[Illustration: THE WOLF TRAP
“You would make me believe that I shall have my cub given back to me,
but I know I shall have to fight for it.”]
Ahasuerus II.
The legend of the Wandering Jew obsessed the imagination of the Middle
Age. The tale, which an Armenian bishop first told at the Abbey of St.
Albans, concerned a doorkeeper in the house of Pontius Pilate--or, as
some say, a shoemaker in Jerusalem--who insulted Christ on His way
to Calvary. He was told by Our Lord, “I will rest, but thou shalt go
on till the Last Day.” Christendom saw the strange figure in many
places--at Hamburg and Leipsic and Lubeck, at Moscow and Madrid, even
at far Baghdad. Goodwives in the little mediæval cities, hastening
homeward against the rising storm, saw a bent figure posting through
the snow, with haggard face and burning eyes, carrying his load of
penal immortality, and seeking in vain for “easeful death.” There is a
profound metaphysic in such popular fancies. Good and evil are alike
eternal. Arthur and Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane are only sleeping
and will yet return to save their peoples; and the Wandering Jew
staggers blindly through the ages, seeking the rest which he denied to
his Lord.
In George Meredith’s “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French
History” there is a famous passage on Napoleon. France, disillusioned
at last,
“Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
Material grandeur’s ape, the Infernal’s hound.”
That is the penalty of mortal presumption. The Superman who would
shatter the homely decencies of mankind and set his foot on the world’s
neck is himself bound captive. He is the slave of the djinn whom he
has called from the unclean deeps. There can be no end to his quest.
Weariness does not bring peace, for the whips of the Furies are in his
own heart.
The Wandering Jew of the Middle Age was a figure sympathetically
conceived. He had still to pay the price in his tortured body, but his
soul was at rest, for he had repented his folly. Raemaekers in his
cartoon follows the conception of Gustave Doré rather than that of
the old fabulists. The modern Ahasuerus has no surety of an eventual
peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine
to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops
before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe,
prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek
tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside
the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the
Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, can find no solace
though he seek it wearily in the four corners of the world.