Part 5

"When asked why he thus rudely acted toward the old man, Motke Chabad explained that had he told the stranger his name the other would have asked where he came from, what his business was, how many children he had, if he was married, how old his father was, if he was still living, if he had any relatives in America, if he ever was blessed by the great rabbi of Wilna, etc., etc., and, said Chabad, 'to say nothing of my morning prayers, I had not as yet had my breakfast, when I met him.'

"Chabad, you see, knew his brother, man. Men curious to know? Rose Dartle is nothing beside Andrew Lang, and he has this advantage over her--that he exists and can find things out. Another instance. You go into your store or factory in the morning. You have a slight toothache. You feel and look rather seedy, and the man who works next to you comes over and sympathetically asks you why it was that she rejected you, why the other fellow won her heart, by what magic charms your rival eclipsed you, etc., and he keeps on with his queries until you tell him--

"Go stand up on the first corner. Take off your hat and cry out: 'Gentlemen, this is a hat, this is a hat! Look into it!' And in a few seconds you will have a big throng of curious men standing about and staring at you. Women who will happen along will pass right on, but men will stand there and stare--like men.

"There was a time when certain things were considered beyond the scrutiny of curious men, when they were held too sacred for investigations and explanations, when the things that were not understood were deemed holy and when men stood in reverence before these things and bowed and took off their thinking caps. But now they want to know everything--even the things that are of prime importance. And there is no use in telling them that nothing really exists--not even the logic of Christian Scientists. They want to know. They must find the facts or make them. What's the use of living if one doesn't know just on what date King Pharaoh died? No news may be good news, but you can't run a newspaper on that principle now-a-days. Whether the things happen or not man wants to know the facts and the details of the cases. They must know. Knowledge is power. To know is to be able to boast of it. And men ever boast of what they know or think they know.

"But why say more? The collected knowledge, the accumulated data and science of the world sufficiently prove the inquisitiveness of men. It is one faculty which works many ways, you know, and these ways are shaped by circumstances and conditions. Now a man peeps through a keyhole to get some material for a bit of gossip, and then he looks up to the stars to make an astronomical observation. But the Darwins and the Newtons and the Herschels prove how curious to know men really are.

"And it is their extreme vanity, too, that makes men so presumptuous, ostentatious and obstreperous. They have so much faith in themselves that no self-respecting person can trust them. They are so confident in their right to know, so convinced of the value of their knowledge, so sure of the absolute necessity of their volubility. They are so unbearably overbearing, self-conscious and self-centred that they forget there are others besides them in this world. It is their vanity that makes men speak in volumes.

"Then they say that women gossip, but you know that they are far outdone, almost totally eclipsed in this respect, too, by men. Men are the real, rapid-transit champion gossips and talkers of the world. It was a dark and dismal night, as the story goes, and we all sat around the fire and the captain said, 'Jack, tell us a story,' and Jack told a number of stories, and so did others, and we all told of divers devilish, wicked things our friends had done, and in our heart of hearts were awfully sorry we did not do these things ourselves, and we made mud-cakes out of good, well-preserved reputations. Oh, how well we can and how we do talk about our neighbors; but you know, people do like to talk about those whom they love. Marie Corelli recently said--now do not scowl because I quote Marie Corelli. She is a very good woman; only she could not resist the temptation to write a few novels, and they may not be so bad, only I could never get myself to read them because I heard that Queen Victoria liked them immensely. Hold on, though; I guess I did read one of these novels in a Yiddish translation; but that was because the translator did not say whose work it was. I think he thought it was original with himself. In fact, he passed it off as his own--which was a brave thing to do, though the book proved to be popular. But I lost my train of thought. Marie Corelli recently said that she never endured such a babel of gossiping tongues as she once heard when being entertained to luncheon at a men's club, and she added, 'nor have I known many more reputations picked to pieces than on that occasion.' But a recent writer told us what awful gossips all the historians have been, and they were all men. We were told that Herodotus, who is the father of history, was also one of the most inveterate of gossips. Saint Simon was considered essentially a gossip, and even therefore a wonderful historian of the time of Louis XV. Pepys, this writer told us, was the greatest gossip that ever lived, also the greatest historian of his time. Even Mommsen, we were told, shows some of the traits of a gossip in his monumental history of Rome. The same was said of Gibbon and many others. Gossip is not only the raw material of history, we were informed, but it is also the raw material of the realistic novel, and as I said before, the finest novels have been produced by the sons of Adam.

"Women are also charged with being loquacious, but that is another trumped-up, false charge. You well know that the loquaciousness of men is prodigious, tremendous. Man is the most wonderful talking machine ever invented, and one of his favorite topics is the talkativeness of woman. Men talk you to mental derangement and death wherever you go. There is no escape. Nearly every man you meet is ready to tell you the sad story of his life--sad, because he is ready to tell it. Many of them write their autobiographies, and what with these and their sermons and orations, novels and essays, histories and philosophies--there will soon be no more room for libraries. And the worst thing about man's garrulity is that he taxes the intellect so heavily, that what he says is loaded with so much meaning. Anything a man says, you know, is in danger of becoming literature. It's appalling. He always makes you think, whereas what little a woman does say is so light and airy, breezy and restive. A woman, too, writes a book, occasionally, but she does not mean anything by it.

"But men are so very bad in this respect, so terribly blatant. They never cease talking. When they don't talk they write, and the pen is worse than the sword. Why am I afraid to ask the man, who stands near me waiting for a car, what time it is? Because he might tell me of his grandfather's heroic exploits in the Civil War. To have gone to war was cruel; but to have left some one behind to boast of it was criminal. Why am I afraid to read the latest short story that I have written to my friend? Because he might show me a poem just done. And I nearly forgot to point out what a monumental proof of naïve garrulity the Talmud is. The Talmud, that strange conglomeration of law, love, legend, gossip, fable, and occasionally a bit of wisdom, which one can find if one searches diligently.

"They say also that women are capricious and changeful; but the progress of the world shows how easily men change their minds. Yes, someone ought to write an essay and point these things out, and vindicate a much-maligned sex. It's a good chance for a man for some interesting gossip on the subject."

"I suppose, then, that you believe in woman's rights," I at length haphazarded an interruption.

"Yes," answered Keidansky, "I believe that women should have all their rights, and should not, as the French cynic would have it, be killed at forty. It's too late. I mean," he added quickly, "that it's too late to talk any more about it."

IX

The Value of Ignorance

"What do I know? I don't know anything," said Keidansky, "and I don't care to."

"I thought you were always in quest of knowledge," I remarked.

"I am," he answered: "I am infatuated with the quest, I love it. It is so exhilarating, stirring, full of excitement and fraught with danger."

"Danger? Wherein is that?" I asked.

"The danger," he emphasized, "is in finding the knowledge I am in quest of; for once your search has been answered with success, and you have informed yourself with the facts of the case, the game is up and the fun is over, as the Americans say. The hallucination of the glorious quest is shattered, the suspense is spoiled, the ecstatic expectations are destroyed, and we become fit subjects for illustrations in the _Fliegende Blätter_. 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing' and a lot of it is fatal. Yes, knowledge is might, but illusion is omnipotence. So I like to seek information well enough, but I would rather not know."

I became interested, although scandalized, and my companion kept on musing aloud.

"Not to know is to hope, to fear, to be in delightful uncertainty, to dream fair dreams, to imagine the most impossible things, to wonder and marvel at all in childlike innocence, to build the most beautiful castles in the air, to give the imagination full swing, to conjure up the most fantastic mythological melodramas, to stand with deep awe and inspired reverence before all the mighty manifestations of nature, to form the finest idols, to build splendid religions, to have faith and to foster it, to see the invisible, to draw gorgeous rainbows of promise upon the horizon of life, in a word, not to know is to sustain perfect illusion, not to go behind the scenes, is to enjoy the entire performance.

"On the other hand, my dear fellow, to know is to have your wings clipped, to see the distance between the earth and the skies and the difference between you and what you thought yourself to be, to feel your littleness and become dreadfully aware of the absurdity of it all, to have the imagination arrested for trespassing, to be rejected from the castles you built for non-payment of taxes, to be punished for the idleness of your idols, to see your little demigods crumble at the rate of sixteen a minute, to become aware of the futility of the whole business, the shortness of terms given you, the unstability of your credit, to find that you are but a feather blown hither and thither by the whirlwind of the world, that your greatest plan may be demolished by a whim of fate, to learn that the stupid moon really does not look so pale because of your unrequited love, and that the great sun does not shine because you are going to a picnic, to discover that your credulity was the only miracle that ever happened, and that even gods suffer from dyspepsia, to lose faith, become sceptic, abandon religion, move out of the balmy fairyland of tradition and freeze in the realms of right reason. To know is to be deprived even of that little confidence in your power to alter the course of the universe; to recognize how inexorable, inscrutable, indifferent, the powers of life are, and what a common pedigree all things of beauty have; it is to have the dramatic effect of the play spoiled and to vote it all a farce and a failure.

"We are all becoming so educated now-a-days that we no longer know the value of ignorance, and we have nearly forgotten things of goodness and of beauty that it has brought into the world. Ignorance is the mazy mist of morning in which so much is born; it is the mystic dimness wherein all things awe and enchant forever. Ignorance is the beginning of the world; knowledge is the end of it. In the unexplored vastnesses of ignorance the mind soars through all the heavens and works wonders; in the measured spheres of knowledge the mind travels carefully and creates little as far as mythology, theology, religion and poetry are concerned. Were it not for ignorance we would not have had all the wealth of legends and fables and fairy tales and sagas and _märchen_, strange, weird, wonderful, to intoxicate the imagination of the world and enable us to live for centuries in lands of magic and charm and dreamlike realities. And if you see some works of beauty and nobility in the world to delight you, it is because we have just come out of these lands, and we are imitating and re-creating what we saw there. There are some who still dwell in them, and they send us messages and often bless us with their visits.

"Thank you for stopping me. I should not have liked to be run over before you had listened to the rest of my argument; besides, it makes a mess of one. This is a dangerous crossing--for a debate. But, to continue: Were it not for ignorance--had we known everything about God--Europe would not be dotted with all the beautiful cathedrals and the wonderful treasures of art that are an everlasting source of enchantment and inspiration. Were it not for the same reason we would not have such a beauty spot in Boston as Copley square, with its two imposing churches, Library and Museum of Art. And remembering that all objects to delight the eye, the ear and the mind began at the earliest shrines of worship, we can barely calculate how poor and meagre all our arts would have been were it not for this ignorance. What would poetry--in the largest sense--what would it be were it not for this ignorance concerning Providence? And poetry is the main motive, the quintessence of all the other arts. Religion is the great question mark of the world, and what you ask for religion I ask for ignorance. Whether the makers of the Bible wrote on space or not, no one can deny its high value as a work of poetry and fiction; and as much can be said for all the other sacred books of the great faiths.

"The mood of ignorance is worth everything: it is wonder, amazement, naïveté, child-like innocence, fairy-like dreaminess.

"In ignorance we trust, trusting we serve, serving we achieve, achieving we glorify our names. Not to know is to long for, to expect everything--and work for it; while to know is to be sure of this or that, and there is something significant in the coupling of the words, 'dead sure.' 'Tis good to have faith; what we believe in is or comes true. The illusion is the thing that makes the play. We are all chasing after phantoms, but the chase is a reality, and it's all in all. The less we know about the results--perhaps the more we do. And not knowing how incapable we are, some of us do remarkable things.

"A Jewish legend tells us that before the human soul is doomed to be born it knows everything, is informed of all knowledge--including, I presume, a knowledge of the Talmudic laws of marriage and divorce--but that at its birth an angel appears, gives the child a _schnel in noz_, or tap on the nose, which causes the infant to forget everything it knows so that it may be born absolutely ignorant. That is a good angel, I say, who performs a good office, and not like the rest of them, who, according to John Hay, are loafing around the throne. Here is a useful angel. For to give the child its ignorance is to confer a great boon; to make it capable of something in life. It is a valuable gift, though earthly creatures soon spoil the good work of the angel and stuff the child's head full of all sorts of useless knowledge. Soon the mind is clogged, the faculties for thinking, wondering, understanding are turned into a phonographic apparatus for remembering what should never have been learned, and the imagination is nipped in the bud, told to be correct and keep still. With all my inability to learn and disinclination to know, there are still a few things I have been trying to forget all my life, but I cannot do it. At the point of a cane my rabbi drove these things into my head. So if I ever impart any information to you, forgive me for I cannot forget. Here in America and in modernity, where superstition is such that people actually believe in the existence of facts, the schools and colleges form tremendous systems of stupefaction. Poor little heads of innocent children are packed, cramped and crowded with dates and names and all sorts of insignificant data. They teach them everything--except what interests them, and they are made to repeat and to remember all things dry and dull and dreary. 'Facts, facts, facts,' the teachers cry, not knowing that there are no facts in real life. Minds are measured, ideas must be of a certain size, you must think but one thought at a time and remember all things in history that never happened. Thus, fancy, whim, suggestion, imagination are sadly neglected, and the finest faculties are left behind. Everybody knows everything, but no one understands anything.

"'Tis so with people generally--they are all clamoring for what they call facts, explaining things after fixed formulas, making the most astonishing, dead-sure statements; in short, spreading useful knowledge. They all have ideas and theories and philosophies after a fashion; they have sized this universe up, past, present and future, and they can explain everything except themselves. Everybody has found a few 'facts,' and after these fashioned a universal panacea, a little patented plan for solving the social problem. There are so many solutions that it is hard to find just what the problem is. Reform is so much in style that even a corn doctor proclaims himself a social saviour. The social reformers with their sure cures, positive facts and all-saving systems are the plague of the age. There is no escape from these things they call certain and positive and indisputable. Figures and statistics and so-called facts make up the sum of our life. Life is harnessed by systems and we are strangled by statistics. The subtle, the strange, the symbolic, the suggestive, the intuitive, the poetic and imaginative, the flash-lights that make you see eternity in a moment--these are overlooked and neglected. The things really true are forgotten. What is that Persian legend about the man who devoted his life to planting and rearing and raising the tree of knowledge in his garden, and afterwards, in his old age, was hanged thereon? What? There is no such Persian legend? Well, then, some Englishman ought to write it. At any rate this shows the value of knowledge. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is now sweet, now bitter--but mostly bitter. We analyze and examine so much these days that we find within ourselves and in our surroundings the symptoms of all diseases and all evil. To quote a quaint but true Zangwillism, 'Analysis is paralysis, introspection is vivisection, and culture drives us mad.' We measure things so closely and leave no room for the surprising, the spontaneous, the freely flowing, the lifelike. The age of reason has come and we are no longer wise. We have forgotten what we owe to ignorance. 'He knows everything,' said the doctor; 'there is no hope for him.'

"In their ignorance of human nature and natural law idealists have dreamed and created the most unattainable Utopias, and their impossible visions shaped our destiny and made us great. The stirring speech that Lametkin delivered this evening is partly due to his ignorance of things and his blind faith in his panacea, but it enthused his audience immensely, and it will have a wonderful effect upon their lives. The other day I read some beautiful lines by Owen Meredith about the child who cries 'to clutch the star that shines in splendor over his little cot.' The matter-of-fact father says that it is folly, that it is millions of miles away, and that 'the star descends not to twinkle on the little one's bed.' But the mother tenderly tells the child to sleep and promises to pluck the star for it and by-and-by

'_Lay it upon the pillow bright with dew_,'

and then the child sleeps and dreams of stars whose light

'_Beams in his own bright eyes when he awakes_.'

"Now in these lines one may find justification for all the idealizations of art, but they are also suggestive of the value of ignorance. So it is. We must learn to see the invisible. We must be oblivious to the obvious, to see anything. We ought not to try to clear up everything. If life were not a problem play it would not interest us so. Let the mystery remain. Intimations of immortality are good enough; proofs would kill our longing for it. Whence? Whither? I rather hope these questions will never be answered. The halo, the maze, the mystery, the shadowy strangeness of it all makes it worth while and gives the fancy freedom to fly. Statistics sterilize the imagination and figures dry up our souls. Do you remember Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learned Astronomers?' The lecturer with his charts and diagrams soon made him unaccountably sick, till rising and gliding out of the lecture room he wandered off by himself 'in the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars,' and thus became himself again.

"Let others seek what they call facts: for me the lights and the shades, the dimness and the flash, the chiaroscuro of life. Let others pierce through phenomena and impregnate realities; my favorite amusement is to walk upon the clouds and play ball with the stars. I cannot grasp such details as the size of the earth, the distance between sun and moon. Logic? Lockjaw. Go study your astronomy and let me lie on my back in some verdant field and gaze upon the stars, and I shall be content. Let others study botany, give me but the fragrance of the blooms and flowers and let me gaze upon their gorgeous riots of color. For others the study of anatomy, for me the beauty of the human form to behold. Let others study ornithology, and let me listen to the thrilling music of the winged songsters. Take all the sciences that explain everything away, and give me the things beautiful to behold, sweet to hear and pleasing to touch. And before you run away let me also tell you that there is a mood of contemplation which, for comprehension, passeth all science and analysis.

"But, after all," he added, as we were about to part, "I could only hint at these things, for it takes a very learned man to prove the value of ignorance."

X

Days of Atonement

All day the Ghetto was astir. There was a babel of excitement at the markets, an unusual rush and bustle on Allen street. The stores were well filled with bargaining, buying men and women, and the push-cart vendors were centres of attracted crowds. Everywhere housewives were busy washing, clearing, cleaning their homes. The spirit of awe, reverence, expectancy, was in the air. The great day of Rosh Hashona was approaching; New Year's day was drawing nigh.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of Berosowsky's book and periodical emporium, the strange place where you can procure anything from Bernard Feigenbaum's pamphlets against religion, to a pair of phylacteries, from Tolstoy's works in Yiddish to a holy scroll. We stood and gazed on the familiar yet fascinating scene. We had just left the store, wherein we glanced through the current newspapers and other publications. "It is so stupid to read. Let's go out and look at the people," Keidansky exclaimed abruptly as he threw down a eulogy of a Yiddish poet written by himself, in the paper of which he is now editor.