Maimon The Fool And Nathan The Wise

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_ I

Happy burghers of Berlin in their Sunday best trooped through the Rosenthaler gate in the cool of the August evening for their customary stroll in the environs: few escaped noticing the recumbent ragged figure of a young man, with a long dirty beard, wailing and writhing uncouthly just outside the gate: fewer inquired what ailed him.

He answered in a strange mixture of jargons, blurring his meaning hopelessly with scraps of Hebrew, of Jewish-German, of Polish, of Russian and mis-punctuating it with choking sobs and gasps. One good soul after another turned away helpless. The stout roll of Hebrew manuscript the swarthy, unkempt creature clutched in his hand grew grimier with tears. The soldiers on guard surveyed him with professional callousness.

Only the heart of the writhing wretch knew its own bitterness, only those tear-blinded eyes saw the pitiful panorama of a penurious Jew's struggle for Culture. For, nursed in a narrow creed, he had dreamt the dream of Knowledge. To know--to know--was the passion that consumed him: to understand the meaning of life and the causes of things.

He saw himself a child again in Poland, in days of comparative affluence, clad in his little damask suit, shocking his father with a question at the very first verse of the Bible, which they began to read together when he was six years old, and which held many a box on the ear in store for his ingenuous intellect. He remembered his early efforts to imitate with chalk or charcoal the woodcuts of birds or foliage happily discovered on the title-pages of dry-as-dust Hebrew books; how he used to steal into the unoccupied, unfurnished manor-house and copy the figures on the tapestries, standing in midwinter, half-frozen, the paper in one hand, the pencil in the other; and how, when these artistic enthusiasms were sternly if admiringly checked by a father intent on siring a Rabbi, he relieved the dreary dialectics of the Talmud--so tedious to a child uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible in a red cow--by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store of Hebrew scientific and historical works discovered in an old cupboard in his father's study. To this chamber, which had also served as the bedroom in which the child slept with his grandmother, the young man's thoughts returned with wistful bitterness, and at the image of the innocent little figure poring over the musty volumes by the flickering firelight in the silence of the night, the mass of rags heaved yet more convulsively. How he had enjoyed putting on fresh wood after his grandmother had gone to bed, and grappling with the astronomical treatise, ignoring the grumblings of the poor old lady who lay a-cold for want of him. Ah, the lonely little boy was, indeed, in Heaven, treading the celestial circles--and by stealth, which made it all the sweeter. But that armillary sphere he had so ably made for himself out of twisted rods had undone him: his grandmother, terrified by the child's interest in these mystic convolutions, had betrayed the magical instrument to his father. Other episodes of the long pursuit of Knowledge--not to be impeded even by flogging pedagogues, diverted but slightly by marriage at the age of eleven,--crossed his mind. What ineffable rapture the first reading of Maimonides had excited, _The Guide of the Perplexed_ supplying the truly perplexed youth with reasons for the Jewish fervor which informed him. How he had reverenced the great mediaeval thinker, regarding him as the ideal of men, the most inspired of teachers. Had he not changed his own name to Maimon to pattern himself after his Master, was not even now his oath under temptation: "I swear by the reverence which I owe my great teacher, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, not to do this act?"

But even Maimonides had not been able to allay his thirst. Maimonides was an Aristotelian, and the youth would fain drink at the fountain-head. He tramped a hundred and fifty miles to see an old Hebrew book on the Peripatetic philosophy. But Hebrew was not enough; the vast realm of Knowledge, which he divined dimly, must lie in other languages. But to learn any other language was pollution to a Jew, to teach a Jew any other was pollution to a Christian.

In his facile comprehension of German and Latin books, he had long since forgotten his first painful steps: now in his agony they recurred to mock him. He had learnt these alien alphabets by observing in some bulky Hebrew books that when the printers had used up the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to mark their sheets, they started other and foreign alphabets. How he had rejoiced to find that by help of his Jewish jargon he could worry out the meaning of some torn leaves of an old German book picked up by chance.

The picture of the innkeeper's hut, in which he had once been family-tutor, flew up irrelevantly into his mind--he saw himself expounding a tattered Pentateuch to a half-naked brood behind the stove, in a smoky room full of peasants sitting on the floor guzzling whisky, or pervaded by drunken Russian soldiery hacking the bedsteads or throwing the glasses in the faces of the innkeeper and his wife. Poor Polish Jews, cursed by poverty and tyranny! Who could be blamed for consoling himself with liquor in such a home? Besides, when one was paid only five thalers, one owed it to oneself not to refuse a dram or so. And then there came up another one-room home in which a youth with his eyes and hair had sat all night poring over Cabalistic books, much to the inconvenience of the newly married Rabbi, who had consented to teach him this secret doctrine. For this had been his Cabalistic phase, when he dreamed of conjurations and spells and the Mastership of the Name. A sardonic smile twitched the corners of his lips, as he remembered how the poor Rabbi and his pretty wife, after fruitless hints, had lent him the precious tomes to be rid of his persistent all-night sittings, and the smile lingered an instant longer as he recalled his own futile attempts to coerce the supernatural, either by the incantations of the Cabalists or the prayer-ecstasy he had learnt later from the Chassidim.

Yes, he had early discovered that all this Cabalistic mysticism was only an attempt at a scientific explanation of existence, veiled in fable and allegory. But the more reasonable he pronounced the Cabalah to be, the more he had irritated the local Cabalists who refused to have their "divine science" reduced to "reason." And so, disillusioned, he had rebounded to "human study," setting off on a pilgrimage in the depth of winter to borrow out-of-date books on optics and physics, and making more enemies by his obtrusive knowledge of how dew came and how lightning. It was not till--on the strength of a volume of Anatomical tables and a Medical dictionary--he undertook cures, that he had discovered the depths of his own ignorance, achieving only the cure of his own conceit. And it was then that Germany had begun to loom before his vision--a great, wonderful country where Truth dwelt, and Judaism was freer, grander. Yes, he would go to Germany and study medicine and escape this asphyxiating atmosphere.

His sobs, which had gradually subsided, revived at the thought of that terrible journey. First, the passage to Koenigsberg, accorded him by a pious merchant: then the voyage to Stettin, paid for by those young Jewish students who, beginning by laughing at his ludicrous accent in reading Herr Mendelssohn's _Phoedon_--the literary sensation of the hour that had dumfoundered the Voltaireans--had been thunderstruck by his instantaneous translation of it into elegant Hebrew, and had unanimously advised him to make his way to Berlin. Ah, but what a voyage! Contrary winds that protracted the journey to five weeks instead of two, the only other passenger an old woman who comforted herself by singing hymns, his own dialect and the Pomeranian German of the crew mutually unintelligible, his bed some hard stuffed bags, never anything warm to eat, and sea-sickness most of the time. And then, when set down safely on shore, without a pfennig or even a sound pocket to hold one, he had started to walk to Frankfort, oh, the wretched feeling of hopelessness that had made him cast himself down under a lime-tree in a passion of tears! Why had he resumed hope, why had he struggled on his way to Berlin, since this fate awaited him, this reception was to be meted him? To be refused admission as a rogue and a vagabond, to be rejected of his fellow-Jews, to be hustled out of his dream-city by the overseer of the Jewish gate-house!

Woe! Woe! Was this to be the end of his long aspiration? A week ago he had been so happy. After parting with his last possession, an iron spoon, for a glass of sour beer, he had come to a town where his Rabbinical diploma--to achieve that had been child's play to him--procured him the full honors of the position, despite his rags. The first seat in the synagogue had been given the tramp, and the wealthy president had invited him to his Sabbath dinner and placed him between himself and his daughter, a pretty virgin of twelve, beautifully dressed. Through his wine-glass the future had looked rosy, and his learned eloquence glowed responsively, but he had not been too drunk to miss the wry faces the girl began to make, nor to be suddenly struck dumb with shame as he realised the cause. Lying on the straw of inn-stables in garments one has not changed for seven weeks does not commend even a Rabbi to a dainty maiden. The spell of good luck was broken, and since then the learned tramp had known nothing but humiliation and hunger.

The throb of elation at the sight of the gate of Berlin had been speedily subdued by the discovery that he must bide in the poorhouse the Jews had built there till the elders had examined him. And there he had herded all day long with the sick and cripples and a lewd rabble, till evening brought the elders and his doom--a point-blank refusal to allow him to enter the city and study medicine.

Why? Why? What had they against him? He asked himself the question between his paroxysms. And suddenly, in the very midst of explaining his hard case to a new passer-by, the answer came to him and still further confused his explanations. Yes, it must have been that wolf in Rabbi's clothing he had talked to that morning in the poorhouse! the red-bearded reverend who had lent so sympathetic an ear to the tale of his life in Poland, his journey hither; so sympathetic an eye to his commentary on the great Maimonides' _Guide of the Perplexed_. The vile spy, the base informer! He had told the zealots of the town of the new-comer's heretical mode of thinking. They had shut him out, as one shuts out the plague.

So this was the free atmosphere, the grander Judaism he had yearned for. The town which boasted of the far-famed Moses Mendelssohn, of the paragon of wisdom and tolerance, was as petty as the Rabbi-ridden villages whose dust he had shaken off. A fierce anger against the Jews and this Mendelssohn shook him. This then was all he had gained by leaving his wife and children that he might follow only after Truth!

Perhaps herein lay his punishment. But no! He was not to blame for being saddled with a family. Marriage at eleven could by no stretch of sophism be called a voluntary act. He recalled the long, sordid, sensational matrimonial comedy of which he had been the victim; the keen competition of the parents of daughters for the hand of so renowned an infant prodigy, who could talk theology as crookedly as a graybeard. His own boyish liking for Pessel, the rich rent-farmer's daughter, had been rudely set aside when her sister fell down a cellar and broke her leg. Solomon must marry the damaged daughter, the rent-farmer had insisted to the learned boy's father, who had replied as pertinaciously, "No, I want the straight-legged sister."

The poor young man writhed afresh at the thought of his father's obstinacy. True, Rachael had a hobble in her leg, but as he had discovered years later when a humble tutor in her family, she was an amiable creature, and as her father had offered to make him joint heir to his vast fortune, he would have been settled for life, wallowing in luxury and learning. But no! his father was bent upon having Pessel, and so he, Solomon, had been beggared by his father's fastidious objection to a dislocated bone.

Alas, how misfortune had dogged him! There was that wealthy scholar of Schmilowitz who fell in love with his fame, and proposed for him by letter without ever having seen him. What a lofty epistle his father had written in reply, a pastiche of Biblical verses and Talmudical passages, the condition of consent neatly quoted from "The Song of Solomon," "Thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand pieces of silver, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred!" A dowry of a thousand guldens for the boy, and two hundred for the father! The terms of the Canticles had been accepted, his father had journeyed to Schmilowitz, seen his daughter-in-law, and drawn up the marriage-contract. The two hundred guldens for himself had been paid him on the nail, and he had even insisted on having four hundred.

In vain, "Here is your letter," the scholar had protested, "you only asked for two hundred."

"True," he had replied; "but that was only not to spoil the beautiful quotation."

How joyously he had returned home with the four hundred guldens for himself, the wedding-presents for his little Solomon--a cap of black velvet trimmed with gold lace, a Bible bound in green velvet with silver clasps, and the like.

The heart-broken tramp saw the innocent boy that had once been he, furtively strutting about in his velvet cap, rehearsing the theological disputation he was to hold at the wedding-table, and sniffing the cakes and preserves his mother was preparing for the feast, what time the mail was bringing the news of the sudden death of the bride from small-pox.

At the moment he had sorrowed as little for his unseen bride as his father, who, having made four hundred guldens by his son in an honorable way, might now hope to make another four hundred. "The cap and the silver-clasped Bible are already mine," the child had told himself, "and a bride will also not be long wanting, while my wedding-disputation can serve me again." The mother alone had been inconsolable, cakes and preserves being of a perishable nature, especially when there is no place to hide them from the secret attacks of a disappointed bridegroom. Only now did poor Maimon realize how his life had again missed ease! For he had fallen at last into the hands of the widow of Nesvig, with a public-house in the outskirts and an only daughter. Merely moderately prosperous but inordinately ambitious, she had dared to dream of this famous wonder-child for her Sarah. Refusal daunted her not, nor did she cease her campaign till, after trying every species of trick and manoeuvre and misrepresentation, every weapon of law and illegality, she had carried home the reluctant bridegroom. By what unscrupulous warfare she had wrested him from his last chance of wealth, flourishing a prior marriage-contract in the face of the rich merchant who unluckily staying the night in her inn, had proudly shown her the document which betrothed his daughter to the renowned Solomon! The boy's mother dying at this juncture, the widow had not shrunk from obtaining from the law-courts an attachment on the dead body, by which its interment was interdicted till the termination of the suit. In vain the rich merchant had kidnapped the bridegroom in his carriage at dead of night, the boy was pursued and recaptured, to lead a life of constant quarrel with his mother-in-law, and exchange flying crockery at meal-times; to take refuge in distant tutorships, and in the course of years, after begetting several children, to drift further and further, and finally disappear beyond the frontier.

Poor Sarah! He thought of her now with softness. A likeable wench enough, active and sensible, if with something of her mother's pertinacity. No doubt she was still the widow's right hand in the public-house. Ah, how handsome she had looked that day when the drunken Prince Radziwil, in his mad freak at the inn, had set approving eyes upon her: "Really a pretty young woman! Only she ought to get a white chemise." A formula at which the soberer gentlemen of his train had given her the hint to clear out of the way.

Now in his despair, the baffled Pilgrim of Knowledge turned yearningly to her image, wept weakly at the leagues that separated him from all who cared for him. How was David growing up--his curly-haired first-born; child of his fourteenth year? He must be nearly ten by now, and in a few years he would be confirmed and become "A Son of the Commandment." A wave of his own early religious fervor came over him, bringing with it a faint flavor of festival dishes and far-away echoes of synagogue tunes. Fool, fool, not to be content with the Truth that contented his fathers, not to rest in the bosom of the wife God had given him. Even his mother-in-law was suffused with softer tints through the mist of tears. She at least appreciated him, had fought tooth and nail for him, while these gross Berliners--! He clenched his fists in fury: the full force of the injustice came home to him afresh; his palms burnt, his brow was racked with shooting pains. His mind wandered off again to Prince Radziwil and to that day in the public-house. He saw this capricious ruler marching to visit, with all the pomp of war, a village not four miles from his residence; first his battalions of infantry, artillery and cavalry, then his body-guard of volunteers from the poor nobility, then his kitchen-wagons, then his bands of music, then his royal coach in which he snored, overcome by Hungarian wine, lastly his train of lackeys. Then he saw his Serene Highness thrown on his mother-in-law's dirty bed, booted and spurred; for his gentlemen, as they passed the inn, had thought it best to give his slumbers a more comfortable posture. Here, surrounded by valets, pages, and negroes, he had snored on all night, while the indomitable widow cooked her meals and chopped her wood in the very room as usual. And here, in a sooty public-house, with broken windows, and rafters supported by undressed tree-stems, on a bed swarming with insects--the prince had awoke, and, naught perturbed, when the thing was explained, had bidden his menials prepare a banquet on the spot.

Poor Maimon's parched mouth watered now as he thought of that mad bacchanal banquet of choice wines and dishes, to which princes and lords had sat down on the dirty benches of the public-house. Goblets were drained in competition to the sound of cannon, and the judges who awarded the prize to the Prince, were presented by him with estates comprising hundreds of peasants. Maimon began to shout in imitation of the cannon, in imagination he ran amuck in a synagogue, as he had seen the prince do, smashing and wrecking everything, tearing the Holy Scrolls from the Ark and trampling upon them. Yes, they deserved it, the cowardly bigots. Down with the law, to hell with the Rabbis. A-a-a-h! He would grind the phylacteries under his heel--thus. And thus! And--

The soldiers perceiving he was in a violent fever, summoned the Jewish overseer, who carried him back into the poorhouse.

II

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 the _Guide 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 Koenigsberg and Stettin were tributes to his learning. Never had he absolutely fallen to _schnorring_ (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 professional _Schnorrer_.

"Are not you?" asked the beggar, equally surprised.

"Certainly not!" cried Maimon angrily.

"What a waste of good rags!" said the _Schnorrer_.

"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."

The _Schnorrer_ shrugged 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 any _Schnorrer_ on 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, to found 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 the _Schnorrer_. "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 from _my_ partnership."

"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. I know 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 the _Schnorrer_. "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, as Maimonides 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 formulae he had learnt from the _Schnorrer_ dried 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 a _Schlachziz_ (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 a _Schnorrer'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 which eked 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--his _s_'s for _sh_'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! the nestling 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 the _Schnorrer_ all 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 himself almost 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 written _Nathan Der Weise_, 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.

III

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 against equivocal 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's _Metaphysics_ from 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 was _not_ Sufficient 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 was unable 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-vaunted _Phoedon_ which 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 this _Jerusalem_ of 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 rate here 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. No one 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 a _Chamor nose 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 forget _The 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 five days--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 into sections 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 the _Rishus_ (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 thank _you_," 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 written _Nathan 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 your _Philosophical Conversations_ your 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 my _Philosophical 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 of _Rishus_ (malice)--on a Saturday. I managed to be there without breaking my _Shabbos_ (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 His Majesty 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 become _my_ Schutz-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 me in 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 Fraeulein 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 famous retort 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 your _Jerusalem_ you have succeeded in combining our religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience, as was never imagined possible, and of which no 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 left it 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," for both 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.

IV

This mingled attitude 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 emancipated intellect really deny that marvellous thinker, who, after a century of unexampled obloquy, was the acknowledged prophet of the God 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 passionate 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, shiftless and feckless, 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 glass 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 nobleman'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 nobleman, 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 circumstances 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 space 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 passion 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 Hellenism, 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 space. 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 Passover 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 passionate sacrifice to a naive 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 fashionable 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 chastity 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 _Phoedon_ 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." _

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