It has been said above that the musical setting has not retained its hold on public taste. The Rev. Francis L. Cohen (in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 179) speaks of it as having “deservedly sunk into oblivion.” I have recently had several of them played over to me, and my verdict is the same as Mr. Cohen’s. In themselves the tunes are sometimes good enough, Maoz Zur appears among them. But the words and the airs rarely fit, and Nathan lost chances by ignoring the Sephardic music. Nathan’s contemporaries had, however, a higher opinion of the work. Perhaps it was because the composer sang his songs so well; Braham does not seem to have included them in his repertoire. But Nathan’s auditors were charmed by his renderings. Byron himself was most moved by “She Walks in Beauty”—to a modern ear Nathan’s is a commonplace and inappropriate setting—and “he would not unfrequently join in its execution.” The verses were really written for the tunes, and the poet often consulted the musician as to the style and metre of the stanzas. Nathan (in his Fugitive Pieces, 1829), records many conversations during the progress of the joint work. He tells us, for instance, how Byron refused to alter the end of “Jephtha’s Daughter.” As Nathan read the Scripture, and as many others also read it, Jephthah’s daughter did not perish as a consequence of her father’s vow; but Byron observed: “Do not seek to exhume the lady.” On another occasion, Nathan was anxious to know what biblical passages were in the poet’s mind when he wrote some of the verses, such as “O snatch’d away in beauty’s bloom!” Byron vaguely answered: “Every mind must make its own reference.” The local color of the poems, besides their substance, is in fact sometimes at fault. “Each flower the dews have lightly wet,” is not a Palestinian touch; the dews there are remarkable for their heaviness.
At this point let us for a moment interrupt Nathan’s reminiscences of Byron himself, and cite what he tells us of another famous poet’s appreciation of the “Melodies.” “When the Hebrew melodies were first published,” says Nathan, “Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, honoured me with a visit at my late residence in Poland Street. I sang several of the melodies to him—he repeated his visit, and requested that I would allow him to introduce his lady and his daughter. They came together, when I had the pleasure of singing to them ‘Jephtha’s Daughter,’ and one or two more of the favourite airs: they entered into the spirit of the music with all the true taste and feeling so peculiar to the Scotch.” Another admirer of Nathan’s singing of the melodies was Lady Caroline Lamb, herself the author of what the conventions of the period would have termed “elegant verses.” Once she wrote to Nathan: “I am, and have been, very ill; it would perhaps cure me if you could come and sing to me ‘Oh Mariamne’—now will you? I entreat you, the moment you have this letter come and see me.” The same lady translated for him a Hebrew elegy which he wrote on the death of his wife. Nathan must obviously have been an amiable companion and a charming renderer of his own music, or he would not have gained the applause of these distinguished judges.
As has been seen from the conversations recorded above, Byron and Nathan became very intimate in the course of their collaboration over the “Hebrew Melodies.” It was this work that brought them together, though they were contemporaries at Cambridge about 1805, Byron being a student at Trinity College, and Nathan a pupil at Solomon Lyon’s Jewish school in Cambridge town. But they naturally did not become acquainted then. Douglas Kinnaird (according to Mr. Prothero) introduced them to one another. Kinnaird was Byron’s banker and Cambridge friend. This mention of Mr. Prothero reminds me that in his edition of Byron’s Letters, he cites a note written by the poet to thank Nathan for a “seasonable bequest” of a parcel of matsos. Byron must have grown very attached to Nathan. An officious friend of the poet exhorted the musician to bring the melodies out in good style, so that his lordship’s name “might not suffer from scantiness in their publication.” Byron overheard the remark, and on the following evening said to Nathan: “Do not suffer that capricious fool to lead you into more expense than is absolutely necessary; bring out the book to your own taste. I have no ambition to gratify, beyond that of proving useful to you.” The poet was, indeed, so indignant that he generously offered to share in the cost of production, an offer which Nathan as generously declined.
Readers of the “Hebrew Melodies” must have been struck by the appearance of two poems based on Psalm 137. Byron first wrote: “We sate down and wept by the waters,” and later on another version beginning: “In the valley of waters we wept.” Byron himself observed the duplication, and wished to suppress the former copy. It is well that he yielded to Nathan’s importunities, for the first version is assuredly the finer. But the incident shows the close connection between the verses and the music. For Byron ended the discussion with these words: “I must confess I give a preference to my second version of this elegy; and since your music differs so widely from the former, I see no reason why it should not also make its public appearance.”
Such being the close bond between poet and musician, it is all the more regrettable that the latter did not make a more competent use of his opportunity. A better fate befell the earlier collaboration which (in 1807) resulted in Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—a title which suggested that given to Byron’s series. Stevenson served Moore better than Nathan was able to serve Byron. Yet it seems a pity to leave things in this condition. Such poems as those already alluded to—and such others as “Saul,” the “Vision of Belshazzar,” and the “Destruction of Sennacherib”—all bear the clearest marks of their design; they were written to be sung, not merely to be read or recited. Jeffrey spoke of their sweetness; Lytton of their depth of feeling; Nathan himself realized that “Oh! weep for those” reaches the acme of emotional sympathy for persecuted Israel. Here, then, there is a chance for a modern Jewish musician. S. Mandelkern, in 1890, gave us a spirited translation of the verses into the Hebrew language. Let a better artist than Nathan now translate them musically into the Hebrew spirit.
COLERIDGE’S “TABLE TALK”
Coleridge was not master of his genius; his genius was master of him. In one place he speaks of the midrashic fancies about the state of our first parents as “Rabbinic dotages”; in another he laments, with Schelling, that these same rabbinic stories are neglected, and proceeds in his periodical, The Friend, to quote several with obvious approval. Again, he writes in one passage of the “proverbial misanthropy and bigotry” of Pharisaism; then, in another, he asserts, on the authority of Grotius, that the “Lord’s Prayer” was a selection from the liturgy of the Synagogue.
The truth is that a large part of Coleridge’s work is of the nature of table talk. His relative indeed published the poet’s “Table Talk,” but a good deal else in Coleridge belongs to the same category. His thoughts are, for the most part, obiter dicta, stray jottings, often stating profound truths, often expressing sheer nonsense. On the whole, he was not unkind to the Jews. He delivered many lectures on Shakespeare, but he never spoke on the Merchant of Venice. He alludes with contempt to the incident of the pound of flesh. Jacob, it is true, he regards as “a regular Jew” because of his trickiness; but he hastens to take the sting out of the remark by adding: “No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel.”
Throughout we find, in Coleridge’s remarks on the Jews and Judaism, the same mixture of conventional views and original judgments. He notes the theory that the Jews were destined to “remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing out the doctrine of the unity of God,” but spoils the compliment by the comment: “The religion of the Jew is, indeed, a light; but it is the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.” He can see in the Jew only love of money, yet he always found Jews “possessed of a strong national capacity for metaphysical discussions.”
The last remark points to his personal familiarity with Jews. This was actually the case. “I have had,” he says, “a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money from them.” He records several conversations with Jews, and does not hesitate to admit that he mostly got the worst of the argument. He argued with one Jew about conversion, and he cites the Jew’s answer: “Let us convert Jews to Judaism first”—an epigram which has been a good deal repeated in other forms since 1830, when Coleridge first recorded it. On one occasion he accosted an “Old Clothes” man, and in a hectoring tone exclaimed: “Why can’t you pronounce your trade cry clearly, why must you utter such a grunt?” The Jew answered: “Sir, I can say ‘Old Clothes’ as well as you can, but if you had to say it ten times a minute, for an hour, you would say, ‘Ogh clo’’ as I do now,” and so he marched off. Coleridge confesses that he “felt floored.” He was so much confounded by the justice of his retort, that, to cite his own words again: “I followed, and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.”