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