"Yes, yes; my head is leaving me. Put it in after 'insight.' 'He unites an energy of will and an attitude for action which plunge me into astonishment.'"
"You see," interrupted Lassalle, looking up; "Heine saw at once the difference between me and Karl Marx. Marx is, when all is said and done, a student, and his present address is practically the British Museum. In mere knowledge I do not pretend to superiority. What language, what art, what science, is unknown to him? But he has run almost entirely to brain. He works out his thoughts best in mathematics—the Spinoza of socialism. But fancy Spinoza leading a people; and even Spinoza had more glow. When I went to see him in London in the winter to ask him to head the movement with me, he objected to my phraseology, dissected my battle-cries in cold blood. I preach socialism as a religion, the Church of the People—he won't even shout 'Truth and Justice!' He will only prove you scientifically that the illusion of the masses that Right is not done them will goad them to express their Might. And his speeches! Treatises, not trumpets! Once after one of his speeches in the prisoner's box, a juror shook hands with him, and thanked him for his instructive lecture. Ha! ha! ha! Take my System of Acquired Rights, now."—Lassalle was now launched on one of his favorite monologues, and the Countess at least never desired to interrupt him.—"There you have learning and logic that has forced the most dry-as-dust to hail it as a masterpiece of Jurisprudence. But it is enrooted in life, and drew its sustenance from my actual practice in fighting my dear Countess's battles. As Heine goes on to say, savoir and pouvoir are rarely united. Luther was a man of action, but his thought was not the widest. Lessing was a man of thought, but he died broken on the wheel of fortune. It was a combination of the two I tried to paint in my Ulrich von Hutten—the Humanist who transcended Luther and who was the morning star of the true Reformation. You remember his Frankfort student who, having mistakenly capped a Jew, could not decide whether the sin was mortal or venial. But though I put my own self into him, I shall not be beaten like him." He jumped to his feet and threw down his pen so that it stood quivering in the table. "For surely it was of me that Heine was thinking when he wrote: 'Yes, a third man will come'"—and Lassalle's accent became dramatically sonorous—"'and he will conclude what Luther began, what Lessing continued, a man of whom the Fatherland stands in such need, The Third Liberator.'"
"The Third Liberator," passionately echoed the Countess.
"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."
Lassalle laughed. "I love Heine. He seemed my soul's brother. I loved him from boyhood, only regretting he wasn't a republican like Börne. 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 gods 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 emancipate 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?"