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_ The young Israelite proceeded then, and rehearsed his conversation
with Messala, dwelling with particularity upon the latter's speeches
in contempt of the Jews, their customs, and much pent round of life.
Afraid to speak the while, the mother listened, discerning the
matter plainly. Judah had gone to the palace on the Market-place,
allured by love of a playmate whom he thought to find exactly as he
had been at the parting years before; a man met him, and, in place
of laughter and references to the sports of the past, the man had
been full of the future, and talked of glory to be won, and of
riches and power. Unconscious of the effect, the visitor had come
away hurt in pride, yet touched with a natural ambition; but she,
the jealous mother, saw it, and, not knowing the turn the aspiration
might take, became at once Jewish in her fear. What if it lured him
away from the patriarchal faith? In her view, that consequence was
more dreadful than any or all others. She could discover but one way
to avert it, and she set about the task, her native power reinforced
by love to such degree that her speech took a masculine strength and
at times a poet's fervor.
"There never has been a people," she began, "who did not think
themselves at least equal to any other; never a great nation,
my son, that did not believe itself the very superior. When the
Roman looks down upon Israel and laughs, he merely repeats the
folly of the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Macedonian; and as the
laugh is against God, the result will be the same."
Her voice became firmer.
"There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations;
hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about
it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves
or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power,
take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write
new names; such is history. If I were called upon to symbolize
God and man in the simplest form, I would draw a straight line
and a circle, and of the line I would say, 'This is God, for he alone
moves forever straightforward,' and of the circle, 'This is man--such
is his progress.' I do not mean that there is no difference between
the careers of nations; no two are alike. The difference, however,
is not, as some say, in the extent of the circle they describe or
the space of earth they cover, but in the sphere of their movement,
the highest being nearest God.
"To stop here, my son, would be to leave the subject where we began.
Let us go on. There are signs by which to measure the height of the
circle each nation runs while in its course. By them let us compare
the Hebrew and the Roman.
"The simplest of all the signs is the daily life of the people.
Of this I will only say, Israel has at times forgotten God,
while the Roman never knew him; consequently comparison is
not possible.
"Your friend--or your former friend--charged, if I understood you
rightly, that we have had no poets, artists, or warriors; by which
he meant, I suppose, to deny that we have had great men, the next most
certain of the signs. A just consideration of this charge requires a
definition at the commencement. A great man, O my boy, is one whose
life proves him to have been recognized, if not called, by God.
A Persian was used to punish our recreant fathers, and he carried
them into captivity; another Persian was selected to restore their
children to the Holy Land; greater than either of them, however,
was the Macedonian through whom the desolation of Judea and the
Temple was avenged. The special distinction of the men was that
they were chosen by the Lord, each for a divine purpose; and that
they were Gentiles does not lessen their glory. Do not lose sight
of this definition while I proceed.
"There is an idea that war is the most noble occupation of men,
and that the most exalted greatness is the growth of battle-fields.
Because the world has adopted the idea, be not you deceived. That we
must worship something is a law which will continue as long as there
is anything we cannot understand. The prayer of the barbarian is
a wail of fear addressed to Strength, the only divine quality he
can clearly conceive; hence his faith in heroes. What is Jove but
a Roman hero? The Greeks have their great glory because they were
the first to set Mind above Strength. In Athens the orator and
philosopher were more revered than the warrior. The charioteer
and the swiftest runner are still idols of the arena; yet the
immortelles are reserved for the sweetest singer. The birthplace
of one poet was contested by seven cities. But was the Hellene the
first to deny the old barbaric faith? No. My son, that glory is
ours; against brutalism our fathers erected God; in our worship,
the wail of fear gave place to the Hosanna and the Psalm. So the
Hebrew and the Greek would have carried all humanity forward and
upward. But, alas! the government of the world presumes war as an
eternal condition; wherefore, over Mind and above God, the Roman
has enthroned his Caesar, the absorbent of all attainable power,
the prohibition of any other greatness.
"The sway of the Greek was a flowering time for genius. In return
for the liberty it then enjoyed, what a company of thinkers the
Mind led forth? There was a glory for every excellence, and a
perfection so absolute that in everything but war even the Roman
has stooped to imitation. A Greek is now the model of the orators
in the Forum; listen, and in every Roman song you will hear the
rhythm of the Greek; if a Roman opens his mouth speaking wisely
of moralities, or abstractions, or of the mysteries of nature,
he is either a plagiarist or the disciple of some school which had
a Greek for its founder. In nothing but war, I say again, has Rome
a claim to originality. Her games and spectacles are Greek inventions,
dashed with blood to gratify the ferocity of her rabble; her religion,
if such it may be called, is made up of contributions from the
faiths of all other peoples; her most venerated gods are from
Olympus--even her Mars, and, for that matter, the Jove she much
magnifies. So it happens, O my son, that of the whole world our
Israel alone can dispute the superiority of the Greek, and with
him contest the palm of original genius.
"To the excellences of other peoples the egotism of a Roman is
a blindfold, impenetrable as his breastplate. Oh, the ruthless
robbers! Under their trampling the earth trembles like a floor
beaten with flails. Along with the rest we are fallen--alas that
I should say it to you, my son! They have our highest places, and
the holiest, and the end no man can tell; but this I know--they
may reduce Judea as an almond broken with hammers, and devour
Jerusalem, which is the oil and sweetness thereof; yet the glory
of the men of Israel will remain a light in the heavens overhead
out of reach: for their history is the history of God, who wrote
with their hands, spake with their tongues, and was himself in all
the good they did, even the least; who dwelt with them, a Lawgiver
on Sinai, a Guide in the wilderness, in war a Captain, in government
a King; who once and again pushed back the curtains of the
pavilion which is his resting-place, intolerably bright, and,
as a man speaking to men, showed them the right, and the way
to happiness, and how they should live, and made them promises
binding the strength of his Almightiness with covenants sworn to
everlastingly. O my son, could it be that they with whom Jehovah
thus dwelt, an awful familiar, derived nothing from him?--that
in their lives and deeds the common human qualities should not
in some degree have been mixed and colored with the divine? that
their genius should not have in it, even after the lapse of ages,
some little of heaven?"
For a time the rustling of the fan was all the sound heard in the
chamber.
"In the sense which limits art to sculpture and painting, it is
true," she next said, "Israel has had no artists."
The admission was made regretfully, for it must be remembered
she was a Sadducee, whose faith, unlike that of the Pharisees,
permitted a love of the beautiful in every form, and without
reference to its origin.
"Still he who would do justice," she proceeded, "will not forget that
the cunning of our hands was bound by the prohibition, 'Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything;'
which the Sopherim wickedly extended beyond its purpose and time.
Nor should it be forgotten that long before Daedalus appeared in
Attica and with his wooden statues so transformed sculpture as
to make possible the schools of Corinth and AEgina, and their
ultimate triumphs the Poecile and Capitolium--long before the
age of Daedalus, I say, two Israelites, Bezaleel and Aholiab,
the master-builders of the first tabernacle, said to have been
skilled 'in all manner of workmanship,' wrought the cherubim of the
mercy-seat above the ark. Of gold beaten, not chiseled, were they;
and they were statues in form both human and divine. 'And they
shall stretch forth their wings on high, . . . . and their faces
shall look one to another.' Who will say they were not beautiful?
or that they were not the first statues?"
"Oh, I see now why the Greek outstripped us," said Judah, intensely
interested. "And the ark; accursed be the Babylonians who destroyed
it!"
"Nay, Judah, be of faith. It was not destroyed, only lost, hidden
away too safely in some cavern of the mountains. One day--Hillel
and Shammai both say so--one day, in the Lord's good time, it will
be found and brought forth, and Israel dance before it, singing as
of old. And they who look upon the faces of the cherubim then,
though they have seen the face of the ivory Minerva, will be ready
to kiss the hand of the Jew from love of his genius, asleep through
all the thousands of years."
The mother, in her eagerness, had risen into something like the
rapidity and vehemence of a speech-maker; but now, to recover
herself, or to pick up the thread of her thought, she rested
awhile.
"You are so good, my mother," he said, in a grateful way. "And I
will never be done saying so. Shammai could not have talked better,
nor Hillel. I am a true son of Israel again."
"Flatterer!" she said. "You do not know that I am but repeating
what I heard Hillel say in an argument he had one day in my
presence with a sophist from Rome."
"Well, the hearty words are yours."
Directly all her earnestness returned.
"Where was I? Oh yes, I was claiming for our Hebrew fathers the
first statues. The trick of the sculptor, Judah, is not all there
is of art, any more than art is all there is of greatness. I always
think of great men marching down the centuries in groups and goodly
companies, separable according to nationalities; here the Indian,
there the Egyptian, yonder the Assyrian; above them the music of
trumpets and the beauty of banners; and on their right hand and
left, as reverent spectators, the generations from the beginning,
numberless. As they go, I think of the Greek, saying, 'Lo! The
Hellene leads the way.' Then the Roman replies, 'Silence! what
was your place is ours now; we have left you behind as dust
trodden on.' And all the time, from the far front back over
the line of march, as well as forward into the farthest future,
streams a light of which the wranglers know nothing, except that
it is forever leading them on--the Light of Revelation! Who are
they that carry it? Ah, the old Judean blood! How it leaps at the
thought! By the light we know them. Thrice blessed, O our fathers,
servants of God, keepers of the covenants! Ye are the leaders of
men, the living and the dead. The front is thine; and though every
Roman were a Caesar, ye shall not lose it!"
Judah was deeply stirred.
"Do not stop, I pray you," he cried. "You give me to hear the
sound of timbrels. I wait for Miriam and the women who went
after her dancing and singing."
She caught his feeling, and, with ready wit, wove it into her speech.
"Very well, my son. If you can hear the timbrel of the prophetess,
you can do what I was about to ask; you can use your fancy, and stand
with me, as if by the wayside, while the chosen of Israel pass us at
the head of the procession. Now they come--the patriarchs first;
next the fathers of the tribes. I almost hear the bells of their
camels and the lowing of their herds. Who is he that walks alone
between the companies? An old man, yet his eye is not dim, nor his
natural force abated. He knew the Lord face to face! Warrior, poet,
orator, lawgiver, prophet, his greatness is as the sun at morning,
its flood of splendor quenching all other lights, even that of the
first and noblest of the Caesars. After him the judges. And then
the kings--the son of Jesse, a hero in war, and a singer of songs
eternal as that of the sea; and his son, who, passing all other
kings in riches and wisdom, and while making the Desert habitable,
and in its waste places planting cities, forgot not Jerusalem which
the Lord had chosen for his seat on earth. Bend lower, my son!
These that come next are the first of their kind, and the last.
Their faces are raised, as if they heard a voice in the sky and
were listening. Their lives were full of sorrows. Their garments
smell of tombs and caverns. Hearken to a woman among them--'Sing
ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously!' Nay, put your
forehead in the dust before them! They were tongues of God, his
servants, who looked through heaven, and, seeing all the future,
wrote what they saw, and left the writing to be proven by time.
Kings turned pale as they approached them, and nations trembled at
the sound of their voices. The elements waited upon them. In their
hands they carried every bounty and every plague. See the Tishbite
and his servant Elisha! See the sad son of Hilkiah, and him, the seer
of visions, by the river of Chebar! And of the three children of
Judah who refused the image of the Babylonian, lo! that one who,
in the feast to the thousand lords, so confounded the astrologers.
And yonder--O my son, kiss the dust again!--yonder the gentle son
of Amoz, from whom the world has its promise of the Messiah to
come!"
In this passage the fan had been kept in rapid play; it stopped
now, and her voice sank low.
"You are tired," she said.
"No," he replied, "I was listening to a new song of Israel."
The mother was still intent upon her purpose, and passed the
pleasant speech.
"In such light as I could, my Judah, I have set our great men
before you--patriarchs, legislators, warriors, singers, prophets.
Turn we to the best of Rome. Against Moses place Caesar, and Tarquin
against David; Sylla against either of the Maccabees; the best
of the consuls against the judges; Augustus against Solomon,
and you are done: comparison ends there. But think then of the
prophets--greatest of the great."
She laughed scornfully.
"Pardon me. I was thinking of the soothsayer who warned Caius Julius
against the Ides of March, and fancied him looking for the omens
of evil which his master despised in the entrails of a chicken.
From that picture turn to Elijah sitting on the hill-top on the
way to Samaria, amid the smoking bodies of the captains and their
fifties, warning the son of Ahab of the wrath of our God. Finally,
O my Judah--if such speech be reverent--how shall we judge Jehovah
and Jupiter unless it be by what their servants have done in their
names? And as for what you shall do--"
She spoke the latter words slowly, and with a tremulous utterance.
"As for what you shall do, my boy--serve the Lord, the Lord God of
Israel, not Rome. For a child of Abraham there is no glory except
in the Lord's ways, and in them there is much glory."
"I may be a soldier then?" Judah asked.
"Why not? Did not Moses call God a man of war?"
There was then a long silence in the summer chamber.
"You have my permission," she said, finally; "if only you serve
the Lord instead of Caesar."
He was content with the condition, and by-and-by fell asleep. She
arose then, and put the cushion under his head, and, throwing a
shawl over him and kissing him tenderly, went away. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER VI
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