. Old love stories retold. a little while. It was magnificent, but, indeed, it was not war;and what Lassalle failed to see was that the pridewhich thus prompted him so desperately to hazardnot only his own but also Helenes happiness wasin its essence as bourgeois as the pride he wasfighting, was indeed identical. All that he couldhope to accomplish was the wresting of an emptyformality from a society whose conventions bothhimself and Helene professed to despise, a sanc-tion gained at the swords point of which neitherfelt any need, an authority, in the opinion of both,obsolete and ridiculous. B
. Old love stories retold. a little while. It was magnificent, but, indeed, it was not war;and what Lassalle failed to see was that the pridewhich thus prompted him so desperately to hazardnot only his own but also Helenes happiness wasin its essence as bourgeois as the pride he wasfighting, was indeed identical. All that he couldhope to accomplish was the wresting of an emptyformality from a society whose conventions bothhimself and Helene professed to despise, a sanc-tion gained at the swords point of which neitherfelt any need, an authority, in the opinion of both,obsolete and ridiculous. But such are the occa-sional paradoxes of the revolutionary. Can we wonder if in Helenes eyes her eaglemoulted some feathers for this unlooked-foraction, and that her love was set a-thinking ?Could he really love her and act so ? and if in-deed he loved her, her brain told her that he hadmade a mistake at a critical moment. Eaglesamong men should never make mistakes. Pos-sibly, too, her fine, feminine sense found some-[148]. Ferdinand Lassalle Lassalle and Helene von Donnigesthing underbred in this anxious assertion of pridein a situation where a truer pride would havedisdained to measure itself with such vulgarstandards. Some such half-formed thoughtsmay well have worked in Helenes mind, and con-tributed to the slackening of a will all too suscep-tible to varying influences and changes of mood;and soon she was to be a prisoner, cut off fromthe spiritual fount of her being, and instead dailyand hourly breathing an atmosphere of her owndoubts and her fathers lies. Herr von Donniges was an opponent whoseobstinacy and resource Lassalle had not countedwith, and whose brutal and unscrupulous methodshe could not have been expected to conceive. Anordinarily severe parent Lassalle might well haveconsidered himself a match for; but Herr vonDonniges was to display a barbarity, a ferocity,of disapproval which one does not expect to en-counter in a modern parent, however tyrannical,and he a
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Keywords: ., bookauthorlegallie, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1904
