FERDINAND LASSALLE
PRINCE YANKO RACOWITZA
HERR VON DONNIGES
KARL MARX
DOCTOR HAENLE
JACQUES
HELENE VON DONNIGES
FRAU VON DONNIGES
FRAU HOLTHOFF
HILDA VON DONNIGES
Servants, maids, butler, landlord, ladies and gentlemen.
A wise man has said that there is a difference between fact and truth.
He has also told us that things may be true and still not be so. The
truth as to the love-story of Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von Donniges
can only be told by adhering strictly to the facts. Facts are not only
stubborn things, but often very inconvenient; yet in this instance the
simple facts fall easily into dramatic form, and the only way to tell
the story seems to be to let it tell itself. Dramas are made up of
incidents that have happened to somebody sometime, but in no instance
that I ever heard of have all the situations pictured in a play happened
to the persons who played the parts. The business of the playwright is
selection and rejection, and usually the dramatic situations revealed
have been culled from very many lives over a long course of years. Here
the author need but reveal the tangled skein woven by Fate, Meddling
Parents, Pride, Prejudice, Caprice, Ambition, Passion. In other words it
is human nature in a tornado, and human nature is a vagrant ship, with a
spurious chart, an uncertain compass, a drunken pilot, a mutinous crew
and a crazy captain.
The moral seems to be that the tragedy of existence lies in interposing
that newly discovered thing called intellect into the delicate affairs
of life, instead of having faith in God, and moving serenely with the
eternal tide.
Moses struck the rock, and the waters gushed forth; but if Moses had
found a spring in the desert and then toiled mightily to smother it with
a mountain of arid sand, I doubt me much whether the name of Moses
would now live as one of the saviors of the world.
Parties with an eczema for management would do well to butt their heads
three times against the wall and take note that the wall falls not. Then
and then only are they safe from Megalocephalia. There are temptations
in life that require all of one's will to succumb to; and he who resists
not the current of his being, nor attempts to dam the fountain of life
for another, shall be crowned with bay and be fed on ambrosia in
Elysium.
[Illustration: LASSALLE]
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