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.