Yet in that facial mask I seem to read all the tale of the long years
of desperate waiting, only half sweetened by premature triumphs of pen
and person; all the rancorous energies of political strife.
And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and
glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no
sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls
across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the
features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the
lips.
I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early
waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank
verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his
false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages,
monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his
braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride
of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic
perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naïve delight
in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct
of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his
gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success
and of Fame--that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls
pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of
Love--Love, the one touch of true romance in his novels--and his
pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his
tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which
he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social
conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manoeuvre
it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play
English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like pawns,
with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability
under attack, only the mediæval Jew's self-mastery before the
grosser-brained persecutor.
I think these things and the Sphinx yields up his secret--the open
secret of the Ghetto parvenu.
V
But as I look again upon his strange Eastern face, so deep-lined, so
haggard, something subtler and finer calls to me from the ruins of its
melancholy beauty.
Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of
ideas and wit, but--a Heine of action--the fantasy of personal
adventure, and--when audacity has been crowned by empery--of dramatic
surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant
castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.
To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its
very constitution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the
Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young
England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats
whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance
to which these young English squires and nobles are born. The
bourgeois he hates--only the pomp of sovereignty and the pathos of
poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy,
wherein the nobles shall make happy the People that is exploited by
the middle classes. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and
the poor are united in God, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into
which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is
split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in
revolt with Byron and Shelley against a Philistine world. And later,
to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the
individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters,
he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine
that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and
its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle,
popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined
executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a
great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism.
That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his
day are only dimly aware, because like their constitution it has
evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is
caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent
possibilities. And in very deed he binds England closer to her
colonies, and restores her dwindled prestige in the Parliament of
Nations. He even proclaims her an Asiatic power.
For his heart is always with his own people--its past glories, its
persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees
himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which
God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its
propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned
to reveal Himself.
And, like his race, he has links with all the human panorama.
He is in touch with the humors and graces of European courts and
cities, has rapport with the rich-dyed, unchanging, double-dealing
East, enjoys the picaresque life of the Spanish mountains: he feels
the tragedy of vanished Rome, the marble appeal of ancient Athens, the
mystery of the Pyramids, the futility of life; his books palpitate
with world-problems.
And, as I think these things, his face is transfigured and he
becomes--beneath all his dazzle of deed--a Dreamer of the Ghetto.