By-paths in Hebraic bookland

No selection from Byron’s poetry is complete unless it contain some of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Matthew Arnold included five of the twenty-three pieces; Bulwer Lytton adopted them all. Swinburne, it is true, gave us a volume of selections without a Hebrew melody in it, but curiously enough he admits the verses beginning: “They say that Hope is happiness,” which, it would seem, were intended for the melodies, though they do not appear among them. Nathan duly adds the lines to his collection, where they form the last item of the fourth and final “Number.” The musician also includes “Francesca,” and, on the other hand, omits the “Song of Saul before his Last Battle.”

The “Melodies” first came out with settings by the Jewish musician, Isaac Nathan. The tunes, partly derived from the Synagogue, were not well chosen; hence, though the poems have survived, the settings are forgotten. In the same year (1815), John Murray also published the verses without the music. Before consenting to this step, Byron wrote to Nathan for permission to take it. He wished, he said, to oblige Mr. Murray, but “you know, Nathan, it is against all good fashion to give and take back. I therefore cannot grant what is not at my disposal.” Nathan readily consented, and the volume of poems was issued with this Preface: “The subsequent poems were written at the request of the author’s friend, the Hon. D. Kinnaird, for a selection of Hebrew melodies, and have been published with the music arranged by Mr. Braham and Mr. Nathan.” In point of fact, Braham had nothing to do with the musical arrangement. Though his name is associated with Nathan’s on the title page of the original edition, it is removed in the reprints.

TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF BYRON’S “HEBREW MELODIES”

It has been said above that the musical setting has not retained its hold on public taste. The Rev. Francis L. Cohen (in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 179) speaks of it as having “deservedly sunk into oblivion.” I have recently had several of them played over to me, and my verdict is the same as Mr. Cohen’s. In themselves the tunes are sometimes good enough, Maoz Zur appears among them. But the words and the airs rarely fit, and Nathan lost chances by ignoring the Sephardic music. Nathan’s contemporaries had, however, a higher opinion of the work. Perhaps it was because the composer sang his songs so well; Braham does not seem to have included them in his repertoire. But Nathan’s auditors were charmed by his renderings. Byron himself was most moved by “She Walks in Beauty”—to a modern ear Nathan’s is a commonplace and inappropriate setting—and “he would not unfrequently join in its execution.” The verses were really written for the tunes, and the poet often consulted the musician as to the style and metre of the stanzas. Nathan (in his Fugitive Pieces, 1829), records many conversations during the progress of the joint work. He tells us, for instance, how Byron refused to alter the end of “Jephtha’s Daughter.” As Nathan read the Scripture, and as many others also read it, Jephthah’s daughter did not perish as a consequence of her father’s vow; but Byron observed: “Do not seek to exhume the lady.” On another occasion, Nathan was anxious to know what biblical passages were in the poet’s mind when he wrote some of the verses, such as “O snatch’d away in beauty’s bloom!” Byron vaguely answered: “Every mind must make its own reference.” The local color of the poems, besides their substance, is in fact sometimes at fault. “Each flower the dews have lightly wet,” is not a Palestinian touch; the dews there are remarkable for their heaviness.

At this point let us for a moment interrupt Nathan’s reminiscences of Byron himself, and cite what he tells us of another famous poet’s appreciation of the “Melodies.” “When the Hebrew melodies were first published,” says Nathan, “Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, honoured me with a visit at my late residence in Poland Street. I sang several of the melodies to him—he repeated his visit, and requested that I would allow him to introduce his lady and his daughter. They came together, when I had the pleasure of singing to them ‘Jephtha’s Daughter,’ and one or two more of the favourite airs: they entered into the spirit of the music with all the true taste and feeling so peculiar to the Scotch.” Another admirer of Nathan’s singing of the melodies was Lady Caroline Lamb, herself the author of what the conventions of the period would have termed “elegant verses.” Once she wrote to Nathan: “I am, and have been, very ill; it would perhaps cure me if you could come and sing to me ‘Oh Mariamne’—now will you? I entreat you, the moment you have this letter come and see me.” The same lady translated for him a Hebrew elegy which he wrote on the death of his wife. Nathan must obviously have been an amiable companion and a charming renderer of his own music, or he would not have gained the applause of these distinguished judges.

As has been seen from the conversations recorded above, Byron and Nathan became very intimate in the course of their collaboration over the “Hebrew Melodies.” It was this work that brought them together, though they were contemporaries at Cambridge about 1805, Byron being a student at Trinity College, and Nathan a pupil at Solomon Lyon’s Jewish school in Cambridge town. But they naturally did not become acquainted then. Douglas Kinnaird (according to Mr. Prothero) introduced them to one another. Kinnaird was Byron’s banker and Cambridge friend. This mention of Mr. Prothero reminds me that in his edition of Byron’s Letters, he cites a note written by the poet to thank Nathan for a “seasonable bequest” of a parcel of matsos. Byron must have grown very attached to Nathan. An officious friend of the poet exhorted the musician to bring the melodies out in good style, so that his lordship’s name “might not suffer from scantiness in their publication.” Byron overheard the remark, and on the following evening said to Nathan: “Do not suffer that capricious fool to lead you into more expense than is absolutely necessary; bring out the book to your own taste. I have no ambition to gratify, beyond that of proving useful to you.” The poet was, indeed, so indignant that he generously offered to share in the cost of production, an offer which Nathan as generously declined.

Readers of the “Hebrew Melodies” must have been struck by the appearance of two poems based on Psalm 137. Byron first wrote: “We sate down and wept by the waters,” and later on another version beginning: “In the valley of waters we wept.” Byron himself observed the duplication, and wished to suppress the former copy. It is well that he yielded to Nathan’s importunities, for the first version is assuredly the finer. But the incident shows the close connection between the verses and the music. For Byron ended the discussion with these words: “I must confess I give a preference to my second version of this elegy; and since your music differs so widely from the former, I see no reason why it should not also make its public appearance.”

Such being the close bond between poet and musician, it is all the more regrettable that the latter did not make a more competent use of his opportunity. A better fate befell the earlier collaboration which (in 1807) resulted in Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—a title which suggested that given to Byron’s series. Stevenson served Moore better than Nathan was able to serve Byron. Yet it seems a pity to leave things in this condition. Such poems as those already alluded to—and such others as “Saul,” the “Vision of Belshazzar,” and the “Destruction of Sennacherib”—all bear the clearest marks of their design; they were written to be sung, not merely to be read or recited. Jeffrey spoke of their sweetness; Lytton of their depth of feeling; Nathan himself realized that “Oh! weep for those” reaches the acme of emotional sympathy for persecuted Israel. Here, then, there is a chance for a modern Jewish musician. S. Mandelkern, in 1890, gave us a spirited translation of the verses into the Hebrew language. Let a better artist than Nathan now translate them musically into the Hebrew spirit.

COLERIDGE’S “TABLE TALK”

Coleridge was not master of his genius; his genius was master of him. In one place he speaks of the midrashic fancies about the state of our first parents as “Rabbinic dotages”; in another he laments, with Schelling, that these same rabbinic stories are neglected, and proceeds in his periodical, The Friend, to quote several with obvious approval. Again, he writes in one passage of the “proverbial misanthropy and bigotry” of Pharisaism; then, in another, he asserts, on the authority of Grotius, that the “Lord’s Prayer” was a selection from the liturgy of the Synagogue.

The truth is that a large part of Coleridge’s work is of the nature of table talk. His relative indeed published the poet’s “Table Talk,” but a good deal else in Coleridge belongs to the same category. His thoughts are, for the most part, obiter dicta, stray jottings, often stating profound truths, often expressing sheer nonsense. On the whole, he was not unkind to the Jews. He delivered many lectures on Shakespeare, but he never spoke on the Merchant of Venice. He alludes with contempt to the incident of the pound of flesh. Jacob, it is true, he regards as “a regular Jew” because of his trickiness; but he hastens to take the sting out of the remark by adding: “No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel.”

Throughout we find, in Coleridge’s remarks on the Jews and Judaism, the same mixture of conventional views and original judgments. He notes the theory that the Jews were destined to “remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing out the doctrine of the unity of God,” but spoils the compliment by the comment: “The religion of the Jew is, indeed, a light; but it is the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.” He can see in the Jew only love of money, yet he always found Jews “possessed of a strong national capacity for metaphysical discussions.”

The last remark points to his personal familiarity with Jews. This was actually the case. “I have had,” he says, “a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money from them.” He records several conversations with Jews, and does not hesitate to admit that he mostly got the worst of the argument. He argued with one Jew about conversion, and he cites the Jew’s answer: “Let us convert Jews to Judaism first”—an epigram which has been a good deal repeated in other forms since 1830, when Coleridge first recorded it. On one occasion he accosted an “Old Clothes” man, and in a hectoring tone exclaimed: “Why can’t you pronounce your trade cry clearly, why must you utter such a grunt?” The Jew answered: “Sir, I can say ‘Old Clothes’ as well as you can, but if you had to say it ten times a minute, for an hour, you would say, ‘Ogh clo’’ as I do now,” and so he marched off. Coleridge confesses that he “felt floored.” He was so much confounded by the justice of his retort, that, to cite his own words again: “I followed, and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.”

Of one particular Jewish friend we know. Coleridge had a deep affection for Hyman Hurwitz, whom he terms “pious, learned, strong-minded, single-hearted.” Afterwards Professor of Hebrew at University College, London, Hurwitz was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the head of the “Highgate Academy.” He died in 1844, surviving Coleridge by ten years; the latter died at Highgate in 1834. Thus the poet and the Hebraist were neighbors as well as friends. Coleridge translated into poor English verse Hurwitz’s feeble Hebrew elegy on the death of Princess Charlotte. He also contracted to prepare for the publisher, Murray, a volume of “Rabbinical Tales”; in this work Hurwitz was to collaborate with him. The fee was settled; it was to be two hundred guineas; but the arrangement came to nothing. Coleridge was rich in plans which he failed to accomplish. As an instance, let me cite what he says about an epic on the “Destruction of Jerusalem.” “That,” he declares, “is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem.” Mark what follows: “I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat.” Perhaps another remark of his explains why he never attempted the task. The subject of the destruction of Jerusalem, with great capabilities, has one great defect. “No genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero being merged in the interest for the event”—a profound sentiment.

Perhaps in no direction was Coleridge more in advance of his age than in his treatment of the ethics of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were, he contends truly, not a sect; they were, he puts it less aptly, the Evangelicals of their day. By that he means those who made religion the main concern of life; therein he is right, but the term is somewhat unhappily chosen. Yet not from one point of view. I have already cited Coleridge’s opinion as to the Jewish sources of the “Lord’s Prayer.” He takes up a similar position with regard to the ethics of the Gospels in general. Here is a very remarkable concession: “The Being and Providence of the Living God, holy, gracious, merciful, the creator and preserver of all things, and a father of the righteous; the Moral Law in its utmost height, breadth, and purity; a state of retribution after death, the Resurrection of the Dead, and a Day of Judgment—all these were known and received by the Jewish people, as established articles of national faith, at or before the proclaiming of Christ by the Baptist.” This is taken, not from the collection of “Table Talk” so named, but from the “Aids to Reflection” (Aphorism vii). Coleridge justifies his claim in behalf of the Jews by citing Leviticus 19. 2 and Micah 6. 8, finding the acme of morality in the command to be holy and in the prophet’s answer to the question, “What doth the Lord require of thee?” Just so did Huxley choose Micah’s saying: “To do justly, to love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God,” as the last word of religion. To give the words of Huxley which cannot be repeated too often: “If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect idea of religion.” No two minds were more unlike than Huxley’s and Coleridge’s—the one the scientist, the other the metaphysician; the one the agnostic, the other the mystic. Yet they agreed in perceiving in the prophetic teaching a unique expression of basic moral truth.

BLANCO WHITE’S SONNET

Fear is natural by night. Man in the day-time is beset by foes; but while he can use his eyes, he has a sense of security. Something he can effect towards self-protection. But in the dark he feels helpless.

Hence it is natural that the Hebrew poets of the Midrash (on Psalm 92) have used as a theme Adam’s first experience of the dark. There was no darkness on the first Friday after Creation. The primeval light, which illumined the world from end to end, was not quenched, though Adam had already sinned before night-fall of the day on which he was born. But the Sabbath came with the Friday’s close, and the celestial rays shone on through the hours that should have been obscure. When, however, the Sabbath had passed, the heavenly light passed with it, and Adam, to his consternation, was unable to see. Would not the wily serpent choose this as a favorable moment for insidious onslaught? Then the light that failed in nature was kindled in man’s intellect. Adam, by the friction of two stones, cleverly made artificial light, and so could see again.

So runs one form of the Jewish legend. Another (I am summarizing both from Prof. Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, vol. i, pp. 86-89) expresses the thought differently. The primeval light does not figure in this version, but it is the normal sun that sinks before Adam’s gaze on the Saturday night. Adam was filled with compunction. “Woe is me!”, he exclaimed, “I have sinned, and because of me is the world darkened; because of me it will again return to a condition of chaos.” So he passed the long vigil of the dark in tears, and Eve wept with him. But with the day he dried his eyes. For he saw the sun rise once more, and realized that the alternations of day and night were part of the divine order of nature.

In both these fancies Adam is much disturbed by his first experience of the dark, a guilty conscience made a coward of him. But not all Hebrew homilists rested in this attitude of fear. The author of the eighth Psalm is above all the poet of the night in its more uplifting aspects. He sees not the terror, but the illumination of the dark. The poet contemplates the heavens at night; he does not mention the sun, but “the moon and the stars” which God has ordained. “Unquestionably, the star-lit sky, especially in the transparent clearness of an Eastern atmosphere, is more suggestive of the vastness and variety and mystery of the universe.” So writes Dr. Kirkpatrick on Psalm 8. 3, and he refers to an eloquent passage in Whewell’s Astronomy, Book III, Chapter 3. Certainly those who have beheld the heavens on an Oriental night can conceive nothing more glorious than the spectacle, nor recall aught more wonderful than the Psalmist’s description of it.

It was left to the theologian Blanco White to combine the two thoughts of fear and illumination, expressed in the Midrash quoted above and in Psalm 8, into an exquisite Sonnet. The author’s name is queer enough. But though Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841) was born in Seville, he was an Irishman by descent. When the family settled in Spain, they translated the patronymic White into Blanco. On his coming to England, the theologian simply retained both forms of the name. As the writer in the Dictionary of National Biography recalls, Blanco White applied to himself the lines which occur in Richard II, Act i, scene 3. Norfolk, doomed to exile in a foreign land, thus laments his fate:

The language I have learn’d these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo;
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.

Strange that this passage, of which only a small part has been here quoted, has never been turned into Hebrew, with a change in one single word of the second line, by a Zionist. Yet more strange that Blanco White, who thus deplored the fact that his paternal English was not his native speech, has given us one of the greatest poems in the English language!

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely Frame,
This glorious canopy of Light and Blue?
Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting Flame,
Hesperus with the Host of Heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in Man’s view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless Orbs thou mad’st us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

It is indeed an exquisite thought. First we have Adam’s fears as night falls. Then we have the reply, the antidote. The sun really conceals. Day shows us indeed insect and plant, but not the vast system of worlds which fill the heavens. It is night that brings to view the amazing extent of the stars, and unfolds the universe which the day had hidden. So death may reveal much that life conceals.

Coleridge pronounced this “the finest and most grandly conceived Sonnet in our language.” The praise is not exaggerated. Yet it was written by one whose native tongue was Spanish, and who, though his career was extraordinary enough, never wrote another line in prose or verse that has lived. Single-speech Hamilton is joined in the realm of immortality by Single-Sonnet White. Written about a century ago, it lives and will go on living. As the writer from whom I drew the allusion to Shakespeare remarks: “Probably Blanco White will continue to be known by this Sonnet, when his other works, in spite of the real interest of his views, have been forgotten.”

Great as the Sonnet is, it fails, however, to express the full significance of the eighth Psalm. The mazes and the wonders of the starry heaven above, unfolded as the sun sets by night, raise the question “What is man?” that he should be of account when compared to these stupendous forces of nature. Yet, crowned with glory and honor, man is master of these forces. “The splendour of God set above the heavens is reflected in His image, man, whom He has crowned as His representative to rule over the earth” (Briggs). Contrasted though the glories be, the glory of man as creature is related to the glory of God as Creator.

DISRAELI’S “ALROY”

Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most truthful authors of the nineteenth century. To confuse his bombast with pose is to misunderstand him. When, therefore, he said of Alroy that it expressed his “ideal ambition,” there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Mr. Monypenny, whose judgment cannot be trusted in general, was right when he fully accepted Disraeli’s statement on this point. Mr. Lucien Wolf had previously shown (in the splendid preface to his centenary edition of Vivian Grey) that “from start to finish, Lord Beaconsfield’s novels are so many echoes and glimpses of the Greater Romance of his own life.” Would that Mr. Wolf would give us an equally fine edition of Alroy.

For Alroy is a novel that deserves to live, and probably will live. From the first it has been better liked by the public than by the professional critics. Soon after the book first appeared in 1833, Disraeli wrote to his sister that he heard good reports as to the popularity of Alroy, and with characteristic “conceit,” some may term it, though to others it appears more like “insight,” he added: “I hear no complaints of its style, except from the critics.” Mr. Monypenny has repeated the same critical objections to the style. But such objections have no real basis. Alroy often falls into rhythms and even into rhymes. Why is this a defect in a prose work? Dickens frequently followed the same method, and in sundry impressive passages his sentences scan faultlessly. Are prose and verse so absolutely divided from one another? If Molière’s bourgeois gentleman found that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, so do we sometimes speak verse without being conscious of the fact. Do we not all “drop into poetry” on occasion, in our ordinary speech in moments of elevation? Moreover, the Oriental writers had created a form in which prose and verse merge; and Disraeli, treating an Eastern theme, might easily have justified his choice of this very form, beloved first of the medieval Arabs, and then adopted by Hebrew contemporaries.

Then, as to the character of Alroy himself, Disraeli’s latest biographer says: “The real David Alroy appears to have been little better than a vulgar impostor, but Disraeli has idealised him into a figure worthy to be compared with Judas Maccabæus.” Mr. Monypenny borrowed this judgment (without acknowledgment) from the Rev. Michael Adler’s able article in the Jewish Encyclopedia. I cannot myself assent to this verdict, though I appreciate the grounds on which it was reached. The whole thing turns on the application of the term “Pseudo-Messiah” to such characters. Why call them false? There would be sufficient reason for applying the epithet if we had the clearest evidence that they were conscious rogues, exploiting their people’s faith, and using their hope as a ladder towards personal ambition. We do not know enough of Alroy to assert this of him. Was Disraeli himself an impostor because he thought of himself as another redeemer of Israel? There is little doubt that Alroy is drawn from Disraeli himself, just as the Miriam of the story is modelled on the author’s own sister. It is bad psychology to dub men of the Alroy type as impostors. Mr. Zangwill, in his Dreamers of the Ghetto—to my mind his most wonderful book—refuses to explain Sabbatai Zevi in this easy fashion. Graetz naturally so explained him, but it was precisely in such matters that Graetz was an unsafe guide. Are we to judge Messianic claims on the same principles as men judge political upheavals?

Treason never prospers, and for this reason:
That when it prospers no one calls it treason.

Is an enthusiastic believer in himself, as the instrument of a great emancipation, “pseudo” because he fails? Such explanations explain nothing.

Whatever be the truth as to the original Alroy—and I repeat that the historical sources give us inadequate information as to his inner personality—there is no room for doubting the character of Disraeli’s fictitious hero. Alroy is a thoroughly sincere portraiture. Mr. Monypenny thought that the story “never really grips us.” It depends on who the “us” are. A good many readers find George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda uninteresting. Yet Daniel Deronda in Hebrew had a considerable success. Despite its queer mixture of ill-digested lore and of genuine material derived from what Disraeli termed the “erratic” Talmud, Alroy has a good deal of Jewish spirit in it. In the many references to the poetical elements of Jewish life, the sentiment rings true. This fact works backward. Whence did the novelist derive this feeling for the beautiful in Judaism except from his father? Isaac Disraeli presents himself to us as a rather unsympathetic student of Judaism. In his books he shows knowledge, but no feeling for the synagogue. It almost seems as though we do not see the real man in his books, and yet, after all, it may be doubted whether Benjamin inherited his Jewish idealism from his father. The latter did not at all approve of his son’s Eastern journey. But Benjamin was consumed with the desire to visit Jerusalem, and he realized this passionate longing in 1830-1. In later life he said that he had begun Alroy before he left England. In the preface to Alroy he writes: “Being at Jerusalem in the year 1831, and visiting the traditionary tombs of the Kings of Israel, my thoughts recurred to a personage whose marvellous career had, even in boyhood, attracted my attention, as one fraught with the richest materials of poetic fiction. And I then commenced these pages that should commemorate the name of ‘Alroy.’” I do not think that this statement contradicts his later assertion. When he says: “I then commenced,” he may well be referring to his “boyhood.”

Disraeli thoroughly enjoyed his stay in the Holy Land. He refused to admit that Athens was more impressive than Jerusalem. “I will not place this spectacle,” he exclaims of the site of the ancient temple, “below the city of Minerva.” Perhaps the most arresting detail in Alroy is the thirty-fifth note—the notes to the book, after the manner of Sir Walter Scott, are full of curious learning. He discusses the origin of coffee, the habits of the marten-cat, the art and furniture of the Orient, the sunset songs of Eastern maidens, the “Daughter of the Voice,” the Persian hurling of the jerreeds (javelins) into the air, the practice of the bastinado, the “golden wine” of Mount Lebanon, the alleged playing of chess before the date of the Trojan War, screens and fans made of the feathers of the roc, and the “tremulous aigrettes of brilliants” worn by persons of the highest rank. In all these directions Disraeli’s learning and fancy run riot, and the result, sometimes as grotesque as a nightmare, is often successful in producing the required effect. But this thirty-fifth entry strikes a more personal note. Let us read it in his own words, remembering, however, that the Mosque of Omar was certainly in existence in Alroy’s day: “The finest view of Jerusalem is from the Mount of Olives. It is little altered since the period when David Alroy is supposed to have gazed upon it; but it is enriched by the splendid Mosque of Omar, built by the Moslem conquerors on the supposed site of the Temple, and which, with its gardens, and arcades, and courts, and fountains, may fairly be described as the most imposing of Moslem fanes. I endeavored to enter it at the hazard of my life. I was detected and surrounded by a crowd of turbaned fanatics, and escaped with difficulty; but I saw enough to feel that minute inspection would not belie the general character I formed from it from the Mount of Olives. I caught a glorious glimpse of splendid courts, and light airy gates of Saracenic triumph, flights of noble steps, long arcades, and interior gardens, where silver fountains spouted their tall streams amid the taller cypresses.”

Here we, too, have a “glorious glimpse” into one-half of the real Disraeli—here and in Tancred; for the other half we must study his political novels. Vivian Grey, so Disraeli himself said, expressed his “practical,” as Alroy expressed his “ideal,” ambition. And one final word. I have said nothing of the plot of Alroy. I assume it to be familiar to my readers. If it be not, they can easily make good the omission. I have no fear that this story of a twelfth century—shall I call him “hero” or “impostor”?—will fail to grip. For it is more than a story, it is—to use that over-worked phrase—also a “human document.”

ROBERT GRANT’S “SACRED POEMS”

When Gibbon wrote the famous fiftieth chapter of the Decline and Fall, he was suspected of being a Mohammedan, because he dealt leniently with the Arab religion. Edwin Arnold was half believed to be a Buddhist, because his Light of Asia idealized the saint of India. But Robert Grant was never called a Jew, despite the fact that he was the champion of Jewish rights in Parliament. Grant was too genuine a Christian for anyone to doubt his orthodoxy. The same man who brought in the 1830 Bill to remove Jewish political disabilities was the author of some of the most popular hymns of the Church.

Yet, as though to show the Hebrew spirit of this non-Hebraic friend of the Hebrews, the best of his poems were written on Hebrew themes. Sir Robert Grant died in India in 1838; he had gone out as governor of Bombay. In the following year, his brother, Lord Glenelg, published Grant’s Sacred Poems. It was a small book, containing in all only a dozen items. But it had a great vogue, and some of the poems found a place “in almost every collection of devotional verse,” as the children of the author proudly claim in the preface to the 1868 edition. Grant would have been especially gratified, one may feel certain, had he been able to anticipate that his translation of parts of Psalm 104 would be adopted in such Jewish compilations as the Services for Children drawn up for use in the New West End Synagogue, London.

A charming poem did Grant write on the text: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee” (Psalm 73. 25). Earth is beautiful with its “woods that wave,” its “hills that tower,” and “Ocean rolling in his power”; human friendship is a “gem transcending price,” while love is a “flower from Paradise,”

Yet, amidst this scene so fair,
Should I cease Thy smile to share,
What were all its joys to me?
Whom have I on earth but Thee?

And so with heaven, where “beyond our sight,” there “rolls a world of purer light,” with its unclouded bliss, its union of severed hearts, where “immortal music rings” from “unnumbered seraph strings.”

O! that world is passing fair;
Yet if Thou wert absent there,
What were all its joys to me?
Whom have I in heaven but Thee?

The poem might have closed there, perhaps a stronger writer would have suppressed the thin stanza. But while it detracts from the virility of the verses, it adds measurably to their tenderness.

Lord of earth and heaven! my breast
Seeks in Thee its only rest;
I was lost, Thy accents mild
Homeward lur’d Thy wandering child;
I was blind; Thy healing ray
Charm’d the long eclipse away;
Source of every joy I know,
Solace of my every woe,
O if once Thy smile divine
Ceas’d upon my soul to shine,
What were earth or heaven to me?
What have I in each but Thee?

Almost as good in idea, though not so perfect in form, is Grant’s set of verses on Psalm 94. 12: “Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest.”

Enchanted with all that was dazzling and fair,
I followed the rainbow—I caught at the toy;
And still in displeasure Thy goodness was there,
Disappointing the hope, and defeating the joy.

The divine goodness is seen in man’s disappointments, when the fulfilment of hope would have been loss, not gain.

On the whole, however, Grant is less successful when writing to a text than when paraphrasing a context. His renderings of certain Psalms are among the best attempts of the kind. This praise applies to his version of Psalm 49; less unreservedly to his adaptation of Psalm 2. In rendering Psalm 71, Grant gave sentiment too loose a rein. Addison had translated the opening verses of Psalm 19, beginning “The spacious firmament on high.” Grant composed what he called “a sequel or counterpart” to Addison’s hymn, corresponding to the latter portion of Psalm 19 as Addison’s fragment corresponds to the earlier portion. Grant’s supplement ends thus:

Almighty Lord! the sun shall fail,
The moon forget her nightly tale,
And deepest silence hush on high
The radiant chorus of the sky;
But, fixed for everlasting years,
Unmoved amid the wreck of spheres,
Thy word shall shine in cloudless day,
When heaven and earth have passed away.

This is fine, but Grant here hardly bears comparison with Addison: it is the fate of sequels to prove inferior to their forerunners. There is nothing in Grant’s version to equal Addison’s close, where the sun, moon, and stars are

Forever singing as they shine,
“The hand that made us is divine.”

On the other hand, Grant falls very little below Milton in his imitation of part of Psalm 84. I must find room to quote it in full.

How deep the joy, Almighty Lord,
Thy altars to the heart afford!
With envying eyes I see
The swallow fly to nestle there,
And find within the house of prayer
A bliss denied to me!

Compelled by day to roam for food
Where scorching suns or tempests rude
Their angry influence fling,
O, gladly in that sheltered nest
She smooths, at eve, her ruffled breast,
And folds her weary wing.

Thrice happy wand’rer! fain would I,
Like thee, from ruder climates fly,
That seat of rest to share;
Opprest with tumult, sick with wrongs,
How oft my fainting spirit longs
To lay its sorrows there!

Oh! ever on that holy ground
The cov’ring cherub Peace is found,
With brooding wings serene;
And Charity’s seraphic glow,
And gleams of glory that foreshow
A higher, brighter scene.

For even that refuge but bestows
A transient tho’ a sweet repose,
For one short hour allowed;—
Then upwards we shall take our flight
To hail a spring without a blight,
A heaven without a cloud!

Had Grant ever studied rabbinic commentaries? For this is the very use made of the eighty-fourth Psalm in the Midrash. The earthly pilgrimage leads to the heavenly Zion.

I have used for this poem space which some readers may have expected me to reserve for the best of all of Grant’s renderings, that of portions of Psalm 104. In this Grant not only does not fall below the greatest of his predecessors—Henry Vaughan—but he transcends even that master’s work. It is true that Vaughan renders the whole of this long Psalm literally, whereas Grant merely paraphrases a few verses. But none the less, Grant’s “O Worship the King” is a superb reproduction of the Psalmist’s spirit. As not uncommonly happens with Grant, he falls off towards the end, and his sixth verse is nowadays justly deleted when the rendering is used liturgically. Nothing, however, could be more exquisite than these stanzas:

The earth with its store
Of wonders untold,
Almighty! Thy power
Hath founded of old:
Hath ’stablished it fast
By a changeless decree,
And round it hath cast,
Like a mantle, the sea.

Thy bountiful care
What tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air,
It shines in the light;
It streams from the hills,
It descends to the plains,
And sweetly distils
In the dew and the rain.

One wonders at his versatility. He could draft a bill for parliament deftly, and then indite such verses as those quoted. There is, indeed, something akin to the Hebrew genius in the English. For David, too, could govern, and in the intervals of ruling meditate the Psalms which make so eternal an appeal. On Robert Grant, the advocate of Jewish rights, there had, indeed, fallen a portion of the Davidic spirit.

GUTZKOW’S “URIEL ACOSTA”

Twice within my recollection there were hopes of the production of Uriel Acosta on the English stage. Soon after Sir Hall Caine published the Scapegoat—that noblest of recent tales with a “Jewish” plot—Sir Herbert Tree was present with the novelist at a Maccabean banquet. On that occasion Sir Herbert, adopting a suggestion of my own, announced that he had proposed to Mr. Zangwill the office of preparing Uriel Acosta for His Majesty’s Theatre. Nothing has come of it. Some years before, that competent actor, Mr. A. Bandmann, was lessee of the Lyceum for a time. He had often played the part of Uriel in Germany with success, and he had an English version made. It was not performed, but the plan was so far fruitful that Mr. H. Spicer’s adaptation was published.

It is a workmanlike but undistinguished rendering. It introduces mistakes for which Gutzkow is guiltless (such as the barbarism Sanhedrim), and it omits points which make up Gutzkow’s merit. Curious, for instance, is it that the English version should obscure the line which so lingers in the mind of the reader of the original, the line in fact most often quoted of everything that Gutzkow wrote. I refer, of course, to the old Rabbi’s constant comment on Uriel’s heresies. These, urged the Rabbi, are as old as old; it has all happened before (“Alles ist schon einmal dagewesen”). It is a striking variant on Solomon’s epigram, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes I. 9), and it drones through the recantation scene with fine dramatic effect. Far superior to this English version is the Hebrew rendering published by Salomo Rubin in 1856.

The actual facts about Uriel Acosta are soon told. His was an arresting personality, but his importance has been much overrated. Acosta would have been deservedly forgotten but for the similarity between his career and that of another Amsterdam Jew of the same period—Baruch Spinoza. Both came into conflict with the synagogue, both were excommunicated. But there the resemblance ends. In Gutzkow’s play, Uriel proclaims himself sufficient unto himself (“Mir selber bin ich eine ganze Welt”). This is just what Spinoza was, just what Uriel was not. Gutzkow represents Uriel as a youth at the time of his suicide. But he was certainly over fifty, and more probably was nearer sixty. He shot himself in 1647; and as it appears that he was born in Oporto in 1590, he must have been fifty-seven at the moment of his tragic end. Uriel (or Gabriel as he was then named) was the scion of a Marano family, and in 1617 contrived to escape to Holland, where he resumed Judaism. But he was no more contented with his ancestral religion than he had been with the creed to which he had compulsorily conformed. He advocated a purely deistic philosophy, was excommunicated by the synagogue, recanted, again defied the authorities, was again excommunicated, and finally underwent the degradation of a public penance, after which he put an end to his troubled life. Uriel’s misfortune was that, though, like Spinoza, he was unable to go with the mass in its beliefs, yet unlike Spinoza, he was unable to stand alone.

Gutzkow was attracted to the subject by his own devotion to freedom. In the stormy movements which culminated in the outbreaks of 1848, Gutzkow was directly implicated. He was born in 1811, and, when barely twenty, suffered imprisonment as a leader of the “Young Germany” party. Besides, Gutzkow had many close Jewish friends, among them Berthold Auerbach, who, perhaps, introduced Uriel Acosta to his notice. When Gutzkow wrote his play on the subject, Europe was on the eve of revolution. It is significant, in face of the anti-Semitism which really originated on the failure of the Liberals, that Gutzkow selected, in 1847, a Jewish mis-en-scène, in order to depict the struggle between the old order and the new. And it is impossible to refuse admiration to the insight and skill which enable the author, while obviously sympathizing with the new, to treat the old with justice and even with tenderness. The characters are all types. Menasseh, father of Judith, is the fair-dealing merchant, accepting the current religion of his people without enthusiasm for or against its demands. Judith, the heroine, more or less betrothed to Jochai, the villain of the piece, is vaguely susceptible to the newer ideas of her tutor and lover Uriel. Jochai is a rather conventionally drawn rascal. But the strength of the play is the contrast, on the one hand, between Uriel and the Rabbis, and, on the other, between the various schools of Rabbis among themselves. Da Silva has the tolerance of uncertainty as to his own position, Akiba has the broad generosity which comes from confidence in his old-world loyalty. The scenes between Uriel and Silva, and between the former and Akiba would make a success on any stage. “May you never repent of this repentance,” cries Da Silva to Akiba when there is talk of Uriel’s recantation. There is strong emotional interest in this recantation. Shall Uriel recant for Judith’s sake? Hardly. But he cannot resist the appeal of his blind mother. “I tremble before thy sightless eyes; shut thine eyes, mother! Yea, I will do it.”

The close is tragic. Both Judith and Uriel perish at their own hands. But the tragedy did not end there. Mention has been made of Da Silva. If Uriel is the counterpart of the talmudic arch-heretic, Elisha ben Abuyah, then is Da Silva the reincarnation of Elisha’s contemporary Meir. Who has not wept over the heart friendship but mind estrangement of these two men? Da Silva stands in the same relation to Uriel. He hates the heresy, but loves the heretic. Uriel himself uses words which sum up the situation. “Love or Truth? What if the heart be wiser than the mind?” Spinoza (who was really fifteen years of age when Uriel died) flits across the scene as a little boy, strewing flowers and wondering why people wonder at his childish thoughts. Uriel bids him “Keep thy soul’s secret and so find peace.” This is perhaps the most tragic incident in the play, though the dramatist contrives to relieve the tension by the simple beauty of the Spinoza interlude.

Still, however, the whole of the tragedy has not yet been told. For Hermann Jellinek has not yet been named. Indeed, three remarkable Jellinek brothers now come on the scene. In 1847 two little works appeared on Gutzkow’s Uriel. The one (Elischa ben Abuya) was written by Adolf Jellinek, then the youthful preacher of Leipzig, afterwards the famous pulpit orator of Vienna. The other was Uriel Acosta’s Leben und Lehre, and its author was Hermann Jellinek (younger than Adolf by a couple of years). The booklet was inscribed to a third brother, Moritz. Now Hermann Jellinek was roused to a heated indignation by Gutzkow’s “fictions” about Uriel. Uriel was no lovelorn boy, but a middle-aged philosopher; he died not for loss of Judith, but as a martyr to truth. Hermann Jellinek in so many words sees his own prototype in Acosta; less than a year later he at all events shared his hero’s tragic end; but under more dignified circumstances. What the historical Uriel Acosta lacked, Hermann Jellinek possessed in over measure—the quality of determination. Hermann was a revolutionary, and took part in the Viennese rising of 1848, being twenty-six at the time. He does not seem to have actually resisted the troops, but he was court-martialled, and sentenced to death. His friends made every effort to save him, but he was relentless. Nothing could move him to present a conciliatory front to the authorities. In this at least he could be no Uriel! Recant? No! “Shoot me,” he cried, “but ideas cannot be shot.” They shot him, and his ideas may be found in two or three volumes, of which dusty copies occur in a few libraries. I have some of them on my table as I write. It is not easy to say which is the greater tragedy, Acosta’s or Jellinek’s; but for the moment at least let Jellinek have his way. For an hour we have resurrected, if not his ideas, at all events his name.

GRACE AGUILAR’S “SPIRIT OF JUDAISM”

Known to the many for her novels, Grace Aguilar is known to the few for her Spirit of Judaism. The book passed through a real adventure, quite as exciting as the fictional fortunes of any of her romantic heroes. Somewhat before 1840, Miss Aguilar wrote to Isaac Leeser, of Philadelphia. She had, in 1839, read the Rabbi’s first published sermons—his Bible was yet to come. She asked him “to undertake the editorial supervision of her manuscript work on the Spirit of our religion.” Leeser courteously responded to the request. “I shall readily be believed,” he wrote in 1842, “that I felt truly happy that such a demand had been made upon me; and I accordingly offered my services to do as I was desired.” Miss Aguilar completed the book, but chance decreed that it was not to reach its goal. She sent it out to America “through a private channel,” and it never came to Leeser’s hands. Such a mishap did not thwart so ardent and industrious a girl—she was not much over twenty at the time. She accordingly proceeded to re-write it “from her original sketches,” made in 1837. On the second occasion fortune was more kind, though the book encountered some further delays before it appeared, in 1842, in America.

A second edition—much inferior from the point of view of “get-up”—was published in 1849, again in Philadelphia. The second issue was No. xiii of the Jewish Miscellany of the original Jewish Publication Society. The book was never printed in England. My own introduction to it was curiously made. Being deeply interested in the new plans for teaching Hebrew, I wrote (in 1903), a preface to a book on the Yellin method. I showed the proof of my essay to the late Rev. S. Singer, whereupon he remarked: “Grace Aguilar said much the same thing more than half a century ago.” And so, indeed, she did. She saw that Hebrew must be taught naturally, that the language must be made to “engage a child’s fancy,” by first of all introducing to it familiar Hebrew words from the child’s every-day life. Glad was I to find this anticipation of modern opinion, and I cited it fully.

GRACE AGUILAR

From that time I have, for other reasons, grown very fond of the book—of which I possess the 1849 reprint. It is so delightfully fresh and young, so confident and enthusiastic. Moreover, there is something entertaining in Leeser’s conception of his editorial function. Not that he could well help himself. He was almost compelled to apply a wet blanket to her fire. She had expressly invited him to confine himself to removing obscurities and appending the necessary notes. “The chief point of difference between Miss Aguilar and myself,” says Leeser, “are her seeming aversion to the tradition, and her idea that the mere teaching of formal religion opens the door to the admission of Christianity.” On the second point, Leeser’s answer is effective. If, through unintelligent teaching, ceremonial religion degenerates into a burden, then the outcome is more likely to be disregard for the old than regard for a new faith. “Indifference is a far greater enemy to us than conversion,” said Leeser in 1842, and assuredly we can use identical words now. It is not so clear, however, that Leeser was equally successful in meeting Miss Aguilar on the problem of tradition. She was very emphatic in her desire to base Judaism on the Bible, but she was only verbally, not spiritually, a Karaite. She often uses the very language of tradition, and in one place says: “The religion of no Hebrew is perfect, unless the form be hallowed by the spirit, the spirit quickened by the form. The heart must be wholly given to the Lord, yet still the instituted form must be obeyed.” Miss Aguilar probably objected to the minutiae of pietism—in the ritual sense—when she spoke of tradition; she had no philosophical conception of it. Leeser could hardly be expected to set her right; he was as little of a mystic as she was.

No doubt, however, she was to this extent an anti-traditionalist that she thought the Bible in itself an all-sufficient basis for Judaism. Her book is cast in the form of a commentary on the Shema—in fact, it is called “Shema Israel, the Spirit of Judaism.” She begins by expounding the unity of God; she shows that it is the real difference between Synagogue and Church; and then ends her chapter with a passionate plea for friendly intercourse between Jew and Christian on the basis of frank and unashamed profession of Judaism by the former. She was absolutely right. It is not merely the only honest, it is also the only stable basis for such intercourse.

To Grace Aguilar, Moses was “the mouth of God” (that is her own phrase). There is nothing between a theory of verbal inspiration and the belief that Moses “invented” and “presumed on the ignorance and superstition of the rescued nation.” With a feminine love of italics she contends that “we must believe God framed every law mentioned in the Mosaic books or none.” How crude this sounds! On the one hand, it cuts off all thought of inspiration before Moses, on the other, all thought of it after the close of the scriptural canon. It would have seemed to her almost blasphemous to regard Hillel as animated with the same spirit of God that moved Haggai. She dismisses the “Oral Law” in an aside. “The Bible is the foundation of religion.” Miss Aguilar goes on to complain that English Bibles were not found in Jewish homes. But the explanation is easy. In those days it was impossible to find an acceptable English Bible for Jewish use. The Authorized Version was marred not only by Christological renderings, but also by the Christological insertions of the headings to the chapters. Before the publication of the Revised Version it had become possible to obtain an Anglican edition without the headings. But I doubt whether that was the case so early as 1842. Moreover, Jews have always been slow to acknowledge that the Hebrew Bible was insufficient. There was much that is creditable in this reluctance to face facts; though there was also much that was dangerous.

It is impossible to do justice in a brief article to the intense love of Judaism shown in Miss Aguilar’s book. She pleads for the religion with persuasive eloquence; it must appeal to the heart and the reason; it must permeate the home; it must regulate life. She would have family prayers daily. To this topic she returns over and over again. “The youthful members of a little domestic congregation would look back with warm emotion, in after years, to that period when, with their brothers and sisters, they thronged around their parents to listen to the word of God, and made known their common wants together.” But the thought that dominates her whole book is the perfect truth and sufficiency of Judaism. It only needs to be known to be preferred to every possible alternative. No Jew can ever become lukewarm if he understands his religion. But he must understand its spirit. “We know that they who depart from the faith of their fathers are ever those reared in the severest obedience to mere forms.” Whereupon Leeser in his note comments: “This is certainly a sweeping clause though there is a great deal of truth in it.” He adds that the fault “does not lie in the forms, but in the absence of spiritual education.” That is clearly the reason why Miss Aguilar called her book “The Spirit of Judaism.” She was no foe to forms as such. She strongly defends the dietary laws, in the very chapter whence the last quotation was taken. Obedience is the term writ large on every page; but so is belief. When Judaism is believed in and obeyed, then will redemption be nigh, release from captivity at hand, and the advent of the Messiah approaching. But how movingly she says it in her own fiery words!

ISAAC LEESER’S BIBLE

The twenty years around the middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the preparation of several Jewish translations of the Bible. Moses Mendelssohn had shown the way in the previous century; he did not, however, produce a complete German Bible. This was done with success by a body of scholars led by Zunz (Berlin, 1838). Ludwig Philippson, in the very next year, began an enterprise the accomplishment of which occupied him till 1856. His edition was not only annotated; it was also adorned with illustrations. In 1875 the Philippson Bible came out anew with the Doré pictures.

ISAAC LEESER
(From a Painting by Solomon Nunez de Carvalho)

As for English versions by Jews, David Levi edited the Pentateuch in 1787. But, to pass over certain publications of separate books, no complete Bible appeared in England from a Jewish hand until the issue of Benisch’s version (1851-56). This was a melancholy affair. Real and original scholarship is shown in every page. He claimed for his rendering “fidelity, uniformity and independence.” But he had no sense for English style. He unnecessarily and grotesquely altered the familiar words of the Authorized Version. Hence, one is bound to speak of this monument of learning and earnestness as “melancholy”; it might so easily have been acceptable. His corrections of the Authorized were often necessary. Thus, in the Ten Commandments he rightly put “Thou shalt not murder” for the current “Thou shalt not kill.” The Revised Version made the same correction. So, too, he was right when, for historical reasons, he made a change in Leviticus 23. 15. In the Authorized Version this runs: “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath.” But by the Jewish tradition the Feast of Weeks is not counted from a Saturday but from the first day of Passover—on whatever day that happens to fall. Hence Benisch substituted: “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest.” Naturally, too, he corrected certain dogmatic prejudices of the Anglican Version.

Curiously enough, Isaac Leeser leaves “Thou shalt not kill” uncorrected. But he was vigilant with “the morrow after the Sabbath,” for which he substitutes “the morrow after the holy day.” On the other hand, he retained the word “Sabbath” (where the Hebrew has Shabbaton) applied to the first and eighth days of Tabernacle, e. g., Leviticus 23. 39. This, however, he altered in his later editions to a rest; Benisch has strict rest. The Revised Version has a similar correction: solemn rest.

It is not my purpose to compare Leeser’s Version with others. From the hour when his “Law of God” appeared in Philadelphia, in 1845, Leeser’s Pentateuch won the affectionate regard of American Jews. The Pentateuch was issued in octavo, in Hebrew and English; the whole of the Bible came out in quarto, in English alone, towards the end of 1853. From that time it has been often reprinted in varying forms, simply and in editions de luxe. But it is not the printers who made the book popular, though I must remark that, despite the small public support the enterprise secured, the 1845 Leeser Pentateuch is a beautiful specimen of the printer’s art. What made the book was the people’s growing love for Leeser. Can higher praise be given, can a finer fate be wished, than that a man’s book shall live in his brethren’s hearts because of him?

This is not the time to criticise Leeser’s work. Like Benisch, he had no feeling for English style. He could, in the twenty-third Psalm, alter the wonderful melody of “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” into “In pastures of tender grass he causeth me to lie down.” He could take the haunting rhythm of Job’s “There the wicked cease from troubling, there the weary are at rest,” and give us “and where the exhausted weary are at rest,” which is no nearer the literal Hebrew (“the wearied in strength”), and is incomparably farther from its beauty. Or again, the felicitous opening lines of the nineteenth Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,” become in Leeser “The heavens relate the glory of God; and the expanse telleth of the works of his hands.” It is this more than anything else that made it impossible for English Jews to use Leeser’s Bible. Revision of Leeser on scholarly grounds was also necessary, no doubt. Thus, in his rendering of Esther 6. 8, where Haman suggests the details of the pageant in behalf of the man whom the king delighteth (why did Leeser substitute desireth?) to honor, Leeser has: “Let them bring a royal apparel which the king hath worn, and a horse on which the king hath ridden, and let there be placed a royal crown on his head.” But, as Ibn Ezra had in part already pointed out (as Leeser notes), and as we know to be almost certainly the case, the crown was for the horse’s head. In the Revised Version the passage runs: “Let royal apparel be brought which the king useth to wear, and the horse that the king rideth upon, and on the head of which a royal crown is set.”

Naturally, in what precedes I have turned to familiar passages. My comments only touch the fringe of the problem of Bible revision. In one important particular, Leeser anticipated the Revised Version: he arranged the English in paragraphs and not in verses. Since Leeser’s day, however, not only have we learned more as to the precise meaning of words, but we have won a closer insight into the idiomatic use of the Hebrew tenses. The American revision, now issued under the auspices of the American Jewish Publication Society, has given us at once a scholarly translation, and one which remains true to the English excellences of the version made in the reign of King James.

Leeser’s Bible, therefore, is more or less doomed, It cannot but pass out of general use. But it can never pass out of our esteem and affection. Leeser, though he indignantly repudiated sectarian bias, did not translate the Bible as an exercise in scholarship. He belonged to those who believed in the Bible. Quite naively he tells us in his Preface (dated September 20, 1853) that he is “an Israelite in faith, in the full sense of the word; he believes in the Scriptures as they have been handed down to us; in the truth and authenticity of prophecies and their ultimate literal fulfilment.” Nor did he think that the age of miracles was past. He admitted that there were sources of information which he had not consulted when preparing his Bible. But he had done his best, and felt that he was therefore working with a hand stronger than his own. “I thought, in all due humility, that I might safely go to the task, confidently relying upon that superior aid which is never withheld from the inquirer after truth.” What a combination of sophistication and simplicity we have here! In the mid-nineteenth century such a union of rationalism and faith was rare; it is growing rarer every day. We shall soon be thinking of putting Isaac Leeser’s memory in a museum of Jewish antiquities as a specimen of a lost type.

LANDOR’S “ALFIERI AND SALOMON”

There is only one Jew in Landor’s long series of Imaginary Conversations, and he was, most probably, an invention of the author’s. “Salomon the Florentine Jew,” who discourses in Landor’s pages with Count Vittorio Alfieri, never existed; at all events he is not identifiable. There is no mention of such a person in Alfieri’s autobiography; so Landor’s editor—Mr. C. G. Crump—is careful to point out. Still, Landor (1775-1864) spent several years in Florence, and it is possible that he heard of some Jewish worthy whom he used for the purpose of his dialogue.

Landor treats his solitary Jewish character with courtesy. “You are the only man in Florence with whom I would willingly exchange a salutation,” says Alfieri at the opening of the conversation. Salomon expresses himself as highly flattered. The actual dialogue is not one of Landor’s best, unless it be for its recognition of the sterling quality of the English middle-class. “It is among those who stand between the peerage and the people that there exists a greater mass of virtue and of wisdom than in the rest of Europe.” The historical Alfieri found himself out of sympathy both with kings and with the French Revolution which destroyed kingship. It was a happy touch of Landor’s, therefore, to put into Alfieri’s mouth the praise of the class which stood between royalty and the masses.

But Alfieri and Salomon is hardly a successful work of art. It has neither the romantic beauty of Landor’s Aesop and Rhodope, nor the dramatic interest of his Hannibal and Marcellus. Naturally, however, it has some good epigrams. “A poet can never be an atheist,” says Landor’s Alfieri. He calls on God to confound the fools who always eulogize the least praiseworthy of princes because, he complains, “the rascals have ruined my physiognomy; I wear an habitual sneer upon my face.” How many a genius has been made similarly disagreeable because he could not suffer fools gladly! Very true again is Alfieri’s paradox that the gravest people are the wittiest. “Few men have been graver than Pascal, few have been wittier.” Had Landor’s Florentine Salomon been a real Jew, he could have capped Alfieri’s citation of Pascal by referring to many a Jewish instance, among them Abraham Ibn Ezra. On the contrary, Salomon disputes the truth of Alfieri’s statement. Landor is fond of national generalizations. “Not a single man of genius hath ever appeared in the whole extent of Austria,” he makes Salomon say; while Alfieri asserts that “the Spaniards have no palate, the Italians no scent, the French no ear.” Fortunately it did not occur to Landor to sum up the Jews in an epigram. He retained, however, the eighteenth century tolerance, and might have been lenient. The only thing he thoroughly detested was priest-craft, fanaticism. His Salomon confesses that “theology is without attraction” for him, and the saying came from Landor’s heart.

There is not much of the Jew in Salomon. He might have been any cultured contemporary of Alfieri. At one point, however, he refuses to hazard a word as to certain clerics, while Alfieri freely judges and condemns them. “The people who would laugh with you, would stone me,” says Salomon. Was this really true of the end of the eighteenth century in Italy? I doubt it. Landor is no true guide to the opinions of his age. To continue. Landor’s Salomon speaks of Florence as his native city; he knows it and its extraordinary story in every detail; he discusses its men of genius, though he admits: “My ignorance of Greek forbids me to compare our Dante with Homer.” Salomon is through and through Italian. Perhaps Landor meant to depict him as a Jew by putting into his mouth a good anecdote: