Immortal Memories

by Clement King Shorter

II. Helene von Dönniges

Helene von Dönniges has told us the story in fullest detail—the story of that tragic love which was to send Lassalle to his too early death. She was the daughter of a Bavarian diplomatist who had held appointments in Italy, and later in Switzerland. She was betrothed as a child of twelve to an Italian of forty years of age. At a time when, as she says, her thoughts should have been concentrated upon her studies, they were distracted by speculations on marriage and the marriage tie. A young Wallachian student named Yanko Racowitza crossed her path. His loneliness—he was far from home and friends—kindled her sympathy. Dark and ugly, she compared him to Othello, and called him her “Moor.” In spite of some parental opposition she insisted upon plighting her troth to him, and the Italian lover was scornfully dismissed. Then comes

the opening scene of the present story. It was in Berlin, whither Helen—we will adopt the English spelling of the name—had travelled with her grandmother in 1862, that she was asked at a ball the momentous question, “Do you know Lassalle?” She had never heard his name. Her questioner was Baron Korff, a son-in-law of Meyerbeer, who, charmed by her originality, remarked that she and Lassalle were made for one another. Two weeks later her curiosity was further excited, when Dr. Karl Oldenberg let fall some similar remark as to her intellectual kinship with the mysterious Lassalle. She asked her grandmother about him, and was told that he was a “shameless demagogue.” Then she turned to her lover, who promised to inquire. Racowitza brought her information about the Countess, the casket, and other “sensations”—only to excite her curiosity the more. Finally a friend, Frau Hirsemenzel, undertook to introduce her to the notorious Socialist. The introduction took place at a party, and if her account is to be trusted, no romance could be more dramatic than the actuality. They loved one another at first sight, conversed with freedom,

and he called her by an endearing name as he offered her his arm to escort her home.

“Somehow it did not seem at all remarkable,” she says, “that a stranger should thus call me ‘Du’ on first acquaintance. We seemed to fit to one another so perfectly.”

She was in her nineteenth year, Lassalle in his thirty-ninth. The pair did not see one another again for some months, not in fact until Helen visited Berlin as the guest of a certain lawyer Holthoff. Here she met Lassalle at a concert, and the friendly lawyer connived at their being more than once together. At a ball, on one occasion, Lassalle asked her what she would do if he were sentenced to death, and she beheld him ascending the scaffold.

“I should wait till your head was severed,” was her answer, “in order that you might look upon your beloved to the last, and then—I should take poison.”

He was pleased with her reply, but declared that there was no fear—his star was in the ascendant! And so it seemed; for although young Racowitza even then accosted him in the ballroom, the friendly Holthoff soon arranged an

informal betrothal; and Lassalle was on the eve of a great public triumph which seemed more likely to take him to the throne than to the scaffold.

To many this will seem an exaggeration. Yet hear Prince Bismarck in the Reichstag seventeen years after Lassalle’s death:—

He was one of the most intellectual and gifted men with whom I have ever had intercourse, a man who was ambitious in high style, but who was by no means Republican: he had very decided national and monarchical sympathies, and the idea which he strove to realize was the German Empire, and therein we had a point of contact. Lassalle was extremely ambitious, and it was perhaps a matter of doubt to him whether the German Empire would close with the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Lassalle dynasty; but he was monarchical through and through. Lassalle was an energetic and very intellectual man, to talk with whom was very instructive. Our conversations lasted for hours, and I was always sorry when they came to an end. [198]

The year 1864, which was to close so tragically, opened indeed with extraordinary promise. Lassalle left Berlin in May—Helen had gone

back to Geneva two or three months earlier—travelling by Leipzig and Cologne through the Rhenish provinces, and holding a “glorious review” the while.

“I have never seen anything like it,” he writes to the Countess von Hatzfeldt. “The entire population indulged in indescribable jubilation. The impression made upon me was that such scenes must have attended the founding of new religions.”

And it appeared possible that Heine’s description of Lassalle as the Messiah of the nineteenth century was to be realized. The Bishop of Mayence was on his side, and the King of Prussia sympathetic. As he passed from town to town the whole population turned out to do him honour. Countless thousands met him at the stations: the routes were ornamented with triumphal arches, the houses decorated with wreaths, and flowers were thrown upon him as he passed. As the cavalcade approached the town of Ronsdorf, for example, it was easy to see that the people were on tip-toe with expectation. At the entrance an arch bore the inscription:—

Willkommen dem Dr. Ferdinand Lassalle
Viel tausendmal im Ronsdorfer Thal!

Under arches and garlands, smothered with flowers thrown by young work-girls, whose fathers, husbands, brothers, cheered again and again, Lassalle and his friends entered the town, while a vast multitude followed in procession. It was at Ronsdorf that Lassalle made the speech which had in it something of fateful presentiment:—

“I have not grasped this banner,” he said, “without knowing quite clearly that I myself may fall. The feelings which fill me at the thought that I may be removed cannot be better expressed than in the words of the Roman poet:

‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor!’

or in German, ‘Möge, wenn ich beseitigt werde, irgend ein Rächer und Nachfolger aus meinen Gebeinen auferstehen!’ May this great and national movement of civilization not fall with my person, but may the conflagration which I have kindled spread farther and farther, so long as one of you still breathes. Promise me that, and in token raise your right hands.”

All hands were raised in silence, and the impressive scene closed with a storm of acclamation.

But Lassalle was worn out, and he fled for a time from the storm and conflict to Switzerland. Helen at Geneva heard of his sojourn at Righi-Kaltbad, and she made an excursion thither with two or three friends, and thus on July 25 (1864) the lovers met again. An account of their romantic interview comes to us in Helen’s own diary and in the letter which Lassalle wrote to the Countess Hatzfeldt two days later. Helen tells how they climbed the Kulm together, discussing by the way the question of their marriage and the possibility of opposition.

“What have your parents against me?” asked Lassalle; and was told that only once had she mentioned his name before them, and that their horror of the Jew agitator had ever since closed her mouth. So the conversation sped. The next morning their hope of “a sunrise” was destroyed by a fog. “How often,” says Helen, “when in later years I have stood upon the summit of the Righi and seen the day break in all its splendour, have I recalled this foggy, damp morning, and Lassalle’s disappointment!”

As he looked upon her, so pale and trembling, he abused the climate, and promised that he

would give up politics, devote himself to science and literature, and take her to Egypt or India. He talked to her of the Countess, “who will think only of my happiness,” and he talked of religion. Was his Jewish faith against him in her eyes? Mahommedanism and Judaism, it was all one to her, was the answer, but paganism by preference! They parted, to correspond immediately, and Lassalle to write to the astonished, and in this affair, unsympathetic Countess, of the meeting with his beloved. With the utmost friendliness, however, he endeavoured to keep the elder lady at a distance for a time.

On July 20 Helen writes to him, repeating her promise to become his wife.

You said to me yesterday: “Say but a sensible and decided ‘Yes’—et je me charge du reste.” Good; I say “Yes”—chargez-vous donc du reste. I only require that we first do all in our power to win my parents to a friendly attitude. To me belongs, however, a painful task. I must slay in cold blood the true heart of Yanko von Racowitza, who has given me the purest love, the noblest devotion. With heartless egotism I must destroy the day-dream of a noble youth. But for your sake I will even do what is wrong.

Meanwhile Lassalle’s unhappy attempts to

conciliate the Countess continue. He writes of Helen’s sympathy and dwells upon her entire freedom from jealousy. He tells Frau von Hatzfeldt how much Helen is longing to see his old friend. In conclusion, as though not to show himself too blind a lover, he remarks that Helen’s one failing is a total lack of will. “When, however, we are man and wife,” he adds, “then shall I have ‘will’ enough for both, and she will be as clay in the hands of the potter.” The Countess continues obdurate, and in a further letter (Aug. 2) Lassalle says:—

It is really a piece of extraordinary good fortune that, at the age of thirty-nine and a half, I should be able to find a wife so beautiful, so sympathetic, who loves me so much, and who—an indispensable requirement—is so entirely absorbed in my personality.

At Lassalle’s request, Helen herself wrote thus to the Baroness von Hatzfeldt:—

Dear and Beloved Countess,—

Armed with an introduction from my lord and master, I, his affianced wife, come to you—unhappily only in writing—le cœur et la main ouverte, and beg of you a little of that friendship which you have given to him so abundantly. How deeply do I regret that your illness separates us, that I cannot tell you face to face how much I love and honour him, how ardently I long for your help and advice as to how I can best make my beautiful and noble eagle happy. This my first letter must necessarily seem somewhat constrained to you; for I am an insignificant, unimportant being, who can do nothing but love and honour him, and strive to make him happy. I would fain dance and sing like a child, and drive away all care from him. My one desire is to understand his great and noble nature, and in good fortune and in bad to stand faithful and true by his side.

Then followed a further appeal for the love and help of this friend of Lassalle’s early years. It was all in vain. Instead of a letter, Helen received from the Countess what she called “a scrawl,” and Lassalle a long homily on his lack of judgment and foresight. Lassalle defended himself, and so the not too pleasing correspondence went on.

Yet these days in Berne were the happiest in the lives of Lassalle and his betrothed. Helen was staying with a Madame Aarson, and was constantly visited by her lover. It was agreed between them that Lassalle should follow her to Geneva, and see her parents. But no sooner had he entered his room at the Pension Leovet,

in the neighbourhood of the house of Herr von Dönniges, than a servant handed him a letter from Helen. It told how on her arrival she had found the whole house excited by the betrothal of her sister Margaret to Count von Keyserling. Her mother’s delight in the engagement had tempted her (contrary to Lassalle’s express wish) to confidences, and she had told of her love for the arch-agitator. Her mother had turned upon her with loathing, execrated Lassalle without stint, spoken scornfully of the Countess, the casket robbery, and kindred matters. “It is quite impossible,” urged the frantic woman, “that Count Keyserling will unite himself to a family with a connexion of this kind.” The father joined in the upbraiding, the disowning of an undutiful daughter. One has but to remember the vulgar, tradesman instinct, which then, as now, guides the marriage ideals of a certain class, to take in the whole situation at a glance.

Lassalle had hardly begun to read the letter when Helen appeared before him, and begged him to take her away immediately—to France—anywhere! Her father’s violence, her mother’s abuse, had driven her to despair.

Lassalle was indignant with her. Why had she not obeyed him? He would speak to her father. All would yet be well. But—she was compromised there—at his hotel. Had she a friend in the neighbourhood?

At this moment her maid came in to say that there was a carriage ready to take them to the station. A train would start for Paris in a quarter of an hour. Helen renewed her entreaty, but Lassalle remained resolute. He would only receive her from her father. To what friend could he take her? Helen named Madame Caroline Rognon, who beheld them with astonishment.

A few minutes later Frau von Dönniges and her daughter Margaret entered the house. Then followed a disagreeable scene between Lassalle and the mother, ending, after many scornful words thrown at the ever self-restrained lover, in Helen being carried off before his eyes—indeed, by his wish. Lassalle had shown dignity and self-restraint, but he had killed the girl’s love—until it was too late.

Dühring speaks of Lassalle’s “inconceivable stupidity,” and there is a great temptation at this date, with all the circumstances before us,

to look at the matter with Dühring’s eyes. But to one whom Heine had called a Messiah, whom Humboldt had termed a “Wunderkind,” and Bismarck had greeted as among the greatest men of the age, it may well have seemed flatly inconceivable that this insignificant little Swiss diplomatist could long refuse the alliance he proposed. Yet stronger and more potent may have been the feeling—although of this there is no positive evidence extant—that the social movement which he had so much at heart could not well endure a further scandal. The Hatzfeldt story had been used against him frequently enough. An elopement—so sweetly romantic under some circumstances—would have been the ruin of his great political reputation.

Lassalle speedily regretted his course of action—what man in love would not have done so?—but his first impulse was consistent with the life of strenuous effort for the cause he had embraced. To a romantic girl, however, his conduct could but seem brutal and treacherous. Helen had done more than enough. She had compromised herself irretrievably, and an immediate marriage was imperatively demanded by the conventionalities.

She was, however, seized by a brutal father and confined to her room, until she understood that Lassalle had left Geneva. Then the entreaties of her family, the representation that her sister’s marriage, even her father’s position, were in jeopardy, caused her to declare that she would abandon Lassalle.

At this point the story is conflicting. Helen herself says that she never saw Lassalle again after he had handed her over to her mother, and that after a long period of ill-usage and petty persecution, she was hurried one night across the lake. Becker, however, declares that as Lassalle and his friend Rüstow were walking in Geneva a carriage passed them on the way to the station containing Helen and another lady, and that Helen acknowledged their salute. Anyway, it is clear that Helen went to Bex on August 9, and that Lassalle left Geneva on the 13th. Letter after letter was sent by Lassalle to Helen—one from Karlsruhe on the 15th, and one from Munich on the 19th, but no answer. In Karlsruhe, according to von Hofstetten, Lassalle wept like a child. His correspondence with the Countess and with Colonel Rüstow becomes forcible

in its demands for assistance. Writing to Rüstow, he tells of a two hours’ conversation with the Bavarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Baron von Schrenk, who assures him of his sympathy, says that he cannot understand the objections of von Dönniges, and that in similar circumstances he would be proud of the alliance, although he deprecated the political views of Lassalle. Finally this accommodating Minister of State—here, at least, the tragi-comedy is but too apparent—engages to send a lawyer, Dr. Haenle, as an official commissioner to negotiate with the obdurate father and refractory ambassador.

Richard Wagner, the great composer, the Bishop of Mayence, and noblemen, generals, and scholars without number were also pressed into the service, but in vain. The treachery of intimate friends more than counterbalanced all that could be achieved by well-meaning strangers. If Helen is to be believed—and the charge is not denied—Lassalle’s friend Holthoff, sent to negotiate in his favour, entreated her to abandon Lassalle, and to comply with her parents’ wishes. Lassalle, he declared, was not in any way a suitable

husband, and her father had decided wisely. The poor girl lived in a constant atmosphere of petty persecution. Her father, she was told, might lose his post in the Bavarian service if she married this Socialist, her brother would have absolutely no career open to him, her sisters could not marry in their own rank of life; in fact, the whole family were alleged to be entirely unhappy and miserable through her stubbornness. The following letter—obviously dictated—was the not unnatural outcome:—

To Herr Lassalle.

Sir,—

I have again become reconciled to my betrothed bridegroom, Herr Yanko von Racowitza, whose love I have regained, and I deeply repent my earlier action. I have given notice of this to your legal representative, Herr Holthoff, and I now declare to you of my own free will and firm conviction, that there never can be any further question of a marriage between us, and that I hold myself in all respects to be released from such an engagement. I am now firmly resolved to devote to my aforesaid betrothed bridegroom my eternal love and fidelity.

Helene von Dönniges.

This letter came through Rüstow, and Lassalle

addressed the following reply to Helen, which, however, she never received—it came in fact into the possession of the Countess—a sufficient commentary on the duplicity and the false friendship not only of Holthoff, but of Colonel Rüstow and the Countess Hatzfeldt in this sad affair.

Munich, Aug. 20, 1864.

Helen,—

My heart is breaking! Rüstow’s letter will kill me. That you have betrayed me seems impossible! Even now I cannot believe in such shamelessness, in such frightful treachery. It is only for a moment that some one has overridden your will and obliterated your true self. It is inconceivable that this can be your real, your abiding determination. You cannot have thrown aside all shame, all love, all fidelity, all truth. If you did, you would dishonour and disfigure humanity. There can be no truth left in the world if you are false, if you are capable of descending to this depth of abandonment, of breaking such holy oaths, of crushing my heart. Then there is nothing more under the sun in which a man can still believe.

Have you not filled me with a longing to possess you? Have you not implored me to exhaust all proper measures, before carrying you away from Wabern? Have you not by your own lips and by your letters, sworn to me the most sacred oaths? Have you not declared to me, even in your last letters, that you were nothing, nothing but my loving wife, and that no power on earth should stay your resolution? And now, after you have bound this true heart of mine to yourself so strongly, this heart which when once it gives itself away gives itself for ever; now, when the battle has scarcely begun, do you cast me off? Do you betray me? Do you destroy me? If so, you succeed in doing what else no fate can do; you will have crushed and shattered one of the hardest of men, who could withstand unflinchingly all outward storms. No, I can never survive such treachery. It will kill me inwardly and outwardly. It is not possible that you are so dishonourable, so shameless, so reckless of duty, so utterly unworthy and infamous. If you were, you would deserve of me the most deadly hatred. You would deserve the contempt of the world. Helen, it is not your own resolution which you have communicated to Rüstow. Some one has fastened it upon you by a coercion of your better feelings. Listen to me. If you abide by this resolution, you will lament it as long as you live.

Helen, true to my words, “Je me charge du reste,” I shall stay here, and shall take all possible steps to break down your father’s opposition. I have already excellent means in my hand, which will certainly not remain unused, and if they do not succeed, I shall still possess thousands of other means, and I will grind all hindrances to dust if you will but remain true to me. If you remain true, there is no limit to my strength or to my love of you, Je me charge toujours du reste! The battle is hardly begun, you cowardly girl. But can it be, that while I sit here, and have already achieved what seemed impossible, you are betraying me, and listening to the flattering words of another man? Helen, my fate is in your hands! But if you destroy me by this wicked treachery, from which I cannot recover, then may evil fall upon you, and my curse follow you to the grave! This is the curse of a true heart, of a heart that you wantonly break, and with which you have cruelly trifled. Yes, this curse of mine will surely strike you.

According to Rüstow’s message, you want your letters to be returned to you. In any case, you will never receive them otherwise than from me—after a personal interview. For I must and will speak to you personally, and to you alone. I must and will hear my death-doom from your own lips. It is only thus that I can believe what otherwise seems impossible to me.

I am continuing here to take further steps to win you, and when I have done all that is possible, I shall come to Geneva. Helen, our destinies are entwined!

F. Lassalle. [213]

It is pitiable to realize the amount of false or imperfect friendship which led Lassalle on to his ruin. Rüstow was false, and Holthoff was false, if it were not rather that both looked upon Lassalle’s affection for this girl, half his age, as a

mad freak to be cured and forgotten. More might have been expected from the Countess, to whom Lassalle had given so much pure and disinterested devotion; but here again, a sense of maternal ownership in Lassalle was sufficient to justify, in such a woman, any means to keep him apart from this fancy of the hour. To the Countess, however, Helen had turned for help, and had received a note which had but enraged her, and made the breach between her and Lassalle yet wider. In the after years, Helen published one letter and the Countess another as the actual reply of the Countess to Helen’s appeal, and the truth will now never be known. Meanwhile Dr. Arndt, a nephew of von Dönniges, had gone to Berlin to fetch Yanko von Racowitza. Of Yanko Helen has herself given us a pleasant picture, as the one man for whom she really cared until the overwhelming presence of Lassalle appeared upon the scene, as her one friend during her persecution. Absent from Lassalle’s influence, it was not strange that the delicate Wallachian—even younger than herself and the slave of her every whim—should have an influence in her life. Had Lassalle, however, had

yet another personal interview with her, there can scarcely be a doubt that she would have been as he had once said, “as clay in the hands of the potter”—but this was not to be. Lassalle came back to Geneva on August 23, and immediately wrote an earnest letter to Herr von Dönniges, begging for an interview, and stating that he had not the least enmity towards him for what had happened. With the fear of the Foreign Minister at Munich before his eyes Helen’s father could not well refuse again, and the interview took place. Lassalle, according to von Dönniges, demanded that Yanko von Racowitza should be forbidden the house, while he himself should have ready access to Helen. He further charged von Dönniges with cruelty to his daughter, and was called a liar to his face, while even the cook was called upon the scene to give her evidence as to the domestic ethics of this family circle. The letter of von Dönniges to Dr. Haenle was clearly meant to be shown to the Foreign Minister, and the wily diplomatist naturally took the opportunity both to justify himself and to vilify Lassalle. Then began a painful dispute as to whether Herr von Dönniges

had ill-used his daughter; the overwhelming evidence, which includes the testimony of that daughter, written long after her father’s death, tending to prove the truth of Lassalle’s allegation. Lassalle meanwhile found no opportunity of approaching Helen, and having every reason to believe that she was entirely faithless, gave up the struggle. He referred to the girl in language characteristic of a despairing and jilted lover, and sent von Dönniges a challenge, although many years before, in a political controversy, he had declined to fight—on principle. His seconds were to be General Becker and Colonel Rüstow, and the latter has left us a long account of the affair.

On the appointed day, August 22, Rüstow went everywhere to look for Herr von Dönniges, but the minister had fled to Berne. Rüstow then saw Lassalle at the rooms of the Countess von Hatzfeldt. Lassalle mentioned that he had that morning had his challenge accepted by von Racowitza, whose seconds were Count Keyserling and Dr. Arndt. Rüstow insisted, both to Lassalle and to Racowitza’s friends, that von Dönniges should have priority, but was overruled;

and it was agreed that the duel should be fought that very evening. Rüstow protested that he could not find another second in so short a time—General Becker does not seem to have been available—but at length it was arranged that General Bethlem should be asked to fill the office, and that the duel should take place on the following morning, August 28. There seems to have been considerable difficulty in finding suitable pistols, and at the last moment General Bethlem declined to be a second, and Herr von Hofstetten consented to act. Rüstow called upon Lassalle at the Victoria Hotel at five o’clock. At half-past six the party started for Carouge, a village in the neighbourhood of Geneva, which they reached an hour later. Lassalle was quite cheerful, and perfectly confident that he would come unharmed out of the conflict. The opponents faced one another and Racowitza wounded Lassalle, who was carried by Rüstow and Dr. Seiler to a coach, and thence to the Victoria Hotel, Geneva. He suffered dreadfully both then and afterwards, and was only relieved by a plentiful use of opium. Three days later, on Wednesday, August 31, 1864, he died.

Was it the chance shot of a delicate boy that killed one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century, or was it a planned attack upon one who loved the people? This last view was taken and is still taken by many of his followers; but it is needless to say that it has no foundation in fact. Lassalle was killed by a chance shot, and killed in a duel which had not even the doubtful justification of hatred of his opponent. “Count me no longer as a rival; for you I have nothing but friendship,” were the words written to Racowitza at the moment that he challenged von Dönniges, and he declared on his death-bed that he died by his own hand.

The revolutionists of all lands assembled around his dead body, which was embalmed by order of the Countess. This woman talked loudly of vengeance, called not only von Racowitza but Helen a murderer, [218] little thinking that posterity would judge her more hardly than Helen. She proposed to take the corpse in solemn procession through Germany; but an order from the Prussian Government disturbed her plans, and at Breslau, Lassalle’s native town, it was allowed

to rest. Lassalle is buried in the family vault in the Jewish Cemetery, and a simple monument bears the inscription:

here rests what is mortal
of
FERDINAND LASSALLE,
The
Thinker and the Fighter.

To understand the whole tragedy and to justify its great victim is to feel something of the strain which comes to every thinker and fighter who, like Lassalle, writes and speaks persistently to vast audiences, often against great odds, and always with the prospect of a prison before him. That his nerves were utterly unstrung, that he was not his real self in those last days, is but too evident. Armed, as he claimed, with the entire culture of his century, a maker of history if ever there was one, he became the victim of a love drama which I suppose that Mr. Matthew Arnold would describe as of the surgeon’s apprentice order: but which, apart from his political creed, will always endear him to men and women who have “lived and loved.”

And what shall we say of Helen von Dönniges? Her own story is surely one of the most romantic ever written. In My Relation to Ferdinand Lassalle, she tells how Yanko broke to her the news that he was going to fight Lassalle, and how much she grieved. “Lassalle will inevitably kill Yanko,” she thought; and she pitied him, but her pity was not without calculation. “When Yanko is dead and they bring his body here, there will be a stir in the house,” she said, “and I can then fly to Lassalle.” But the hours flew by, and finally Yanko came to tell her that he had wounded his opponent. For the moment, and indeed until after Lassalle’s death, she hated her successful lover; but a little later his undoubted goodness, his tenderness and patience, won her heart. They were married, but he died within a year, of consumption. Being disowned by her relations, Helen then settled in Berlin, and studied for the stage. She herself relates how at Breslau on one occasion, when acting a boy’s part in one of Moser’s comedies, some of Lassalle’s oldest friends being present remarked upon her likeness to Lassalle in his youth, a resemblance on which she and Lassalle had more

than once prided themselves. At a later date Frau von Racowitza married a Russian Socialist, S. E. Shevitch, then resident in America. M. Shevitch returned to Russia a few years after this and lived with his wife at Riga. Those who have seen Madame Shevitch describe her as one of the most fascinating women they have ever met. She and her husband were very happy in their married life. Madame Shevitch is now living in Munich. Our great novelist and poet George Meredith has immortalized her in his Tragic Comedians.

VIII. LORD ACTON’S LIST OF THE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

Every one has heard of Lord Avebury’s (Sir John Lubbock’s) Hundred Best Books, not every one of Lord Acton’s. It is the privilege of the Pall Mall Magazine [225] to publish this latter list, the final impression as to reading of one of the most scholarly men that England has known in our time. The list in question is, as it were, an omitted chapter of a book that was one of the successes of its year—The Letters of Lord Acton to Miss Mary Gladstone—published by Mr. George Allen. That series of letters made very pleasant reading. They showed Lord Acton not as a Dryasdust, but as a very human personage indeed, with sympathies invariably in the right place.

Nor can his literary interests be said to have been restricted, for he read history and biography with avidity, and probably knew more of theology than any other layman of modern times. In imaginative literature, however, his critical instinct was perhaps less keen. He called Heine “a bad second to Schiller in poetry,” which is absurd; and he thought George Eliot the greatest of modern novelists. In arriving at the latter judgment he had the excuse of personal friendship and admiration for a woman whose splendid intellectual gifts were undeniable.

In one letter we find Lord Acton discussing with Miss Gladstone the eternal question of the hundred best books. Sir John Lubbock had complained to her of the lack of a guide or supreme authority on the choice of books. Lord Acton had replied that, “although he had something to learn on the graver side of human knowledge,” Sir John would execute his own scheme better than almost anybody. We all know that Sir John Lubbock attempted this at a lecture delivered at the Great Ormond Street Working Men’s College; that that lecture has been reprinted again and again in a book entitled The

Pleasures of Life, and that the publishers have sold more than two hundred thousand copies—a kind of success that might almost make some of our popular novelists turn green with envy. Later on in the correspondence Lord Acton quoted one of the popes, who said that “fifty books would include every good idea in the world.” “But,” continued Lord Acton, “literature has doubled since then, and it would be hard to do without a hundred.”

Lord Acton was possessed of the happy thought that he would like some of his friends and acquaintances each to name his ideal hundred best books—as for example Bishop Lightfoot, Dean Church, Dean Stanley, Canon Liddon, Professor Max Muller, Mr. J. R. Lowell, Professor E. A. Freeman, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. John Morley, Sir Henry Maine, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, Cardinal Newman, Mr. Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Professor Goldwin Smith, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Mark Pattison, and Mr. J. A. Symonds. Strange to say, he thought there would be a surprising agreement between these writers as to which were the hundred best books. I am all but certain, however, that

there would not have been more than twenty books in common between rival schools of thought—the secular and the ecclesiastical—between, let us say, Mr. John Morley and Cardinal Newman. But it is probable that not one of these eminent men would have furnished a list with any similarity whatever to the remainder. Each would have written down his own hundred favourites, and herein may be admitted is an evidence of the futility of all such attempts. The best books are the books that have helped us most to see life in all its complex bearings, and each individual needs a particular kind of mental food quite unlike the diet that best stimulates his neighbour. Writing more than a year later, Lord Acton said that he had just drawn out a list of recommended authors for his son, as being the company he would like him to keep; but this list is not available—it is not the one before me. That was compiled yet another twelve months afterwards, when we find Lord Acton sending to Miss Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) his own ideal “hundred best books.” This list is now printed for the first time. Evidently Miss Gladstone remonstrated with her friend over the

character of the list; but Lord Acton defended it as being in his judgment really the hundred best books, apart from works on physical science—that it treated of principles that every thoughtful man ought to understand, and was calculated, in fact, to give one a clear view of the various forces that make history. “We are not considering,” he adds, “what will suit an untutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman, who would never come to an end of the Imitation.”

However, here is Lord Acton’s list, which Mrs. Drew has been kind enough to place in the hands of the Editor of the Pall Mall Magazine. I give also Lord Acton’s comment with which it opens, and I add in footnotes one or two facts about each of the authors:

* * * * *

“In answer to the question: Which are the hundred best books in the world?

“Supposing any English youth, whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not training for a profession.

“To perfect his mind and open windows in every direction, to raise him to the level of his age so that he may know the (20 or 30) forces that have made our world what it is and still reign over it, to guard him against surprises and against the constant sources of error within,

to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides, to give force and fullness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are wrong, to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent; so that each book, thoroughly taken in, shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of him—this list is submitted”:—

1. Plato—Laws—Steinhart’s Introduction. [230a]

2. Aristotle—Politics—Susemihl’s Commentary. [230b]

3. Epictetus—Encheiridion—Commentary of Simplicius. [230c]

4. St. Augustine—Letters. [230d]

5. St. Vincent’s Commonitorium. [231a]

6. Hugo of S. Victor—De Sacramentis. [231b]

7. St. Bonaventura—Breviloquium. [231c]

8. St. Thomas Aquinas—Summa contra Gentiles. [231d]

9. Dante—Divina Commedia. [232a]

10. Raymund of Sabunde—Theologia Naturalis. [232b]

11. Nicholas of Cusa—Concordantia Catholica. [232c]

12. Edward Reuss—The Bible. [232d]

13. Pascal’s Pensées—Havet’s Edition. [233a]

14. Malebranche, De la Recherche de la Vérité. [233b]

15. Baader—Speculative Dogmatik. [233c]

16. Molitor—Philosophie der Geschichte. [233d]

17. Astié—Esprit de Vinet. [233e]

18. Pünjer—Geschichte der Religions-philosophie. [234a]

19. Rothe—Theologische Ethik. [234b]

20. Martensen—Die Christliche Ethik. [234c]

21. Oettingen—Moralstatistik. [234d]

22. Hartmann—Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. [234e]

23. Leibniz—Letters edited by Klopp. [235a]

24. Brandis—Geschichte der Philosophie. [235b]

25. Fischer—Franz Bacon. [235c]

26. Zeller—Neuere Deutsche Philosophie. [235d]

27. Bartholomess—Doctrines Religieuses de la Philosophie Moderns. [236a]

28. Guyon—Morale Anglaise. [236b]

29. Ritschl—Entstehung der Altkatholischen Kirche. [236c]

30. Loening—Geschichte des Kirchenrechts. [236d]

31. Baur—Vorlesungen über Dogmengeschichte. [237a]

32. Fénelon—Correspondence. [237b]

33. Newman’s Theory of Development. [237c]

34. Mozley’s University Sermons. [237d]

35. Schneckenburger—Vergleichende Darstellung. [238a]

36. Hundeshagen—Kirckenvorfassungsgeschichte. [238b]

37. Schweizer—Protestantische Centraldogmen. [238c]

38. Gass—Geschichte der Lutherischen Dogmatik. [238d]

39. Cart—Histoire du Mouvement Religieux dans le Canton de Vaud. [238e]

40. Blondel—De la Primauté. [239a]

41. Le Blanc de Beaulieu—Theses. [239b]

42. Thiersch.—Vorlesungen über Katholizismus. [239c]

43. Möhler—Neue Untersuchungen. [239d]

44. Scherer—Mélanges de Critique Religieuse. [240a]

45. Hooker—Ecclesiastical Polity. [240b]

46. Weingarten—Revolutionskirchen Englands. [240c]

47. Kliefoth—Acht Bücher von der Kirche. [240d]

48. Laurent—Etudés de l’Histoire de l’Humanitè. [240e]

49. Ferrari—Rèvolutions de l’ltalie. [241a]

50. Lange—Geschichte des Materialismus. [241b]

51. Guicciardini—Ricordi Politici. [241c]

52. Duperron—Ambassades. [241d]

53. Richelieu—Testament Politique. [242a]

54. Harrington’s Writings. [242b]

55. Mignet—Négotiations de la Succession d’Espagne. [242c]

56. Rousseau—Considérations sur la Pologne. [243a]

57. Foncin—Ministère de Turgot. [243b]

58. Burke’s Correspondence. [243c]

59. Las Cases—Mémorial de Ste. Hélène. [243d]

60. Holtzendorff—Systematische Rechtsenzyklopädie. [244a]

61. Jhering—Geist des Römischen Rechts. [244b]

62. Geib—Strafrecht. [244c]

63. Maine—Ancient Law. [245a]

64. Gierke—Genossenschaftsrecht. [245b]

65. Stahl—Philosophie des Rechts. [245c]

66. Gentz—Briefwechsel mit Adam Müller. [246a]

67. Vollgraff—Polignosie. [246b]

68. Frantz—Kritik aller Parteien. [246c]

69. De Maistre—Considérations sur la France. [246d]

70. Donoso Cortès—Ecrits Politiques. [247a]

71. Périn—De la Richesse dans les Societes Chretiennes. [247b]

72. Le Play—La Réforme Sociale. [247c]

73. Riehl—Die Bürgerliche Sociale. [247d]

74. Sismondi—Etudes sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres. [248a]

75. Rossi—Cours du Droit Constitutionnel. [248b]

76. Barante—Vie de Royer Collard. [248c]

77. Duvergier de Hauranne—Histoire du Gouvernement Parlementaire. [249a]

78. Madison—Debates of the Congress of Confederation. [249b]

79. Hamilton—The Federalist. [249c]

80. Calhoun—Essay on Government. [249d]

81. Dumont—Sophismes Anarchiques. [250a]

82. Quinet—La Révolution Française. [250b]

83. Stein—Sozialismus in Frankreich. [250c]

84. Lassalle—System der Erworbenen Rechte. [251a]

85. Thonissen—Le Socialisme depuis l’Antiquité. [251b]

86. Considérant—Destines Sociale. [251c]

87. Roscher—Nationalökonomik. [251d]

89. Mill—System of Logic. [251e]

90. Coleridge—Aids to Reflection. [252a]

91. Radowitz—Fragmente. [252b]

92. Gioberti—Pensieri. [252c]

93. Humboldt—Kosmos. [253a]

94. De Candolle—Histoire des Sciences et des Savants. [253b]

95. Darwin—Origin of Species. [253c]

96. Littré—Fragments de Philosophie. [253d]

97. Cournot—Enchaînements des Idées fondamentales. [253e]

98. Monatschriften der wissenschaftlichen Vereine. [254]

This list, written in 1883 in Miss Gladstone’s (Mrs. Drew’s) Diary, must always have an interest in the history of the human mind.

But my readers will, I imagine, for the most part, agree with me that there are others besides untutored savages and illiterate peasant women to whom such a list is entirely impracticable. It indicates the enormous preference which on the whole Lord Acton gave to the Literature of Knowledge over the Literature of Power, to use De Quincey’s famous distinction. With the exception of Dante’s Divine Comedy there is practically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy is here, and high thought.

Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato and Pascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all among the world’s immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by finding the least important book of a well-known author—as for example Rousseau’s Poland instead of the Confessions and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection instead of the Poems or the Biographia Literaria. Think of an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that he despised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the Memorial of St. Helena of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon’s exile, but in preference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon.

Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, at others a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is a fascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought the noblest mental equipment for life’s work. At the best, it is true, it would represent but one half of life. But then Lord Acton recognized this when he asked that

men should be “steeled against the charm of literary beauty and talent,” and he was assuming in any case that all the books in aesthetic literature, the best poetry and the best history had already been read, as he undoubtedly had read them.

“The charm of literary beauty and talent!” There is the whole question. Nothing really matters for the average man, so far as books are concerned, but this charm, and I am criticizing Lord Acton’s list for the average man. The student who has got beyond it need not worry himself about classified lists. He may read his Plato, and Aristotle, his Pascal and Newman, his Christian apologists and German theologians, as he wills; or he may read in some other quite different direction. Guidance is impossible to a mind at such a stage of cultivation as Lord Acton had in view.

Only minds at a more primitive stage of culture than this most learned and most accomplished man seemed able to conceive of, could be bettered by advice as to reading. Given, indeed, contact with some superior mind, which out of its rich equipment of culture should advise

as to the books that might be most profitably read, I could imagine advice being helpful. It would be of no value, it is true, to an untutored savage or illiterate peasant, but to a youth fresh from school-books and much modern fiction, to a young girl about to enter upon life in its more serious aspects, it would be immensely serviceable. It was of such as these that Mr. Ruskin thought when he wrote of “King’s Treasures” in Sesame and Lilies, and the same idea was doubtless in Sir John Lubbock’s mind when he lectured on the “Hundred Best Books.” But Lord Avebury’s list had its limitations, it seems to me, for any one who has an interest in good literature and guidance to the reading thereof. To give “Scott” as one book and “Shakspere” as another was I suggest to shirk much responsibility of selection. Scott is a whole library, Shakspere is yet another. One may give “Keats” or “Shelley” because they are more limited in quantity. Even to name novels by Charles Kingsley and Bulwer Lytton in this select hundred was to demonstrate to men of this generation that Lord Avebury being of an earlier one had a bias in favour of the books

that we are all outgrowing. To include Mill’s Logic is to ignore the Time Spirit acting on philosophy; to include Tennyson’s Idylls its action on poetry. Mill and Tennyson will always live in literature but not I think by these books.

But the fact is that there is no possibility of naming the hundred best books. No one could quarrel with Lord Avebury if he had named these as his hundred own favourites among the books of the world. Still, it might have been his hundred; it could not possibly have been any one else’s hundred because every man of education must make his own choice. No! the naming of the hundred best books for any large, general audience is quite impossible. All that is possible in such a connexion is to state emphatically that there are very few books that are equally suitable to every kind of intellect. Temperament as well as intellectual endowment make for so much in reading. Take, for example, the Imitation of Christ. George Eliot, although not a Christian, found it soul-satisfying. Thackeray, as I think a more robust intellect, found it well nigh as mischievous as did Eugene Sue, whose

anathematizations in his novel The Wandering Jew are remembered by all. Other books that have been the outcome of piety of mind leave less room for difference of opinion. Surely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, make an universal appeal. That universal appeal is the point at which alone guidance is possible. There are great books that can be read only by the few, but surely the very greatest appeal alike to the educated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intellectual endowment and to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are incomprehensible. Hamlet is a wonderful test of this quality. It “holds the boards” at the small provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr. Crummles to an illiterate peasantry, and it is performed by the greatest actor to the most select city audience. It is made the subject of study by learned commentators. It is world-embracing.

Are there in the English language, including translations, a hundred books that stand the test as Hamlet stands it? No two men would make the same list of books that answer to this demand of an universal appeal, and obviously each nation

must make its own list. Mine is for English boys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those who have had no educational advantages in early years. I exclude living writers, and I give the hundred in four groups.