Israelites have a God, who is very powerful but also very jealous. He
has always helped them in the time of need if they held near to him and
did not worship strange gods; for this his jealousy will not bear. When
they do this he forsakes them. But thou, O King, hast taken their
silver and gold and jewels, but hast let them keep the God who gives it
all back to them. They know this; and so they smile at thee, and await
that thou shalt be thrown into the dust by him, and they will arise his
avengers, and persecute thy men."
The King paled; he remembered his loss in Egypt, and he feared that if
the enemy pursued him he should find help in Israel; and he said, "What
ought we to do?"
Assar replied: "If thou wilt permit thy servant to utter his humble
advice, thou shouldst use severity and forbid their praying to the God
they call Jehovah, and order them to pray to thy gods."
The King's adviser looked at Assar and asked, "Hast thou offered up
sacrifice to our gods?"
Assar replied, "I am ready."
They led him to the altar, and on the way thither Assar said:--"Lord,
all-powerful God! Thou who seest the heart and not alone the deeds of
the hand, be my witness! It is written: 'And it shall happen in that
same hour that I shall wipe out the name of idols out of the land, and
they shall be remembered no more, and the unclean spirit shall I cause
to depart from the country.' Do thou according to thy word, O Lord!
Amen!"
When the sacrifice was brought, Assar was dressed in festive robes on
the word of the King, and a place was given him among the King's
friends, and orders were sent out throughout the country, according to
what he had said.
And to Modin too came the King's messenger; and when the rabbi heard of
it, he went with his five sons to the large prayer-house, and read
maledictions over those who worshiped idols and blessings over those who
were faithful to Jehovah. And those who were present noticed that the
rabbi's eldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, carried a sword under his mantle.
And when they came out of the prayer-house they saw that a heathen altar
had been built, and there was a Jew making his sacrifice; and when Rabbi
Mattathew saw this, he hastened to the spot and seized the knife of
sacrifice and thrust it into the Jew's breast. The centurion who stood
by, and who was the same that had previously talked to Mirjam the
rabbi's daughter at the brook, would kill the rabbi; but Judas Maccabaeus
drew his sword quickly, and struck the centurion in the throat and
killed him. Then the King's men gathered; but the street was narrow,
and Judas Maccabaeus went last and shielded all, until the night came and
they had got their women together and could flee to the mountains. And
then began the fight of the men of Juda against the Macedonians, the
Greeks, and the Assyrians, and they killed those of the King's men who
pursued them into the mountains.
Then King Antiochus the temple-robber said to Assar, "This is thy
advice!" to which Assar replied: "No, King; this is the advice of thy
warriors, since they allow the rebels to escape and do not treat them
without mercy. For this know, O King, that so long as thou art merciful
to this people there is no hope."
Then there were issued strict orders to torture and kill all who refused
to obey the King's command; and all those in Israel in whom Jehovah was
still living rose to fight with Mattathew and his sons, and men and
women, yea, children even, were moved to suffer death for the Lord and
his law.
But at this time it happened that King Antiochus the temple-destroyer
was visited by his shameful disease, and he sent messengers with rich
gifts to all oracles and temples to seek help; but they could find none.
Then he said to Assar, "Thou saidst once that the God of Israel was a
mighty God; could not _he_ cure me of my disease?"
Assar replied: "I have indeed heard from my childhood that the God of
Israel is a mighty God; but O King, thou wilt not give in to that hard
people and make peace with their God?"
The King answered, "I must live! How can he be pacified?"
Assar said, "It is too heavy a sacrifice for so great a king as thee.
Their wise men assert that God has given them the country for a
possession, and it would be necessary for thee not only to allow them to
worship their God, but also to call back thy men and make a covenant
with them so that they should merely pay a tribute to thee. But this is
more than I can advise."
The King answered, "Much does a man give for his life. Dost thou believe
that he is a great God?"
"I have seen a great proof of it, lord."
"What is that?"
"This: that even a greatness like thine was as nothing to his."
"It is not a dishonor to be smaller than the Immortals. Go and prepare
all, according to what we have spoken."
Then Assar prepared all and had the King's men called back, and promised
the inhabitants peace and led the King on his way to Jerusalem; and they
passed by Modin.
And the King's sufferings being very great, he had himself carried into
the house of prayers, before the holy, and he prayed to the God of
Israel. And the men of Juda stood around him; they stood high and he lay
low, and they had saved their souls.
But when the King was carried out, one of the Maccabaean warriors
recognized Assar and cried out, "Thou hast offered up sacrifices to
idols, and from thee have come the evil counsels which have cost
precious blood! Thou shalt be wiped off the earth!"
He drew his sword and aimed at him, but Mirjam, who had come up, threw
herself between them with the cry, "He called forth Israel's God!" And
the steel which was meant for him pierced her.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
by Olga Flinch.
[Illustration: O. GOLDSMITH.]
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
(1728-1774)
BY CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY
Oliver Goldsmith was born at Pallas, County Longford, Ireland, November
10th, 1728. That was the year in which Pope issued his 'Dunciad,' Gay
his 'Beggar's Opera,' and Thomson his 'Spring.' Goldsmith's father was a
clergyman of the Established Church. In 1730 the family removed to
Lissoy, a better living than that of Pallas. Oliver's school days in and
around Westmeath were unsatisfactory; so also his course at Trinity,
1744 to 1749. For the next two years he loafed at Ballymahon, living on
his mother, then a widow, and making vain attempts to take orders, to
teach, to enter a law course, to sail for America. He was a bad
sixpence. Finally his uncle Contarine, who saw good stuff in the
awkward, ugly, humorous, and reckless youth, got him off to Edinburgh,
where he studied medicine till 1754.
In 1754 he is studying, or pretending to study, at Leyden. In 1755 and
1756 he is singing, fluting, and otherwise "beating" his way through
Europe, whence he returns with a mythical M. B. degree. From 1756 to
1759 he is in London, teaching, serving an apothecary, practicing
medicine, reading proof, writing as a hack, planning to practice surgery
in Coromandel, failing to qualify as a hospital mate, and in general
only not starving. In 1759 Dr. Percy finds him in Green Arbor Court amid
a colony of washerwomen, writing an 'Enquiry into the Present State of
Polite Learning in Europe.' Next follows the appearance of that work,
and his acquaintance with publishers and men of letters. In 1761, with
Percy, comes Johnson to visit him. In 1764 Goldsmith is one of the
members of the famous Literary Club, where he counts among his friends,
besides Percy and Johnson, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Burke, and others
who shone with their own or reflected light. The rest of his life, spent
principally in or near London, is associated with his literary career.
He died April 4th, 1774, and was buried near the Temple Church.
Goldsmith was an essayist and critic, a story-writer, a poet, a comic
dramatist, and a literary drudge: the last all the time, the others
"between whiles." His drudgery produced such works as the 'Memoirs of
Voltaire,' the 'Life of Nash,' two Histories of England, Histories of
Rome and Greece, Lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke. The 'History of
Animated Nature' was undertaken as an industry, but it reads, as Johnson
said, "like a Persian tale,"--and of course, the more Persian the less
like nature. For the prose of Goldsmith writing for a suit of clothes or
for immortality is all of a piece, inimitable. "Nothing," says he, in
his 'Essay on Taste,' "has been so often explained, and yet so little
understood, as simplicity in writing.... It is no other than beautiful
nature, without affectation or extraneous ornament."
This ingenuous elegance is the accent of Goldsmith's work in verse and
prose. It is nature improved, not from without but by exquisite and
esoteric art, the better to prove its innate virtue and display its
artless charm. Such a style is based upon a delicate "sensibility to the
graces of natural and moral beauty and decorum." Hence the ideographic
power, the directness, the sympathy, the lambent humor that characterize
the 'Essays,' the 'Vicar,' the 'Deserted Village,' and 'She Stoops to
Conquer.' This is the "plain language of ancient faith and sincerity"
that, pretending to no novelty, renovated the prose of the eighteenth
century, knocked the stilts from under Addison and Steele, tipped half
the Latinity out of Johnson, and readjusted his ballast. Goldsmith goes
without sprawling or tiptoeing; he sails without rolling. He borrows the
carelessness but not the ostentation of the Spectator; the dignity but
not the ponderosity of 'Rasselas'; and produces the prose of natural
ease, the sweetest English of the century. It in turn prefaced the way
for Charles Lamb, Hunt, and Sydney Smith. "It were to be wished that we
no longer found pleasure with the inflated style," writes Goldsmith in
his 'Polite Learning.' "We should dispense with loaded epithet and
dressing up trifles with dignity.... Let us, instead of writing finely,
try to write naturally; not hunt after lofty expressions to deliver mean
ideas, nor be forever gaping when we only mean to deliver a whisper."
Just this naturalness constitutes the charm of the essay on 'The Bee'
(1759), and of the essays collected in 1765. We do not read him for
information: whether he knows more or less of his subject, whether he
writes of Charles XII., or Dress, The Opera, Poetry, or Education, we
read him for simplicity and humor. Still, his critical estimates, while
they may not always square with ours, evince not only good sense and
aesthetic principle, but a range of reading not at all ordinary. When he
condemns Hamlet's great soliloquy we may smile, but in judicial respect
for the father of our drama he yields to none of his contemporaries. The
selections that he includes in his 'Beauties of English Poetry' would
argue a conventional taste; but in his 'Essay on Poetry Distinguished
from the Other Arts,' he not only defines poetry in terms that might
content the Wordsworthians, he also to a certain extent anticipates
Wordsworth's estimate of poetic figures.
While he makes no violent breach with the classical school, he
prophesies the critical doctrine of the nineteenth century. He calls for
the "energetic language of simple nature, which is now grown into
disrepute." "If the production does not keep nature in view, it will be
destitute of truth and probability, without which the beauties of
imitation cannot subsist." Still he by no means falls into the quagmire
of realism. For, continues he, "if on the other hand the imitation is so
close as to be mistaken for nature, the pleasure will then cease,
because the [Greek: mimesis] or imitation, no longer appears."
Even when wrong, Goldsmith is generally half-way right; and this is
especially true of the critical judgments contained in his first
published book. The impudence of 'The Enquiry' (1759) is delicious. What
this young Irishman, fluting it through Europe some five years before,
had _not_ learned about the 'Condition of Polite Learning' in its
principal countries, might fill a ponderous folio. What he did learn,
eked out with harmless misstatement, flashes of inspiration, and a
clever argument to prove that criticism has always been the foe of
letters, managed to fill a respectable duodecimo, and brought him to the
notice of publishers and scholars.
The essay has catholicity, independence, and wit, and it carries itself
with whimsical ease. Every sentence steps out sprightly. Of the French
Encyclopedies: "Wits and dunces contribute their share, and Diderot as
well as Desmaretz are candidates for oblivion. The genius of the first
supplies the gale of favor, and the latter adds the useful ballast of
stupidity." Of the Germans: "They write through volumes, while they do
not think through a page.... Were angels to write books, they never
would write folios." And again: "If criticism could have improved the
taste of a people, the Germans would have been the most polite nation
alive." That settles the Encyclopedias and the Germans. So each
nationality is sententiously reviewed and dismissed with an epigram that
even to-day sounds not altogether unjust, rather amusing and urbane than
acrimonious.
But it was not until Goldsmith began the series of letters in the Public
Ledger (1760), that was afterwards published as 'The Citizen of the
World' that he took London. These letters purport to be from a
philosophic Chinaman in Europe to his friends at home. Grave, gay,
serene, ironical, they were at once an amusing image and a genial censor
of current manners and morals. They are no less creative than critical;
equally classic for the characters they contain: the Gentleman in Black,
Beau Tibbs and his wife, the pawnbroker's widow, Tim Syllabub, and the
procession of minor personages, romantic or ridiculous, but
unique,--equally classic for these characters and for the satire of the
conception. These are Goldsmith's best sketches. Though the prose is not
always precise, it seems to be clear, and is simple. The writer cares
more for the judicious than the sublime; for the quaint, the comic, and
the agreeable than the pathetic. He chuckles with sly laughter--genial,
sympathetic; he looses his arrow phosphorescent with wit, but not
barbed, dipped in something subacid,--straight for the heart. Not Irving
alone, but Thackeray, stands in line of descent from the Goldsmith of
the 'Citizen.'
'The Traveller,' polished _ad unguem_, appeared in 1764, and placed
Goldsmith in the first rank of poets then living; but of that later.
There is good reason for believing that his masterpiece in prose, 'The
Vicar of Wakefield,' had been written as early as 1762, although it was
not published until 1766. It made Goldsmith's mark as a storyteller. One
can readily imagine how, after the grim humor of Smollett, the broad and
_risque_ realism of Fielding, the loitering of Sterne, and the
moralizing of Richardson, the public would seize with a sense of relief
upon this unpretentious chronicle of a country clergyman's life: his
peaceful home, its ruin, its restoration. Not because the narrative was
quieter and simpler, shorter and more direct than other narratives, but
because to its humor, realism, grace, and depth it added the charity of
First Corinthians Thirteenth. England soon discovered that the borders
of the humanities had been extended; that the Vicar and his "durable"
wife, Moses, Olivia with the prenatal tendency to romance, Sophia, the
graceless Jenkinson,--the habit and temper of the whole,--were a new
province. The prose idyl, with all its beauty and charity, does not
entitle Goldsmith to rank with the great novelists; but of its kind, in
spite of faults of inaccuracy, improbability, and impossibility, it is
first and best. Goethe read and re-read it with moral and aesthetic
benefit; and the spirit of Goldsmith is not far to seek in 'Hermann and
Dorothea.' 'The Vicar' is perhaps the most popular of English classics
in foreign lands.
In poetry, if Goldsmith did not write much, it was for lack of
opportunity. What he did write is good, nearly all of it. The philosophy
of 'The Traveller' (1764) and the political economy of 'The Deserted
Village' (1770) may be dubious, but the poetry is true. There is in both
a heartiness which discards the formalized emotion, prefers the touch of
nature and the homely adjective. The characteristic is almost feminine
in the description of Auburn: "_Dear_ lovely bowers"; it is inevitable,
artless, in 'The Traveller': "His first, best country ever is at home."
But on the other hand, the _curiosa felicitas_ marks every line, the
nice selection of just the word or phrase richest in association,
redolent of tradition, harmonious, classically proper, but still
natural, true, and apt. "My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee"--not
a word but is hearty; and for all that, the line is stamped with the
academic authority of centuries: "Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans
mare currunt." Both poems are characterized by the infrequency of
epithet and figure,--the infrequency that marks sincerity and that
heightens pleasure,--and by a cunning in the use of proper names,
resonant, remote, suggestive: "On Idra's cliffs or Arno's shelvy
side,"--the cunning of a musical poem. Both poems vibrate with
personality, recall the experience of the writer. It would be hard to
choose between them; but 'The Deserted Village' strikes the homelier
chord, comes nearer, with its natural pathos, its sidelong smile, and
its perennial novelty, to the heart of him who knows.
Goldsmith is less eloquent but more natural than Dryden, less precise
but more simple than Pope. In poetic sensibility he has the advantage of
both. Were the volume of his verse not so slight, were his conceptions
more sublime, and their embodiment more epic or dramatic, he might rank
with the greatest of his century. As it is, in imaginative insight he
has no superior in the eighteenth century; in observation, pathos,
representative power, no equal: Dryden, Pope, Gray, Thomson,
Young,--none but Collins approaches him. The reflective or descriptive
poem can of course not compete with the drama, epic, or even lyric of
corresponding merit in its respective kind. But Goldsmith's poems are
the best of their kind, better than all but the best in other kinds. His
conception of life is more generous and direct, hence truer and gentler,
than that of the Augustan age. Raising no revolt against classical
principles, he rejects the artifices of decadent classicism, returns to
nature, and expresses _it_ simply. He is consequently in this respect
the harbinger of Cowper, Crabbe, Bloomfield, Clare, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge. In technique also he breaks away from Pope. His larger
movement, his easier modulation, his richer tone, his rarer epithet and
epigram, his metaphor "glowing from the heart," mark the defection from
the poetry of cold conceit.
For lack of space we can only refer to the romantic quality of his
ballad 'Edwin and Angelina' (1765), the spontaneous humor of 'The Haunch
of Venison,' and the exquisite satire of 'Retaliation' (1774).
To appreciate the historical position of Goldsmith's comedies, one must
regard them as a reaction against the school that had held the stage
since the beginning of the century--a "genteel" and "sentimental"
school, fearing to expose vice or ridicule absurdity. But Goldsmith felt
that absurdity was the comic poet's game. Reverting therefore to
Farquhar and the Comedy of Manners, he revived that species, at the same
time infusing a strain of the "humors" of the tribe of Ben. Hence the
approbation that welcomed his first comedy, and the applause that
greeted the second. For 'The Good-natured Man' (1768) and 'She Stoops to
Conquer' (1773) did by example what Hugh Kelly's 'Piety in Pattens'
aimed to do by ridicule,--ousted the hybrid comedy (tradesman's tragedy,
Voltaire called it) of which 'The Conscious Lovers' had been the most
tolerable specimen, and 'The School for Lovers' the most decorous and
dull.
But "Goldy" had not only the gift of weighing the times, he had the gift
of the popular dramatist. His _dramatis personae_ are on the one hand
nearly all legitimate descendants of the national comedy, though none is
a copy from dramatic predecessors; on the other hand, they are in every
instance "imitations" of real life, more than once of some aspect of his
own life; but none is so close an imitation as to detract from the
pleasure which fiction should afford. The former quality makes his
characters look familiar; the latter, true. So he accomplishes the feat
most difficult for the dramatist: while idealizing the individual in
order to realize the type, he does not for a moment lose the sympathy of
his audience.
Even in his earlier comedy these two characteristics are manifest. In
the world of drama, young Honeywood is the legitimate descendant of
Massinger's Wellborn on the one side, and of Congreve's Valentine Legend
on the other, with a more distant collateral resemblance to Ben Jonson's
Younger Knowell. But in the field of experience this "Good-natured Man"
is that aspect of "Goldy" himself which, when he was poorest, made him
not so poor but that Irishmen poorer still could live on him; that
aspect of the glorious "idiot in affairs" which could make to the Earl
of Northumberland, willing to be kind, no other suggestion of his wants
than that he had a _brother_ in Ireland, "poor, a clergyman, and much in
need of help." Similarly might those rare creations Croaker and Jack
Lofty be traced to their predecessors in the field of drama, even though
remote. That they had their analogies in the life of Goldsmith, and have
them in the lives of others, it is unnecessary to prove. But graphic as
these characters are, they cannot make of 'The Good-natured Man' more
than a passable second to 'She Stoops to Conquer.' For the premises of
the plot are absurd, if not impossible; the complication is not much
more natural than that of a Punch-and-Judy show, and the denouement but
one shade less improbable than that of 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' The
value of the play is principally historical, not aesthetic.
Congreve's 'Love for Love,' Vanbrugh's 'Relapse, Farquhar's 'Beaux'
Stratagem,' Goldsmith's 'She Stoops to Conquer,' and Sheridan's 'School
for Scandal,' are the best comedies written since Jonson, Fletcher, and
Massinger held the stage. In plot and diction 'She Stoops to Conquer' is
equaled by Congreve; in character-drawing by Vanbrugh; in dramatic ease
by Farquhar, in observation and wit by Sheridan: but by none is it
equaled in humor, and in naturalness of dialogue it is _facile
princeps_. Here again the characterization presents the twofold charm of
universality and reality. Young Marlow is the traditional lover of the
type of Young Bellair, Mirabell, and Aimwell, suggesting each in turn
but different from all; he is also, in his combination of embarrassment
and impudence, not altogether unlike the lad Oliver who, years ago, on a
journey back to school, had mistaken Squire Featherstone's house in
Ardagh for an inn.
A similar adjustment of dramatic type and historic individual
contributes to the durability of Tony Lumpkin. In his _dramatis persona_
he is a practical joker of the family of Diccon and Truewit, and first
cousin on the Blenkinsop side to that horse-flesh Sir Harry Beagle. But
Anthony is more than the practical joker or the squire booby: he is a
near relative of Captain O'Blunder and that whole countryside of
generous, touch-and-go Irishmen; while in reality, _in propria persona_,
he is that aspect of Noll Goldsmith that "lived the buckeen" in
Ballymahon. Of the other characters of the play, Hardcastle, Mrs.
Hardcastle, and Kate have a like prerogative of immortality. They are
royally descended and personally unique.