Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 40

IV

This mingled att.i.tude of Maimon the Fool towards Nathan the Wise continued till the death of the Sage plunged Berlin into mourning, and the Fool into vain regrets for his fits of disrespect towards one, the great outlines of whose character stood for ever fixed by the chisel of death. "_Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis?_" he wrote in his autobiography.

Too often had he lost his temper--particularly when Spinoza was the theme--and had all but accused Mendelssohn of dishonesty. Was not Truth the highest ideal? And was not Spinoza as irrefutable as Euclid.

What! Could the emanc.i.p.ated intellect really deny that marvellous thinker, who, after a century of unexampled obloquy, was the acknowledged prophet of the G.o.d of the future, the inspirer of Goethe, and all that was best in modern thought! But no, Mendelssohn held stubbornly to his own life-system, never would admit that his long spiritual happiness had been based on a lie. It was highly unreasonable and annoying of him, and his formula for closing discussions, "We must hold fast not to words but to the things they signify," was exasperatingly answerable. How strange that after the restless Maimon had of himself given up Spinoza, the Sage's last years should have been clouded by the alleged Spinozism of his dear dead Lessing.

But now that the Sage himself was dead, the Fool remembered his infinite patience--the patience not of bloodlessness, but of a pa.s.sionate soul that has conquered itself--not to be soured by a fool's disappointing career, nor even by his bursts of profligacy.

For Maimon's life held many more vicissitudes, but the profession of medicine was never of them. "I require of every man of sound mind that he should lay out for himself a plan of action," said the philosopher; and wandered to Breslau, to Amsterdam, to Potsdam, the parasite of protectors, the impecunious hack of publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understood _The Critique of Pure Reason_, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the Kantians. Goethe and Schiller made flattering advances to him. Berlin society was at his feet. But he remained to the end, s.h.i.+ftless and f.e.c.kless, uncouth and unmanageable, and not seldom when the taverns he frequented were closed, he would wander tipsily through the sleeping streets meditating suicide, or arguing metaphysics with expostulant watchmen.

"For all his mathematics," a friend said of him, "he never seems to think of the difference between _plus_ and _minus_ in money matters."

"People like you, there's no use trying to help," said another, worn-out, when Maimon pleaded for only a few coppers. Yet he never acquired the beggar's servility, nay, was often himself the patron of some poorer hanger-on, for whom he would sacrifice his last gla.s.s of beer. Curt in his manners, he refused to lift his hat or embrace his acquaintances in cold blood. Nor would he wear a wig. Pure Reason alone must rule.

So, clad in an all-concealing overcoat, the unshaven philosopher might be seen in a coffee-house or on an ale-house bench, scribbling at odd moments his profound essays on Transcendental Philosophy, the leaves flying about and losing themselves, and the thoughts as ill-arranged, for the Hebrew Talmudical manner still clung to his German writing as to his talking, so that the body swayed rhythmically, his thumb worked and his voice chanted the sing-song of piety to ideas that would have paralyzed the Talmud school. It was in like manner that when he lost a game of chess or waxed hot in argument, his old Judean-Polish mother jargon came back to him. His old religion he had shed completely, yet a synagogue-tune could always move him to tears. Sometimes he might be seen at the theatre, sobbing hysterically at tragedies or laughing boisterously over comedies, for he had long since learned to love Homer and the humane arts, though at first he was wont to contend that no vigor of literary expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole.

But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table--one leg usually supported by a folio volume--surrounded by the cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself with. And even if lodged in a n.o.bleman's palace, his surroundings were no cleaner. In Amsterdam he drove the Dutch to despair: even German housekeepers were stung to remonstrance. Yet the charm of his conversation, the brilliancy of his intellect kept him always well-friended. And the fortune which favors fools watched over his closing years, and sent the admiring Graf Kalkreuth, an intellectual Silesian n.o.bleman, to dig him out of miserable lodgings, and instal him in his own castle near Freistadt.

As he lay upon his luxurious death-bed in the dreary November dusk, dying at forty-six of a neglected lung-trouble, a worthy Catholic pastor strove to bring him to a more Christian frame of mind.

"What matters it?" protested the sufferer; "when I am dead, I am gone."

"Can you say that, dear friend," rejoined the Pastor, with deep emotion. "How? Your mind, which amid the most unfavorable circ.u.mstances ever soared to higher attainments, which bore such fair flowers and fruits--shall it be trodden in the dust along with the poor covering in which it has been clothed? Do you not feel at this moment that there is something in you which is not body, not matter, not subject to the conditions of s.p.a.ce and time?"

"Ah!" replied Maimon, "there are beautiful dreams and hopes--"

"Which will surely be fulfilled. Should you not wish to come again into the society of Mendelssohn?"

Maimon was silent.

Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was indeed as a fiery scourge. Too late he realized that the pa.s.sion for Truth had destroyed him. Knowledge alone was not sufficient for life.

The will and the emotions demanded their nutriment and exercise as well as the intellect. Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract formula, pale ghost of living realities.

"To seek for Truth"--yes, it was one ideal. But there remained also--as the quotation went on which Mendelssohn's disciples had chosen as their motto--"To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to do the best." Mendelssohn with his ordered scheme of harmonious living, with his equal grasp of thought and life, sanely balanced betwixt philosophy and letters, learning and business, according so much to h.e.l.lenism, yet not losing hold of Hebraism, and adjusting with equal mind the claims of the Ghetto and the claims of Culture, Mendelssohn shone before Maimon's dying eyes, as indeed the Wise.

The thinker had a last gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of fixedness--in opinions, in s.p.a.ce. Soul and body had need of a centre, a pivot, a home.

He had followed the hem of Truth to the mocking horizon: he had in turn fanatically adopted every philosophical system Peripatetic, Spinozist, Leibnozist, Leibnitzian, Kantian--and what did he know now he was going beyond the horizon? Nothing. He had won a place among the thinkers of Germany. But if he could only have had his cast-off son to close his dying eyes, and could only have believed in the prayers his David would have sobbed out, how willingly would he have consented to be blotted out from the book of fame. A Pa.s.sover tune hummed in his brain, sad, sweet tears sprang to his eyes--yea, his soul found more satisfaction in a meaningless melody charged with tremulous memories of childhood, than in all the philosophies.

A melancholy synagogue refrain quavered on his lips, his soul turned yearningly towards these ascetics and mystics, whose life was a voluntary martyrdom to a misunderstood righteousness, a pa.s.sionate sacrifice to a nave conception of the cosmos. The infinite pathos of their lives touched him to forgetfulness of his own futility. His soul went out to them, but his brain denied him the comfort of their illusions.

He set his teeth and waited for death.

The Pastor spoke again: "Yes, you have been foolish. But that you say so now shows your soul is not beyond redemption. Christ is ever on the threshold."

Maimon made an impatient gesture. "You asked me if I should not like to see Mendelssohn again. How do you suppose I could face him, if I became a Christian?"

"You forget, my dear Maimon, he knows the Truth now. Must he not rejoice that his daughters have fallen upon the bosom of the Church?"

Maimon sat up in bed with a sudden shock of remembrance that set him coughing.

"Dorothea, but not Henrietta?" he gasped painfully.

"Henrietta too. Did you not know? And Abraham Mendelssohn also has just had his boy Felix baptized--a wonder-child in music, I hear."

Maimon fell back on his pillow, overcome with emotions and thoughts.

The tragedy latent in that smile of the sisters had developed itself.

He had long since lost touch with Berlin, ceased to interest himself in Judaism, its petty politics, but now his mind pieced together vividly all that had reached him of the developments of the Jewish question since Mendelssohn's death: the battle of old and new, grown so fierce that the pietists denied the reformers Jewish burial; young men scorning their fathers and crying, "Culture, Culture; down with the Ghetto"; many in the reaction from the yoke of three thousand years falling into braggart profligacy, many more into fas.h.i.+onable Christianity. And the woman of the new generation no less apostate, Henrietta Herz bringing beautiful Jewesses under the fascination of brilliant Germans and the romantic movement, so that Mendelssohn's own daughter, Dorothea, had left her husband and children to live with Schlegel, and the immemorial chast.i.ty of the Jewess was undermined.

And instead of the honorable estimation of his people Mendelssohn had worked for, a violent reaction against the Jews, fomented spiritually by Schleiermacher with his "transcendental Christianity," and politically by Gentz with his cry of "Christian Germany": both men lions of the Jewish-Christian Salon which Mendelssohn had made possible. And the only Judaism that stood stable amid this flux, the ancient rock of Rabbinism he had sought to dislodge, the Amsterdam Jewry refusing even the civil rights for which he had fought.

"Poor Mendelssohn!" thought the dying Maimon. "Which was the Dreamer after all, he or I? Well for him, perhaps, that his _Phdon_ is wrong, that he will never know."

The gulf between them vanished, and in a last flash of remorseless insight he saw himself and Mendelssohn at one in the common irony of human destiny.

He murmured: "And how dieth the wise? As the fool."

"What do you say?" said the Pastor.

"It is a verse from the Bible."

"Then are you at peace?"

"I am at peace."

FROM A MATTRESS GRAVE

["I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy, I am comedy--Herac.l.i.tus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a G.o.d."

"G.o.d's satire weighs heavily upon me. The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crus.h.i.+ng force to me, the little earthly so-called German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery."]

The carriage stopped, and the speckless footman, jumping down, inquired: "Monsieur Heine?"

The _concierge_, knitting beside the _porte cochere_, looked at him, looked at the glittering victoria he represented, and at the _grande dame_ who sat in it, s.h.i.+elding herself with a parasol from the glory of the Parisian sunlight. Then she shook her head.

"But this is number three, Avenue Matignon?"

"Yes, but Monsieur receives only his old friends. He is dying."

"Madame knows. Take up her name.'"

The _concierge_ glanced at the elegant card. She saw "Lady"--which she imagined meant an English _d.u.c.h.esse_--and words scribbled on it in pencil.

"It is _au cinquieme_," she said, with a sigh.