Jewish Portraits. Lady Katie Magnus
To the barren land where no fruit can grow?’(1)
The little grumble is characteristic, but in actual fact no land was ‘barren’ to his hopeful, sunny temperament. In the ‘morning he sowed his seed, and in the evening he withheld not his hand,’ and from his ‘gathered clouds,’ the raindrops fell rainbow-tinted. The love songs, which a trustworthy edition tells us were written to his wife, are quite as beautiful in their very different way as an impassioned elegy he wrote when death claimed his friend, Aben Ezra, or as the famous ode he composed on Jerusalem. Halevi wrote prose too, and a bulky volume in Arabic is in existence, which sets forth the history of a certain Bulan, king of the Khozars, who reigned, the antiquarians agree, about the beginning of the eighth century, over a territory situate on the shores of the Caspian Sea. This Bulan would seem to have been of a hesitating, if not of a sceptical, turn of mind in religious matters. Honestly anxious to be correct in his opinions, his anxiety becomes intensified by means of a vision, and he finally summons representative followers of Moses, of Jesus, and of Mahomet, to discuss in his presence the tenets of their masters. These chosen doctors of divinity argue at great length, and the Jewish Rabbi is said to have best succeeded in satisfying the anxious scruples of the king. The same authorities tell us that Bulan became an earnest convert to Judaism, and commenced in his own person a Jewish dynasty which endured for more than two centuries. Over these more or less historic facts Halevi casts the glamour of his genius, and makes, at any rate, a very readable story out of them, which incidentally throws some valuable side-lights on his own way of regarding things. Unluckily, side-lights are all we possess, in place of the electric illuminating fashion of the day. Those copious details, which our grandchildren seem likely to inherit concerning all and sundry of this generation, are wholly wanting to us, the earlier heirs of time. Of Halevi, as of greater poets, who have lived even nearer to our own age, history speaks neither loudly nor in chorus. Yet, for our consolation, there is the reflection that the various and varying records of ‘Thomas’s ideal John: never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either,’ may, in truth, help us but little to a right comprehension of the ‘real John, known only to His Maker.’ Once get at a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy. And thus though our facts are but few and fragmentary concerning the man of whom one admirer quaintly says that, ‘created in the image of God’ could in his case stand for literal description, yet may we, by means of his ideals, arrive perhaps at a juster conception of Halevi’s charming personality than did we possess the very pen with which he wrote and the desk at which he sat and the minutest and most authentic particulars as to his wont of using both.
His ideal of religion was expressed in every practical detail of daily life.
‘When I remove from Thee, O God,
I die whilst I live; but when
I cleave to Thee, I live in death.’[3]
These three lines indicate the sentiment of Judaism, and might almost serve as sufficient sample of Halevi’s simple creed, for, truth to tell, the religion of the Jews does not concern itself greatly with the ideal, being of a practical rather than of an emotional sort, rigid as to practice, but tolerant over theories, and inquiring less as to a man’s belief than as to his conduct. Work—steady, cheerful, untiring work—was perhaps Halevi’s favourite form of praise. Still, being a poet, he sings, and, like the birds, in divers strains, with happy, unconscious effort. Only ‘For Thy songs, O God!’ he cries, ‘my heart is a harp’; and truly enough, in some of these ancient Hebrew hymns, the stately intensity of which it is impossible to reproduce, we seem to hear clearly the human strings vibrate. The truest faith, the most living hope, the widest charity, is breathed forth in them; and they have naturally been enshrined by his fellow-believers in the most sacred parts of their liturgy, quotations from which would here obviously be out of place. Some dozen lines only shall be given, and these chosen in illustration of the universality of the Jewish hope. ‘Where can I find Thee, O God?’ the poet questions; and there is wonderfully little suggestion of reserved places about the answer:—
‘Lord! where art Thou to be found?
Hidden and high is Thy home.
And where shall we find Thee not?
Thy glory fills the world.
Thou art found in my heart,
And at the uttermost ends of the earth.
A refuge for the near,
For the far, a trust.
‘The universe cannot contain Thee;
How then a temple’s shrine?
Though Thou art raised above men
On Thy high and lofty throne,
Yet art Thou near unto them
In their spirit and in their flesh.
Who can say he has not seen Thee?
When lo! the heavens and their host
Tell of Thy fear, in silent testimony.
‘I sought to draw near to Thee.
With my whole heart I sought Thee.
And when I went out to meet Thee,
To meet me, Thou wast ready on the road.
In the wonders of Thy might
And in Thy holiness I have beheld Thee.
Who is there that should not fear Thee?
The yoke of Thy kingdom is for ever and for all,
Who is there that should not call upon Thee?
Thou givest unto all their food.’
Concerning Halevi’s ideal of love and marriage we may speak at greater length; and on these subjects one may remark that our poet’s ideal was less individual than national. Mixing intimately among men who, as a matter of course, bestowed their fickle favours on several wives, and whose poetic notion of matrimony—on the prosaic we will not touch—was a houri-peopled Paradise, it is perhaps to the credit of the Jews that this was one of the Arabian customs which, with all their susceptibility, they were very slow to adopt. Halevi, as is the general faithful fashion of his race, all his life long loved one only, and clave to her—a ‘dove of rarest worth, and sweet exceedingly,’ as in one of his poems he declares her to be. The test of poetry, Goethe somewhere says, is the substance which remains when the poetry is reduced to prose. When the poetry has been yet further reduced by successive processes of translation, the test becomes severe. We fancy, though, that there is still some considerable residuum about Halevi’s songs to his old-fashioned love—his Ophrah, as he calls her in some of them. Here is one when they are likely to be parted for a while:—
‘So we must be divided; sweetest, stay,
Once more, mine eyes would seek thy glance’s light.
At night I shall recall thee: Thou, I pray,
Be mindful of the days of our delight.
Come to me in my dreams, I ask of thee,
And even in my dreams be gentle unto me.
‘If thou shouldst send me greeting in the grave,
The cold breath of the grave itself were sweet;
Oh, take my life, my life, ’tis all I have,
If it should make thee live, I do entreat.
I think that I shall hear when I am dead,
The rustle of thy gown, thy footsteps overhead.’(1)
And another, which reads like a marriage hymn:—
‘A dove of rarest worth
And sweet exceedingly;
Alas, why does she turn
And fly so far from me?
In my fond heart a tent,
Should aye preparèd be.
My poor heart she has caught
With magic spells and wiles.