Part II
IBN GEBIROL’S “ROYAL CROWN”
Authors are not invariably the best critics of their own work. Was Solomon Ibn Gebirol, who was born in Andalusia, perhaps in Malaga, in the earlier part of the eleventh century, just when he regarded as the crown of all his writings the long poem which he called the “Royal Crown” (Keter Malkut)? Some will always doubt his judgment. Plausibly enough, preference may be felt for several of his shorter poems, particularly “At Dawn I Seek Thee” (which Mrs. R. N. Salaman translated for the Routledge Mahzor) or “Happy the Eye that Saw these Things” (paraphrased by Mrs. Lucas in her Jewish Year).
Ibn Gebirol was, however, sound in his opinion. One line in the “Royal Crown” is the finest that he, or any other neo-Hebraic poet, ever wrote. Should God make visitation as to iniquity, cries Ibn Gebirol, then “from Thee I will flee to Thee.” Nieto interpreted: “I will fly from Thy justice to Thy clemency.” But the line needs no interpretation. In his Confessions (4. 9) Augustine says: “Thee no man loses, but he that lets Thee go. And he that lets Thee go, whither goes he, or whither runs he, but from Thee well pleased back to Thee offended?” A great passage, but Ibn Gebirol’s is greater. It is a sublime thought, and its author was inspired. He must have felt this when he named his poem. For the title comes from the Book of Esther, and the Midrash has it that, when the queen is described as donning the robes of royalty, the Scripture means to tell us that the holy spirit rested on her.
It has been said (among others, by Sachs and Steinschneider) that the “Royal Crown” is substantially a versification of Aristotle’s short treatise “On the World.” This is in a sense true enough. The “Royal Crown” is largely physical, and to modern readers is marred by its long paragraphs of obsolete astronomical conceptions, which go back, through the Ptolemaic system, to Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle, in his treatise cited above, anticipated Ibn Gebirol in the motive with which he directed his ancient readers’ attention to the elements and the planets. “What the pilot is in a ship, the driver in a chariot, the coryphæus in a choir, the general in an army, the lawgiver in a city—that is God in the world” (De Mundo, 6). This saying of Aristotle is indeed Ibn Gebirol’s text. But the Hebrew poet owes nothing else than the skeleton to his Greek exemplar. The style—with its superb application of biblical phrases, a method which in al-Harizi is used to raise a laugh, but in Ibn Gebirol at every turn rouses reverence—is as un-Greek as are the spiritual intensity of thought and the moral optimism of outlook.
Our Sephardic brethren were wiser than the Ashkenazim in their selections for the liturgy. Why the Ashkenazim have neglected Ibn Gebirol and ha-Levi in favor of Kalir will always remain a mystery. The Sephardim did not include all that they might have done from the Spanish poets, but the Ashkenazic Mahzor has suffered by the loss of such masterpieces as Judah ha-Levi’s “Lord! unto Thee are ever manifest my inmost heart’s desires, though unexpressed in spoken words.” But most of all is our loss apparent in the omission of the “Royal Crown” from the Kol Nidre service. In Germany, the Ashkenazim have been better advised. The Rödelheim Mahzor and the Michael Sachs edition both include the poem in their volumes for the Atonement Eve. Sachs (unlike de Sola) omits the astronomical sections in his fine German rendering, and wisely, for the “Royal Crown” notably illustrates the Greek epigram: “part may be greater than the whole.” On the other hand, in his famous Religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien, Sachs includes the omitted cosmology. There is a difference between our attitudes to a poem as a work of literature and to the same poem as an invocation or prayer. Sachs the scholar refused to mutilate the “Royal Crown,” but as a liturgist (though he printed all the Hebrew) he took liberties with it.
Sachs and de Sola were not the only translators of the “Royal Crown.” In fact, to name all who have turned Ibn Gebirol’s work into modern languages would need more space than is here available. In her Jewish Year, Mrs. Lucas—to name the most recent of Ibn Gebirol’s translators—has exquisitely rendered a large part of the poem. I do not propose to quote from it, as Mrs. Lucas’ book is available at a small cost. And we shall, it is to be hoped, not have too long to wait for Mr. Israel Zangwill’s promised rendering.
What is it that appeals to us in Ibn Gebirol’s poetry? Dr. Cowley attributes his charm to “the youthful freshness” of his verses, “in which he may be compared to the romantic school in France and England in the early nineteenth century.” This same feature was also detected by al-Harizi—a better critic than poet. In fact, it was his appreciation of Ibn Gebirol’s “youthful freshness” that led him to assert that the poet died before his thirties had been completed. Al-Harizi treats Ibn Gebirol’s successors as his imitators. There is a large element of truth in this. One fact only need be quoted in evidence. Ibn Gebirol entitled his longest poem the “Royal Crown” (partly, no doubt, because of the frequent comparison of God to the King in the Scriptures). Now, the title “Royal Crown” passed over to designate a type of poem. We find several versifiers who later on wrote “Royal Crowns,” just as we speak of an orator uttering a “Jeremiad” or a “Philippic.” Heine, supreme among the modern Romantics in Germany, recognized this same freshness of inspiration in this freshest of the Spanish Hebrew poets: a pious nightingale singing in the Gothic medieval night, a nightingale whose Rose was God—these are Heine’s phrases.
Gustav Karpeles again and again claims that Ibn Gebirol was the first poet thrilled by “that peculiar ferment characteristic of a modern school”—a ferment which the Germans name Weltschmerz. Clearly, Karpeles made a good point by showing that Schopenhauer—of whom it may be doubted whether he despised women or Jews more heartily—the apostle of Weltschmerz, had as a predecessor, eight centuries before his time, the despised Jew, the “Faust of Saragossa.” This is another of Karpeles’ epithets for Ibn Gebirol, who spent, indeed, some years in Saragossa, but had little of the Faust in him. If, however, we attribute to Ibn Gebirol the feeling of Weltschmerz, we must be cautious before we identify his sense of the “world’s misery” with modern pessimism. Ibn Gebirol’s was, no doubt, a lonely and even melancholy life. But though he often writes sadly, though he would have sympathized with William Allingham’s sentiment:
Sin we have explained away,
Unluckily the sinners stay;
yet the final outcome of his realization of human failings and human pain was hope and not despair. And this I say not because Ibn Gebirol appreciated the humor of life as well as its miseries. It is not his humorous verses on which I should base my belief in his optimism. For I regard as the epitome, or rather, essential motive of the “Royal Crown,” the lines: