A propos, a word about their relationship. Kinkel always preserved his dignity and she always marvelled at him. Between themselves they talk of the most everyday matters in the style of edifying comedies (modish haute comedic in Germany! ) and moral novels.
'Beste Johanna,' says he sonorously and without haste, 'du bist, mein Engel, so gut, schenke mir noch cine Tasse von den vortreff lichen Thee, den du so gut machst, ein!'
'Es ist zu himmlisch, Iieber Gottfried, dass er dir gesclzmeckt hat. Tue, mein Bester, fur miclz einige Tropfen Sclzmand lzinein!'
And he lets some cream drip in, regarding her with tenderness, and she gazes at him with gratitude. Johanna persecuted her husband fiercely with her perpetual, inexorable solicitude: when there was a fog she handed him a revolver in some sort of special belt; begged him to protect himself from the wind, from evil people, from harmful food, and in petto from \vomen's eyes,
'vhich were more harmful than any winds and pate de foie gras . . . . In a word, she poisoned his life vvith her acute jealousy and implacable, ever-stimulated love. In return she supported him in his idea that he was a genius, at any rate not inferior to Lessing, and that in him a new Stein was being provided for Germany; Kinkel knew that this was true, and
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
472
mildly restrained Johanna in the presence of outsiders when her praises went rather too far.
'Johanna, have you heard about Heine?' Charlotte asked her once, running in much upset.
'No,' answers Johanna.
'He's dead . . . yesterday night.
'Really?'
'Zu wahr.'
'Oh, how glad I am. I was always afraid that he would write some caustic epigram against Gottfried: he had such a venomous tongue. You do amaze me,' she added, catching herself up;
'what a loss for Germany.'li
The source of these hatreds lies partly in a consciousness of the political second-ratedness of the German fatherland, and in their pretensions to play the chief part. Nationalistic fanfaronade is ludicrous even in the French, but at least the French can say that in a certain manner they have shed their blood for the sake of humanity. The pretension to some enormous national importance, going hand in hand with a doctrinaire cosmopolitanism, is the more ridiculous that it exhibits no other right to its claim than a disbelief in consideration for others, a desire sich geltend zu machen.
'Why do the Poles not like us?' a German seriously asked in a gathering of Gelehrter.
There happened to be a journalist there, an intelligent man, who had lived in England for a long time.
'Well, that's not so hard to understand,' he answered. 'You'd do better to ask who does like us, or why everyone hates us.'
'How do you mean, everyone hates us?' asked the astonished professor.
'All foreigners do, at any rate: Italians, Danes, Swedes, Russians, Slavs.'
'Excuse me, Herr Doktor: there are some exceptions,' returned the disquieted and embarrassed Gelehrte.
'Without the least doubt: and what are they? France and England.'
The man of learning began to blossom out:
5 I am sorry, in my turn, that I wrote these lines. Soon after this the poor woman threw herself out of a third-storey window into a paved yard.
Jealousy and a disease of the heart brought her to this fearful death.
6 There is a hiatus here in the text. (R.)
England
473
'And do you know why? France is afraid of us and England despises us.'
The situation of the German is really a sad one, but his sadness is not interesting. They all know that they can settle with the internal and external enemy, but they do not know how to. How comes it, for instance, that peoples of the same stock as the Germans-England, Holland, Sweden-are free, and the Germans are not? Incapability also has its obligations, like nobility, and to modesty most of all. The Germans are conscious of this, and have recourse to desperate measures in order to get the upper hand: they point to England and the North American states7 as representatives of Germanism in the sphere of political Praxis. Ruge, infuriated by Edward Bauer's inane pamphlet on Russia, entitled, I think, Kirche und Staat, and suspecting that it was I who had led Bauer into temptation, wrote to me (and later published the same thing in the Jersey Almanac) that Russia was only rough material, undisciplined and disorganised, whose strength, glory and beauty proceeded only from German genius having given her its own form and l ikeness.
Every Russian who appears on the scene encounters in the Germans that malevolent amazement that not so long ago was directed by those same Germans at our mpn of learning who wished to become professors at Russian universities and the Russian Academy. 'Colleagues' who had been imported into Russia thought this was insolence, ingratitude, usurpation of other people's posts.
Bakunin nearly lost his head, for the sake of the Germans, a t the hands o f a Saxon headsman, a n d Marx, who knew him very well, denounced him as a Russian spy. In his paper he told a complete story8 of how George Sand had heard from Ledru-7 Ruge evinced similar ideas in a letter of his to H. seeking to prove the rights of the Germans to a dominion 'from Kamchatka to Ostend,' and reproaching H. for Russian 'nationalism.' He did not restric"t himself to this: he plainly included both England and the U.S.A. in the 'German world.' (A.S. )
8 Marx never denounced Bakunin as a Russian spy. This slander was spread by the Russian embassy in Paris before the revolution of 1 848 ; it was taken up by certain circles of Polish emigrants, and was current, after the March revolution in Germany, at Breslau, where B. had gone at the end of April to be nearer the Russian frontier. A Paris journalistic agency passed on this rumour to newspapers, among them Marx's paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Everbeck, a German emigre, included it in his correspondence with his newspaper, citing the finding at George Sand's of compromising documents of a Russian revolutionary: the ac-
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
474
Rollin that, while he had been Minister of the Interior, he had seen a correspondence which compromised Bakunin. At that time Bakunin was in prison9 awaiting sentence, and suspected nothing. The slander tended to thrust him towards the scaffold, and to sever the last contact of love between the martyr and the mass that sympathised in silence. Adolf Reichel, a friend of Bakunin, wrote to George Sand at Nahant and asked her what the truth was. She answered Reichel at once and sent a letter to the editor of Marx's paper expressing the greatest friendship for Bakunin; she added that she had never talked about Bakunin to Ledru
Rollin, in virtue of which she could not have repeated what the newspaper said. Marx exonerated himself cleverly and printed George Sand's letter with a note which said that the notice about Bakunin had been printed 'at a time when he was absent.'
The finale \vas a completely German one: it would have been impossible not only in France, where the point d'honneur is so scrupulous and where the editor would have buried all the dirtiness of the affair under a heap of phrases, words, circumlocutions count appeared on 6th July, 1 848. 'The publication of the accusation,'