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