CHAPTER XXVIIILESSING
On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a battle was fought between the armies of the French Revolution and the armies of the allied monarchs who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of insurrection.
It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their infantry could not be employed on the slippery hillsides of the village of Valmy. The battle therefore consisted of a series of solemn broadsides. The rebels fired harder and faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the first to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated northward. Among those present at the engagement was a certain Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary Prince of Weimar.
Several years afterwards this young man published his memoirs of that day. While standing ankle-deep in the sticky mud of Lorraine, he had turned prophet. And he had predicted that after this cannonade, the world would never be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable day, Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo. The Crusaders of the Rights of Man did not run like chickens, as they had been expected to do. They stuck to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through valleys and across mountains until they had carried their ideal of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermostcorners of Europe and had stabled their horses in every castle and church of the entire continent.
It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence. The revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one hundred and fifty years and we can poke as much fun at them as we like. We can even be grateful for the many good things which they bestowed upon this world.
But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city, could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their cellars and garrets and had combed the cobwebs out of their perukes, they began to devise measures by which to prevent a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.
But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must first of all bury the past. Not a vague past in the broad historical sense of the word but their own individual “pasts” when they had surreptitiously read the works of Monsieur de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de Voltaire were stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur Diderot were sold to the junk-man. Pamphlets that had been reverently read as the true revelation of reason were relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an effort was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short sojourn in the realm of liberalism.
Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the literary material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant brotherhood overlooked one item which was even more important as a telltale of the popular mind. That was the stage. It was a bit childish on the part of the generationthat had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The Marriage of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment believed in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and the people who had wept over “Nathan the Wise” could never successfully prove that they had always regarded religious tolerance as a misguided expression of governmental weakness.
The play and its success were there to convict them of the opposite.
The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment of the latter half of the eighteenth century was a German, one Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology in the University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination for a religious career and had played hooky so persistently that his father heard of it, had told him to come home and had placed him before the choice of immediate resignation from the university or diligent application as a member of the medical department. Gotthold, who was no more of a doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was asked of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of his beloved actor friends and upon their subsequent disappearance from town was obliged to hasten to Wittenberg that he might escape arrest for debt.
His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks and short meals. First of all he went to Berlin where he spent several years writing badly paid articles for a number of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself as private secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip around the world. But no sooner had they started than the Seven Years’ war must break out. The friend, obliged to join his regiment, had taken the first post-chaise for homeand Lessing, once more without a job, found himself stranded in the city of Leipzig.
But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new friend in the person of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an officer by day and a poet by night, a sensitive soul who gave the hungry ex-theologian insight into the new spirit that was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was shot to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven to such dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.
Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander of the fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison life was mitigated by a profound study of the works of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after the philosopher’s death, were beginning to find their way to foreign countries.
All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily Butterbrod. Lessing was now almost forty years old and wanted a home of his own. His friends suggested that he be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But years before, something had happened that had made Lessing persona non grata at the Prussian court. During his first visit to Berlin he had made the acquaintance of Voltaire. The French philosopher was nothing if not generous and being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of Louis XIV,” then ready for publication. Unfortunately, Lessing, when he hastily left Berlin, had (entirely by accident) packed the manuscript among his own belongings. Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds of the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he had been robbed. The young German had stolen his most important manuscript, the police must watch the frontier, etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an excited Frenchmanin a foreign country. Within a few days the postman returned the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter from Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed his own ideas of people who would dare to suspect his honesty.
This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten, but the eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots played a great rôle in the lives of men and women and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost twenty years, still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of having Lessing at his court.
And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there was rumor of a newly to be founded national theater. This enterprise came to nothing and Lessing in his despair accepted the office of librarian to the hereditary grand duke of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal library was one of the finest in all Germany. It contained more than ten thousand manuscripts and several of these were of prime importance in the history of the Reformation.
Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering and gossip. In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic, columnist and dramatic essayist was by this very fact a highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once more in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on account of something he was vaguely supposed to have done, to wit: the publication of a series of articles attacking the orthodox opinions of the old school of Lutheran theology.
These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been written by a former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke of Brunswick, panic stricken at the prospect of a religious war within his domains, ordered his librarian to be discreetand keep away from all controversies. Lessing complied with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had been said about treating the subject dramatically and so he set to work to re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.
The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus was called “Nathan the Wise.” The theme was very old and I have mentioned it before in this book. Lovers of literary antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will allow them) in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:
Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract a large sum of money from one of his Jewish subjects. But as he had no valid reason to deprive the poor man of his property, he bethought himself of a ruse. He sent for the victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most widely spread religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the Christian, he held to be most true. The worthy patriarch did not answer the Padishah directly but said, “Let me, oh great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made a will that whichever of his sons at the time of his death should be found with that ring upon his finger should fall heir to all his estates. His son made a like will. His grandson too, and for centuries the ring changed hands and all was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the ring had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply could not decide which of the three should own that much valued treasure. So he went to a goldsmith and ordered him to make two other rings exactly like the one he had. On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them each his blessing and what they supposed was the one and only ring. Of course, as soon as the father had been buried,the three boys all claimed to be his heir because they had The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally they laid the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right one and so the case has been dragged on and on and very likely will drag on until the end of the world. Amen.”
Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that no one religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it was the inner spirit of man that counted rather than his outward conformity to certain prescribed rituals and dogmas and that therefore it was the duty of people to bear with each other in love and friendship and that no one had the right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured perfection and say, “I am better than all others because I alone possess the Truth.”
But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no longer popular with the little princelings who thirty years later returned to salvage such goods and chattels as had survived the deluge of the Revolution. For the purpose of regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered their lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the clerical gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood to act as a spiritual militia and help the regular cops to reëstablish law and order.
But whereas the purely political reaction was completely successful, the attempt to reshape men’s minds after the pattern of fifty years before ended in failure. And it could not be otherwise. It was true that the vast majority of the people in all countries were sick and tired of revolution and unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of taxation that had completely ruined commerce and industry. They wanted peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to do business and sit in their own front parlors and drinkcoffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers billeted upon them and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves. Provided they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they were willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such as saluting whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before every imperial letter-box and saying “Sir” to every assistant official chimney-sweep.
But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of sheer necessity, of the need for a short breathing space after the long and tumultuous years when every new morning brought new uniforms, new political platforms, new police regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and earth. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general air of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely appointed masters, that the people in their heart of hearts had forgotten the new doctrines which the drums of Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into their heads and hearts.
As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent in all reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward semblance of decency and order and cared not one whit for the inner spirit, the average subject enjoyed a fairly wide degree of independence. On Sunday he went to church with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept his private opinions to himself and aired his views when a careful inspection of the premises had first assured him that no secret agent was hidden underneath the sofa or was lurking behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed the events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head when his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper told him what new idiotic measures his masters had takento assure the peace of the realm and bring about a return to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.
What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs, whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.
Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been on a public platform.
There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto him who dares to approach such a potentatepro tem without visible manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human being.
But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse.
They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable mercies of the neighbors.
This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress, has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.” The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against “His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of Schubert.
Poor old Austria!
Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards the “gay empire” and forgets that onceupon a time it had an active intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less than Johann Strauss himself.
We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had changed when Rudolf II became emperor.
This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved his empire from too drastic a change of policy.
That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year 1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic.
He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and Bohemia and Silesia.
Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange family, which acquired vast quantities of European real estate with every new wife, an effort was made to drive the Protestants from their Magyar strongholds. But backed upby the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain their independence until the second half of the eighteenth century. And by that time a great change had taken place in Austria itself.
The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last even their sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference with their affairs on the part of the Popes and they were willing for once to risk a policy contrary to the wishes of Rome.
In an earlier part of this book I have already told how many medieval Catholics believed that the organization of the Church was all wrong. In the days of the martyrs, these critics argued, the Church was a true democracy ruled by elders and bishops who were appointed by common consent of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede that the Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct successor of the Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite position in the councils of the Church, but they insisted that this power had been purely honorary and that the popes therefore should never have considered themselves superior to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend their influence beyond the confines of their own territory.
The popes from their side had fought this idea with all the bulls, anathemas and excommunications at their disposal and several brave reformers had lost their lives as a result of their bold agitation for greater clerical decentralization.
The question had never been definitely settled, and then during the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was revived by the vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop of Trier. His name was Johann von Hontheim, but he is better known by his Latin pseudonym of Febronius. Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberaleducation. After a few years spent at the University of Louvain he had temporarily forsaken his own people and had gone to the University of Leiden. He got there at a time when that old citadel of undiluted Calvinism was beginning to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This suspicion had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard Noodt, a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to enter the field of theology and had been permitted to publish a speech in which he had extolled the ideal of religious tolerance.
His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.
“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to lay down certain laws of science which hold good for all people at all times and under all conditions. It follows that it would have been very easy for him, had he desired to do so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that they all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject of religion. We know that He did not do anything of the sort. Therefore, we act against the express will of God if we try to coerce others by force to believe that which we ourselves hold to be true.”
Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or not, it is hard to say. But something of that same spirit of Erasmian rationalism can be found in those works of Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own ideas upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.
That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in February of the year 1764) is of course no more than was to be expected. But it happened to suit the interests of Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and Febronianism or Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started was called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practicalshape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the son of Maria Theresa, bestowed upon his subjects on the thirteenth of October of the year 1781.
Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great enemy, Frederick of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing the right thing at the wrong moment. During the last two hundred years the little children of Austria had been sent to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those same infants henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors (who, as they all knew, had horns and a long black tail), as their dearly beloved brothers and sisters was to ask the impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard working, blundering Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles and aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and cardinals and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden outburst of courage. He was the first among the Catholic rulers who dared to advocate tolerance as a desirable and practical possibility of statecraft.
And what he did three months later was even more startling. On the second of February of the year of grace 1782 he issued his famous decree concerning the Jews and extended the liberty then only enjoyed by Protestants and Catholics to a category of people who thus far had considered themselves fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the same air as their Christian neighbors.
Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe that the good work continued indefinitely and that Austria now became a Paradise for those who wished to follow the dictates of their own conscience.
I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught since time immemorial to regardthe Jew as his natural enemy and the Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his natural enemies.
A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century. Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black.
So much for paper decrees.