Chapter XX: Three Witnesses 281 (6)

The romance of _The Wandering Jew_, by Eugene Sue (1844), from which the majority of people have derived what impressions they may have of the legend, is so “sensational” that its value as an illustration of the myth is concealed. Whether intentionally or not, this novel, so far as the Jew appears in it, reproduces very nearly the spirit of an Arabian legend which belongs to the class discussed in this work. The story of Al Khedr will be found in the Koran (xviii.). It is said that Moses, having boasted of his knowledge, was told by God of one wiser than himself; and having found out this man (Al Khedr), he (Moses) journeyed with him. But the aged man had exacted from Moses a promise that he would not ask any question, whatever he might see. Al Khedr commits various crimes, and Moses cannot contain his indignation. Al Khedr then reveals to him that each apparent wrong he had done was a retribution, or a blessing in disguise, telling him the story of each person who had apparently suffered injustice. The Arabs have identified Al Khedr with both Elias and St. George (who they say, recovered life after being thrice slain). The wisdom of Al Khedr therefore lies in his continuity of existence. He represents the primitive conception of a particular providence, seeing the end of events from the beginning. They who have perused the history of a single family whose records have been preserved for several generations, may sometimes feel, with Browning’s Luria,

“The only fault’s with time:
All men become good creatures--but so slow!”

It takes the life of a family to round out and complete the events and incidents which its individual members often find so out of joint, and which have baffled the efforts of this or that generation to set them right. And since the general pressure of the aggregate members of the family, in all its generations, is toward the better conditions, the tendency is such as to suggest a providential guidance by the Sleepless and Eternal. This is reflected in Al Khedr; and the Eternal Jew of Eugene Sue is related to him. In the drama built of this novel, which I saw well performed recently as “All for Gold” in the Surrey Theatre, the tableaus of the Wanderer were quite impressive. He appears on a peak of Arctic snow, with the Northern Light behind him; his doom, as that of his race, was recalled in a certain reddish hue of beard and raiment, and he speaks of the children--who, seeming so helpless, are struggling successfully as unconsciously for their bequest with the hidden powers of Jesuitism--as representatives of a family which represents the history of humanity.

Wherever Ahasuerus moves he leaves the sign of the cross on his track--the last departing glimpse of the mark of Cain. Herodias, his fellow-sufferer, comes up to the Arctic region on the American side--a notable incident when it is remembered (see IX.), that her myth is mainly Spanish and survives chiefly in Spanish America. Eugene Sue brings both of the Wanderers to rest. Herodias enters the Abbey of “St. John the Beheaded;” exhausted she sinks before his image. Weary, footsore, as she had never felt before, even when passing over fiery lava, sandy desert, or Arctic icefields, athirst, and in pain, she looks into a fountain and observes the traces of age in her features. Her youth, which had seemed endless, has passed. Her expiation ends at the feet of the image of him her guilt had destroyed. She implores the forgiveness of God for Ahasuerus also. The Wandering Jew, meanwhile, has climbed Calvary and sits down at the feet of an image of Jesus there. Suddenly he perceives that the face looks upon him as if it were alive, with gentleness and compassion. Ahasuerus prays and is pardoned. Ahasuerus and Herodias are finally seen together, under a shelter, at peace, awaiting longed-for and approaching death.

In Ahasuerus, Sue represents the Workingman, an outcast from heaven under sentence of drudgery, finding at last release from oppression. Herodias is Woman, delivered at last from her political slavery.

So, in their widely differing spheres, have Quinet and Eugene Sue given a nineteenth-century refrain to the seventeenth century song:

“Mais toujours le soleil se lève,
Toujours, toujours.
Tourne la terre où moi je cours,
Toujours, toujours, toujours, toujours!”

M. Pierre Dupont has written a poetical version of our legend to accompany G. Doré’s designs (published by Michel Lévy in 1856). But, as Champfleury says, the imaginatively created Jew of M. Doré, and the modernised narrative of M. Dupont, are very uninteresting compared with the rude pictures of the folk-books, and the quaint simplicity of the folk ballads. The figure of the Wandering Jew which Kaulbach introduced into his picture of the siege of Jerusalem might, as a painting, be regarded as somewhat related to the New Ahasuerus of the poets, but it is a subject that still invites artistic treatment. And how suggestive of artistic effects the legend is may be judged by the next and last French work to be considered here: _La Mort du Juif-Errant. Par Edouard Grenier._

This poem was first published, separately, in 1857, but afterwards included in its author’s _Petits Poëmes_, of which the fourth edition is before me. It is a beautiful and pathetic poem, and treats the story subjectively. The poet describes himself as having escaped from the haunts of men, and built a little hermitage far away in the mountain solitudes. One evening, when he had been watching the fading splendours of sunset, the signs of a storm appeared. The labourers had hastened homeward, the herds sought their shelter, the birds their nests. He then beheld a solitary wayfarer moving on, and asked him to enter, informing him that, in the direction he was going, he could reach no house until morning, and pointing to the increasing menaces of the storm. The traveller turned upon him a burning eye and said, “Thou knowest not the wayfarer whose steps thou wouldst stay. Why, detained by thy request, should I enter with thee thy hospitable door, if my name, when pronounced, must freeze thy welcome, and force me to repass thy threshold?” “Whatever thy name or lot, yet must this roof shelter thee this night.” The Wanderer accepts. The poet draws a striking picture of his guest’s strange and noble appearance. The traveller is shown a fountain where he may bathe; a repast is then spread before him. Afterwards the poet inquires the name and country of his guest, who turns pale, and with a sigh answers, “I am called Ahasuerus; I am the Wandering Jew.” Seeing the poet’s shudder, the Wanderer rises, thanks him for his hospitality, and says, “The cursed one blesses thee,” then starts up to resume his journey. But the poet holds him. “It is not I who am charged with thy punishment.” He forbids Ahasuerus to go out into the storm. The Wanderer says, “The beasts of the field and the birds of the air have their retreats from the rain and lightning, but the Proscribed One hath not where to lay his head.” He heeds not the storm, but the voice which above it cries, “Still march! For thee alone neither repose nor death. March for ever! The justice of God has not had its full course.” But when the poet has detained him, and as they sit together, this harsh voice for the first time is not heard. He asks if the divine justice can have become weary? The poet bids him hope. The lamp is lit, and the poet entreats Ahasuerus to instruct his youth. He who has explored so many regions, seen so many peoples, traversed the earth--what a sublime destiny!--can tell much to him who, bound to one little spot, can only dream of such far realms, which he has longed to see. Ahasuerus tells him the earth is so small, his desire would soon be calmed, could he explore it. Each corner of nature offers the universe as in miniature. With the blue heaven above, and a soul within, he may unite the image of the real with the infinite dream. Earth, air, heaven, man, are everywhere the same. But, the poet says, life is so short; man does but begin to peruse the universe when death closes his eyes; while for him--the Wanderer--length of days have opened the treasures of knowledge; man, time, lands and ages, have no secrets for him. Ahasuerus bids the poet undeceive himself: each man receives in his mind what his forerunners have traced. “Step by step, day by day, century by century, along with humanity, I have wearily climbed the painful ladder on whose last rung God has placed thee.” They have journeyed the same road, but he--the Wanderer--as a pioneer, has had to travel for ages on foot, over stones, the course which the man of the present passes in his chariot in a day.

In the third canto the Wanderer gives the poet an account of his wanderings. At first he had not believed in his doom; then, when he began to contemplate the possibility of it, he entered into all manner of dissipation to forget himself. Finally, in the mournful Valley of Jehoshaphat, he turned upon the pursuing phantom and faced it. “Is it then such a terrible thing to live for ever? What have I lost? Death. What everybody is trying to do! Are not all aiming to live eternally as God in heaven?” He is elated at his prospect; he will have glory, gold, bend nations under his sceptre. Perhaps he will be the Messiah himself!

But the Wanderer’s wife, passionately loved, slowly parts from his heart, withers of age, and dies in his young arms. The torture of that gradual decay of the one he loved is portrayed. His sons, as they grow in years, dread him, hate him, try to poison him; and then leave him in horror or remorse for other lands. Of his family one alone remains, a beloved son. But this last child’s heart even grows cold to him. Its life sinks; its colour departs; its face becomes thin, corpse-like. O horror! he sees before him, in the dying child, the very face of Jesus, whom he had insulted! The child dies on the day and hour of the anniversary of Christ’s death.

After many wanderings Ahasuerus finds himself in the Colosseum at Rome, there seated in the moonlight. He had seen that great edifice built by Jews, stone by stone, while their own beloved Jerusalem fell to dust. As in the great Roman ruin he is meditating upon the vicissitudes he has witnessed, the _Angelus_ sounds forth; the stars, the dew, all nature started in chorus, and said, “Repent!” He looks upon the crucifix amid that circle--triumphantly raised there, where he had seen Christians torn by lions. As he was looking upon that figure a well-remembered voice came to him from it, “Why fly from me? Thy sole refuge is in my love.” Then he there knelt, crying, “O Christ! thou hast conquered me!” Then his first relief came in tears, and an ineffable peace descended in his heart. From that time he did not suffer as one disinherited; he even felt a delicious pain in his expiation; he lived, suffered and loved along with humanity. He now comprehended the enormity of his crime, which God had pursued so relentlessly: it was not his insult to Divinity, but his lese-humanity. He now felt that he might hope that his expiation would be complete, and in the last day he would find repose in the love of Christ.

In the fifth and last Canto the poet entreats the Wanderer to give him a description of Jesus personally, of whom he has so long dreamed--his look, manner, voice. When he has ended this appeal there is a knock at his door, and a stranger enters. Ahasuerus at once recognises him, and kneels, clasping his feet and bathing them with his tears. Jesus says to him, “Friend! weep no more! Since thy touched heart comprehends its sin and washes it away in tears; since the man outraged by thee as much as the God is now thy brother; since thy heart loves, I bring pardon, the reward of repentance. Be happy! Now, thou canst at last die.”

In the morning a shepherd coming to the poet’s hermitage found two forms lying prostrate, both apparently dead. The poet was slowly brought to life, but Ahasuerus was dead. On his face was a smile of celestial sweetness and calm felicity. On a bier made of larches the poet and the shepherd bore the dead body of the Wanderer to its place of rest. They bore it to the summit of the highest mountain. Beyond the trees they passed, beyond the bushes, and where the grass became scant. Into a cloud they entered, upward and onward bore him, till they came to the blue foot of a glacier. On a little couch of moss they laid the body while they dug a grave; as they covered the Wanderer’s form their last vision was of the smile still shining, or even happier, upon his face.

“Ce vieux corps, fatigué par vingt siècles d’effort,
Goûtait encore mieux le bienfait de la mort.
Et c’est là qu’il repose, inconnu, solitaire,
Perdu dans la nuée au-dessus de la terre!
Nul monument funèbre attirant le regard,
Ne révèle sa tombe au pas du montagnard.
Le glacier qui défend cette gorge isolée
En est le seul gardien et le seul mausolée.
Nulle épouse, nul fils n’y sanglote sur lui,
Et la seul rosée y vient pleurer la nuit.
Nul mortel ne connaît sa demeure dernière,
Personne, excepté moi, n’y versa de prière,
Et seul l’aigle se pose à la cime où ses os
Savourent dans mort un éternel repos.

It is interesting to contrast this peaceful end of Grenier’s Ahasuerus with the invincible Wanderer of Shelley. Nevertheless, the Ahasuerus of this poem yields only to a tender appeal from Christ--himself the bound victim of an eternal curse. Another poem may yet be written which shall show Jesus not to have pronounced the doom upon the poor shoemaker, but to have known so much of Jahve’s vindictive disposition as to foretell it, and ultimately coming to an understanding with Ahasuerus as the fellow-victim of an eternal curse. They might be shown buried together by the compassionate poet and shepherd where the foiled eagle of Jove, surviving from its feast on Prometheus, could not reach them, and the glacier-heart of deified power could freeze and crush them no more. This, for one of the two, would be a happier fate than survival in the satirical song still sung in France--

“Jésus la bonté même
Lui dit en soupirant,
Tu marcheras toi-même
Au moins pour trois milles ans,
Tu finiras tes peines
Au dernier jugement.”

XVII.

THE NEW AHASUERUS IN ENGLAND.

The old Ahasuerus had his day in England. While he was personally wandering about the world, however, in the guise of the pious pretender, pouring his cant into every long ear he could find, clever English writers began to utilise him. The earliest work (1640), _The Wandering Jew telling Fortunes to Englishmen_, was a fair satire upon some features of London in that time. The name of the Jew is Gad Ben-Arod Ben-Balaam Ben-Alimoth Ben-Baal Ben-Gog Ben-Magog. The next work that followed (1797) was an amusing drama. It is entitled _The Wandering Jew, or Love’s Masquerade_, by Andrew Franklin. A surly old guardian, disgusted with the young beaux seeking his ward’s hand, has vowed that he will give her to the most aged man to be found in England. The lover most favoured by the young lady conspires with her to have an announcement of the presence of the Wandering Jew in London, and then presents himself in that disguise as Mr. Mathusalem. He is attended by his equally aged servant, Juba, in whose anachronisms the fun mainly consists. Juba, despite all efforts on Mr. Mathusalem’s part to make him more reticent, is voluminous in his reminiscences; among other things, he tells about Romulus and Remus, and relates that, when he was at the baptism of the twins, their mother threw a basin of tea at him for saying that Remus was the prettier of the two.

In 1799 appeared the novel _St. Leon_, by William Godwin. It is not a very interesting work now, whatever it may have been at the time. The plot of it is, that a gentleman, who, through gambling, has sunk into poverty and plunged his family in distress, obtains from an uncanny old man the secret of recovering youth and obtaining money whenever he needs it. But he has vowed secrecy. He returns to his family, but is not recognised. He is cut off from the old sympathies. The novel speedily carries interest away from St. Leon to other persons, and ends without any account of his end, nor does it even carry St. Leon beyond the lives of his children. The romance might have been suggested by any traditional type of longevity, such as the Hindu Dnyaneshvar, found in his tomb reading his Commentaries 300 years after apparent death; or Artesius, the Arabian alchemist, said to have, by his art, prolonged his life 1025 years, or Alkazwini, who also lived præternaturally long. The preface, however, contains an interesting citation, which gives its actual origin:--“The following passage from a work, said to be written by the late Dr. John Campbel, and entitled _Hermippus Redivivus_, suggested the first hint of the present performance: ‘There happened in the year 1687 an odd accident at Venice, that made a very great stir then, and which I think deserves to be rescued from oblivion. The great freedom and ease with which all persons who make a good appearance live in that city is known sufficiently to all who are acquainted with it; such will not, therefore, be surprised that a stranger, who went by the name of Signor Gualdi, and who made a considerable figure there, was admitted into the best company, though nobody knew who or what he was. He remained at Venice for some months, and three things were remarked in his conduct. The first was, that he had a small collection of fine pictures, which he readily showed to anybody that desired it; the next, that he was perfectly versed in all arts and sciences, and spoke on every subject with such readiness and sagacity as astonished all who heard him; and it was, in the third place, observed that he never wrote or received any letter, never desired any credit, or made use of bills of exchange; but paid for everything in ready money, and lived decently, though not in splendour.

“‘This gentleman met one day at the coffee-house with a Venetian nobleman, who was an extraordinary good judge of pictures; he had heard of Signor Gualdi’s collection, and in a very polite manner desired to see them, to which the other very readily consented. After the Venetian had viewed Signor Gualdi’s collection, and expressed his satisfaction by telling him he had never seen a finer, considering the number of pieces of which it consisted--he cast his eye by chance over the chamber-door, where hung a picture of this stranger. The Venetian looked upon it, and then upon him. “This picture was drawn for you, sir,” says he to Signor Gualdi, to which the other made no answer but by a low bow. “You look,” continued the Venetian, “like a man of fifty, and yet I know this picture to be of the hand of Titian, who has been dead one hundred and thirty years. How is this possible?” “It is not easy,” said Signor Gualdi gravely, “to know all things that are possible; but there is certainly no crime in my being like a picture drawn by Titian.” The Venetian easily perceived, by his manner of speaking, that he had given the stranger offence, and therefore took his leave. He could not forbear speaking of this in the evening to some of his friends, who resolved to satisfy themselves by looking upon the picture the next day. In order to have an opportunity of doing so, they went to the coffee-house about the time that Signor Gualdi was wont to come thither; and not meeting him, one of them, who had often conversed with him, went to his lodgings to inquire after him, when he heard that he had set out an hour before for Vienna. This affair made a great noise, and found a place in all the newspapers of that time.’”

It is probable that not only _St. Leon_, but the _Bassevilliana_ of Vincenzo Monti had influence in exciting the English imagination with legends of this character. A translation of this Italian poem, by the Rev. Henry Boyd, was published in London in 1805. It is the story of a “Soul’s Doom,” founded on the murder of the French minister, Basseville, in Rome, near the end of the last century. The soul of Basseville is condemned to wander over the French provinces, and behold the desolations caused by the revolution and its retributions. The Spirit of the Abyss is forbidden to clutch Basseville. An angel says to the soul:

“Fear not; thou art not doomed to sip the wave
Of black Avernus, which who tastes, resigned
All hope of change, becomes the demon’s slave;
But Heaven’s high justice, nor in mercy blind,
Nor in security scrupulous to gauge
Each blot, each wrinkle, of the human mind,
Has written on the adamantine page,
That thou no joys of paradise mayst know,
Till punished be of France the guilty rage.”

Both _St. Leon_ and “The Soul’s Doom” might have been read by those comrades in distress, Shelley and Medwin, for whom seventy years ago Oxford Christianity, and homes inspired by it, had nothing better than wanderings about London under a curse. They took up the subject, Medwin says, when Shelley was fifteen. Of the poem, as it now stands, in the edition of Chatto and Windus, Shelley wrote but a few lines; but I think that amidst its rhapsodical rubbish a scholarly expression or illustration may here and there be found traceable to Shelley. There is evidence of Shelley’s divining-rod in the allusions to some of the more significant legends concerning Ahasuerus which had attracted the attention of several German poets. There is in the opening some resemblance to the scene in Southey’s _Curse of Kehama_. Where, in the latter, the young Hindu woman is brought forward to perish on the funeral-pyre, in Shelley’s poem a sinning novice is dragged to the “fatal shrine,” from which she is rescued by the mysterious traveller. This horseman, hastening to Padua,

“Wraps his mantle around his brow,
As if to hide his woes.”

In his tale, he says:

“A burning cross illumed my brow,
I hid it with a fillet grey.”

This Cross enables him to command fiends. To Paulo, who has rescued her, Rosa the novice has given herself. Victorio, her lover, summons a witch-demon, and to her consigns his soul to obtain a philtre which will secure Rosa’s love. But when he has administered it she dies.

Is the resemblance mentioned between this _Wandering Jew_ and the _Curse of Kehama_ accidental? The Medwin-Shelley poem was unable to reach the light for which it struggled in 1810. It was published in _Frazer’s Magazine_ in 1831. But soon after it was written, Shelley shows great eagerness to get Southey’s poem, which had been announced, and twice writes to the bookseller, Stockdale, for it in December, 1810. In 1812, while at Keswick with his young wife, Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, if not before. In the poem of Southey, the young Indian casts down the idol before which the woman is about to be burned, which corresponds to the blow given to Christ by Ahasuerus. The curse is artificially modified, and may have been suggested by the sentence on Cain, “Behold now art thou cursed from the earth.” The doom on the iconoclast is that on him shall fall neither the rain nor the sunshine, nor any of the influences of nature.

There would seem to be little doubt that _St. Leon_ inspired Shelley’s _St. Irvyne, the Rosicrucian_, or rather Ginotti, with his elixir of life, whose only “survival” is in Bulwer’s _Zanoni_. The “gigantic Ginotti” dies through the wicked Wolfstein; but Shelley was particular in pointing out that “he did not die by Wolfstein’s hand, but by the influence of that natural magic which, when the secret was imparted to the latter, destroyed him.” The longevity is here not a doom. But once, as Shelley was walking through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he picked up a “dirty and torn” work, which contained Schubart’s “Rhapsody” of Ahasuerus, elsewhere mentioned. Hogg was quite mistaken in affirming that Shelley’s account was an invention. Full information on this point may be found in Rossetti’s Shelley (vol. i. p. 434). The German poem had appeared in a magazine called the _German Museum_, in 1802. The Wandering Jew thus became a type in Shelley’s mind, and repeatedly appears in his works. In Alastor he uses the Wanderer as an illustration.

“Oh that God,
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever,
Lone as incarnate death!”

It is, however, in _Queen Mab_ that we find the real form which arose before Shelley out of Schubart’s small casket, fished up from the muddy ocean of London. Schubart’s Ahasuerus whines and is pardoned. Shelley’s Ahasuerus is a Titan, who prefers the sharp vulture-beak and the chain to any surrender to the Christian Jove. Believing as I do that Cain was originally a Semitic Prometheus,--as first of those who began removal of Jahve’s curse on the earth by agriculture and working in metals,--I find it remarkable that Shelley, outcast from college and home in early youth because of his atheism, should recognise this feature in the distant successor of Cain.

“A strange and woe-worn wight,
Arose beside the battlements,
And stood unmoving there:
His inessential figure cast no shade
Upon the golden floor;
His port and mien bore mark of many years,
And chronicles of untold ancientness
Were legible within his beamless eye:
Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth;
Freshness and vigour knit his manly frame;
The wisdom of old age was mingled there
With youth’s primeval dauntlessness;
And inexpressible woe,
Chastenéd by fearless resignation, gave
An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.

_Spirit._--Is there a God?

_Ahasuerus._--Is there a God!--ay, an Almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice
Was heard on earth: earth shudder’d at the sound;
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawn’d,
To swallow all the dauntless and the good,
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power. None but slaves
Survived--cold-blooded slaves, who did the work
Of tyrannous Omnipotence; whose souls
No honest indignation ever urged
To elevated daring, to one deed
Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.
These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend,
Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked
With human blood, and hideous pæans rang,
Through all the long-drawn aisles.
* * * * *
“O Spirit! centuries have set their seal,
On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain,
Since the Incarnate came: humbly he came,
Veiling his horrible godhead
In the shape of man; scorn’d by the world, his name unheard,
Save by the rabble of his native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword
He brought on earth, to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom his malignant soul
At length his mortal frame was led to death.
I stood beside him: on the torturing cross
No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense;
And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summ’d
The massacres and miseries which his name
Had sanction’d in my country, and I cried,
‘Go! go!’ in mockery.
A smile of godlike malice reillumined
His fading lineaments,--‘I go,’ he cried,
‘But thou shalt wander o’er the unquiet earth,
Eternally.’--The dampness of the grave,
Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,
And long lay tranced upon the charméd soil.
When I awoke hell burned within my brain,
Which stagger’d on its seat; for all around
The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,
Even as the Almighty’s ire arrested them,
And in their various attitudes of death,
My murder’d children’s mute and eyeless skulls,
Glared ghastlily upon me.

But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learn’d to prefer
Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven.
Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began
My lonely and unending pilgrimage,
Resolved to wage unweariable war
With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl
Defiance at his impotence to harm,
Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand
That barr’d my passage to the peaceful grave
Has crush’d the earth to misery, and given
Its empire to the chosen of his slaves.
* * * * *
“Thus have I stood--through a wild waste of years
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,
Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will;
Even as the giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame
Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there;
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads
Its worn and wither’d arms on high,
To meet the quiet of a summer’s morn.

The Fairy waved her hand:
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,
Flee from the morning beam:
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought.”

This Ahasuerus is not only the fellow Titan of Prometheus, but he is the New Ahasuerus-Prometheus who had his fire to bring and his doom to suffer in England. The events of Shelley’s life between 1812, when he probably wrote this part of _Queen Mab_, and the latter part of 1814, added new curses to the eternal wanderings of the Jew. These appear in that sufficiently wild fragment entitled _The Assassins_, written in Switzerland, 1814, from which the subjoined passage is selected:

“A young man named Albedir, wandering in the woods, was startled by the screaming of a bird of prey, and, looking up, saw blood fall, drop by drop, from among the intertwined boughs of a cedar. Having climbed the tree, he beheld a terrible and dismaying spectacle. A naked human body was impaled on the broken branch. It was maimed and mangled horribly--every limb bent and bruised into frightful distortion, and exhibiting a breathing image of the most sickening mockery of life. A monstrous snake had scented its prey from among the mountains--and above hovered a hungry vulture. From amidst the mass of desolated humanity two eyes, black and excessively brilliant, shone with an unearthly lustre. Beneath the blood-stained eyebrows their steady rays manifested the serenity of an immortal power, the collected energy of a deathless mind, spell-secured from dissolution. A bitter smile of mingled abhorrence and scorn distorted his wounded lip--he appeared calmly to observe and measure all around--self-possession had not deserted the shattered mass of life.

“The youth approached the bough on which the breathing corpse was hung. As he approached, the serpent reluctantly unwreathed his glittering coils, and crept towards his dark and loathsome cave. The vulture, impatient of his meal, fled to the mountain, that re-echoed with his hoarse screams. The cedar-branches creaked with their agitating weight, faintly, as the dismal wind arose. All else was deadly silent.

“At length a voice issued from the mangled man. It rattled in hoarse murmurs from his throat and lungs--his words were the conclusion of some strange, mysterious soliloquy. They were broken and without apparent connection, completing wide intervals of inexpressible conceptions.

“‘The great tyrant is baffled, even in success. Joy, joy to his tortured foe! Triumph to the worm which he tramples under his feet! Ha! his suicidal hand might dare as well abolish the mighty frame of things! Delight and exultation sit before the closed gates of death! I fear not to dwell beneath their black and ghastly shadow. Here thy power may not avail! Thou createst--’tis mine to ruin and destroy. I was thy slave--I am thy equal, and thy foe. Thousands tremble before thy throne, who, at my voice, shall dare to pluck the golden crown from thy unholy head.’ He ceased. The silence of noon swallowed up his words. Albedir clung tighter to the tree--he dared not for dismay remove his eyes. He remained mute in the perturbation of mute and creeping horror.

“‘Albedir,’ said the same voice--‘Albedir, in the name of God, approach! He that suffered me to fall watches thee. The gentle and merciful spirits of sweet human love delight not in agony and horror. For pity’s sake, approach! In the name of thy good God, approach, Albedir!’ The tones were mild and clear as the responses of Æolian music. They floated to Albedir’s ear like the warm breath of June that lingers in the lawny groves, subduing all to softness. Tears of tender affection started into his eyes.”

The “Assassins” are something like Schiller’s “Robbers,” outlaws better than the laws that have branded them. In _Hellas_, Ahasuerus, though still appropriately responding to a summons from the Moslem Antichrist, is an impersonation of human thought as raised by long experience to a prophetic power. The idea is substantially the same as that which we have seen underlying the myths of Enoch and Teiresias, while it goes beyond them in its suggestion that knowledge, living over the ages past, and imagination attaining to the farthest outcome of present tendencies, can make for the being of a day an eternal existence. Ahasuerus says to Mahmud:

“All is contained in each.
Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is--the absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions.”

With true Shelleyan felicity Hassan describes this Jew--

“From his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to come ...
Some feign that he is Enoch.”

In the year 1820 appeared the novel in four volumes, _Melmoth, the Wanderer_, by the Rev. Robert Charles Maturin, author also of _Bertram_, a respectable play, and several novels. Melmoth is a man who has sold himself to Satan for the advantage of a vast length of life, to which is added a power of passing instantaneously, at will, from place to place. The terms of his bond are that he may escape the final doom of his soul, which is to pay for these advantages, provided he can find anyone willing to take the contract, with its benefits and penalty, off his hands. The author’s purpose appears to be to show that no one would deliberately damn himself to all eternity for any temporal advantage; though this would seem to be rather “Irish,” since his hero is just that man. However, the hero is an exception that proves the rule, for he goes about the world vainly tempting the poor and needy to take his place. Even a beautiful Indian maiden, who has fallen desperately in love with him, will not surrender her soul. Failing with all, he is carried off by the Devil. The supposed date of this catastrophe is toward the close of the eighteenth century.

The next work to be noticed at this point, and one which the perusal of Shelley may have suggested, is more distinctly based upon the legend of the Wandering Jew; this is the Rev. George Croly’s _Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future_. This novel, in three volumes, appeared anonymously in 1828. The spirit in which the legend is treated in this work will sufficiently appear by the following passages:

“Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature was to rule in successive tyranny over my soul.

“Fearfully was the decree fulfilled.

“In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed the country to seek out an enemy of Rome. I found in the Northern snows a man of blood: I stirred up the soul of Alaric and led him to the sack of Rome.

“In revenge for the insults heaped upon the Jew by the dotards and dastards of the city of Constantine, I sought out an instrument of compendious ruin: I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured ambition into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca.

“In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the Temple, I roused the iron tribes of the West, and at the head of the Crusaders, expelled the Saracens. I fed full on revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge!

“A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. I talked with the Alchemist. I wore away years in the perplexities of the schoolmen; and I felt the guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge.

“A passion for human fame seized me. A passion for gold!...

“I found a bold Genoese. I led him to discover the New World; with its metals I inundated the Old; and to my own misery added the misery of two hemispheres.”

At length the eternal World-wanderer stands beside the newly discovered Printing Press; again he pays homage to Luther at his rise, and he attains a faith in the progress of mankind. “At this hour I see the dawn of things to whose glory the glory of the Past is but a dream!”

Quite another Ahasuerus than Shelley’s is represented in Wordsworth’s “_Song of the Wandering Jew_,” which somewhat resembles the idea of Müller, already quoted, as indeed both do the old saying, “The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

“Though the torrents from their fountains
Roar down many a craggy steep,
Yet they find among the mountains
Resting-places calm and deep.

“Clouds that love through air to hasten,
Ere the storm its fury stills,
Helmet-like themselves will fasten
On the heads of towering hills.

“What if through the frozen centre
Of the Alps the chamois bound,
Yet he has a home to enter
In some nook of chosen ground.

“If on windy days the raven
Gambol like a dancing skiff,
Not the less she loves her haven
In the bosom of the cliff.

“Though the sea-horse in the ocean
Own no dear domestic cave,
Yet he slumbers--by the motion
Rocked of many a gentle wave.

“The fleet ostrich, till day closes,
Vagrant over desert sands,
Brooding on her eggs reposes
When chill night that care demands.

“Day and night my toils redouble,
Never nearer to the goal;
Night and day, I feel the trouble
Of the Wanderer in my soul.”

It would be interesting to know at just what period of his life, or in which of his two lives, Wordsworth wrote this “Song.” Was it a memory of his dead self, the radical that fell in the French Revolution? Or did he write it when the sceptical wanderings of other minds around him had become to his peaceful soul, with no doom heavier than the liturgical round of Grasmere Church, as imaginary as the “seven whistlers on their nightly rounds,” which his peasant-friend heard, while overhead were heard those “Gabriel’s hounds” by ears that little knew they too were fabled of Jews doomed by the Crucified? All around Wordsworth in his home amid the Lakes were the real wanderers. Before nearly every fine mind living at the beginning of the last generation, this Ahasuerus had risen as a spiritual type. Seven times did Shelley evoke this form, and it was with him when he wandered unrecognised past Rydal Mount. Southey had known the meaning of it. Byron had taken the side of Cain against him who in Paradise permitted “the Serpent to creep in,” and seen in Prometheus, with “the wretched gift Eternity,” the symbol of man’s fate and force. De Quincey had made acquaintance with such doomed wanderers of rabbinical legend as “The Widow of Hebron.” From afar the sighings of “L. E. L.” were heard in fitful dreams of “The Undying One.”

There came a terrible day when the children of the Revolution recognised the inexorable Mother of whom they were born. The old beliefs and ideas in which good and honest people had lived so comfortably were shrivelled up. It was not the half-way heresy of the earlier time which believed it was attaining a purer Christianity and a more glorious immortality. These children of the Revolution found the whole fabric of faith fallen to black ruins. The youth went off light-hearted to college: he came back heavy-hearted. Beside the old fireside he sat once more, with the dear faces around him and exile in his heart. He listened to the old Bible, and knelt; but his mind was far away, and had left him amid the innocent, a guilty, kneeling, assenting phantasm. Then there began this Age of Wandering; for the new mind could not yet get a new heart, and could only wander about like the night-raven of folk-lore, that ever seeks the Holy Sepulchre for rest. Their voices may be heard in most of the literature of the last generation, pathetic as the appeal of deserted brides going about the street asking, “Saw ye my Beloved?”--the only answer being endless echoes of the question. Intellect seemed to them a curse. By it they were at one stroke deprived alike of faith in future and hope of present joys. Unfit for usual avocations, unable to enter pulpits and professions tainted with the discredited superstitions, how well could they understand the doom of every wanderer!

In the same year (1833) that Edgar Quinet--after ten years of wandering in the effort to find some point where he could catch a least ray of the old faith that made his early home so sweet, only to discover that his faith was gone out, not eclipsed--published his _Ahasuerus_, Carlyle also, after like wanderings, published his _Sartor Resartus_, with its story of the “Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh.” It was in that same year, too, that Ralph Waldo Emerson, unable to rest even in his Unitarian pulpit, escaping from the clinging arms of his devoted congregation, came across the ocean to converse with Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and find if they could show him any light on the great problems. Coleridge had taken refuge with opium and orthodoxy. Wordsworth entertained the young American Wanderer with lamentations over the excess of intellectual above moral culture in the modern world. But it was in the far solitude of Nithsdale that he hoped to find what he sought; for Carlyle had written an essay in which he spoke of standing amid night, yet seeing the faint signs of a new day-spring. “Here, straight uprose that lone wayfaring man,” wrote Carlyle afterwards; but, alas, it was only to find at Craigenputtoch (Hawk Hill) one preyed upon by the same remorseless doubts. The personal hospitality was beautiful. But when the young American, just bereaved of his wife, sought some vision beyond the grave, there was no help for him. He asked Carlyle to what religious development those sentences about a new day-spring pointed? The answer was that he could not state that even to himself. Everyone, he said, must find out his own path, and walk in it.

When Emerson parted from Carlyle and returned to the New World, he found in its new life more than his vanished faith: to emancipate slaves, and human minds, and the moral genius of woman, and give the People their opportunity to build the New World into beauty and happiness--this he found was a religion with eternal vistas opening from it, hopes fairer than his faded heaven, a providence better than the Syrian deity who had led the Old World into Red Seas, but never through them to any Promised Land. But Carlyle remained to wander to the last amid the wrecks of his lost worlds.

“Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying with Hunger always parallel to him, and a whole Infernal Chase in his rear; so that the countenance of Hunger is comparatively a friend’s! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew, save only that he feels himself not guilty and but suffering the pains of guilt--wend to and fro with aimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the earth (by footprints) write his _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_; even as the great Goethe, in passionate words, must write his _Sorrows of Werther_, before the spirit freed itself and he could become a Man. Vain, truly, is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow!”

Among all the Wanderers only one seemed to have found a new heart atwin with his new intellect--he alone loved and welcomed the new, and preferred the vulture-beak that tears Prometheus, the loneliness of Ahasuerus, to the favour of Jove, Jahve or Jesus. Shelley alone was heard singing his matin of the lark above ruins sadder than all the rest.

XVIII.

AHASUERUS VINCTUS.

Here before me is a formidable array of large--one might almost say fat--volumes, which I have hardly known whether to assign to England or Germany, but conclude that they belong to both, and also to America, and to the night-side of Protestantism everywhere. They are entitled: _Chronicles, selected from the originals, of Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, embracing a period of nearly XIX. centuries. Now first revealed to and edited by David Hoffman, Hon. J. U. D. of Göttingen. In two series, each of three volumes. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853._ This book contains a dedication, dated March 10, 1851, Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, to the author’s brother, Samuel Hoffman, Esq., of Baltimore, U. S. A. It contains also a dedication, dated September, 1852, Austin Friars, London, from Cartaphilus himself: “To the Children of the Dispersion--Jehovah’s favoured people during so many ages, Christ’s scattered flock during so many more--these chronicles are affectionately inscribed,” etc.

There is nothing in these volumes which bear upon the legendary Wandering Jew, except a tradition, incidentally mentioned, that in 1539 he visited Cornelius Agrippa, and was shown the face of Rebecca, whom he had loved fifteen centuries before, in a magic mirror. But the existence of such a book, embodying the vulgar Protestant superstitions about the “dispersion” and the gathering of the “chosen people;” the fact that so much labour can be expended on these notions by a man otherwise educated, the author apparently of several legal works, are phenomena to excite reflections. There is a good deal of suggestiveness, too, in the link between Austin Friars and Grosvenor Square. Cartaphilus, going his eternal round with cry of “O’ clo’!” has finally, it would appear, discovered that he need only have his Judaism baptized to be one of “Christ’s flock,” pastured as richly in the fashionable Square.

But even more significant just now is the fact that Germany is ready to supply the hand that can write of the Jews as for ages “Jehovah’s favoured people,” and in the next moment be clenched to smite them as an accursed race. So much this union of Cartaphilus and Austin Friars with the Hon. Mr. Hoffman and Grosvenor Square may mean for us, as we bid them farewell, finding nothing further in their voluminous sermons pertinent to our present inquiry or purpose.

Here are two pregnant facts. In various parts of the East Jews manifest a superstitious dread of a Christian’s curse. On the other hand, for a long time there prevailed among Christians a belief that an oath taken in a Jewish synagogue was more binding and efficient than one taken elsewhere.[40] Add these two facts together, and their sum is in the following third fact: on Wednesday, April 13, 1881, a petition against the Jews was presented to the German Chancellor, in twenty-six volumes, 14,000 sheets, and with 255,000 signatures.

Every signature to that most shameful document which the nineteenth century has witnessed was set there by--Judaism itself. It was Israel that taught Christendom its black art of cursing. The Christian idea of a Chosen People of Christ, commissioned to make war upon other peoples as heathen, infidels, hosts of Antichrist, is a precise transcript of the Judaic idea of a Chosen People of Jahve, with commission to put Gentiles to the edge of the sword. In the darkest ages, when holocausts of Jews were offered in sacrifice to a deified member of their race, the Christian might have addressed his victim with a paraphrase of Shylock’s words, “If a Baalite disagreed with a Jew, what was his humility? Slaughter. If a Jew disagree with a Christian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, slaughter. The intolerance your Testament teaches me I will execute, and it shall go hard but, with the aid of my Testament, I will better the instruction!”

When Moses Mendelssohn was asked, “When will the Jews become Christians?” he answered, “When the Christians cease to be Jews.”

After Shakspeare had startled the world with a suspicion that the Jew is a man, it still required a hundred and fifty years, or thereabout, to awaken the further suspicion that a Jew might be a good, even a religious man. This revelation came through Lessing. When he was coming of age, Lessing recognised the injustice done to the Jews of Germany. Every Jew entering Berlin was compelled to pay toll at Brandenburg Gate. The meanest Christian might gain credit by insulting or assaulting a Jew. Frederick the Great could write, “Jesus was a Jew, yet we persecute the Jews,” but his wide toleration left that people unprotected. Lessing wrote an early drama, _Die Juden_, which touched gently on the matter. In it a wealthy Jew of high character saves the life of a Christian baron and his daughter. The baron desires the youth to marry his daughter, but finding to what race and religion he belongs, that, of course, is impossible. So the drama ends. Why impossible? The answer to that question had to be postponed. There are some evils in this world which are like the birth-mark in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story: the chemist succeeded in extracting the birth-mark from his wife’s face, but the wife lay dead. When the mark of the cross disappears from the Wanderer’s brow, so that the Christian who has branded him shall no longer say as he passes, “He is a Jew,” nor for that part from his daughter’s lover, Christianity will be dead. The flower of Lessing’s great heart and mind was _Nathan the Wise_. The apologue of “The Three Rings,” in which the Jew, the Moslem, the Christian Templar, raised above their bigotry by mutual human service are seen in a tableau of charity, shone like the star of a new religion over Germany. It is the “Ideal of Religious Liberty,” said Schwartz, Historian of Modern Theology at Halle; “Truly can Deity be said to pervade every line of Nathan,” said Kuno Fischer, of Jena University; while in it Strauss sees one advancing the “Kingdom of God on earth.”[41] Yet even Lessing was still not equal to the idea of having the Jewess marry the Christian. Just as we are listening to hear the marriage-bells ring out for the lovers, lo, they turn out to be brother and sister! So, the religious equality having been proclaimed a hundred and fifty years after Shakspeare had proclaimed the human equality, Lessing leaves it to a like time to establish the social equality of Jew and Christian.

But was this line drawn altogether by the Christian? Lessing’s friendship with Moses Mendelssohn had taught him otherwise. When Michaelis, the theologian, read his early play, “The Jews,” he wrote a criticism in which he expressed a doubt whether an oppressed and despised race could produce such a man as the hero. Mendelssohn replied, and Lessing, enclosing this reply to Michaelis, wrote concerning its author: “He really is a Jew, a man of five-and-twenty, who, without any instruction, has acquired great attainments in languages, in mathematics, in philosophy, in poetry. I foresee in him an honour to our nation, if he is allowed to come to maturity by his co-religionists, who have always displayed an unfortunate spirit of persecution towards men like him.” The confirmation of this apprehension on the part of the Jews’ earliest champion in Germany may be found in the enthusiasm which the next eminent Mendelssohn put into his oratorio of “St. Paul.”