But Lassalle's laughter soon ceased. Another recollection stabbed him
to silence. The old man was dead--that beautiful, cheerful old man.
Never more would his blue eyes gaze in proud tenderness on his darling
brilliant boy. But a few months ago and he had seemed the very type of
ruddy old age. How tenderly he had watched over his poor broken-down
old wife, supporting her as she walked, cutting up her food as she
ate, and filling her eyes with the love-light, despite all her pain
and weakness. And now this poor, deaf, shrivelled little mother, had
to totter on alone. "Father, what have you to do to-day?" he
remembered asking him once. "Only to love you, my child," the old man
had answered cheerily, laying his hand on his son's shoulder.
Yes, he had indeed loved him. What long patience from his childhood
upwards; patience with the froward arrogant boy, a law to himself even
in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating
suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant
clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose
soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and
ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering
wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a
commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; patience
even with his refusal to study law and medicine. "But what then do you
wish to study, my boy? At sixteen one must choose decisively."
"The vastest study in the world, that which is most closely bound up
with the most sacred interests of humanity--History."
"But what will you live on, since, as a Jew, you can't get any post or
professorship in Prussia?"
"Oh, I shall live somehow."
"But why won't you study medicine or law?"
"Doctors, lawyers, and even savants, make a merchandise of their
knowledge. I will have nothing of the Jew. I will study for the sake
of knowledge and action."
"Do you think you are a poet?"
"No, I wish to devote myself to public affairs. The time approaches
when the most sacred ends of humanity must be fought for. Till the end
of the last century the world was held in the bondage of the stupidest
superstition. Then rose, at the mighty appeal of intellect, a material
force which blew the old order into bloody fragments. Intellectually
this revolt has gone on ever since. In every nation men have arisen
who have fought by the Word, and fallen or conquered. Börne says that
no European sovereign is blind enough to believe his grandson will
have a throne to sit on. I wish I could believe so. For my part,
father, I feel that the era of force must come again, for these folk
on the thrones will not have it otherwise. But for the moment it is
ours not to make the peoples revolt, but to enlighten and raise them
up."
"What you say may not be altogether untrue, but why should _you_ be a
martyr,--you, our hope, our stay? Spare us. One human being can change
nothing in the order of the world. Let those fight who have no
parents' hearts to break."
"Yes, but if every one talked like that--! Why offer myself as a
martyr? Because God has put in my breast a voice which calls me to the
struggle, has given me the strength that makes fighters. Because I can
fight and suffer for a noble cause. Because I will not disappoint the
confidence of God, who has given me this strength for His definite
purpose. In short, because I cannot do otherwise."
Yes, looking back, he saw he could not have done otherwise, though for
that old voice of God in his heart he now substituted mentally the
Hegelian concept of the Idea trying to realize itself through him,
Shakespeare's "prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to
come." The Will of God was the Will of the Time-spirit, and what was
True for the age was whatever its greatest spirits could demonstrate
to it by reason and history. The world had had enough of merely
dithyrambic prophets, it was for the Modern Prophet to heat with his
fire the cannon-balls of logic and science; he must be a thinker among
prophets and a prophet among thinkers. Those he could not inspire
through emotion must be led through reason. There must be not one weak
link in his close-meshed chain of propositions. And who could doubt
that what the Time-spirit was working towards among the Germans--the
Chosen People in the eternal plan of the universe for this new step in
human evolution--was the foundation of a true Kingdom of right, a
Kingdom of freedom and equality, a State which should stand for
justice on earth, and material and spiritual blessedness for all? But
his father had complained not unjustly. Why should _he_ have been
chosen for the Man--the Martyr--through whom the Idea sought
self-realization? It was a terrible fate to be Moses, to be
Prometheus. No doubt that image of himself he read in the faces of his
friends, and in the loving eyes of the Countess Hatzfeldt--that
glorious wonder-youth gifted equally with genius and beauty--must seem
enviable enough, yet to his own heart how chill was this lonely
greatness. And youth itself was passing--was almost gone.