BARBARIC ARISTOCRACY.
Jacob, the 'Impostor'--The Barterer--Esau, the 'Warrior'--Barbarian
Dukes--Trade and War--Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau--Their
Ghosts--Legend of Iblis--Pagan Warriors of Europe--Russian
Hierarchy of Hell.
In the preceding chapter it was noted that there were two myths
wrapped up in the story of Jacob and Esau,--the one theological,
the other human. The former was there treated, the latter may be
considered here. Rabbinical theology has made the Jewish race adopt
as their founder that tricky patriarch whom Shylock adopted as his
model; but any censure on them for that comes with little grace
from christians who believe that they are still enjoying a covenant
which Jacob's extortions and treacheries were the divinely-adopted
means of confirming. It is high time that the Jewish people should
repudiate Jacob's proceedings, and if they do not give him his first
name ('Impostor') back again, at least withdraw from him the name
Israel. But it is still more important for mankind to study the phases
of their civilisation, and not attribute to any particular race the
spirit of a legend which represents an epoch of social development
throughout the world.
When Rebekah asked Jehovah why her unborn babes struggled in her
womb, he answered, 'Two nations are in thy womb. One people shall
be stronger than the other people; the elder shall be subject to
the younger.' What peoples these were is described in the blessings
of Jacob on the two representatives when they had grown up to be,
the one red and hairy, a huntsman; the other a quiet man, dwelling
in tents and builder of cattle-booths.
Jacob--cunning, extortionate, fraudulent in spirit even when
technically fair--is not a pleasing figure in the eyes of the
nineteenth century. But he does not belong to the nineteenth
century. His contest was with Esau. The very names of them belong
to mythology; they are not individual men; they are conflicting
tendencies and interests of a primitive period. They must be thought
of as Israel and Edom historically; morally, as the Barter principle
and the Bandit principle.
High things begin low. Astronomy began as Astrology; and when Trade
began there must have been even more trickery about it than there
is now. Conceive of a world made up of nomadic tribes engaged in
perpetual warfare. It is a commerce of killing. If a tribe desires
the richer soil or larger possessions of another, the method is to
exterminate that other. But at last there rises a tribe either too
weak or too peaceful to exterminate, and it proposes to barter. It
challenges its neighbours to a contest of wits. They try to get the
advantage of each other in bargains; they haggle and cheat; and it
is not heroic at all, but it is the beginning of commerce and peace.
But the Dukes of Edom as they are called will not enter into this
compact. They have not been used to it; they are always outwitted
at a bargain; just like those other red men in the West of America,
whose lands are bought with beads, and their territorial birthright
taken for a mess of pottage. They prefer to live by the hunt and by
the sword. Then between these two peoples is an eternal feud, with
an occasional truce, or, in biblical phrase, 'reconciliation.'
Surrounded by a commercial civilisation, with its prosaic virtues and
its petty vices, we cannot help admiring much about the Duke of Edom,
non-producer though he be. Brave, impulsive, quick to forgive as to
resent; generous, as people can afford to be when they may give what
they never earned; his gallant qualities cast a certain meanness
over his grasping brother, the Israelite. It is a healthy sign in
youth to admire such qualities. The boy who delights in Robin Hood;
the youth who feels a stir of enthusiasm when he reads Schiller's
Robbers; the ennuyés of the clubs and the roughs, with unfulfilled
capacities for adventure in them, who admire 'the gallant Turk,' are
all lingering in the nomadic age. They do not think of things but
of persons. They are impressed by the barbaric dash. The splendour
of warriors hides trampled and decimated peasantries; their courage
can gild atrocities. Beside such captivating qualities and thrilling
scenes how poor and commonplace appear thrifty rusticity, and the
cautious, selfish, money-making tradesmen!
But fine and heroic as the Duke of Edom may appear in the distance,
it is best to keep him at a distance. When Robin Hood reappeared on
Blackheath lately, his warmest admirers were satisfied to hear he was
securely lodged in gaol. The Jews had just the same sensations about
the Dukes of Edom. They saw that tribe near to, and lived in daily
dread of them. They were hirsute barbarians, dwelling amid mountain
fastnesses, and lording it over a vast territory. The weak tribe of
the plains had no sooner got together some herds and a little money,
than those dashing Edomites fell upon them and carried away their
savings and substance in a day. This made the bartering tribe all the
more dependent on their cunning. They had to match their wits against,
the world; and they have had to do the same to this day, when it is
a chief element of their survival that their thrift is of importance
to the business and finance of Europe. But in the myth it is shown
that Trade, timorous as it is in presence of the sword, may have a
magnanimity of its own. The Supplanter of Edom is haunted by the wrong
he has done his elder brother, and driven him to greater animosity. He
resolves to seek him, offer him gifts, and crave reconciliation. It is
easy to put an unfavourable construction upon his action, but it is not
necessary. The Supplanter, with droves of cattle, a large portion of
his possessions, passes out towards perilous Edom, unarmed, undefended,
except by his amicable intentions towards the powerful chieftain
he had wronged. At the border of the hostile kingdom he learns that
the chieftain is coming to meet him with four hundred men. He is now
seized, with a mighty spirit of Fear. He sends on the herdsmen with
the herds, and remains alone. During the watches of the night there
closes upon him this phantom of Fear, with its presage of Death. The
tricky tradesman has met his Conscience, and it is girt about with
Terror. But he feels that his nobler self is with it, and that he
will win. Finely has Charles Wesley told the story in his hymn:--
Come, O thou traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold but cannot see!
My company before is gone
And I am left alone with thee:
With thee all night I mean to stay
And wrestle till the break of day.
'Confident in self-despair,' the Supplanter conquers his Fear; with
the dawn he travels onward alone to meet the man he had outraged
and his armed men, and to him says, 'I have appeared before thee as
though I had appeared before God, that thou mightest be favourable
to me.' The proud Duke is disarmed. The brothers embrace and weep
together. The chieftain declines the presents, and is only induced
to accept them as proof of his forgiveness. The Tradesman learns for
all time that his mere cleverness may bring a demon to his side in
the night, and that he never made so good a bargain as when he has
restored ill-gotten gains. The aristocrat and warrior returns to his
mountain, aware now that magnanimity and courage are not impossible
to quiet men living by merchandise. The hunting-ground must make way
now for the cattle-breeder. The sword must yield before the balances.
Whatever may have been the tribes which in primitive times had
these encounters, and taught each other this lesson, they were long
since reconciled. But the ghosts of Israel and Edom, of Barter and
Plunder, fought on through long tribal histories. Israel represented
by the archangel Michael, and Edom by dragon Samaël, waged their
war. One characteristic of the opposing power has been already
considered. Samaël embodied Edom as the genius of Strife. He was the
especial Accuser of Israel, their Antichrist, so to say, as Michael
was their Advocate. But the name 'Edom' itself was retained as a kind
of personification of the barbaric military and lordly Devil. The
highwayman in epaulettes, the heroic spoiler, with his hairy hand
which Israel itself had imitated many a time in its gloves, were
summed up as 'Edom.'
This personification is the more important since it has characterised
the more serious idea of Satan which prevails in the world. He is
mainly a moral conception, and means the pride and pomp of the world,
its natural wildness and ferocities, and the glory of them. The
Mussulman fable relates that when Allah created man, and placed him
in a garden, he called all the angels to worship this crowning work
of his hands. Iblis alone refused to worship Adam. The very idea of
a garden is hateful to the spirit of Nomadism. [70] Man the gardener
receives no reverence from the proud leader of the Seraphim. God
said unto him (Iblis), What hindered thee from worshipping Adam,
since I commanded thee? He answered, I am more excellent than he:
thou hast created me of (ethereal) fire, and hast created him of clay
(black mud). God said, Get thee down therefore from paradise, for it
is not fit that thou behave thyself proudly therein. [71]
The earnestness and self-devotion of the northern pagans in their
resistance to Christianity impressed the finest minds in the Church
profoundly. Some of the Fathers even quoted the enthusiasm of those
whom they regarded as devotees of the Devil, to shame the apathy of
christians. The Church could show no martyr braver than Rand, down
whose throat St. Olaf made a viper creep, which gnawed through his
side; and Rand was an example of thousands. This gave many of the early
christians of the north a very serious view of the realm of Satan,
and of Satan himself as a great potentate. It was increased by their
discovery that the pagan kings--Satan's subjects--had moral codes and
law-courts, and energetically maintained justice. In this way there
grew up a more dignified idea of Hell. The grotesque imps receded
before the array of majestic devils, like Satan and Beelzebub; and
these were invested with a certain grandeur and barbaric pride. They
were regarded as rival monarchs who had refused to submit themselves to
Jehovah, but they were deemed worthy of heroic treatment. The traces of
this sentiment found in the ancient frescoes of Russia are of especial
importance. Nothing can exceed the grandeur of the Hierarchy of Hell
as they appear in some of these superb pictures. Satan is generally
depicted with similar dignity to the king of heaven, from whom he is
divided by a wall's depth, sometimes even resembling him in all but
complexion and hair (which is fire on Satan). There are frequent
instances, as in the accompanying figure (4), where, in careful
correspondence with the attitude of Christ on the Father's knees,
Satan supports the betrayer of Christ. Beside the king of Hell,
seated in its Mouth, are personages of distinction, some probably
representing those poets and sages of Greece and Rome, the prospect
of whose damnation filled some of the first christian Fathers with
such delight.
In Spain, when a Bishop is about to baptize one of the European
Dukes of the Devil, he asks at the font what has become of his
ancestors, naming them--all heathen. 'They are all in hell!' replies
the Bishop. 'Then there will I follow them,' returns the Chief, and
thereafter by no persuasion can he be induced to fare otherwise than
to Hell. Gradually the Church made up its mind to ally itself with
this obstinate barbaric pride and ambition. It was willing to give
up anything whatever for a kingdom of this world, and to worship any
number of Princes of Darkness, if they would give unto the Bishops
such kingdoms, and the glory of them. They induced Esau to be baptized
by promise of their aid in his oppressions, and free indulgences to
all his passions; and then, by his help, they were able to lay before
weaker Esaus the christian alternatives--Be baptized or burnt!
Not to have known how to conquer in bloodless victories the barbaric
Esaus of the world by a virtue more pure, a heroism more patient,
than theirs, and with that 'sweet reasonableness of Christ,'
which is the latest epitaph on his tomb among the rich; not to have
recognised the true nobility of the Dukes, and purified their pride
to self-reverence, their passion to moral courage, their daring and
freedom to a self-reliance at once gentle and manly; this was no doubt
the necessary failure of a dogmatic and irrational system. But it
is this which has made the christian Israel more of an impostor than
its prototype, in every country to which it came steadily developing
to a hypocritical imitator of the Esau whose birthright it stole
by baptism. It speedily lost his magnanimity, but never his sword,
which however it contrived to make at once meaner and more cruel
by twisting it into thumbscrews and the like. For many centuries
its voice has been, in a thin phonographic way, the voice of Jesus,
but the hands are the hands of Esau with Samaël's claw added.