Ghetto Comedies. Israel Zangwill

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      CHAPTER V

      LAST STAGE OF ALL

      This letter seemed decisive. I did not trouble Mr. Conn to English the Yiddish epistle. My imagination saw too clearly Quarriar himself dictating its luridly romantic phraseology. Such counter-plots, coils, treasons, and stratagems in so simple a matter! How Quarriar could even think them plausible I could not at first imagine; and with my anger was mingled a flush of resentment at his low estimate of my intellect.

      After-reflection instructed me that he wrote as a Russian to whom apparently nothing mediæval was strange. But at the moment I had only the sense of outrage and trickery. All these months I had been fed upon lies. Day after day I had been swathed with them as with feathers. I had so pledged my reputation as a reader of character that he would appear with his three younger children, bear every test, and be triumphantly vindicated. And in that moment of hot anger and wounded pride I had almost slashed through my canvas and mutilated beyond redemption that kingly head. But it looked at me sadly with its sweet majesty, and I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.' He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful dignity, seemed almost to turn the other cheek. Illegal calling! No; it was the law that was illegal—the cruel, impossible law, that in taking away all means of livelihood had contorted the Jew's conscience. It was the country that was illegal—the cruel country whose frontiers could only be crossed by bribery and deceit—the country that had made him cunning like all weak creatures in the struggle for survival. And so, gradually softer thoughts came to me, and less unmingled feelings. I could not doubt the general accuracy of his melancholy wanderings between Russia and Rotterdam, between London and Brighton. And were he spotless as the dove, that only made surer the blackness of Kazelia and the partner—his brethren in Israel and in the Exile.

      And so the new Man of Sorrows shaped himself to my vision. And, taking my brush, I added a touch here and a touch there till there came into that face of sorrows a look of craft and guile. And as I stood back from my work, I was startled to see how nearly I had come to a photographic representation of my model; for those lines of guile had indeed been there, though I had eliminated them in my confident misrepresentation. Now that I had exaggerated them, I had idealized, so to speak, in the reverse direction. And the more I pondered upon this new face, the more I saw that this return to a truer homeliness and a more real realism did but enable me to achieve a subtler beauty. For surely here at last was the true tragedy of the people of Christ—to have persisted sublimely, and to be as sordidly perverted; to be king and knave in one; to survive for two thousand years the loss of a fatherland and the pressure of persecution, only to wear on its soul the yellow badge which had defaced its garments.

      For to suffer two thousand years for an idea is a privilege that has been accorded only to Israel—'the soldier of God.' That were no tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was the Israel—the high tragedian in the comedy sock—that I tried humbly to typify in my Man of Sorrows.