Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 46

"Do you know," he went on, "I've often fancied it was I who gave Heine the line of thought he developed in his sketch of German philosophy, that our revolution will be the outcome of our Philosophy, that in the earthquake will be heard the small still voice of Kant and Hegel. It is what I tried to say the other day in my address on Fichte. It is pure thought that will build up the German Empire. Reality--with its fragments, Prussia, Saxony, etc.--will have to remould itself after the Idea of a unified German--Republic. Why do you smile?" he broke off uneasily, with a morbid memory of his audience drifting away into the refreshment room.

"I was thinking of Heine's saying that we Germans are a methodical nation, to take our thinking first and our revolution second, because the heads that have been used for thinking may be afterwards used for chopping off. But if you chopped off heads first, like the French, they could not be of much use to philosophy."

La.s.salle laughed. "I love Heine. He seemed my soul's brother. I loved him from boyhood, only regretting he wasn't a republican like Borne.

Would he could have lived to see the triumph of his prediction, the old wild Berserker rage that will arise among us Teutons when the Talisman of the Cross breaks at last, as break it must, and the old G.o.ds come to their own again. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye.

The canting tyrants shall bite the dust, the false judges shall be judged."

"That is how I like you to talk."

He smote the table with his fist. His own praises had fired him, though his marvellous memory that could hold even the complete libretti of operas had been little in doubt as to Heine's phrasing.

"Yes, the holy alliance of Science and the People--those opposite poles! They will crush between their arms of steel all that opposes the higher civilization. The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all civilization--what a good phrase! I must write that down for my _Kammergericht_ speech."

"And at the same time finish this Heine business, please, and be done with that impertinent demoiselle. What! she must have letter for letter! Of course it's a blessing she ceased to correspond with you.

But all the same, just see what these creatures are. No sympathy with the wear and tear of your life. All petty egotisms and vanities! What do they care about your world-reaching purposes? Yes, they'll sit at your feet, but their own enjoyment or mental development is all they're thinking of. These Russian girls are the most dreadful. I know hundreds like your Sophie. They're a typical development of our new-fangled age. They even take nominal husbands, merely to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the parental roof. I wonder she didn't play you that trick. And now she's older and has got over her pique, she sees what she has lost. But you will not be drawn in again?"

"No; you may rely on that," said La.s.salle.

Her face became almost young.

"You are so ignorant of woman, _mon cher enfant_," she said, smoothing his brown curly hair; "you are really an infant, without judgment or reason where they are concerned."

"And you are so ignorant of man," thought La.s.salle, for his repudiation of the Russian girl had brought up vividly the vision of his enchanting Brunehild. Did the Countess then think that a man could feed for ever on memories? True, she had gracefully declined into a quasi-maternal position, but a true mother would have felt more strongly that the relation was not so sufficing to him as to her.

The Countess seemed to divine what was pa.s.sing through his mind. "If you could get a wife worthy of you," she cried. "A brain to match yours, a soul to feel yours, a heart to echo the drum-beat of yours, a mate for your dungeon or your throne, ready for either--but where is this paragon?"

"You are right," cried La.s.salle, subtly gratified. After all Helene was a child with a child's will, broken by the first obstacle. "Never have I met a woman I could really feel my mate. If ever I have kindled a soul in one, it has been for a moment. No, I have always known I must live and die alone. I have told you of my early love for the beautiful Rosalie Zander, my old comrade's sister, who still lives unmarried for love of me. But I knew that to marry her would mean crippling myself through my tenderness. Alone I can suffer all, but how drag a weaker than myself into the tragic circle of my destinies?

No, Curtius must leap into his gulf alone."

His words soothed her, but had a sting in them.

"But your happiness must be before all," she said, not without meaning it. "Only convince me that you have found your equal, and she shall be yours in the twinkling of an eye. I shouldn't even allow love-letters to intervene--you are so colossal. Your t.i.tanic emotions overflow into hundreds of pages. You are the most uneconomical man I ever met."

He smiled.

"A volcano is not an ant-heap. But I know you are right. For La.s.salle the Fighter the world holds no wife. If I could only be sure that the victory will come in my day."

"Remember what your own Herac.l.i.tus said: 'The best follow after fame.'"

"Yes, Fame is the Being of Man in Non-Being. It is the immortality of man made real," he quoted himself. "But--"

She hastened to continue his quotation. "'Hence it has always so mightily stirred the greatest souls and lifted them beyond all petty and narrow ends.'"

"The ends are great--but the means, how petty! The Presidency of a Working-Men's Union, one not even to be founded in Berlin."

"But yet a General German Working-Men's Union. Who knows what it may grow to! The capture of Berlin will be a matter of days."

"I had rather capture it with the sword. Bismarck is right. The German question can only be solved by blood and iron."

"Is it worth while going over that ground again? Did we not agree last year in Caprera when Garibaldi would not see his way to invading Austria for us, that we must put our trust in peaceful methods. You have as yet no real following at all. The Progressists will never make a Revolution, for all their festivals and fanfaronades. This National League of theirs is only a stage-threat."

"Yes, Bismarck knows our weak-kneed, white-livered _bourgeois_ too well to be taken in by it. The League talks and Bismarck is silent.

Oh, if I had a majority in the Chamber, as they have, I'd leave _him_ to do the talking."

"But even if their rant was serious, they would allow _you_ no leaders.h.i.+p in their revolution. Have they not already rejected your overtures? Therefore this deputation to you of the Leipzig working-men (whom they practically rejected by offering them honorary members.h.i.+p) is simply providential. The conception of a new and real Progressive Party that is seething in their minds under the stimulus of their contact with socialism in London--you did write that they had been in London?"

"Yes; they went over to see the Exhibition. But they also represent, I take it, the old communistic and revolutionary traditions, that have never been wholly lulled to sleep by our pseudo-Liberalism. But that is how history repeats itself. When the middle cla.s.ses oppose the upper cla.s.ses, they always have the air of fighting for the whole majority. But the day soon comes, especially if the middle cla.s.ses get into power, when the lower cla.s.ses discover there never was any real union of interests!"

"Well, that's just your chance!" cried the Countess. "Here is a new party waiting to be called out of chaos, nay, calling to you. An unformed party is just what you want. You give it the impress of your own personality. Remember your own motto: _Si superos nequeo movere Acheronta movebo._"

La.s.salle shook his head doubtfully. He had from the first practically resolved on developing the vague ideas of the Deputation, but he liked to hear his own reasons in the mouth of the Countess.

"The heads.h.i.+p of a party not even in existence," he murmured. "That doesn't seem a very short cut to the German Republic."

"Do you doubt yourself? Think of what you were when you took up my cause--a mere unknown boy. Think how you fought it from court to court, picking up your Law on the way, a Demosthenes, a Cicero, till all the world wondered and deemed you a demiG.o.d. You did that because I stood for Injustice. You were the Quixote to right all wrong. You saw the universal in the individual. My case was but a prefiguration of your real mission. Now it is the universal that calls to you. See in your triumph for me your triumph for that suffering humanity, with which you have taught me to sympathize."

"My n.o.ble Countess!"

"What does your own Franz von Sickingen say of history?

"'And still its Form remains for ever Force.'

The Force of the modern world is the working-man. And as you yourself have taught me that there are no real revolutions except those that formally express what is already a fact, there wants then only the formal expression of the working-man's Force. To this Force you will now give Form."

"What an apt pupil!" He stooped and kissed her lips. Then, walking about agitatedly: "Yes," he cried; "I will weld the workers of Germany--to gain their ends they must fuse all their wills into one--none of these acrid, petty, mutually-destructive individualities of the _bourgeois_--one gigantic hammer, and I will be the Thor who wields it." His veins swelled, he seemed indeed a Teutonic G.o.d. "And therefore I must have Dictator's rights," he went on. "I will not accept the Presidency to be the mere puppet of possible factions."

"There speaks Ferdinand La.s.salle! And now, _mon cher enfant_, you deserve to hear my secret."

She smiled brilliantly.

His heart beat a little quicker as he bent his ear to her customary whisper. Her secrets were always interesting, sometimes sensational, and there was always a pleasure in the sense of superiority that knowledge conferred, and in the feeling of touching, through his Princess-Countess, the inmost circles of European diplomacy. He was of the G.o.ds, and should know whatever was on the knees of his fellow-G.o.ds.

"Bismarck is thinking of granting Universal Suffrage!"

"Universal Suffrage!" he shouted.

"Hush, hus.h.!.+ Walls have ears."

"Then I must have inspired him."

"No; but you will have."

"How do you mean? Is it not my idea?"

"Implicitly, perhaps, but you have never really pressed for it specifically. Your only contribution to practical politics is a futile suggestion that the Diet should refuse to sit, and so cut off supplies. Now of course Universal Suffrage is the first item of the programme of your Working-Men's Union."

"Sophie!"