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 Bagdad. Goodwives in the little mediaeval 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 gradeur'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 Dore 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.