Having once been taken along by Schutz and Blind to see Ledru-Rollin Ruge suddenly interrupted the diplomatic negotiations with a terrible diatribe against the Germans in the presence of the Frenchmen so that his colleagues finally had to withdraw discomfited and compromised. June 13th [34] came and dealt our Arnold such a severe blow that he took to his heels and did not pause to take breath again until he found himself in London, on free British soil. Referring to this fight later he compared himself to Demosthenes.
In London Ruge first attempted to pass himself off as the Baden provisional ambassador. He then tried to gain acceptance in the English press as a great German writer and thinker but was turned away on the grounds that the English were too materialistic ever to understand German philosophy.
He was also asked about his works -- a request which Ruge could answer only with a sigh while the image of Bruno Bauer once again rose up before his eyes. For even his Collected Works, what were they but reprints of pamphlets? And they were not even pamphlets but merely newspaper articles in pamphlet form, and basically they were not even newspaper articles but only the muddled fruits of his reading. Action was necessary and so Ruge wrote two articles for the Leader in which under the pretext of an analysis of German democracy he declared chat in Germany "humanism" was the order of the day as represented by Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge, the author of the following works: (1) The Religion of our Age , (2) Democracy and Socialism , (3) Philosophy and the Revolution. These three epoch-making works which have not appeared in the bookshops to this day are, it goes without saying, nothing more than new titles arbitrarily applied to old essays of Ruge's. Simultaneously he resumed his daily stints when for his own edification, for the benefit of the German public and to the horror of Mr. Brüggemann [35] he began to retranslate articles into German that had somehow got out of the Kölnische Zeitung and into the Morning Advertiser. Not exactly burdened with laurels he withdrew to Ostend where he found the leisure necessary to his preparations for the role of universal sage, the Confucius of the German Emigration.
Just as Gustav was the vegetable and Gottfried the sensibility of the German petty-bourgeois Philistine, Arnold is representative of its understanding or rather its non-understanding. Unlike Arnold Winkelried [36] he does not open up a path to freedom [der Freiheit eine Gasse]; he is in his own person the gutter of freedom [der Freiheit eine Gosse]; Ruge stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: It is permitted to pass water here.
We return at last to our circular with its covering letter. It fell flat and the first attempt to create a united democratic church came to nought. Schramm and Gustav later declared that failure was due solely to the circumstance chat Ruge could neither speak French nor write German.
But then the heroes again set to work.
Che ciascun oltra moda era possente, Come udirete nel canto seguente.
[For puissant were they all beyond compare, As in our next canto you shall hear.] [37]
