approach! He that suffered me to fall watches thee. The gentle and
merciful spirits of sweet human love delight not in agony and horror.
For pity’s sake, approach! In the name of thy good God, approach,
Albedir!’ The tones were mild and clear as the responses of Æolian
music. They floated to Albedir’s ear like the warm breath of June that
lingers in the lawny groves, subduing all to softness. Tears of tender
affection started into his eyes.”
The “Assassins” are something like Schiller’s “Robbers,” outlaws better
than the laws that have branded them. In _Hellas_, Ahasuerus, though
still appropriately responding to a summons from the Moslem Antichrist,
is an impersonation of human thought as raised by long experience to a
prophetic power. The idea is substantially the same as that which we
have seen underlying the myths of Enoch and Teiresias, while it goes
beyond them in its suggestion that knowledge, living over the ages
past, and imagination attaining to the farthest outcome of present
tendencies, can make for the being of a day an eternal existence.
Ahasuerus says to Mahmud:
“All is contained in each.
Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is--the absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions.”
With true Shelleyan felicity Hassan describes this Jew--
“From his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to come ...
Some feign that he is Enoch.”
In the year 1820 appeared the novel in four volumes, _Melmoth,
the Wanderer_, by the Rev. Robert Charles Maturin, author also of
_Bertram_, a respectable play, and several novels. Melmoth is a man who
has sold himself to Satan for the advantage of a vast length of life,
to which is added a power of passing instantaneously, at will, from
place to place. The terms of his bond are that he may escape the final
doom of his soul, which is to pay for these advantages, provided he
can find anyone willing to take the contract, with its benefits and
penalty, off his hands. The author’s purpose appears to be to show that
no one would deliberately damn himself to all eternity for any temporal
advantage; though this would seem to be rather “Irish,” since his hero
is just that man. However, the hero is an exception that proves the
rule, for he goes about the world vainly tempting the poor and needy
to take his place. Even a beautiful Indian maiden, who has fallen
desperately in love with him, will not surrender her soul. Failing
with all, he is carried off by the Devil. The supposed date of this
catastrophe is toward the close of the eighteenth century.
The next work to be noticed at this point, and one which the perusal of
Shelley may have suggested, is more distinctly based upon the legend
of the Wandering Jew; this is the Rev. George Croly’s _Salathiel: A
Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future_. This novel, in three
volumes, appeared anonymously in 1828. The spirit in which the legend
is treated in this work will sufficiently appear by the following
passages:
“Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature was to rule in
successive tyranny over my soul.
“Fearfully was the decree fulfilled.
“In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed the country to seek
out an enemy of Rome. I found in the Northern snows a man of blood: I
stirred up the soul of Alaric and led him to the sack of Rome.
“In revenge for the insults heaped upon the Jew by the dotards and
dastards of the city of Constantine, I sought out an instrument of
compendious ruin: I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured ambition
into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca.
“In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the Temple, I roused the
iron tribes of the West, and at the head of the Crusaders, expelled the
Saracens. I fed full on revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge!
“A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. I talked with the
Alchemist. I wore away years in the perplexities of the schoolmen; and
I felt the guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge.
“A passion for human fame seized me. A passion for gold!...
“I found a bold Genoese. I led him to discover the New World; with its
metals I inundated the Old; and to my own misery added the misery of
two hemispheres.”
At length the eternal World-wanderer stands beside the newly discovered
Printing Press; again he pays homage to Luther at his rise, and he
attains a faith in the progress of mankind. “At this hour I see the
dawn of things to whose glory the glory of the Past is but a dream!”
Quite another Ahasuerus than Shelley’s is represented in Wordsworth’s
“_Song of the Wandering Jew_,” which somewhat resembles the idea of
Müller, already quoted, as indeed both do the old saying, “The foxes
have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath
not where to lay his head.”
“Though the torrents from their fountains
Roar down many a craggy steep,
Yet they find among the mountains
Resting-places calm and deep.
“Clouds that love through air to hasten,
Ere the storm its fury stills,
Helmet-like themselves will fasten
On the heads of towering hills.
“What if through the frozen centre
Of the Alps the chamois bound,
Yet he has a home to enter
In some nook of chosen ground.
“If on windy days the raven
Gambol like a dancing skiff,
Not the less she loves her haven
In the bosom of the cliff.
“Though the sea-horse in the ocean
Own no dear domestic cave,
Yet he slumbers--by the motion
Rocked of many a gentle wave.
“The fleet ostrich, till day closes,
Vagrant over desert sands,
Brooding on her eggs reposes
When chill night that care demands.
“Day and night my toils redouble,
Never nearer to the goal;
Night and day, I feel the trouble
Of the Wanderer in my soul.”
It would be interesting to know at just what period of his life, or in
which of his two lives, Wordsworth wrote this “Song.” Was it a memory
of his dead self, the radical that fell in the French Revolution? Or
did he write it when the sceptical wanderings of other minds around
him had become to his peaceful soul, with no doom heavier than the
liturgical round of Grasmere Church, as imaginary as the “seven
whistlers on their nightly rounds,” which his peasant-friend heard,
while overhead were heard those “Gabriel’s hounds” by ears that little
knew they too were fabled of Jews doomed by the Crucified? All around
Wordsworth in his home amid the Lakes were the real wanderers. Before
nearly every fine mind living at the beginning of the last generation,
this Ahasuerus had risen as a spiritual type. Seven times did Shelley
evoke this form, and it was with him when he wandered unrecognised past
Rydal Mount. Southey had known the meaning of it. Byron had taken the
side of Cain against him who in Paradise permitted “the Serpent to
creep in,” and seen in Prometheus, with “the wretched gift Eternity,”
the symbol of man’s fate and force. De Quincey had made acquaintance
with such doomed wanderers of rabbinical legend as “The Widow of
Hebron.” From afar the sighings of “L. E. L.” were heard in fitful
dreams of “The Undying One.”
There came a terrible day when the children of the Revolution
recognised the inexorable Mother of whom they were born. The old
beliefs and ideas in which good and honest people had lived so
comfortably were shrivelled up. It was not the half-way heresy of the
earlier time which believed it was attaining a purer Christianity and
a more glorious immortality. These children of the Revolution found
the whole fabric of faith fallen to black ruins. The youth went off
light-hearted to college: he came back heavy-hearted. Beside the old
fireside he sat once more, with the dear faces around him and exile
in his heart. He listened to the old Bible, and knelt; but his mind
was far away, and had left him amid the innocent, a guilty, kneeling,
assenting phantasm. Then there began this Age of Wandering; for the
new mind could not yet get a new heart, and could only wander about
like the night-raven of folk-lore, that ever seeks the Holy Sepulchre
for rest. Their voices may be heard in most of the literature of the
last generation, pathetic as the appeal of deserted brides going about
the street asking, “Saw ye my Beloved?”--the only answer being endless
echoes of the question. Intellect seemed to them a curse. By it they
were at one stroke deprived alike of faith in future and hope of
present joys. Unfit for usual avocations, unable to enter pulpits and
professions tainted with the discredited superstitions, how well could
they understand the doom of every wanderer!
In the same year (1833) that Edgar Quinet--after ten years of
wandering in the effort to find some point where he could catch a
least ray of the old faith that made his early home so sweet, only
to discover that his faith was gone out, not eclipsed--published his
_Ahasuerus_, Carlyle also, after like wanderings, published his _Sartor
Resartus_, with its story of the “Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh.” It was
in that same year, too, that Ralph Waldo Emerson, unable to rest
even in his Unitarian pulpit, escaping from the clinging arms of his
devoted congregation, came across the ocean to converse with Carlyle,
Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and find if they could show him any light
on the great problems. Coleridge had taken refuge with opium and
orthodoxy. Wordsworth entertained the young American Wanderer with
lamentations over the excess of intellectual above moral culture in
the modern world. But it was in the far solitude of Nithsdale that
he hoped to find what he sought; for Carlyle had written an essay in
which he spoke of standing amid night, yet seeing the faint signs of a
new day-spring. “Here, straight uprose that lone wayfaring man,” wrote
Carlyle afterwards; but, alas, it was only to find at Craigenputtoch
(Hawk Hill) one preyed upon by the same remorseless doubts. The
personal hospitality was beautiful. But when the young American, just
bereaved of his wife, sought some vision beyond the grave, there was
no help for him. He asked Carlyle to what religious development those
sentences about a new day-spring pointed? The answer was that he could
not state that even to himself. Everyone, he said, must find out his
own path, and walk in it.
When Emerson parted from Carlyle and returned to the New World, he
found in its new life more than his vanished faith: to emancipate
slaves, and human minds, and the moral genius of woman, and give
the People their opportunity to build the New World into beauty and
happiness--this he found was a religion with eternal vistas opening
from it, hopes fairer than his faded heaven, a providence better than
the Syrian deity who had led the Old World into Red Seas, but never
through them to any Promised Land. But Carlyle remained to wander to
the last amid the wrecks of his lost worlds.
“Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying with Hunger always parallel to him, and a
whole Infernal Chase in his rear; so that the countenance of Hunger
is comparatively a friend’s! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient
Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew, save only that he feels himself
not guilty and but suffering the pains of guilt--wend to and fro with
aimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the earth (by
footprints) write his _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_; even as the great
Goethe, in passionate words, must write his _Sorrows of Werther_,
before the spirit freed itself and he could become a Man. Vain, truly,
is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow!”
Among all the Wanderers only one seemed to have found a new heart
atwin with his new intellect--he alone loved and welcomed the new, and
preferred the vulture-beak that tears Prometheus, the loneliness of
Ahasuerus, to the favour of Jove, Jahve or Jesus. Shelley alone was
heard singing his matin of the lark above ruins sadder than all the
rest.
XVIII.
AHASUERUS VINCTUS.
Here before me is a formidable array of large--one might almost say
fat--volumes, which I have hardly known whether to assign to England or
Germany, but conclude that they belong to both, and also to America,
and to the night-side of Protestantism everywhere. They are entitled:
_Chronicles, selected from the originals, of Cartaphilus, the Wandering
Jew, embracing a period of nearly XIX. centuries. Now first revealed
to and edited by David Hoffman, Hon. J. U. D. of Göttingen. In two
series, each of three volumes. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853._ This
book contains a dedication, dated March 10, 1851, Upper Brook Street,
Grosvenor Square, to the author’s brother, Samuel Hoffman, Esq., of
Baltimore, U. S. A. It contains also a dedication, dated September,
1852, Austin Friars, London, from Cartaphilus himself: “To the Children
of the Dispersion--Jehovah’s favoured people during so many ages,
Christ’s scattered flock during so many more--these chronicles are
affectionately inscribed,” etc.
There is nothing in these volumes which bear upon the legendary
Wandering Jew, except a tradition, incidentally mentioned, that in
1539 he visited Cornelius Agrippa, and was shown the face of Rebecca,
whom he had loved fifteen centuries before, in a magic mirror.
But the existence of such a book, embodying the vulgar Protestant
superstitions about the “dispersion” and the gathering of the “chosen
people;” the fact that so much labour can be expended on these notions
by a man otherwise educated, the author apparently of several legal
works, are phenomena to excite reflections. There is a good deal of
suggestiveness, too, in the link between Austin Friars and Grosvenor
Square. Cartaphilus, going his eternal round with cry of “O’ clo’!”
has finally, it would appear, discovered that he need only have his
Judaism baptized to be one of “Christ’s flock,” pastured as richly in
the fashionable Square.
But even more significant just now is the fact that Germany is ready
to supply the hand that can write of the Jews as for ages “Jehovah’s
favoured people,” and in the next moment be clenched to smite them as
an accursed race. So much this union of Cartaphilus and Austin Friars
with the Hon. Mr. Hoffman and Grosvenor Square may mean for us, as we
bid them farewell, finding nothing further in their voluminous sermons
pertinent to our present inquiry or purpose.
Here are two pregnant facts. In various parts of the East Jews manifest
a superstitious dread of a Christian’s curse. On the other hand, for a
long time there prevailed among Christians a belief that an oath taken
in a Jewish synagogue was more binding and efficient than one taken
elsewhere.[40] Add these two facts together, and their sum is in the
following third fact: on Wednesday, April 13, 1881, a petition against
the Jews was presented to the German Chancellor, in twenty-six volumes,
14,000 sheets, and with 255,000 signatures.
Every signature to that most shameful document which the nineteenth
century has witnessed was set there by--Judaism itself. It was Israel
that taught Christendom its black art of cursing. The Christian idea of
a Chosen People of Christ, commissioned to make war upon other peoples
as heathen, infidels, hosts of Antichrist, is a precise transcript of
the Judaic idea of a Chosen People of Jahve, with commission to put
Gentiles to the edge of the sword. In the darkest ages, when holocausts
of Jews were offered in sacrifice to a deified member of their race,
the Christian might have addressed his victim with a paraphrase of
Shylock’s words, “If a Baalite disagreed with a Jew, what was his
humility? Slaughter. If a Jew disagree with a Christian, what should
his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, slaughter. The intolerance
your Testament teaches me I will execute, and it shall go hard but,
with the aid of my Testament, I will better the instruction!”
When Moses Mendelssohn was asked, “When will the Jews become
Christians?” he answered, “When the Christians cease to be Jews.”
After Shakspeare had startled the world with a suspicion that the Jew
is a man, it still required a hundred and fifty years, or thereabout,
to awaken the further suspicion that a Jew might be a good, even a
religious man. This revelation came through Lessing. When he was
coming of age, Lessing recognised the injustice done to the Jews
of Germany. Every Jew entering Berlin was compelled to pay toll at
Brandenburg Gate. The meanest Christian might gain credit by insulting
or assaulting a Jew. Frederick the Great could write, “Jesus was a
Jew, yet we persecute the Jews,” but his wide toleration left that
people unprotected. Lessing wrote an early drama, _Die Juden_, which
touched gently on the matter. In it a wealthy Jew of high character
saves the life of a Christian baron and his daughter. The baron desires
the youth to marry his daughter, but finding to what race and religion
he belongs, that, of course, is impossible. So the drama ends. Why
impossible? The answer to that question had to be postponed. There are
some evils in this world which are like the birth-mark in Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s story: the chemist succeeded in extracting the birth-mark
from his wife’s face, but the wife lay dead. When the mark of the
cross disappears from the Wanderer’s brow, so that the Christian who
has branded him shall no longer say as he passes, “He is a Jew,” nor
for that part from his daughter’s lover, Christianity will be dead.
The flower of Lessing’s great heart and mind was _Nathan the Wise_.
The apologue of “The Three Rings,” in which the Jew, the Moslem, the
Christian Templar, raised above their bigotry by mutual human service
are seen in a tableau of charity, shone like the star of a new religion
over Germany. It is the “Ideal of Religious Liberty,” said Schwartz,
Historian of Modern Theology at Halle; “Truly can Deity be said to
pervade every line of Nathan,” said Kuno Fischer, of Jena University;
while in it Strauss sees one advancing the “Kingdom of God on
earth.”[41] Yet even Lessing was still not equal to the idea of having
the Jewess marry the Christian. Just as we are listening to hear the
marriage-bells ring out for the lovers, lo, they turn out to be brother
and sister! So, the religious equality having been proclaimed a hundred
and fifty years after Shakspeare had proclaimed the human equality,
Lessing leaves it to a like time to establish the social equality of
Jew and Christian.
But was this line drawn altogether by the Christian? Lessing’s
friendship with Moses Mendelssohn had taught him otherwise. When
Michaelis, the theologian, read his early play, “The Jews,” he wrote
a criticism in which he expressed a doubt whether an oppressed and
despised race could produce such a man as the hero. Mendelssohn
replied, and Lessing, enclosing this reply to Michaelis, wrote
concerning its author: “He really is a Jew, a man of five-and-twenty,
who, without any instruction, has acquired great attainments in
languages, in mathematics, in philosophy, in poetry. I foresee in
him an honour to our nation, if he is allowed to come to maturity
by his co-religionists, who have always displayed an unfortunate
spirit of persecution towards men like him.” The confirmation of this
apprehension on the part of the Jews’ earliest champion in Germany may
be found in the enthusiasm which the next eminent Mendelssohn put into
his oratorio of “St. Paul.”
Goethe tells us that he had intended to bring his Wandering Jew to a
meeting with Spinoza. The great German had met with two illustrations
of the legend he did deal with, of Faust carried off by demons. One was
in the case of Lessing, who, for his defence of Jews and his attack on
historic Christianity, had been piously impaled by a rumour that Satan
had appeared at his death-bed. The other was in a tract he picked up in
which Spinoza was denounced as an infidel, and upon which was a picture
of the noble man, giving him diabolical features. But, alas! Spinoza
had been more a martyr among his own people than among Christians.
Ahasuerus with the red cross on his brow would have found Spinoza also
a lonely wanderer, outcast from his people, but not under any Christian
doom.
Were Goethe alive, he would find Spinoza still in Europe, and
still a lonely wanderer amid the scowling hatred of both Jew and
Christian. He would find in England, certainly, a steady tendency of
synagogue-Judaism to find its ally and support in the Christianity
which alone represents its ancient superstition and bigotry. It is
the orthodox Jew who on Saturday sets the model of a Sabbath for
the Christian to copy on Sunday. When the parliamentary oath--half
Romish, half Jewish--is questioned, Jew and Christian stand side by
side in its defence, and together seek to impose upon Englishmen of
the nineteenth century the theological test of belief in an oath-bound
and oath-guaranteeing deity in which no educated man can possibly
believe. The orthodox male Jew thanks Jahve in his liturgy that he was
not made a woman; and the male Christian responds by excluding women
from political rights. While in Germany the Christian persecutes the
Jew as Antichrist, in England the Jew persecutes the Antichristian
as Armillus. The Jew recognises a believer in the Trinity as a true
theist, and the Christian accepts the Jewish worshipper of Jahve as a
theist; and they make common cause against the disbeliever in both as
a “miscreant,” an “atheist.” Some influential Jews recently made an
effort to “Boycott” the _Jewish World_ newspaper for its criticisms on
Christianity. From another “Jewish” quarter there came a sharp cry of
distress and anger because a scholar attempted to prove that Jesus was
not of the Jewish race!
It is a significant fact that the man of whom the Jews of recent
times have been proudest, the statesman whom every Israelite in
Europe was glad to aid with his information and his wealth, was a Jew
whose circumcision had been subordinated to Christian baptism. This
combination of auspices--the heart of an ancient Jew with the political
advantages of a Christian--made Lord Beaconsfield a symbolical figure.
It is only in its Christianised form that Judaism can ever behold
even a partial fulfilment of its ancient dreams of worldly power. The
theocracy of Jahve is henceforth dependent for every shred of its
authority upon the golden sceptre of Christ.
Christ is for the present a monarch--in England the last surviving
sovereign whose rule is at all theocratic. The Jews, as we have seen,
were really saved from extermination by powerful rulers who only
hungered for their money while the mob thirsted for their blood. Fear
of the populace was part of the heritage of the Jew, transmitted
by heredity. However bravely the modern Jew--at least up to this
generation--might begin with the radicalism of his prophets, he was
pretty sure to develop into a supporter of strong government; and there
has hitherto, in most countries, been always sufficient Christian
intolerance to enable that evolution to pass its embryonic phases
without arrest. Heine begins with revolutionism and atheism; ends
with worshipping Napoleon I. (whom he sees protecting Jews along the
Rhine), and God (of whose existence he was convinced by the sense of
smell while mingling with the atheistical _ouvriers_ in their Paris
clubs). Benjamin Disraeli begins with poetical eulogy of regicide,
and ends with turning a queen into an empress. So far as this ancient
reactionism can survive into the immediate future, it must necessarily
be the ally of Christianity. The English Jews who paid so large a sum
to bring back Charles II. to his throne, were represented by those who
gathered to the support of the Christian Lord Beaconsfield.
Lord Beaconsfield was for the Jews a triumph for their race, but a
humiliation for their religion. They must needs find their leader
in a family of apostates! But the orthodox Jews knew well that this
humiliation was more than compensated to them in the new resource
which their christened leader opened for them against their party of
progress. Disraeli the Elder had fled from the dry bones of Judaism to
find intellectual freedom. Disraeli the Younger, sent by his father
into the Christian Church, found there the dry bones all turned into
armed men.