LESSING’S FIRST JEWISH PLAY
There are bigger virtues than consistency, and I have spared a good word for that human chameleon Leon Modena. But, undeniably, a great career is all the nobler when through it there runs a consistent purpose. Wordsworth, in a famous poem, asked:
Who is the happy warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
And the first sentence of his answer runs:
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought.
If this be so, then Lessing was a happy warrior indeed. For religious tolerance is interwoven with his combative life. It was the ideal of his boyhood and of his age. It is to be seen in his “Nathan,” the masterpiece of his mature genius, and it equally underlay his youthful drama The Jews. Nathan the Wise is Mendelssohn, and was drawn on the basis of experience; but the “Traveller,” who is the hero of Die Juden is no individual, having been drawn by Lessing out of his own good heart. Thirty years separate the two plays (written, respectively, in 1749 and 1779). But they are united in spirit.
Die Juden is a short composition, even though it includes twenty-three scenes. Some of these scenes are very brief. The plot is quite simple. A baron and his daughter are saved by a traveller from robbers; the impression made by the rescuer is so great, that the baron is inclined to find in him a son-in-law. Then the traveller reveals the fact that he is a Jew. Baron and Jew part with mutual esteem. Dramatically, the play is not of much merit. The “Traveller” is not so much a person as a personification. He is the type of virtue, honor, magnanimity. He leaves one cold, not because, as Michaelis objected in 1754, he is impossibly, or at least improbably, perfect, but because he is crudely and mechanically drawn. Mendelssohn completely rebutted the criticism of Michaelis; but, none the less, the “Traveller” possesses little of that human, personal quality which makes “Nathan” so convincing and interesting. On the other hand, the baron is admirably painted. He is not a bigoted Jew-hater; he is simply animated by a conventional dislike of Jews. Lessing, even in his student years, was too good an artist to daub on his colors too glaringly.
The importance of Die Juden is to be found, as we have seen, in its anticipation of Nathan der Weise. Sometimes the identity of thought is strikingly close. In the fourth act of Nathan occurs this dialogue:
Friar: Nathan! Nathan! You are a Christian! By God, you are a Christian! There never was a better Christian!
Nathan: We are of one mind! For that which makes me, in your eyes, a Christian, makes you, in my eyes, a Jew!
Compare (as Niemeyer has done) the exchanges in Die Juden:
Baron: How estimable would the Jews be if they were all like you!
Traveller: And how admirable the Christians, if they all possessed your qualities!
A Tsar is said to have repeated pretty much the baron’s speech to Sir Moses Montefiore. It is not recorded that the latter made the traveller’s reply.
Edmund Burke, in one of his speeches on America, protested that it was impossible to draw up “an indictment against a whole people.” He forgot the frequency with which such indictments are drawn up against the Jews. Now if there was one thing that more than the rest roused Lessing’s anger, it was just this tarring of all Jews with one brush. One can conceive the glee with which Lessing wrote the passage in which the baron commits this very offence, unconscious of his peculiarly unfortunate faux pas, for he has no notion yet that the traveller is a Jew:
Baron: It seems to me that the very faces of the Jews prejudice one against them. You can read in their eyes their maliciousness, deceit, perjury. Why do you turn away from me?
Traveller: I see you are very learned in physiognomies—I am afraid, sir, that mine....
Baron: O, you wrong me! How could you entertain such a suspicion? Without being learned in physiognomies, I must tell you I have never met with a more frank, generous, and pleasing countenance than yours.
Traveller: To tell you the truth, I do not approve of generalizations concerning a whole people.... I should think that among all nations good and wicked are to be found.
These quotations will suffice to convey an idea of the aim of the dramatist and of the manner in which it is carried out. There is a certain amount of comic relief to the gravity of the main plot. The foot-pad and garroter, Martin Krumm, cuts an amusing figure as an assailant of the honesty of the Jews. “A Christian would have given me a kick in the ribs and not a snuff-box,” says Christopher, the traveller’s servant. Christopher is a funny rogue. When his master cannot find him, and naturally complains, the servant replies: “I can only be in one place at one time. Is it my fault that you did not go to that place? You say you have to search for me? Surely you’ll always find me where I am.”
There were a few attempts prior to Lessing to present the Jew in a favorable light on the stage, as Sir Sidney Lee has shown. But between Shylock and Nathan there stretches a lurid desert, broken only by the oasis of Die Juden. To some it may occur that the battle of tolerance fought by Lessing did not end in a permanent victory. Lessing himself would not have been disquieted at that result. As he expressed it, the search for truth rather than the possession of truth is the highest human good. A leading Viennese paper said some few years ago that if Nathan the Wise had been written now, it would have been hissed off the German stage. It is not unlikely. Fortunately, Lessing wrote before 1880! Nathan does not remain unacted. I saw Possart play the title-role in Munich in the nineties. His splendid elocution carried off Nathan’s long speeches with wonderful absence of monotony.
A thing of truth is a boon forever, because it makes further progress in truth-seeking certain. Because there has been one Lessing, there must be others. And if Nathan the Wise be thus a lasting inspiration, let us not forget that the poet was trying his hand, and maturing his powers, by writing the play which has served as the subject of this sketch.