperament. He throws all his forces into the battle, and is mad with fear lest the enemy have additional forces in reserve. He transfers dialectic to the battlefield of the passions. Against the troops of feelings he leads the regiments of rhetoric and philosophy. When this high-stepping cavalry is repulsed the artillery of crude abuse thunders, there is a stormy outburst of the emotionalism of a heart which does not want to be a heart, a volcanic eruption takes place, there is a lava-like flood of scriptural malediction. Lonni, a young musician, his best friend’s best girl, be­ comes the object of his wooing. He overwhelms her with attentions, to which she pays no heed. He tries to undermine her moral principles with an ingenious sophistry bom out of the ardency of his desire. Lonni shows no signs of yielding.

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Perhaps he really was a little in love with her. Beyond question it was in her company that he spent some of the most charming hours of his life. Since he was unable to impose upon her his own conception of “morality” , he parted from her. So far, all was in order. But, as parting gift, he bestowed on her a curse ! “You have committed the greatest of crimes, for you have torn your own life in sunder, you have severed the soul from the body. From this soul you have withheld your body, and therefore your body will be enjoyed and possessed soullessly, without love. “You have called down a double curse upon yourself. You have committed the twofold atrocity of tearing the soul away from the body .and the body away from the soul. You have committed an adultery of the most immoral kind. You have broken the most sacred of marriage ties, the marriage ties between body and spirit. You have given your soul to me and have refused to give me your body.” No one acquainted with Lassal’s eloquence will believe for a moment that the sentences above quoted constitute more than a very small fraction of his farewell curse. In actual fact he needs no less than seventeen closely filled pages in which to tell his Lonni that he regards her as a whore for the simple reason that she has obstinately refused to become his whore. Still, we are not entitled, from the length and vastness of his farewell letter, to infer that his passion was on the same scale. Love is a melody' which he plays on the violin, accom­ panied by the orchestra, and to which he gives the tempo. For a long time now even his friends have been only his bondservants. He takes a poor relation to live with him. “It is agreeable to have a faithful companion, and besides, for practical purposes he is my valet. O f course, I told him that if he proved idle or misbehaved himself in any way I should promptly clear him out.” Arnold Mendelssohn, a doctor of medicine, ten years older than Lassai, having become his devoted friend, writes to the youth of nineteen as follows: “ My friend and ruler; my

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friend Cortez of the modern age ; master of minds ; you have radically cured me of love ; indeed, of women in general” . His retainers receive nicknames. Lehfeldt becomes the “Isolani” of Ferdinand as “Wallenstein” . Alexander Oppen­ heim is called “Klex” . Ferdinand issues the orders of the day as if he were a tsar issuing a ukase : “In myself and my intimates I tolerate no illusions” . Ferdinand “does not tolerate” ; Ferdinand utters his commands and others have to obey. Baron von Stücker, seventeen years older than Lassai and but slightly acquainted with the young man, finds the follow­ ing crazy letter in his room on returning to his Berlin hotel one evening : “Lassal’s compliments, with the remark that he might have expected you to await his return in order to greet him” . When the baron protests against being treated in this imperious way by one so much his junior, Lassai tries to browbeat him. Stücker complains of Lassal’s rudeness in sending him so unceremonious a message, penned upon an open card, and delivered by the hand of a hotel servant. Lassai thereupon has recourse to an insane method of calcu­ lation which can turn a minus into a plus, can prove that Lassal’s rudeness has been Stücker’s rudeness, and that the baron is clearly in the wrong. Lassai goes to Breslau. His thrall Mendelssohn reports: “ People tell me that I am now better company than I was when you were here, for then, they say, I was so much taken up by admiring you that I always sat mumchance” . Ferdinand’s social appearances are attended by a good deal of pomp and circumstance. He is elegantly dressed; his curly brown hair is carefully brushed back from his high, pale forehead ; he is defiantly self-conscious. With an assumed carelessness, in which the'discerning can perceive the extremity of care, he makes his entry, takes a lightning glance round the room, sits down, and then assumes the lead of the conversation. Not readily, nor for more than a minute or two, will he give any one else a chance of speaking. He whirls dialectic like a dress sword. He has, if not the mind, certainly the temperament of a god. Women, who are

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generally more interested in a man’s temperament than in his mind, easily forget his extreme youth. Since he makes a point of treating them as women, they treat him as a man, and, as soon as he shows the wish, they treat him as their own man. O ur youthful philosopher is not inclined to abandon the realities of this world, is not disposed to chain himself to a writing-table, the platform whence one sets out into the land of ideas. Though he poses as a philosopher, he sees no reason why he should make any sacrifices to philosophy. In like manner, he is pleased to present himself as a social revolu­ tionary ; yet here again he can conceive no reason why he should make sacrifices on behalf of his convictions. When there are disturbances among the weavers in June 1844, he rejoices : “Do you notice anything? Do you hear the distant thunder? Don’t be afraid. It will pass this time, and will pass yet again ; but in the end the storm will break !—The time is out of joint. I am glad that I was born to set it right.— O r are you really so blind, so deaf, so bereft of your senses, that you do not realise whkt all this means? They are petrels, I tell you, stormy petrels, heralding the storm of the new spirit. Don’t deceive yourselves. This is the beginning of that war of the poor against the rich which is imminent. These are the first rumblings of communism. These are the birth-pangs. Do you note how fully aware the fellows are of what they are doing? When there cropped up a proposal to burn the fac­ tories, the idea was unanimously rejected, for, they said, ‘We shall not attain our end in that way. The factories are in­ sured ; the damage would be made good ; and we should fail of our purpose, which is to make them as poor as we are ourselves.’ This is no mere rage for destruction ; this is clear, self-conscious purposiveness. You may stop your ears if you like; that won’t help you.” Nevertheless, this prophet of the class war is an unmistak­ able adherent of the possessing class. This sworn enemy of capitalism and the entrepreneurs is himself a capitalist entrepreneur. Father Lassai, who has got the monopoly of the gas supply in Breslau, is about to invest 50,000 talers in

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a Prague branch. Ferdinand, who is the friend of the poor, can also be the friend of the rich. He conducts with the banking firm of Mendelssohn a skilful correspondence, in order to induce the moneyed men of Berlin to participate in his father’s enterprises. In the most subtle way he tries to interest the great bankers, and, invested with plenipotentiary powers by the arrogance of his twenty years, he writes : “We should be little fitted to conduct the great undertaking at whose head we stand were it not our first principle to sub­ ordinate personal considerations to the general advantage” . In the house of Mendelssohn, indeed, other views prevail. One member of the family declares : “Lassai is a man without any moral foundation. Nothing is sacred to him, and he will trample on you ruthlessly if there is anything to gain by it.” He is not regarded as a good friend. As we have seen, for him friendship means that he is to be leader and his friends are to be subordinates. He dreams of gasworks, factories, armies of workers, under his exclusive control. The grandson of an insignificant Jew from Loslau in the district of Rybnik ; the son of an industri­ ous Jew who laid taler to taler in the subaltern belief that position depends on money and that power can be bought— Ferdinand Lassai dreams of gigantic enterprises employing a hundred thousand hands whose leader and ruler and god he will be. He foresees that the era of new emperors is approaching. He divines that within thirty years new crowns will be worn in France, Italy, Germany, Hindustan, and Mexico. He dreams of a “ Lassai dynasty” . He is the crown prince of a throne which he is going to establish. Manual workers will be his soldiers, factories his fortresses, chimneys his watch-towers, and warehouses his bastions. Lassai the Messiah ! Early in 1845, Karl Marx, who had been expelled from Paris and had taken refuge in Brussels, fluttered the pages of a new novel sent him by his bookseller. The title is Coningsby, and the author is a Londoner, a dandy, and an adventurer named Benjamin Disraeli. The book contains

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all kinds of statesmanlike, romantic, and fanciful notions. Among other things we read in it that the Jews are by nature a monarchical, profoundly religious, and strongly conserva­ tive race. Marx, an impoverished refugee whose experiences have embittered him, feels that he is being made fun of. He is not aware that he has a religion, that he is a conservative and a monarchist. He believes in the class war, and he is convinced that he sees the way to a new social order. He is waiting for the day when, from M ount Sinai, he will go down to his people, the workers of the world. He is to be the successor to the world throne. Benjamin Disraeli is right, after all. Lassai in Berlin is very like Disraeli in London. The Jew Lassai, the Jew Disraeli, and the Jew K arl Marx, are all dreaming the same dream. The friend of the London ladies is akin to the despot of the Berlin boudoirs. The tory of the revolution is no less a tory than the British tory. Their appetites are the same; they have the same hunger, and they look to the same means for its satisfaction. “Life is too short to be a small man” , says one. “Why should I hesitate to step out into the light of my reputation?” says the other. Their ambition is as boundless as their self-confidence, and as their conviction that they will become men of mark. They are audacious ; and there is warrant for their audacity. They are monarchical, so long as the monarchy is a Disraeli monarchy or a Lassai monarchy; they are profoundly religious, though their religion is “applied” rather than “ theoretical” . God exists in order to single them out. God exists that his heavenly hosts may blow the trumpets of their calling. “ I am high priest of the god who I myself am .” “I am the sustainer and the apostle of an idea of god.” When they pray silently to their god, they are really offering up prayers to themselves. Since God is not afraid of his own glories, pious conviction makes them both dandies. They are also fundamentally con­ vinced that the natural function of youth is to be a model

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of grace and elegance. An ambition which will brook no waiting leads them into the drawing-rooms, where an agile mind, a vigorous self-confidence, and spotless linen are the requisites for success. For the rest, in or soon after the epoch of Beau Brummell and Count d ’Orsay what could seem more natural than to be a fop? In those days kings would have shaken their subjects’ respect for the monarchy had they not, in accordance with the laws of dandyism, changed their gloves and the rest of their attire six times a day. For this reason, thrifty sovereigns wore uniforms. It was an expedient adopted for the sake of economy, rather than out of pride in military power. At the moment, if it had occurred to Count d’Orsay to take his own life, more than one of the great kingdoms of Europe would have adopted the republican form because of the suicide of their crowned rulers. No king worthy the name would have ventured to do other than follow the example of this famous dandy. The dandy was the true sovereign of that age. Lassai, therefore, indues the silken uniform of the dandy. It is a pity that his tailor did not think of writing Ferdinand’s biography, for no one who saw this exquisite could fail to realise that he must hold the most earnest and lengthy con­ sultations with his tailor. These dialogues were even carried on under the roof of the High Court of Berlin, where dis­ tressing legal proceedings have immortalised the tenor of the conversations. It appears from them that to be Lassal’s tailor was a dis­ tinction which brought almost as much trouble in its train as to be Lassal’s mistress.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

GLADIATORS Every epoch is a sphinx; and the creature hurls itself into the abyss as soon as we have solved its riddle. H

e in r ic h

H e in e

When Ferdinand came to Berlin, all he had seen of the sphinx was the woman’s head, the breasts, the human body. He had taken the sphinx for a lady and ladies for sphinxes, and had learned that their riddles can be solved without the smallest difficulty by a handsome young man. Neither the riddles nor the abysses of these sphinxes were remarkably profound. There was no great trium ph to be won here. The time in which one lives is the sphinx ! Elegance is the best way of mastering women, whereas one’s epoch can best be stormed with the weapons of philosophy. In this latter campaign, his book-case is a m an’s arsenal, just as his ward­ robe is his arsenal in the campaign of love. At times, there­ fore, Lassai, the idling, love-making, dallying, wine-bibbing seeker of “bonnes fortunes” , studies with fierce energy. He is intoxicated by the translucency, rationality, and systematism of a new outlook on the world. In his youthful arrogance he rides across the freshly conquered plains of the history of philosophy. Armed with dialectic, the young student goes a-hunting in the game preserves of history. He lays whole herds of sphinxes low. “ I have often told you, my dear Father, that I am a man, that I am a man in the fullest sense of the term, and that with virile maturity, I combine the vigour and energy of youth. What changes a youth into a man? Experience. Yet how paltry, how slender, are the experiences which an ordinary individual can enjoy through the happenings and incidents of his own poor life; how few in number, how insignificant in content ! It is otherwise with the philosopher ; he makes his own the experiences of all history from the year one down to the present day. He has as much experience as

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if he had lived from the year 1 0 0 0 b .c . down to the year 1844 a .d . ; he matures in the process of historical life; he is schooled by historical life, that is to say by God Almighty. Thus have I been matured, thus have I been schooled, and that’s enough.” There was no one to tell the young man that it is possible to enjoy the experiences of three thousand years without becoming wise and experienced, that a man may m ature in the process of history without becoming ripe, and that even if one is schooled by God Almighty one may turn out to be a bad pupil. Farther on in the letter, Heymann came to the following passage: “Through philosophy I have become self-compre­ hending reason, that is to say God aware of himself (that is to say the spirit which is aware of itself as the phenomenal form and the realisation of the divine). Well, now, one who has become a God can never again be a stupid youngster ! ! !” Unfortunately Heymann was content to shake his head over this son of his, whom he would so gladly have loved with fatherly simplicity in the quietude of the domestic hearth. In his innermost being, and unconsciously, the father was afraid of this sprig who described himself as God and was certainly the most exacting Messiah who ever walked the earth. Heymann learned by bitter experience that it is a terrible thing to be the father of a Messiah. When he gave his son good advice, speaking from the heart, the worthy and humble merchant received in exchange audacities veiled in philosophical trappings. The son’s con­ tempt gathers strength in letter after letter. “Mend your ways ! I f that be the slogan, it applies to you also, my dear Father.”—“Your fears and your exhortations are equally superfluous.”—“In your last letter you gave me a great deal of excellent advice, but that is not what I need. I am well stored with good counsel; what I need is money, money, money. One thing more ! I strongly object to your discussing me with Riekchen—and yet you have been at it again. While she has been here she has done me a great deal of harm with

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her foolish, childish loquacity, so that I have wished her and her chatter at the devil. Now, in a letter to her husband, she has, in her malicious stupidity and stupid malice, given vent to such absurd and uncharitable utterances concerning me that henceforward and for all eternity she is dead to me, and I never wish to be reminded that there still lives a ninny who called herself my sister. If your laden heart must find relief in letter-writing, write to me. I won’t have you write to my sister about me.” The son rails at the father, calling him a bourgeois, a shopkeeper. The father answers with a prom pt remittance. “ My beloved Son ! I am almost wounded by your perpetual mistrust, and by your remark that we merchants regard nothing but mortgages as securities. I really don’t think I deserve observations of that kind. Please take it from me, my dear Son, that if I could I would fulfil your wishes. But all I can do is to say with Luther, ‘God help us both, I can go no further !’ ” Ferdinand does not hear the tone of love, does not see the words of love, in his father’s letters. He keeps his gaze fixed upon the sphinx. He knows his road. He is going to demon­ strate the forecasting of Hegelian ideas in the writings of Heraclitus of Ephesus. He is aiming at a professorship of philosophy. On his twentieth birthday he is ready to make a start. “I am eager to write my book. It is really time to make an end of the increasing spread of ignorance and superficiality. Besides, as soon as I have written my book I shall be a made man, one with worldwide fame.” He thinks no longer of advancing the revolution ; all he desires is to advance his own system. As a Hegelian he knows that a revolution is not made by individuals but by the forces of an epoch. The epoch propounds problems ; it is not individuals who propound them. The epoch, too, solves problems, but it is only the philosopher who understands the solutions. At length, therefore, he breathes the pure atmo­ sphere of the spirit. Abandoning the street, he builds himself barricades of books. “ I am making everything clear and

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intelligible to myself, the feelings as well. For me, lack of clarity is practically identical with unhappiness.” He begins to write a philosophy of the spirit, for he likes to range in thought through vast spaces. He has the gift for generalisation. Apropos of an industrial exhibition, he writes to his father, who is a big man in the gas industry, a letter concerning the nature of industry, a letter which occupies twenty-two closely written pages, and ends as follows : “There you have the concept of industry, which as yet few, very few, understand. Indeed, it needs all the energy of conceptual cognition to grasp the protean forms and to lift the veil of Isis from these veiled images of Sais.” Having prophesied the imminence of the class war, he closes with the remark that, after working on his book for three days at the expense of 7 pens and 39 cigars, he is tired out. The father, who must have been equally exhausted by the reading of this letter, must have shaken his head once more over the son who, in the middle of labours on Hera­ clitus, pauses to hurl himself upon the questions of the day with unabated passion. The young man is assimilating the experiences of a couple of thousand years in order to misapply them as a vade-mecum for the year 1845. He reveals the crazy Talmudism of the world spirit : the Parisian revolution explains the freedom of the individual; reaction, on the other hand, explains the inviolability of the State, which now (Rousseau plus Hegel) becomes a dogma of socialism ! Ferdinand imperturbably contemplates socialism as an evolutionary phase, proclaims the valuelessness of the indi­ vidual, and hastens to translate theory into action : “What do you really want? Don’t bother yourself about things which are no concern of yours. It is your business to look after the welfare of the town, not after the welfare of the State. The latter is my affair. As human beings we are on the same footing, though you are subject and I am lord! Do you know what you have to do? Submit yourself to the authority set over you. I wield this authority, and I intend to use it. Don’t make any mistake about that.” From Breslau he sends to his friends in Berlin a manuscript

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of eighteen pages which opens with the word “Triumviri” and ends as follows: “Here you have my war manifesto against the world, and if you find yourselves in agreement with it, you had better sign it. Any one who can now join with me in crying ‘Vainquons!’ knows at least the whole significance of this little word.” The document in question is the most arrogant that arro­ gance has ever created. In it a prophet hallows himself. In it we have the declaration of an Isaiah who has adopted the gestures of Robespierre and the words of Hegel. “ I am servant and master of the idea, priest of the god, I myself am. Whatever I do, I know to be the moral demand of the idea. I have overcome the defiance of my body. I have made an end of the difference between it and my will, I have de­ prived it of its own entity and independent physiognomy so that it has been compelled unresistingly to accommodate itself to and to accept the stamp of my thought. I have compelled it to be the reflex of my will. I have become an actor. The tremulous tones of my voice and the flashings of my eyes, every one of my gestures, must slavishly reproduce the passion which I desire at that precise moment to vivify me and illumine me. From head to foot I am nothing but will. I have made it true of myself that being is only the being of thought. I have the will to destroy, and I have the means for spreading woe and disaster over those on whom I breathe.” The triumviri receive this preposterous letter as if it were the consecrated Host. They reply: “ Great General: Knower of the Heights and the Depths ; Commander of the S pirit.. . . ” They have faith in this letter as if it were a sacra­ ment, and they speak of the domain of Lassal’s thought as the “kingdom of God” . This is not a commonplace hypertrophy of the imagination, it is not one of the more familiar mani­ festations of swelled head. Thus spake Gideon, who con­ quered the Midianites ; thus spake Isaiah, announcing his mission. Lassai, intoxicated by the conviction of his own priest­ hood, thinks : “ Knowing myself to be lord of the earth, one

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before whose fiery breath nothing finite can persist, I look around me, see that the earth is my footstool, and that heaven is the throne of my glories'*. Since no imperial throne happens to be vacant, he takes possession of the whole earth. He knows neither rest nor measure. He drafts treaties, enters into business negotiations, studies the pre-Socratic fragments. He devours the almost incomprehensible Heraclitus literature; to the reading of Greek texts he superadds the reading of the works of the young Hegelians; he closely follows political developments in England ; he defines his own situation and prescribes the meridian he is to follow ; in Breslau he rules his family, and from Breslau he rules his friends in Berlin. He is prophet and stockjobber, saviour and conjurer, philosopher and politician, is filled with tireless and insatiable ambition. The most remarkable thing is that this frenzy of a young man of twenty casts a spell over men who are ten years older. Every youth is prone to picture himself storming the heavens, and grown men are wont to smile indulgently at those who entertain such fancies. Almost every youth strives forward with the overwrought feelings of those against whom the doors are bolted and barred, and, stimulated by obstacles, placing too high an estimate upon his own powers, makes ready for a record leap. Older men, in general, do not follow in the enthusiast’s train, being satisfied to give a few words of friendly counsel. Ferdinand, however, hears nothing but words of admiration. Men of experience bow before the in­ experienced youth. He subjugates all the elders he meets. The study of materials for his Heraclitus takes him to Paris, where he becomes acquainted with Heinrich Heine, whose scepticism he scatters to the winds. Heine is blinded, succumbs to enthusiasm, is taken by storm. The weary poet is full of admiration for the youthful Alcibiades ; the brilliant thrusts of this ruthless intelligence overpower him ; he gives the young man a letter of introduction to Varnhagen von Ense in Berlin : “ My friend Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young man of the widest knowledge and of the most dis-

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tinguished intellectual powers. He has the most thorough scholarship, the most expansive will, and the greatest pene­ tration that I have ever known. To the fullest endowment with imaginative powers he adds an energy of will and a dexterity in action which simply astound me. This union of knowledge and ability, of talent and character, have been a delight to me ; and you, with your keen insight, will certainly be able to do them full justice. H err Lassalle is a definite and declared modernist. He will hear nothing of the renunciation and the modesty with which we were accustomed, more or less hypocritically, to dream away and prate away our time. The new generation wants to enjoyy wants to make itself seen and heard. We elders used to bow humbly before the invisible, aspiring to shadowy kisses and the scent of blue flowers, and whining while we renounced. At the same time, we may have been happier than these stem gladiators who advance so proudly to the death struggle.” It remains uncertain whether, as an entry in Vam hagen’s diary implies, Ferdinand brought back with him from Paris some new fragments of Heraclitus. But he brought back with him two things of no less importance : Heine’s love letter, and an extra syllable to his name. When studying the Greek Heraclitus, he did not forget the Jacobin Robespierre. Since he himself had not a Greek name, the best thing would be to make his name as French as possible. The terminology of the sciences was a mixture of Latin and Greek ; the termin­ ology of revolutionary craftsmanship was (thanks to the guillotine, thanks to the reds of the South who inspired the famous Marseillaise, and thanks to the Bastille) French. Ferdinand donned the Phrygian cap of the Jacobins by adding the letters “le” to his name. In Breslau he had become the devotee of a new religion, and now he adopted a new name. He became Lassalle. When he left Paris, he was enriched by two letters of the alphabet and by a new friend. Never was a friendship entered into under less favourable auspices. Lassalle was wont to say : “There are two things I cannot stomach : Jews and men of letters ; I have the bad

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luck to be both” . This was rather coquettish. Heine had the same ill luck, without being lucky enough to be called Lassalle. The disciple of Hegel saw in Heine the prototype of an unqualified individualist, that is to say of a “subject entangled in the most vulgar realism” . Heine, the heir of the bourgeois revolution, was an enthusiast for individual liberty and for the right of the individual to go whithersoever he pleased ; Lassalle, the heir of Hegel, was an enthusiast for the collectivity of the State. Heine was a liberal, and, insofar as it was compatible with his getting along in the world, he was a bit of a communist. Since Heine was a sick man, and sometimes suffered from terrible attacks of pain, it seemed to him that the world was badly organised. He came, too, of a well-to-do family, but was at odds with his relatives about money, and therefore regarded the capitalist system as in­ famous. So did K arl Marx, and proved his point. One could, therefore, with certain reserves, be a bit of a Marxist. “We were hens which had hatched out ducks* eggs” , re­ marked Heine, referring to Lassalle. “We ourselves shall teach the hens how to swim” , remarked Lassalle in reference to Heine. The boy had managed his sister’s affairs; the schoolboy had managed the affairs of his ill-treated schoolfellows; the abiturient had managed his own affairs. He had a taste for espousing the cause of injured innocence, whether it passed by the name of Riekchen, Hasselbach, Wittenburg, Heraclitus, or Heine. He was glad to lead the cause of justice ; and (as his correspondence with the banking house of Mendelssohn showed) he was also glad to lead the cause of capital, which is the cause of injustice. To espouse the cause of Heine meant to fight on behalf of an unrighteous right. Cousin Karl had cut off Heinrich’s financial supplies. If that was unjust it was a just injustice in view of the attitude, the behaviour, and the verbal out­ pourings of Heinrich. Lassalle took up the cause with fierce energy. Heine sup­ plied steam for the boiler ; “ Put the thumbscrew on the bear. Do everything you can to make the bear dance to our piping.”

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The exhortation was needless, for his advocate was doing everything that was humanly possible. Lassalle assailed old Humboldt, and set to work on Prince Pückler, whom he promptly addressed by letter as “My Prince” . The press was appealed to on behalf of the “war of the Hamburg succes­ sion” . Lassalle moved heaven and hell, applied to Varnhagen, Meyerbeer, Jacques Offenbach, and the banker Mendelssohn—so that Heine, touched by the evidence of so much zeal, wrote : “Never before have I found in any one a combination of such fervour and of such clarity of intelligence in dealing with affairs. You certainly have the right to be impudent : the rest of us merely usurp this divine right, this heavenly privilege. In comparison with you I am but a modest fly.” The result of Lassalle’s efforts was not proportional to the expenditure of energy; so the man who had a right to be impudent, decided to become a philosopher once more. He returned to Heraclitus, though without forsaking the draw­ ing-rooms of Berlin, which Heine’s recommendation had opened to him. There, the poet’s letter did not fail of its effect, and this effect was intensified by the French ring which had now been given to the name of the Upper Silesian Jew. The houses of Varnhagen, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer, that is to say those of literature, money, and music, were opened to him. Lassalle had reached the goal of his wishes. He toasted Humboldt, felt himself to be in a position in which he could turn his back on ordinary privy councillors, and was able to shock the wives of right honourables by quoting Heine to them. Having gained admittance to the best society of Prussia, he took his position there entirely as a m atter of course. The more he dreaded lest in this brilliant company he might have to play the role of wallflower, the more auda­ ciously did he comport himself. His behaviour was outra­ geous. He publicly hectored the venerable Alexander von Humboldt, rudely correcting the great m an’s quotation of a passage from Hegel. Lassalle used such strong expressions

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that there was a very unpleasant scene. Next day, however, Humboldt, being a man of the world, wrote a polite note to Lassalle (almost sixty years his junior) to say that before going to bed he had looked up the reference to Hegel and had found that his adversary had been right. The comment of the immature fellow who aspired to greatness upon the courtesy of his great senior was : “ I suppose this must be regarded as a trium ph! But I really don’t care a dam n whether Humboldt admits he was wrong; that is a m atter of perfect indifference to me.” This conceited young spark was not loved in Berlin society, and yet people could not help admiring his intellect. Though he lacked heart, there was no doubt that he had an exceptional brain. It was necessary to put up with him. Not for long, however, was he able to reckon on the sup­ port of Heine. To be Lassalle’s friend meant to be Lassalle’s slave and to take Lassalle’s orders. Any one who was to be on intimate terms with Lassalle must be at Lassalle’s beck and call. When Lassalle wanted Heine’s assistance on behalf of a new enthusiasm of his, Countess Hatzfeldt, Heine would have nothing to do with an affair which seemed, so he said, “ to belong to the domain of one of Sue’s novels” . He declined to participate in the “gladiator’s” enterprise, in his “ques­ tionable doings” . He sent a polite refusal to the invitation to join the journalistic hunt which was being organised against Count Hatzfeldt. Replying to the hen which would not learn to swim, and was especially disinclined to swim into a marsh, the duck wrote: “You are slothful, you are finical. You know, Heine, what the philistines throughout Germany have written about your character. You know what I thought about the matter.—Your answer to my request is no more than common selfishness and pettiness ; it is an indication of the shallowness of your heart. You have committed a breach of duty, love, and faith. If you wish to let the m atter rest at this threefold breach, no doubt you will gain thereby. Every one has an incontestable right to a lack of principle. This is

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a precious accessory of freedom, and I will not try to deprive you of it.” The hen and the duck whetted their beaks for the fray. Heine accused his “ comrade in arms” of shady trans­ actions in connexion with the Prague gas shares. Lassalle countered by telling the “ poet of whoredom” that he was unprincipled. Lassalle, to whom Heine had previously accorded the “right to be impudent” , was now, according to the same authority, “ a prey to demoniacal self-laceration” . Lassalle had become an exploiter who, through Heine’s recommendation, had obtained access to the most distin­ guished houses. “This fellow, in his rapid downward career, has become one of the most terrible of malefactors, so that murder, forgery, and theft may be expected of one whose will has been intensified to the verge of lunacy.” Lassalle, in a rage, declares that he has compromised his own position by avowing himself Heine’s friend, that his association with a poet having so unsavoury a reputation has greatly impaired his chances of getting a professorship. Nevertheless, two or three years later, when he wants testimonials of character and evidence as to the purity of his intentions, he does not shrink from “ compromising” himself once more, and unhesitatingly publishes Heine’s love letter in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”—although the author of that letter has long since revoked its sentiments. Further­ more, as regards Lassalle’s hopes of a professorship, he still lacks the qualifications prescribed by law. Friendship with Heine had been a tough job, but friend­ ship with Heraclitus was even tougher. The Heine affair had been troublesome ; but the Heraclitus affair, which had been going on for more than two thousand years, was far more troublesome. Long, long ago, Socrates had passed judgm ent on Hera­ clitus in the court of first instance, saying that so much as he had been able to understand in the writings of the philo­ sopher of Ephesus had been apposite, and he was therefore ready to believe that what he had not been able to under­ stand was also apposite; though to make headway right

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through the book a man would need to be one of the swimmers of Delos. Since then, in the course of the ages, the book had been reduced to fragments, with the result that there was now needed, not only a lusty swimmer, but also a great architect to reconstruct the system out of these scattered remnants. Donning the cork jacket of dialectic, Lassalle started on his swim. A philosopher who taught that the one was the many, and that cold was a phase of heat, might perhaps come into conflict with ordinary logic; he could not come into conflict with the logic of Hegel. He might be paradoxi­ cal; and yet his paradoxes would be dialectically sound. Indeed, Hegel himself had said : “There is not a single one of Heraclitus’ propositions which I have not adopted into my logic” . “Everything always contains its opposite.”—“ One can never, even for so long as a second, go on swimming in the same river, for the river is in a continual flux.”—There are two of the utterances of the Hellenic Talmudist. Since everything has the qualities of the river, since every­ thing is simultaneously its own opposite, the logical principle or law of contradiction is invalid. To invalidate this principle was to enthrone dialectic. Hegel had recognised Heraclitus as his forerunner. Lassalle remarks : “ The whole depth of Heraclitus’ philosophy con­ sists in the one proposition : ‘Only not-being exists !’ ” The Talmudist among the Greek philosophers exercises a magical attraction upon the Talmudist Lassalle. Heraclitus, regarding the world as absolute movement, banishes from it all repose, all arrest of movement, all inertia. “We see” , says Lassalle jubilantly, “that Heraclitus was far removed from apathy. There was storm in this nature.” For Heraclitus the instrument of knowledge is dialectic ; and for him knowledge is knowledge of the becoming of all things, of their struggle, of their polar duel. Heraclitus’ religion is action. For Heraclitus “real” things are things which “ work” . Activity, work, workfulness, is the very essence of things.

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Lassalle is charmed by this teaching. Heraclitus' contribution to philosophy is that he estab­ lishes the philosophy of action! This is a philosophy for gladiators ! Only what becomes, is. Only not-being exists. Only what acts, is. Only what persists, is. Only what works, is. The mutability of the real encourages the apostle of revolution. Nothing is ever at rest. A philosophy which undermines our confidence in the stability of the earth beneath our feet cannot but appeal *to, cannot but fortify, one who has been washed up out of the mire of the Upper Silesian ghetto. It is a philosophy which can justify any and every revolu­ tion. At each moment of time, light and darkness, bitter and sweet, are conjoined ; and in the perpetual wrestle of oppo­ sites, now one and now the other gains the upper hand. Honey is a substance in which sweet has overcome bitter. The world is a great phial whose contents are continually being shaken before being taken. Everything is in a flux. Everything can “ become” ! The world offers unprecedented possibilities. Only one of them is realised ; nevertheless, the possibilities are innumer­ able. What we perceive as the universe of things is nothing more than the momentary condition of a struggle which the next moment may alter. Things, in whose permanence and stability people believe, are only “the flash of clashing swords, the sheen of victory in the battle between opposing qualities” . The essence of reality is found in that which works. Everything is in a flux ! “You apply names to objects as if they were perennial. What you see, however, is merely the temporary coagulation of a moment in the fight.” Next instant they will be liquefied once more, and will flow away.

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“War is the father of all things.” For things are created by the clash of opposites. What is history? The fluctuations of a combat. Revolution is always possible, and the under-dog may always become top-dog. There is only one morality, the morality of struggle. A philosophy for desperadoes ; a philosophy for Vulcans ; a philosophy for those who crave for action. Lassalle exultantly adopts this philosophy. Everything is in a flux. The world is a process. Heraclitus is no longer obscure. Everything is in a flux. Imagine an eye, an ear, which was only capable of an isolated perception every few seconds. For such an eye, for such an ear, everything would be in a flux. The sun would be racing through the sky; trees would burst into foliage, then the leaves would swiftly fall; grass would thrust up suddenly out of the earth and would vanish like smoke driven before the breeze. The stars would show themselves to be no more than flickering lights. Everything is in a flux. The individual is but a drop in the stream. As a drop he is worthless, and has value only as part of the universal whole. “The general rules the particular” , says Heraclitus. “The State holds sway over all individuals” , says Hegel. “ The class is the universal” , says Lassalle. Heraclitus is no longer obscure. The torches of dialectic illumine his syllogistic thickets. O ur student of philosophy, who is but one-and-twenty years of age, cuts his way through the undergrowth which has been becoming more and more entangled for two thousand years, the swimmer of Delos is in sight of the farther shore ; God is not in the sub­ stance but in the process. Already, Lassalle has applied for a licence to lecture. There is a new aspirant to the chair of Hegel. Victory is at hand. Then, of a sudden, his life takes a new turn.

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Everything is in a flux. Everything flows away. God is in the process. He abandons his writing-desk, his Heraclitus, his chosen road, his element. Just as he deserted the gymnasium and the commercial academy, so he deserts the university. He dreads to complete himself, to perfect himself. He cannot wait. He cannot allow himself to ripen. When he is about to attain the goal, he ceases to strive towards the goal. Everything is in a flux. The river carries him in a new direction.

CHAPTER

NINE

TH E TH R EE MUSKETEERS Lassalle, who might easily have found his prototype in the ambitious heroes of Disraeli’s novels, was not fastidious in his reading, and preferred to seek it in the heroes of Alexandre Dumas. His literary taste was poor; his favourite authors were Friedrich Schiller and the elder Dumas. Les trois mousquetaires, in eight volumes, was congenial to him ; the musketeers were insufferably loquacious, led a dissolute life, and behaved like turkey-cocks. He turned his reading of the book to good account. For him the three musketeers were Lassalle, Mendelssohn, and Oppenheim. Although their chief had just issued a war manifesto against the world, the musketeers were by no means disinclined to engage in the meantime in small filibustering sallies, which they regarded as manoeuvres preliminary to the great cam­ paign. They were young, and they hungered for power. They had vigorous imaginations, and very little cash. They wanted influence and coin, and were willing to undertake shady services on behalf of influential people in return for good money. They were three youthful Jews, and consequently were persons of little account ; their ambition was to behave like discontented young noblemen. They were quite ready to don Catilinian masks, provided they were well paid for doing so. It suited their humour to play the part of con­ spirators. They organised a kind of Mafia, for which Oppenheim recruited clients. Their only difference from the Italian carbonari, whose activities they greatly admired, was that they did not possess a hundredth part of the power. Their activities on behalf of Heinrich Heine had been rather a cheerful little conspiracy entered into by turbulent youths than a service undertaken out of love for the poet ; they had been the outcome rather of a desire for notoriety, bustle, and commotion, than of a passion for justice. The three musketeers, while, preparing their war against the ■V

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world, were content for the nonce with minor acts of plunder and extortion. They reaped the benefit of legal proceedings which advertised them widely ; they became private enquiry agents, furnishing their employers with dubious testimony to be used for dubious purposes; and they were neither fas­ tidious nor prudish as to means. They were so unscrupulous that they seemed predestined for great careers. Ferdinand’s instincts, above all, knew no curb. Dirty work did not come amiss to him. He intercepted letters, bribed servants, acted as a spy, and became odd-job man to a certain Countess Hatzfeldt, who had applied for legal advice to Assistant-Judge Oppenheim. In this matter Lassalle scented a great opportunity, and therefore sought the countess’ acquaintance in January 1846. Countess Hatzfeldt was a very great lady, a princess by birth, a member of the ruling caste, supposed to be fabulously wealthy, and beyond question a woman of the highest aristocratic connexions. One who managed her affairs would enter into relationships with the few dozen families which still guided the destinies of Germany and exercised a pre­ dominant influence in all political concerns. They were the State. They were tabu. To touch their existence, to touch their majesty, meant to shake the foundations of the State. They wielded divine authority. They made the political weather. The peasants of Prince Franz Ludwig Hatzfeldt’s estate might thank their stars that they were no longer under the sway of his grandfather. Franz Ludwig had a splendid heritage, but there were unpleasant disputes about the entail. His grandfather, in such a case, would have armed his serfs, would have sallied forth with his riders, and the dispute would have been settled with the aid of halberds, incendiary torches, swords, and muskets. The blood of the unhappy peasants would have been shed in the quarrels of their lord. His grandson, Franz Ludwig, knowing that new times needed new methods, had become a diplomatist. Diplomacy

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was the means whereby the masses could be compelled to shoulder their muskets in the interests of the great. What he understood as diplomacy was that form of dream interpreta­ tion which translates the troubled, restless sleep of a monarch into a national misfortune. Grandfather Hatzfeldt would simply have called up his men for the fight, and that would have been all. Franz Ludwig was far more dangerous to the peace of the realm. He sat at the green tables, making secret treaties, carrying out intrigues, entering into secret alliances; and when the general nervousness which is the invariable outcome of such secrecy led to catastrophe, the people at large were called upon to rescue liberty and justice, faith and country. Besides, if we are rightly to appraise Franz Ludwig’s talents, we shall have to admit that he was a clever fellow. His adversaries in the dispute about the inheritance belonged to the noble line of the Counts Hatzfeldt. He had made up his mind to save all the costs of a trial, all the money that would have to be squandered in bribing judges and witnesses. He had three daughters, and, being a diplomatist, it came natural to him to use them as pawns in his game. He decided to unite the two Hatzfeldt lines, that of the princes and that of the counts, by marriage. Then the dispute about the inheritance could be settled in the marriage contract. Franz Ludwig was a man of the new times, one of those who are always ready to use the word humanity. His idea was simultaneously gentlemanly, pacific, and humane—in a word, it was sublimely base. He invited his cousin to an inspection, as a result of which a choice from among the three possible brides, the three princesses, could be made. Count Edmund made his selec­ tion under stress of concrete and reasonable considerations. Knowing that, when he had once made his choice, he would have to abide by it, he laid great stress upon a yielding and humble disposition in his bride. Having learned to rule, he wanted to domineer. He was not thinking so much of entering into a marriage as of signing a marriage contract. Since, however, the marriage contract involved his taking a woman

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to wife, he wanted that wife to be in the “line of least resistance” . Confounding youth with docility, he decided upon the youngest of the three princesses, Sophie, who was only just fifteen. Since the young lady did not fail to notice that her elder sisters were not best pleased at being passed over, she thought it wise to accept. The pair became engaged, and Count Edmund congratulated himself on winning a wife who would be as pliable as a child, as obedient as a child, as affectionate and tractable as a child. He signed the marriage contract “for the greater exaltation of the ancient name and race of von Hatzfeldt, and for the eternal con­ solidation of the close, peaceful, and friendly relationships already existing between the two high families” . In 1822, on her seventeenth birthday, Sophie became Count Edmund von Hatzfeldt’s wife. She probably had few illusions when she entered into this marriage, which was for one of the partners a m atter of business, and was not even for the other a love adventure. Still, such illusions as she may have entertained were so swiftly dispelled that a certain bitterness inevitably remained. She presented her husband with several children. Count Hatzfeldt, however, preferred the embraces of ladies who could not bestow on him the boon of legitimate offspring ; and the children of the marriage were, to the best of their father’s ability, brought up in such a way as would least incline them to look upon the countess as a mother. She protested ; the count made mock of her protests. She offered resistance, and was humiliated all the more. Before she was one-and-twenty she realised that for family reasons she had been sacrificed to a brute. She bore him children which he promptly withdrew from her influence, and brought up to regard themselves exclusively as his own. She was cheated, browbeaten, deceived. She was cut out of her share in the family inheritance; her daughters were spirited off to a convent in Vienna. Sophie raged and stormed ; resistance was of no avail. She appealed for help to her brothers, but the family wished to hush up the quarrel, dreaded publicity, and

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drafted wonderful schemes of reconciliation, which were hopelessly impracticable. It is true that from time to time Sophie’s brothers took Count Hatzfeldt to task. Edmund made lame excuses, and retaliated by assuming the offensive. He said that his expectations had not been fulfilled; that, contrary to his hopes, Sophie, though a mere child, had proved to have a will of her own ; that she made demands, was troublesome in all sorts of ways. He kept her on short allowance, and broke one promise after another. After depriving her of the two girls, and estranging their minds from her, he began an attack upon the youngest child, a son, Paul. The story runs that when the king of Prussia sent an aide-de-camp to take Paul to the military academy, Countess Sophie received him with the following words : “Major, here is my son. If you dare to touch him”—producing and aiming a pistol—“ I shall shoot you.” Perhaps the story is untrue. Certainly Countess Hatzfeldt’s position was desperate enough to justify such excesses. Ill-treated, isolated, robbed of her income, estranged from her children, neglected by her family, subjected again and ever again to affronts and outrages on the part of her husband, her position was deplorable. People took sides against her because she had no adherents of her own. She learned from her husband’s example how to tread devious paths, and was then blamed for misconduct. She had to endure the most unspeakable devilries, and to crown all was herself spoken of as a she-devil. In her desperate struggle for justice, she learned to do injustice. Wanting fair treatment, she learned to commit crimes. She bought support wherever she could find it, and her standing in the world was not improved by the fact that her heart was better than her head. The crooked ways along which she walked were not straightened by the purity of her aims. While she was confusedly seeking to obtain a divorce, her family, dreading scandal, was always trying to patch up the hopelessly damaged marriage. Her brothers threatened to

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disown her if she ventured to sue for freedom in open court. They had long since ceased to give her any effective help. All that they had ever done for her was to lay before the count prettily worded agreements, which he, when in good vein, would sign readily enough—to forget them no les:; readily when he was in better vein still. Sophie would no longer be intimidated by threats. O n May 22, 1846, she wrote to her eldest brother : “ I agree with you that I have hitherto conducted my affairs maladroitly. I have made the great mistake of letting my feelings speak for me, and feelings arc poor weapons. I have done with feelings, and henceforward shall have recourse to law. I have quieted the storm of my feelings, and shall now guide my footsteps with cold and irrefutable logic. As I have already told you by word of mouth, I shall do nothing more, nothing at all, without others* advice and help. Having lost confidence in my own insight, I shall take advantage of that of certain men who are well informed upon legal matters, o f men whose trustworthy logic is supported by indisputable culture. I shall appeal to the law for the establishment of my rights. In the last resort, I shall have courage to sue in the courts. Peace at any price is peace too dearly bought. I want peace, but I will not sacrifice myself to peace.” Here for the first time in the countess’ utterances we have the tone of the war manifesto. H er army consists of three men ; one of them is Lassalle. He is two days younger than her eldest son ; her only feeling for him is that which a woman over forty may well have for a young man who is so ready to adopt strong measures as her protector. She speaks of him as “ my child” , and puts him in the place of the children of whom she has been bereft. Lassalle, who has already adopted a new religion and a new name, now adopts a new mother. A princess in her own right, a passionate woman of riper years, a lady of rank and fashion, used to luxury and the great world, a strong-willed aristocrat, ardent and gifted—becomes his mother-elect. Sophie Hatzfeldt is a woman of vigorous personality ; she H

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has the influence of social position, maturity, and great charm ; and with these she holds sway over the youth. She, and she alone, can bend him this way and th a t; she alone can modify his course. “You know well enough that never before has any one had so much influence upon me as you have ; that no one ever will have so much influence upon me ; and that you have become necessary to my life. The strange thing is that, all the same, we are so often on edge with one another.” There is nothing strange about this when we remember that the countess has to lick this ill-bred young man into shape. She is the daughter of a line of princes ; he is the son of Chajjim, one of the Jews who were emancipated in 1812. When Ferdinand Lassalle compares her with the peevish, spiteful, sickly little scandalmonger who was competent to bring him into the world, but was incompetent to bring him up in it, Sophie von Hatzfeldt becomes much more to him than his mother by blood. She trains him, whereas that other woman had merely given him suck. He had improved on his destiny by abandoning Judaism in order to become a Hegelian; now he improved upon nature by calling the countess his mother and by whistling down the wind that other woman, “ the goose who had hatched out an eagle’s egg” . Thenceforward the house of Sophie von Hatzfeldt was his eyrie. H er cause was his cause. I f she influenced him, he likewise influenced her. He spurred her on to revolt. H e persuaded her to go to law. Impetuously, he towed her in his wake. He took the affair out of her hands, to run it as he thought best. He compelled her to declare a war, since it suited him to engage in a war in which he had nothing to lose and all to win. To defend her, to attack her adversaries, meant that he would gain a footing in the great world ! A war manifesto ! He who hit the mark, Edmund von Hatzfeldt, hit the bull’s-eye of the world. Both parties to this dispute employed spies, bribed servants, suborned witnesses to testify to the most unlikely rascalities, dragged their opponents’ private life into the light in the most detestable way, penned writs which in their malicious

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imaginativeness outdid the most venomous of lampoons, did not shrink from uttering the basest calumnies, published the most abominable pamphlets, and behaved so outrageously that beneath the profuse splashes of vulgar abuse and the grimaces of the foulest hatred, people’s countenances were no longer recognisable. The contemporary who declared “ I would give all Lassalle’s philosophical and legal writings for this great deed of his youth, for this chivalrous intervention on behalf of an unhappy woman” completely misunderstood the character of the combat, of which the historian Herm ann Oncken writes “in it the opposing forces behaved towards one another like two Red Indian tribes upon the war-path” . The man who laid aside his almost finished work on Heraclitus in order to hunt Count Hatzfeldt’s scalp could excuse himself by quoting from his Greek exemplar: “ God is not in the sub­ stance but in the process” . What ensued was not so much a process as eight years of the hawking of scandal, filth, and evil-smelling muck in six-and-thirty of the Prussian law courts. Lassalle, having encased his intellect in the armour-plate of dialectic, now acquired a horny skin in the marshy pool of the Hatzfeldt trial, and took a bath of dragon’s blood. In the end of April 1846, the count had written to his son Paul, then fourteen years of age, that he would be disinherited unless he ran away from his mother. Paul showed the letter to his mother, and hostilities began. Lassalle took the war­ path with much pomp and circumstance, with the beating of gongs, with military music, with the shouting of loud hosannas. “ I was a young man of twenty. I had just left the university, where I had been studying philosophy. I knew nothing of law; yet that did not restrain me! I said to the countess: ‘You know very well that if you begin the lawsuit your relatives will leave you in the lurch. If, however, you are firmly resolved to conquer or to die, I will take your affairs into my hands, which are young but strong, and I swear that I will fight for you to the death.* Convinced that right was

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on her side, she had confidence in her own strength and in mine. She accepted my proposal with all her heart. “Thereupon I, a youthfiil Jew without influence, uprose against the most terrible powers—I alone against the world, against the power of rank and of the whole arisfocracy, against the power of unlimited wealth, against the govern­ ment and against the officials of all kinds who are invariably the natural allies of rank and wealth, and against all possible prejudices. I had made up my mind to oppose illusion with truth, rank with right, the power of money with the power of the spirit.” However fine this may sound, it does not ring perfectly true. Here, likewise, the truth was a little twisted; here, likewise, as unimpeachable testimony shows, the power of money played a great part. Calumnies had to be paid for ; the peasants on the Hatzfeldt estate, and the journalists who espoused the countess’ cause, had to be rewarded in hard cash for showing their detesta­ tion of Count Hatzfeldt and all his works. Lassalle and the countess knew perfectly well that a just war, no less than an unjust war, costs money, and more money, and yet again money. Count Hatzfeldt promptly cut off the sources of supply. The “young Jew without influence” could exercise un­ limited influence over his friends. Moreover, while assuring the countess of his inviolable fidelity to their alliance, he was careful to reinsure himself by making his friends swear to be faithful unto death. Rhenish Prussia was the theatre of war. Lassalle mobilised the press, supplying it with an abundance of spicy news items. He went so far as to ask Humboldt to approach the king of Prussia about the matter, but this His Excellency flatly refused to do. Close watch was kept upon Count Hatzfeldt, who played into his enemies’ hands by setting no guard on his behaviour. As to money, Lassalle extorted thousands of talers from his father in support of the great press campaign. Victory seemed at hand. The countess, elegantly attired,

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living in luxury, using the finest scents, and enjoying the arom a of a good Havana now and again (for she was a smoker), was full of hope and courage. The proofs were abundant, and the count had taken fright. He seemed ready for a compromise, prepared to sign legal documents securing the countess* financial future. In the beginning of August, Lassalle sent him a messenger to request an interview. The count, who hated this impudent young Jew like poison, had the messenger unceremoniously ejected by his servants. This was not the way to peace ! Lassalle rejoined by threats : “ Unless you promptly send me the apologies I demand, I shall hold you personally to account for the behaviour of your servants, and it will be for me a disagreeable but imperious necessity at our next meeting (which shall be as soon as possible, and which I know I can bring about) to treat you, wellborn Sir, personally in pre­ cisely the same rough way in which you handled my messenger” . Peace was now out of the question. Lassalle had been affronted. Lassalle wanted vengeance. The war flamed up again. For him, now, the cause is no longer merely that of the countess, no longer merely that of Ferdinand Lassalle. It is not a private affair any longer, but the cause of the oppressed class against the privileged class. It is the cause of emancipa­ tion against tyranny. It is an uprising of the rights of man against oppression. It is a war of one hungry for power against those who wield power. Lassalle is no longer merely con­ cerned to win the Hatzfeldt trial, for he now wants to liberate the women of all nations. “You seem to overlook the fact that an idea of permanent historical moment has borrowed your body!” O n August 20th, a fortnight after the threatening letter to the count, he strikes his first blow. Baroness Meyendorff, Count Hatzfeldt’s mistress, has just come to stay at the Mainzer H of in Cologne. Lassalle suspects

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th at she has with her im portant documents. Oppenheim and Mendelssohn, whose orders are to follow the baroness to the end of the world, arrive in Cologne on her trail and put up at the same hotel. They have had their eyes on a casket which the baroness has with her, for they believe it to contain the papers they want. Seizing a favourable moment, Oppen­ heim manages to abstract this casket, and hastens with it to Mendelssohn’s room, that the latter may hide it in his trunk. The theft of the casket is promptly discovered, and the hotel is in an uproar. Mendelssohn, whose box is already full to the brim, takes out some articles of clothing to make room, and hastily departs with his trunk and the casket inside. The abandoned articles of clothing are discovered in Mendels­ sohn’s room. They arouse suspicion, so the young man is shadowed. Noticing in the train that he is being kept under observation, Mendelssohn leaves his luggage in the railway carriage and takes to flight without it. But since he has brought away with him from the hotel Oppenheim’s bag as well as his own box, the police, when they impound the refugee’s luggage, find Oppenheim’s papers, and arrest the latter. An assistant judge, the son of a multi-millionaire, has been arrested for theft ! Although, as assistant judge, Oppenheim was well acquainted with the nature of theft, he was still better acquainted with the nature of obedience, and had not hesitated to obey his chief. The sacrifice had been fruitless. There were no im portant documents in the casket. The battle was lost. Mendelssohn had fled to foreign parts, and Oppenheim was in prison. Lassalle was not discouraged. He was the last defender, and would carry on unaided. He overwhelmed the count with legal proceedings. He put up a regular barrage of lawsuits. Charges of adultery were brought, and calumnies were dis­ seminated. Lassalle multiplied himself: he conducted the trials, being barrister and solicitor in one; he directed the work of the spies; he inflamed public opinion against the count ; he wrote articles for the democratic press ; he did

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not shrink from eavesdropping, backstairs intrigues, tricks and subterfuges ; he was at one and the same time the furious Ajax and the crafty Odysseus. The rights of man are infringed, not when he, Lassalle, hires thieves, but when his self-esteem is wounded. Nature itself is affronted as soon as he is affronted. So confidently does he regard himself as the organ of justice and righteous­ ness that for him everything is right and just which strengthens his own position. H e has no scruples. In the petition for divorce he does not hesitate to speak of Sophie von Hatzfeldt as “a timid gazelle, piteously hunted from field to field, until at length she hurls herself upon the hunter and would fain cast herself with him into the abyss” . Such behaviour on the part of gazelles has not hitherto been observed by naturalists. But from the 131 folio pages of the petition for divorce naturalists might learn about another unprecedented animal, a beast of prey this time, a cross between a rabid mastiff and a hungry jackal—Edmund von Hatzfeldt. The list of witnesses contains 358 names. There are 358 persons who are to testify to Hatzfeldt’s crimes and mis­ demeanours ; 358 persons, ranging from Prussian princes to kitchenmaids. The count retaliates. He has memorials composed, he enters a counter-petition. H e publishes a lampoon, which has to be printed in Basle for fear of the German law. A poetical squib appears, with a caricature of Lassalle, Countess Hatzeldt and her son Paul : Give ear to a very queer story Which seems to be true According to the reports which have come to hand To the effect that the well-known Countess Hatzfeldt For a few sordid talers Allows herself to be made ridiculous By her factotum Lassalle And everywhere the wicked world Declares that these are not the first breaths off ill-fame And that it is not so much she As Lassalle who is the author of the scandal

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And that her son Is not free from the taint Young Count Paul To whom one may appropriately exclaim Are not you ashamed to cry stinking fish But in order that in these hard times When hunger and trouble and sorrow are rife We may still have a good laugh now and again These light verses have been penned And not by a common cheat But by an unauthorised polite letter writer A little book was published this year Which has made matters even worse than before Since we besides other things Are above all celebrating a hero Great wits will jump and will follow The traditional example of the poet And we regard it as our duty To issue as prelude a heroic poem And since the whole affair is unfortunately a jeremiad We shall call our song a LassaIliad. Lassalle has got all his energies entangled in this series of quarrels, and can think of nothing else. He is continually finding fresh points of attack, and conducts the affair with so much tenacity, courage, and skill, that, according to the opinion of the best legal experts, no one could have done better. In the beginning of December, the trial of Assistant Judge Oppenheim took place. The court did not fail to recognise that the theft of the casket had not been undertaken, like an ordinary theft, in pursuit of private gain, but had been instigated by a passionate desire to defend another’s interests. Public opinion had approved the “crime committed in selfdefence” . Public sympathy had been aroused by this escapade in which a Jewish assistant judge had filched something from the mistress of a great nobleman. The decision of the jury was influenced by the rumblings of the now imminent revo­ lution. Oppenheim was acquitted. He is set at liberty, but the experience has been a warning to him. He has been burned, so he dreads the fire. He has had enough. He withdraws from the dangerous magician’s

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sphere of influence, takes his departure from Lassalle’s army, and makes his peace with the world. Naturally the failure of the Oppenheim prosecution mortified Edmund von Hatzfeldt. He spent money more freely than ever upon counter-machinations, so that Lassalle, although he could register victory after victory, made no real progress. Here is an extract from one of Ferdinand’s letters to his father: “ Count Hatzfeldt is worn out and utterly broken. He would be ready to throw up the sponge, were it not that his advisers are still able to sustain his declining courage ; his last hope is in the slenderness of our pecuniary resources. He goes on fighting because our material needs are over­ whelming.” The pack of paid hounds, baying furiously, now assails Lassalle ; he loses his head, and his courage fails. In despair he seeks help from his father. “ I have set my heart upon winning the case of this un­ happy and ill-treated woman. I cling to this undertaking with all the fibres of my being ; I devote myself to it with all the strength of my will. My will, here, is the whole of me ! The thing has, without exaggeration, become a m atter of life and death to me. I think of nothing else ! My whole existence, my whole mind, circles round it, and I shall be shattered if I have to abandon it. W hat will happen if sheer lack of means prevents my winning this woman her rights—the cause to which I have sacrificed my friends, devoted my youth, our honour, our liberty, and your suffering? I should wrap myself up in my misery and perish. You will readily understand that, strong though I am by nature, and indeed precisely because I am so strong by nature, I should simply die of a broken heart, like a consumptive girl at whom the worm is gnawing, I should withdraw into solitude, vanish into some remote corner of the world, to be devoured there by my own wretchedness ! I should be a living corpse during the brief space for which my life would endure. I am not like other men ; when my heart is given to anything, my bowels yearn for it, The shame this woman has suffered, the outrageoijs

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brutality with which she has been treated, the resistance which has been offered to me, the money I have poured out, the glorious and almost incredible victories I have won—all these things have inspired me with an absorbing passion; and if, after these colossal efforts and victories, after over­ coming such insuperable difficulties, and when the final victory is unquestionably so near at hand, I should fail for want of a few thousand talers, it will be the end of me. The world will lose all meaning for me. Perhaps (only perhaps) I shall continue to live the semblance of a life ; but the vigour, the elasticity, the tension of my mind will have been de­ stroyed, and I shall become as dull and inert as an imbecile.” The father’s answer is soothing, tranquillising, and not devoid of greatness : “When I used to offer you advice and instruction concerning this, that, or the other, you always told me that your own experiences were as old as the history of the world, that you were a man of forty equipped with all the freshness of youth. You should act up to these assertions now. I f any one whose life has hitherto been free from disagreeables should, from sheer presumption (what other word fits the case?), step out of his own circle, force himself into one entirely alien to him, and there, in pure arrogance, enter upon a fight; and if, then, things do not work out precisely as he had hoped or had in his overweening imagina­ tion expected—is he then entitled to say, T am sick of the world and its pleasures’? After all, you are but a greenhorn ! I told you recently what severe trials I have myself had to go through, and how, though I was blameless, the hand of fate was laid heavily upon me. Yet, in case of need, I could still bear further trials to-day, whereas you, at the first onslaught, show yourself as cowardly as a young officer who in time of peace has strutted proudly with dangling sword and clinking spurs but shows the white feather as soon as he is under fire. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A soldier must not grow weary of battle in the first skirmish, which even yet is not entirely lost.” These battalions of words are followed by battalions of talers, but the amount sent never suffices. The post carries

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letter after letter of complaint to Breslau. There are painful scenes between father and son. Ferdinand levies ducats like recruits, and, in fact, plays the extortioner. In Paris he has a row with his brother-in-law Friedland. In Berlin there are storms and reproaches. The affair stinks; he tries to cover up the stench with money, and this in its turn stinks. He is arrested, acquitted, visits Berlin, meets his father, who implores him to abandon a cause which is destroying him. Ferdinand, who is always sure of victory when he has money in his pocket, tells the father to mind his own business. The case is going splendidly ! Some of the Hatzfeldt peasants suborned by him have applied to the Landtag. O n May 14th, 141 deputies, members of the opposition, are holding a private meeting at the Rheinische Hof. Matters of great political importance are to be discussed. Before the session can begin two unauthorised intruders have to be removed by force. One of them is “Dr. Lassalle, whose name has been so widely mentioned in connexion with the Hatzfeldt suit” . Lassalle goes to the “fighting front” . Attended by a body­ guard of two hundred peasants, he appears on Count Hatzfeldt’s estate. The demonstration degenerates into threats : “The countess need but have said one word, need but have issued a single order, and all the count’s mansions would have been razed to the ground, and he and his retainers hanged to the tallest pine-tree. The peasants were eager to attack by storm. Permission was refused, and they obeyed the countess as soldiers obey a military commander. Though fuming with wrath, they had to control their passion, and the crowbars they had brought from the mines were laid aside unused.” A cheerful little campaign with petty breaches of the peace and minor riots is in progress ; filibustering raids are renewed ; we seem to be back once more in the days of the peasant wars. At the close of the year 1847, Lassalle certainly appeared to be gaining the upper hand. But the year 1848 began with a disastrous reverse. On February n th , Mendelssohn, who after Oppenheim’s

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acquittal had returned to Germany to stand his trial, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The day before going to prison, the thrall received the thanks of his lord and master Lassalle: “ I cannot associate with you any longer. You have become rough and unpolished.” February n t h marked a turn in the fortunes of the war. The condemnation of Mendelssohn opened the way for an attack on Lassalle. The attack was not slow in coming. On February 20th he was arrested and taken to Cologne. In Paris, four days later, the big guns began to fire the cause of liberty. Lassalle was behind prison bars because of the foolish and futile theft of the casket. He sent out for some of the Paris newspapers. Under the very eyes of the warder, he pasted up on the door of his cell the inflammatory mani­ festo composed by Blanqui in prison. A traitor government would be any government which, having been raised to power by the proletariat, should not instantly introduce the following measures : 1. The disarmament of the Civil Guard. 2. The arming of the workers. No weapons must be left in the hands of the bourgeoisie ! Without this there can be no safety. He who has iron, has bread. We have to give way before bayonets, and unarmed masses are swept away like chaff. Obstacles, hindrances, impossibilities, will all vanish if the proletarians are armed. But for workers who are content to amuse themselves with street parades, with the planting of trees of liberty, and with legalist phraseology, there will first of all be Holy Water, then curses, then bullets—and wretchedness without end ! Let the people choose ! A ugust B lanqui.

Manifesto to the People, written in prison, 1848.

CHAPTER

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THE REBELLION OF THE KINGS Paris had not wanted the revolution, but the French government had done everything to exhaust the patience of the people. I t had forbidden the reform banquets. In the Chamber it had instructed its m ajority to vote down the timid proposals for reform ; in the streets it was represented by armed police ; with the result that, after much labour and pains, the stones began to fly. “The spirit of individuals has come to an end, the spirit of all has begun” , reported a French newspaper on the out­ break of the February revolution in Paris. Beneath the fertilising rain of musket balls, barricades arose and the ministerial seats were upset; a throne was burned in the Place de la Bastille, and a king went into exile. February 25th was the birthday of the proletariat. The great revolution of half a century before had been the revolution of the third estate. O n February 25th, for the first time in European history, the fourth estate took possession of the streets. The provisional government, which was as revolutionary as possible and prom ptly summoned K arl Marx from Brussels, had a difficult task. One of the difficulties with which it had to cope was the enthusiast Bakunin, who planned a new revolt every day and discovered a new adversary to fight at least every other day. O f him it was said : “W hat a man ! The first day he is wonderful ; the second day he ought to be shot !” In this case the spirit of an individual had ceased to be spirit. The German poet Herwegh represented the rom antic school in the revolution. He sharked up a legion which he proposed to lead to Germany in order to overthrow thrones large and small ; but Karl M arx made so fierce an attack upon the wild-cat scheme that Herwegh’s legion had fewer active members than there were active princes in Germany. Marx, whose satirical thrusts were directed against all

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romanticism except his own, had since M arch 4th been a guest of the revolutionary movement in Paris; whilst his friend Engels, who was the son of a rich factory owner, found it convenient to be short of funds for the journey. Not much can be expected of a revolution when one of its leaders has a hatred for opera-bouffe, and another of its chiefs cannot take p art in the first night’s performance because he is short of travelling expenses. In France, however, the revolution achieved certain successes, though these did not in the end prove to be successes of a communist kind. In Germany, on the other hand, the revolution at this date am ounted to nothing more than noisy demonstrations. Economic conditions in Bavaria and in eastern Germany differed markedly from those in Baden and the Rhenish industrial regions. In the R uhr area there was, perhaps, a class-conscious fourth estate, but this certainly was not the case in Pomerania. The French revolu­ tion of 1848, which, at the outset at least, was a working-class affair, could not be simply transferred without modification to German soil. The German burgher, having to choose between a socialist republic and a feudal monarchy, prom ptly decided in favour of the king, if only because in the fatherland there were more kings than socialists. He was alarmed at the appearance of radical elements, and felt th at it would be better to counter­ m and the revolution. A part from the fact th at the German revolution was being attem pted in the absence of its real leaders (some of whom were in foreign parts while others were behind prison bars), the rabble was quickly and easily subdued by force. Against the spirit of the individual, “justice” could be set to work; against the spirit of all, a whiff of grape-shot was effective. For there was too little spirit in this spirit for it to be immune to powder and shot. No one will be surprised therefore th at the German burghers preferred oppression from above to oppression from below. But western Germany, the Rhenish provinces and Baden, more proletarianised than other parts of Germany and more exposed to French influence, did not resign themselves to the

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inevitable so speedily. M arx came from Paris to Cologne, Engels went to Barmen. O n June ist there appeared, under M arx’s editorship, the opening num ber of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” . O n June ist, safeguarded by the benevolent neutrality of the alarm ed “liberals” , reaction set in. Beaten on all the open battlefields, the proletariat had one stronghold left, the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” . It had one leader left, K arl Marx. Only a few defenders remained to it. The best of these was Lassalle. In duress at Cologne he tingled with expecta­ tion. To the great annoyance of the prison authorities he sent jubilant letters forth into the outer world. He dreamed of the approaching moment when rifle-butts and proletarian fists would break down the doors of his bastille, and when his liberators would carry him forth on their shoulders and proceed to establish his kingdom. While on the barricades of all the European capitals the people were gambling away his present and his future, he sat in enforced inaction, waiting, waiting, walking restlessly up and down his cell, listening, planning, dreaming—but, above all, waiting. No one came. He had dispatched a representative to participate in the revolution. At public meetings Countess Hatzfeldt stormed the platforms, insisting on being allowed to speak : “I have abandoned everything to serve the people ; I am just as much a proletarian as you are. Look at my friends, look at my son ! Protect us against the reaction, which would gladly make an end of us.” The trial of Ferdinand Lassalle, charged with inciting to the theft of a casket and with complicity in the crime, took place before a Cologne jury from August 5th to August n th . In the description of the accused we read : “Twenty-three years of age, no occupation, born at Breslau, recently domiciled in Berlin, five feet six inches high, with brown curly hair, an open forehead, brown eyebrows, dark-blue eyes, well-proportioned nose and mouth, a rounded chin, a narrow face, and a slender figure.” These are moving times. In Vienna the Reichstag has been

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summoned. No one knows what will happen. Almost without exception the jurors are democrats. The arrogance of the lawmen, the most arrogant of the official stratum , has given place to a sense of insecurity and to a feeling of uneasiness. They have begun to entertain doubts whether w hat they have been used to call justice is really justice. They are not sure whether their justice will for ever remain justice. Now there has been brought up before them for trial the pleni­ potentiary of a lady belonging to one of the princely houses of the Lower Rhine, a lady who has unquestionably been very badly treated. This plenipotentiary has the masses of the people on his side ! Who can tell how far his ties and con­ nexions may extend upwards and downwards, in Berlin and in Paris? The proceedings had lasted for six days. The prosecution had made no headway. The accused took his stand upon the barricades of a dialectic which fired murderous salvos. The streets were speaking through his m outh, and had espoused his cause. Undismayed he stripped the rags of pretence from the false witnesses, confused and annihilated those who bore testimony against him. On the n th , exactly six months after the defeat of Mendelssohn, he began to speak in his own defence. Leaving the barricade, he advanced to take the opposing fortress by storm. He had to avenge Mendelssohn, to rehabilitate the countess, and to defend the revolution. His speech lasted for six hours, and filled eighty pages of print! “The family was silent, but it is said that when men hold their peace the stones will cry out. When all hum an rights are outraged, when even the voice of kinship is mute, and when a helpless m ortal is abandoned by his natural protec­ tors, then there rises in defence m an’s first and last relative— man. You have all read with indignation the terrible story of the unhappy Duchess of Praslin. Which of you would not have hastened to bring her aid in her struggle for life? Well, gentlemen, here is the Praslin case ten times over. W hat is the brief death struggle of an hour compared with the torments of a death agony that is protracted for twenty years? W hat

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are the wounds inflicted by a knife compared with assassina­ tion long drawn out committed with fiendish cruelty and causing intolerable suffering to a woman whose most elementary hum an rights have been deliberately tram pled underfoot day after day for two decades—a woman who has first been held up to contumely th at she may subsequently be ill-used with im punity? “The charge against me is based upon a contention unexampled in its logic, upon the contention th at because I gave Mendelssohn a general commission to get hold of a certain document in any possible way, I have therefore m ade myself an accomplice in any conceivable action, in any con­ ceivable crime, which Oppenheim or Mendelssohn m ight have thought of committing. If, in fulfilment of my orders, Oppenheim and Mendelssohn had set fire to the hotel in order to get possession of the papers, if they had committed assault, robbery under arms, or m urder, should I have been a participator in arson, robbery under arms, or m urder? Just as much and ju st as little as the commission to obtain the paper in any possible way implied instruction and mis­ guidance to the effect th at it was to be obtained by stealing the casket, just so little and ju st so much was there instruc­ tion to the effect th at it was to be obtained by m anslaughter, murder, revolution, and God knows w hat else. “If immediately after Mendelssohn’s departure I had gone to the public prosecutor and had asked him, ‘Have I com­ mitted a crime by giving Mendelssohn this commission, and if so of what crime am I guilty?* then, according to the logic of the indictment, he would have had to reply, ‘You have committed a crime, but w hat th at crime is I cannot tell you as yet. You must wait a while. W hatever it may enter Mendelssohn’s head to do on your behalf will be your crime. If he steals the papers, then you will be a thief. If he gets possession of them by robbery under arms or by arson, then you will be a robber or an incendiary.* “W hat sort of a crime is th at which is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring, but only acquires its specific character twenty-four hours after it has been committed, i

LASSALLE 130 twenty-four hours after I gave the commission in a town nearly one hundred miles away, and only acquires its specific character through the will of another person, th at o f Mendelssohn? “An undefined crime is not a crime at all, and if our criminal law pushes this m atter it will degenerate into an Inquisition. “The M inistry of Justice should not forget that, while it certainly exists to prosecute and punish crimes when crimes have been committed, it does not exist in order itself to commit th at most heinous of all offences, the making of crime where there is no crime. “The systematic, venomous, and base persecutions which for the last two years have been unceasingly directed against me, the calumnies th at have been voiced against me, and the attacks th at have been made upon me, instigated by the united powers of wealth and rank and of those allies which wealth and rank can always find, would expose me to great risks, but for the happy circumstance th at in these days the system of falsehood, oppression, and hypocrisy is everywhere collapsing, so th at at length tru th m ust prevail concerning an affair, concerning an individual instance of suffering, which represents the universal sufferings, miseries, and oppressions ; and thus, likewise, tru th will prevail concerning my honest and indefatigable endeavours to secure recognition for the violated rights of m an !” The court understood the allusion, and acquitted the accused. Thus six months after the great defeat, came the great trium ph. Twelve years later he wrote concerning this day : “Nothing can give even an approximate idea of the electrical impresssion I aroused. The whole city, the population of the entire province, were bubbling over with enthusiasm! The people had seen the countenance of a m an. T he people had understood me. Not the common people alone, but all classes, the whole bourgeoisie, were intoxicated with delight. When we reached Düsseldorf, the inhabitants almost deafened me with their acclamations. Unharnessing the

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hones from the carriage in which I was sitting beside the countess, they drew the vehicle themselves. Although the trial had not been a political one in the strict sense of the term , the populace had understood th at its deeper meaning had been political, th at it had been a revolt against oppression. “Not only was I acquitted, but I had given my adversaries a shrewd blow. In Rhenish Prussia I had acquired the repu­ tation of being an incom parable orator and a m an of un­ bounded energy, and the newspapers spread this reputation throughout the monarchy. All extolled me as one able to fight single-handed against the whole world. Ever since then, the democratic party in Rhenish Prussia has regarded me as one of its chief leaders.” Lassalle was free. Meanwhile, however, the spirit of the individual had ceased to manifest itself, and the spirit of all had been driven out of the trenches. Lassalle came too late. Twenty-four hours after his acquittal, he took over the leadership of the Democratic People’s Club in Düsseldorf. O n August 29th, a t a public meeting in Cologne, he protested against the arrest of Freiligrath. O n August 31st, at a huge public meeting in Düsseldorf, he demanded the liberation of the poet of the revolution. O n September ist he sent to the public prosecutor a formal protest against Freiligrath’s arrest. O n September 17th there was held in a field near Worringen-on-the-Rhine a public meeting summoned by Friedrich Engels. To this meeting there came a delegation from Düsseldorf, led by Ferdinand Lassalle. In Cologne there was held a democratic congress, to which Lassalle came as delegate from Düsseldorf. The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” was directing a brisk fire against the reaction, and the heaviest of its heavy guns was Lassalle. The volunteer force had a captain named Lorenz Clasen and a musketeer named Lassalle. In the beginning of October there was a clash because the musketeer wished to lead the captain’s company too far to the left !

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O n November gth the Cologne democrats held a great meeting. Suddenly K arl M arx burst into the hall, waving a telegram like a banner, and shouting : “ In accordance with the M arch law, R obert Blum has been shot in Vienna !” A yell of w rath went up from six thousand throats. Every one of the six thousand felt himself h it by the bullet which had been aimed at one man. A m an and a revolution were the casualties of Novem­ ber gth. Lassalle called for a tax strike and for a mass rising. O n November 10th, W rangel and his soldiers occupied Berlin. The king was now making his revolution. He ap­ pointed a new ministry, the Brandenburg and Manteuffel ministry, which was based upon sixty thousand rifles. The king’s revolution was successful. On December 5th it dissolved the National Assembly and issued an order in accordance with which from th at day onwards the new constitution was in force. Thus from the start Lassalle was muzzled. O n November 13th, at the Düsseldorf m ainguard station, he summoned the m ilitia to rise. O n November 19th he spoke in the name of the m ilitia: “The time for passive resistance is over. We implore the N ational Assembly to issue a call to arms !” He set to work upon the getting together of money and weapons to fight the revolution of the king. He mobilised the Hatzfeldt peasants. In a speech he declared th at the uprising was to begin in the west as soon as Düsseldorf should give the sign, and that this attack from the west would be simultaneous with the expected revolt in Silesia. O n November 21st, he urged the citizens to have recourse to arms in a last attem pt to revive the revolution. O n November 22nd, the government proclaimed a state of siege, which m eant th at only one party, the party of those in power, m ight shoot, plunder, use the strong hand.

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On November 22nd, Lassalle was once more imprisoned in Düsseldorf. Marx and Engels were seized in Cologne. The revolution was dead and buried. T he spirit of the individual had ceased to be anything more than spirit. T he king’s revolution had trium phed. Marx’s trial took place in February 1849. He defended himself eloquently. Furtherm ore, since the people had been accused, he defended the people. “Wfien the crown makes a counter-revolution, the people answers by a revolution. Rightly!” ‘‘Righdy !”—M arx was acquitted. The upshot of the trial of M arx seemed of good omen for Lassalle. He pressed for a prom pt settlement. A deputation to this effect was sent to the authorities, carrying a petition with 2,800 signatures. A second deputation, headed by M arx, Engels, and Paul Hatzfeldt, urged a speedy trial. In spite of all efforts Lassalle’s trial was again and again postponed. The counter-revolution was in full blast. Three months after the acquittal of M arx by the Cologne jury, the government suppressed the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” , and expelled its editor from the country. The last num ber of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” was published on May 19,1849. It was printed in red ink, and was headed by Freiligrath’s famous poem : No Open Blow in an Open Fight. This poem consisted of five sections, each section containing eight stanzas. It has the impetus of the Marseillaise: FAREWELL O F T H E “ NEW R H E N ISH GAZETTE” [E rnest J ones’

translation ]

No open blow in an open fight But with quips and quirks they arraign me, By creeping treachery’s secret blight The western Calmucks have slain me. The fatal shaft in the dark did fly ; I was struck by an ambushed knave ; And here in the pride of my strength I lie, Like the corse of a rebel brave.

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When the last of the crowns like glass shall break On the scene our sorrows have haunted, And the People the last dread “guilty” shall speak. By your side you shall find me undaunted. On Rhine, or on Dantibe, in word and deed, You shall witness, true to his vow, On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the freed, The rebel who greets you now !

CHAPTER

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TH E GRAVEYARD O F ILLU SIO N S While the revolution was petering out Lassalle was making w ar after his own fashion. He bom barded with pedtions the public prosecutor, the court of enquiry, the governor of the prison, all the authorities to which he could get access. He dem anded a w ithdraw al of the accusation. He demanded release on bail. He insisted th at he must be allowed to write articles for the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung“ . He addressed the public prosecutor as follows: “ I am defending myself in my own way, and I venture to hope that the m inistry has no right to prescribe the m anner of my defence. I cannot understand how the public prose­ cutor can presume to reply to all my petitions with a laconic negative and without quoting the laws on which he bases his refusal.” He is a perfect plague to the w arder so th at the two are at daggers drawn. Lassalle tyrannises over the m an, orders him about, almost proceeds to blows, until at length the w arder complains to his superiors. The governor, the m agistrate, and the w arder come to visit Lassalle. The governor takes the prisoner to task. Lassalle interrupts him : “ It is usual, among persons of culture, for one gentlem an who enters another’s room to say ‘Good morning*. I am entitled to expect this courtesy from you.” “W hat nonsense ! For me you are a prisoner, and nothing more ! You have to comply with the rules and regulations, and if you don’t I shall order you into strict confinement—or something worse !” “You have no right to punish me in accordance with the rules and regulations. I am here awaiting trial. This loud talk of yours avails nothing and proves still less. Even if this house be a prison, here we are in my room, and when you enter it I must ask you to say ‘Good morning’ !”

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“You had better stop waving your fingers towards my face in th at way. I f you go on doing it I shall give you a box on the ears.*’ As soon as the other visitors have managed to pacify the governor a little, Lassalle proceeds to dem and facilities for filing a suit against the prison authorities for ill-treatm ent, insulting behaviour, and the overstepping of their powers. He sends an account of this interview to the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” , which publishes it forthwith. When he is forbidden to go out daily for air and exercise, he berates Public Prosecutor von Ammon as follows : “W hat­ ever happens I shall continue to go out daily, since I see no reason for yielding to the pretensions of the government and endangering my health. Your Excellency will do well to countenance this. I hope you will find th at you have the power to insist on your orders being carried out.” A few days later : “ I put this question categorically to Your Excellency. Am I to drive out to-day or not? No government in the world is entitled to run counter to Your Excellency’s orders. I must ask Your Excellency whether the ordinance which allows me to go out driving is a worthless scrap of paper or an ordinance. I cannot see th at you have any right to deprive me of my privileges for a single day.” He treats his judges as if he were the judge and they were the accused. From prison her writes to his m other : “ I shall come before the assizes in the course of M arch. I delight in the proceedings like a god. Like Apollo laying his enemies low from afar, I shall cast my javelins, and I look forward with pity to the lot of the poor wretch whose painful task it will be to defend the ridiculous and crim inal accusation which has been brought against m e.” He does not regard the cause of the revolution as lost. After the interlude of reaction, there will be a second act, there will be a counter-revolution against the counter-revolution. “ Either Germany will return, and for ever, into the night of the old conditions (and then all knowledge is falsehood, all philosophy is merely m ental trifling, Hegel is an escaped lunatic, and there is no meaning whatever in the nonsensical

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process known as history)-—or else the revolution will soon celebrate a new and decisive trium ph. The latter is enor­ mously more probable than the former. Then there will be a tremendous explosion ! This spring, fire and flame will rage throughout Europe. God help our Prussian realm then! The eyes of even the stupidest have been opened by what happened last November. The November prosecutions have been rightly visited with scorn, and the lesson will not be lost.” The public prosecutor and the police took copies of this letter. N aturally it did not make his defence easier. The trial began on May 3rd. The accusation was to the effect th at “on November 21, 1848, at Neuss, in a public meeting” , Lassalle “had incited subjects to take up arms against the State authority and against their fellow-subjects for the purposes of civil war” . Lassalle had had his speech for the defence printed in April, and when the trial opened copies of this “Assize Speech” were on sale at the doors of the court-house. In Dresden, the Palatinate, and Baden, fresh revolts were in progress. The second act of the sanguinary comedy was beginning, and public feeling was heated to boiling-point. Two thousand Germans were repeating the sentences of the accused at the very time when the act of accusation against Lassalle was being read in court. To every utterance of the prosecution, two thousand Germans knew Lassalle’s answer before it had been spoken. The public prosecutor was uneasy, and feared disorder. O n May 4th, in a panic, the court decided to exclude the public. Catastrophe seemed im m inent ! Lassalle entered a protest : “ I regard the exclusion of the public from the court as an infamous betrayal of the laws” . The protest was rejected. Justice, like every assassin, dreaded publicity. The court was cleared. Lassalle declared that it would be beneath his dignity to

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defend him self before this court. He merely demanded an acquittal. H e thus refrained from the actual delivery of a speech for the defence whose contents were already known to each m ember o f the ju ry . Even in cold print, however, the revolutionary impetus, the political fire, of this oration are irresistible. “ O n M arch 18th the people of Berlin fought for and won the constitutional State. The principle of this State is th a t therein the will of the m onarch is no longer supreme, for it is the expression of the general mind, of the aggregate popular will. In a constitutional State, the electors, the electoral class, are the real rulers. “For example, the order th at the N ational Assembly was to be suspended and to be banished to Brandenburg was a flagrant violation of public right ! W hat will th at m an in the gown over there, the public prosecutor, the official guardian of the law, have to say against this assertion? Not a word, I fancy! Gould the crown, without any breach of public right, having removed the Assembly from Berlin to Branden­ burg, have transferred it thence to Elberfeld, from Elberfeld to Danzig, and so, and so on, keeping it perm anently and instructively on the move from one Prussian fortress to another? Could this, I say, have been done without any infringem ent of public right? “But when the Assembly’s sense of honour awakened in an appeal to the m ilitia, a dissolution followed. The ministry ordered the m ilitia of Berlin to stop the sittings of the N ational Assembly by force. I f in France during the days of the greatest abasement such an order had been issued to the Parisian N ational G uard, by God I believe th at the most pacific of small shopkeepers would have become lion-hearted and would have sworn th at nothing but blood could wash out such an affront. “ Freedom of the press and the right of public meeting, both of which have been guaranteed for all tim e by the law of April 6th, these fundam ental popular rights were done away with. Therewith legally guaranteed freedom has been

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confiscated. By w hat right can these rights be abolished? By w hat right can the laws which guarantee them be sus­ pended? A law can only be abrogated by another law. “Nevertheless, the Assembly was dissolved. Then, instead of summoning a new Assembly as directed by the before mentioned electoral law, the authorities proceeded to violate the constitution. T hat is to say they destroyed the entire basis of public right, the legal organism of the country being, as it were, slowly broken on the wheel, one limb after another, one law after another, being shattered into fragments. The whole constitutional system was thrown on to the scrap-heap and replaced by a ‘thus do I will, and thus do I order* backed up by the eloquence of bayonets. This is high treason pushed to its utm ost and most terrible extreme, high treason at its greatest conceivable perfection. W hat does the throne care for these pitiful m atters of law and constitution? If it had not right on its side, it had something better. In Berlin, a state of siege had been declared ; in Berlin was W rangel, with a force of sixty thousand soldiers under his command, and with cannons galore. In Breslau, in M agdeburg, in Cologne, in Düsseldorf, there were so many soldiers, so many big guns. These are convincing reasons, reasons which every one can understand. “ The passive resistance of the N ational Assembly (this much we must concede to our adversaries), the passive resistance of the N ational Assembly was certainly a crime. Either the crown was right in the measures it adopted, and in th at case the N ational Assembly was nothing more than a mob of seditious agitators and disturbers of the peace; or else the measures adopted by the crown were illegal acts of violence, and in th at case the liberties of the people should have been supported actively, by persons willing to stake their bodies and their lives. In th at case the rem arkable discovery of passive resistance was a cowardly betrayal of the people, a base abandonm ent of the duty of the assembly to protect the rights of the people. “ Passive resistance, gentlemen, is self-contradictory; it is tolerant resistance, a non-resistant resistance, a resistance

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which is no resistance at all. Passive resistance is like Lichtenberg’s knife which had no handle and of which the blade had been lost ; it is like a hide which you w ant to wash w ithout wetting it ; it is a malevolent inner will which finds no issue in action. “ The N ational Assembly legalised the revolution and desired the revolution ; but at the same tim e the Assembly wanted to be assured against a possible failure of the revolu­ tion, and was unwilling to accept responsibility for the revolution. There you have the secret of passive resistance. “Why, then, since the authorities were determ ined to create rightfor themselves exclusively by artilleryfire, did they not simply dissolve the m ilitia without giving any further reason? “Because, although the sword is the sword, it is never itself the embodiment of right. Judges who should consent to punish citizens for wishing to defend the laws, and should justify such punishm ent in the name of the very laws to whose defence the accused parties had devoted themselves ; judges who should condemn a nation for the crime of defend­ ing its laws—such judges I could no longer regard as judges, but only as the eunuchs of authority. “ I would rather endure in prison everything which the sword, desecrating the forms of law, may hang over me, I would rather bear th at this trial should have the most disastrous consequences for me, than myself play any p art in the legalist farce which the apostles of arbitrary force have staged. Prussia is the first country in the world in which the citizens have been outraged by summoning them in the capacity of jurym en to act as accomplices of a government hostile to the people. In Rhenish Prussia, since M arch 1848, though there have been numberless political trials, there has not been a single condemnation. “My person, however, is to be offered up. As the arm our of a w arrior is pierced by arrows, so am I by crim inal prosecutions. Even though, having right on my side, I have been able to shatter three such prosecutions like glass, I cannot expect to be able to do this with a dozen more. “My speech is not intended to w ard off this miserable

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accusation, which can be annihilated in three words. I shall be proud to have been one of the November prisoners ; but it was my duty to disclose the wounds of the fatherland, and to accuse those who daily and shamelessly are committing crimes against her. “ O ur vengeance will be as complete as our disgrace has been!’* Never before, and hardly ever again, did Lassalle’s revo­ lutionary impetus find such resonant, supple, logical, and crystal-clear utterance. There is storm in this speech ; there are bayonet thrusts. I t is m ilitary music played between battles, an overwhelmingly powerful effort of political prose. Here for the last tim e did the revolution find its own voice, speaking through the m outh of a m an twenty-three years of age ! The public prosecutor’s reply to this defence was a demand for a sentence of five years* imprisonment. The ju ry ’s answer to this defence was a verdict of not guilty. Lassalle is exultant. He demands to be set at liberty instantly. But the authorities, having him , hold him fast. For some trifling offence he is still kept in prison. His m outh is stopped. His demands to be set at liberty are rejected. O n M ay 19th the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung’’ had been suppressed and M arx had been expelled from Prussia; on May 20th Countess H atzfeldt was arrested, this closing Lassalle’s last m outh. During the bloody days of May he was behind prison bars. The authorities wanted to protect themselves against him, but they protected him against himself. By preventing his participation in the final disturbances, they saved him. All his fellow-revolutionists compromised themselves, were arrested, shot, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, or chased abroad ; whereas Lassalle, when in Ju ly he was at length liberated on bailÿ was no longer able to make his way into the battlefield of the revolution, but only into its graveyard. The rebels were in Switzerland, in England, in Belgium,

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in the U nited States. The scattered rem nants of the defeated revolutionary arm y could only reassemble as groups o f refugees in Zurich, London, Brussels, and W ashington. The dialectic of history had brilliantly confirmed itself in the person of Lassalle, its disciple. From fear and caution they had laid him by the heels, and thereby they had raised up against themselves the fiercest of their enemies. In the M ay struggles the victors had made prisoners, and now they gave their captives short shrift. D rum head courts-m artial were at work. A couplet of the day commemorated the slaughter of “Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz, and Blum” . Lassalle was the last of the Mohicans. I f in M ay he had been given the key o f the streets, he would soon have been a refugee in Geneva or London, or would have fallen in a street fight, or would have been sentenced to death by courtm artial. T h at would have been the end of “the rebel F. L .” Now he was at liberty, but liberty itself had been shot down. H e was free to take up Countess H atzfeldt’s cause once more, but thenceforward trials would be settled in accordance with the law of the reaction. Lassalle was free, but his freedom was rendered nugatory in the simplest possible way. He was harassed by incessant prosecutions. A police court sentenced him to six m onths’ imprisonment. H ardly a week passed without the failure of one of the countess’ trials. The reaction was taking its revenge. Defeat followed hard on the heels of defeat. The people had been routed in a pitched battle, and Lassalle had to pay. I t seemed to him th at the cause was lost. “A continuance of legal proceedings will be futile. As the courts of justice are at present constituted, we cannot get justice without a revolution. If there is a revolution, however, we shall have no need of legal proceedings. One or two more such years as this, my dear Paul, and your m other will be in her grave. I have sworn th at your m other shall have her rights. But where is it w ritten th at these rights are to be secured in the law courts? O f course, if our judges were even moderately

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just, th at would be the most natural and the simplest way. Since justice is bought and sold, I must seek other means. All roads lead to Rome. If I cannot get through the wall I shall have to go round it. In a word, I am weary of seeing your m other slowly m urdered. I have almost made up my mind to accept a pitiful compromise. I shall be prepared to make the best of the terms which Ammon recently offered in the count’s name. I hope he will keep to them . “ See w hat you can do about it. “The sooner the arrangem ents for a compromise can be setded, the better. Even if the conditions should seem absolutely outrageous, do not finally break off the negotia­ tions.” He is at the end of his resources. Ferdinand is the last of the Mohicans. He is ready to accept defeat. Sophie von H atzfeldt is done for, is cold-shouldered by good society, is shunned. From Vienna comes a terrible letter from Mendelssohn, whom Lassalle has regarded as his best friend : “ It is inscribed in the book of fate th at you are to destroy yourself and your associates !” Ferdinand is in despair. The countess is an outcast. His political friends are in exile. Mendelssohn has fled to Turkey, to perish somewhere on the Persian frontier. The last th at Ferdinand, whose victim he is, hears from him runs as follows : “ I am off to the foot of M ount A rarat, to die there in my youth, abandoned by the whole world, breathing my last breath in a hole like a dog” . The outcast, the defeated, makes approaches towards others who are outcast and defeated. Ferdinand applies for admission to the Communist League. His offer of his person and his energies is regarded with suspicion. His application for membership is rejected on the ground th at he “still cherishes aristocratic principles, and is not so enthusiastic as he ought to be on behalf of the general welfare of the workers” . Small fry felt uneasy in Lassalle’s company, and they

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dignified their discomfort by calling it a lack of confidence in him. For the day in 1851 when Lassalle was to be discharged from prison he had invited the communist Bürgers to drink with him to the speedy coming of the red republic. Bürgers declined the invitation and m ounted the high horse. “The red republic ! Yes, there is the ground on which we 'm ight join hands. The red republic—for us this means the coming of communism, at one stroke, without transi­ tion, for we leave half-measures to our adversaries. The red republic—this implies the strictest party organisation, the most unconditional self-denial, the most thorough going subordination to the logical consequences of our principles. In face of the red republic there must be an end to all separate desires on the p art of the intelligentsia, all lust for dominion, all the privileges of personality. Do you w ant the red republic? Very well, then, you must show us th at you are prepared to fulfil the conditions necessary for our acceptance of you as one of ourselves.” Bürgers, whose foolish vanity had been wounded because Lassalle regarded his own discharge from prison as good gfbund for a celebration, received a rem arkable answer to the foregoing effusion. “The red republic, you declare, implies the strictest party organisation, the most unconditional self-denial, and so on, and so on. No one can read thus far without asking himself why such self-evident things should need to be said. M any may excel me in many things, but no one will ever excel me in faithfulness to my principles, or in self-denial in respect of my convictions and my party. You ought to know this better than any one else. But soon your letter becomes even more outspoken. The sentence which ends with a question-mark, ‘Do you w ant the red republic?’ is, to say the least of it, an affront. So long as any one avows a principle and belongs to a party, and so long as his actions do not in any way conflict with this, no one is entitled to doubt or to question whether this principle be really his principle. But put me aside ! You write : ‘Show us th at you are prepared to fulfil the conditions

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necessary for our acceptance of you as one of ourselves.* To whom am I to show this? Who are the ‘us’ of whom you speak? Have you a m andate from others? Who has com­ missioned you? O r are you speaking to me as the chief and the grand m aster of a party speaks to a neophyte?” There are still a few communists in western Germany. Not enough of them to make a revolution, but enough of them to suspect one another and to calum niate one another. After the m anner of failures, they look for excuses. They try to justify themselves by blam ing others. They are desperate, and they show their teeth. Lassalle humbles him self more than he finds easy in a renewed application for adm ittance to the Communist League. Fruitlessly, once more. They don’t w ant him. His situation is most distressing. He applies everywhere, and is met everywhere by the same rebuff. The revolutionist, the victor in a dozen trials, the defender of the revolution, is in the same position as was ten years ago the lad at the Leipzig Commercial Academy. He is isolated, and thrust back upon himself. H e is equally denounced by the authorities and by the rebels. H e is surrounded by a palisade of suspicion. W ith a trifling variation, one m ight repeat of him w hat Schiebe remarked in August 1841 : “was respected neither by the reaction nor by the revolution” . He is done for. He had enthusiastically described M arx as the “M arat of our revolution” ; but Engels had w ritten sarcastically to M arx about “His Excellency Ephraim Gescheidt” . In speeches, protests, and petitions, he had espoused the cause of Freiligrath ; in return Freiligrath had mocked at the “public washing of dirty linen” in the H atzfeldt trials. His “dearest friend” had perished on the Persian frontier. Everything seemed to have crumbled in his hands. He had but one friend left, Sophie von Hatzfcldt. K

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T he two outcasts, the two degraded, the two despised and rejected, turned to one another for support. H ere was Lassalle’s last prop. Sophie was m other, refuge, peace, rest. She was his vindication, and he was hers. He was her knight, her saviour, the support of her advancing years. He was her “dear child’*; she was his “good and gracious lady” . Each consoled the other ; each gathered strength from the other. By giving one another renewed courage, they fortified their own powers of resistance. Both of them hated defeat even more than death, and both o f them had a keen love of life. In February 1850, Sophie at length secured her divorce; yet this was far from being a victory. She was not rehabilitated because a m arriage which had long since ceased to exist in fact had now ceased to exist in law. The countess still had occasion to deplore the ambiguity of her position. Ferdinand wrote her a letter of six-and-thirty pages, referred to Schlegel’s Lucinde, buttressed the tottering walls of her self-confidence, filled the breaches with the sandbags of his eloquence. Once he got fairly started, there came a flux of words, images, similes, hyperboles; his courage had returned ; he was again young, elastic, inviolable. “Thus it was, M adame, th at you found your three musketeers. Nor was it a m atter of indifference or of chance th at these were not three frivolous or subordinate or rom antic individuals. Those who espoused your cause were three per­ sons in the prim e of early manhood, in comfortable circum­ stances, an assistant judge, a physician, and a philosopher, standing at the highest level of intellectual culture and wisdom. “This greatest m ental achievement of yours, Madame, this discovery by you of the three musketeers, is an achievement which it seems to me you have never sufficiently appraised, one to which you have never given its due worth as a proof of your own competence. This achievement was a demon­ stration of your power.”

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He extols the countess as a pioneer worker in the cause of the em ancipation of women. He declares th at the legal proceedings she has taken against the count are the prologue to women’s enfranchisement. In Ems, in Schlangenbad, and in W ildbad, she is frowned on by good society but he interprets the signs of contem pt as signs of fear and adm iration. The countess thanks him : “Believe me, dear child, th at if I continue to voice so m any complaints regarding your mistakes in daily life, there is nevertheless no one who does more justice than I to your great qualities, and no one who is prouder of them than I am .” She obeys him, and allows herself to be led by him. Still, she moderates his impetuosity, she makes him tone down his crazy and ill-bred behaviour. She bridles him. H er social training enables her to make an impression upon him. She teaches him how to curb his impulses, to behave more coolly and more like a m an of the world. She helps him to m ute his thrillest tones. She does her utm ost to eradicate the traces of his all-too-obvious petty-bourgeois origin. In the society of this lady, who is in very tru th a woman of strong affections and is brilliantly cultivated, the unhappy arrogance of the spoiled Breslau upstart is tempered. Sophie and Ferdinand live under the same roof. The salon of the princess, who is the daughter of a distinguished diplomat and the granddaughter of an incredibly wealthy territorial magnate, adjoins the study of the lawyer, who is the son of a Breslau m erchant and the grandson of Feitel Beraun from the ghetto at Loslau. It need hardly be said th at gossip is rife. How easy for spiteful tongues to say th at this woman of many troubles who has divorced her husband is living on intim ate terms with her lawyer. The scandalmongers, however, merely showed their poverty of im agination when they used the relationship between the m an of twenty-five and the woman of forty-five as an illustration to the dictum : “For a cit, a princess is never more than thirty years of age” . Some jailbird or other, seeking to curry favour, bore

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witness in court to the im propriety of Lassalle's relationships with the countess, b u t he injured the cause he thought he was serving by the prom pt addition: “ The workers con­ sidered him an egoist, and abused him as a Jew ” . Lassalle, in fact, proved invulnerable. He was able to revenge himself for having been clapped into prison in 1849 instead of being allowed to take p art in w hat was going on outside. In 1851 the victorious reaction devoted itself to making a clean sweep of the vestiges of rebellion. The small fry of the Communist League were arrested and p u t on trial. Lassalle, instead of bearing a grudge for earlier mortifica­ tions, gave all the help he could. He supplied funds, enabled suspects to keep out of the way, assisted escapes across the frontier. In O ctober 1852 there began in Cologne the great trial of the communists, in which the victors punished the van­ quished with six years* imprisonment for merely having been defeated, for no other crime than th at of having got the worst of it. O ne m an, however, had given the victors the go by— Lassalle. He was not a member of the Communist League, and for this he had to thank the m istrust of the would-begreat, of those who were no more than “ the tombstones on the graves of great men” . These lesser party magnates knew only too well th at Lassalle would hold sway over them, so for the time being they assumed a hectoring tone towards him. They did not w ant him. He remained the public advocate of an oppressed woman and the private advocate of an oppressed class. He went on losing trials, but he no longer lost courage. He was chosen, he was reserved for great things. After each reverse, he collected his forces for a fresh onslaught. In the police records we read th at he “ by his exceptional intellectual capacity, his fascinating eloquence, his unwearied activity, and his resoluteness, is fitted to be the chief leader of the revolutionary party in Rhenish Prussia” .

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The police kept an eye on his correspondence, set spies to watch his house, did him all possible honour, sent a report to Berlin concerning “a feast fit for a Lucullus” at which the countess had entertained a num ber of proletarians, stating th at at the end of the banquet the hostess had declared th at her guests m ight fare sumptuously like this every day if only the goods of the earth were equitably distributed. Having nosed about to find further m aterials for a report to headquarters, the police wrote th at a deputation of workers had given a copy of Platen’s poems to Lassalle, “ the indefatigable champion of the cause of the workers” . He was, in fact, the last and the most dangerous of these champions. He was the centre of a circle ready to commit outrages, b u t not doing anything for the moment ! The police, on the other hand, did too much ! T heir actions were eminently calculated to bring Lassalle into touch w ith the proletariat and the proletariat into touch with Lassalle. Through the press organs in their pay they agitated on behalf of the future agitator. Thanks to their foolish and spiteful intrigues, the house of Lassalle became the first home of refuge for any persecuted proletarian. In 1854 they reported to Berlin that, the successful issue of the H atzfeldt trial having put the control of great possessions into the hands of Lassalle, it m ight be expected th at his ideas concerning property would undergo a considerable change. Then these same police were idiots enough to describe it as “an almost inexplicable fact” th at the countess and Lassalle were “still keeping up a close intim acy with persons belonging to the working class” . This was absurd, for, when in 1854 the “compromise” with Count H atzfeldt was effected, Ferdinand had long since become something much more than the general plenipo­ tentiary of a divorced lady fighting for a few hundred thousand talers; he had become the unchallenged leader of the workers on the lower Rhine. He was no longer waiting for the revolution. From the sphere of conspiracy and of playing at revolution, he had returned to the sphere of Heraclitus.

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In the summer of 1854, the eight years* war had come to an end. Independence had been gained by the winning of three hundred thousand talers. Nevertheless, the victors were hard to distinguish from the vanquished. “To-day, dear child, on my birthday (which I am spending quite alone), I have cut off a lock of perfectly white hair, and have been hunting everywhere for a locket in which to send it to you, to keep you in perpetual remembrance of how old I am, how much I have suffered, and how much sympathy and consideration I have a right to expect.” A victress holds a melancholy celebration, by cutting her first lock of white hair. A jubilee harvest ! Lassalle, having had a theoretical course of Hegel, has now enjoyed a practical course of Wrangel. He did not forget the teaching of these years. Politics is not the handm aiden of metaphysics. The practical politician prefers ballistics to logic. Big guns are stronger than premisses. Lassalle has been taught by experience. Like every one who has noticed th at the intellect can look backward but not forward, th at it is able to compose epilogues b u t cannot make trustw orthy prophecies, he has become modest and humble. Life cannot be regulated in advance upon philosophical principles. The m an who in boyhood had boasted himself the heir of the experiences of two thousand years, has learned scepticism from the experience of one year, the year 1849. W rangel’s artillery fire has taught the abiturient of the school of God the A B C of history—unreason, to wit. He has won a trial, but has lost numberless illusions. Now peace has been signed. The balance-sheet of a decade. Revision of all properties. Breathing-time in which to think things over.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

IN TERM EZZI As soon as the terms of peace have been dictated to the count, the two allies are eager to get away from Düsseldorf. There is no longer any reason for staying in th at town. The peace has rendered the occupation of these headquarters superfluous. While the countess is taking the waters in Ems and M arienbad, Lassalle contemplates a removal to Berlin. The return to his Heraclitus is a return to youth. T he battle­ fields on which the Heraclitus struggle must be fought out are not law courts, prisons, penitentiaries, but the lecture theatres, the libraries, and the drawing-rooms of Berlin. H e yearns for Berlin. He is restless. T he countess complains of his irritability. “Don’t drive your white niggers so hard !” she writes. She wants rest and a quiet life. She is sick of the Eroica and craves for the Pastoral. Lassalle, who is pining for a change, for a new wind, fresh fields, unfam iliar conditions, raises a commotion in heaven and hell in order to get back to Berlin. The countess understands his longing, and to some extent shares it while deploring it. “Now you w ant to move to Berlin. T h at is perfectly explicable to me, and I, too, should like you to go. Yet I contem plate it with trem bling, for I am afraid th at (unless I am a t your shoulder to watch and to warn) you will lack discretion. As for myself, I am under no illusions ; I shall certainly not be able to come thither.” She feels th at dark forces are gaining power over him ; she suspects th at the insipidity and quietude of his present existence are fostering long-repressed and weakened germs. She knows th at her mere presence is enough to m oderate his eccentricities, to smooth out his kinks ; and she is convinced th at her perseverance can strengthen his. Yet she realises th at in the end she must lose him ; she feels already, and will feel yet more keenly in days to come, the pangs of the m other whose son is breaking away from her.

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“When I spoke of a separation, I was not so much thinking of your journey to Berlin as of a more general impression which I cannot describe otherwise than as the feeling of a m other who has to cut her son adrift and who watches him go forth into the world. Even though he be an affectionate son, so th at he often turns back to wave his hand to his m other, nevertheless, the natural course of events sweeps him onward and ever farther away from her.** In April 1855, Ferdinand visits Berlin, to see his father and his brother-in-law ; b u t in M ay he returns to Düsseldorf, for the chief of police in the Prussian capital is better acquainted with the dossier of the suspect Lassalle than with the frag­ ments of the ancient Heraclitus ; and, while doubtless assured as to the innocuousness of the long-decayed philosopher, may well have his doubts as to the harmlessness of the youthful m an of learning, who is very much alive and kicking. Since the king was notoriously feeble-minded, it would obviously be inexpedient to allow so strong-minded a demo­ crat to take up his quarters in Berlin. Assiduously, however, Lassalle continues his wooing of the chief of police. U nfortunately the sweetest of strains, the most childlike asseverations of innocence, the most courte­ ously worded promises of good behaviour, fall on deaf ears. A cat which has not been able to leave the mice alone in Düsseldorf, is likely to continue mouse-hunting after a removal to Berlin. Berlin remains obdurate. Lassalle does not take the rebuff easily, and grows more and more restless. Peccadilloes which he seemed to have got the better of, crop up once more. He spends lavishly, he eats and drinks too luxuriously, puts on airs, bestows costly gifts. He specu­ lates wildly on the stock exchange. Home affairs, the vicissi­ tudes of the Crimean war, and so on, instead of being exploited for revolutionary purposes, are considered with regard to the effect they are likely to have on the money m arket. These gambling raids give him relief from inertia, provide

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the sense of friction he needs if he is to feel thoroughly alive. The hero of thirty-six trials dissipates his energies on the bourse. This is the ebb tide. The Hatzfeldt trial is finished. The revolutionary move­ m ent has slackened off. His hopes have proved futile. Except for a few unim portant details, his Heraclitus is finished. He is at a loose end. The days follow one another tediously, flowing in a wellworn bed. His passions are being lulled into slumber. Instead of overturning thrones, he is clipping coupons off bonds. To escape from these shallows, from this inertia, he hurls him self into a love affair. In May 1855, Franz Liszt visits Düsseldorf, and Lassalle makes the acquaintance of one of Liszt’s favourite pupils, a beautiful young woman named Agnes Denis-Street. She was the daughter of George Klindworth, one of the last of the great European adventurers, perhaps the most disreputable among the secret agents of European diplomacy. Gentz had been an extremely elegant perform er in the same ’ field. K lindworth could not, of course, compete with Gentz in charm, but, incredible as it may seem, he actually excelled Gentz in covetousness. By turns, Klindworth had been schoolmaster, actor, third-rate theatrical m anager, and shady journalist. He knew the world. He was as fam iliar with the art of make­ up as with the art of lying. Consequently, he was well fitted for the work of congresses. As a schoolmaster, he had learned writing, reading, and arithm etic ; as an actor, he had learned how to bluff; as theatrical exploiter, he had learned how to cheat; and finally, as journalist, he had learned how to wash dirty linen in printer’s ink. From 1820 onwards he washed dirty linen for the kings of Europe. He became washerman to the Alliance which passed by the name of Holy and therefore could not afford to go dirty.

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He had the title of councillor of State and owned a huge mansion in Paris ; but he washed also for Brunswick, Vienna, and Stuttgart. He spoke of th at as “polishing-up the halo o f the Alliance” . This was a euphemism for very dirty work indeed. All the world mistrusted him ; all the world deemed him capable of every treason, every baseness, every indiscretion. Still, since no one believed a single word he said, his rascalities harm ed no one. People did not like associating with him, and yet they associated with him because he was indispen­ sable. He knew all secrets, and disclosed them all. H e was always able to procure the best information. Serving all States indifferently, he was able in every case to turn this service to his own account. People needed him, and the more they needed him the better they paid him. He knew the smells of all the private kitchens of Europe ; he was a liliputian M etternich; he was the Talleyrand of the back stairs; he tasted the food before it was ladled out to the nation. His charm ing daughter Agnes sometimes helped him in his work. Liszt, who was easily enthralled, taught her the piano and love. She learned th at in music there are numerous tones, and she guessed th at love likewise could be played in many different ways. Liszt taught her only a few of them, only the melancholic-romantic. Subsequently, by diligent practice, she became, not only an expert pianist, b u t also an expert in the game of love. Lassalle stormed a fortress which was ready to capitulate, and while waiting for a rise in the stock m arket was able to enjoy a rise in the tem perature of his feelings. The pretty little secret agent supplied him with both inform ation and sensations. He kept the latter to himself, for which no one will blame him. The information, however, he passed on, partly to K arl M arx, and partly to his banker—which was not altogether playing the game. He speculated simultaneously in commun­ ism and capitalism. Like a trick rider in the circus rather

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than a m an of character, he rode two horses at once, a white one and a black. For the rest, every frank politician will agree th at this riding of two horses simultaneously is a favourite “num ber” in the political circus of our own day. He rode the horse of love with especial delight. Lucky in love, he was by no means inclined to be unlucky as a game* ster. T h at was why he took care to glean all the information he could from Agnes. The councillor of State, who in the diplomatic field behaved like a souteneur, and was correspondingly diplom atic when acting prim arily as a souteneur, had a gargantuan appetite for money, which the countess and Lassalle did their best to satisfy. His m outh was always open wide. Beautiful Agnes stayed with Lassalle while the countess was visiting spas. She even went with him to Bonn w ithout showing any jealousy of her rival, Heraclitus by name, with whom Lassalle had frequent assignations a t the library. Agnes, whose business (from her father’s point of view) was to extract information from Lassalle concerning the refugees in London, got from him something outside her commission—a baby. When the child died of teething convulsions, she wrote to little Fernande’s father an urgent request for money for the burial. In this case she strictly fulfilled her commission. She subsequently lived in Brussels, and disappeared from Ferdinand’s ken. Once more Ferdinand was at a loose end. W ith increasing irritability, he felt th at his energies were running to waste. He was thirty-one years of age, he still had measureless tasks to perform, b u t he was unable to make a beginning. To go on living in Düsseldorf m eant to go on breathing the dust which eight years of battle had stirred up, m eant to go on living at the end of things, to go on playing the underling as gatherer of information for M arx, to rem ain man-of-all-work to Countess Hatzfeldt, to be the hireling of a revolution which was indefinitely postponed, to fritter

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away his existence am id the petty destinies of a one-horse provincial town. His nervous irritability grew with his growing dissatis­ faction. This unequally m atched pair had been brought together by the need for making onslaughts, by the need for overcoming difficulties, and the need no longer existed. There was a danger th at two strong temperaments, two despotic natures, would come into collision when there were no outside enemies to subdue. To add to his troubles, an affection of the eyes now inter­ fered with his studies. Whenever Lassalle became excited, his eyes became bloodshot, and this sign of strong emotion had often done him good service both in prison and in the law courts. He would appear furious with w rath when, w ith his mane of curly hair disordered, w ith gesticulating hands, and w ith suffused eyes, he was defending his cause. But this eye trouble, which was an incontestable advantage to him as a pleader, was a great drawback to him in a sedentary life. I t interfered with the finishing of his Heraclitus. Gambling on the stock exchange m ight satisfy moneygrubbers and camp-followers, but he soon tired of it. Finan­ cial speculators were a gang of tim id hares, always on the watch to see w hat the big financier was doing, buying when he bought and selling when he sold, panic-stricken when a minister of State went down with influenza, or rushing off to their broker’s to buy stock because a ruling prince had issued a decree. No doubt the stock exchange was a great power, but its understrappers disgusted him by their impotence. Lassalle knew th at battles in the money m arket, like all other battles, are fought and won by a few generals, and th at the lesser men on the stock exchange are merely the private soldiers with whose blood the great ones win their victories. The petty bankers do but m arch to and fro under the supervision of the great ones ; they are the non-commissioned officers of the moneyed army. Thus while in im agination Lassalle could play with huge masses of money, could move his troops hither and thither,

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concentrating them here and scattering them there, could enjoy the illusion of power by reckoning in magnificent figures and picturing fabulous gains—whenever he awakened to reality, he was enraged at the paltriness of his winnings and his losses, at the utter ineffectiveness of his campaign. His carefully planned schemes would come to naught because, at some idiotic dinner, a courtier had uttered a few rough words which some m inister for foreign affairs had been able to con­ strue as a threat. W hat decided the movements of the money m arket was not so much great political issues as the caprices of the persons upon whom great political issues turned. He was put out of hum our by the subordinate and depen­ dent position of the stock exchange, and he was still more annoyed to find th at his losses greatly exceeded his gains. H e was being bled, and he found the process extremely disagreeable. Lassalle dream ed of power, but his speculations were im potent; the illusion of power fevered his senses, but Düsseldorf was kindly to no other illusions than those of a w ar memorial. His only resource was to wander about the precincts of the law court and stare at the doors leading into the clerks* rooms—the mausoleum of the H atzfeldt trial. T he law courts ! They were the Beresina, the Leipzig, and the Waterloo of Count H atzfeldt and his clique. Lassalle was not old enough to intoxicate him self with the glories of past battlefields. T h at was over and done with. Only w hat works is. Only the struggle is real. But there is no struggle ! He breaks away, wanders, travels. He accompanies the countess to Vevey. He rages and storms as he goes about with her. In low spirits he makes his way to Prague, to have a talk with his parents; there he finds his brother-in-law Friedland, about to visit the East. Impulsively he decides to go too. W ithout any proper equipm ent and without sufficient funds, following a whim of the moment, he undertakes the journey, improvises the adventure.

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The Crimean w ar is over, and he has an itch to see the latest battlefield on which freedom has fallen. The visit to Turkey is, in a sense, a visit to the cemetery of his dead illusions. T he optimist Lassalle had had extravagant hopes of Turkey and has now to learn th at the sick m an on the Bosphorus is in even worse case than the sick m an on the Neva. He sets off down the Danube, speeded on his way by his father’s kindly thoughts. “Especially, my dear son-in-law, I shall hold you responsible for exercising, not merely fraternal, but also paternal, care, and for seeing to it th at Ferdinand is properly clothed, for in these m atters he is careless, not to say unhandy. Don’t forget to see th at he has warm socks, overshoes, warm trousers. Don’t let him leave valuables lying about in the hotel; and since Ferdinand is so unpractical as to carry his pocket-book in his tail-coat pocket, where other men carry their handkerchief, I must ask you to make sure th at he doesn’t.—The stock exchange, where till recently all the values were falling terribly, is recovering. I ’ve had a long letter from the countess; I ’m terribly sorry for the poor woman. W rite to her, Ferdinand, and try to reassure her, for she is much concerned because you have started off without a fur coat, without bedding, without a tent, and without any warm clothes, and also because, in general, when you are travelling, you do not know how to look after yourself. Let me remind you th at I w ant you to bring me back a bagful of earth from Jerusalem , from the place where the temple of Solomon stood.” Lassalle journeys through Serbia and Roumania. The nearer he comes to the homeland of his race, the more does he find th at the Jews are stately, of striking appearance, and ceremonious in their ways. The members of this tribe which is everywhere persecuted, which elsewhere has been barely tolerated, become free and self-reliant when they breathe the air of their ancient home. He is reminded of his youth. This coming into touch once more with manners and customs he has abandoned, with articles of faith he has long since repudiated, makes a

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strong impression on him. The fancy seizes him to visit a mosque. “How strange to hear the very same melodies which as a boy at home I had so often heard in the synagogue. The same rhythm , the same measure, the same nasal tone, now groaning and moaning, now wailing loudly and then dying away, now hurrying along through a great num ber of words and then pausing on particular passages with strange coloratur adornments and flourishes as the chanting ebbs and flows; indeed, as I have said, it is often precisely the same melody. Any of our Jews of the older generation could take up this cadence in sequence to the precentor without the Turks being able to notice any difference ! “Among the so-called howling dervishes, I saw exactly w hat I had seen in former days among our Jews. One mem­ ber of the congregation, especially pious or held in high esteem, would join in the precentor’s chant, following him in all the variations, and sometimes, in an access of religious fervour, drowning his voice. Among the dervishes I saw the same rocking to and fro with head and body th at I used to see among the Jews at home. And when, at length, in one of the prayers, the congregation knelt and accompanied this action with words which came from deep down in the chest in a tone of profound lam entation to give expression to a shattering sense of sin, I could have believed myself in the great synagogue at Breslau, on the Day of Atonement, taking p art in the Abinu Malkenu. “H itherto I had always believed th at the religious melodies of our Jews had only come into being after the diaspora ; th at they had been a product of th at tastelessness, that corruption and distortion, which are apt to ensue when a people robbed of its independence has to drag out a pitiful existence under the rule of foreign oppressors. “ One need merely come here to be set right upon this point. These are the prim al religious melodies of ancient Asia; they are songs preserved by petrifaction! They are not simply Jewish, but have the general character of the old Semitic religious songs of Asia. It was one of these psalms

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which David sang when he danced before the Ark. They give expression to the original religious consciousness of the Semites, to the religious philosophy peculiar to the Semitic tem peram ent, to the feeling of utter worthlessness and nullity, of overwhelming penitence and abasement. “Thus sang, thus groaned and howled, thus lam ented the Semite, and only the Semite, when intoxicated by the sense of his nothingness, his futility, his abjectness. “ Continuing their chant for three hours, the dervishes worked themselves into a frenzy in which, just like the members of our Jewish sect of the Hasidim, they could give themselves up to the free expression of religious ecstasy. Thereupon two of the dervishes, stripped to the waist, sprang forward, one of them leaping high into the air and clapping his hands, the other twisting his head and shaking his arms so violently th at it seemed he must be trying to detach them from his body. These two men, each of them taking a great iron-handled scourge consecrated by the m aster of the ceremonies, a scourge whose thongs were beset with heavy and spiked iron chains and balls, now began a course of self-flagellation.” Among these dervishes, watching manners and customs which are fam iliar to him , and surrounded by persons closely akin to him by blood, he completely fails to recognise how m uch of a dervish he is himself, how large a p art this ecstasy and this lust for self-abasement plays in his own composition. As he looks on, he thinks, sees, combines, interprets, and appraises as a German. He looks at these phenomena causally, and tries to explain them logically. He contemplates the bloodshot eyes of a flagellant, he sees a dancing dervish who is frenzied and foams at the mouth, and he utterly fails to recognise his own image, to discern the intim ate resemblance, to perceive in this other the copy of his own urge towards self-destruction, of his own inclina­ tion to run amuck. I t is amazing to watch the Semite Lassalle, who is so obviously endowed with all the merits and all the defects of his race, wandering among the Semites, coolly watching

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them, dispassionately taking note of their antics, honestly conceiving himself to be a stranger when he is in reality moving among his own brethren. Wearing, as he does, Hegel's spectacles, he fails to see th at he is contem plating himself when he is looking at these others. This journey, which ought to have led him to himself, leads him away from himself, and he visits his home as if he were visiting a foreign land. He writes much about politics. Travelling through Hungary stimulates his hatred for A ustria; he compares the W allachians with the prole­ tarians of Germany, and is proud to be able to declare th at the latter excel greatly in respect of civilisation. He is much interested in the countries he visits and in the people he sees. Though he looks within as well as w ithout he is unable to perceive the likeness between the two pictures. “ In my case, as you know, there is a strange coincidence between tem peram ent and destiny, so th at I always w ant to begin and have to begin at the difficult end. Thus when learning Greek, I began with Sophocles; when studying philosophy, I began with Hegel's Phenomenology ; I learned the law by taking p art in actual legal proceedings—and in like m anner I made my first sea voyage on the Black Sea, the roughest of all, and did this in October, the season when the weather is at its stormiest.” When Asia opens before his gaze, he defines Europe as the land of history and Asia as the land of saga. He fails to notice how much his own existence resembles th at of one of the heroes of mythology. In Smyrna he thinks of Ephesus, the birthplace of H era­ clitus ; and in Egypt he thinks of the Caesars, not of Moses, who led the Jewish people out of the captivity. In a boat on the Nile he meditates on the days of the Pharaohs, not upon the sighs of the Jewish bondslaves. T he stones of Egypt speak to him of the cult of Isis, of the campaign of Alexandria, and of the eagles of M ark Antony. Wherever he goes, he writes detailed reports to the countess. They exchange frequent letters. She tells him her troubles, he tells her his enjoyments. Both adm it a longing

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for one another, and both of them find pretentious names for this longing. Recalled by Sophie, Ferdinand drives post-haste from Triest to Laibach, and then takes the train to Breslau, where he arrives on New Year’s Eve. M other Rosalie brews punch with plenty of sugar and plenty of emotion, w hat time Ferdinand, himself apparently unmoved, shouts at the top of his voice in a vain endeavour to make her hear. She sits with a distressful smile watching her husband and her son as they talk about the stock market. Ferdinand sleeps in his old room, where he slept as a child. Very early on New Y ear’s Day the countess arrives. Ferdinand instantly becomes lively, attentive, eloquent, zealous. The two mothers sit beside one another ; the trouble of one of them is different from the trouble of the other, bu t the son of one of them is the son of the other. One of them is handsome and impressive, the other, commonplace and pitiful. Both of them, however, bear a burden of white hair ; and both of them , while wishing one another a happy New Year, have their gaze fixed on Ferdinand. To outw ard seeming they get on well enough with one another, the princess and the elderly Jewess. I t may well be th at their sentiments are much alike, th at both of them look upon this troublesome child of theirs with the same mixed feelings—a little pride, a little anxiety, a little passion­ ate affection, a little hope. Ferdinand sits beside Heymann, smoking like a chimney, and gesticulating as he prophesies the imminence of the revolution.

PART

TWO

In early youth I believed it was my vocation to become a great actor. Subsequently I came to see that I am predestined to play in life itself the part which I had wanted to play upon the stage. L assallb

CHAPTER

ONE

BERLIN ! In the early days of the year 1857 Lassalle visited Berlin on his way from Breslau to Düsseldorf. He thus recapitulates the phases of his life. In order to study Hegel, he had at the age of twenty removed from Breslau to B erlin; in order to help the persecuted and oppressed Countess Hatzfeldt he had left Berlin, the university, and society, for Düsseldorf. Being under the watchful eyes of the police and compelled to proceed with his journey, he stays only a few hours in Berlin. He finds, however, th at the East pales before the realities of this busy town. The splendour, the saga, and the farce of Asia M inor and of Egypt are but phantasm al vapour-wreaths when compared with the intense vigour of life in Berlin. The steady growth of the city enchants him ; its actuality, its brightness, its density of population allure him ; the atmosphere of the streets seems to him more nourishing than the balsamic odours of Cairo and Smyrna ; the sight of fam iliar houses stirs his emotions ; the thronged and cheerful life of the place fills him with enthusiasm ; U nter den Linden appears to him the very axis of the world. When, reluctantly and dispiritedly, he has to resume his journey, it is with an almost bodily pang th at he severs himself from Berlin. The Prussian capital is the centre of the circle, the place where the great decisions of the future will be made, and he is being forced away towards the circumference. Travelling westward to Düsseldorf, which for ten years has been his home, he has the impression of going into exile. Barely a fortnight can he endure life in this provincial town. The Rhine is the maelstrom whose waters flow down into the underworld, whereas the Spree is the midstream of the upper world. The Rhine writes “finis” under his plans, but the waters of the Spree bear up the ship of his hopes. He interprets his return to Düsseldorf as a retreat. He feels defeated for no other reason than because the winds

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o f life have blown him hither. His im aginary horizon has been formed by wide continents, and here he is shut in by the narrow prospects of a hole-and-corner place. W ith a tone of melancholy which is rare in him he writes to K arl M arx in London : “ I t is not you who are banished, but I ! M any of you there are old comrades in arms, many o f the same way of thinking are assembled in London ! W hilst I, all these years, have had to live so utterly alone, so com­ pletely cut off from my sometime comrades, the last o f the Mohicans as I once called myself in a fit of sentimentalism. Düsseldorf is a small place, devoid of intellectual capacity. For five months I have been travelling in the East—I wanted a breath of southern air to blow through my life. One who happens to have personal good luck can find there much more readily than among us, all the conditions requisite for individual happiness. But one for whom the historical struggle to establish a better civilisation has become a vital necessity can only breathe enduringly in our own sphere, despite police and persecution and all the rest of it.” Lassalle’s thoughts and dreams tu rn ever towards Berlin. Berlin is the centre of his plans. Berlin is his duty. H e is determ ined to go to Berlin. All his thoughts and all his energies circle round Berlin and impel him thither. Feverishly he pulls every possible string. The countess, whose sister is m arried to some cavalry officer or other of high rank who happens to be adjutantgeneral to His Majesty, is asked to pave the way for him . He writes in urgent terms : “Please do everything in your power to facilitate my remove to Berlin. I shall have finished Heraclitus by M arch 15th. Then, without loss of a day, I w ant to come to Berlin to arrange for the publication. I simply can’t endure staying here any longer and must get away. I am consumed with impatience to come to B erlin.” Almost daily he asks the countess to let him know how the affair is going on, gives her advice, orders her hither and thither, hunts her from one m inister of State to another. “Do wake up out of your lethargy and take action in the sense in which I understand the word. I w ant you to be

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able to tell me in your next letter th at you have at length taken six definite steps which, even though they should prove futile, should prove ineffective, will at least have been real, definite steps.’1 H e storms and threatens : “ Let me tell you beforehand th at if you w ant to make me postpone my departure from here, it is impossible. I shall leave as soon as I am ready, and not even a Demosthenes could persuade me to do anything else.” He fights for Berlin as if it were a m atter of life or death. His interm ediaries are making sallies in all directions. His father, the countess, his brother-in-law, who can dance attendance on this archduke or th at, lay siege to the authorities. While they thus make the running, Ferdinand sits in Düsseldorf burning the m idnight oil. He labours unceasingly, hurls himself upon the Heraclitus ; guards him self against the intrusion of new schemes ; works, writes, groans, slaves ; is convinced th at he is banned, despised, and rejected. O ne hope keeps him going, the hope of Berlin ! The countess pushes his cause with mixed feelings. H er position will become untenable as soon as Ferdinand moves to Berlin. His residence there will put an end to hers. Family considerations, and especially regard for her son, forbid their living in close proximity. She is too fam iliar with his disregard for scandalous tongues to believe his promises of discretion. She is sure, moreover, th at the consent of the police authorities to Lassalle's presence in Berlin can only be bought at the price of her absence. He has set her a hard task, and she does it with a mind tom in sunder. Every step she takes on his behalf helps to underm ine her own position. All the same, she hum bly and obediently fulfils the commands of her “dear child”—to earn as thanks the intolerable roughness and the uncontrolled irritation of his letters. During the first days of M arch Heraclitus is finished, except for a final revision, which Lassalle undertakes without a moment’s delay. W ithout a moment’s delay he sketches a plan for a great tragedy in verse and yet another plan for

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a book on political economy. He is overworked, so th at a balance never very stable is completely upset, and in his daily letters to the countess we note sudden transitions from tones o f w rath and defiance to pusillanimous whimperings. The solitude of his study induces claustrophobia ; and his persistent toil, rarely interrupted for sleep, though occasion­ ally broken off by a recurrence of his eye trouble, intensifies his irritability. O n M arch 19th the m anuscript of Heraclitus is ready for the press. The book has been finished eleven years later than the author had originally planned. Beneath the motto on the title-page stands the name of Hegel. It would have been more in conformity with tru th if he had chosen as motto the words “ Sophie H atzfeldt” . A decade of his life, from the tim e he was twenty to the time he was thirty, had been devoted to the task of fighting for this woman’s freedom ; during these ten years, the sixand-thirty trials had absorbed the energies which he had m eant to apply to philosophy. The history o f Hegelianism, the history of the philosophy of history, would have taken a different course had not Sophie H atzfeldt crossed the path of this student of Berlin. It was impossible for the m an to take up life now as a philosopher at the point where the student had laid it down. In the interim , “ Casket Lassalle” had passed through tremendous experiences. H e was not now a youth who had recently graduated, subm itting a work to the philosophical faculty in order to obtain permission to deliver lectures at the university; he was Countess H atzfeldt’s famous advocate, he was the notorious dem ocrat Lassalle, who had w ritten a philosophical treatise. Every one had long since pigeon-holed the m an. His doings were on record. No academic faculty could possibly examine his Heraclitus with an unprejudiced m ind. He had already been docketed. A few years as a student could not outweigh the Düsseldorf record. Lassalle was regarded as a lawyer whose strange hobby it

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was to dabble in learning and literature. For three years, indeed, he had been a casual student at Prussian universities, but for thrice three years he had been a fam iliar o f the Rhenish crim inal courts and prisons. The author o f Heraclitus was a m an with a past, and, although the book was brilliant enough, it was unlikely th at his future would be out of keeping with his past. The Berlin police, anyhow, being only interested in books which could be impounded as seditious, compared the weight of the blameless m anuscript of Heraclitus with the weight of “the Lassalle dossier” , and, since the latter was much heavier, decided to adopt an attitude of cautious reserve. Lassalle, nevertheless, keeps busy. He writes letters marked “ urgent” . I must come to Berlin. I must find a publisher. I must get my book published. Consequently I must come to Berlin. The greater the difficulties, the greater is his assiduity. He conceives the idea of getting him self elected to the Cham ber as representative for Düsseldorf, and thus securing access to the forbidden city. Chance comes to his aid. Some boxes of am m unition vanish while in transit by rail between E rfurt and Düssel­ dorf. The thoughts of the m inister for police at once tu rn to Lassalle, whose presence in Berlin m ight perhaps help the authorities to unravel the mystery of this theft. The great man had heard of the “casket thief”, and was a dab at reasoning by analogy. I f a thief is a dem ocrat, w hat is he likely to steal? W hat does a dem ocrat w ant? C artridges! Then he will steal cartridges. Lassaile’s chances are improving. He wants to come to Berlin to arrange for the publication of his Heraclitus. The police w ant him in Berlin because they think his presence there will help to throw light upon a theft of am m unition. A little misunderstanding ! Lassalle wants to come to Berlin to consult a specialist about his eyes. The police w ant him in Berlin in order th at all his doings may be under their eyes. A little misunder­ standing !

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The “chief rabbi of the public safety” , as Dohm of the “K ladderadatsch” has nicknamed Chief Commissioner of Police von Zedlitz-Neukirch, is ready to give Lassalle access to Berlin, thinking th at this will mean access to his private synagogue, which has thick walls and barred windows. The police are confident th at they will soon have him in their clutches. Zedlitz regards Lassalle as a novice who will occupy one of the cells in his tranquil home for penitents, and is willing to give this disturber of the peace an opportu­ nity of becoming yet more closely acquainted with the philosophy of Heraclitus the obscure in the dark recesses of a prison. But there is still a lion in Lassalle’s path—or, rather, a lioness. H er Majesty the Queen of Prussia considers herself the chief guardian of public morals. She is not so much con­ cerned about Lassalle’s having stolen a casket and cartridges, as about his having stolen Count H atzfeldt’s plaything. Since the queen has had to bear her husband’s imbecility, surely the countess m ight have borne the count’s whippings. A countess who had divorced her husband was bad enough, but a divorced countess who went on holding public converse with the hero of her divorce story, was insufferable. To crown all, this hero was a Jew , a democrat, a thief, a m an of low origin, a journalistic hack, a Breslau Cossack. She frowned upon the Hatzfeldt-Lassalle alliance with all the arrogance of a woman who plum ed herself on the conviction th at even a husband’s dem entia was no ground for the dissolution of a m arriage. T he upshot was th at Countess H atzfeldt left the capital, and a fortnight after his thirty-second birthday Ferdinand was granted permission for a six months’ stay in Berlin. W ith the utm ost speed, therefore, he had his books, his furniture, his clothing, and the contents of his wine-cellar packed. The head of the comet now shooting towards Berlin was followed by a huge tail of multifarious possessions. H e rented a first floor in the Potsdamer Strasse and dug him self in there, being determined to m aintain a position

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which had been won rather by craft than by force of arms. In his hunt for fame, he had three strings to his bow. W ithin a day or two after finishing Heraclitus he had penned the first act of Franz von Sickingen. Day by day, too, he read books on economics, making notes, collecting m aterial. Heraclitus is the philosophy of the revolution; Sickingen is to be the tragedy of revolution; the political economy will disclose the causality of the revolution. All his writings belong to the domain of science and phi* losophy. They deal with learning and literature, history, metaphysics, law, and logic. They all have a single aim, to justify revolution. For him the sciences are to be used as counsel for the defence of the revolution. His own path has been revolutionary, and he is ever seeking to establish his past upon a logical foundation. H e had fought on behalf of a distressed lady, but he assured him self and others th at “had she never existed, I should have found some other motive for displaying my hostility to the contem porary w orld” . He had an overwhelming confidence in the capacity of the sciences to establish conviction. He was cherishing a new illusion. H e was overestimating the power of doctrine. Having the intellect of a m an of genius, he was naturally inclined to overrate the force of intelligence. Boastfully, therefore, he made reason, which should have been his hand-m aiden, his goddess. The dictatorship of the sword was to be overcome by the dictates of science. Even artillery could be outfought by the data of research. U nder the spell of a new optimism he is convinced th at the laws of the State can be underm ined by the laws of science. Since the revolution has been defeated on the barricades, he will lead it to victory in books. But for him science is—Berlin. For him the State is—Berlin. Berlin is the fulcrum of the Prussian world.

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He settles down in Berlin. He assembles a splendid library there, as a commander assembles his troops. He sends his corrected proofs back to the press with the gesture of a field-marshal. These felicities disturb the countess. She proposes to come to Berlin. He runs from pillar to post, raises a frightful hubbub, utters prayers and threats, is by turns affectionate and fierce, advances and retreats, finds the most amazing arguments. A t length, when Sophie’s departure from Düsseldorf for Berlin is im minent, Lassalle is informed th at if she comes he will have to leave. He is beside himself. The countess m ust be mad. They both explode, the explosions being directed against one another. “When I make so definite a demand as I have unfortu­ nately had to make in my last letter I insist upon precise and blind obedience, for otherwise our friendship is over and done with. I cannot put up with people upon whom I cannot rely.” “ I have ju st received your letter, and can only answer you in your own words, by saying th at this is too much, and th at no one but a fool like myself would have endured all th at I have had to endure for the last ten years—no one but a fool without a will of her own. You abuse me like a pick­ pocket; and if I do not instantly comply with all your notions like an autom aton you threaten to break off our friendship and even to regard me with contempt. The emotional disturbance which results from your violence, your despotism, and your ruthlessness is sapping my strength.” The two autocrats do not lag behind one another in rude­ ness. They overwhelm one another with harsh accusations. In the end the countess, instead of coming to Berlin, goes to a health resort. Lassalle reads his proofs, works, writes, picks up the threads th at were dropped in 1846. His pub­ lisher Franz Duncker enters into a close friendship with him, and does everything th at can be done to secure his acceptance

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into a rather antagonistic society. Lina Duncker is up in arms and says: “ I will not endure th at any one should regard my friends with unjust and stupid prejudice» and should think or speak evil of them. Lassalle has to encounter so much hatred» so much antipathy on account of his past» th at I need all my energies to support him against his adversaries. I know perfectly well what I am doing and with whom I have to do» and I unhesitatingly declare th at he is the greatest and most notable m an of his time» and th at time will teach those who now so greatly misunderstand him how mistaken they are.” Ferdinand keeps careful note of the_ countesses and baronesses who are daring enough after the theatre to accept his invitation to a cup of coffee on the veranda or after m idnight to drink a glass of champagne in his rooms (properly chaperoned, of course). Such successes tickle his vanity. In the beginning of November the first volume of Heraclitus is published, and the learned world cannot withhold its applause. Hum boldt, Boeckh, and Lepsius are charm ed. Recognition flows in from all the professorial chairs of Prussia. Stahr, Hum boldt, Vam hagen, the drawing-rooms of Berlin, show their favour to him. He is the m an of the hour. After all, the eight hundred pages of Heraclitus outweigh the dossier. Absolution is granted. By Lassalle, the murmurs of approval are passed on through a megaphone. He gathers together the opinions of Ritschl, Eduard Zeller, August Meinecke, Bernays, and Friedrich Haase into an orchestra of the leaders of intellectual Germany. Hosannas of hero-worship caress his receptive ears. Intoxicated with this chorus of praise, he writes in extrava­ gant terms to his parents and to the countess. So much have the fumes of incense gone to his head th at he actually informs M arx: “ I have received the most incredible letters from Boeckh, Hum boldt, Lepsius, and many others. Hegel­ ians and men of learning walk before me as the herald of King Ahasuerus went before M ordecai, shouting: ‘This is the man who wrote Heraclitus ! Hum boldt makes me come

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to see him and trum pets my fam e; and now th at it has become the fashion to sing my praises beyond the bounds of reason, every one vies with every one else in the exercise.” T he effect of this on M arx was to make him write to Engels : “ In his philosophical spangle-bedecked State, Lassalle moves to and fro with all the grace of a rough fellow who has for the first time put on a well-fitting suit.” To Lassalle he sent a cool and curt acknowledgment of the receipt of the book. Six months later he managed to bring himself to write th at it was “masterly” , but the very same day wrote to Engels saying: “You will have to give me absolution for the praise I have been compelled to bestow upon Heraclitus the Obscure” . Heraclitus actually makes an impression on the police. I t is the one contem porary work which secures approval both from K arl M arx and from Zedlitz. The police see no reason for driving Lassalle back to Düsseldorf, since this would mean driving him back into an agitator’s life. They have nothing to say against a m an whose am bition it is to dine at the Prussian Academy of the Sciences in the company of baronesses, ministers of State, and diplomatists. Professor Lepsius is scarcely able to believe his eyes, and enquires: “ Is this the Lassalle of the H atzfeldt trials? Is the m an really so red as he is said to be?” There were good reasons for the enquiry. Was this Lassalle who so plainly sympathised with Heraclitus* arrogant con­ tem pt for the mob, really a dem ocrat? Could the m an who was so eager to be accepted into the exclusive caste of the learned really be a revolutionist? Could the m an who deliber­ ately cut “Red Becker” really be a communist? Could he even be a socialist, seeing th at he regarded it as his “grand coup sociale” th at at the Heraclitus festival Varnhagen should appear in full w ar-paint side by side with his niece Ludm illa Assing, who had still to lose one of the most impeccable reputations in Berlin? His ambitions have changed, and, characteristically enough, he is indifferent as to the means by which he can fulfil them. He forsakes the proletarian cause and becomes a

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member of the republic of learning. He is no longer the plenipotentiary of revolution, but the plenipotentiary of Hegel. The Hegelian Society invites him to dinner. H e sits beside a president of the Chamber, opposite an ex-premier, and has university professors as aides-de-camp. H e shines, he radiates, he contemplates his own image in the m irror. “Is not physical beauty a talent no less than the talents of the mind? Is it not a great gift of fate th at even through external aspect one should be so gifted th at one cannot enter a drawing-room blazing with lights w ithout putting every one else into the shade, and without becoming the cynosure of all eyes?” O n one social occasion, when Lassalle arrives in full panoply, and, after his m anner, stands in the doorway to receive the adm iring glances of all present, the wife of professor Diderici (herself a handsome woman) rem arks: “Lassalle is the handsomest m an I have ever seen” . Boeckh answers: “The handsomest m an? T h at is beyond my competence to decide, but he is certainly the wittiest and a t the same time the most learned m an I have ever m et.” He shines in an altogether unprecedented way. He is not only the handsomest, but also the most energetic, of mortals. He is characterised by positively overweening courage, selfconfidence, pride, and will-power. When his health is drunk, the toast is introduced in the following words : “We have to-day among us a m an whose glorious task it has been to throw the clearest of lights on the obscurest of philosophers !” Forgotten, now, th at only a few years before he had m ade it his task to throw the glaring light of a law court on the shadiest of noblemen ! The ban on him has been suspended. Varnhagen, reading Lassalle’s first speech in court, exclaims : “ I can only tell you this, th at it strongly reminds me of M irabeau’s speeches. W hat a pity, not only for you, b u t still more for the cause you advocate in this speech, th at it is not more widely known.”

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Hum boldt begs Lassalle to come and see him often. People forgive him his attacks on the State, now th at they see with w hat vigour he has espoused the cause of philosophy. Women forgive him for acting as defender of one woman when they see him engaged in the conquest of them all. Intim ate association with women is essential to him. It enlivens him, at once stimulates and soothes his nerves. He is strongly erotic. He electrifies women, and becomes intoxi­ cated by their intoxication. He is a lover, as certain other men are drinkers. Nor is he fastidious. He drinks distilled liquor and champagne by turns ; enjoys in brief succession the embraces of an actress, a shop girl, a lady of the great world. “ I am no gallant to play tedious court to a woman. I am not made for women to amuse themselves with me. I insist upon religious fervour in a woman’s love for me.” He is outrageous in his methods, being ready to use every kind of force and cunning in order to gain his end. He succeeds through the terrible impetuosity of his wooing. People say of him : “An African thread runs through his soul” . He is a woman-eater of insatiable and indiscrim inate appetite. Association with him involves its risks and its surprises. The women he possesses feel themselves to be heroines, and they are grateful to him. In dem anding religious fervour from the women who love him, he does not expect th at the hours of love are to be religious hours. Like Jehovah, he is a jealous god. The gods of Hellas, being less absolute than the minor German princes, made the great mistake of plurality. I t should be the leading principle of every god to be unique. This claim of exclusive worship makes his passion for Lina Duncker, Hedwig Dohm, and Fanny Lehwald more of a torm ent than of a delight to the objects of his affection. Lina, above all, who lives almost next door, suffers much from his capricious moods. “You are tyrannical. I could put up with that ; but what I cannot endure and cannot forgive is m istrust!”

M R

Hegel After a painting by Scbbers

Caricature illustrating the Hatzfeldt Affair Showing Lass alle, Countess Hatzfeldt, and her son Count Paul

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When Cosima von Bulow gives an evening party in honour of Liszt, Emma Herwegh, who has come to Berlin in Liszt’s company, refuses to allow Lassalle to be introduced to her, for Lassalle is “showing his worst side’*. I t was only to be expected th at on this occasion he would be at his worst, when Liszt was the leading figure instead of himself. He is on the verge of a breach with the countess. Sophie von Hatzfeldt, weary of the role of Joan of Arc, would like to assume th at of great-grandm other. The youthful hero, however, wants her as partner. She is tired ; he stigmatises her as cowardly. She wants rest; Lassalle storms at her. “You are like the people in M arch 1848. You have made a revolution, but you have not got rid of the gendarmes w ithin your own m ind.” The real fact is th at the poor woman is surfeited with memories of her past. Lassalle was in much the same case. He, too, had had more than enough of his Düsseldorf role. The p art o f hero no longer interested him. He wanted to play the epicure. He gave “splendid suppers” . He provided illustrious guests with the daintiest fare. “The élite of the intellectual world of Berlin” frequented his house. “Next winter I shall give a supper p art every four weeks, and once a week I shall be at home in the evening—a modest affair, sparkling only in respect of the quality of the frequenters. The one thing still lacking to me for this purpose is more commodious quarters, for I must have a dining-room where four-andtwenty persons can sit at table, or at least from twenty to two-and-twenty. This very day I shall start house-hunting.” The ban has been suspended. Both m an of the world and sage, both m an of learning and epicure, he complacently accepts the homage of professors, the genuflections of retired diplomats, and the commenda­ tions of th at marvellous nonagenarian Hum boldt. He fails to notice th at no young voices swell the adm iring chorus. He fails to understand th at a crowd of oldsters feel a trifle rejuvenated when they contem plate his ten years* overdue book. Ten years earlier his Heraclitus might have led to a fresh blossoming of the Hegelian school ; now it has

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come too late. I t belongs to yesterday, not to to-m orrow; it is a belated harvest, not a sowing. Lassalle hears a chorus of acclam ation, and overestimates its im portance, because the voices are those of men of title and of men who wear decorations. H e does not see th at the old men are old. He corresponds with them about Aristotle, and lulls him self into contentm ent. He informs the police th at he is planning a new philosophical work, a Pythagoras. T he police are glad to believe this. A part from w hat he may tell them , they are well supplied with inform ation by the envious who keep watch on Lassalle. His friendship w ith Duncker, however, was somewhat distasteful to them , and not to them only. Duncker was a publisher. He published the great demo­ cratic newspaper which told the crown all those unpalatable truths which would have been much more unpalatable had they been said by the Chamber. But Duncker’s newspaper had a gentle and submissive way of saying harsh things. Duncker was a good fellow, shrewd for all his easygoing ways, and he kept open house. A power in Berlin, he used his power sagaciously and w ith m oderation. He liked to move straight forward along the middle road. His paper flourished, and he flourished with it. His most precious possession, however, was not the “Volkszeitung” , but his wife Lina. She was a woman of sterling character, upright, vigorous, and cheerful. H er father had an estate near Wesel ; the vineyards among which she had grown up had bestowed on her their sap, their aroma, their gentleness, and their healthy abundance. She had the splendid qualities of the countryside from which she sprang. Duncker kept an excellent table, and had an even better cellar. At Duncker’s you could hear good talk ; and, more rem arkable still, at his house you m et people who had learned the art of listening. For Lassalle a house where people would listen while he talked was of inestimable value. He became an intim ate of the place, and, as Pietsch once said, made “rain and sunshine shine” at Duncker’s ; he was the household god on whom the weather depended.

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But before he could become established as god, he had had to dislodge a few earlier gods from their privileged positions. It need hardly be said th at Lassalle did not perform this necessary clearance with m uch tact or delicacy. Fabrice, an official in the commissariat departm ent, who did not hesitate to show his dislike for the intruder, was rewarded at times by a mocking smile from Ferdinand. This Lucifer expelled from the heaven where Lina reigned as queen m editated vengeance. Why, after being eight years the leading intim ate, should he allow him self to be put in the shade by “a Jew and casket thief**? Having learned in M arch th at Lassalle was on principle opposed to the duel, in May Fabrice made up his m ind to challenge Lassalle for having “smiled offensively** a t him four months earlier. Lassalle naturally refused to accept the challenge. Yet even after this, Fabrice was not able to persuade Lina th at Lassalle was “a worthless fellow and a swellmobsman” . Fabrice, who had quaint ideas concerning the best way of obtaining “satisfaction,** made an onslaught on Lassalle in the street. His weapon was a riding-whip. Lassalle did not stand upon ceremony, but returned blow for blow. T he handle of his walking-cane made a huge gash in his opponent’s forehead. Fabrice hastened to the nearest surgeon to have some stitches put in. Lassalle was the hero of the day. Since, in the violence of the affray, the golden head of his cane had been broken off, Förster the historian gave the victor a new walking-stick, whose handle consisted of a model of the Bastille, fashioned in gold. This stick was generally believed to have belonged to Robespierre. Every one knows th at the most blood-drenched among the wolves of the French revolution was at the same time a dandy, and it is therefore possible th at the stick in question may have been his. Ferdinand, who while in Paris had lengthened his name to give it a Robespierrean flavour, was already a dandy without having* to im itate Robespierre. Such a walking-cane was the very thing for him. It would

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serve as conductor's baton in the revolution—for revolutions are much like operettas, only in the former the music is not so good. Ferdinand, having broken Fabrice's sconce, was inclined to follow this up by sending a bullet through the man. “ It would be a huge delight to challenge the beast to a duel with pistols, and I should probably make sure work of it with my bullet. Still, it would shame me to abandon my principles in this way. W hat do you think of the idea? I f it seems to you in the least degree admissible, it would rejoice my soul to go ahead, and I really must adm it that, stickler for principle though I be, I do not find it easy in this case to hold the stirrings of my blood in leash for the sake of principle. Yesterday I was full of the idea of challenging him to a duel with pistols.” M atters turned out differently. A commissariat officer who attacks with a force of two to one (for Fabrice had been supported by a second) and after all gets a thrashing, cuts a ridiculous figure. But circum­ stances alter cases, and in this case the m an who has given the thrashing is nam ed Lassalle. The police take note of this, and they feel th at the affair may bring discredit on them. The police are not trying to protect the commissariat officer (whose superiors cashier him and send him to cool his heels in a fortress for a year), but are trying to protect themselves when they give Lassalle four weeks' notice to quit Berlin. Lassalle, who has just been writing a letter to K arl M arx in order to discuss the point whether it will be admissible for him to send a challenge “as a salve to my wounded vanity, of which I find myself to have a sufficient store” , is filled with*dismay, feels the order to be outrageous. He was ready to stake his life, but not Berlin ! He set the whole squadron of his literary and learned friends to work in an attack upon the authorities. Most of them answered his call, and enquired of persons in high places : “How is it possible to expel a m an from Berlin because he defends himself when he is assaulted?” Hum boldt, at first, declined

BERLIN !

i8i

to intervene: “There are extremely unliterary affairs, in which one is loath to become involved. W ith all my respect for your great learning, I must really abstain from any personal' utterance concerning so unpleasant an incident*'. Lassalle applies to Manteuffel and to W estphalen. He lobbies among the reactionary ministers of State. The prem ier advises him to send a petition to the Prince of Prussia, who is acting as regent during the king’s illness, and promises his good word. Hum boldt, relenting, also begs Prince William “ to show in this m atter likewise your justice, your clemency, and your love for science” . Ferdinand, having found Heraclitus an excellent chaperon, now takes Pythagoras as squire. “ Let me assure your Royal Highness th at I am striving on behalf of the dearest and most im portant interests of a m an of science.” I t never enters his head th at it m ight befit a revolutionary republican better to abstain from asking a m onarch to grant him favours. Although he applies to M arx as an authority upon the question of the duel, in political m atters he prefers to decide for himself. Who wills the end, wills the means. He rails against the stupidity of the police, who, in their eagerness to expel a revolutionist, are molesting a m an of science. Unfortunately, however, Fabrice has denounced him to the police for his “atrocious political utterances and conversations” in Duncker’s house; and, in the middle of July, Zedlitz, as “chief rabbi of the public safety” , imposes a definitive sentence of banishm ent on Lassalle. Lassalle persists in his endeavours. He threatens ; Zedlitz threatens ; each talks of reprisals ; warnings and prophecies are uttered ; at length a compro­ mise is reached. The whole m atter is left open. Lassalle (needs must when Zedlitz drives) promises to go on a journey, and not to come back before October. He also voluntarily undertakes to write on his return a brochure to be entitled “a characterisation of the Prince of Prussia” . Zedlitz congratulates “H err Doktor Lassalle” on

18a

LASSALLE

the delightful prospect of becoming literary purveyor to the royal family, and hopes th at the change of air will do him go9°>9 I> 1 0 0 , 1 2 5 , 127, 132, 133, 1 4 1 , 1 4 5 , 154, 1 5 5 , 166, 1 7 3 . 174» *8o, 181, 189, i93> *94» *95» 2 0 1 , 2 0 2 , 204, 207, 226, 227, 228, 237, 242, 254, 279, 304, 305, 306, 310 M ary, 2 7 M a y e r, 310 M a z z in i, 229 M e h r i n g , 19 M e i n e c k e , 173 M e n d e l s s o h n , Arnold, 8 7 , 8 8 ,1 0 8 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 3 , 124, 1 28, 129, 130, 143, 25 7 , 309 M e n d e l s s o h n , Moses, 2 7 , 9 0 , 100, 101, 2 3 9 , 2 6 9 M e r e d it h , i i M e t t e r n ic h , i 5 4 , 211 M e YENDORFF, 1 17

M e y e rb e e r, io i M i r a b e a u , 175 M ordecai, 173

Moses, 26,161 N apoleon— 25, 27, 28, 73, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 214, 229, 230, 234, 259, 292

Narcissus, 39, 291, 300 N a t h a n s o n , 52

“ Neue Rheinische Zeitung” , 103, 127, 131» *33» *35» *36, 141, 226

133,

O ffe n b a c h , io i O n c k e n , 115 Oppenheim, 8 8 , 1 0 8 ,1 0 9 , 1 1 8 ,1 2 0 , 121, 123, 129

Open Letter o f Reply ,

first charter of German social democracy, 252, 254

O rigin o f Species, 2 3 2

O rsay, 92 Ovid, 4 7 151 Patroclus, 26

Pastoral,

P e e l, 277

Pentateuch, 26 P e s t a l o z z i, 23

Petronius, 66 Pharaohs, 161 Phenomenology,

161

P i e t s c h , 178 P l a t e n , 149

Plato, 45 Po and Rhine, 201 P r a s l i n , 128

“Preussische Gerichtszeitung”, 208 Prometheus, 53 P ü c k l e r , IO I

Pythagoras, 181 Pythagoras, 178

R acow itz, 288, 298, 300, 304,

309

“Red Becker” , 174 “Rheinische Zeitung”, 75, 76 R i c a r d o , 19 R ic h e lie u , 264 R i e k c h e n , see L a s s a l , R i t s c h l , 173

Friederike

INDEX R o b e s p i e r r e , 3 7 , 9 7 , 9 9 , 179, 227 R odbertus, 2 5 5 , 2 5 6 , 2 5 7 R o o n , 211 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 2 3 2 , 2 4 3 , 244 R osalie, F e r d i n a n d ’s m o th e r , see Lassal, R o s a lie R osalie, Z a n d e r ’s s is te r, 5 4 , 5 8 R ousseau, 2 7 , 9 6 R uge, 7 4 , 77 R ühle, 19 R üstow, 2 2 9 , 2 3 0 , 2 3 3 , 2 4 1 , 2 9 4 ,

295 » 2 9 6 » 2 99 > 3°9

Sais, 96 Samson,

26 S c h a r n h o r s t , 21 2 S c h a t z , 23 Schelung , F r i e d r i c h , 8 2 , 2 4 3 , 250 Schelung , son of above, a lawyer, 250, 251, 268 S cm cK L E R 2 3 9 Schiebe, 5 0 , 5 1 , 5 2 , 5 6 , 6 0 , 6 3 , 1 4 5 Schiller, 8 2 , 108, 185, 186, 192 Schlegel, 146 “ S c h le s is c h e Z e i t u n g ” , 7 6 Schmidt, 2 5 5 S c h ö n e h o s e , 2 4 4 see B ism a r c k S c h ö n h a u s e n , see B ism a r c k S c h u l z , 6 7 , 6 8 , 6 9 , 70 Schulze, 228 S c h u l z e - D e l i t z s c h , 2 5 2 ,2 5 4 ,2 5 6 , 2 5 9 , 2 6 8 ,2 7 3 S c h w e itz e r, i i , 268, 303, 304,

307

217, 2 1 8 , 219 , 220,

SONTZEFF, 2 1 6 , 2 2 1 , 224

Sophocles,

161 S o rg e , 20 S ta h r, 173 S t r a u s s , 7 4 , 7 5 , 185, 192 S t r u v e , 142 Stü ch er, 88

“Süddeutsche Zeitung” , 266 System der erworbenen Rechte, 209,

228 T a l l e y r a n d , 154 T a u e n t z œ n , 25

Thetis-M ary, 27 T h i e l e , 24 Thora, 26 T o o k e , 243 Tragic Comedians, The , 1 1

T ren d elen b u rg , Trim alchio, 66

82

Trois mousquetaires, Les, 108

T ü rk ,

302

Ulrich von Hutten, 185 Unpolitical Lays, 80 V a r n h a g e n , 9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 1 ,1 7 3 ,1 7 4 ,

175» 196 V i c t o r E m m a n u e l, 201, 211, 216 V i c t o r i a , Princess, 199 V i s c h e r , 193 V o g e l , 72 V o g t , 301 “Volkszeitung”, 178, 2 0 1 , 2 2 6 V o l t a i r e , 27

Voss, 45

S c h w e r i n , 23 S h a k e s p e a r e , 192 S h e l l e y , 283 Shylock, 5 9 Sickingen, 190 Socrates, 5 1 , 103 Solomon, 2 6 , 158

Song of the Union,

319

W a g n e r , 223, 295 W a l l e n s t e i n , nickname o f

Ferdi­

nand Lassal, 88 Count, 181 Countess (Marx’s

W e s tp h a le n , W e s tp h a le n , 284

see also Bundeslied

w ife),

Jenny

195, see also M a r x ,

340

LASSALLE

W illiam , Prince of Prussia, afterwards king, 181, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 207, 212,215,226,231, 244,272 W illiam II, 199

Wranoel,

WlNCKELMANN, 4 4

196 Z e l l e r , 5 8 , 173 Z ie g l e r , 2 4 0 , 2 4 9 Z ie t e n , 2 3 Z r r z , 142

Wissowa, Father, Son, Grandson, 65 et seq. W itten b erg , 78, 79, 100 W olf, Friedrich August, 44 W o lff, “ Casemate”, 287 Workers' Program , 235, 246, 250

132, 1 39, 150, 2 0 8 , 2 7 6 WULTKE, 2 5 5

Z an d er, 5 4 , 5 8 , see also R o salie Z ed u tz-N eu k irch , 1 7 0 ,1 7 4 ,1 8 1 ,

Z ur K ritik der politischen Oekononùe,

193