It was a week of delicious happiness, niched amid the eternal mountains, fused with skies and waters.
With an accommodating chaperon who knew no German, the couple could do and say what they pleased. Lassalle, throwing off the heavy burdens of prophet and politician, alternated between brilliant lover and happy-hearted boy. It was almost a honeymoon. Now they were children with all the overflowing endearments of plighted lovers. Now they were on the heights of intellect, talking poetry and philosophy, and reading Lassalle's works; now they were discussing Balzac'sPhysiologie du Mariage. Anon Lassalle was a large dog, gambolling before his capricious mistress. "Lie down, sir," she cried once, as he was reading a poem to her. And with peals of Homeric laughter Ferdinand declared she had found the only inoffensive way of silencing him. "If ever I displease you in future, you have only to say, 'Lie down, sir!'" And he began barking joyously.
And in the glow of this happiness his sense of political defeat evaporated. He burgeoned, expanded, flung back his head in the old, imperial way. "By God!" he said, marching up and down the room feverishly, "you have chosen no mean destiny. Have you any idea of what Ferdinand Lassalle's wife will be? Look at me!" He stood still. "Do I look a man to be content with the secondrôle in the State? Do you think I give the sleep of my nights, the marrow of my bones, the strength of my lungs, to draw somebody else's chestnuts out of the fire? Do I look like a political martyr? No! I wish to act, to fight, and also to enjoy the crown of victory, to place it on your brow."
A vision of the roaring streets and floral arches of the Rhenish cities flashed past him. "Chief of the People, President of the German Republic,—there's the only true sovereignty. That was what kings were once—giants of brain and brawn. King—one who knows, one who can! Headship is for the head. What is this mock dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult to manhood and reason. Hereditary kingship! When you can breed souls as you breed racehorses it will be time to consider that. Stand here by my side before this mirror. Is not that a proud, a royal couple? Did not Nature fashion these two creatures in a holiday mood of joy and intoxication?Vive la Républiqueand its Queen with the golden locks!"
"Vive la Républiqueand its eagle King!" she cried, intoxicated, yet with more of dramatic enjoyment than of serious conviction.
"Bravo! You believe in our star! Since I met you I see it shining clearer over the heights. We mount, we mount, peak beyond peak. We have enemies enough now, thick as the serpents in tropic forests. Well, let them soil with their impure slaver the hem of our garments. But how they will crawl fangless when Ferdinand—the Elect of the People—makes his solemn entry into Berlin. And athis side, drawn by six white horses, his blonde darling, changed into the first woman of Germany." He, too, though to him the fancy was real enough for the moment, enjoyed it with a certain artistic aloofness.
In honor of thefiancés—for such they openly avowed themselves, Geneva and Helene's family being sufficiently distant to be temporarily forgotten—the American Consul at Berne gave a charming dinner. There was a gallant old Frenchman, a honey-tongued Italian, a pervasive air of complimentary congratulation. Helene returned to her hotel, thrilling with pleasure and happy auguries. The night was soft and warm. Before undressing she leaned out of the window of her room on the ground floor, and gazed upon the eternal glaciers, sparkling like silver under the full moon. Through every sense she drank in the mystery and perfume of the night, till her spirit seemed at one with the stars and the mountains. Suddenly she felt two mighty arms clasped about her. Lassalle stood outside. Her heart throbbed violently.
"Hush!" he said, "don't be frightened. I will stay outside here, good and quiet, till you are tired and say, 'Lie down, sir!' Then I will go!"
"My gentle Romeo!" she whispered, and bent her fragrant lips to meet his—the divine kiss of god and goddess in the divine night. "My Ferdinand!" she breathed. "If we should be parted after all. I tremble to think of it. My father will never consent."
"He shall consent. And you don't even need his consent. You are of age."
"Then take me now, dear heart. I am yours—yourcreature, your thing. Fly away with me, my beautiful eagle, to Paris, to Egypt, where you will. Let us be happy Bohemians. We do not need the world. We have ourselves, and the moonlight, and the mountains."
She was maddening to-night, hisenfant du diable. But he kept a last desperate grip upon his common sense. What would his friends say if he involved Helene in the scandal of an elopement? What would Holthoff say, what Baron Korff? Surely this was not the conduct that would commend itself to the chivalry and nobility of Berlin! And besides, how could his political career survive a new scandal? He was already sufficiently hampered by his old connection with the Countess, and not even a public acquittal and twenty years had sufficed to lay that accusation of instigating the stealing of a casket of papers from her husband's mistress, which was perhaps the worst legacy of the great Hatzfeldt case. No, he must win his bride honorably: the sanctities and dignities of wedlock were seductive to the Bohemian in love.
"We shall have ourselves and the world, too," he urged gently. "Let us enter our realm with the six white horses, not in a coach with drawn blinds. Your father shall give you to me, I tell you, in the eye of day. What, am I an advertisement canvasser to be shown the door? Shall my darling not have as honorable nuptials as her father's wife. Shall the Elect of the People confess that a petty diplomatist didn't consider him good enough for a son-in-law? Think how Bismarck would chuckle. After all I have said to him!"
Her confidence came back. Yes, one might build one's house on the rock of such a Will! "What have you said to him?"
He laughed softly. "I've let slip a secret, little girl."
"Tell me."
"Incredible! That baby with her little fingers,"—he seized them—"with her fairy paws, she plunges boldly into my most precious secrets, into my heart's casket, picks out the costliest jewel, and asks for it."
"Well, do you like him? Is he an intellectual spirit?"
"Hum! If he is, we are not. He is iron, and of iron we make steel, and of steel pretty weapons; but one can make nothing but weapons. I prefer gold. Gold like my darling's hair"—he caressed it—"like my own magic power over men. You shall see, darling, how your gold and mine will triumph."
"But you also are always speaking of arms, of blood, of battles; and Revolutions are scarcely forged without arms and iron."
"Child, child," he answered, drawing her golden locks to his lips, "why do you wish to learn all in this beautiful starry night? The conquests of thousands of years, the results of profound studies, you ask for as for toys. To speak of battles, to call to arms, is by no means the same thing as to sabre one's fellow, one's brother, with icy heart and bloodstained hand. Don't you understand, sly little thing, of what arms I speak, of the golden weapons of the spirit, eloquence, the love of humanity, the effort to raise to manly dignity the poor, the unfortunate, the workers. Above all, I mean—Will. These noble weapons, these truly golden weapons, I count higher and more useful than the rusted swords of Mediævalism."
Her eyes filled with tears. She felt herself upborne on waves of religious emotion towards those shining stars. The temptation was over.
"Good-night, my love," she said humbly.
He drew her face to his in passionate farewell, and seemed as if he would never let her go. When her window closed he strode towards the glaciers.
An adventure next day came to show the conquered Helena that her spiritual giant was no less king of men physically. At the American Consul's dinner an expedition on the Niessen had been arranged. But as the party was returning at nightfall across the fields, and laughing over Lassalle's sprightly anecdotes, suddenly a dozen diabolical gnomes burst upon them with savage roars and incomprehensible inarticulate jabberings, and began striking at hazard with their short, solid cudgels, almost ere the startled picnickers could recognize in these bestial creatures, with their enormously swollen heads and horrible hanging goitres, the afflicted idiot peasants of the valley. The gallant Frenchman and the honey-tongued Italian screamed with the women, and made even less play with umbrellas and straps; but Lassalle fell like a thunderbolt with his Robespierre stick upon the whole band of cretins, and reduced them to howls and bloodstained tears. It was only then that Lassalle was able to extract from them that the party had trampled over the hay in their fields, and that they demanded compensation. Being given money, they departed, growling and waving their cudgels. When the excursionists looked at one another they found themselves all in rags, and Lassalle's face disfigured by two heavy blows. Helene ran to him with a cry.
"You are wounded, bruised!"
"No, only one of the towers of the Bastille," he said, ruefully surveying the stick; "the brutes have dinted it."
"And there are people who call him coward because he won't fight duels," thought Helene adoringly.
The drama shifted to Geneva, where heroine preceded hero by a few hours, charged to be silent till her parents had personally experienced Lassalle's fascinations. He had scarcely taken possession of his room in the Pension Bovet when a maidservant brought in a letter from Helene, and ere he had time to do more than break the envelope, Helene herself burst in.
"Take me away, take me away," she cried hysterically.
He flew to support her.
"What has happened?"
"I cannot bear it. I cannot fight them. Save me, my king, my master. Let us fly across the frontier—to Paris." She clung to him wildly.
Sternness gathered on his brow.
"Then you have disobeyed me!" he said. "Why?"
"I have written you," she sobbed.
He laid her gently on the bed, and ran his eye through the long, hysteric letter.
Unhappy coincidence! At Helene's arrival, her whole family had met her joyously at the railway station, overbrimming with the happy news that her little sister, Marguerite, had just been proposed to by Count Kayserling.
Helene had thought this a heaven-sent opportunity of breaking her own happiness to her radiant mother, foolishly forgetting that the Count Kayserling would be the last man in the world to endure a Jew and a demagogue as a brother-in-law. Terrible scenes had followed—the mother's tears, the father's thunders, the general family wail and supplication, sisters trembling for their prospects, brothers anticipating the sneers of club-land. What! exchange Prince Janko for a thief!
Cross-examined by Lassalle, Helene admitted her mother was not so furious as her father, and had even, weeping on her bosom, promised to try and smooth the Baron down. But she knew that was impossible—her father considered nothing but his egoistic plans. And so, when the dinner-bell was sounding, informed with a mad courage by the thought of her hero's proximity, she had flown to him.
Lassalle felt that the test-moment of his life had come, and the man of action must rise to it. He scribbled three telegrams—one to his mother, one to his sister, Frau Friedland, and one to the Countess, asking all to come at once.
"You must have a chaperon," he interjected. "And till one of the three arrives, who is there here?"
She sobbed out the address of Madame Rognon. Lassalle opened the door to hand over the telegrams, and saw the woman who had brought Helene's letter lingering uneasily, and he had the unhappiest yet not least characteristic inspiration of his life. "These to the telegraph office," he said aloud, and in a whisper: "Tell the Baroness von Dönniges that we shall be at Madame Rognon's."
For, with lightning rapidity, his brain had worked out a subtle piece of heroic comedy. He would restore Helene to her mother, he would play the grand seigneur, the spotless Bayard, he, the Jew, the thief, the demagogue, the Don Juan; his chivalry would shame this little diplomatist. In no case could they refuse him the girl, she was too hopelessly compromised. All the Pension had seen her—the mother would be shrewd enough to understand that. She must allow the renunciation to remain merely verbal, but the words would sound how magnificent!
The scene was duly played. The bewildered Helene, whom he left in the dark, confused by the unexpectedappearance of her mother, was thrown into the last stage of dazed distress by being recklessly restored to the maternal bosom. He kissed her good-bye, and she vanished from his sight for ever.
For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family egotism, kept for weeks under arégimeof terror and intercepted letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally announced her eternal love and devotion for her formerfiancé. Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody and anybody into his feverish service—musicians, artists, soldiers, antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria to speak to vonDönniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help him?—he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"—her first word to him at their first meeting—resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail.
Helene evidently thought so too. By fair means and foul, by spies and lawyers and friendly agents, Lassalle's frenzied energy had penetrated through every defence to the inmost entrenchment where she sat cowering. He had exacted the father's consent to an interview. Only Helene's own consent was wanting. His friend Colonel Rustow brought the sick Hercules the account of her refusal—a refusal which made ridiculous his moving of mountains.
"But surely you owe Lassalle some satisfaction," he had protested.
"To what? To his wounded vanity?"
It was the last straw.
"Harlot!" cried Lassalle, and as in a volcanic jet, hurled her from his burning heart.
A terrible calm settled upon him. It was as if fire should become ice. Yes, he understood at last what Destiny had always been trying to tell him—that love and happiness were not for him. He was consecrate to greatcauses: His Will, entangled with that of others, grew feeble, fruitless. Women were trulyenfants du diable. He had been within an ace of abandoning his historical mission. Now he would arise, strong, sublime: a mighty weapon forged by the gods, and tempered by fire and tears.
Only, one thing must first be done. The past must be wiped off. He must recommence with a clean sheet. True, he had always refused duels. But now he saw the fineness, the necessity of them. In a world of chicanery and treachery the sword alone cut clean.
He sent a challenge to the father, a message of goodwill to the lover. But it was Janko who took up the challenge.
The weapon chosen was the pistol.
Lassalle's friends begged him to practise.
"Useless! I know what is destined."
Never had he been so colossal, so assured. His nerves seemed to have regained their tone. The night before the duel he slept like a tranquil child.
In the early morn, on the way to the field outside Geneva, he begged his second to arrange the duel on the French side of the frontier, so that he might remain in Geneva and settle his account with the father. At the word of command, "One!" Janko's shot rang out. Lassalle's was not a second later, but he had already received his death-wound.
He lay three days, dying in terrible agony, relieved only by copious opium. Between the spasms, surprise possessed his mind that his Will should have counted for nothing before the imperturbable march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters." But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had becomemere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand; the daughters of Judæa were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at these mediæval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so meaningless to her.
O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils—religion, race, sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods, knowing good and evil.
Only one thing was left—to die unbroken.
He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People—the Germans—should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.
A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi—a month after his glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"—he was a corpse, the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned for her was to become a great power in the State, under the ever-growing glamour of his memory.
The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in her grief. He belonged to her—to her and the People. Yes, she would bear the body of hercher enfantthrough the provinces of the Rhine—he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.
And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him—in no figurative sense—"enfant"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his superb fore-visionings.
In the choir of the old-fashioned church of Hughenden, that broods amid the beautiful peace of English meadows, there stands, on the left hand of the aisle, a black high-backed stall of polished oak, overhung by the picturesque insignia of the Order of the Garter.
In the pavement behind it gleams a square slab, dedicated by "his grateful sovereign and friend" to her great Prime Minister, and heaped in the spring with primroses.
And on this white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile the wisdom of the ages.
I see him, methinks, in life, Premier of England, Lord Privy Seal, Earl Beaconsfield of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden, sitting in his knightly stall, listening impassibly to the country parson's sermon. His head droops on his breast, but his coal-black inscrutable eyes are open.
It is the hour of his star.
He is just back from the Berlin Congress, bringing"Peace with Honor." The Continent has stood a-tiptoe to see the wonderful English Earl pass and repass. He has been the lion of a congress that included Bismarck. The laurels and the Oriental palm placed by his landlord on the hotel-balcony have but faintly typified the feeling of Europe. His feverous reception in England, from Dover pier onwards, has recalled an earlier, a more romantic world. Fathers have brought their little ones to imprint upon their memories the mortal features of this immortal figure, who passes through a rain of flowers to his throne in Downing Street. The London press, with scarce an exception, is in the dust at his feet—with the proud English nobles and all that has ever flouted or assailed him.
The sunshine comes floridly through the stained-glass windows, and lies upon the austere crucifix.
By what devious ways has he wandered hither—from that warm old Portuguese synagogue in Bevis Marks, whence his father withdrew under the smart of a fine from "the gentlemen of the Mahamad?"
But hark! The parson—as paradoxically—is reading a Jewish psalm.
"'The Lord said unto my lord: Sit thou on my right hand,until I make thine enemies thy footstool.The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: bethou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee freewillofferings with a holy worship: the dew of thy birth is ofthe womb of the morning.'"
"'The Lord said unto my lord: Sit thou on my right hand,until I make thine enemies thy footstool.The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: bethou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee freewillofferings with a holy worship: the dew of thy birth is ofthe womb of the morning.'"
The Earl remains impassive.
"Half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew."
Whom does he worship?
"Sensible men never tell."
Yet in that facial mask I seem to read all the tale of the long years of desperate waiting, only half sweetened by premature triumphs of pen and person; all the rancorous energies of political strife.
And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the lips.
I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naïve delight in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success and of Fame—that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of Love—Love, the one touch of trueromance in his novels—and his pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manœuvre it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like pawns, with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability under attack, only the mediæval Jew's self-mastery before the grosser-brained persecutor.
I think these things and the Sphinx yields up his secret—the open secret of the Ghetto parvenu.
But as I look again upon his strange Eastern face, so deep-lined, so haggard, something subtler and finer calls to me from the ruins of its melancholy beauty.
Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of ideas and wit, but—a Heine of action—the fantasy of personal adventure, and—when audacity has been crowned by empery—of dramatic surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.
To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its very constitution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance to which these young English squires and nobles are born. The bourgeois he hates—only the pomp ofsovereignty and the pathos of poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy, wherein the nobles shall make happy the People that is exploited by the middle classes. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and the poor are united in God, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in revolt with Byron and Shelley against a Philistine world. And later, to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters, he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle, popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism. That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his day are only dimly aware, because like their constitution it has evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent possibilities. And in very deed he binds England closer to her colonies, and restores her dwindled prestige in the Parliament of Nations. He even proclaims her an Asiatic power.
For his heart is always with his own people—its past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned to reveal Himself.
And, like his race, he has links with all the human panorama.
He is in touch with the humors and graces of European courts and cities, has rapport with the rich-dyed, unchanging, double-dealing East, enjoys the picaresque life of the Spanish mountains: he feels the tragedy of vanished Rome, the marble appeal of ancient Athens, the mystery of the Pyramids, the futility of life; his books palpitate with world-problems.
And, as I think these things, his face is transfigured and he becomes—beneath all his dazzle of deed—a Dreamer of the Ghetto.
So think I. But what—as the country parson's sermon drones on—thinks the Sphinx?
Who shall tell?
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." By the river of Bâle we sit down, resolved to weep no more. Not the German Rhine, but the Rhine ere it leaves the land of liberty; where, sunning itself in a glory of blue sky and white cloud, and overbrooded by the eternal mountains; it swirls its fresh green waves and hurries its laden rafts betwixt the quaint old houses and dreaming spires, and under the busy bridges of the Golden Gate of Switzerland.
In the shady courtyard of the Town Hall are sundry frescoes testifying to the predominant impress on the minds of its citizens of the life and thoughts of a little people that flourished between two and three thousand years ago in the highlands of Asia Minor. But, amid these suggestive illustrations of ancient Jewish history, the strangest surely is that of Moses with a Table of the Law, on which are written the words: "Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."
For here, after all this travail of the centuries, a very modern Moses—in the abstract-concrete form of a Congress—is again meditating the deliverance of Israel from the house of bondage.
Not in the Town Hall, however, but in the Casino the Congress meets, and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance,are debated the tragic issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform, over which rise the heads and festal shirt-fronts of the leaders.
A strangely assorted set of leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naïvely that the pen is mightier than the millionaire's gold.
Only one of them hitherto has really stirred the world with his pen-point—a prophet of the modern, preaching "Woe, woe" by psycho-physiology; in himself a breezy, burly undegenerate, with a great gray head marvellously crammed with facts and languages; now to prove himself golden-hearted and golden-mouthed, an orator touching equally to tears or laughter. In striking contrast with this quasi-Teutonic figure shows the leonine head, with its tossing black mane and shoulders, of the Russian leader, Apollo turned Berserker, beautiful, overpowering, from whose resplendent mouth roll in mountain thunder the barbarous Russian syllables.
And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions—types that once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood in Zion—they are come from many places; from far lands and from near, from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution, in rare units from the free realms of England and America—astrange phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones; a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark, Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian, tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped, curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in the University, with a colored band across his shirt-front; a dandy, smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah.
Who speaks of the Jewish type? One can only say negatively that these faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex heredity? Is it the brand of suffering? Certainly a stern Congress, the speeches little lightened by humor, the atmosphere of historic tragedy too overbrooding for intellectual dalliance. Even the presence of the gayer sex—for there are a few ladies among the delegates, and more peep down from the crowded spectators' gallery that runs sideways along the hall—only makes a few shots of visual brightness in the sober scene. Seriousness is stamped everywhere; on the broad-bulging temples of the Russian oculist, on the egg-shaped skull and lank white hair of the Heidelberg professor, on the open countenance of the Hungarian architect, on the weak, narrow lineaments of the neurotic Hebrew poet; it gives dignity to red hair and freckles, tones down the grossness of too-fleshy cheeks, and lends an added beauty to finely-cut features.
Superficially, then, they have little in common, and if almost all speak German—the language of the Congress—it is only because they are all masters of three or four tongues. Yet some subtle instinct links them each to each; presage, perhaps, of some brotherhood of mankind, of which ingathered Israel—or even ubiquitous Israel—may present the type.
Through the closed red-curtained windows comes ever and anon the sharp ting of the bell of an electric car, and the President, anxiously steering the course of debate through difficult international cross-roads, rings his bell almost as frequently.
A majestic Oriental figure, the President's—not so tall as it appears when he draws himself up and stands dominating the assembly with eyes that brood and glow—you would say one of the Assyrian Kings, whose sculptured heads adorn our Museums, the very profile of Tiglath-Pileser. In sooth, the beautiful sombre face of a kingly dreamer, but of a Jewish dreamer who faces the fact that flowers are grown in dung. A Shelley "beats in the air his luminous wings in vain"; our Jewish dreamer dreams along the lines of life; his dream but discounts the future, his prophecy is merely fore-speaking, his vision prevision. He talks agriculture, viticulture, subvention of the Ottoman Empire, both by direct tribute and indirect enrichment; stocks and shares, railroads, internal and to India; natural development under expansion—all the jargon of our iron age. Let not his movement be confounded with those petty projects for helping Jewish agriculturists into Palestine. What! Improve the Sultan's land without any political equivalent guaranteed in advance! Difficulty about the holy places of Christianity and Islam? Pooh! extra-territorial.
A practised publicist, a trained lawyer, a notunsuccessful comedy writer, converted to racial self-consciousness by the "Hep, Hep" of Vienna, and hurried into unforeseen action by his own paper-scheme of a Jewish State, he has, perhaps, at last—and not unreluctantly—found himself as a leader of men.
In a Congress of impassioned rhetoricians he remains serene, moderate; his voice is for the more part subdued; in its most emotional abandonments there is a dry undertone, almost harsh. He quells disorder with a look, with a word, with a sharp touch of the bell. The cloven hoof of the Socialist peeps out from a little group. At once "The Congress shall be captured by no party!" And the Congress is in roars of satisfaction.
'Tis the happy faculty of all idealists to overlook the visible—the price they pay for seeing the unseen. Even our open-eyed Jewish idealist has been blest with ignorance of the actual. But, in his very ignorance of the people he would lead and the country he would lead them to, lies his strength, just as in his admission that his Zionist fervor is only that second-rate species produced by local anti-Semitism, lies a powerful answer to the dangerous libel of local unpatriotism. Of the real political and agricultural conditions of Palestine he knows only by hearsay. Of Jews he knows still less. Not for him the paralyzing sense of the humors of his race, the petty feud of Dutchman and Pole, the mutual superiorities of Sephardi and Ashkenazi, the grotesque incompatibility of Western and Eastern Jew, the cynicism and snobbery of the prosperous, the materialism of the uneducated adventurers in unexploited regions. He stands so high and aloof that all specific colorings and markings are blurred for him into the common brotherhood, and, if he is cynic enough to suspect them, he is philosopher enough to recognize that all nations are compact of incongruites, vitalized by warring elements. Nor has he any sympatheticperception of the mystic religious hopes of generations of zealots, of the great swirling spiritual currents of Ghetto life. But in a national movement—which appears at first sight hopeless, because it lacks the great magnetizer, religion—lies a chance denied to one who should boldly proclaim himself the evangel of a modern Judaism, the last of the Prophets. Political Zionism alone can transcend and unite: any religious formula would disturb and dissever. Along this line may all travel to Jerusalem. And, as the locomotive from Jaffa draws all alike to the sacred city, and leaves them there to their several matters, so may the pious concern themselves not at all with the religion of the engineer.
Not this the visionary figure created by the tear-dimmed yearning of the Ghetto; no second Sabbataï Zevi, master of celestial secrets, divine reincarnation, come with signs and wonders to lead back Israel to the Promised Land. Still less the prophet prefigured by Christian visionaries, some of whom, fevered nevertheless, press upon the Congress itself complex collations of texts, or little cards with the sign of the cross. Palestine, indeed, but an afterthought: an aspiration of unsuspected strength, to be utilized—like all human forces—by the maker of history. States are the expression of souls; in any land the Jewish soul could express itself in characteristic institutions, could shake off the long oppression of the ages, and renew its youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there is this longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it—capital that will return its safe percentage. A rush to Palestine will mean all that seething medley of human wants and activities out of which profits are snatched by the shrewd—gold-rush and God-rush, they are both one in their economic working. May not the Jews themselves take shares in so promising a project? May not even their great bankers put their names to such a prospectus? The shareholdersincur no liability beyond the extent of their shares; there shall be no call upon them to come to Palestine—let them remain in their snug nests; the Jewish Company, Limited, seeks a home only for the desolate dove that finds no rest for the sole of her feet.
And yet beneath all this statesmanlike prose, touched with the special dryness of the jurist, lurk the romance of the poet and the purposeful vagueness of the modern evolutionist; the fantasy of the Hungarian, the dramatic self-consciousness of the literary artist, the heart of the Jew.
Is one less a poet because he regards the laws of reality, less religious because he accepts them, less a Jew because he will live in his own century? Our dreamer will have none of the Mediæval, is enamoured of the Modern; has lurking admiration of the "over-man" of Nietzsche, even to be overpassed by the coming Jerusalem Jew; the psychical Eurasian, the link and interpreter between East and West—nay, between antiquity and the modern spirit; the synthesis of mankind, saturated with the culture of the nations, and now at last turning home again, laden with the spiritual spoils of the world—for the world's benefit. He shall found an ideal modern state, catholic in creed, righteous in law, a centre of conscience—even geographically—in a world relapsing to Pagan chaos. And its flag shall be a "shield of David," with the Lion of Judah rampant, and twelve stars for the Tribes. No more of the cringing and the whispering in dark corners; no surreptitious invasion of Palestine. The Jew shall demand right, not tolerance. Israel shall walk erect. And he, Israel's spokesman, will not juggle with diplomatic combinations—he will play cards on table. He has nothing to say to the mob, Christian or Jewish, he will not intrigue with political underlings. He is no demagogue; he will speak with kings in their palaces, with prime ministers in their cabinets.There is a touch of theὕβριςof Lassalle, of the magnificence of Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo Da Costa, King of the question-beggars.
Do you object that the poor will be the only ones to immigrate to Palestine? Why, it is just those that we want. Prithee, how else shall we make our roads and plant our trees? No mention now of the Eurasian exemplar, the synthetic "over-man." Perhaps he is only to evolve. Do you suggest that an inner ennobling of scattered Israel might be the finer goal, the truer antidote to anti-Semitism? Simple heart, do you not see it is just for our good—not our bad—qualities that we are persecuted? A jugglery—specious enough for the moment—with the word "good"; forceful "struggle-for-life" qualities substituted for spiritual, for ethical. And yet to doubt that the world would—and does—respond sympathetically to the finer elements so abundantly in Israel, is it not to despair of the world, of humanity? In such a world, what guarantee against the pillage of the Third Temple? And in such a world were life worth living at all? And, even with Palestine for ultimate goal, do you counsel delay, a nursing of the Zionist flame, a gradual education and preparation of the race for a great conscious historic rôle in the world's future, a forty years' wandering in the wilderness to organize or kill off the miscellaneous rabble—then will you, dreamer, turn a deaf ear to the cry of millions oppressed to-day? Would you ignore the appeals of these hundreds of telegrams, of these thousands of petitions with myriads of signatures, for the sake of some visionary perfection of to-morrow? Nay, nay, the cartoon of the Congress shall bring itself to pass. Against the picturesque wailers at the ruins of the Temple wall shall be set the no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic shall becleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its bosom the experience of the ages?
Not all his own ideas, these; some perhaps only half-consciously present to him, so that even in this very Congress the note of jealousy is heard, the claim of an earlier prophet insisted on fiercely. For a moment the dignified assembly, becomes a prey to atavism, reproduces the sordid squabbles of theKahal. As if every movement was not fed by subterranean fires, heralded by obscure rumblings, though 'tis only the earthquake or the volcanic jet which leaps into history!
But the President is finely impersonal. Not he, but the Congress. The Bulgarians have a tradition that the Messiah will be born on August 29. He shares this belief. To-day the Messiah has been born—the Congress. "In this Congress we procure for the Jewish people an organ which till now it did not possess, and of which it was so sadly in want. Our cause is too great for the ambition and wilfulness of a single person. It must be lifted up to something impersonal if it is to succeed. And our Congress shall be lasting, not only until we are redeemed from the old state, but still more so afterwards ... serious and lofty, a blessing for the unfortunate, noxious to none, to the honor of all Jews, and worthy of a past, the glory of which is far off, but everlasting."
And, as he steps from the tribune, amid the roar of "Hochs," and the thunder of hands and feet and sticks, and the flutter of handkerchiefs, with men precipitating themselves to kiss his hand, and others weeping and embracing, be sure that no private ambition possesses him, be sure that his heart swells only with the presentiment of greatevents and with uplifting thoughts of the millions who will thrill to the distant echo of this sublime moment.
What European parliament could glow with such a galaxy of intellect? Is not each man a born orator, master of arts or sciences? Has not the very caftan-Jew from the Carpathians published his poetry and his philosophy, gallantly championing "The Master of the Name" against a Darwinian world? Heine had figured the Jew as a dog, that at the advent of the Princess Sabbath is changed back to a man. More potent than the Princess, the Congress has shown the Jew's manhood to the world. That old painter, whose famous Dance of Death drew for centuries the curious to Bâle, could not picture the Jew save as the gaberdined miser, only dropping his money-bag at Death's touch. Well, here is another sight for him—could Death, that took him too, bring him back for a moment—these scholars, thinkers, poets, from all the lands of the Exile, who stand up in honor of the dead pioneers of Zionism, and, raising their right hands to heaven, cry, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning!" Yes, the dream still stirs at the heart of the mummied race, the fire quenched two thousand years ago sleeps yet in the ashes. And if our President forgets that the vast bulk of his brethren are unrepresented in his Congress, that they are content with the civic rights so painfully won, and have quite other conceptions of their creed's future, who will grudge him this moment of fine rapture?
Or, when at night, in the students'Kommers, with joyful weeping and with brotherly kisses, sages and gray-beards join in thegaudeamus igitur, who shall deny him grounds for his faith thatjuvenes sumusyet, that the carking centuries have had no power over our immortal nation. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."
The world in which prophecies are uttered cannot be the world in which prophecies are fulfilled. And yet when—at the wind-up of this memorable meeting—the Rabbi of Bâle, in the black skull-cap of sanctity, ascending the tribune amid the deafening applause of a catholic Congress, expresses the fears of the faithful, lest in the new Jewish State the religious Jew be under a ban; and when the President gravely gives the assurance, amid enthusiasm as frantic, that Judaism has nothing to fear—Judaism, the one cause and consolation of the ages of isolation and martyrdom—does no sense of the irony of history intrude upon his exalted mood?