He curtailed his visit and returned to Berlin heavy of heart, saddened
beyond endurance. His short-lived romance intensified his bitterness
against the rulers of Poland. He hurried to Rahel. He knew no one would
understand his present woe as well as that all-wise woman. She was not
only his literary critic but also his priestess, to whom he confessed
everything. And with that sage smile on her refined intellectual
features she knew how to console, how to tender sympathy, and listened
with genuine concern.
He buried himself in work again but he could not forget his love for
Miriam and with it came the depressing memory of Poland. All his innate
slumbering passions for justice, for liberty, were aroused to a white
heat. Unlike Balaam of old, he had gone to Poland to bless and returned
cursing. Why should he care for personal friendships? Why think of
selfish advantage? Why consider what a hypocritical society might call
poor manners? Like the seers of old he was bidden to speak, and he
seized his pen and told the truth as he saw it regardless of all
consequences.
This essay was the first gun that he fired in the liberation of the
_Junker_-ridden people. For his caustic utterances not only revealed the
tyranny of the Polish nobles but also silhouetted the hideous forms of
the _Junkers_; the censor who had pruned away every trace of humor from
the article, unwittingly failed to strike out a sentence fraught with
danger.
His first political pronouncement proved a veritable boomerang. It was
too daring, too pointed, too truthful. He learned that even in letters,
no less than in the drawingroom, truth must be masked, if not altogether
suppressed. His acquaintances of rank looked at him askance, his Polish
friend and patron shunned him, Prussian officials took notice of him.
Even Rahel, herself a passionate lover of truth and no friend of
_Junkerdom_, advised caution. And when she tried to give him the wisdom
of her experience, he only grew peevish and said he was no diplomat and
did not wish to be one, and that truth was to be his only guide in life.
He found himself at odds with everybody. He had anticipated applause but
instead met with hostility and condemnation.
His cultured Jewish friends, too, took offense at this essay. In
speaking of the pitiful conditions of his co-racials in Poland he spoke
disparagingly of the elegantly dressed Berliners. He had ironically made
a comparison between the exterior of the ungainly Polish Jew, with a
heart beating for freedom, and the elegant Berliner, whose head was
filled with the silly romanticism of the period, with nothing but vanity
in his heart.