The Spirit of the Ghetto Part 11

"I do not know much about him," said the inventor. "I am not a genius, like the others."

He sneered, but it was so nearly imperceptible that it did not seem ill-natured.

"But I am told," said the American, "that you are a great inventor.

And that is a kind of genius."

"Yes, perhaps," he replied, carelessly. "It takes talent, too, to do what I have done. But I am not a genius, like these people."

Again he smiled, sarcastically.

"I find," said the American, "a great many interesting people in these cafes."

"Yes, they are what you call characters, I suppose," he said, dispa.s.sionately; "but I find them interesting only for one reason--no, no, I won't tell you what that reason is."

"You don't seem to be as enthusiastic about the people as I am," said the American, "but whenever I come into a cafe down here I find serious men who will talk seriously. They are different from the Americans who amuse themselves in bars, at horse races and farces."

The inventor smiled coldly.

"I do not call serious, what you call serious," he said. "It is not necessary to talk seriously to be serious. Serious men do things. The Russians don't do things. If they were gay and did things, they would be more serious than they are. But they are solemn and don't do anything."

"I don't agree with you," said the American, warmly. "Doesn't Blank, who writes so many excellent novels, do anything? Don't the actors, who act so truthfully, without self-consciousness, do anything? Don't the journalists, who spread excellent ideas, do anything?"

The inventor nodded judicially and remarked that there were some exceptions.

"But," he added, "you are deceived by the surface. There are many men in our colony who seem to be stronger intellectually than they really are. In Russia a few men, really cultivated and intellectual, give the tone, and everybody follows them. In America, however, the public gives the tone, and the playwright, the literary man, simply expresses the public. So that really intellectual Americans do not express as good ideas as less intellectual Russians. The Russians all imitate the best. The Americans imitate what the ma.s.s of the people want. But an intellectual American is more intellectual than these geniuses around here whom you like. Of course, they have some good things in them, as everybody has."

"What is it that you find to like in this Russian colony?" asked the American.

"I find," replied the inventor, "that when they come over here they lose what is best in the Russian character and acquire what is worst in the American character."

"And what do you deem best in the Russian character?"

"Well, in Russia they are warm hearted and friendly. They are envious even there, but not nearly so envious as they are here."

"And what do you find that is worst in the American character?"

"Oh, you know; they do everything for money. But yet there is more greatness in the American character. They are mechanical. They are practical. They don't get cheated by unscrupulous lawyers.

"Are you married?" asked the American, sympathetically.

"No, thank G.o.d!" he replied, with more energy than he had yet shown.

"But you have no friends?"

"No."

"Some men," commented the American, "find a friend in a wife."

"That depends on a man's character. It increases the loneliness of some men," replied the inventor, smiling in spite of what he was saying.

"You seem to me to be rather pessimistic," remarked the American.

"No, I am not pessimistic. I understand that a pessimist thinks life is worse than it is, but I see things just as they are; that is all.

When I came to New York I was enthusiastic, too; I was an optimist. I saw life as it is not. But the mists have pa.s.sed from before my eyes, and I see things just as they are."

AN IMPa.s.sIONED CRITIC

He loves literature with an absorbing love, and is pained constantly by what he deems the chaos of art in the United States. The Americans seem to him to be trivial and immature in their art, lacking in serious purpose.

"It is a vast and fruitful land," he will say, "but there is no order and little sincerity as far as art is concerned. Your writers try to amuse the readers, to entertain them merely, rather than to give them serious and vital truth. Why is it that a race which is clever and progressive in all mechanical and industrial matters, which in such things has no overpowering respect for the past, is weighed down in art by a regard for all the literary ghosts of bygone times? Look at the books put forth in any one year in the United States! What a senseless hodgepodge it is! Variety of all kinds, historical novels, short stories, social plays, costume plays, bindings, ill.u.s.trations, _editions de luxe_, new editions of books written in all ages alongside of the latest productions of the day. The Americans have great tact in most things. They are the cleverest people in the world, and yet they are very backward in literature.

"Indeed the whole Anglo-Saxon race, great economically and practically as it is, is curiously at sea and chaotic in all that pertains to literary art. There are men of genius, great artists among them, but they are artists only in part, fragmentarily, artists without being aware of it, with no consistent and clear understanding of what art is. Your great men are hindered by their environment. America and England are the most difficult countries in the world for real art to get a hearing, for all the people insist on being amused by their authors. They treat them as they do their actors, merely as public servants whose duty it is to amuse the public when it is tired. But art is a serious thing, instinct with sincerity, and should never be lightly approached either by the artist or the reader.

"Another indication of what I mean is the way you all talk about style over here, as if the style had anything to do with art. Some of the great Russian realists have no style, but they are great artists.

There was a time when to write well was an exception, and people who did it were supposed to be great. Now so many write well that it const.i.tutes no longer any particular distinction. Real art consists in the presentation of ideas in images, and in the power of seeing in images, and of reproducing imaginatively; what is thus seen is wholly independent of style. And, more, words often stand in the way of art.

A man writes a pretty style. There may be no idea or image beneath it, but you Anglo-Saxons say: 'Ha! Here is a man with a style, a great artist!' But he is no artist. He is a mere decorator, trivial and empty. He doesn't seize earnestly upon life and tell the truth about it. Now and then, indeed, I see indications of real art in your writers--great images, great characters, great truth, but all merely in suggestion. You don't know when you do anything good, and most of you don't like it when you see it. You prefer an exciting plot to a great delineation of character. Sometimes you throw off, often in newspapers, something that indicates great talent, real art, but you cover it up with an indistinguishable ma.s.s of rubbish. You don't know what you are after. You have no method. Every writer goes his single way, confused, at cross purposes. There is no school of literature.

Consequently, there is great loss of energy, great waste of material; great richness, but what carelessness, what deplorable carelessness, about the deepest and n.o.blest and most serious things in life! I love you; I love you all; you are clever, good fellows, but you are children, talented, to be sure, but wayward and vagrant children, in the fields of art. Sincerity, realism, purpose and unity are what as a race you need, if you wish ever to have a consistent and genuine art.

"The Russian, the Frenchman, the German, knows what he wants. He is after the truth. He is serious about life. He doesn't try to dodge the facts for the sake of a little false cheerfulness and optimistic inanity."

Thus talks the Russian prophet. He is a robust, earnest man, who is trying to make head and tail out of contemporary English literature.

He finds no great mainspring of impulse or principle behind it, but an infinite pandering to an infinitely diversified public taste. He thinks it is a kind of vaudeville of art, full of compromises, vulgar in its lack of principle. It makes him sad in much the same way that skepticism and profanity sadden a deeply religious person. Wisdom and truth he wants, and doesn't find them. What he finds is haste, greed, incompleteness and waste, and his soul abhors anything which takes away from the deepest nature of the soul. He is really a religious man, profound and sincere, sad at the wasteful, foolish lightness in art of the Anglo-Saxon world. Like his great countryman, Tolstoy, he writes stories, and, again like Tolstoy, as he grows older the more he sees in art and life which he would like to reform and deepen. Economy of the heart, soul and brain, the direction of them to a constant end--the feeling of the necessity of this is now an altruistic pa.s.sion with this man. Like all reformers, he is sad, but, again like all reformers, he is robust and calm, self-sufficient.

THE POET OF ZIONISM

Naptali Herz Imber is known to all Jews of any education as the man who has written in the old Hebrew language the poems that best express the hope of Zion and that best serve as an inspiring battle cry in the struggle for a new Jerusalem. Zangwill has translated into English the Hebrew "Wacht Am Rhein," the most popular of Imber's poems, which is called _The Watch on the Jordan_. It is in four stanzas, the first of which is:

Like the crash of the thunder Which splitteth asunder The flame of the cloud, On our ears ever falling, A voice is heard calling From Zion aloud; "Let your spirits' desires For the land of your sires Eternally burn From the foe to deliver Our own holy river, To Jordan return."

Where the soft flowing stream Murmurs low as in dream, There set we our watch.

Our watchword, "The sword, Of our land and our Lord,"

By the Jordan then set we our watch.

Mr. Imber is a peculiar character and is said to be the original of the poet Pinchas in Zangwill's _Children of the Ghetto_.

At a Russian-Jewish cafe on Ca.n.a.l Street he may often be found. Not long ago I met him there and discovered that the dignified Hebrew poet had as a man many of the more humorous and less impressive peculiarities of the character in Mr. Zangwill's book. It is difficult to take him seriously. He was sitting opposite an old "magid," or wandering preacher, whose specialty is to attack America, and he consented to tell about his work and to confide some of his ideas.

"I am the origin of the Zionistic movement," he said. "It is not generally known, but I am. Many years ago I went to Jerusalem, saw the misery of the people, felt the spirit of the place and determined to bring my scattered people again together. For twelve years I struggled to put the Zionistic movement on foot, and now that I have started it I will let others carry it on and get the glory. For long I was not recognized, but when my Hebrew poems were published our whole race were made enthusiastic for Zion.

"If you wish to know what the spirit and purpose of my Hebrew poems is I will tell you. For two thousand years Hebrew poetry has been nothing but lamentations--nothing but literature expressing the spirit of Jeremiah. There have been no love songs, no wine songs, no songs of joy, nothing pagan. There have been no poets, only critics in rhyme.

Now what I did in my Hebrew verses was to do away with lamentations.

We have had enough of lamentations. I introduced the spirit of love and wine, the pagan spirit. My theme, indeed, is Zion. I am an individualist. It is the only 'ist' I believe in, and I want my nation to be individual, too. I want them to be joyously themselves, and so I am a Zionist. Therefore I did away with critical poetry and with lamentations and led my people on to an individual and a joyous life."

Altho Mr. Imber's best work is in Hebrew poetry, he is yet a very voluminous writer on science, economics, medicine, mysticism, history and many other subjects.

"I have written on everything," said the poet, "everything. I know almost nothing about the subjects on which I write. I don't believe in reading. I believe in knowing myself. In that way we learn to know others. Psychology is the only science. All others are fakes, and I can fake as well as anybody. Why read, or why seek amus.e.m.e.nt in the theatres or elsewhere, when one can sit in a cafe and talk to a man like that?"