"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come,
saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength
of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of
bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of
Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I
redeem."--EXODUS xiii. 14, 15.
_Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat._
At last the Passover family service was drawing to an end. His father
had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up:
_One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in
a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice,
talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out
the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed
pillows.
_And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two
zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service
was over. He had only come in during the second part, arriving from
Vienna with his usual unquestioned unexpectedness, and was quite
startled to find it was Passover night, and that the immemorial
service was going on just as when he was a boy. The rarity of his
visits to the old folks made it a strange coincidence to have stumbled
upon them at this juncture, and, as he took his seat silently in the
family circle without interrupting the prayers by greetings, he had a
vivid artistic perception of the possibilities of existence--the witty
French novel that had so amused him in the train, making him feel
that, in providing raw matter for _esprit_, human life had its joyous
justification; the red-gold sunset over the mountains; the floating
homewards down the Grand Canal in the moonlight, the well-known
palaces as dreamful and mysterious to him as if he had not been born
in the city of the sea; the gay reminiscences of Goldmark's new opera
last night at the Operntheater that had haunted his ear as he ascended
the great staircase; and then this abrupt transition to the East, and
the dead centuries, and Jehovah bringing out His chosen people from
Egypt, and bidding them celebrate with unleavened bread throughout the
generations their hurried journey to the desert.
Probably his father was distressed at this glaring instance of his
son's indifference to the traditions he himself held so dear; though
indeed the old man had realized long ago the bitter truth that his
ways were not his son's ways, nor his son's thoughts his thoughts. He
had long since known that his first-born was a sinner in Israel, an
"Epikouros," a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor
quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals, a scorner of
the dietary laws and tabus, an adept in the forbidden. The son thought
of himself through his father's spectacles, and the faint smile
playing about the sensitive lips became bitterer. His long white
fingers worked nervously.
And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the
perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he
expended it, the fidelity that resisted its temptations and made this
_Seder_ service, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple
as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the
Grand Canal, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah
stood as naïvely expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with
love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters--shafts from a full
quiver--sat around the table variously happy and content with
existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety
pervaded the table.
_And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my
father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless
life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled
with salt tears. _He_ would never sit at the head of his own table,
carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to
each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and
trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their
little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith,
gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping
on--the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered--he,
modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems!
_Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!_ Modern of the moderns? But it was
an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is
the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an
ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new
under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:
"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all
is vanity.
"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but
the earth abideth for ever.
"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto
the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return
again.
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new
thing under the sun.
"That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which
is wanting cannot be numbered.
"For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow."
Yes, it was all true, all true. How the Jewish genius had gone to the
heart of things, so that the races that hated it found comfort in its
Psalms. No sense of form, the end of Ecclesiastes a confusion and a
weak repetition like the last disordered spasms of a prophetic
seizure. No care for art, only for reality. And yet he had once
thought he loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after
forbidden gods, thrilled by that solitary marble figure of a girl that
looked in on the Ghetto alley from a boundary wall. Yes; he had
worshipped at the shrine of the Beautiful; he had prated of the
Renaissance. He had written--with the multiform adaptiveness of his
race--French poems with Hellenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics--half
felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden
intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save
perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence
of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of
the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking of life.
_And a staff came and smote the dog which had bitten the cat, which
had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad
Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
Yes, he was a Jew at heart. The childhood in the Ghetto, the long
heredity, had bound him in emotions and impulses as with
phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! The very melody awakened
associations innumerable. He saw in a swift panorama the intense inner
life of a curly-headed child roaming in the narrow cincture of the
Ghetto, amid the picturesque high houses. A reflex of the child's old
joy in the Festivals glowed in his soul. How charming this quaint
sequence of Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles; this
survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, this living in the
souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their
booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap
himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of
prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren
ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His
imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo,
bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants
in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers
rowing round and round the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow
cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be
persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for
emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they
were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring
into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German
merchants, then Levantines, helping to build up the commercial capital
of the fifteenth century. He saw the later accession of Peninsular
refugees from the Inquisition, their shelter beneath the lion's wing
negotiated through their fellow-Jew, Daniel Rodrigues, Consul of the
Republic in Dalmatia. His mind halted a moment on this Daniel
Rodrigues, an important skeleton. He thought of the endless shifts of
the Jews to evade the harsher prescriptions, their subtle, passive
refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What
well-springs of energy, seething in those paradoxical progenitors of
his, who united the calm of the East with the fever of the West; those
idealists dealing always with the practical, those lovers of ideas,
those princes of combination, mastering their environment because they
never dealt in ideas except as embodied in real concrete things.
Reality! Reality!
That was the note of Jewish genius, which had this affinity at least
with the Greek. And he, though to him his father's real world was a
shadow, had yet this instinctive hatred of the cloud-spinners, the
word-jugglers, his idealisms needed solid substance to play around.
Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not
smoothed his passage to a not unprosperous career in letters, he might
have escaped this haunting sense of the emptiness and futility of
existence. He, too, would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian
persecutor, in piling ducat on ducat. Ay, even now he chuckled to
think how these _strazzaroli_--these forced vendors of second-hand
wares--had lived to purchase the faded purple wrappings of Venetian
glory.
He remembered reading in the results of an ancient census: Men, women,
children, monks, nuns--and Jews! Well, the Doges were done with,
Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew--the Jew lived sumptuously
in the palaces of her proud nobles. He looked round the magnificent
long-stretching dining-room, with its rugs, oil-paintings, frescoed
ceiling, palms; remembered the ancient scutcheon over the stone
portal--a lion rampant with an angel volant--and thought of the old
Latin statute forbidding the Jews to keep schools of any kind in
Venice, or to teach anything in the city, under penalty of fifty
ducats' fine and six months' imprisonment. Well, the Jews had taught
the Venetians something after all--that the only abiding wealth is
human energy. All other nations had had their flowering time and had
faded out. But Israel went on with unabated strength and courage. It
was very wonderful. Nay, was it not miraculous? Perhaps there was,
indeed, "a mission of Israel," perhaps they were indeed God's "chosen
people." The Venetians had built and painted marvellous things and
died out and left them for tourists to gaze at. The Jews had created
nothing for ages, save a few poems and a few yearning synagogue
melodies; yet here they were, strong and solid, a creation in flesh
and blood more miraculous and enduring than anything in stone and
bronze. And what was the secret of this persistence and strength? What
but a spiritual? What but their inner certainty of God, their
unquestioning trust in Him, that He would send His Messiah to rebuild
the Temple, to raise them to the sovereignty of the peoples? How
typical his own father--thus serenely singing Chaldaic--a modern of
moderns without, a student and saint at home! Ah, would that he, too,
could lay hold on this solid faith! Yes, his soul was in sympathy with
the brooding immovable East; even with the mysticisms of the
Cabalists, with the trance of the ascetic, nay, with the fantastic
frenzy-begotten ecstasy of the Dervishes he had seen dancing in
Turkish mosques,--that intoxicating sense of a satisfying meaning in
things, of a unity with the essence of existence, which men had
doubtless sought in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, which the
Mahatmas of India had perhaps found, the tradition of which ran down
through the ages, misconceived by the Western races, and for lack of
which he could often have battered his head against a wall, as in
literal beating against the baffling mystery of existence. Ah! there
was the hell of it! His soul was of the Orient, but his brain was of
the Occident. His intellect had been nourished at the breast of
Science, that classified everything and explained nothing. But
explanation! The very word was futile! Things were. To explain things
was to state A in terms of B, and B in terms of A. Who should explain
the explanation? Perhaps only by ecstasy could one understand what lay
behind the phenomena. But even so the essence had to be judged by its
manifestations, and the manifestations were often absurd, unrighteous,
and meaningless. No, he could not believe. His intellect was
remorseless. What if Israel was preserved? Why should the empire of
Venice be destroyed?
_And a fire came and burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which
had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought
for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
He thought of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city;
the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art
treasures--churches, pictures, sculptures--no less built on obscure
human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed
names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's
pictures floated before him, and Tintoretto's--record of dead
generations; and then, by the link of size, those even vaster
paintings--in gouache--of Vermayen in Vienna: old land-fights with
crossbow, spear, and arquebus, old sea-fights with inter-grappling
galleys. He thought of galley-slaves chained to their oar--the sweat,
the blood that had stained history. "So I returned and considered all
the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of
such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter." And then he
thought of a modern picture with a beautiful nude female figure that
had cost the happiness of a family; the artist now dead and immortal,
the woman, once rich and fashionable, on the streets. The futility of
things--love, fame, immortality! All roads lead nowhere! What profit
shall a man have from all his labor which he hath done under the sun?
No; it was all a flux--there was nothing but flux. +Panta rhei+. The
wisest had always seen that. The cat which devoured the kid, and the
dog which bit the cat, and the staff which smote the dog, and the fire
which burnt the staff, and so on endlessly. Did not the commentators
say that that was the meaning of this very parable--the passing of the
ancient empires, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome? Commentators!
what curious people! What a making of books to which there was no end!
What a wilderness of waste logic the Jewish intellect had wandered in
for ages! The endless volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The
countless codes, now obsolescent, over which dead eyes had grown dim!
As great a patience and industry as had gone to build Venetian art,
and with less result. The chosen people, indeed! And were they so
strong and sane? A fine thought in his brain, forsooth!
He, worn out by the great stress of the centuries, such long
in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and
languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be
like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny,
this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him
it had perhaps grown thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He
stood for latter-day Israel, the race that always ran to extremes,
which, having been first in faith, was also first in scepticism,
keenest to pierce to the empty heart of things; like an orphan wind,
homeless, wailing about the lost places of the universe. To know all
to be illusion, cheat--itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a
career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that
had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper--not a divine
hope--it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great
stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a
pine on a mountain. To be done with it all--the sighs and the sobs and
the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness
and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall,
willing to die.
Perhaps it was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on
his spirit. Tourgénieff was right; only the young should come here,
not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he
recalled the lines of Catullus--the sad, stately plaint of the classic
world, like the suppressed sob of a strong man:
"Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetuo una dormienda."
And then he thought again of Virgil, and called up a Tuscan landscape
that expressed him, and lines of cypresses that moved on majestic like
hexameters. He saw the terrace of an ancient palace, and the grotesque
animals carven on the balustrade; the green flicker of lizards on the
drowsy garden-wall; the old-world sun-dial and the grotto and the
marble fountain, and the cool green gloom of the cypress-grove with
its delicious dapple of shadows. An invisible blackbird fluted
overhead. He walked along the great walk under the stone eyes of
sculptured gods, and looked out upon the hot landscape taking its
siesta under the ardent blue sky--the green sunlit hills, the white
nestling villas, the gray olive-trees. Who had paced these cloistral
terraces? Mediæval princesses, passionate and scornful, treading
delicately, with trailing silks and faint perfumes. He would make a
poem of it. Oh, the loveliness of life! What was it a local singer
had carolled in that dear soft Venetian dialect?
"Belissimo xe el mondo
perchè l' è molto vario.
nè omo ghe xe profondo
che dir possa el contrario."
Yes, the world was indeed most beautiful and most varied. Terence was
right: the comedy and pathos of things was enough. We are a sufficient
spectacle to one another. A glow came over him; for a moment he
grasped hold on life, and the infinite tentacles of things threw
themselves out to entwine him.
_And a water came and extinguished the fire, which had burnt the
staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had
devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya!_
But the glow faded, and he drew back sad and hopeless. For he knew now
what he wanted. Paganism would not suffice. He wanted--he hungered
after--God. The God of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief
could not be shaken off. It was atavism that gave him those sudden
strange intuitions of God at the scent of a rose, the sound of a
child's laughter, the sight of a sleeping city; that sent a warmth to
his heart and tears to his eyes, and a sense of the infinite beauty
and sacredness of life. But he could not have the God of his fathers.
And his own God was distant and dubious, and nothing that modern
science had taught him was yet registered in his organism. Could he
even transmit it to descendants? What was it Weismann said about
acquired characteristics? No, certain races put forth certain beliefs,
and till you killed off the races, you could never kill off the
beliefs. Oh, it was a cruel tragedy, this Western culture grafted on
an Eastern stock, untuning the chords of life, setting heart and
brain asunder. But then Nature _was_ cruel. He thought of last year's
grape-harvest ruined by a thunderstorm, the frightful poverty of the
peasants under the thumb of the padrones. And then the vision came up
of a captured cuttle-fish he had seen gasping, almost with a human
cough, on the sands of the Lido. It had spoilt the sublimity of that
barren stretch of sand and sea, and the curious charm of the white
sails that seemed to glide along the very stones of the great
breakwater. His soul demanded justice for the uncouth cuttle-fish. He
did not understand how people could live in a self-centred spiritual
world that shut out the larger part of creation. If suffering
purified, what purification did overdriven horses undergo, or starved
cats? The miracle of creation--why was it wrought for puppies doomed
to drown? No; man had imposed morality on a non-moral universe,
anthropomorphizing everything, transferring into the great remorseless
mechanism the ethical ideals that governed the conduct of man to man.
Religion, like art, focussed the universe round man, an unimportant
by-product: it was bad science turned into good art. And it was his
own race that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto God:
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods
had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the
welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and
made a god of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it
permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been
formed. And because God was goodness, therefore He was oneness--he
remembered the acute analysis of Kuenen. No, the moral law was no more
the central secret of the universe than color or music. Religion was
made for man, not man for religion. Even justice was a meaningless
concept in the last analysis: What was, was. The artist's view of
life was the only true one: the artist who believes in everything and
in nothing.
The religions unconsciously distorted everything. Life itself was
simple enough: a biological phenomenon that had its growth, its
maturity, its decay. Death was no mystery, pain no punishment, nor sin
anything but the survival of lower attributes from a prior phase of
evolution, or not infrequently the legitimate protest of the natural
self against artificial social ethics. It was the creeds that tortured
things out of their elemental simplicity. But for him the old craving
persisted. That alone would do. God, God--he was God-intoxicated,
without Spinoza's calm or Spinoza's certainty. Justice, Pity,
Love--something that understood. He knew it was sheer blind heredity
that spoilt his life for him--oh, the irony of it--and that, if he
could forget his sense of futility, he could live beautifully unto
himself. The wheels of chance had ground well for him. But his soul
rejected all the solutions and self-equations of his friends--the
all-sufficiency of science, of art, of pleasure, of the human
spectacle; saw with inexorable insight through the phantasmal
optimisms, refused to blind itself with Platonisms and Hegelisms,
refused the positions of æsthetes and artists and self-satisfied
German savants, equally with the positions of conventional preachers,
demanded justice for the individual down to the sparrow, two of which
were sold in the market-place for a farthing, and a significance and a
purpose in the secular sweep of destiny; yet knew all the while that
Purpose was as anthropomorphic a conception of the essence of things
as justice or goodness. But the world without God was a beautiful,
heartless woman--cold, irresponsive. He needed the flash of soul. He
had experimented in Nature--as color, form, mystery--what had he not
experimented in? But there was a want, a void. He had loved Nature,
had come very near finding peace in the earth-passion, in the
intoxicating smell of grass and flowers, in the scent and sound of the
sea, in the rapture of striking through the cold, salt waves, tossing
green and white-flecked; ill exchanged for any heaven. But the passion
always faded and the old hunger for God came back.
He had found temporary peace with Spinoza's God: the eternal
infinite-sided Being, of whom all the starry infinities were but one
poor expression, and to love whom did not imply being loved in return.
'Twas magnificent to be lifted up in worship of that supernal
splendor. But the splendor froze, not scorched. He wanted the eternal
Being to be conscious of his existence; nay, to send him a whisper
that He was not a metaphysical figment. Otherwise he found himself
saying what Voltaire has made Spinoza say: "Je crois, entre nous, que
vous n'existez pas." Obedience? Worship? He could have prostrated
himself for hours on the flags, worn out his knees in prayer. O
Luther, O Galileo, enemies of the human race! How wise of the Church
to burn infidels, who would burn down the spirit's home--the home warm
with the love and treasures of the generations--and leave the poor
human soul naked and shivering amid the cold countless worlds. O
Napoleon, arch-fiend, who, opening the Ghettos, where the Jews
crouched in narrow joy over the Sabbath fire, let in upon them the
weight of the universe.
_And an ox came and drank the water, which had extinguished the fire,
which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten
the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two
zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
In Vienna, whence he had come, an Israelite, on whom the modern
universe pressed, yet dreamed the old dream of a Jewish State--a
modern State, incarnation of all the great principles won by the
travail of the ages. The chameleon of races should show a specific
color: a Jewish art, a Jewish architecture would be born, who knew?
But he, who had worked for Mazzini, who had seen his hero achieve that
greatest of all defeats, victory, _he_ knew. He knew what would come
of it, even if it came. He understood the fate of Christ and of all
idealists, doomed to see themselves worshipped and their ideas
rejected in a religion or a State founded like a national monument to
perpetuate their defeat. But the Jewish State would not even come. He
had met his Viennese brethren but yesterday; in the Leopoldstadt,
frowsy with the gaberdines and side-curls of Galicia; in the Prater,
arrogantly radiant in gleaming carriages with spick-and-span
footmen--that strange race that could build up cities for others but
never for itself; that professed to be both a religion and a
nationality, and was often neither. The grotesquerie of history!
Moses, Sinai, Palestine, Isaiah, Ezra, the Temple, Christ, the Exile,
the Ghettos, the Martyrdoms--all this to give the Austrian comic
papers jokes about stockbrokers with noses big enough to support
unheld opera--glasses. And even supposing another miraculous link came
to add itself to that wonderful chain, the happier Jews of the new
State would be born into it as children to an enriched man,
unconscious of the struggles, accepting the luxuries, growing
big-bellied and narrow-souled. The Temple would be rebuilt. _Et
après?_ The architect would send in the bill. People would dine and
dig one another in the ribs and tell the old smoking-room stories.
There would be fashionable dressmakers. The synagogue would persecute
those who were larger than it, the professional priests would prate of
spiritualities to an applausive animal world, the press would be run
in the interests of capitalists and politicians, the little writers
would grow spiteful against those who did not call them great, the
managers of the national theatre would advance their mistresses to
leading parts. Yes, the ox would come and drink the water, and
Jeshurun would wax fat and kick. "For that which is crooked cannot be
made straight." Menander's comedies were fresh from the mint, the Book
of Proverbs as new as the morning paper. No, he could not dream. Let
the younger races dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race
that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the
first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man
under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit
disintegrated! _Omnia Vanitas_, this too was vanity.
_And the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the
water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff,
which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had
devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya!_
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! He had never thought of the meaning of the
words, always connected them with the finish of the ceremony. "All
over! All over!" they seemed to wail, and in the quaint music there
seemed a sense of infinite disillusion, of infinite rest; a
winding-up, a conclusion, things over and done with, a fever subsided,
a toil completed, a clamor abated, a farewell knell, a little folding
of the hands to sleep.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! It was a wail over the struggle for existence,
the purposeless procession of the ages, the passing of the ancient
empires--as the commentators had pointed out--and of the modern
empires that would pass on to join them, till the earth itself--as the
scientists had pointed out--passed away in cold and darkness. Flux and
reflux, the fire and the water, the water and the fire! He thought of
the imperturbable skeletons that still awaited exhumation in Pompeii,
the swaddled mummies of the Pharaohs, the undiminished ashes of
forgotten lovers in old Etruscan tombs. He had a flashing sense of the
great pageant of the Mediæval--popes, kings, crusaders, friars,
beggars, peasants, flagellants, schoolmen; of the vast modern life in
Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago; the brilliant
life of the fashionable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor
in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the
prostitutes, the slaveys in lodging-houses, the criminals, the
lunatics; the vast hordes of Russia, the life pullulating in the
swarming boats on Chinese rivers, the merry butterfly life of Japan,
the unknown savages of mid-Africa with their fetishes and war-dances,
the tribes of the East sleeping in tents or turning uneasily on the
hot terraces of their houses, the negro races growing into such a
terrible problem in the United States, and each of all these peoples,
nay, each unit of any people, thinking itself the centre of the
universe, and of its love and care; the destiny of the races no
clearer than the destiny of the individuals and no diviner than the
life of insects, and all the vast sweep of history nothing but a spasm
in the life of one of the meanest of an obscure group of worlds, in an
infinity of vaster constellations. Oh, it was too great! He could not
look on the face of his own God and live. Without the stereoscopic
illusions which made his father's life solid, he could not continue to
exist. His point of view was hopelessly cosmic. All was equally great
and mysterious? Yes; but all was equally small and commonplace. Kant's
_Starry Infinite Without?_ Bah! Mere lumps of mud going round in a
tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of
specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There
were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough
for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no
more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy--they were all
in the splashes of mud from a passing carriage. Everywhere one law and
one futility. The human race? Strange marine monsters crawling about
in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim upwards, oddly tricked out
in the stolen skins of other creatures. As absurd, impartially
considered, as the strange creatures quaintly adapted to curious
environments one saw in aquaria. Kant's _Moral Law Within!_ Dissoluble
by a cholera germ, a curious blue network under the microscope, not
unlike a map of Venice. Yes, the cosmic and the comic were one. Why be
bullied into the Spinozistic awe? Perhaps Heine--that other Jew--saw
more truly, and man's last word on the universe into which he had been
projected unasked, might be a mockery of that which had mocked him, a
laugh with tears in it.
And he, he foreshadowed the future of all races, as well as of his
own. They would all go on struggling, till they became self-conscious;
then, like children grown to men, the scales falling from their eyes,
they would suddenly ask themselves what it was all about, and,
realizing that they were being driven along by blind forces to labor
and struggle and strive, they too would pass away; the gross childish
races would sweep them up, Nature pouring out new energies from her
inexhaustible fount. For strength was in the unconscious, and when a
nation paused to ask of itself its right to Empire, its Empire was
already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to
Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle
and mobile! For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure
in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent
spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness of all the
periods of man's mysterious existence on this queer little planet;
while the old geocentric ethics, oddly clinging on to the changed
cosmogony, would keep life clean. But all that would pall--and then
the deluge!
There was a waft of merry music from without. He rose and went
noiselessly to the window and looked out into the night. A full moon
hung in the heavens, perpendicularly and low, so that it seemed a
terrestrial object in comparison with the stars scattered above, glory
beyond glory, and in that lucent Italian atmosphere making him feel
himself of their shining company, whirling through the infinite void
on one of the innumerable spheres. A broad silver green patch of
moonlight lay on the dark water, dwindling into a string of dancing
gold pieces. Adown the canal the black gondolas clustered round a
barca lighted by gaily colored lanterns, whence the music came.
_Funiculi, Funicula_--it seemed to dance with the very spirit of
joyousness. He saw a young couple holding hands. He knew they were
English, that strange, happy, solid, conquering race. Something
vibrated in him. He thought of bridegrooms, youth, strength; but it
was as the hollow echo of a far-off regret, some vague sunrise of gold
over hills of dream. Then a beautiful tenor voice began to sing
Schubert's Serenade. It was as the very voice of hopeless passion; the
desire of the moth for the star, of man for God. Death, death, at any
cost, death to end this long ghastly creeping about the purlieus of
life. Life even for a single instant longer, life without God, seemed
intolerable. He would find peace in the bosom of that black water. He
would glide downstairs now, speaking no word.
_And the Angel of Death came and slew the slaughterer, which had
slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished
the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which
had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father
bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_
When they should find him accidentally drowned, for how could the
world understand, the world which yet had never been backward to judge
him, that a man with youth, health, wealth, and a measure of fame
should take his own life; his people would think, perhaps, that it was
a ghost that had sat at the _Seder_ table so silent and noiseless.
And, indeed, what but a ghost? One need not die to hover outside the
warm circle of life, stretching vain arms. A ghost? He had always been
a ghost. From childhood those strange solid people had come and talked
and walked with him, and he had glided among them, an unreal spirit,
to which they gave flesh-and-blood motives like their own. As a child
death had seemed horrible to him; red worms crawling over white flesh.
Now his thoughts always stopped at the glad moment of giving up the
ghost. More lives beyond the grave? Why, the world was not large
enough for one life. It had to repeat itself incessantly. Books,
newspapers, what tedium! A few ideas deftly re-combined. For there was
nothing new under the sun. Life like a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Shakespeare had found the
supreme expression for it as for everything in it.
He stole out softly through the half-open door, went through the vast
antechamber, full of tapestry and figures of old Venetians in armor,
down the wide staircase, into the great courtyard that looked strange
and sepulchral when he struck a match to find the water-portal, and
saw his shadow curving monstrous along the ribbed roof, and leering at
the spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out
into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow
side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black,
with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow
rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through
the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble
steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its
black shadow in the water.
He walked to where the water-alley met the deeper Grand Canal, and let
himself slide down with a soft, subdued splash. He found himself
struggling, but he conquered the instinctive will to live.
But as he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night and the
stars and death mingled with a strange whirl of childish memories
instinct with the wonder of life, and the immemorial Hebrew words of
the dying Jew beat outwards to his gurgling throat: "Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God, the Lord is One."
Through the open doorway floated down the last words of the hymn and
the service:--
_And the Holy One came, blessed be He, and slew the Angel of Death,
who had slain the slaughterer, who had slaughtered the ox, which had
drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the
staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had
devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya!_