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 naïve 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.