outdone, almost totally eclipsed in this respect, too, by men. Men are
the real, rapid-transit champion gossips and talkers of the world. It
was a dark and dismal night, as the story goes, and we all sat around
the fire and the captain said, 'Jack, tell us a story,' and Jack told a
number of stories, and so did others, and we all told of divers
devilish, wicked things our friends had done, and in our heart of hearts
were awfully sorry we did not do these things ourselves, and we made
mud-cakes out of good, well-preserved reputations. Oh, how well we can
and how we do talk about our neighbors; but you know, people do like to
talk about those whom they love. Marie Corelli recently said--now do not
scowl because I quote Marie Corelli. She is a very good woman; only she
could not resist the temptation to write a few novels, and they may not
be so bad, only I could never get myself to read them because I heard
that Queen Victoria liked them immensely. Hold on, though; I guess I did
read one of these novels in a Yiddish translation; but that was because
the translator did not say whose work it was. I think he thought it was
original with himself. In fact, he passed it off as his own--which was a
brave thing to do, though the book proved to be popular. But I lost my
train of thought. Marie Corelli recently said that she never endured
such a babel of gossiping tongues as she once heard when being
entertained to luncheon at a men's club, and she added, 'nor have I
known many more reputations picked to pieces than on that occasion.' But
a recent writer told us what awful gossips all the historians have been,
and they were all men. We were told that Herodotus, who is the father of
history, was also one of the most inveterate of gossips. Saint Simon was
considered essentially a gossip, and even therefore a wonderful
historian of the time of Louis XV. Pepys, this writer told us, was the
greatest gossip that ever lived, also the greatest historian of his
time. Even Mommsen, we were told, shows some of the traits of a gossip
in his monumental history of Rome. The same was said of Gibbon and many
others. Gossip is not only the raw material of history, we were
informed, but it is also the raw material of the realistic novel, and as
I said before, the finest novels have been produced by the sons of Adam.
"Women are also charged with being loquacious, but that is another
trumped-up, false charge. You well know that the loquaciousness of men
is prodigious, tremendous. Man is the most wonderful talking machine
ever invented, and one of his favorite topics is the talkativeness of
woman. Men talk you to mental derangement and death wherever you go.
There is no escape. Nearly every man you meet is ready to tell you the
sad story of his life--sad, because he is ready to tell it. Many of them
write their autobiographies, and what with these and their sermons and
orations, novels and essays, histories and philosophies--there will soon
be no more room for libraries. And the worst thing about man's garrulity
is that he taxes the intellect so heavily, that what he says is loaded
with so much meaning. Anything a man says, you know, is in danger of
becoming literature. It's appalling. He always makes you think, whereas
what little a woman does say is so light and airy, breezy and restive. A
woman, too, writes a book, occasionally, but she does not mean anything
by it.
"But men are so very bad in this respect, so terribly blatant. They
never cease talking. When they don't talk they write, and the pen is
worse than the sword. Why am I afraid to ask the man, who stands near me
waiting for a car, what time it is? Because he might tell me of his
grandfather's heroic exploits in the Civil War. To have gone to war was
cruel; but to have left some one behind to boast of it was criminal. Why
am I afraid to read the latest short story that I have written to my
friend? Because he might show me a poem just done. And I nearly forgot
to point out what a monumental proof of naïve garrulity the Talmud is.
The Talmud, that strange conglomeration of law, love, legend, gossip,
fable, and occasionally a bit of wisdom, which one can find if one
searches diligently.
"They say also that women are capricious and changeful; but the progress
of the world shows how easily men change their minds. Yes, someone ought
to write an essay and point these things out, and vindicate a
much-maligned sex. It's a good chance for a man for some interesting
gossip on the subject."
"I suppose, then, that you believe in woman's rights," I at length
haphazarded an interruption.
"Yes," answered Keidansky, "I believe that women should have all their
rights, and should not, as the French cynic would have it, be killed at
forty. It's too late. I mean," he added quickly, "that it's too late to
talk any more about it."
IX
The Value of Ignorance
"What do I know? I don't know anything," said Keidansky, "and I don't
care to."
"I thought you were always in quest of knowledge," I remarked.
"I am," he answered: "I am infatuated with the quest, I love it. It is
so exhilarating, stirring, full of excitement and fraught with danger."
"Danger? Wherein is that?" I asked.
"The danger," he emphasized, "is in finding the knowledge I am in quest
of; for once your search has been answered with success, and you have
informed yourself with the facts of the case, the game is up and the fun
is over, as the Americans say. The hallucination of the glorious quest
is shattered, the suspense is spoiled, the ecstatic expectations are
destroyed, and we become fit subjects for illustrations in the
_Fliegende Blätter_. 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing' and a lot
of it is fatal. Yes, knowledge is might, but illusion is omnipotence. So
I like to seek information well enough, but I would rather not know."
I became interested, although scandalized, and my companion kept on
musing aloud.
"Not to know is to hope, to fear, to be in delightful uncertainty, to
dream fair dreams, to imagine the most impossible things, to wonder and
marvel at all in childlike innocence, to build the most beautiful
castles in the air, to give the imagination full swing, to conjure up
the most fantastic mythological melodramas, to stand with deep awe and
inspired reverence before all the mighty manifestations of nature, to
form the finest idols, to build splendid religions, to have faith and to
foster it, to see the invisible, to draw gorgeous rainbows of promise
upon the horizon of life, in a word, not to know is to sustain perfect
illusion, not to go behind the scenes, is to enjoy the entire
performance.
"On the other hand, my dear fellow, to know is to have your wings
clipped, to see the distance between the earth and the skies and the
difference between you and what you thought yourself to be, to feel your
littleness and become dreadfully aware of the absurdity of it all, to
have the imagination arrested for trespassing, to be rejected from the
castles you built for non-payment of taxes, to be punished for the
idleness of your idols, to see your little demigods crumble at the rate
of sixteen a minute, to become aware of the futility of the whole
business, the shortness of terms given you, the unstability of your
credit, to find that you are but a feather blown hither and thither by
the whirlwind of the world, that your greatest plan may be demolished by
a whim of fate, to learn that the stupid moon really does not look so
pale because of your unrequited love, and that the great sun does not
shine because you are going to a picnic, to discover that your
credulity was the only miracle that ever happened, and that even gods
suffer from dyspepsia, to lose faith, become sceptic, abandon religion,
move out of the balmy fairyland of tradition and freeze in the realms of
right reason. To know is to be deprived even of that little confidence
in your power to alter the course of the universe; to recognize how
inexorable, inscrutable, indifferent, the powers of life are, and what a
common pedigree all things of beauty have; it is to have the dramatic
effect of the play spoiled and to vote it all a farce and a failure.
"We are all becoming so educated now-a-days that we no longer know the
value of ignorance, and we have nearly forgotten things of goodness and
of beauty that it has brought into the world. Ignorance is the mazy mist
of morning in which so much is born; it is the mystic dimness wherein
all things awe and enchant forever. Ignorance is the beginning of the
world; knowledge is the end of it. In the unexplored vastnesses of
ignorance the mind soars through all the heavens and works wonders; in
the measured spheres of knowledge the mind travels carefully and creates
little as far as mythology, theology, religion and poetry are concerned.
Were it not for ignorance we would not have had all the wealth of
legends and fables and fairy tales and sagas and _märchen_, strange,
weird, wonderful, to intoxicate the imagination of the world and enable
us to live for centuries in lands of magic and charm and dreamlike
realities. And if you see some works of beauty and nobility in the world
to delight you, it is because we have just come out of these lands, and
we are imitating and re-creating what we saw there. There are some who
still dwell in them, and they send us messages and often bless us with
their visits.
"Thank you for stopping me. I should not have liked to be run over
before you had listened to the rest of my argument; besides, it makes a
mess of one. This is a dangerous crossing--for a debate. But, to
continue: Were it not for ignorance--had we known everything about
God--Europe would not be dotted with all the beautiful cathedrals and
the wonderful treasures of art that are an everlasting source of
enchantment and inspiration. Were it not for the same reason we would
not have such a beauty spot in Boston as Copley square, with its two
imposing churches, Library and Museum of Art. And remembering that all
objects to delight the eye, the ear and the mind began at the earliest
shrines of worship, we can barely calculate how poor and meagre all our
arts would have been were it not for this ignorance. What would
poetry--in the largest sense--what would it be were it not for this
ignorance concerning Providence? And poetry is the main motive, the
quintessence of all the other arts. Religion is the great question mark
of the world, and what you ask for religion I ask for ignorance. Whether
the makers of the Bible wrote on space or not, no one can deny its high
value as a work of poetry and fiction; and as much can be said for all
the other sacred books of the great faiths.
"The mood of ignorance is worth everything: it is wonder, amazement,
naïveté, child-like innocence, fairy-like dreaminess.
"In ignorance we trust, trusting we serve, serving we achieve, achieving
we glorify our names. Not to know is to long for, to expect
everything--and work for it; while to know is to be sure of this or
that, and there is something significant in the coupling of the words,
'dead sure.' 'Tis good to have faith; what we believe in is or comes
true. The illusion is the thing that makes the play. We are all chasing
after phantoms, but the chase is a reality, and it's all in all. The
less we know about the results--perhaps the more we do. And not knowing
how incapable we are, some of us do remarkable things.
"A Jewish legend tells us that before the human soul is doomed to be
born it knows everything, is informed of all knowledge--including, I
presume, a knowledge of the Talmudic laws of marriage and divorce--but
that at its birth an angel appears, gives the child a _schnel in noz_,
or tap on the nose, which causes the infant to forget everything it
knows so that it may be born absolutely ignorant. That is a good angel,
I say, who performs a good office, and not like the rest of them, who,
according to John Hay, are loafing around the throne. Here is a useful
angel. For to give the child its ignorance is to confer a great boon; to
make it capable of something in life. It is a valuable gift, though
earthly creatures soon spoil the good work of the angel and stuff the
child's head full of all sorts of useless knowledge. Soon the mind is
clogged, the faculties for thinking, wondering, understanding are turned
into a phonographic apparatus for remembering what should never have
been learned, and the imagination is nipped in the bud, told to be
correct and keep still. With all my inability to learn and
disinclination to know, there are still a few things I have been trying
to forget all my life, but I cannot do it. At the point of a cane my
rabbi drove these things into my head. So if I ever impart any
information to you, forgive me for I cannot forget. Here in America and
in modernity, where superstition is such that people actually believe in
the existence of facts, the schools and colleges form tremendous systems
of stupefaction. Poor little heads of innocent children are packed,
cramped and crowded with dates and names and all sorts of insignificant
data. They teach them everything--except what interests them, and they
are made to repeat and to remember all things dry and dull and dreary.
'Facts, facts, facts,' the teachers cry, not knowing that there are no
facts in real life. Minds are measured, ideas must be of a certain size,
you must think but one thought at a time and remember all things in
history that never happened. Thus, fancy, whim, suggestion, imagination
are sadly neglected, and the finest faculties are left behind. Everybody
knows everything, but no one understands anything.
"'Tis so with people generally--they are all clamoring for what they
call facts, explaining things after fixed formulas, making the most
astonishing, dead-sure statements; in short, spreading useful knowledge.
They all have ideas and theories and philosophies after a fashion; they
have sized this universe up, past, present and future, and they can
explain everything except themselves. Everybody has found a few 'facts,'
and after these fashioned a universal panacea, a little patented plan
for solving the social problem. There are so many solutions that it is
hard to find just what the problem is. Reform is so much in style that
even a corn doctor proclaims himself a social saviour. The social
reformers with their sure cures, positive facts and all-saving systems
are the plague of the age. There is no escape from these things they
call certain and positive and indisputable. Figures and statistics and
so-called facts make up the sum of our life. Life is harnessed by
systems and we are strangled by statistics. The subtle, the strange, the
symbolic, the suggestive, the intuitive, the poetic and imaginative, the
flash-lights that make you see eternity in a moment--these are
overlooked and neglected. The things really true are forgotten. What is
that Persian legend about the man who devoted his life to planting and
rearing and raising the tree of knowledge in his garden, and
afterwards, in his old age, was hanged thereon? What? There is no such
Persian legend? Well, then, some Englishman ought to write it. At any
rate this shows the value of knowledge. The fruit of the tree of
knowledge is now sweet, now bitter--but mostly bitter. We analyze and
examine so much these days that we find within ourselves and in our
surroundings the symptoms of all diseases and all evil. To quote a
quaint but true Zangwillism, 'Analysis is paralysis, introspection is
vivisection, and culture drives us mad.' We measure things so closely
and leave no room for the surprising, the spontaneous, the freely
flowing, the lifelike. The age of reason has come and we are no longer
wise. We have forgotten what we owe to ignorance. 'He knows everything,'
said the doctor; 'there is no hope for him.'
"In their ignorance of human nature and natural law idealists have
dreamed and created the most unattainable Utopias, and their impossible
visions shaped our destiny and made us great. The stirring speech that
Lametkin delivered this evening is partly due to his ignorance of things
and his blind faith in his panacea, but it enthused his audience
immensely, and it will have a wonderful effect upon their lives. The
other day I read some beautiful lines by Owen Meredith about the child
who cries 'to clutch the star that shines in splendor over his little
cot.' The matter-of-fact father says that it is folly, that it is
millions of miles away, and that 'the star descends not to twinkle on
the little one's bed.' But the mother tenderly tells the child to sleep
and promises to pluck the star for it and by-and-by
'_Lay it upon the pillow bright with dew_,'
and then the child sleeps and dreams of stars whose light
'_Beams in his own bright eyes when he awakes_.'
"Now in these lines one may find justification for all the idealizations
of art, but they are also suggestive of the value of ignorance. So it
is. We must learn to see the invisible. We must be oblivious to the
obvious, to see anything. We ought not to try to clear up everything. If
life were not a problem play it would not interest us so. Let the
mystery remain. Intimations of immortality are good enough; proofs would
kill our longing for it. Whence? Whither? I rather hope these questions
will never be answered. The halo, the maze, the mystery, the shadowy
strangeness of it all makes it worth while and gives the fancy freedom
to fly. Statistics sterilize the imagination and figures dry up our
souls. Do you remember Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learned Astronomers?'
The lecturer with his charts and diagrams soon made him unaccountably
sick, till rising and gliding out of the lecture room he wandered off by
himself 'in the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time looked
up in perfect silence at the stars,' and thus became himself again.
"Let others seek what they call facts: for me the lights and the shades,
the dimness and the flash, the chiaroscuro of life. Let others pierce
through phenomena and impregnate realities; my favorite amusement is to
walk upon the clouds and play ball with the stars. I cannot grasp such
details as the size of the earth, the distance between sun and moon.
Logic? Lockjaw. Go study your astronomy and let me lie on my back in
some verdant field and gaze upon the stars, and I shall be content. Let
others study botany, give me but the fragrance of the blooms and flowers
and let me gaze upon their gorgeous riots of color. For others the study
of anatomy, for me the beauty of the human form to behold. Let others
study ornithology, and let me listen to the thrilling music of the
winged songsters. Take all the sciences that explain everything away,
and give me the things beautiful to behold, sweet to hear and pleasing
to touch. And before you run away let me also tell you that there is a
mood of contemplation which, for comprehension, passeth all science and
analysis.
"But, after all," he added, as we were about to part, "I could only hint
at these things, for it takes a very learned man to prove the value of
ignorance."
X
Days of Atonement
All day the Ghetto was astir. There was a babel of excitement at the
markets, an unusual rush and bustle on Allen street. The stores were
well filled with bargaining, buying men and women, and the push-cart
vendors were centres of attracted crowds. Everywhere housewives were
busy washing, clearing, cleaning their homes. The spirit of awe,
reverence, expectancy, was in the air. The great day of Rosh Hashona was
approaching; New Year's day was drawing nigh.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of Berosowsky's book and periodical
emporium, the strange place where you can procure anything from Bernard
Feigenbaum's pamphlets against religion, to a pair of phylacteries, from
Tolstoy's works in Yiddish to a holy scroll. We stood and gazed on the
familiar yet fascinating scene. We had just left the store, wherein we
glanced through the current newspapers and other publications. "It is so
stupid to read. Let's go out and look at the people," Keidansky
exclaimed abruptly as he threw down a eulogy of a Yiddish poet written
by himself, in the paper of which he is now editor.
Not far off was heard the short, shrill sound of the ram's horn. It was
the "bal tkio," the official synagogue trumpeter practising for the
nearing ominous days. Hard by, a cantor and his choir of sweet voices
were rehearsing the quaint hymns and prayers of the great fast, singing
the strange, tearful, traditional melodies that have never been written,
and yet have come down from generation to generation for hundreds of
years; the weird musical wailings, the tunes of the cheerless chants,
charged with the sighs, groans and laments of centuries of sufferings,
flooded the noisy street, mingled with the harsh cries of the hucksters,
and were lost in the general buzz and roar of the crowded district.
"The days of awe and of atonement are upon us," said Keidansky, "and
these evocative, awakening voices are drawing, drawing me back to the
synagogue, back to the days of childhood, faith, hope, ignorance,
innocence, peace, and plenty of sleep. A broken note of old music, then
a flood of memories, a sway of feeling, and no matter what I have, or
have not been, I am again as pious and penitent, and as passionately
religious, as I was when a child in the most God-fearing Ghetto in the
world.
"Did you say something about free thought, the higher criticism,
universal religion, about the law of evolution applied to religion,
about all creeds being equally true and equally false? Did you talk to
me about these things?
"Well, a scrap of Yom Kippur melody and the faith of my fathers is my
faith. Our instincts destroy our philosophies. 'Our feelings and
affections are wiser than we are!' The old is preserved for our
self-preservation. The new is destructive, bewildering. The old is
often worth deserting, yet it is bred in the bone; it is comforting and
consoling and easy to live up to. The new is bewitching, but baneful; it
breeds discontent, ennui, we can hardly ever live up to it. Blessed are
those who live in the world they were born into. They are also damned,
but that's not in their time.
"Tradition," Keidansky continued musing aloud, "is far more beautiful
than history, and even nature with all her charms has to be improved
upon by art, by illusion. In the course of time science may build up
some interesting superstitions, but meanwhile it is our poor debtor. It
has filled the world with cold facts. It has emptied the heart of its
fond fancies. And what do we really know, after all? The greatest
philosopher of the age pauses and stands nonplussed before the
Unknowable. The densest ignoramus in the world knows it all; knows all
about the worlds beneath and beyond--their climates, inhabitants,
populations, moral status, tortures and pleasures. What do we know,
anyway? Next to nothing, and we feel lonely and desolate and powerless
after we have had everything explained to us. Orthodoxy, at least, gives
us the consciousness of having some control in the universe; it gives us
a sense of shelter and of safety. We know we have a kind of vote in the
general management of things. We can accomplish something by our
prayers, by fasting. And when the fearful days come, the days in which
the destiny of every mortal for the coming year is determined on high,
we ask for atonement, and fast and pour out our griefs in mournful
prayers and burn candles for the dead. Our voices are heard on high,
because we believe they are, and our names are entered in the Book of
Life for another year. Do not smile now, nor look so wise. All that is,
is well, and whatever we believe in is true. The greatest sacrifice we
made to science was our ignorance.