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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.
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?
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.
Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir." The effect of this change on Deronda he afterward smiled when he recalled it was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his congé. There was nothing further to be said, however: he paid his half-crown and carried off his Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte with a mere "good-morning."
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reference takes one to the fifteenth chapter of the Autobiography. Indeed, George Eliot was right as to the misleading tendency of a good deal in Maimon's "wonderful piece of autobiography," as she terms the work in "Daniel Deronda." She returns to the attack on p. 36 of her copy, where she has jotted, "See infra, p. 150 et seq. for a better-informed view of Talmudic study."
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.
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