I found him at Brighton, a grumbling old man, angry and spiteful. Abandoned by his former friends, forgotten in Germany, without influence on affairs and at variance with his fellow emigrants, Ruge \Vas absorbed in slanderous gossip. In constant touch with him there were t\"\"O or three most inept newspaper correspondents, penny-a-liners, those petty free-lances of publicity, who are never to be seen in time of battle and always aften••ards, cockchafers of the political and literary worlds, who rootle about every evening, gloating and busy, in the discarded remnants of the day. Ruge composed newspaper paragraphs with these men, goaded them on, gave them copy and produced several periodicals in Germany and America.
I dined with him and spent the evening. He complained the whole time about the emigrants and ran them down.
'Have you heard,' he said, 'how things are going with our forty-five-year-old Werther and the baroness?2 It's said that when he revealed his love for her he tried to captivate her with 2 The reference is to August \Yillich and Baroness Bruning, a Russian by birth. who had helped to a rrange Kinkel's escape from prison. ( A .S. )
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the chemical prospect of a child of genius, to be born of an aristocratic mother and a communist father. The baron, they say, who was no amateur of physiological experiments, chucked him out neck and crop. Is that true?'
'How can you believe such absurdities?'
'No, in point of fact I don't really believe it. I l ive this parochial life here and only hear from the Germans what is going on in London ; all of them, and particularly the emigrants, tell God knows what lies; they're all quarrelling and slandering each other. I think that this Kinkel set that rumour going as a token of gratitude to the baroness, who got him out of prison.
He would have run after her himself, you know, but he's not free to: his wife doesn't let him get into mischief. "You got me away from my first husband," she says, "and that's quite enough.
There is a sample of philosoph ical conversation with Arnold Ruge!
He did once alter his tone and talk with friendly interest about Bakunin, but recollected himself half-way and added:
'However, he's begun to go to seed recently; he's been raving about revolutionary tsarism, panslavism or something.'
I left him with a heavy heart and a firm determination never to come back.
A year later he gave some lectures in London about the philosophical movement in Germany. The lectures were bad; the Berlin-English accent struck the ear unpleasantly, and besides he pronounced all the Greek and Latin names in the German way, so that the English could not make out who these Yofis and Yunos were . . . . A dozen people came to the second lecture, and to the third two-Worcell and I. As he walked through the empty hall past us Ruge shook me by the hand, and added:
'Poland and Russia have come, but Italy's not here; I shan't forgive Mazzini or Safli this when there's a new people's rising.'
When he left, wrathful and menacing, I looked at Worcell's sardonic smile and said:
'Russia invites Poland to dine with her.'
'C'en est fait d'ltalie,' Worcell observed, shaking his head, and we set off.
Kinkel was one of the most remarkable German emigrants in London. A man of irreproachable conduct, who had laboured in the sweat of his brow-a thing which, however strange this seems, was practically never met with among the emigrants-
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Kinkel was Ruge's sworn enemy. Why? That is just as hard to explain as that Ruge, the advocate of atheism, was a friend of the nco-Catholic Ronge. Gottfried Kinkel was one of the heads of the forty timl's forty� German schisms in London.
\Yhen I looked at him I always marvelled that the majestic head of a Zeus had found itself on the shoulders of a German professor, and how a German professor had found himself first on the field of battle and then, wounded, in a Prussian prison; but perhaps the oddl'st thing of all is that all this plus London did not change him in the least, and he remained a German professor. A tall man, with grey hair and a grizzled beard, he had a look that of itself was stately and inspired respect; but he added to it as it were an official unction, Salbung, something judicial and episcopaL solemn, stiff, and modestly self-satisfied. This nuance, in different variations, is encountered in fashionable priests, ladies' physicians, and especially in mesmerisers, advocates who are the special guardians of morals and the headwaiters of aristocratic hotels in England. Kinkel had studied thPology a good deal as a young man ; when he got free of it he retained the priestly manner. There is nothing surprising in this: Lamcnnais himself, who cut so deeply at the roots of Catholicism, kept the appearance of an abbot until he was an old man. Kinkel's deliberate, fluent speech, correct and eschewing extremes, ran on as if part of an edifying discussion; he listened to the other side ''"ith studied indulgence and to himself with frank self-satisfaction.
He had been a professor at Somerset House4 and at several insti tutl's of higher education, and had lectured publicly on aesthetics in London and Manchester: this could not be forgiven him by the liberators, roaming hungrily and idly about London, of thirty-four GC'rman fatherlands. Kinkel was constantly abused in American newspapers, which became the main channel for German libels, and at the scantily attended meetings held every yea r in memory of Robert Blum, of the first Schildcrhcbung in Baden, the first Austrian Schwcrtfahrt, etc. He was abused by all his compatriots, who never gave any lessons and were constantly asking for loans, never gave back what they had borrowed and
;{ Bv tradition there we1·e said to be fortv times forty churches in Mos-
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cm;. (fl.)
� I n 1 7 7 1 the kinp; p;ranted the Royal Academy apartments in old Somer
S!'! HousP. ami in 1 780 in new Somerset House, where they remained till 1 8 30 when they removed to the National Gallery. (R.)
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were always ready, in case of refusal, to denounce a man as a spy or a thief. Kinkel did not reply . . . . The scribblers barked ; they barked and, as Krylov puts it, began to lag behind ; only now and then a rough, hairy, uncombed mongrel darts out from the bottom floor of German democracy into the feuilleton that is read by nobody and bursts out into a vicious yapping to recall the happy times of fraternal insurrections in the various Tiibingens, Darmstadts and Brunsvvick-vVolfenbiittels.
In Kinkel's house, at his lectures, in his conversation, it was all good and sensible--but there was some kind of grease lacking in the wheels, so that everything went round stiffly; his wife, a well known pianist, played splendid pieces: and the boredom was deadly. Only the children as they jumped about introduced a brighter element; their little shining eyes and resounding voices augured less virtue, perhaps, but . . . more grease in the wheels.
'Ich bin ein !Hensch der Moglichkeit,' Kinkel has said to me more than once to describe his position among the extremist parties ; he thinks he is a possibility for a future minister in the coming Germany; I do not think so, but Johanna, his wife, has no doubt of it.