One day he received a call to edit a political journal. He was thrilled.
He wished to awaken Young Germany; Old Germany, he realized, was
hopeless. He meant to speak freely, come what might. He wished to enroll
himself among the warriors for the liberation of humanity. On his
arrival in Munich he was made to feel that his renown was growing; that,
in fact, he was already famous. His name was known, his songs were on
everyone’s lips, his epigrams were frequently quoted. He had learned
with a keen sense of pleasure that while his first two books had made
him many enemies they had also enlarged his circle of admirers.
He felt that the time was ripe for the emancipation of the German mind.
Every great mind miscalculates the minds of the people about him. He
either underestimates or overestimates them; or rather he underestimates
some of its qualities and overestimates others. Albert was no exception
to this rule. While he was convinced that when “asses wish to abuse one
another they call each other men” he attributed to the masses—stupider
than asses—an intelligence and vision equal to his own. He jumped at
the conclusion that the masses would get his viewpoint once it was
presented to them. And because his clarity of vision enabled him to see
the sham, superstition, and hypocrisy of the prevalent fetishes that
passed for creeds, and of the tyrannies that passed for government, he
imagined that others would see these great evils as soon as they were
revealed to them.
The reception accorded his books deceived him. He mistook the people’s
laughter for applause. He failed to see that only a handful understood
him and sympathized with him. Only the chosen few understood that when
one dips his pen in gall his own heart very often brims over with love.
The vast majority only laughed at his mordant irony, called him a
scoffer and an atheist, and hated him. When a friend had whispered in
his ear “Look out for the Jesuits,” Albert only laughed. He thought it
was for them to look out for him. He knew no fear.
V.
The reception given him on his arrival at Munich assured him that his
friend was wrong. He had no cause to fear the Jesuits.
But the Jesuits in Munich were watching him. He was their sworn enemy,
and the report that he would direct the policy of a new journal roused
their ire. Munich was then the centre of Jesuitical activities. Ever
since their return to Germany, after the fall of Napoleon, they had been
hatching plots, creating dissension among the masses, shaping policies
for their own selfish ends. They were seeking to rehabilitate
themselves. They could not afford to pass in silence the caustic attacks
of the jesting Albert Zorn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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