ACCORDING to Mr. Matthew Arnold, as we find the highest traditions of
grace, beauty and the heroic virtues among the Greeks and Romans, so we
derive our highest ideal of righteousness from Jewish sources.
Righteousness was to the Jew what strength and beauty were to the Greek
or fortitude to the Roman.
This sounds well, but can we think that the Jews taken as a nation were
really more righteous than the Greeks and Romans? Could they indeed be
so if they were less strong, graceful and enduring? In some respects
they may have been—every nation has its strong points—but surely there
has been a nearly unanimous verdict for many generations that the typical
Greek or Roman is a higher, nobler person than the typical Jew—and this
referring not to the modern Jew, who may perhaps he held to have been
injured by centuries of oppression, but to the Hebrew of the time of the
old prophets and of the most prosperous eras in the history of the
nation. If three men could be set before us as the most perfect Greek,
Roman and Jew respectively, and if we could choose which we would have
our only son most resemble, is it not likely we should find ourselves
preferring the Greek or Roman to the Jew? And does not this involve that
we hold the two former to be the more righteous in a broad sense of the
word?
I dare not say that we owe no benefits to the Jewish nation, I do not
feel sure whether we do or do not, but I can see no good thing that I can
point to as a notoriously Hebrew contribution to our moral and
intellectual well-being as I can point to our law and say that it is
Roman, or to our fine arts and say that they are based on what the Greeks
and Italians taught us. On the contrary, if asked what feature of
post-Christian life we had derived most distinctly from Hebrew sources I
should say at once “intolerance”—the desire to dogmatise about matters
whereon the Greek and Roman held certainty to be at once unimportant and
unattainable. This, with all its train of bloodshed and family disunion,
is chargeable to the Jewish rather than to any other account.
There is yet another vice which occurs readily to any one who reckons up
the characteristics which we derive mainly from the Jews; it is one that
we call, after a Jewish sect, “Pharisaism.” I do not mean to say that no
Greek or Roman was ever a sanctimonious hypocrite, still,
sanctimoniousness does not readily enter into our notions of Greeks and
Romans and it does so enter into our notions of the old Hebrews. Of
course, we are all of us sanctimonious sometimes; Horace himself is so
when he talks about _aurum irrepertum et sic melius situm_, and as for
Virgil he was a prig, pure and simple; still, on the whole,
sanctimoniousness was not a Greek and Roman vice and it was a Hebrew one.
True, they stoned their prophets freely; but these are not the Hebrews to
whom Mr. Arnold is referring, they are the ones whom it is the custom to
leave out of sight and out of mind as far as possible, so that they
should hardly count as Hebrews at all, and none of our characteristics
should be ascribed to them.
Taking their literature I cannot see that it deserves the praises that
have been lavished upon it. The Song of Solomon and the book of Esther
are the most interesting in the Old Testament, but these are the very
ones that make the smallest pretensions to holiness, and even these are
neither of them of very transcendent merit. They would stand no chance
of being accepted by Messrs. Cassell and Co. or by any biblical publisher
of the present day. Chatto and Windus might take the Song of Solomon,
but, with this exception, I doubt if there is a publisher in London who
would give a guinea for the pair. Ecclesiastes contains some fine things
but is strongly tinged with pessimism, cynicism and affectation. Some of
the Proverbs are good, but not many of them are in common use. Job
contains some fine passages, and so do some of the Psalms; but the Psalms
generally are poor and, for the most part, querulous, spiteful and
introspective into the bargain. Mudie would not take thirteen copies of
the lot if they were to appear now for the first time—unless indeed their
royal authorship were to arouse an adventitious interest in them, or
unless the author were a rich man who played his cards judiciously with
the reviewers. As for the prophets—we know what appears to have been the
opinion formed concerning them by those who should have been best
acquainted with them; I am no judge as to the merits of the controversy
between them and their fellow-countrymen, but I have read their works and
am of opinion that they will not hold their own against such masterpieces
of modern literature as, we will say, _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson
Crusoe_, _Gulliver’s Travels_ or _Tom Jones_. “Whether there be
prophecies,” exclaims the Apostle, “they shall fail.” On the whole I
should say that Isaiah and Jeremiah must be held to have failed.
I would join issue with Mr. Matthew Arnold on yet another point. I
understand him to imply that righteousness should be a man’s highest aim
in life. I do not like setting up righteousness, nor yet anything else,
as the highest aim in life; a man should have any number of little aims
about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names,
but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the
main aim of his life. Whatever we do we must try and do it rightly—this
is obvious—but righteousness implies something much more than this: it
conveys to our minds not only the desire to get whatever we have taken in
hand as nearly right as possible, but also the general reference of our
lives to the supposed will of an unseen but supreme power. Granted that
there is such a power, and granted that we should obey its will, we are
the more likely to do this the less we concern ourselves about the matter
and the more we confine our attention to the things immediately round
about us which seem, so to speak, entrusted to us as the natural and
legitimate sphere of our activity. I believe a man will get the most
useful information on these matters from modern European sources; next to
these he will get most from Athens and ancient Rome. Mr. Matthew Arnold
notwithstanding, I do not think he will get anything from Jerusalem which
he will not find better and more easily elsewhere. [1883.]