There are some people who maintain the Wandering Jew to be a myth. I
believe the contrary--that he exists amongst us, and that he is known to
men as Dr. Wolff. I hope the Hon. Mrs. Norton will make a note of this.
It is a fact of which she ought to be aware, as should Dr. Croly, and
especially Dumas, otherwise his wondrous tale will be incomplete. Yes,
Dr. Wolff is the Wandering Jew--not the melancholy personage of the poet
and the novelist, but a fat jolly Jew, for whom 'the law having a shadow
of good things to come' has ceased to exist, and to whom, if I may
imagine by his portly presence and unctuous face, the good things have
already come. We may look long ere we see in his countenance
'the settled gloom
The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,
That dared not look beyond the tomb,
That might not hope for peace before.'
On the contrary, all seems peace within and without, so far as Dr. Wolff
is concerned. Had he any inward sorrow, had he been borne down by its
agony, had the accents of despair been ever on his lip, and its terror
ever glancing from his eye, he would have been a very different man.
Nevertheless, the Dr. is the Wandering Jew, but in reality, and not in
romance; he becomes a Christian, marries a lady of title, and becomes a
clergyman of the English Church. Nominally, he is not of the London
Pulpit. He has a local habitation and a name, but he is of no place. He
is of an unsettled race. I have no doubt but that he preaches as much
out of his own church as in it, and that he has as much right to be
included in the London Pulpit as in any other. At this time his voice is
often heard in London. It really is surprising that the Bishop, or some
admiring friend, such as Mr. Henry Drummond, has never given him a
metropolitan charge, or built him a chapel somewhere in the vicinity of
the Clapham sect. One would have thought he would have done as well, at
any rate, as Mr. Ridley Herschell, than whom he is a great deal more
interesting, and not half so heavy. What is the Society for Promoting
Christianity among the Jews about? What is Exeter Hall thinking of? Is
Dr. Wolff too fat for sentiment? Must female youthful piety lavish its
tenderness on a younger man? Does a converted Jew cease to be
interesting, the same as common Evangelical curates, when their hair gets
grey or their heads bald? Must a converted Jew, too, lose his charms as
he gains flesh, as any ordinary Adonis of pious tea-tables? Alas! alas!
I fear these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. Woman is
woman everywhere,
'As fickle as the shade,
By the light quivering aspen made'--
in cave Adullam, or in the select Christian Society of Camberwell--as in
the theatre or the ball-room, or, as Mr. Bunn would say, in halls of
dazzling light. I stop not to moralize over the bitter fact. I merely
lament it; and if I deduce a moral, it shall soon be told. It would be
but to bid the male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting
popularity--a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin,
or the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable
fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white
hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak
oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others,
divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers
shall be worked by fairy hands. Every dog has his day.
On his legs, whether on the platform or in the pulpit, Dr. Wolff is one
of the extraordinary men of our time. In shape he is somewhat of a tub.
Wrap it up in black cloth, put on it a big head with a fat face, let that
face have small eyes, a slightly Jewish nose, and be of a light
complection, jolly and sensual, and you have Dr. Wolff. To complete the
picture, let the figure have a Bible in his right hand, and let him read
from it incessantly with a foreign pronunciation, but with a musical
voice. As a preacher or a lecturer the Doctor is but an indifferent
model. He gets off the rail as soon as he starts. He gives you a
heterogeneous mass of raw material, gathered in every country under
heaven. He talks of Bokhara as familiarly as we do of the Bank; he is as
much at home in Palestine as we in Piccadilly. He begins a sentence with
'As I was last in Abyssinia,' as we should say, 'When we were last in
Chancery-lane;' or he says, 'As I was smoking with the Schah of Persia,'
as we should speak of smoking a quiet pipe with Smithers of the Strand;
and then he loses himself, shouts as if he were a war-horse going into
battle--bursts out into unknown tongues--sings Hebrew melodies in what
the distracted Puritan calls 'the blessed tongue of Canaan,' and has a
wild look in his eye as if he were speaking to his own people by the
silent waters and ruined temples of Babel, and not in a Christian church
and speaking to Christian men. The Doctor is a rhapsodist, not a
lecturer. He belongs to the men who have died out amongst us, to the
bards and scalds of ancient days. He is out of place amidst the
conventional proprieties and ecclesiastical decorums of the modern
church, and especially in that section of it which in this country is
honoured with State patronage and pay. I wonder how Dr. Wolff ever could
have become a clergyman--or ever settled down. Was it Lady Georgiana
that produced the wondrous change, that tamed the rover of the desert,
and turned him into a husband and a rector? It is wonderful what woman
can do, yet even woman cannot accomplish everything. She cannot make the
Doctor get into a pulpit and preach a sober sermon in a sober way. She
cannot alter his wild and eccentric nature, which makes him an original,
almost a mountebank, which in another man would be intolerable. I must
candidly confess that with one or two exceptions no public man ventures
so near the verge of absurdity as Dr. Wolff.
My own opinion is, that the Doctor, as I have already stated, is the
Wandering Jew. It is only fair, however, to give facts which would lead
the reader to an opposite opinion. The Doctor tells us himself he was
born in 1796, in a little village in Bavaria, at which place his father
was a Rabbi. At an early age, long before the reasoning power was
developed, or before he had sufficient information to justify him in
taking the step, he renounced the religion of his fathers, and set up for
himself as a Roman Catholic. After wandering about the country, at times
working for a living, and at times subsisting on the charity of friends,
he made his way to Rome, and became a student, first at the Seminario
Pontifico, then at the Propaganda. The Doctor seems to have stumbled at
the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility, and to have been compelled to
leave in consequence, and tries to make out a case of hardship in his
dismissal. He says he was dismissed without a fair hearing. It does not
seem so. In writing to his friends, he had said he would always be an
enemy to the anti-Christian tyranny of Rome. No wonder then that Rome
dismissed him. After wandering about the Continent, and learning to read
and speak French as he rode on the rumble of Mr. Haldane's carriage from
Montauban to Calais, he arrived in London in June, 1819, and became
London Agent to the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.
In order that he might be better fitted for his work, he spent some time
at Cambridge under the care of the late Dr. Lee. His journeyings and
perils have been great. He has been sold as a slave thrice, condemned to
death thrice. He has been attacked with cholera and typhus fever, and
almost every Asiatic fever. He has been bastinadoed and starved. He has
been carried away by pirates. For eighteen years he has traversed the
most barbarous countries of the world, and yet he looks as if he had
never known a sorrow or gone without a dinner in his life. He thus sums
up his labours:--'I began in 1821, and accomplished in 1826, my
missionary labours among the dispersed of my people in Palestine, Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Persia, Crimea, Georgia, and the Ottoman Empire. My next
labours among my brethren were in England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland,
and the Mediterranean, from 1826 to 1830. I then proceeded to Turkey,
Persia, Turkistaun, Bokhara, Affghanistan, Cashmere, Hindostan, and the
Red Sea, from 1831 to 1834.' In 1835 the Doctor left England for a
Missionary tour in Abyssinia--thence for Bombay--thence for the United
States. In June 1838 he received priest's orders from the Bishop of
Dromore, and became curate of Linthwaite, near Huddersfield, where he had
the princely income of 24 pounds a-year--thence he moved in 1840 to the
curacy of High Ryland, near Wakefield. In 1843, at the desire of the
Stoddard and Conolly Committee, he undertook to ascertain the fate of
those officers, and entered Cabul, where again he was in danger of death,
but saved by the friendly power of Persia. He is now rector of the Isle
of Brewers, Somersetshire, but has been recently in London, lecturing and
preaching. Hence his parishioners see but little of him. He is here and
there and everywhere. The Doctor should never have settled, or if he did
settle it should have been in London, where there is something fresh, and
wonderful, and stirring every day.
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