Maimon awoke the next morning with a clear and lively mind, and soon understood that he was sick. "God be thanked," he thought joyfully, "now I shall remain here some days, during which not only shall I eat but I may hope to prevail upon some kindly visitor to protect me. Perhaps if I can manage to send a message to Herr Mendelssohn, he will intercede for me. For a scholar must always have bowels of compassion for a scholar."
These roseate expectations were rudely dusked: the overseer felt Maimon's pulse and his forehead, and handing him his commentary on theGuide of the Perplexed, convoyed him politely without the gate. Maimon made no word of protest, he was paralyzed.
"What now, O Guide of the Perplexed?" he cried, stonily surveying his hapless manuscript. "O Moses, son of Maimon, thou by whom I have sworn so oft, canst thou help me now? See, my pockets are as empty as the heads of thy adversaries."
He turned out his pockets, and lo! several silver pieces fell out and rolled merrily in the roadway. "A miracle!" he shouted. Then he remembered that the elders had dismissed him with them, and that overcome by his sentence he had put them mechanically away. Yes, he had been treated as a mere beggar. A faint flush of shame tinged his bristly cheek at the thought. True, he had partaken of the hospitality of strangers, but that was the due meed of his position as Rabbi, as the free passages to Königsberg and Stettin were tributes to his learning. Never had he absolutely fallen toschnorring(begging). He shook his fist at the city. He would fling their money in their faces—some day. Thus swearing, he repocketed the coins,took the first turning that he met, and abandoned himself to chance. In the mean inn in which he halted for refreshment he was glad to encounter a fellow-Jew and one in companionable rags.
Maimon made inquiries from him about the roads and whither they led, and gathered with some surprise that his companion was a professionalSchnorrer.
"Are not you?" asked the beggar, equally surprised.
"Certainly not!" cried Maimon angrily.
"What a waste of good rags!" said theSchnorrer.
"What a waste of good muscle!" retorted Maimon; for the beggar was a strapping fellow in rude health. "If I had your shoulders I should hold my head higher on them."
TheSchnorrershrugged them. "Only fools work. What has work brought you? Rags. You begin with work and end with rags. I begin with rags and end with meals."
"But have you no self-respect?" cried Maimon, in amaze. "No morality? No religion?"
"I have as much religion as anySchnorreron the road," replied the beggar, bridling up. "I keep my Sabbath."
"Yes, indeed," said Maimon, smiling, "our sages say, Rather keep thy Sabbath as a week-day than beg; you say, Rather keep thy week-day as a Sabbath than be dependent on thyself." To himself he thought, "That is very witty: I must remember to tell Lapidoth that." And he called for another glass of whisky.
"Yes; but many of our sages, meseems, are dependent on their womankind. I have dispensed with woman; must I therefore dispense with support likewise?"
Maimon was amused and shocked in one. He set down his whisky, unsipped. "But he who dispenses with woman lives in sin. It is the duty of man to beget posterity, tofound a home; for what is civilization but home, and what is home but religion?" The wanderer's tones were earnest; he forgot his own sins of omission in the lucidity with which his intellect saw the right thing.
"Ah, you are one of the canting ones," said theSchnorrer. "It strikes me you and I could do something better together than quarrel. What say you to a partnership?"
"In begging?"
"What else have I to offer? You are new to the country—you don't know the roads—you haven't got any money."
"Pardon me! I have a thaler left."
"No, you haven't—you pay that to me for the partnership."
The metaphysical Maimon was tickled. "But what do I gain for my thaler?"
"My experience."
"But if so, you gain nothing frommypartnership."
"A thaler to begin with. Then, you see, your learning and morality will draw when I am at a loss for quotations. In small villages we go together and produce an impression of widespread misery: we speak of the destruction of our town by fire, of persecution, what you will. One beggar might be a liar: two together are martyrs."
"Then you beg only in villages?"
"Oh no. But in towns we divide. You do one half, I do another. Then we exchange halves, armed with the knowledge of who are the beneficent in either half. It is less fatiguing."
"Then the beneficent have to give twice over."
"They have double merit. Charity breeds charity."
"This is a rare fellow," thought Maimon. "How Lapidoth would delight in him! And he speaks truth. Iknow nothing of the country. If I travel a little with him I may learn much. And he, too, may learn from me. He has a good headpiece, and I may be able to instil into him more seemly notions of duty and virtue. Besides, what else can I do?" So, spinning his thaler in air, "Done!" he cried.
The beggar caught it neatly. "Herr Landlord," said he, "another glass of your excellent whisky!" And, raising it to his lips when it came, "Brother, here's to our partnership."
"What, none for me?" cried Maimon, crestfallen.
"Not till you had begged for it," chuckled theSchnorrer. "You have had your first lesson. Herr Landlord, yet another glass of your excellent whisky!"
And so the philosopher, whose brain was always twisting and turning the universe and taking it to pieces, started wandering about Germany with the beggar whose thoughts were bounded by his paunch. They exploited but a small area, and with smaller success than either had anticipated. Though now and then they were flush, there was never a regular meal; and too often they had to make shift with mouldly bread and water, and to lie on stale straw, and even on the bare earth.
"You don't curse enough," the beggar often protested.
"But why should one curse a man who refuses one's request?" the philosopher would persist. "Besides, he is embittered thereby, and only the more likely to refuse."
"Cork your philosophy, curse you!" the beggar would cry. "How often am I to explain to you that cursing terrifies people."
"Not at all," Maimon would mutter, terrified.
"No? What is Religion, but Fear?"
"False religion, if you will. But true religion, asMaimonides says, is the attainment of perfection through the knowledge of God and the imitation of His actions."
Nevertheless, when they begged together, Maimon produced an inarticulate whine that would do either for a plea or a curse. When he begged alone, all the glib formulæ he had learnt from theSchnorrerdried up on his tongue. But his silence pleaded more pitifully than his speech. For he was barefooted and almost naked. Yet amid all these untoward conditions his mind kept up its interminable twisting and turning of the universe; that acute analysis for which centuries of over-subtlety had prepared the Polish Jew's brain, and which was now for the first time applied scientifically to the actual world instead of fantastically to the Bible. And it was perhaps when he was lying on the bare earth that the riddle of existence—twinkling so defiantly in the stars—tortured him most keenly.
Thus passed half a year. Maimon had not learnt to beg, nor had the beggar acquired the rudiments of morality. How often the philosopher longed for his old friend Lapidoth—the grave-digger's son-in-law—to talk things over with, instead of this carnal vagabond. They had been poverty-stricken enough, those two, but oh! how differently they had taken the position. He remembered how merrily Lapidoth had pinned his dropped-off sleeve to the back of his coat, crying, "Don't I look like aSchlachziz(nobleman)?" and how he in return had vaunted the superiority of his gaping shoes: "They don't squeeze at the toes." How they had played the cynic, he and the grave-digger's son-in-law, turning up with remorseless spade the hollow bones of human virtue! As convincedly as synagogue-elders sought during fatal epidemics for the secret sins of the congregation, so had they two striven to uncover the secret sinfulness of self-deceived righteousness.
"Bad self-analysis is the foundation of contentment," Lapidoth had summed it up one day, as they lounged on the town-wall.
To which Maimon: "Then, friend, why are we so content to censure others? Let us be fair and pass judgment on ourselves. But the contemplative life we lead is merely the result of indolence, which we gloss over by reflections on the vanity of all things. We are content with our rags. Why? Because we are too lazy to earn better. We reproach the unscholarly as futile people addicted to the pleasures of sense. Why? Because, not being constituted like you and me, they live differently. Where is our superiority, when we merely follow our inclination as they follow theirs? Only in the fact that we confess this truth to ourselves, while they profess to act, not to satisfy their particular desires, but for the general utility."
"Friend," Lapidoth had replied, deeply moved, "you are perfectly right. If we cannot now mend our faults, we will not deceive ourselves about them, but at least keep the way open for amendment."
So they had encouraged each other to clearer vision and nobler living. And from such companionship to have fallen to aSchnorrer's! Oh, it was unendurable.
But he endured it till harvest-time came round, bringing with it the sacred season of New Year and Atonement, and the long chilly nights. And then he began to feel tremors of religion and cold.
As they crouched together in outhouses, the beggar snoozing placidly in a stout blouse, the philosopher shivering in tatters, Maimon saw his degradation more lucidly than ever. They had now turned their steps towards Poland, every day bringing Maimon nearer to the redeeming influence of early memories, and it was when sleeping in the Jewish poorhouse at Posen—the master of whicheked out his livelihood honorably as a jobbing tailor—that Maimon at length found strength to resolve on a breach. He would throw himself before the synagogue door, and either die there or be relieved. When his companion awoke and began to plan out the day's campaign, "No, I dissolve the partnership," said he firmly.
"But how are you going to live, you good-for-nothing?" asked his astonished comrade, "you who cannot even beg."
"God will help," Maimon said stolidly.
"God help you!" said the beggar.
Maimon went off to the school-room. The master was away, and a noisy rabble of boys ceased their games or their studies to question the tatterdemalion, and to make fun of his Lithuanian accent—hiss's forsh's. Nothing abashed, the philosopher made inquiries after an old friend of his who, he fortunately recollected, had gone to Posen as the Chief Rabbi's secretary. The news that the Chief Rabbi had proceeded to another appointment, taking with him his secretary, reduced him to despair. A gleam of hope broke when he learnt that the secretary's boy had been left behind in Posen with Dr. Hirsch Janow, the new Chief Rabbi.
And in the event this boy brought salvation. He informed Dr. Hirsch Janow that a great scholar and a pious man was accidentally fallen into miserable straits; and lo! in a trice the good-hearted man had sent for Maimon, sounded his scholarship and found it plumbless, approved of his desire to celebrate the sacred festivals in Posen, given him all the money in his pockets—the indurated beggar accepted it without a blush—invited him to dine with him every Sabbath, and sent the boy with him to procure him "a respectable lodging."
As he left the house that afternoon, Maimon could not help overhearing the high-pitched reproaches of the Rabbitzin (Rabbi's wife).
"There! You've again wasted my housekeeping money on scum and riff-raff. We shall never get clear of debt."
"Hush! hush!" said the Rabbi gently. "If he hears you, you will wound the feelings of a great scholar. The money was given to me to distribute."
"That story has a beard," snapped the Rabbitzin.
"He is a great saint," the boy told Maimon on the way. "He fasts every day of the week till nightfall, and eats no meat save on Sabbath. His salary is small, but everybody loves him far and wide; he is named 'the keen scholar.'" Maimon agreed with the general verdict. The gentle emaciated saint had touched old springs of religious feeling, and brought tears of more than gratitude to his eyes.
His soul for a moment felt the appeal of that inner world created by Israel's heart, that beautiful world of tenderest love and sternest law, wherein The-Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He (who has chosen Israel to preach holiness among the peoples), mystically enswathed with praying-shawl and phylacteries, prays to Himself, "May it be My will that My pity overcome My wrath."
And what was his surprise at finding himself installed, not in some mean garret, but in the study of one of the leading Jews of the town. The climax was reached when he handed some coppers to the housewife, and asked her to get him some gruel for supper.
"Nay, nay," said the housewife, smiling. "The Chief Rabbi has not recommended us to sell you gruel. My husband and my son are both scholars, and so long as you choose to tarry at Posen they will be delighted if you will honor our table."
Maimon could scarcely believe his ears; but the evidence of a sumptuous supper was irrefusable. And after that he was conducted to a clean bed! O the luxurious ache of stretching one's broken limbs on melting feathers! thenestling ecstasy of dainty-smelling sheets after half a year of outhouses!
It was the supreme felicity of his life. To wallow in such a wave of happiness had never been his before, was never to be his again. Shallow pates might prate, he told himself, but what pleasure of the intellect could ever equal that of the senses? Could it possibly pleasure him as much even to fulfil his early Maimonidean ideal—the attainment of Perfection? Perpending which problem, the philosopher fell deliciously asleep.
Late, very late, the next morning he dragged himself from his snug cocoon, and called, in response to a summons, upon his benefactor.
"Well, and how do you like your lodging?" said the gentle Rabbi.
Maimon burst into tears. "I have slept in a bed!" he sobbed, "I have slept in a bed!"
Two days later, clad—out of the Rabbitzin's housekeeping money—in full rabbinical vestments, with clean linen beneath, the metamorphosed Maimon, cheerful of countenance, and godly of mien, presented himself at the poorhouse, where the tailor and his wife, as well as his whilom mate—all of them acquainted with his good fortune—expected him with impatience. The sight of him transported them. The poor mother took her babe in her arms, and with tears in her eyes begged the Rabbi's blessings; the beggar besought his forgiveness for his rough treatment, and asked for an alms.
Maimon gave the little one his blessing, and theSchnorrerall he had in his pocket, and went back deeply affected.
Meantime his fame had spread: all the scholars of the town came to see and chop theology with this illustrious travelling Rabbi. He became a tutor in a wealthy family: his learning was accounted superhuman, and he himselfalmost divine. A doubt he expressed as to the healthiness of a consumptive-looking child brought him at her death the honors of a prophet. Disavowal was useless: a new prophet had arisen in Israel.
And so two happy years passed—honorably enough, unless the philosopher's forgetfulness of his family be counted against him. But little by little his restless brain and body began to weary of these superstitious surroundings.
It began to leak out that he was a heretic: his rare appearances in the synagogue were noted; daring sayings of his were darkly whispered; Persecution looked to its weapons.
Maimon's recklessness was whetted in its turn. At the entrance to the Common Hall in Posen there had been, from time immemorial, a stag-horn fixed into the wall, and an equally immemorial belief among the Jews that whoso touched it died on the spot. A score of stories in proof were hurled at the scoffing Maimon. And so, passing the stag-horn one day, he cried to his companions: "You Posen fools, do you think that any one who touches this horn dies on the spot? See, I dare to touch it."
Their eyes, dilating with horror, followed his sacrilegious hand. They awaited the thud of his body. Maimon walked on, smiling.
What had he proved to them? Only that he was a hateful heretic, a profaner of sanctuaries.
The wounded fanaticism that now shadowed him with its hatred provoked him to answering excesses. The remnant of religion that clung, despite himself, to his soul, irritated him. Would not further culture rid him of the incubus? His dream of Berlin revived. True, bigotry barked there too, but culture went on its serene course. The fame and influence of Mendelssohn had grown steadily, and it was now at its apogee, for Lessing had writtenNathan DerWeise, and in the tempest that followed its production, and despite the ban placed on the play and its author in both Catholic and Protestant countries, the most fanatical Christian foes of the bold freelance could not cry that the character was impossible.
For there—in the very metropolis—lived the Sage himself, the David to the dramatist's Jonathan, the member of the Coffee-House of the Learned, the friend of Prince Lippe-Schaumberg, the King's own Protected Jew, in every line of whose countenance Lavater kept insisting the unprejudiced phrenologist might read the soul of Socrates.
And he, Maimon, no less blessed with genius, what had he been doing, to slumber so long on these soft beds of superstition and barbarism, deaf to that early call of Truth, that youthful dream of Knowledge? Yes, he would go back to Berlin, he would shake off the clinging mists of the Ghetto, he would be the pioneer of his people's emancipation. His employers had remained throughout staunch admirers of his intellect. But despite every protest he bade them farewell, and purchasing a seat on the Frankfort post with his scanty savings set out for Berlin. No mendicity committees lay in wait for the prosperous passenger, and as the coach passed through the Rosenthaler gate, the brave sound of the horn seemed to Maimon at once a flourish of triumph over Berlin and of defiance to superstition and ignorance.
But superstition and ignorance were not yet unhorsed. The Jewish police-officers, though they allowed coach-gentry to enter and take up their quarters where they pleased, did not fail to pry into their affairs the next day, as well for the protection of the Jewish community againstequivocal intruders as in accordance with its responsibility to the State.
In his modest lodging on the New-Market, Maimon had to face the suspicious scrutiny of the most dreaded of these detectives, who was puzzled and provoked by a belief he had seen him before, "evidently looking on me," as Maimon put it afterwards, "as a comet, which comes nearer to the earth the second time than the first, and so makes the danger more threatening."
Of a sudden this lynx-eyed bully espied a Hebrew Logic by Maimonides, annotated by Mendelssohn. "Yes! yes!" he shrieked; "that's the sort of books for me!" and, glaring threateningly at the philosopher, "Pack," he said. "Pack out of Berlin as quick as you can, if you don't wish to be led out with all the honors."
Maimon was once more in desperate case. His money was all but exhausted by the journey, and the outside of the Rosenthaler gate again menaced him. All his sufferings had availed him nothing: he was back almost at his starting-point.
But fortune favors fools. In a countryman settled at Berlin he found a protector. Then other admirers of talent and learning boarded and lodged him. The way was now clear for Culture.
Accident determined the line of march. Maimon rescued Wolff'sMetaphysicsfrom a butterman for two groschen. Wolff, he knew, was the pet philosopher of the day. Mendelssohn himself had been inspired by him—the great brother-Jew with whom he might now hope some day to talk face to face.
Maimon was delighted with his new treasure—such mathematical exposition, such serried syllogisms—till it came to theology. "The Principle of Sufficient Reason"—yes, it was a wonderful discovery. But as proving God?No—for that there wasnotSufficient Reason. Nor could Maimon harmonize these new doctrines with his Maimonides or his Aristotle. Happy thought! He would set forth his doubts in Hebrew, he would send the manuscript to Herr Mendelssohn. Flushed by the hope of the great man's acquaintance, he scribbled fervidly and posted the manuscript.
He spent a sleepless night.
Would the lion of Berlin take any notice of an obscure Polish Jew? Maimon was not left in suspense. Mendelssohn replied by return. He admitted the justice of his correspondent's doubts, but begged him not to be discouraged by them, but to continue his studies with unabated zeal. O, judge in Israel!Nathan Der Weise, indeed.
Fired with such encouragement, Maimon flung himself into a Hebrew dissertation that should shatter all these theological cobwebs, that by an uncompromising Ontology should bring into doubt the foundations of Revealed as well as of Natural Theology. It was a bold thing to do, for since he was come to Berlin, and had read more of his books, he had gathered that Mendelssohn still professed Orthodox Judaism. A paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato—such a man a creature of the Ghetto! Doubtless he took his Judaism in some vague Platonic way; it was impossible to imagine him the literal bond-slave of that minute ritual, winding phylacteries round his left arm or shaking himself in a praying-shawl. Anyhow here—in logical lucid Hebrew—were Maimon's doubts and difficulties. If Mendelssohn was sincere, let him resolve them, and earn the blessings of a truly Jewish soul. If he wasunable to answer them, let him give up his orthodoxy, or be proved a fraud and a time-server.Amicus Mendelssohn sed magis amica veritas.
In truth there was something irritating to the Polish Jew in the great German's attitude, as if it held some latent reproach of his own. Only a shallow thinker, he felt, could combine culture and spiritual comfort, to say nothing of worldly success. He had read the much-vauntedPhœdonwhich Lutheran Germany hailed as a counterblast to the notorious "Berlin religion," restoring faith to a despondent world mocked out of its Christian hopes by the fashionable French wits and materialists under the baneful inspiration of Voltaire, whom Germany's own Frederick had set on high in his Court. But what a curious assumption for a Jewish thinker to accept, that unless we are immortal, our acts in this world are of no consequence! Was not he, Maimon, leading a high-minded life in pursuit of Truth, with no such hope? "If our soul were mortal, then Reason would be a dream, which Jupiter has sent us in order that we might forget our misery; and we should be like the beasts, only to seek food and die." Nonsense! Rhetoric! True, his epistles to Lavater were effective enough, there was courage in his public refusal of Christianity, nobility in his sentiment that he preferred to shame anti-Jewish prejudice by character rather than by controversy. He, Maimon, would prefer to shame it by both. But thisJerusalemof Mendelssohn's! Could its thesis really be sustained? Judaism laid no yoke upon belief, only on conduct? was no reason-confounding dogma? only a revealed legislation? A Jew gave his life to the law and his heart to Germany! Or France, or Holland, or the Brazils as the case might be? Palestine must be forgotten. Well, it was all bold and clever enough, but was it more than a half-way house to assimilation with the peoples? At any ratehere was a Polish brother's artillery to meet—more deadly than that of Lavater, or the stupid Christians.
Again, but with acuter anxiety, he awaited Mendelssohn's reply.
It came—an invitation for next Saturday afternoon. Aha! The outworks were stormed. The great man recognized in him a worthy foe, a brother in soul. Gratitude and vanity made the visit a delightful anticipation. What a wit-combat it would be! How he would marshal his dialectic epigrams! If only Lapidoth could be there to hear!
As the servant threw open the door for him, revealing a suite of beautiful rooms and a fine company of gentlefolks, men with powdered wigs and ladies with elegant toilettes, Maimon started back with a painful shock. An under-consciousness of mud-stained boots and a clumsily cut overcoat, mixed itself painfully with this impression of pretty, scented women, and the clatter of tongues and coffee-cups. He stood rooted to the threshold in a sudden bitter realization that the great world cared nothing about metaphysics. Ease, fine furniture, a position in the world—these were the things that counted. Why had all his genius brought him none of these things? Wifeless, childless, moneyless, he stood, a solitary soul wrestling with problems. How had Mendelssohn managed to obtain everything? Doubtless he had had a better start, a rich father, a University training. His resentment against the prosperous philosopher rekindled. He shrank back and closed the door. But it was opened instantly again from within. A little hunchback with shining eyes hurried towards him.
"Herr Maimon?" he said inquiringly, holding out his hand with a smile of welcome.
Startled, Maimon laid his hand without speaking in that cordial palm. So this was the man he had envied. Noone had ever told him that "Nathan der Weise" was thus afflicted. It was as soul that he had appealed to the imagination of the world; even vulgar gossip had been silent about his body. But how this deformity must embitter his success.
Mendelssohn coaxed him within, complimenting him profusely on his writings: he was only too familiar with these half-shy, half-aggressive young Poles, whose brains were bursting with heretical ideas and sick fantasies. They brought him into evil odor with his orthodox brethren, did these "Jerusalem Werthers," but who should deal with them, if not he that understood them, that could handle them delicately? What was to Maimon a unique episode was to his host an everyday experience.
Mendelssohn led Maimon to the embrasure of a window: he brought him refreshments—which the young man devoured uncouthly—he neglected his fashionable guests, whose unceasing French babble proclaimed their ability to get on by themselves, to gain an insight into this gifted young man's soul. He regarded each new person as a complicated piece of wheelwork, which it was the wise man's business to understand and not be angry with. But having captured the secret of the mechanism, it was one's duty to improve it on its own lines.
"Your dissertation displays extraordinary acumen, Herr Maimon," he said. "Of course you still suffer from the Talmudic method or rather want of method. But you have a real insight into metaphysical problems. And yet you have only read Wolff! You are evidently not aChamor nosé Sefarim(a donkey bearing books)." He used the Hebrew proverb to make the young Pole feel at home, and a half smile hovered around his sensitive lips. Even his German took on a winning touch of jargon in vocabulary and accentuation, though to kill the jargon was one of the ideals of his life.
"Nay, Herr Mendelssohn," replied Maimon modestly; "you must not forgetThe Guide of the Perplexed. It was the inspiration of my youth!"
"Was it?" cried Mendelssohn delightedly. "So it was of mine. In fact I tell the Berliners Maimonides was responsible for my hump, and some of them actually believe I got it bending over him."
This charming acceptance of his affliction touched the sensitive Maimon and put him more at ease than even the praise of his writings and the fraternal vocabulary. "In my country," he said, "a perfect body is thought to mark the fool of the family! They believe the finest souls prefer to inhabit imperfect tenements."
Mendelssohn bowed laughingly. "An excellently turned compliment! At this rate you will soon shine in our Berlin society. And how long is it since you left Poland?"
"Alas! I have left Poland more than once. I should have had the honor and the happiness of making your acquaintance earlier, had I not been stopped at the Rosenthaler gate three years ago."
"At the Rosenthaler gate! If I had only known!"
The tears came into Maimon's eyes—tears of gratitude, of self-pity, of regret for the lost years. He was on his feet now, he felt, and his feet were on the right road. He had found a powerful protector at last. "Think of my disappointment," he said tremulously, "after travelling all the way from Poland."
"Yes, I know. I was all but stopped at the gate myself," said Mendelssohn musingly.
"You?"
"Yes—when I was a lad."
"Aren't you a native of Berlin, then?"
"No, I was born in Dessau. Not so far to tramp from as Poland. But still a goodish stretch. It took me fivedays—I am not a Hercules like you—and had I not managed to stammer out that I wished to enrol myself among the pupils of Dr. Frankel, the new Chief Rabbi of the city, the surly Cerberus would have slammed the gate in my face. My luck was that Frankel had come from Dessau, and had been my teacher. I remember standing on a hillock crying as he was leaving for Berlin, and he took me in his arms and said I should also go to Berlin some day. So when I appeared he had to make the best of it."
"Then you had nothing from your parents?"
"Only a beautiful handwriting from my father which got me copying jobs for a few groschens and is now the joy of the printers. He was a scribe, you know, and wrote the Scrolls of the Law. But he wanted me to be a pedlar."
"A pedlar!" cried Maimon, open-eyed.
"Yes, the money would come in at once, you see. I had quite a fight to persuade him I would do better as a Rabbi. I fear I was a very violent and impatient youngster. He didn't at all believe in my Rabbinical future. And he was right after all—for a member of a learned guild, Jewish or Christian, have I never been."
"You had a hard time, then, when you came to Berlin?" said Maimon sympathetically.
Mendelssohn's eyes had for an instant an inward look, then he quoted gently, "Bread with salt shalt thou eat, water by measure shalt thou drink, upon the hard earth shalt thou sleep, and a life of anxiousness shalt thou live, and labor in the study of the law!"
Maimon thrilled at the quotation: the fine furniture and the fine company faded, and he saw only the soul of a fellow-idealist to which these things were but unregarded background.
"Ah yes," went on Mendelssohn. "You are thinking I don't look like a person who once notched his loaf intosections so as not to eat too much a day. Well, let it console you with the thought that there's a comfortable home in Berlin waiting for you, too."
Poor Maimon stole a glance at the buxom, blue-eyed matron doing the honors of her salon so gracefully, assisted by two dazzling young ladies in Parisian toilettes—evidently her daughters—and he groaned at the thought of his peasant-wife and his uncouth, superstition-swaddled children: decidedly he must give Sarah a divorce.
"I can't delude myself with such day-dreams," he said hopelessly.
"Wait! Wait! So long as you don't day-dream your time away. That is the danger with you clever young Poles—you are such dreamers. Everything in this life depends on steadiness and patience. When we first set up hospitality, Fromet—my wife—and I, we had to count the almonds and raisins for dessert. You see, we only began with a little house and garden in the outskirts, the main furniture of which," he said, laughing at the recollection, "was twenty china apes, life-size."
"Twenty china apes!"
"Yes, like every Jewish bridegroom, I had to buy a quantity of china for the support of the local manufactory, and that was what fell to me. Ah, my friend, what have not the Jews of Germany to support! The taxes are still with us, but theRishus(malice)"—again he smiled confidentially at the Hebrew-jargon word—"is less every day. Why, a Jew couldn't walk the streets of Berlin without being hooted and insulted, and my little ones used to ask, 'Father, is it wicked to be a Jew?' I thank the Almighty that at the end of my days I have lived to see the Jewish question raised to a higher plane."
"I should rather thankyou," cried Maimon, with sceptical enthusiasm.
"Me?" said Mendelssohn, with the unfeigned modesty of the man who, his every public utterance having been dragged out of him by external compulsion, retains his native shyness and is alone in ignorance of his own influence. "No, no, it is Montesquieu, it is Dohm, it is my dear Lessing. Poor fellow, the Christian bigots are at him now like a plague of stinging insects. I almost wish he hadn't writtenNathan der Weise. I am glad to reflect I didn't instigate him, nay, that he had written a play in favor of the Jews ere we met."
"How did you come to know him?"
"I hardly remember. He was always fond of outcasts—a true artistic temperament, that preferred to consort with actors and soldiers rather than with the beer-swilling middle-class of Berlin. Oh yes, I think we met over a game of chess. Then we wrote an essay on Pope together. Dear Gotthold! What do I not owe him? My position in Berlin, my feeling for literature—for we Jews have all stifled our love for the beautiful and grown dead to poetry."
"Well, but what is a poet but a liar?"
"Ah, my dear Herr Maimon, you will grow out of that. I must lend you Homer. Intellectual speculation is not everything. For my part, I have never regretted withdrawing a portion of my love from the worthy matron, philosophy, in order to bestow it on her handmaid,belles-lettres. I am sorry to use a French word, but for once there's no better. You smile to see a Jew more German than the Germans."
"No, I smile to hear what sounds like French all round! I remember reading in yourPhilosophical Conversationsyour appeal to the Germans not to exchange their own gold for the tinsel of their neighbors."
"Yes, but what can one do? It is a Berlin mania; and,you know, the King himself.... Our Jewish girls first caught it to converse with the young gallants who came a-borrowing of their fathers, but the influence of my dear daughters—there, the beautiful one is Dorothea, the eldest, and that other, who takes more after me, is Henrietta—their influence is doing much to counteract the wave of flippancy and materialism. But fancy any one still reading myPhilosophical Conversations—my 'prentice work. I had no idea of printing it. I lent the manuscript to Lessing, observing jestingly that I, too, could write like Shaftesbury, the Englishman. And lo! the next time I met him he handed me the proofs. Dear Gotthold."
"Is it true that the King—?"
"Sent for me to Potsdam to scold me? You are thinking of another matter. That was in my young days." He smiled and lowered his voice. "I ventured to hint in a review that His Majesty's French verses—I am glad by the way he has lived to write some against Voltaire—were not perfection. I thought I had wrapped up my meaning beyond royal comprehension. But a malicious courtier, the preacher Justi, denounced me as a Jew who had thrown aside all reverence for the most sacred person of His Majesty. I was summoned to Sans-Souci and—with a touch ofRishus(malice)—on a Saturday. I managed to be there without breaking myShabbos(Sabbath)."
"Then he does keep Sabbath!" thought Maimon, in amaze.
"But, as you may imagine, I was not as happy as a bear with honey. However, I pleaded that he who makes verses plays at nine-pins, and he who plays at nine-pins, be he monarch or peasant, must be satisfied with the judgment of the boy who has charge of the bowls."
"And you are still alive!"
"To the annoyance of many people. I fancy HisMajesty was ashamed to punish me before the French cynics of his court, and I know on good authority that it was because the Marquis D'Argens was astonished to learn that I could be driven out of Berlin at any moment by the police that the King made me a Schutz-Jude (protected Jew). So I owe something to the French after all. My friends had long been urging me to sue for protection, but I thought, as I still think, that one ought not to ask for any rights which the humblest Jew could not enjoy. However, a king's gift horse one cannot look in the mouth. And now you are to becomemySchutz-Jude"—Maimon's heart beat gratefully—"and the question is, what do you propose to do in Berlin? What is the career that is to bring you a castle and a princess?"
"I wish to study medicine."
"Good. It is the one profession a Jew may enter here; though, you must know, however great a practice you may attain—even among the Christians—they will never publish your name in the medical list. Still, we must be thankful for small mercies. In Frankfort the Jewish doctors are limited to four, in other towns to none. We must hand you over to Dr. Herz—there, that man who is laughing so, over one of his own good things, no doubt—that is Dr. Herz, and the beautiful creature is his wife, Henrietta, who is founding a Goethe salon. She and my daughters are inseparable—a Jewish trinity. And so, Herr Physician, I extend to you the envious congratulations of a book-keeper."
"But you are not a book-keeper!"
"Not now, but that was what I began as—or rather, what I drifted into, for I was Talmudical tutor in his family, when my dear Herr Bernhardt proposed it to me. And I am not sorry. For it left me plenty of time to learn Latin and Greek and mathematics, and finally landed mein a partnership. Still I have always been a race-horse burdened with a pack, alas! I don't mean my hump, but the factory still steals a good deal of my time and brains, and if I didn't rise at five—But you have made me quite egoistic—it is the resemblance of our young days that has touched the spring of memories. But come! let me introduce you to my wife and my son Abraham. Ah, see, poor Fromet is signalling to me. She is tired of being left to battle single-handed. Would you not like to know M. de Mirabeau? Or let me introduce you to Wessely—he will talk to you in Hebrew. It is Wessely who does all the work for which I am praised—it is he who is elevating our Jewish brethren, with whom I have not the heart nor the courage to strive. Or there is Nicolai, the founder of 'The Library of the Fine Arts,' to which," he added with a sly smile, "I hope yet to see you contributing. Perhaps Fräulein Reimarus will convert you—that charming young lady there talking with her brother-in-law, who is a Danish state-councillor. She is the great friend of Lessing—as I live, there comes Lessing himself. I am sure he would like the pleasure of your acquaintance."
"Because he likes outcasts? No, no, not yet," and Maimon, whose mood had been growing dark again, shrank back, appalled by these great names. Yes, he was a dreamer and a fool, and Mendelssohn was a sage, indeed. In his bitterness he distrusted even his own Dissertation, his uncompromising logic, destructive of all theology. Perhaps Mendelssohn was right: perhaps he had really solved the Jewish problem. To be a Jew among Germans, and a German among Jews: to reconcile the old creed with Culture: to hold up one's head, and assert oneself as an honorable element in the nation—was not this catholic gathering a proof of the feasibility of such an ideal? Good sense! What true self-estimate as well as wit in the sage's famousretort to the swaggering German officer who asked him what commodity he dealt in. "In that which you appear to need—good sense." Maimon roused himself to listen to the conversation. It changed to German under the impulse of the host, who from his umpire's chair controlled it with play of eye, head, or hand; and when appealed to, would usually show that both parties were fighting about words, not things. Maimon noted from his semi-obscure retreat that the talk grew more serious and connected, touched problems. He saw that for Mendelssohn as for himself nothing really existed but the great questions. Flippant interruptions the sage seemed to disregard, and if the topic dribbled out into irrelevancies he fell silent. Maimon studied the noble curve of his forehead, the decided nose, the prominent lips, in the light of Herr Lavater's theories. Lessing said little: he had the air of a broken man. The brilliant life of the culture-warrior was closing in gloom—wife, child, health, money, almost reputation, gone: the nemesis of genius.
At one point a lady strove to concentrate attention upon herself by accusing herself of faults of character. Even Maimon understood she was angling for compliments. But Mendelssohn gravely bade her mend her faults, and Maimon saw Lessing's harassed eyes light up for the first time with a gleam of humor. Then the poet, as if roused to recollection, pulled out a paper, "I almost forgot to give you back Kant's letter," he said. "You are indeed to be congratulated."
Mendelssohn blushed like a boy, and made a snatch at the letter, but Lessing jestingly insisted on reading it to the company.
"I consider that in yourJerusalemyou have succeeded in combining our religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience, as was never imagined possible, and of whichno other faith can boast. You have at the same time so thoroughly and so clearly demonstrated the necessity of unlimited liberty of conscience, that ultimately our Church will also be led to reflect how it should remove from its midst everything that disturbs and oppresses conscience, which will finally unite all men in their view of the essential points of religion."
There was an approving murmur throughout the company. "Such a letter would compensate me for many more annoyances than my works have brought me," said Mendelssohn. "And to think," he added laughingly, "that I once beat Kant in a prize competition. A proof of the power of lucid expression over profound thought. And that I owe to your stimulus, Lessing."
The poet made a grimace. "You accuse me of stimulating superficiality!"
There was a laugh.
"Nay, I meant you have torn away the thorns from the roses of philosophy! If Kant would only write like you—"
"He might understand himself," flashed the beautiful Henrietta Herz.
"And lose his disciples," added her husband. "That is really, Herr Mendelssohn, why we pious Jews are so angry with your German translation of the Bible—you make the Bible intelligible."
"Yes, they have done their best to distort it," sighed Mendelssohn. "But the fury my translation arouses among the so-called wise men of the day, is the best proof of its necessity. When I first meditated producing a plain Bible in good German, I had only the needs of my own children at heart, then I allowed myself to be persuaded it might serve the multitude, now I see it is the Rabbis who need it most. But centuries of crooked thinking have deadened them to the beauties of the Bible: they have leftit behind them as elementary, when they have not themselves coated it with complexity. Subtle misinterpretation is everything, a beautiful text, nothing. And then this corrupt idiom of theirs—than which nothing more corrupts a nation—they have actually invested this German jargon with sanctity, and I am a wolf in sheep's clothing for putting good German in Hebrew letters. Even the French Jews, Cerf Berr tells me, think bad German holy. To say nothing of Austria."
"Wait, wait!" said an eager-eyed man; "the laws of the Emperor Joseph will change all that—once the Jews of Vienna are forced to go to school with the sciences, they will become an honored element of the nation."
Mendelssohn shook a worldly-wise head. "Not so fast, my dear Wessely, not so fast. Your Hebrew Ode to the Austrian Emperor was unimpeachable as poetry, but, I fear, visionary as history. Who knows that this is more than a temporary political move?"
"And we pious Jews," put in Dr. Herz, smiling, "you forget, Herr Wessely, we are not so easily schooled. We have never forgiven our Mendelssohn for saying our glorious religion had accumulated cobwebs. It is the cobwebs we love, not the port."
"Yes, indeed," broke in Maimon, so interested that he forgot his own jargon, to say nothing of his attire. "When I was in Poland, I crawled nicely into mud, through pointing out that they ought not to turn to the east in praying, because Jerusalem, which, in accordance with Talmudic law, they turned to, couldn't lie due east of everywhere. In point of fact we were north-west, so that they should have turned"—his thumbs began to turn and his voice to take on the Talmudic sing-song—"south-east. I told them it was easy in each city to compute the exact turning, by corners and circles—"
"By spherical trigonometry, certainly," said Mendelssohn pleasantly. Maimon, conscious of a correction, blushed and awoke to find himself the centre of observation. His host made haste to add, "You remind me of the odium I incurred by agreeing with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin's edict, that we should not bury our dead before the third day. And this in spite of my proofs from the Talmud! Dear, dear, if the Rabbis were only as anxious to bury dead ideas as dead bodies!" There was a general smile, but Maimon said boldly—
"I think you treat them far too tolerantly."
"What, Herr Maimon," and Mendelssohn smiled the half-sad smile of the sage, who has seen the humors of the human spectacle and himself as part of it—"would you have me rebuke intolerance by intolerance? I will admit that when I was your age—and of an even hotter temper—I could have made a pretty persecutor. In those days I contributed to the mildest of sheets, 'The Moral Preacher,' we young blades called it. But because it didn't reek of religion, on every page the pious scented atheism. I could have whipped the dullards or cried with vexation. Now I see intolerance is a proof of earnestness as well as of stupidity. It is well that men should be alert against the least rough breath on the blossoms of faith they cherish. The only criticism that still has power to annoy me is that of the timid, who fear it is provoking persecution for a Jew to speak out. But for the rest, opposition is the test-furnace of new ideas. I do my part in the world, it is for others to do theirs. As soon as I had yielded my translation to friend Dubno, to be printed, I took my soul in my hands, raised my eyes to the mountains, and gave my back to the smiters. All the same I am sorry it is the Rabbi of Posen who is launching these old-fashioned thunders against the German Pentateuch of "Moses of Dessau," forboth as a Talmudist and mathematician Hirsch Janow has my sincere respect. Not in vain is he styled 'the keen scholar,' and from all I hear he is a truly good man."
"A saint!" cried Maimon enthusiastically, again forgetting his shyness. His voice faltered as he drew a glowing panegyric of his whilom benefactor, and pictured him as about to die in the prime of life, worn out by vigils and penances. In a revulsion of feeling, fresh stirrings of doubt of the Mendelssohnian solution agitated his soul. Though he had but just now denounced the fanatics, he was conscious of a strange sympathy with this lovable ascetic who fasted every day, torturing equally his texts and himself, this hopeless mystic for whom there could be no bridge to modern thought; all the Polish Jew in him revolted irrationally against the new German rationalism. No, no; it must be all or nothing. Jewish Catholicism was not to be replaced by Jewish Protestantism. These pathetic zealots, clinging desperately to the past, had a deeper instinct, a truer prevision of the future, than this cultured philosopher.
"Yes, what you tell me of Hirsch Janow goes with all I have heard," said Mendelssohn calmly. "But I put my trust in time and the new generation. I will wager that the translation I drew up for my children will be read by his."
Maimon happened to be looking over Mendelssohn's shoulder at his charming daughters in their Parisian toilettes. He saw them exchange a curious glance that raised their eyebrows sceptically. With a flash of insight he caught their meaning. Mendelssohn seeking an epigram had stumbled into a dubious oracle.
"The translation I drew up for my children will be read by his."
By his, perhaps.
But by my own?
Maimon shivered with an apprehension of tragedy. Perhaps it was his Dissertation that Mendelssohn's children would read. He remembered suddenly that Mendelssohn had said no word to its crushing logic.
As he was taking his leave, he put the question point-blank. "What have you to say to my arguments?"
"You are not in the right road at present," said Mendelssohn, holding his hand amicably, "but the course of your inquiries must not be checked. Doubt, as Descartes rightly says, is the beginning of philosophical speculation."
He left the Polish philosopher on the threshold, agitated by a medley of feelings.