But in the first two years of the 90’s he had established himself as a humorist with “The Bachelor’s Club,” “The Old Maid’s Club,” and “The Big Bow Mystery,” an ingenious burlesque of the popular detective story which was as exciting as the real thing; and as a new novelist of high and original achievement with “The Children of the Ghetto.” Just then Jerome and Robert Barr started The Idler, with G. B. Burgin as their assistant editor: a year later Jerome launched To-Day, and Zangwill, who, on the strength of his earlier books, had been branded by the superior as a “humorist,” was among the notable group of young writers that J. K. J. collected on his two magazines. Many of his short stories appeared in the one, and to the other he contributed a causerie, “Without Prejudice” (which re-emerged in due course as a book), and his novel, “The Master,” as a serial.
“The Master” is a sustained and revealing study of a single character—the story of a young painter, Matt Strang, who comes from Nova Scotia to London, self-centered, afire with ambition, but it is not till, broken by disillusion and failure, he withdraws from the babble and dazzle of art circles and social swaggerings, returns to the obscurity of his own home and subserviates his hopes to his wife’s happiness that he finds himself and is able to do the great work he had dreamt of doing. There is more of the ironic, satirical Zangwill in “The Mantle of Elijah”; he places his scenes in the days of Palmerston, but drives home a big-minded gospel that is as badly needed in the politics of these days as it was then. Broser, a strong, self-confident political leader, rises to power by breaking his promises and changing his convictions as often as necessary and is acclaimed the savior of his country, but he has a wife, Allegra, whose conscience is not so accommodating, who cannot abandon her principles whenever he abandons his, and in the hour of his triumph she leaves him, to devote herself to working for the cause that, in the interests of his career, he had betrayed.
Nearly twenty years later Zangwill gave us “Jinny the Carrier,” a very charming story of mid-Victorian life and character in rural Essex; but his finest, most memorable work in fiction has been done as the interpreter of his own people. This he is in “Children of the Ghetto,” in the whimsical grotesque, broadly and grimly humorous tales of “The King of Schnorrers,” that glorious Hebrew mendicant Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, and in the masterly little stories of light and shadow that make up the “Ghetto Tragedies” and “Ghetto Comedies.” He has his unique place in letters as the novelist of London’s modern Jewry. Aldgate, Whitechapel, Hoxton, Dalston, all the roads and byways, mean lanes and squalid squares there and thereabouts are a world large and varied and crowded enough for his purposes. His pride of race glows as surely in such stories of the children of his fancy, the poor of the Ghetto, their profoundly simple piety, their patience, self-sacrifice, humble endurance, human kindness, as in his subtle studies of those real, yet scarcely more real in seeming, “Dreamers of the Ghetto,” Heine, Lasalle, Spinoza, and other such seers and prophets of latter-day Israel. But he is too much of an artist to suppress anything of the truth, and dealing with his own people, actual or imaginary, he shows them starkly as they are, their vices as well as their virtues, their avarice, meanness, hypocrisies, as well as their generosity and loyalties. He is steeped in the Jewish tradition, and fills in the atmosphere and intimate detail of his pictures with most meticulous realism; he is ready enough to ridicule obsolete racial bigotries and ancient customs that have lost their meaning, but is sensitively reverent to the beauty and mystic significance of all old ceremonies and practices that still embody the essential spirit of the faith.
Nowhere has the soul of the London Jew (and the rich Jew who lives in the West has not been overlooked) been more sympathetically or impartially unveiled than in Zangwill’s novel and tales of the Ghetto. His tragedies are touched with comedy, his comedies with tragedy; if I were limited to three of his short stories, I would name “They that Sit in Darkness,” “Transitional” and “To Die in Jerusalem,” for their delicate art and simple directness of narrative, among the greatest in the language.
How many plays Zangwill has written altogether I do not know; but he began in 1892 with “Six Persons,” a comedy, and in the last decade or so has written more plays than stories. “Merely Mary Ann,” a tale of a quaint little lodging-house slavey, came out first as a short novel, then was adapted to the stage and had a popular success in both forms. He dramatized “Children of the Ghetto”; and “Jinny the Carrier” was a domestic drama before it was a novel. But his bigger work in this kind is “The Melting Pot,” “The War God,” “The Next Religion,” “The Forcing House” and “The Cockpit.” Each of them is inspired with a high and serious purpose. The first is a moving plea for race-fusion: the Jews are not a nation but a race; they become absorbed into the nation where they make their home, and you are shown how David Quixano, in America, “God’s crucible, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming,” is moulded into a patriotic American with a passionate ideal of freedom. “The War God,” with its appeal for international goodwill and its scathing indictment of the crime and folly of war is a prophetic commentary on much that has befallen the world since 1912; “The Forcing House” is a tragi-comedy of revolution, which has its parallel in Bolshevik Russia; “The Cockpit” is the tragi-comedy, edged at times with bitterest satire, of the restoration of a Queen who, bent on ruling by love, is thwarted and brought to disaster by her ministers, who have a family likeness to ministers everywhere; and “The War God” (1911) was recognized as the noblest, most impressive drama that had been seen on the London stage for years.
If Zangwill’s road has sometimes been difficult, one reason is that he has never gone with the crowd, never been afraid to go against the view of the majority. More than once he has got himself into trouble through championing unpopular causes. When it needed courage to come out openly in favor of Woman’s Suffrage, he supported it in the press and on the platform; for he is as witty and can be as devastating with his tongue as with his pen. And with all these activities he has found time to do a lot of spade work as President of the International Jewish Territorial Organization, which aims at establishing Jewish Colonies wherever land can be found for them, and time to give practical service in Leagues and Committees that are doing what is possible to build up the peace and universal brotherhood that politicians are too busy to do more than talk about. From which you may take it that he does not put all his sympathies into the printed page, does not write one way and live another, but that his books and his life are of a piece, and if you know them you know him.
INDEX
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