Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 44

Such is the Ma.r.s.eillaise the Social Democrats of Germany sing, as they troop out when the police break up their meetings.

This La.s.salle, whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah--the Saviour of the People.

II

But no man is a hero to his valet or his relatives, and on the spring morning when La.s.salle stood at the parting of the ways--where the Thinker's path debouched on the Fighter's--his brother-in-law from Prague, being in Berlin on business, took the opportunity of remonstrating.

"I can't understand what you mean by such productions," he cried, excitedly waving a couple of pamphlets.

"That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said La.s.salle suavely. "It takes _some_ brain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What have you there?"

"The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's gas-contract.

"Not so fast. There is my appeal yet before the _Kammergericht_. And take care that you are not in gaol first; that pamphlet is either one of the suppressed editions, or has been smuggled in from Zurich, a proof in itself of that negative concept of the State which the pamphlet aims at destroying. Your State is a mere night-watchman--it protects the citizen but it does nothing to form him. It keeps off ideas, but it has none of its own. But the State, as friend Bckh puts it, should be the inst.i.tution in which the whole virtue of mankind realizes itself. It should sum up human experience and wisdom, and fas.h.i.+on its members in accordance therewith. What is history but the story of man's struggle with nature? And what is a State but the socialization of this struggle, the stronger helping the weaker?"

"Nonsense! Why should we help the lower cla.s.ses?"

"Pardon me," said La.s.salle, "it is they who help us. We are the weaker, they are the stronger. That is the point of the other pamphlet you have there, explaining what is a Const.i.tution."

"Don't try your legal quibbles on me."

"Legal quibbles! Why the very point of my pamphlet is to ignore verbal definitions. A Const.i.tution is what const.i.tutes it, and the working-cla.s.s being nine-tenths of the population must be nine-tenths of the German Const.i.tution."

"Then it's true what they say, that you wish to lead a Revolution!"

exclaimed Friedland, raising his coa.r.s.e glittering hands in horror.

"Follow a Revolution, you mean," said La.s.salle. "Here again I do away with mere words. Real Revolutions make themselves, and we only become conscious of them. The introduction of machinery was a greater Revolution than the French, which, since it did not express ideals that were really present among the ma.s.ses, was bound to be followed by the old thing over again. Indeed, sometimes, as I showed in _Franz von Sickingen_ (my drama of the sixteenth-century war of the Peasants), a Revolution may even be reactionary, an attempt to re-establish an order of things that has hopelessly pa.s.sed away. Hence it is _your_ sentiments that are revolutionary."

Friedland's face had the angry helplessness of a witness in the hands of a clever lawyer. "A pretty socialist _you_ are!" he broke out, as his arm swept with an auctioneer's gesture over the luxurious villa in the Bellevuestra.s.se. "Why don't you call in the first sweep from the street and pour him out your champagne?"

"My dear Friedland! Delighted. Help yourself," said La.s.salle imperturbably.

The Prague dignitary purpled.

"You call your sister's husband a sweep!"

"Forgive me. I should have said 'gas-fitter.'"

"And who are you?" shrieked Friedland; "you gaol-bird!"

"The honor of going to gaol for truth and justice will never be yours, my dear brother-in-law."

Although he was scarcely taller than the gross-paunched parvenu who had married his only sister, his slim form seemed to tower over him in easy elegance. An aristocratic insolence and intelligence radiated from the handsome face that so many women had found irresistible, uniting, as it did, three universal types of beauty--the Jewish, the ancient Greek, and the Germanic. The Orient gave complexion and fire, the nose was Greek, the shape of the head not unlike Goethe's. The spirit of the fighter who knows not fear flashed from his sombre blue eyes. The room itself--La.s.salle's cabinet--seemed in its simple luxuriousness to give point at once to the difference between the two men and to the parvenu's taunt. It was of moderate size, with a large work-table thickly littered with papers, and a comfortable writing-chair, on the back of which La.s.salle's white nervous hand rested carelessly. The walls were a ma.s.s of book-cases, gleaming with calf and morocco, and crammed with the literature of many ages and races. Precious folios denoted the book-lover, ancient papyri the antiquarian. It was the library of a seeker after the encyclopaedic culture of the Germany of his day. The one lighter touch in the room was a small portrait of a young woman of rare beauty and n.o.bility. But this sober cabinet gave on a Turkish room--a divan covered with rich Oriental satins, inlaid whatnots, stools, dainty tables, all laden with costly narghiles, chibouques, and opium-pipes with enormous amber tips, Damascus daggers, tiles, and other curios brought back by him from the East--and behind this room one caught sight of a little winter-garden full of beautiful plants.

"Truth and justice!" repeated Friedland angrily. "Fiddlesticks! A crazy desire for notoriety. That's the truth. And as for justice--well, that was what was meted out to you."

"Prussian justice!" La.s.salle's hand rose dramatically heavenwards. His brow grew black and his voice had the vibration of the great orator or the great actor. "When I think of this daily judicial murder of ten long years that I pa.s.sed through, then waves of blood seem to tremble before my eyes, and it seems as if a sea of blood would choke me.

Galley-slaves appear to me very honorable persons compared with our judges. As for our so-called Liberal press, it is a harlot masquerading as the G.o.ddess of liberty."

"And what are you masquerading as?" retorted Friedland. "If you were really in earnest, you would share all your fine things with dirty working-men, and become one of them, instead of going down to their meetings in patent-leather boots."

"No, my dear man, it is precisely to show the dirty working-man what he has missed that I exhibit to him my patent-leather boots. Humility, contentment, may be a Christian virtue, but in economics 'tis a deadly sin. What is the greatest misfortune for a people? To have no wants, to be lazzaroni sprawling in the sun. But to have the greatest number of needs, and to satisfy them honestly, is the virtue of to-day, of the era of political economy. I have always been careful about my clothes, because it is our duty to give pleasure to other people. If I went down to my working-men in a dirty s.h.i.+rt, they would be the first to cry out against my contempt for them. And as for becoming a working-man, I choose to be a working-man in that sphere in which I can do most good, and I keep my income in order to do it. At least it was honorably earned."

"Honorably earned!" sneered Friedland. "That is the first time I have heard it described thus." And he looked meaningly at the beautiful portrait.

"I am quite aware you have not the privilege of conversing with my friends," retorted La.s.salle, losing his temper for the first time. "I know I am kept by my mistress, the Countess Hatzfeldt; that all the long years, all the best years of my life, I chivalrously devoted to championing an oppressed woman count for nothing, and that it is dishonorable for me to accept a small commission on the enormous estates I won back for her from her brutal husband! Why, my mere fees as lawyer would have come to double. But pah! why do I talk with you?"

He began to pace the room. "The fact that I have such a delightful home to exchange for gaol is just the thing that should make you believe in my sincerity. No, my respected brother-in-law"--and he made a sudden theatrical gesture, and his voice leapt to a roar,--"understand I will carry on my life-mission as I choose, and never--never to satisfy every fool will I carry the a.s.s." His voice sank. "You know the fable."

"Your mission! The Public Prosecutor was right in saying it was to excite the non-possessing cla.s.ses to hatred and contempt of the possessing cla.s.s."

"He was. I live but to point out to the working-man how he is exploited by capitalists like you."

"And ruin your own sister!"

"Ha, ha! So you're afraid I shall succeed. Good!" His blue eyes blazed. He stood still, an image of triumphant Will.

"You will succeed only in disgracing your relatives," said Friedland sullenly.

His brother-in-law broke into Homeric laughter. "Ho, ho," he cried.

"Now I see. You are afraid that I'll come to Prague, that I'll visit you and cry out to your fas.h.i.+onable circle: 'I, Ferdinand La.s.salle, the pernicious demagogue of all your journals, Governmental and Progressive alike, the thief of the casket-trial, the Jew-traitor, the gaol-bird, I am the brother-in-law of your host,' And so you've rushed to Berlin to break off with me. Ho, ho, ho!"

Friedland gave him a black look and rushed from the room. La.s.salle laughed on, scarcely noticing his departure. His brain was busy with that comical scene, the recall of which had put the enemy to flight.

On his migration from Berlin to Prague, when he got the gas-contract, Friedland, by a profuse display of his hospitality, and a careful concealment of his Jewish birth, wormed his way among families of birth and position, and finally into the higher governmental circles.

One day, when he was on the eve of dining the _elite_ of Prague, La.s.salle's old father turned up accidentally on a visit to his daughter and son-in-law. Each in turn besought him hurriedly not to let slip that they were Jews. The old man was annoyed, but made no reply. When all the guests were seated, old La.s.salle rose to speak, and when silence fell, he asked if they knew they were at a Jew's table. "I hold it my duty to inform you," he said, "that I am a Jew, that my daughter is a Jewess, and my son-in-law a Jew. I will not purchase by deceit the honor of dining with you." The well-bred guests cheered the old fellow, but the host was ghastly with confusion, and never forgave him.

III

But La.s.salle's laughter soon ceased. Another recollection stabbed him to silence. The old man was dead--that beautiful, cheerful old man.

Never more would his blue eyes gaze in proud tenderness on his darling brilliant boy. But a few months ago and he had seemed the very type of ruddy old age. How tenderly he had watched over his poor broken-down old wife, supporting her as she walked, cutting up her food as she ate, and filling her eyes with the love-light, despite all her pain and weakness. And now this poor, deaf, shrivelled little mother, had to totter on alone. "Father, what have you to do to-day?" he remembered asking him once. "Only to love you, my child," the old man had answered cheerily, laying his hand on his son's shoulder.

Yes, he had indeed loved him. What long patience from his childhood upwards; patience with the froward arrogant boy, a law to himself even in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; patience even with his refusal to study law and medicine. "But what then do you wish to study, my boy? At sixteen one must choose decisively."

"The vastest study in the world, that which is most closely bound up with the most sacred interests of humanity--History."

"But what will you live on, since, as a Jew, you can't get any post or professors.h.i.+p in Prussia?"

"Oh, I shall live somehow."

"But why won't you study medicine or law?"

"Doctors, lawyers, and even savants, make a merchandise of their knowledge. I will have nothing of the Jew. I will study for the sake of knowledge and action."

"Do you think you are a poet?"

"No, I wish to devote myself to public affairs. The time approaches when the most sacred ends of humanity must be fought for. Till the end of the last century the world was held in the bondage of the stupidest superst.i.tion. Then rose, at the mighty appeal of intellect, a material force which blew the old order into b.l.o.o.d.y fragments. Intellectually this revolt has gone on ever since. In every nation men have arisen who have fought by the Word, and fallen or conquered. Borne says that no European sovereign is blind enough to believe his grandson will have a throne to sit on. I wish I could believe so. For my part, father, I feel that the era of force must come again, for these folk on the thrones will not have it otherwise. But for the moment it is ours not to make the peoples revolt, but to enlighten and raise them up."