Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 60

"Belissimo xe el mondo perche l' e molto vario.

ne omo ghe xe profondo che dir possa el contrario."

Yes, the world was indeed most beautiful and most varied. Terence was right: the comedy and pathos of things was enough. We are a sufficient spectacle to one another. A glow came over him; for a moment he grasped hold on life, and the infinite tentacles of things threw themselves out to entwine him.

_And a water came and extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!

Chad Gadya!_

But the glow faded, and he drew back sad and hopeless. For he knew now what he wanted. Paganism would not suffice. He wanted--he hungered after--G.o.d. The G.o.d of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief could not be shaken off. It was atavism that gave him those sudden strange intuitions of G.o.d at the scent of a rose, the sound of a child's laughter, the sight of a sleeping city; that sent a warmth to his heart and tears to his eyes, and a sense of the infinite beauty and sacredness of life. But he could not have the G.o.d of his fathers.

And his own G.o.d was distant and dubious, and nothing that modern science had taught him was yet registered in his organism. Could he even transmit it to descendants? What was it Weismann said about acquired characteristics? No, certain races put forth certain beliefs, and till you killed off the races, you could never kill off the beliefs. Oh, it was a cruel tragedy, this Western culture grafted on an Eastern stock, untuning the chords of life, setting heart and brain asunder. But then Nature _was_ cruel. He thought of last year's grape-harvest ruined by a thunderstorm, the frightful poverty of the peasants under the thumb of the padrones. And then the vision came up of a captured cuttle-fish he had seen gasping, almost with a human cough, on the sands of the Lido. It had spoilt the sublimity of that barren stretch of sand and sea, and the curious charm of the white sails that seemed to glide along the very stones of the great breakwater. His soul demanded justice for the uncouth cuttle-fish. He did not understand how people could live in a self-centred spiritual world that shut out the larger part of creation. If suffering purified, what purification did overdriven horses undergo, or starved cats? The miracle of creation--why was it wrought for puppies doomed to drown? No; man had imposed morality on a non-moral universe, anthropomorphizing everything, transferring into the great remorseless mechanism the ethical ideals that governed the conduct of man to man.

Religion, like art, focussed the universe round man, an unimportant by-product: it was bad science turned into good art. And it was his own race that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto G.o.d: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the G.o.ds had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and made a G.o.d of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been formed. And because G.o.d was goodness, therefore He was oneness--he remembered the acute a.n.a.lysis of Kuenen. No, the moral law was no more the central secret of the universe than color or music. Religion was made for man, not man for religion. Even justice was a meaningless concept in the last a.n.a.lysis: What was, was. The artist's view of life was the only true one: the artist who believes in everything and in nothing.

The religions unconsciously distorted everything. Life itself was simple enough: a biological phenomenon that had its growth, its maturity, its decay. Death was no mystery, pain no punishment, nor sin anything but the survival of lower attributes from a prior phase of evolution, or not infrequently the legitimate protest of the natural self against artificial social ethics. It was the creeds that tortured things out of their elemental simplicity. But for him the old craving persisted. That alone would do. G.o.d, G.o.d--he was G.o.d-intoxicated, without Spinoza's calm or Spinoza's certainty. Justice, Pity, Love--something that understood. He knew it was sheer blind heredity that spoilt his life for him--oh, the irony of it--and that, if he could forget his sense of futility, he could live beautifully unto himself. The wheels of chance had ground well for him. But his soul rejected all the solutions and self-equations of his friends--the all-sufficiency of science, of art, of pleasure, of the human spectacle; saw with inexorable insight through the phantasmal optimisms, refused to blind itself with Platonisms and Hegelisms, refused the positions of aesthetes and artists and self-satisfied German savants, equally with the positions of conventional preachers, demanded justice for the individual down to the sparrow, two of which were sold in the market-place for a farthing, and a significance and a purpose in the secular sweep of destiny; yet knew all the while that Purpose was as anthropomorphic a conception of the essence of things as justice or goodness. But the world without G.o.d was a beautiful, heartless woman--cold, irresponsive. He needed the flash of soul. He had experimented in Nature--as color, form, mystery--what had he not experimented in? But there was a want, a void. He had loved Nature, had come very near finding peace in the earth-pa.s.sion, in the intoxicating smell of gra.s.s and flowers, in the scent and sound of the sea, in the rapture of striking through the cold, salt waves, tossing green and white-flecked; ill exchanged for any heaven. But the pa.s.sion always faded and the old hunger for G.o.d came back.

He had found temporary peace with Spinoza's G.o.d: the eternal infinite-sided Being, of whom all the starry infinities were but one poor expression, and to love whom did not imply being loved in return.

'Twas magnificent to be lifted up in wors.h.i.+p of that supernal splendor. But the splendor froze, not scorched. He wanted the eternal Being to be conscious of his existence; nay, to send him a whisper that He was not a metaphysical figment. Otherwise he found himself saying what Voltaire has made Spinoza say: "Je crois, entre nous, que vous n'existez pas." Obedience? Wors.h.i.+p? He could have prostrated himself for hours on the flags, worn out his knees in prayer. O Luther, O Galileo, enemies of the human race! How wise of the Church to burn infidels, who would burn down the spirit's home--the home warm with the love and treasures of the generations--and leave the poor human soul naked and s.h.i.+vering amid the cold countless worlds. O Napoleon, arch-fiend, who, opening the Ghettos, where the Jews crouched in narrow joy over the Sabbath fire, let in upon them the weight of the universe.

_And an ox came and drank the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

In Vienna, whence he had come, an Israelite, on whom the modern universe pressed, yet dreamed the old dream of a Jewish State--a modern State, incarnation of all the great principles won by the travail of the ages. The chameleon of races should show a specific color: a Jewish art, a Jewish architecture would be born, who knew?

But he, who had worked for Mazzini, who had seen his hero achieve that greatest of all defeats, victory, _he_ knew. He knew what would come of it, even if it came. He understood the fate of Christ and of all idealists, doomed to see themselves wors.h.i.+pped and their ideas rejected in a religion or a State founded like a national monument to perpetuate their defeat. But the Jewish State would not even come. He had met his Viennese brethren but yesterday; in the Leopoldstadt, frowsy with the gaberdines and side-curls of Galicia; in the Prater, arrogantly radiant in gleaming carriages with spick-and-span footmen--that strange race that could build up cities for others but never for itself; that professed to be both a religion and a nationality, and was often neither. The grotesquerie of history!

Moses, Sinai, Palestine, Isaiah, Ezra, the Temple, Christ, the Exile, the Ghettos, the Martyrdoms--all this to give the Austrian comic papers jokes about stockbrokers with noses big enough to support unheld opera--gla.s.ses. And even supposing another miraculous link came to add itself to that wonderful chain, the happier Jews of the new State would be born into it as children to an enriched man, unconscious of the struggles, accepting the luxuries, growing big-bellied and narrow-souled. The Temple would be rebuilt. _Et apres?_ The architect would send in the bill. People would dine and dig one another in the ribs and tell the old smoking-room stories.

There would be fas.h.i.+onable dressmakers. The synagogue would persecute those who were larger than it, the professional priests would prate of spiritualities to an applausive animal world, the press would be run in the interests of capitalists and politicians, the little writers would grow spiteful against those who did not call them great, the managers of the national theatre would advance their mistresses to leading parts. Yes, the ox would come and drink the water, and Jeshurun would wax fat and kick. "For that which is crooked cannot be made straight." Menander's comedies were fresh from the mint, the Book of Proverbs as new as the morning paper. No, he could not dream. Let the younger races dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit disintegrated! _Omnia Vanitas_, this too was vanity.

_And the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!

Chad Gadya!_

Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! He had never thought of the meaning of the words, always connected them with the finish of the ceremony. "All over! All over!" they seemed to wail, and in the quaint music there seemed a sense of infinite disillusion, of infinite rest; a winding-up, a conclusion, things over and done with, a fever subsided, a toil completed, a clamor abated, a farewell knell, a little folding of the hands to sleep.

Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! It was a wail over the struggle for existence, the purposeless procession of the ages, the pa.s.sing of the ancient empires--as the commentators had pointed out--and of the modern empires that would pa.s.s on to join them, till the earth itself--as the scientists had pointed out--pa.s.sed away in cold and darkness. Flux and reflux, the fire and the water, the water and the fire! He thought of the imperturbable skeletons that still awaited exhumation in Pompeii, the swaddled mummies of the Pharaohs, the undiminished ashes of forgotten lovers in old Etruscan tombs. He had a flas.h.i.+ng sense of the great pageant of the Mediaeval--popes, kings, crusaders, friars, beggars, peasants, flagellants, schoolmen; of the vast modern life in Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago; the brilliant life of the fas.h.i.+onable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the prost.i.tutes, the slaveys in lodging-houses, the criminals, the lunatics; the vast hordes of Russia, the life pullulating in the swarming boats on Chinese rivers, the merry b.u.t.terfly life of j.a.pan, the unknown savages of mid-Africa with their fetishes and war-dances, the tribes of the East sleeping in tents or turning uneasily on the hot terraces of their houses, the negro races growing into such a terrible problem in the United States, and each of all these peoples, nay, each unit of any people, thinking itself the centre of the universe, and of its love and care; the destiny of the races no clearer than the destiny of the individuals and no diviner than the life of insects, and all the vast sweep of history nothing but a spasm in the life of one of the meanest of an obscure group of worlds, in an infinity of vaster constellations. Oh, it was too great! He could not look on the face of his own G.o.d and live. Without the stereoscopic illusions which made his father's life solid, he could not continue to exist. His point of view was hopelessly cosmic. All was equally great and mysterious? Yes; but all was equally small and commonplace. Kant's _Starry Infinite Without?_ Bah! Mere lumps of mud going round in a tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy--they were all in the splashes of mud from a pa.s.sing carriage. Everywhere one law and one futility. The human race? Strange marine monsters crawling about in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim upwards, oddly tricked out in the stolen skins of other creatures. As absurd, impartially considered, as the strange creatures quaintly adapted to curious environments one saw in aquaria. Kant's _Moral Law Within!_ Dissoluble by a cholera germ, a curious blue network under the microscope, not unlike a map of Venice. Yes, the cosmic and the comic were one. Why be bullied into the Spinozistic awe? Perhaps Heine--that other Jew--saw more truly, and man's last word on the universe into which he had been projected unasked, might be a mockery of that which had mocked him, a laugh with tears in it.

And he, he foreshadowed the future of all races, as well as of his own. They would all go on struggling, till they became self-conscious; then, like children grown to men, the scales falling from their eyes, they would suddenly ask themselves what it was all about, and, realizing that they were being driven along by blind forces to labor and struggle and strive, they too would pa.s.s away; the gross childish races would sweep them up, Nature pouring out new energies from her inexhaustible fount. For strength was in the unconscious, and when a nation paused to ask of itself its right to Empire, its Empire was already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle and mobile! For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness of all the periods of man's mysterious existence on this queer little planet; while the old geocentric ethics, oddly clinging on to the changed cosmogony, would keep life clean. But all that would pall--and then the deluge!

There was a waft of merry music from without. He rose and went noiselessly to the window and looked out into the night. A full moon hung in the heavens, perpendicularly and low, so that it seemed a terrestrial object in comparison with the stars scattered above, glory beyond glory, and in that lucent Italian atmosphere making him feel himself of their s.h.i.+ning company, whirling through the infinite void on one of the innumerable spheres. A broad silver green patch of moonlight lay on the dark water, dwindling into a string of dancing gold pieces. Adown the ca.n.a.l the black gondolas cl.u.s.tered round a barca lighted by gaily colored lanterns, whence the music came.

_Funiculi, Funicula_--it seemed to dance with the very spirit of joyousness. He saw a young couple holding hands. He knew they were English, that strange, happy, solid, conquering race. Something vibrated in him. He thought of bridegrooms, youth, strength; but it was as the hollow echo of a far-off regret, some vague sunrise of gold over hills of dream. Then a beautiful tenor voice began to sing Schubert's Serenade. It was as the very voice of hopeless pa.s.sion; the desire of the moth for the star, of man for G.o.d. Death, death, at any cost, death to end this long ghastly creeping about the purlieus of life. Life even for a single instant longer, life without G.o.d, seemed intolerable. He would find peace in the bosom of that black water. He would glide downstairs now, speaking no word.

_And the Angel of Death came and slew the slaughterer, which had slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

When they should find him accidentally drowned, for how could the world understand, the world which yet had never been backward to judge him, that a man with youth, health, wealth, and a measure of fame should take his own life; his people would think, perhaps, that it was a ghost that had sat at the _Seder_ table so silent and noiseless.

And, indeed, what but a ghost? One need not die to hover outside the warm circle of life, stretching vain arms. A ghost? He had always been a ghost. From childhood those strange solid people had come and talked and walked with him, and he had glided among them, an unreal spirit, to which they gave flesh-and-blood motives like their own. As a child death had seemed horrible to him; red worms crawling over white flesh.

Now his thoughts always stopped at the glad moment of giving up the ghost. More lives beyond the grave? Why, the world was not large enough for one life. It had to repeat itself incessantly. Books, newspapers, what tedium! A few ideas deftly re-combined. For there was nothing new under the sun. Life like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Shakespeare had found the supreme expression for it as for everything in it.

He stole out softly through the half-open door, went through the vast antechamber, full of tapestry and figures of old Venetians in armor, down the wide staircase, into the great courtyard that looked strange and sepulchral when he struck a match to find the water-portal, and saw his shadow curving monstrous along the ribbed roof, and leering at the s.p.a.cious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-ca.n.a.l had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black shadow in the water.

He walked to where the water-alley met the deeper Grand Ca.n.a.l, and let himself slide down with a soft, subdued splash. He found himself struggling, but he conquered the instinctive will to live.

But as he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night and the stars and death mingled with a strange whirl of childish memories instinct with the wonder of life, and the immemorial Hebrew words of the dying Jew beat outwards to his gurgling throat: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d, the Lord is One."

Through the open doorway floated down the last words of the hymn and the service:--

_And the Holy One came, blessed be He, and slew the Angel of Death, who had slain the slaughterer, who had slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!

Chad Gadya!_

EPILOGUE

A MODERN SCRIBE IN JERUSALEM

I

Outside the walls of Jerusalem, on the bleak roadless way to the Mount of Olives, within sight of the domes and minarets of the sacred city, and looking towards the mosque of Omar--arrogantly a-glitter on the site of Solomon's Temple--there perches among black, barren rocks a colony of Arabian Jews from Yemen.

These all but cave-dwellers, grimy caftaned figures, with swarthy faces, coal-black ringlets, and hungry eyes, have for sole public treasure a synagogue, consisting of a small room, furnished only with an Ark, and bare even of seats.

In this room a Scribe of to-day, humblest in Israel, yet with the gift of vision, stood turning over the few old books that lay about, strange flotsam and jetsam of the great world-currents that have drifted Israel to and fro. And to him bending over a copy of the mystic _Zohar_,--that thirteenth century Cabalistic cla.s.sic, forged in Chaldaic by a Jew of Spain, which paved the way for the Turkish Messiah--was brought a little child.

A little boy in his father's arms, his image in miniature, with a miniature grimy caftan and miniature coal-black ringlets beneath his little black skull-cap. A human curiosity brought to interest the stranger and increase his _bakhs.h.i.+sh_.

For lo! the little boy had six fingers on his right hand! The child held it shyly clenched, but the father forcibly parted the fingers to exhibit them.

And the child lifted up his voice and wept bitterly.

And so, often in after days when the Scribe thought of Jerusalem, it was not of what he had been told he would think; not of Prophets and Angels and Crusaders--only of the crying of that little six-fingered Jewish child, washed by the great tides of human history on to the black rocks near the foot of the Mount of Olives.

II

Jerusalem--centre of pilgrimage to three great religions--unholiest city under the sun!

"For from Zion the Law shall go forth and the Word of G.o.d from Jerusalem." Gone forth of a sooth, thought the Scribe, leaving in Jerusalem itself only the swarming of sects about the corpse of Religion.

No prophetic centre, this Zion, even for Israel; only the stagnant, stereotyped activity of excommunicating Rabbis, and the capricious distribution of the paralyzing _Chalukah_, leaving an appalling mult.i.tudinous poverty agonizing in the steep refuse-laden alleys. The faint stirrings of new life, the dim desires of young Israel to regenerate at once itself and the soil of Palestine, the lofty patriotism of immigrant Dreamers as yet unable to overcome the long lethargy of holy study and of prayers for rain. A city where men go to die, but not to live.

An accursed city, priest-ridden and pauperized, with cripples dragging about its shrines and lepers burrowing at the Zion gate; but a city infinitely pathetic, infinitely romantic withal, a centre through which pa.s.s all the great threads of history, ancient and mediaeval, and now at last quivering with the telegraphic thread of the modern, yet only the more charged with the pathos of the past and the tears of things; symbol not only of the tragedy of the Christ, but of the tragedy of his people, nay of the great world-tragedy.

III

On the Eve of the Pa.s.sover and Easter, the Scribe arrived at the outer fringe of the rainbow-robed, fur-capped throng that shook in pa.s.sionate lamentation before that t.i.tanic fragment of Temple Wall, which is the sole relic of Israel's national glories. Roaring billows of hysterical prayer beat against the monstrous, symmetric blocks, quarried by King Solomon's servants and smoothed by the kisses of the generations. A Fatherland lost eighteen hundred years ago, and still this strange indomitable race hoped on!

"Hasten, hasten, O Redeemer of Zion."

And from amid the mourners, one tall, stately figure, robed in purple velvet, turned his face to the Scribe, saying, with out-stretched hand and in a voice of ineffable love--

"_Shalom Aleichem._"