Chapter XIX: Part II: Uriel Acosta (14)

"Yes it did, old fellow," I said affectionately. "The joy and the glow of it, and yet also some strange antique simplicity and restfulness you have got into it, I know not how, have been with me all day, comforting me in the midst of the tearing, grinding life of this closing nineteenth century after Christ."

A curious smile flitted across Dan's face. He tilted his chair back, and rested his head against the wall.

"There's nothing that takes me so much out of the nineteenth century after Christ," he said dreamily, "as this little French café. It wafts me back to my early student days, that lie somewhere amid the enchanted mists of the youth of the world; to the zestful toil of the studios, to the careless trips in quaint, gray Holland or flaming, devil-may-care Spain. Ah! what scenes shift and shuffle in the twinkle of the gas-jet in this opalescent liquid; the hot shimmer of the arena at the Seville bull-fight, with its swirl of color and movement; the torchlight procession of pilgrims round the church at Lourdes, with the one black nun praying by herself in a shadowy corner; the lovely valley of the Tauba, where the tinkle of the sheep-bells mingles with the Lutheran hymn blown to the four winds from the old church tower; wines that were red--sunshine that was warm--mandolines--!" His voice died away as in exquisite reverie.

"And the East?" I said slily.

A good-natured smile dissipated his delicious dream.

"Ah, yes," he said. "My East was the Tyrol."

"The Tyrol? How do you mean?"

"I see you won't let me out of that story."

"Oh, there's a story, is there?"

"Oh, well, perhaps not what you literary chaps would call a story! No love-making in it, you know."

"Then it can wait. Tell me about your picture."

"But that's mixed up with the story."

"Didn't I say you had become an anecdotal artist?"

"It's no laughing matter," he said gravely. "You remember when we parted at Munich, a year ago last spring, you to go on to Vienna and I to go back to America. Well, I had a sudden fancy to take one last European trip all by myself, and started south through the Tyrol, with a pack on my back. The third day out I fell and bruised my thigh severely, and could not make my little mountain town till moonlight. And I tell you I was mighty glad when I limped across the bridge over the rushing river and dropped on the hotel sofa. Next morning I was stiff as a poker, but I struggled up the four rickety flights to the local physician, and being assured I only wanted rest, I resolved to take it with book and pipe and mug in a shady beer-garden on the river. I had been reading for about an hour when five or six Tyrolese, old men and young, in their gray and green costumes and their little hats, trooped in and occupied the large table near the inn-door. Presently I was startled by the sound of the zither; they began to sing songs; the pretty daughter of the house came and joined in the singing. I put down my book.

"The old lady who served me with my _Maass_ of beer, seeing my interest, came over and chatted about her guests. Oh no, they were not villagers; they came from four hours away. The slim one was a school-teacher, and the _dicker_ was a tenor, and sang in the chorus of the _Passion-Spiel_; the good-looking young man was to be the St. John. Passion play! I pricked up my ears. When? Where? In their own village, three days hence; only given once every ten years--for hundreds and hundreds of years. Could strangers see it? What should strangers want to see it for? But _could_ they see it? _Gewiss_. This was indeed a stroke of luck. I had always rather wanted to see the Passion play, but the thought of the fashionable Ober-Ammergau made me sick. Would I like to be _vorgestellt_? Rather! It was not ten minutes after this introduction before I had settled to stay with St. John, and clouds of good American tobacco were rising from six Tyrolese pipes, and many an "Auf Ihr Wohl" was busying the pretty _Kellnerin_. They trotted out all their repertory of quaint local songs for my benefit. It sounded bully, I tell you, out there with the sunlight, and the green leaves, and the rush of the river; and in this aroma of beer and brotherhood I blessed my damaged thigh. Three days hence! Just time for it to heal. A providential world, after all.

"And it was indeed with a buoyant step and a gay heart that I set out over the hills at sunrise on that memorable morning. The play was to begin at ten, and I should just be on time. What a walk! Imagine it! Clear coolness of dawn, fresh green, sparkling dew, the road winding up and down, round hills, up cliffs, along valleys, through woods, where the green branches swayed in the morning wind and dappled the grass fantastically with dancing sunlight. And as fresh as the morning, was, I felt, the artistic sensation awaiting me. I swung round the last hill-shoulder; saw the quaint gables of the first house peeping through the trees, and the church spire rising beyond, then groups of Tyrolese converging from all the roads; dipped down the valley, past the quiet lake, up the hills beyond; found myself caught in a stream of peasants, and, presto! was sucked from the radiant day into the deep gloom of the barn-like theatre.

"I don't know how it is done in Ober-Ammergau, but this Tyrolese thing was a strange jumble of art and _naïveté_, of talent and stupidity. There was a full-fledged stage and footlights, and the scenery, some one said, was painted by a man from Munich. But the players were badly made up; the costumes, if correct, were ill-fitting; the stage was badly lighted, and the flats didn't 'jine.' Some of the actors had gleams of artistic perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by _tableaux vivants_ of Old Testament scenes, from Adam and Eve onwards. There was much, you see, that was puerile, even ridiculous; and every now and then some one would open the door of the dusky auditorium, and a shaft of sunshine would fly in from the outside world to remind me further how unreal was all this gloomy make-believe. Nay, during the _entr'acte_ I went out, like everybody else, and lunched off sausages and beer.

"And yet, beneath all this critical consciousness, beneath even the artistic consciousness that could not resist jotting down a face or a scene in my sketch-book, something curious was happening in the depths of my being. The play exercised from the very first a strange magnetic effect on me; despite all the primitive humors of the players, the simple, sublime tragedy that disengaged itself from their uncouth but earnest goings-on, began to move and even oppress my soul. Christ had been to me merely a theme for artists; my studies and travels had familiarized me with every possible conception of the Man of Sorrows. I had seen myriads of Madonnas nursing Him, miles of Magdalens bewailing Him. Yet the sorrows I had never felt. Perhaps it was my Jewish training, perhaps it was that none of the Christians I lived with had ever believed in Him. At any rate, here for the first time the Christ story came home to me as a real, living fact--something that had actually happened. I saw this simple son of the people--made more simple by my knowledge that His representative was a baker--moving amid the ancient peasant and fisher life of Galilee; I saw Him draw men and women, saints and sinners, by the magic of His love, the simple sweetness of His inner sunshine; I saw the sunshine change to lightning as He drove the money-changers from the Temple; I watched the clouds deepen as the tragedy drew on; I saw Him bid farewell to His mother; I heard suppressed sobs all around me. Then the heavens were overcast, and it seemed as if earth held its breath waiting for the supreme moment. They dragged Him before Pilate; they clothed Him in scarlet robe, and plaited His crown of thorns, and spat on Him; they gave Him vinegar to drink mixed with gall; and He so divinely sweet and forgiving through all. A horrible oppression hung over the world. I felt choking; my ribs pressed inwards, my heart seemed contracted. He was dying for the sins of the world, He summed up the whole world's woe and pitifulness--the two ideas throbbed and fused in my troubled soul. And I, a Jew, had hitherto ignored Him. What would they say, these simple peasants sobbing all around, if they knew that I was of that hated race? Then something broke in me, and I sobbed too--sobbed with bitter tears that soon turned sweet in strange relief and glad sympathy with my rough brothers and sisters." He paused a moment, and sipped silently at his absinthe. I did not break the silence. I was moved and interested, though what all this had to do with his glowing, joyous picture I could only dimly surmise. He went on--

"When it was all over, and I went out into the open air, I did not see the sunlight. I carried the dusk of the theatre with me, and the gloom of Golgotha brooded over the sunny afternoon. I heard the nails driven in; I saw the blood spurting from the wounds--there was realism in the thing, I tell you. The peasants, accustomed to the painful story, had quickly recovered their gaiety, and were pouring boisterously down the hill-side, like a glad, turbulent mountain stream, unloosed from the dead hand of frost. But I was still ice-bound and fog-wrapped. Outside the _Gasthaus_ where I went to dine, gay groups assembled, an organ played, some strolling Italian girls danced gracefully, and my artistic self was aware of a warmth and a rush. But the inmost Me was neck-deep in gloom, with which the terribly pounded steak they gave me, fraudulently overlaid with two showy fried eggs, seemed only in keeping. St. John came in, and Christ and the schoolmaster--who had conducted the choir--and the thick tenor and some supers, and I congratulated them one and all with a gloomy sense of dishonesty. When, as evening fell, I walked home with St. John, I was gloomily glad to find the valley shrouded in mist and a starless heaven sagging over a blank earth. It seemed an endless uphill drag to my lodging, and though my bedroom was unexpectedly dainty, and a dear old woman--St. John's mother--metaphorically tucked me in, I slept ill that night. Formless dreams tortured me with impalpable tragedies and apprehensions of horror. In the morning--after a cold sponging--the oppression lifted a little from my spirit, though the weather still seemed rather gray. St. John had already gone off to his field-work, his mother told me. She was so lovely, and the room in which I ate breakfast so neat and demure with its whitewashed walls--pure and stainless like country snow--that I managed to swallow everything but the coffee. O that coffee! I had to nibble at a bit of chocolate I carried to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I tried hard not to let the blues get the upper hand again. I filled my pipe and pulled out my sketch-book. My notes of yesterday seemed so faint, and the morning to be growing so dark, that I could scarcely see them. I thought I would go and sit on the little bench outside. As I was sauntering through the doorway, my head bending broodingly over the sketch-book, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of a little white match-stand fixed up on the wall. Mechanically I put out my left hand to take a light for my pipe. A queer, cold wetness in my fingers and a little splash woke me to the sense of some odd mistake, and in another instant I realized with horror that I had dipped my fingers into holy water and splashed it over that neat, demure, spotless, whitewashed wall."

I could not help smiling. "Ah, I know; one of those porcelain things with a crucified Saviour over a little font. Fancy taking heaven for brimstone!"

"It didn't seem the least bit funny at the time. I just felt awful. What would the dear old woman say to this profanation? Why the dickens did people have whitewashed walls on which sacrilegious stains were luridly visible? I looked up and down the hall like Moses when he slew that Egyptian, trembling lest the old woman should come in. How could I make her understand I was so ignorant of Christian custom as to mistake a font for a matchbox? And if I said I was a Jew, good heavens! she might think I had done it of fell design. What a wound to the gentle old creature who had been so sweet to me! I could not stay in sight of that accusing streak, I must walk off my uneasiness. I threw open the outer door; then I stood still, paralyzed. Monstrous evil-looking gray mists were clumped at the very threshold. Sinister formless vapors blotted out the mountain; everywhere vague, drifting hulks of malarious mist. I sought to pierce them, to find the landscape, the cheerful village, the warm human life nesting under God's heaven, but saw only--way below--as through a tunnel cut betwixt mist and mountain, a dead, inverted world of houses and trees in a chill, gray lake. I shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had brought some grisly Nemesis?"

"You believed that?"

"Not really, of course. But you, as an artist, must understand how one dallies with an idea, plays with a mood, works oneself up imaginatively into a dramatic situation. I let it grow upon me till, like a man alone in the dark, afraid of the ghosts he doesn't believe in, I grew horribly nervous."

"I daresay you hadn't wholly recovered from your fall, and your nerves were unstrung by the blood and the nails, and that steak had disagreed with you, and you had had a bad night, and you were morbidly uneasy about annoying the old woman, and all those chunks of mist got into your spirits. You are a child of the sun!"

"Of course I knew all that, down in the cellars of my being, but upstairs, all the same, I had this sense of guilt and expiation, this anxious doubt that perhaps all that great, gloomy, mediæval business of saints and nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons, and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair shirts, and blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and stretched myself with an ache of luxurious languor. Encouraged, I stole within again to peep at the streak. It was dry--a virgin wall, innocently white, met my delighted gaze. I opened the window; the draggling vapors were still rising, rising, the bleakness was merging in a mild warmth. I refilled my pipe, and plunged down the yet gray hill. I strode past the old saw-mill, skirted the swampy border of the lake, came out on the firm green, when bing! zim! br-r-r! a heavenly bolt of sunshine smashed through the raw mists, scattering them like a bomb to the horizon's rim; then with sovereign calm the sun came out full, flooding hill and dale with luminous joy; the lake shimmered and flashed into radiant life, and gave back a great white cloud-island on a stretch of glorious blue, and all that golden warmth stole into my veins like wine. A little goat came skipping along with tinkling bell, a horse at grass threw up its heels in ecstasy, an ox lowed, a dog barked. Tears of exquisite emotion came into my eyes; the beautiful soft warm light that lay over all the happy valley seemed to get into them and melt something. How unlike those tears of yesterday, wrung out of me as by some serpent coiled round my ribs! Now my ribs seemed expanding--to hold my heart--and all the divine joy of existence thrilled me to a religious rapture. And with the lifting of the mists all that ghastly mediæval nightmare was lifted from my soul; in that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellowship with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of God. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me--The Joyous Comrade. Christ--not the tortured God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls; the joyous comrade, with the children clinging to him, and peasants and fishers listening to his chat; not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the direct vision and the living ecstasy; not the man of sorrows loving the blankness of underground cells and scourged backs and sexless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful."

"Every man makes his God in his own image," I thought, too touched to jar him by saying it aloud.

"And so--ever since--off and on--I have worked at this human picture of him--The Joyous Comrade--to restore the true Christ to the world."

"Which you hope to convert?"

"My business is with work, not with results. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with all thy might.' What can any single hand, even the mightiest, do in this great weltering world? Yet, without the hope and the dream, who would work at all? And so, not without hope, yet with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish lust for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question: What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?"

His voice died away solemnly, and I heard only the click of the billiard-balls and the rumble and roar of New York.

CHAD GADYA

"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come,
saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength
of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of
bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of
Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I
redeem."--EXODUS xiii. 14, 15.

_Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat._

At last the Passover family service was drawing to an end. His father had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up:

_One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice, talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed pillows.

_And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service was over. He had only come in during the second part, arriving from Vienna with his usual unquestioned unexpectedness, and was quite startled to find it was Passover night, and that the immemorial service was going on just as when he was a boy. The rarity of his visits to the old folks made it a strange coincidence to have stumbled upon them at this juncture, and, as he took his seat silently in the family circle without interrupting the prayers by greetings, he had a vivid artistic perception of the possibilities of existence--the witty French novel that had so amused him in the train, making him feel that, in providing raw matter for _esprit_, human life had its joyous justification; the red-gold sunset over the mountains; the floating homewards down the Grand Canal in the moonlight, the well-known palaces as dreamful and mysterious to him as if he had not been born in the city of the sea; the gay reminiscences of Goldmark's new opera last night at the Operntheater that had haunted his ear as he ascended the great staircase; and then this abrupt transition to the East, and the dead centuries, and Jehovah bringing out His chosen people from Egypt, and bidding them celebrate with unleavened bread throughout the generations their hurried journey to the desert.

Probably his father was distressed at this glaring instance of his son's indifference to the traditions he himself held so dear; though indeed the old man had realized long ago the bitter truth that his ways were not his son's ways, nor his son's thoughts his thoughts. He had long since known that his first-born was a sinner in Israel, an "Epikouros," a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals, a scorner of the dietary laws and tabus, an adept in the forbidden. The son thought of himself through his father's spectacles, and the faint smile playing about the sensitive lips became bitterer. His long white fingers worked nervously.

And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he expended it, the fidelity that resisted its temptations and made this _Seder_ service, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Canal, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah stood as naïvely expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters--shafts from a full quiver--sat around the table variously happy and content with existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety pervaded the table.

_And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled with salt tears. _He_ would never sit at the head of his own table, carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith, gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping on--the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered--he, modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems! _Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!_ Modern of the moderns? But it was an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all
is vanity.

"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but
the earth abideth for ever.

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto
the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return
again.

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new
thing under the sun.

"That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which
is wanting cannot be numbered.

"For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow."

Yes, it was all true, all true. How the Jewish genius had gone to the heart of things, so that the races that hated it found comfort in its Psalms. No sense of form, the end of Ecclesiastes a confusion and a weak repetition like the last disordered spasms of a prophetic seizure. No care for art, only for reality. And yet he had once thought he loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after forbidden gods, thrilled by that solitary marble figure of a girl that looked in on the Ghetto alley from a boundary wall. Yes; he had worshipped at the shrine of the Beautiful; he had prated of the Renaissance. He had written--with the multiform adaptiveness of his race--French poems with Hellenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics--half felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking of life.

_And a staff came and smote the dog which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

Yes, he was a Jew at heart. The childhood in the Ghetto, the long heredity, had bound him in emotions and impulses as with phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! The very melody awakened associations innumerable. He saw in a swift panorama the intense inner life of a curly-headed child roaming in the narrow cincture of the Ghetto, amid the picturesque high houses. A reflex of the child's old joy in the Festivals glowed in his soul. How charming this quaint sequence of Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles; this survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, this living in the souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo, bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers rowing round and round the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German merchants, then Levantines, helping to build up the commercial capital of the fifteenth century. He saw the later accession of Peninsular refugees from the Inquisition, their shelter beneath the lion's wing negotiated through their fellow-Jew, Daniel Rodrigues, Consul of the Republic in Dalmatia. His mind halted a moment on this Daniel Rodrigues, an important skeleton. He thought of the endless shifts of the Jews to evade the harsher prescriptions, their subtle, passive refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What well-springs of energy, seething in those paradoxical progenitors of his, who united the calm of the East with the fever of the West; those idealists dealing always with the practical, those lovers of ideas, those princes of combination, mastering their environment because they never dealt in ideas except as embodied in real concrete things. Reality! Reality!

That was the note of Jewish genius, which had this affinity at least with the Greek. And he, though to him his father's real world was a shadow, had yet this instinctive hatred of the cloud-spinners, the word-jugglers, his idealisms needed solid substance to play around. Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not smoothed his passage to a not unprosperous career in letters, he might have escaped this haunting sense of the emptiness and futility of existence. He, too, would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian persecutor, in piling ducat on ducat. Ay, even now he chuckled to think how these _strazzaroli_--these forced vendors of second-hand wares--had lived to purchase the faded purple wrappings of Venetian glory.

He remembered reading in the results of an ancient census: Men, women, children, monks, nuns--and Jews! Well, the Doges were done with, Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew--the Jew lived sumptuously in the palaces of her proud nobles. He looked round the magnificent long-stretching dining-room, with its rugs, oil-paintings, frescoed ceiling, palms; remembered the ancient scutcheon over the stone portal--a lion rampant with an angel volant--and thought of the old Latin statute forbidding the Jews to keep schools of any kind in Venice, or to teach anything in the city, under penalty of fifty ducats' fine and six months' imprisonment. Well, the Jews had taught the Venetians something after all--that the only abiding wealth is human energy. All other nations had had their flowering time and had faded out. But Israel went on with unabated strength and courage. It was very wonderful. Nay, was it not miraculous? Perhaps there was, indeed, "a mission of Israel," perhaps they were indeed God's "chosen people." The Venetians had built and painted marvellous things and died out and left them for tourists to gaze at. The Jews had created nothing for ages, save a few poems and a few yearning synagogue melodies; yet here they were, strong and solid, a creation in flesh and blood more miraculous and enduring than anything in stone and bronze. And what was the secret of this persistence and strength? What but a spiritual? What but their inner certainty of God, their unquestioning trust in Him, that He would send His Messiah to rebuild the Temple, to raise them to the sovereignty of the peoples? How typical his own father--thus serenely singing Chaldaic--a modern of moderns without, a student and saint at home! Ah, would that he, too, could lay hold on this solid faith! Yes, his soul was in sympathy with the brooding immovable East; even with the mysticisms of the Cabalists, with the trance of the ascetic, nay, with the fantastic frenzy-begotten ecstasy of the Dervishes he had seen dancing in Turkish mosques,--that intoxicating sense of a satisfying meaning in things, of a unity with the essence of existence, which men had doubtless sought in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, which the Mahatmas of India had perhaps found, the tradition of which ran down through the ages, misconceived by the Western races, and for lack of which he could often have battered his head against a wall, as in literal beating against the baffling mystery of existence. Ah! there was the hell of it! His soul was of the Orient, but his brain was of the Occident. His intellect had been nourished at the breast of Science, that classified everything and explained nothing. But explanation! The very word was futile! Things were. To explain things was to state A in terms of B, and B in terms of A. Who should explain the explanation? Perhaps only by ecstasy could one understand what lay behind the phenomena. But even so the essence had to be judged by its manifestations, and the manifestations were often absurd, unrighteous, and meaningless. No, he could not believe. His intellect was remorseless. What if Israel was preserved? Why should the empire of Venice be destroyed?

_And a fire came and 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!_

He thought of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city; the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art treasures--churches, pictures, sculptures--no less built on obscure human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's pictures floated before him, and Tintoretto's--record of dead generations; and then, by the link of size, those even vaster paintings--in gouache--of Vermayen in Vienna: old land-fights with crossbow, spear, and arquebus, old sea-fights with inter-grappling galleys. He thought of galley-slaves chained to their oar--the sweat, the blood that had stained history. "So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter." And then he thought of a modern picture with a beautiful nude female figure that had cost the happiness of a family; the artist now dead and immortal, the woman, once rich and fashionable, on the streets. The futility of things--love, fame, immortality! All roads lead nowhere! What profit shall a man have from all his labor which he hath done under the sun?

No; it was all a flux--there was nothing but flux. +Panta rhei+. The wisest had always seen that. The cat which devoured the kid, and the dog which bit the cat, and the staff which smote the dog, and the fire which burnt the staff, and so on endlessly. Did not the commentators say that that was the meaning of this very parable--the passing of the ancient empires, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome? Commentators! what curious people! What a making of books to which there was no end! What a wilderness of waste logic the Jewish intellect had wandered in for ages! The endless volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The countless codes, now obsolescent, over which dead eyes had grown dim! As great a patience and industry as had gone to build Venetian art, and with less result. The chosen people, indeed! And were they so strong and sane? A fine thought in his brain, forsooth!

He, worn out by the great stress of the centuries, such long in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny, this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him it had perhaps grown thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He stood for latter-day Israel, the race that always ran to extremes, which, having been first in faith, was also first in scepticism, keenest to pierce to the empty heart of things; like an orphan wind, homeless, wailing about the lost places of the universe. To know all to be illusion, cheat--itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper--not a divine hope--it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all--the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall, willing to die.

Perhaps it was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgénieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus--the sad, stately plaint of the classic world, like the suppressed sob of a strong man:

"Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetuo una dormienda."

And then he thought again of Virgil, and called up a Tuscan landscape that expressed him, and lines of cypresses that moved on majestic like hexameters. He saw the terrace of an ancient palace, and the grotesque animals carven on the balustrade; the green flicker of lizards on the drowsy garden-wall; the old-world sun-dial and the grotto and the marble fountain, and the cool green gloom of the cypress-grove with its delicious dapple of shadows. An invisible blackbird fluted overhead. He walked along the great walk under the stone eyes of sculptured gods, and looked out upon the hot landscape taking its siesta under the ardent blue sky--the green sunlit hills, the white nestling villas, the gray olive-trees. Who had paced these cloistral terraces? Mediæval princesses, passionate and scornful, treading delicately, with trailing silks and faint perfumes. He would make a poem of it. Oh, the loveliness of life! What was it a local singer had carolled in that dear soft Venetian dialect?

"Belissimo xe el mondo
perchè l' è molto vario.
nè 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--God. The God 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 God 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 God of his fathers. And his own God 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 God: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods 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 god 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 God was goodness, therefore He was oneness--he remembered the acute analysis 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 analysis: 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. God, God--he was God-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 æsthetes 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 God 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-passion, in the intoxicating smell of grass 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 passion always faded and the old hunger for God came back.

He had found temporary peace with Spinoza's God: 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 worship 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? Worship? 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 shivering 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 worshipped 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--glasses. 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 après?_ 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 fashionable 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 passing of the ancient empires--as the commentators had pointed out--and of the modern empires that would pass on to join them, till the earth itself--as the scientists had pointed out--passed 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 flashing sense of the great pageant of the Mediæval--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 fashionable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the prostitutes, 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 butterfly life of Japan, 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 God 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 passing 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.