contrasts. No natural want of moral elevation or tenderness or grace
can be ascribed to the nation that has produced both the Old Testament
and the Gospels, and has most largely shaped and inspired the moral
life of the civilised world. In Christian times no race has maintained
its faith with a more devoted courage, and it has encountered and
survived persecutions before which the persecutions of other creeds
dwindle almost into insignificance. M. Leroy-Beaulieu quotes the
statement of the grand Rabbi Lehmann, that it is a clearly attested
fact that in two months of the year 1096 twelve thousand Jews, whose
names have been preserved, were massacred in the towns of the Rhine
alone, because they refused to accept a Christian baptism. The Spanish
Jews who perished by one of the most excruciating deaths rather than
forswear their faith may be numbered by thousands, and those who
preferred exile and spoliation to apostasy, by hundreds of thousands.
Even in our own sceptical and materialising age the conduct of the
Russian Jews under the recent savage persecution shows that the old
spirit is not extinct. In the face of the long and splendid roll of
Jewish heroism, it is idle to dwell on the fact that in each great
persecution some Jews have yielded to the fear of death and consented
to perform the rites of a faith which they inwardly abhorred, or on
the fact that a few Rabbis have under such circumstances justified
these feigned conversions.
Prolonged persecution, however, has had a profound influence on their
character, and its influence in some respects has been very
pernicious. Hatred naturally provokes hatred, and violent oppression
against which there is no redress is naturally encountered by
subterfuge and fraud. A race who were for centuries playing their part
in life against overwhelming obstacles learned to avail themselves of
every advantage. Adulation, servility, falsehood, and deception became
common among them. They became at once hard, wily, and rapacious, and
ready instruments in ignoble and oppressive callings. Shut out from
open paths and honourable ambitions they haunted the obscurer byways
of industry; they were to be found in many occupations which sharpen
the intellect but blunt the moral sense, and they threw themselves
passionately into the acquisition of wealth and of secret power.
Exposed for generations, even in lands where they were not more
seriously persecuted, to constant insult and contempt, they often lost
their self-respect and learned to acquiesce tamely in what another
race would resent. Slavish conditions produced, as they always do,
slavish characteristics, and, as is always the case, those
characteristics did not at once disappear when the conditions that
produced them had altered.
M. Leroy-Beaulieu has dwelt with much force on this subject, and he
ascribes considerable weight to the fact that the Jews have been
wholly outside the system of feudalism and chivalry in which the
modern conception of honour was chiefly formed. Perhaps the Jew might
retort with some justice, that he has had at least the compensating
moral advantage of having derived no part of his notions of right and
wrong from a Church in which such an institution as the Spanish
Inquisition was deemed a holy thing.
Defects of another kind have contributed largely to his unpopularity.
Great as is the power of assimilation which the Jewish race possesses,
the charm and grace of manner seem to have been among the qualities
they most slowly and most imperfectly acquire. It is natural that men
who have been excluded from honours but not from wealth should value
money and the ostentatious display of riches more than their
neighbours. In the professions in which the Jews chiefly excel, men
rise most rapidly from low origin and culture to conspicuous wealth.
Direct money-making has some tendency to materialise and lower the
character, and Jews have been for generations prominent in occupations
which do much to impair those delicacies of feeling on which the charm
of manner largely depends. Besides this, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly
remarks, though the oldest of the cultured races they are a race of
_parvenus_ in the good society of Europe. In nearly all countries they
have till very recently been excluded from the kind of society and
from the kind of education in which the best manners are formed. The
exaggerations of bad taste; the love of the loud, the gaudy, the
ostentatious, and the meretricious; the awkwardness of men who are ill
at ease in an unaccustomed sphere, who have not yet mastered the happy
mean between arrogance and obsequiousness and who are therefore
somewhat prone to both extremes, still frequently characterise them.
Few persons who know Germany will doubt that the tone of manners of
the German Jews has contributed quite as much as any other cause to
their unpopularity.
It is probable that these defects will gradually diminish, and it
would be a grave error to regard the Jewish race as wholly devoted to
material ends. The multitude of their martyrs is a sufficient answer
to the charge, and no people cherish more strongly the ideals of their
past and have more of the pride both of race and of creed. They have
at all times, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu observes, been distinguished for
their reverence for learning, and it is an undoubted fact that Jewish
families and families mixed with Jewish blood have produced an amount
and variety of ability that far exceed the average of men. The ability
goes rather with the race than with the religion. Spinosa, Heine,
Ricardo, and Disraeli--to quote but a few of the most illustrious
names--were not believers in the synagogue. Some of the forms in which
the Jews have most excelled are such as might have been expected from
their past. It is natural that the descendants of the most nomadic
and cosmopolitan of races should have been great masters of language
and in the foremost rank of philologists, and it is not surprising
that the descendants of the chief moneylenders and calculators of the
world should have produced great financiers, and have shown a very
eminent aptitude for mathematics. Medicine more than most professions
depends on individual ability, and has been exercised independently of
the favour of Churches and Governments, and in medicine the Jews were
for a long period pre-eminent. Their marked taste and turn for music
may appear more surprising. It is universally recognised and is
sufficiently evident to anyone who will look at the faces of the chief
orchestras of Europe. Besides a crowd of lesser names they have
produced among composers Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Halévy, and among
contemporary performers Rubinstein, Joachim, Hermann Levy, and Lucca.
A Jewess is the most popular tragic actress on the contemporary stage,
and another Jewess was probably the greatest tragic actress of the
century. M. Leroy-Beaulieu notices that in painting and sculpture the
Jews have been less conspicuous, and he attributes this to their
horror of idolatry. I should rather ascribe it to the fact that
European art in its best period was mainly devoted to depicting
Christian subjects for Christian churches. At all events several
considerable Jewish names may be cited in contemporary art, and the
Dutch painter who bears the name of Israels is perhaps the greatest
living master of the pathetic in painting. In Western Europe, wherever
public life has been opened to them, Jews have thrown themselves into
almost all the great movements of their time and have distinguished
themselves in nearly all. Crémieux, who was a leading figure in the
French Republic of 1848, was a Jew both by birth and by creed. David
Manin and Léon Gambetta had Jewish blood in their veins. Lassalle and
Marx, the chief names in German socialism, as well as great numbers of
their followers belong to the same race, and more than one English
example of political eminence will occur to the reader. In both German
and Dutch literature Jewish names are frequent and they are nearly
everywhere prominent in journalism. In the army they have been much
less distinguished. Many Jews no doubt serve in the great continental
armies with honour, but the Jew is naturally a pacific being, hating
violence and recoiling with a peculiar horror from blood. The
beneficence of the Jew was for a long time very naturally confined to
his own race, but since the hand of persecution has been withdrawn,
and wherever the Jews have been suffered to mingle freely with the
Christian population, it has taken a wider range and Jewish names are
conspicuous in some of the best forms of unsectarian philanthropy.
It is the evident tendency of modern political life to split up into a
number of distinct groups representing distinct interests or forms of
thought. We find a Catholic party, a Nonconformist party, a Labour
party, a Socialist party, a Temperance party, and many others. But in
spite of the crusade that has arisen in so many countries against the
Jews, we nowhere find a distinct and clearly defined Jewish party. The
tendency of the race is rather to throw themselves ardently into
existing movements, and their power of assimilation is one of their
most remarkable gifts. As M. Leroy-Beaulieu shows by many
illustrations, they are apt in most Western nations even to exaggerate
the national characteristics, though they usually combine with them a
certain flexibility of adaptation and a certain cosmopolitanism of
view which is essentially their own.
It was inevitable that with such tendencies the old rigidity of creed
should be impaired and that the observances which completely severed
the Jew from other people should be discarded. There can be little
doubt that the dissolution of old beliefs which has been such a marked
and ominous characteristic of the latter half of the nineteenth
century has been even more common among the Western Jews than in
Christian nations, and it appears to have spread quite as rapidly
among the women as among the men. Many Jews have passed into complete
religious indifference--into absolute and often very cynical negation.
They have become, as Sheridan wittily said, like the blank page
between the Old and the New Testament. Others have taken refuge in a
kind of highly rationalised Judaism little different from pure Theism.
Some of the most independent, scientific, and trenchant criticism of
the Old Testament writings has proceeded from members of the race
which was once distinguished for the most complete and superstitious
worship of the letter of the law. Spinoza in his 'Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus' led the way in this path, and in our own day I
need only mention the writings of Salvador, Kalisch, and Darmesteter
and the remarkable Hibbert Lectures of Mr. Montefiore.
This movement, however, is chiefly confined to the Western Jews. The
Oriental Jews have retained in a far greater measure their old creed
and ritual, their old fanaticism and aspirations. To them Palestine is
still the land of promise, and they still dream that it is destined to
become once more a Jewish State. Few persons who consider the
conditions of the East and the power of the Jewish race will
pronounce the realisation of this dream to be impossible or even in a
very high degree improbable. Perhaps the most formidable obstacle is
the poverty of the land and the total absence among the Jews of
agricultural tastes and aptitudes. One thing, however, may be safely
predicted. If Palestine is ever again to become a Jewish land, this
will be effected only through the wealth and energy of the Western
Jews, and it is not those Jews who are likely to inhabit it.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Mr. Lecky had made various notes with the intention of bringing this
essay up to date, but failing health prevented him from accomplishing
it.--ED.
MADAME DE STAËL
Among the many important works which have lately been published on the
Continent, reconstructing the history of France during the struggle of
the Revolution and during the periods that immediately preceded and
followed it, scarcely any have been so comprehensive, and not many
have been so valuable, as 'The History of the Life and Times of Madame
de Staël,' by Lady Blennerhassett. The author--a Bavarian lady who was
an intimate friend and favourite pupil of Dr. Döllinger--has brought
to her task a knowledge, which is scarcely rivalled in its
completeness, of the French, German, English, and Italian literatures
relating to the period; and she has produced a work of which it is in
one sense the merit, but in another the defect, that it sweeps over a
far wider field than might be expected from its title. It is seldom, I
think, a judicious thing to confuse the provinces of history and
biography by turning the life of an individual into an elaborate
history of his time; and in the few cases in which this method has
been successfully pursued, the biographer has selected as his subject
some man like Cromwell, or Frederick the Great, or Napoleon, who was
indisputably the chief mover of his age. When figures of less
prominence are chosen, both the history and the biography are apt to
suffer. The true perspective, or relative magnitude, of events is
impaired, and the book is almost sure to lose something of its
artistic charm and of its popularity. Mr. Masson, as it seems to me,
committed a mistake of this kind in his 'Life of Milton,' when he
grouped around the great Puritan poet--who, however illustrious, was
certainly not the central figure of his time--a full and valuable
history of the Commonwealth, and of large sections of the reigns of
Charles I. and Charles II.
In like manner, a great part of the work of Lady Blennerhassett is not
biography, but history, and history of a very high order. Madame de
Staël was so closely connected in her own person, and still more
through her father, with the early events of the French Revolution,
that we accept with gratitude the admirable sketch of that period
which Lady Blennerhassett has given us; but we should scarcely expect
to find in a work primarily devoted to Madame de Staël full and
masterly accounts of the Ministry of Turgot, of the rise and teaching
of the Economists, of the rival influence of the writings of
Montesquieu and Rousseau on the French political character, of the
effect of English influence and American example in preparing the
Revolution, and of the part played by Germans and Swedes in French
politics. At the same time, the pictures of the social and
intellectual life prevailing in the different countries with which
Madame de Staël was connected, and the full accounts given of a crowd
of persons with whom she came into casual contact, though in
themselves both interesting and valuable, often tend to divert the
reader from the main subject of the book. In truth, Lady
Blennerhassett has not been able to resist the temptation of a very
full mind to pour out all its knowledge, and, while possessing many
rare and brilliant literary gifts, she appears to me to want that
restraining sense of literary perspective which gives biography its
true proportion and symmetry. This defect has, I fear, diminished the
popularity of a most valuable book. In the original German, and in an
excellent French translation which was revised by the author and which
I especially commend to my readers, the work consists of three very
substantial volumes.[9] A hasty reader will readily conclude that, in
this short and crowded life, such a space is far more than should be
allotted to a long-vanished figure which, though interesting and
brilliant, was not of the first magnitude. But if he has the courage
to persevere, he will soon discover that few modern books have lighted
up in so many directions the political, social, moral, and
intellectual history of a momentous period, and have exhibited at once
so many kinds of talent and so wide a range of sympathies and
knowledge. The complete competence, the firm, sober, and--if I may use
the expression--masculine judgment with which Lady Blennerhassett has
grasped the great political problems of the period of the Revolution,
is not less conspicuous than the truly feminine delicacy of
observation and touch with which she has delineated social life in
many different countries, and painted the finer shades of many widely
dissimilar characters.
Anne Louise Germaine Necker was born in Paris on April 22, 1766. Her
father was at that time known only as a Swiss banker of high character
and reputation, who had amassed a vast fortune and had come to Paris
for his private affairs; but about two years after the birth of his
daughter he was appointed to represent the interests of Geneva at
Paris, and when she was ten years old he rose, for the first time, to
a leading place in the Ministry of France. Her mother had been the
Mademoiselle Curchod whose charms and accomplishments had captivated
Gibbon when he was a young man at Lausanne. Every reader of his
autobiography will remember the famous passage in which he describes
his engagement, the opposition of his father, and the resignation with
which he 'sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son.' M. d'Haussonville
has published from the archives at Coppet some melancholy letters
which show clearly that Gibbon exhibited more heartlessness and
inflicted more suffering than might be gathered from his own stately
narrative. But no lasting scar remained. After a few years of poverty
and hardship, during which she was obliged to earn a livelihood as a
schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Curchod found in Necker a husband who
realised her fondest wishes; and when, soon after, she became the
centre of a brilliant salon at Paris, her former lover, then in the
zenith of his fame, was often among her guests. Madame Necker did not
always abstain from slightly veiled allusions to the past, but it is
pleasant to see that a warm and solid friendship seems to have grown
up between Gibbon and both his host and hostess. A pretty anecdote is
related of how, on one occasion, after he had left the house, they
agreed in expressing the deep regret with which they looked forward to
his approaching departure for England; when their little daughter, who
was then just ten years old, gravely offered to prevent the
catastrophe by marrying the illustrious, but by no means
prepossessing, historian.
It was a saying of Talleyrand that he who had not lived before 1789
had never known the full charm of life. Germaine Necker grew up in the
last bright flush of a society which had, perhaps, as many
fascinations as any that the world has known. Her mother, however,
though she occupied a prominent position in this brilliant world, was
never altogether of it. She shared fully, indeed, its intellectual
tastes, and had herself won some small place in literature. She threw
herself ardently into its philanthropic movements, and especially into
that for the reform of the hospitals. She formed a warm and true
friendship with Buffon and Thomas. She corresponded with Voltaire, and
attracted to her house most of the best writers of the age. But to the
last she remained eminently and characteristically Swiss, and she
never acquired the light touch, or the easy, pliant grace, of the true
Parisian. She was a little cold, a little prim, a little pedantic, a
little self-conscious. Neither her reserved manners nor her strong
domestic tastes, nor the vein of Puritanism that ran through her
opinions, harmonised with the lax and sceptical society around her,
and it was no sacrifice to her to exchange the splendours and the
gaieties of Paris for her peaceful retreat on the Lake of Geneva.
In this, as in most respects, her daughter was very different. In her
the Swiss element had altogether disappeared, and, as is often the
case with the eminent child of eminent parents, her character shot out
in directions wholly unlike both that of her father and that of her
mother. She was not beautiful, though her dark and eminently lustrous
eyes, beaming with intelligence, and her rich brown tint, gave some
charm to her large and rather coarse features; while her massive
shoulders, arms, and breast, her full lips and the firm grasp of her
vigorous hand, indicated a strong, frank, ruling, and passionate
nature, overflowing with life and with many forms of energy. Her
education was somewhat fitfully conducted, but she threw herself
eagerly into literary enthusiasms. At fifteen we find her annotating
Montesquieu. Raynal and Richardson were among her idols, but, like
most of the more ardent spirits of her generation, her ideas and
character were moulded chiefly by the genius of Rousseau. Her first
work of importance was an exposition of his doctrines, and his
influence left deep traces on both 'Corinne' and 'Delphine.' Her
strong sane judgment, however, her genuine humanity, and the
moderating influence of her father, saved her from being swept away,
like Madame Roland and most of the disciples of Rousseau, by the
sanguinary torrent of revolutionary enthusiasm; and in times of wild
passion and exaggeration she usually exhibited a singular soundness
and sobriety of political judgment. She was sometimes mistaken, but on
the whole it may well be doubted whether there is any other French
writer or politician of the period of the Revolution whose
contemporary judgments of men and events have been more frequently
ratified by posterity.
In this respect she was not of the school of Rousseau. In another and
less admirable way she was curiously untouched by his spirit, for few
superior intellects have been so openly, so utterly, insensible to the
charms of nature. She once spoke of 'the infernal peace' of her Swiss
home, and she candidly acknowledged that if it were not for respect
for the opinions of others she would not open her window to look for
the first time on the Bay of Naples, though she would gladly travel
five hundred leagues to make the acquaintance of a man of talent. On
the borders of the Lake of Geneva, with one of the fairest scenes on
earth expanding before her, she was incessantly pining for 'le
ruisseau de la Rue du Bac'--for the interest and the excitement of a
society which had become the passion of her life.
Her gifts of conversation were very wonderful, and she had a wide
range of sympathies, keen insight into character, and great power of
describing it by a few vivid words. She had, however, no reticence or
reserve, she made many enemies by her unbounded frankness, and she
often fatigued or overwhelmed by her exuberant animal spirits and by
the torrent of her words. At the same time, unlike most great talkers,
she possessed to a very eminent degree the gifts of learning from
others, of grasping the characteristic features of their teaching, of
awakening sympathies, of dispelling bashfulness, and of kindling
latent intellect into a flame. Few women combined so remarkably a
sound and moderate judgment with extreme vividness and impetuosity of
emotion. She admired deeply, and she generally admired wisely; her
first judgments and impulses were almost always generous; and,
although she was subject to violent gusts of passion, she could be
very patient with those she loved. Through her whole life she was the
warmest and most self-sacrificing of friends, and her few antipathies
were singularly devoid of rancour. One of those who knew her best
pronounced her to be 'absolutely incapable of hatred.'
She soon became the most attractive figure in the salon of Madame
Necker, and as the health of her mother declined she became its
central figure. Her rare accomplishments and her position as a great
heiress naturally would have drawn many suitors around her, but in
that age the determined Protestantism of her family was a formidable
barrier. It appears from something that she wrote late in life to a
German correspondent that, when a mere girl, she had come under the
spell of Louis de Narbonne, who asked her hand, and with whom, in
after years, she had relations which caused much scandal and which
greatly coloured her political life. The story that her parents at one
time contemplated a marriage between her and William Pitt, on the
occasion of his visit to France in 1783, was discredited by Lord
Stanhope; but M. d'Haussonville pronounces it to be quite true, though
there is no clear evidence that Pitt was apprised of the wish of the
Neckers. She was then only seventeen, and her vehement protest against
an English marriage nipped the project in the bud. In 1786, however, a
marriage was negotiated for her with the Swedish ambassador, the Baron
de Staël, who was at that time a special favourite of Gustavus III. It
was a marriage into which but little affection entered, and twelve
years later it ended in a separation. There was afterward, it is true,
a partial reconciliation, and she was present with her husband when he
died, in 1802, on the way from Paris to Coppet.