Part 14
“He, too,—the hero whom we sing,—Jehuda ben Halevy, too, had his lady-love; but she was of a special sort.
“She was no Laura, whose eyes, mortal stars, in the cathedral on Good Friday kindled that world-renowned flame.
“She was no châtelaine, who in the blooming glory of her youth presided at tourneys, and awarded the victor’s crown.
“No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady _doctrinaire_, who delivered her oracles in the judgment-chamber of a Court of Love.
“She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor darling, a mourning picture of desolation ... and her name was Jerusalem.”
Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and there, amid the ruins, sings a song of Sion which has become famous among his people:—
“That lay of pearled tears is the wide-famed Lament, which is sung in all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout the world.
“On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab, on the anniversary of Jerusalem’s destruction by Titus Vespasianus.
“Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy sang with his dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jerusalem.
“Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, he sate there upon the fragment of a fallen column; down to his breast fell,
“Like a gray forest, his hair; and cast a weird shadow on the face which looked out through it,—his troubled pale face, with the spiritual eyes.
“So he sate and sang, like unto a seer out of the foretime to look upon; Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to have risen out of his grave.
“But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on his barb, lolling in his saddle, and brandishing a naked javelin;
“Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his deadly shaft, and shot away like a winged shadow.
“Quietly flowed the Rabbi’s life-blood, quietly he sang his song to an end; and his last dying sigh was Jerusalem!”
But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing a public dispute, before King Pedro and his Court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on the merits of their respective faiths. In the strain of the Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its rigid defiant Monotheism, appear:—
“Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for mankind; he is no gushing philanthropist, no declaimer.
“Our God is not love, caressing is not his line; but he is a God of thunder, and he is a God of revenge.
“The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every sinner, and the sins of the fathers are often visited upon their remote posterity.
“Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities.
“Our God, too is a God in robust health, no myth, pale and thin as sacrificial wafers, or as shadows by Cocytus.
“Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon, and stars; thrones break, nations reel to and fro, when he knits his forehead.
“Our God loves music, the voice of the harp and the song of feasting; but the sound of church-bells he hates, as he hates the grunting of pigs.”
Nor must Heine’s sweetest note be unheard,—his plaintive note, his note of melancholy. Here is a strain which came from him as he lay, in the winter night, on his “mattress-grave” at Paris, and let his thoughts wander home to Germany, “the great child, entertaining herself with her Christmas-tree.” “Thou tookest,”—he cries to the German exile,—
“Thou tookest thy flight towards sunshine and happiness; naked and poor returnest thou back. German truth, German shirts,—one gets them worn to tatters in foreign parts.
“Deadly pale are thy looks, but take comfort, thou art at home! one lies warm in German earth, warm as by the old pleasant fireside.
“Many a one, alas, became crippled, and could get home no more! longingly he stretches out his arms; God have mercy upon him!”
God have mercy upon him! for what remain of the days of the years of his life are few and evil. “Can it be that I still actually exist? My body is so shrunk that there is hardly anything of me left but my voice, and my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin, which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose tops shine like green flames to heaven. Ah, I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh waving! for over my mattress-grave here in Paris no green leaves rustle; and early and late I hear nothing but the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of the piano. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books. What a melancholy situation!”
He died, and has left a blemished name; with his crying faults,—his intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness in passion, his inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his incessant mocking,—how could it be otherwise? Not only was he not one of Mr. Carlyle’s “respectable” people, he was profoundly _dis_respectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can make up for a man’s being that. To his intellectual deliverance there was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was something immense; the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient in _love_; to me his weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in self-respect, in true dignity of character. But on this negative side of one’s criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part, when I have once clearly marked that this negative side is and must be there, have no pleasure in dwelling. I prefer to say of Heine something positive. He is not an adequate interpreter of the modern world. He is only a brilliant soldier in the Liberation War of humanity. But, such as he is, he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the European poetry of that quarter of a century which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably the most important figure.
What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature! With what prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power, content to gather almost always little result from it, sometimes none! Look at Byron, that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, I cannot but think which has appeared in our literature since Shakspeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature? He shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and with no ideas. Well, then, look at Heine. Heine had all the culture of Germany; in his head fermented all the ideas of modern Europe. And what have we got from Heine? A half-result, for want of moral balance, and of nobleness of soul and character. That is what I say; there is so much power, so many seem able to run well, so many give promise of running well;—so few reach the goal, so few are chosen. _Many are called, few chosen._
VI.
PAGAN AND MEDIÆVAL RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.
I read the other day in the _Dublin Review_:—“We Catholic are apt to be cowed and scared by the lordly oppression of public opinion, and not to bear ourselves as men in the face of the anti-Catholic society of England. It is good to have an habitual consciousness that the public opinion of Catholic Europe looks upon Protestant England with a mixture of impatience and compassion, which more than balances the arrogance of the English people towards the Catholic Church in these countries.”
The Holy Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, can take very good care of herself, and I am not going to defend her against the scorn of Exeter Hall. Catholicism is not a great visible force in this country, and the mass of mankind will always treat lightly even things the most venerable, if they do not present themselves as visible forces before its eyes. In Catholic countries, as the _Dublin Review_ itself says with triumph, they make very little account of the greatness of Exeter Hall. The majority has eyes only for the things of the majority, and in England the immense majority is Protestant. And yet, in spite of all the shocks which the feeling of a good Catholic, like the writer in the _Dublin Review_, has in this Protestant country inevitably to undergo, in spite of the contemptuous insensibility to the grandeur of Rome which he finds so general and so hard to bear, how much has he to console him, how many acts of homage to the greatness of his religion may he see if he has his eyes open! I will tell him of one of them. Let him go in London to that delightful spot, that Happy Island in Bloomsbury, the reading-room of the British Museum. Let him visit its sacred quarter, the region where its theological books are placed. I am almost afraid to say what he will find there, for fear Mr. Spurgeon, like a second Caliph Omar, should give the library to the flames. He will find an immense Catholic work, the collection of the Abbé Migne, lording it over that whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Protestant forces which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism is duly represented, indeed: the librarian knows his business too well to suffer it to be otherwise; all the varieties of Protestantism are there; there is the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, learned, decorous, exemplary, but a little uninteresting; there are the works of Calvin, rigid, militant, menacing; there are the works of Dr. Chalmers, the Scotch thistle valiantly doing duty as the rose of Sharon, but keeping something very Scotch about it all the time; there are the works of Dr. Channing, the last word of religious philosophy in a land where every one has some culture, and where superiorities are discountenanced,—the flower of moral and intelligent mediocrity. But how are all these divided against one another, and how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the Catholic Leviathan, their neighbor! Majestic in its blue and gold unity, this fills shelf after shelf and compartment after compartment, its right mounting up into heaven among the white folios of the _Acta Sanctorum_, its left plunging down into hell among the yellow octavos of the _Law Digest_. Everything is there, in that immense _Patrologiæ Cursus Completus_, in that _Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Nouvelle Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Troisième Encyclopédie Théologique_; religion, philosophy, history, biography, arts, sciences, bibliography, gossip. The work embraces the whole range of human interests; like one of the great Middle-Age Cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life. Like the net in Scripture, it drags everything to land, bad and good, lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that it be but matter of human concern. Wide-embracing as the power whose product it is! a power, for history at any rate, eminently _the Church_; not, perhaps, the Church of the future, but indisputably the Church of the past and, in the past, the Church of the multitude.
This is why the man of imagination—nay, and the philosopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him—will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church; because of the rich treasures of human life which have been stored within her pale. The mention of other religious bodies, or of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the thought of men of a definite type as their adherents; the mention of Catholicism suggests no such special following. Anglicanism suggests the English episcopate; Calvin’s name suggests Dr. Candlish; Chalmers’s, the Duke of Argyll; Channing’s, Boston society; but Catholicism suggests,—what shall I say?—all the pell-mell of the men and women of Shakspeare’s plays. This abundance the Abbé Migne’s collection faithfully reflects. People talk of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their life with only one; for my part I think I would choose the Abbé Migne’s collection. _Quicquid agunt homines_,—everything, as I have said, is there. Do not seek in it splendor of form, perfection of editing; its paper is common, its type ugly, its editing indifferent, its printing careless. The greatest and most baffling crowd of misprints I ever met in my life occurs in a very important page of the introduction to the _Dictionnaire des Apocryphes_. But this is just what you have in the world,—quantity rather than quality. Do not seek in it impartiality, the critical spirit; in reading it you must do the criticism for yourself; it loves criticism as little as the world loves it. Like the world, it chooses to have things all its own way, to abuse its adversary, to back its own notion through thick and thin, to put forward all the _pros_ for its own notion, to suppress all the _contras_; it does just all that the world does, and all that the critical shrinks from. Open the _Dictionnaire des Erreurs Sociales_: “The religious persecutions of Henry the Eighth’s and Edward the Sixth’s time abated a little in the reign of Mary, to break out again with new fury in the reign of Elizabeth.” There is a summary of the history of religious persecution under the Tudors! But how unreasonable to reproach the Abbé Migne’s work with wanting a criticism, which, by the very nature of things, it cannot have, and not rather to be grateful to it for its abundance, its variety, its infinite suggestiveness, its happy adoption, in many a delicate circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man of the world, instead of the acrid tone and temper of the fanatic!
Still, in spite of their fascinations, the contents of this collection sometimes rouse the critical spirit within one. It happened that lately, after I had been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times, I took down the _Dictionnaire des Origines du Christianisme_, to see what it had to say about paganism and pagans. I found much what I expected. I read the article, _Révélation Évangélique, sa Nécessité_. There I found what a sink of iniquity was the whole pagan world; how one Roman fed his oysters on his slaves, how another put a slave to death that a curious friend might see what dying was like; how Galen’s mother tore and bit her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. I found this account of the religion of paganism: “Paganism invented a mob of divinities with the most hateful character, and attributed to them the most monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, sensuality, knavery, cruelty, and rage.” And I found that from this religion there followed such practice as was to be expected: “What must naturally have been the state of morals under the influence of such a religion, which penetrated with its own spirit the public life, the family life, and the individual life of antiquity?”
The colors in this picture are laid on very thick, and I for my part cannot believe that any human societies, with a religion and practice such as those just described, could ever have endured as the societies of Greece and Rome endured, still less have done what the societies of Greece and Rome did. We are not brought far by descriptions of the vices of great cities, or even of individuals driven mad by unbounded means of self-indulgence. Feudal and aristocratic life in Christendom has produced horrors of selfishness and cruelty not surpassed by the grandee of pagan Rome; and then, again, in antiquity there is Marcus Aurelius’s mother to set against Galen’s. Eminent examples of vice and virtue in individuals prove little as to the state of societies. What, under the first emperors, was the condition of the Roman poor upon the Aventine compared with that of our poor in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green? What, in comfort, morals, and happiness, were the rural population of the Sabine country under Augustus’s rule, compared with the rural population of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire under the rule of Queen Victoria?
But these great questions are not now for me. Without trying to answer them, I ask myself, when I read such declamation as the foregoing, if I can find anything that will give me a near, distinct sense of the real difference in spirit and sentiment between paganism and Christianity, and of the natural effect of this difference upon people in general. I take a representative religious poem of paganism,—of the paganism which all the world has in its mind when it speaks of paganism. To be a representative poem, it must be one for popular use, one that the multitude listens to. Such a religious poem may be at the end of one of the best and happiest of Theocritus’s idylls, the fifteenth. In order that the reader may the better go along with me in the line of thought I am following, I will translate it; and, that he may see the medium in which religious poetry of this sort is found existing, the society out of which it grows, the people who form it and are formed by it, I will translate the whole, or nearly the whole, of the idyll (it is not long) in which the poem occurs.
The idyll is dramatic. Somewhere about two hundred and eighty years before the Christian era, a couple of Syracusan women, staying at Alexandria, agreed on the occasion of a great religious solemnity,—the feast of Adonis,—to go together to the palace of King Ptolemy Philadelphus, to see the image of Adonis, which the queen Arsinoe, Ptolemy’s wife, had had decorated with peculiar magnificence. A hymn, by a celebrated performer, was to be recited over the image. The names of the two women are Gorgo and Praxinoe; their maids, who are mentioned in the poem, are called Eunoe and Eutychis. Gorgo comes by appointment to Praxinoe’s house to fetch her, and there the dialogue begins:—
_Gorgo._—Is Praxinoe at home?
_Praxinoe._—My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Eunoe, find a chair,—get a cushion for it.
_Gorgo._—It will do beautifully as it is.
_Praxinoe._—Do sit down.
_Gorgo._—Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoe, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you really live _too_ far off.
_Praxinoe._—It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place,—for a house it is not,—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbors. He is always just the same; anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!
_Gorgo._—My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. Never mind, Zopyrio, my pet, she is not talking about papa.
_Praxinoe._—Good heavens! the child does really understand.
_Gorgo._—Pretty papa!
_Praxinoe._—That pretty papa of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead;—stupid, great, big, interminable animal!
_Gorgo._—Mine is just the fellow to him.... But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.
_Praxinoe._—In grand people’s houses everything is grand. What things you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to anybody who has never been here!
_Gorgo._—Come, we ought to be going.
_Praxinoe._—Every day is holiday to people who have nothing to do. Eunoe, pick up your work; and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that, extravagant! Now pour out the water;—stupid! why don’t you take care of my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here;—quick!
_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost?—the dress by itself, I mean.
_Praxinoe._—Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it I have almost worn my life out.
_Gorgo._—Well, you couldn’t have done better.
_Praxinoe._—Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head;—properly. No, child (_to her little boy_), I am not going to take you; there’s a bogy on horseback, who bites. Cry as much as you like; I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse, take the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street-door. (_They go out._) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? here are the royal Horse Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoe, you mad girl, do take care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home!
_Gorgo._—All right, Praxinoe, we are safe behind them; and they have gone on to where they are stationed.
_Praxinoe._—Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon us.
_Gorgo_ (_to an old woman_).—Mother, are you from the palace?
_Old Woman._—Yes, my dears.
_Gorgo._—Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?
_Old Woman._—My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.
_Gorgo._—The old creature has delivered herself of an oracle and departed.
_Praxinoe._—Women can tell you everything about everything, Jupiter’s marriage with Juno not excepted.
_Gorgo._—Look, Praxinoe, what a squeeze at the palace gates!
_Praxinoe._—Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoe, take hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoe! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress!
_Stranger._—I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.
_Praxinoe._—What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.
_Stranger._—Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.
_Praxinoe._—May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There is Eunoe jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride.
_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is!—how exquisite! Why, they might wear it in heaven.
_Praxinoe._—Heavenly patroness of needlewomen, what hands were hired to do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real;—as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis,—Adonis, whom one loves even though he is dead!
_Another Stranger._—You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter! Like turtles, you go on forever. They are enough to kill one with their broad lingo—nothing but _a, a, a_.