Part 9
There is a tone of pity in the old verses which spread abroad the fable in Flanders, and has thence gone through many lands as _The Wandering Jew’s Complaint_, though with many variations. I find them quoted in Mr. Hoffman’s book, referred to elsewhere. The burgesses of Brabant address the Wanderer:
“We used to think your story Was but an idle dream; But when thus wan and hoary And broken down you seem, The sight can not deceive And we the tale believe.
“Are you that man of sorrow Of whom our authors write-- Grief comes with every morrow, And wretchedness at night; Oh, let us know are you Isaac, the Wandering Jew?
“Then he replied, ‘Believe me, I suffer bitter woe; Incessant travels grieve me-- No rest’s for me below; A respite I have never, But onward MARCH forever!
“’Twas by my rash behaviour I wrought this fearful scathe: As Christ our Lord and Saviour Was passing to the grave, His mild request I spurned, His gentle pleading scorned.
“A secret force expelled me That instant from my home, And since the Doom hath held me Unceasingly to roam-- But neither day nor night Must check my onward flight.
“I have no home to hide me, No wealth can I display; Yet Unknown Powers provide me Five farthings every day; This always is my store, ’Tis never less nor more.’”
I may here mention an extremely important work, _Histoire de l’Imagerie Populaire, par Champfleury_ (Paris: Dentu, 1869), which contains a number of pictures taken from the old ballads and folk-books concerning the Wandering Jew. The early pictures represent the Jew as a man of noble form, and generally of a handsome and melancholy countenance. The only picture in the volume which betrays anti-Jewish feeling is a modern one from Sweden (where the Wandering Jew is still believed in), which represents him in semi-caricature, carrying top-boots at his back. In most of the pictures the boots worn constitute a prominent feature. This work of Champfleury is of value beyond its pictorial representations, on account of the curiosities which the author has discovered concerning the adventures of the legend among rustic populations. The author does not give us his authority for saying that the Wandering Jew appeared in some of the mediæval miracle-plays, but he shows that he was introduced into a French ballet, _Mariage de Pierre de Provence et de la belle Maguelonne, dancé par son Altesse Royale dans la Ville de Tours, le 21, en son Hostel_, and at Paris in 1638. There may also be found in this work the Breton ballad of the Wandering Jew, consisting of 180 verses, sung at country fairs, to the popular air _Güerz, Santez Anna_. This ballad is very ancient, and much more interesting than that in _Percy’s Reliques_. The Wanderer calls himself Boudedeo, and tells of the many countries he has visited. He has always five sous in his pocket, and is never disturbed by sickness or hunger. The ballad ends,
“Chrétiens, priez Dieu pour le malheureux Boudedeo!”
Champfleury describes a Wissembourg picture which shows a beggar raising his hat to the Wanderer and the latter drops his five sous into the beggar’s cap. This incident tells much of the popular sympathy felt for persons believed to be the doomed man, and is remembered by Béranger in his poem:
“Plus d’un pauvre vient implorer Le denier que je puis répandre, Qui n’a pas le temps de serrer La main qu’au passant j’aime à tendre.”
Champfleury remarks that, in popular belief, it was always for inhumanity that Ahasuerus was punished; and the meaning of this Wissembourg picture is that as he was punished for lack of charity, he is saved by his charity. The picture shows a citizen giving the Wanderer a glass of beer. It is all a lesson of humanity, but is pictured on a background of such inhumanity on the part of Christ, that Ahasuerus, giving away his sous, seems to have taken the place in human sympathy of the Jew who cursed him.
Dr. Coremans, in his _Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire de Belgique_ (X., No. 1) says that most of the Belgian villages have their legend of the passage of the Wandering Jew through them, and that there is a general notion that he rejuvenates old women.
The Man in the Moon with his thornbush--if, as some think, he represents the doom of a Jew, who picked up fire-wood on the Sabbath, doomed to go on picking up sticks forever, and be bayed at by Gabriel’s hounds--might typify the shrivelling up in English folk-lore of the great myths of earthly immortals, including Ahasuerus.
Mr. William Henderson gives the following example from the North-country: “An old woman of the North Riding once asked a friend of mine whether it was wrong to wash on Good Friday. ‘I used to do so,’ she said, ‘and thought no harm of it, till once, when I was hanging out my clothes, a young woman passed by (a dressmaker she was, and a Methodist); and she reproved me, and told me this story. While our Lord Jesus was being led to Calvary, they took him past a woman who was washing, and the woman “blirted” the thing she was washing in his face; on which he said, “Cursed be everyone who hereafter shall wash on this day!” And never again,’ added the old woman, ‘have I washed on Good Friday.’ Now it is said in Cleveland that clothes washed and hung out to dry on Good Friday will become spotted with blood; but the Methodist girl’s wild legend reminds me more of one which a relation of mine elicited from a poor Devonshire shoemaker. She was remonstrating with him for his indolence and want of spirit, when he astonished her by replying, ‘Don’t ’ee be hard on me. We shoemakers are a poor slobbering race, and so have been ever since the curse that Jesus Christ laid on us.’ ‘And what was that?’ she asked. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘when they were carrying him to the cross, they passed a shoemaker’s bench, and the man looked up and spat at him; and the Lord turned and said, “A poor slobbering fellow shalt thou be, and all shoemakers after thee, for what thou hast done to me.”’”[38]
Such, by the blessing of Protestantism, is the outcome of the great legends of Veronica and Ahasuerus! Tithonus, outliving his time, is changed to a grasshopper. Another instance of the chirpings to which great myths are reduced may be heard from our above-mentioned “Seven Whistlers,” of which ingenious use is made by the authoress of “That Lass o’ Lowrie.” Mr. James Pearson contributed to “Notes and Queries” (September 30, 1871) the following: “One evening, a few years ago, when crossing one of our Lancashire moors, in company with an intelligent old man, we were suddenly startled by the whistling overhead of a covey of plovers. My companion remarked that when a boy the old people considered such a circumstance a bad omen, ‘as the person who heard _the Wandering Jews_’--as he called the plovers--‘was sure to be overtaken with some ill luck.’ On questioning my friend on the name given to the birds, he said, ‘There is a tradition that they contain the souls of those Jews who assisted at the crucifixion, and in consequence were doomed to float in the air forever.’ When we arrived at the foot of the moor, a coach, by which I had hoped to complete my journey, had already left its station thereby causing me to finish the distance on foot. The old man reminded me of the omen.”
This superstition is connected with the Gabriel-hounds, believed in Yorkshire to be human-headed dogs, or sky-yelpers, as Wordsworth calls them. That poet tells of an aged peasant--
“With ample sovereignity of eye and ear; Rich were his walks with supernatural cheer; He the seven birds hath seen that never part, Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds, And counted them! And oftentimes will start, For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s hounds, Doomed with their impious lord the flying hart To chase for ever on aërial grounds.”
I may quote here part of the interesting account of superstitions concerning the Wandering Jew contributed to “Notes and Queries” (vol. xii. p. 503) by Mr. V. T. Sternberg. “Sometimes, during the cold winter nights, the lonely cottager will be awoke by a plaintive demand for ‘Water, good Christian! water, for the love of God!’ And if he looks out, he will see a venerable old man in antique raiment, with grey flowing beard and a tall staff, who beseeches his charity with the most earnest gesture. Woe to the churl who refuses him water or shelter! My old nurse, who was a Warwickshire woman, and, as Sir Walter Scott said of his grandmother, ‘a most _awfu’ leer_,’ knew a man who boldly cried out, ‘All very fine, Mr. Ferguson, but you can’t lodge here!’ And it was decidedly the worst thing he ever did in his life, for his best mare fell dead lame, and corn went down I am afraid to say how much per quarter. If, on the contrary, you treat him well, and refrain from indelicate inquiries respecting his age--on which point he is very touchy--his visit is sure to bring good luck. Perhaps, years afterwards, when you are on your death-bed, he may happen to be passing, and if he should, you are safe; for three knocks with his staff will make you hale, and he never forgets any kindnesses. Many stories are current of his wonderful cures, but there is one to be found in Peck’s _History of Stamford_ which possesses the rare merit of being written by the patient himself. Upon Whitsunday, in the year of our Lord 1658, ‘about six of the clock, just after evensong,’ one, Samuel Wallis, of Stamford, who had been long wasted with a lingering consumption, was sitting by the fire, reading in that delectable book called _Abraham’s Suit for Sodom_. He heard a knock at the door, and, as his nurse was absent, he crawled to open it himself. What he saw there Samuel shall say in his own style: ‘I beheld a proper, tall, grave old man. Thus he said, “Friend, I pray thee, give an old pilgrim a cup of small beere?” And I said, “Sir, I pray you, come in and welcome.” And he said, “I am no sir, therefore call me not sir; but come in I must, for I cannot pass by thy doore.” After finishing the beere, “Friend,” he said, “thou art not well?” I said, “No, truly, sir, I have not been well this many years.” He said, “What is thy disease?” I said, “A deep consumption, sir; our doctors say, past cure: for truly, I am a very poor man, and not able to follow doctor’s counsel.” “Then,” said he, “I will tell thee what thou shalt do; and, by the help and power of Almighty God above, thou shalt be well. Tomorrow, when thou risest up, go into thy garden, and get there two leaves of red sage and one of bloodworte, and put them into a cup of thy small beere. Drink as often as need require, and when the cup is empty, fill it again, and put in fresh leaves every fourth day, and thou shalt see, through our Lord’s great goodness and mercy, before twelve dayes shall be past, thy disease shall be cured and thy body altered.”’ After this simple prescription, Wallis pressed him to eat. But he said, ‘No, friend, I will not eat; the Lord Jesus is sufficient for me. Very seldom doe I drinke any beere neither, but that which comes from the rocke. So, friend, the Lord God be with thee.’ So saying, he departed, and was never more heard of; but the patient got well within the given time, and for many a long day there was war hot and fierce among the divines of Stamford, as to whether the stranger was an angel or a devil. His dress had been minutely described by honest Sam. His coat was purple, and buttoned down to the waist; ‘his britches of the same couler, all new to see to;’ his stockings were very white, but whether linen or jersey, deponent knoweth not; his beard and head were white, and he had a white stick in his hand. The day was rainy from morning to night, ‘but he had not one spot of dirt upon his clothes.’ Aubrey gives an almost exactly similar relation, the scene of which he places in the Staffordshire moorlands. He there appears in a purple shag gown, and prescribes balm-leaves.”
Brand mentions having seen one of these ‘impostors’ going about Newcastle-on-Tyne, followed by a crowd, and murmuring to himself “Poor Jack all alone!” Probably Brand did not hear the phrase rightly, since the cry of the Wanderer was “Poor Joe all alone!” There was a crossing-sweeper near St. Paul’s Churchyard, who murmured the same, of whom there is an engraving in the British Museum. A picture of the Newcastle man was made for the Musgraves of Eden Hall, which has beneath it “Poor Joe all alone!” My friend Mr. W. B. Scott, who once resided at Newcastle, writes that he remembers hearing of him. “He seemed to have left an impression of a somewhat respectful kind, but from what cause I never heard; probably he had a history of a melancholy kind, and had been left alone by some calamity.”
This, so far as I can learn, was the last appearance in the world of any man pretending to be the Wandering Jew, if indeed he did so pretend, and the honour was not thrust upon him by the superstitious crowd. There had been advantages enough in earlier times to entice Ahasuerus, or “the famous Joseph,” to make his appearance. He came as a “witness” for Christ; he was generally a pious Christian; a tradition tells of his gambling in Naples, but, as the people there invoke their saints for luck in gambling, the exception is not considerable. Jurisconsult Louvet heard him preaching to street crowds in a French province like a revivalist friar. But in England common sense gradually chilled the Wandering Jew. When it was found that he was not above receiving sixpences to support his imperishable existence the public lost interest in him.
A question addressed by me a few weeks ago to the _Newcastle Weekly Chronicle_ elicited the following answer:
“It is quite true that a man who was known as ‘The Wandering Jew’ lived in Newcastle during the latter part of last century. He left a son, who I believe has lived in Hull the greater part of this century, and who is now a very old man indeed, keeping a small public-house named the Cricketers’ Arms. He is very eccentric, is known as ‘Topper, the Newcastle Fossil,’ and attracts a deal of attention on account of his appearance and the condition of his house. He is a very peculiar-looking man, with features of a decided Jewish cast. His clothes appear to be as old as himself. He has never been known to be clean: and old people in Hull do not remember the counter or floor of his house to have been washed. He is supposed to be emulating ‘Dirty Dick’ of London in this respect.
“GEORGE COOPER.”
_Hull._
This may be regarded as the epitaph upon an ancient dream which branched into a vast and various mythology, and, in its time, bore for millions their hopes of a renovated earth, and their visions of resurrection from the sleep of death!
XV.
THE NEW AHASUERUS IN GERMANY.
Having, as a figure of popular faith, gathered to him all related elements of mould and decay, and found fit extinction in the Newcastle “fossil” just mentioned, Ahasuerus rises for new wanderings as a poetic ideal.
The Germans were the first to deal seriously with our legend, and their literature of the Wandering Jew is indicated in this chapter. The subject attracted the unhappy DANIEL FRIEDRICH SCHUBART during his imprisonment. Carlyle, in the notes to his _Life of Schiller_, says the idea of making old _Joannes a temporibus_, the ‘Wandering,’ or, as Schubart’s countrymen denominate him, the ‘Eternal Jew,’ into a novel hero was a mighty favourite with him. “In this antique cordwainer, as on a raft at anchor in the stream of time, he would survey the changes and wonders of two thousand years: the Roman and the Arab were to figure there, the Crusader and the Circumnavigator, the Eremite and the Thebaid, and the Pope of Rome. Joannes himself, the Man existing out of Time and Space--Joannes, the unresting and undying--was to be a deeply tragic personage. Schubart warmed himself with this idea, and talked about it in his cups, to the astonishment of simple souls. He even wrote a certain rhapsody connected with it, which is published in his poems. But here he rested; and the project of the Wandering Jew, which Goethe likewise meditated in his youth, is still unexecuted. Goethe turned to other objects, and poor Schubart was surprised by death in the midst of his schemes, on the 10th of October, 1791.” But the project, as we shall see, is not unexecuted.
Schubart’s _Rhapsody_ appeared in his “Poems, Frankfort, 1787.”[39] His Ahasuerus has retired into the wild solitudes of Mount Carmel. There he is seen, with frantic laughter, casting away the dry skulls of his relatives, which break to pieces, crying, “That is my father! Those are my wives! these my children! They could die, but I--outcast--cannot die!” And again, “Jerusalem fell; I crushed the babe, I rushed into the flames, cursed the Roman!--Rome fell, whole nations perished, and--I remained!” He tries to kill himself in different ways, but in vain. He feels pain acutely, but has to endure every variety of it, even to the agonies of the moment of death, without this moment ever arriving. The snake bites him, the dragon tortures, the burning forest blisters him. He says to himself, “Under my feet the mine exploded and threw me high into the air; senseless I fell down, and found myself roasted amidst blood, and brains, and bones.” He is obliged to carry on a corpse-like body, infirm, smelling of the grave; and through thousands of years he must see, like a yawning monster, an everlasting sameness. The rhapsody brings the Wanderer to a peaceful end. Ahasuerus throws himself down from the top of Carmel into the abyss, “and night covers his bushy eyelids. An angel carries him into a recess in the rocks. ‘There mayest thou sleep now,’ says the angel; ‘sleep, Ahasuerus, sleep soundly! God’s anger does not last for ever.’”
In 1807 appeared the ballad of _The Eternal Jew_, by ALOYS SCHREIBER. The torture of this Ahasuerus consists in his not being able to enjoy life and nature, open to all other men, on account of his restlessness. He cannot drink the water of the fountain, he cannot rest in the shade of a tree, he cannot break a flower to enjoy its smell, for which he longs; he must start, he must wander. In this he differs from Schubart’s Ahasuerus, who had long been weary of life. Being continually obliged to renounce everything, he at last becomes timid, shy; he flies all men and hurries on heedlessly. Finally he observes a crucifix by the wayside; about to rush on, an impulse brings him to his knees, imploring the Crucified for forgiveness. Christ answers him from the cross, “Whoever has failed may repent; and none who loves and believes in me shall need to shun my countenance.” The Wanderer is found dead, kneeling before the cross.
WILHELM MÜLLER, in his _Wanderlieder_ (published in his works, 1830) has a poem on “The Eternal Jew,” which pictures the desolation and loneliness that torture a life satiated to disgust, longing for rest and death. It is pervaded by melancholy. “Although I have seen everything I am never allowed to rest!” All around him has an end: the river in the ocean, the eagle on the Alps, the cloud in the falling rain, and also “to the tired wanderer a certain limit has been fixed. What, does he complain of his day’s misery?--before night death will have taken him home.” The end of the poem is a wish of the poor Wanderer that those who have finished their earthly pilgrimage might, ere they go to sleep for ever, ask of God one hour’s rest for him.
NIKOLAUS LENAU has treated the subject in a similar manner. The scenery of his poem, _Ahasuerus, the Eternal Jew_, is a lonely heath. In a distant meadow shepherds are seen surrounding and weeping over the corpse of a beloved youth. Whilst they are thus standing a Wanderer passes that way: his hair is grey, his countenance pale, cold, deeply wrinkled; his beard long and white, his fiery eyes in dark sockets. He walks on to the bier, and calls out, with mingled mockery and mournfulness, “Suppress your ungrateful tears; his rest is good; oh yes, his rest is good! Though fools like you complain, his heart is still; while mine beats on by night and day, in restless longing to find its sabbath in the grave!” The Wanderer utters the philosophy of Schopenhauer, explaining that the earth is only the lie of Paradise, that it is always the same old delusion of Time--all flowering to its destruction: a philosophy which terminates in a marriage with Madness, personified in Lenau himself.
Meanwhile, says the poem, the shepherds cover the coffin. Suddenly the stranger gets sight of the crucifix on the lid of the coffin. He is frightened, and tears come to his eyes. Now the Lenau-Schopenhauer turns out to be Ahasuerus. He tells the story of his life in the usual form of the myth. He tells the different kinds of death he had vainly sought. Then he wanders on, on--on; above his head you hear the whizzing of the birds; a long shadow walks behind him; the shepherds tremble and make the sign of the cross.
Although ADALBERT VON CHAMISSO was by birth French, his life and culture were German; his mixed origin is shown in his subjective poem, the “New Ahasuerus” (1836), where the Wanderer is simply a lover whose mistress has married another! This rejected lover compares himself to Ahasuerus, who cannot die or rest until the Day of Judgment, while the faithless lady represents the fallen city of Jerusalem. Ahasuerus says, “Time stands still before me; the age of man is as one moment, and the moments ages. Every hundred years I come once more to Jerusalem, mourning over its cold ashes, trying to put the ruins in their old place again, but nobody takes notice of me; evermore I come to the same thing--a grave!” Ahasuerus is “the son of sorrow turned into stone.”
The poem of A. W. SCHLEGEL, “The Eternal Jew,” follows the old myth, with nothing new. His Ahasuerus, on account of his unbelief, wanders through the world as a solace for all those who are miserable, until the reappearance of Christ releases him.