Of one particular Jewish friend we know. Coleridge had a deep affection for Hyman Hurwitz, whom he terms “pious, learned, strong-minded, single-hearted.” Afterwards Professor of Hebrew at University College, London, Hurwitz was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the head of the “Highgate Academy.” He died in 1844, surviving Coleridge by ten years; the latter died at Highgate in 1834. Thus the poet and the Hebraist were neighbors as well as friends. Coleridge translated into poor English verse Hurwitz’s feeble Hebrew elegy on the death of Princess Charlotte. He also contracted to prepare for the publisher, Murray, a volume of “Rabbinical Tales”; in this work Hurwitz was to collaborate with him. The fee was settled; it was to be two hundred guineas; but the arrangement came to nothing. Coleridge was rich in plans which he failed to accomplish. As an instance, let me cite what he says about an epic on the “Destruction of Jerusalem.” “That,” he declares, “is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem.” Mark what follows: “I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat.” Perhaps another remark of his explains why he never attempted the task. The subject of the destruction of Jerusalem, with great capabilities, has one great defect. “No genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero being merged in the interest for the event”—a profound sentiment.
Perhaps in no direction was Coleridge more in advance of his age than in his treatment of the ethics of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were, he contends truly, not a sect; they were, he puts it less aptly, the Evangelicals of their day. By that he means those who made religion the main concern of life; therein he is right, but the term is somewhat unhappily chosen. Yet not from one point of view. I have already cited Coleridge’s opinion as to the Jewish sources of the “Lord’s Prayer.” He takes up a similar position with regard to the ethics of the Gospels in general. Here is a very remarkable concession: “The Being and Providence of the Living God, holy, gracious, merciful, the creator and preserver of all things, and a father of the righteous; the Moral Law in its utmost height, breadth, and purity; a state of retribution after death, the Resurrection of the Dead, and a Day of Judgment—all these were known and received by the Jewish people, as established articles of national faith, at or before the proclaiming of Christ by the Baptist.” This is taken, not from the collection of “Table Talk” so named, but from the “Aids to Reflection” (Aphorism vii). Coleridge justifies his claim in behalf of the Jews by citing Leviticus 19. 2 and Micah 6. 8, finding the acme of morality in the command to be holy and in the prophet’s answer to the question, “What doth the Lord require of thee?” Just so did Huxley choose Micah’s saying: “To do justly, to love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God,” as the last word of religion. To give the words of Huxley which cannot be repeated too often: “If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect idea of religion.” No two minds were more unlike than Huxley’s and Coleridge’s—the one the scientist, the other the metaphysician; the one the agnostic, the other the mystic. Yet they agreed in perceiving in the prophetic teaching a unique expression of basic moral truth.
BLANCO WHITE’S SONNET
Fear is natural by night. Man in the day-time is beset by foes; but while he can use his eyes, he has a sense of security. Something he can effect towards self-protection. But in the dark he feels helpless.
Hence it is natural that the Hebrew poets of the Midrash (on Psalm 92) have used as a theme Adam’s first experience of the dark. There was no darkness on the first Friday after Creation. The primeval light, which illumined the world from end to end, was not quenched, though Adam had already sinned before night-fall of the day on which he was born. But the Sabbath came with the Friday’s close, and the celestial rays shone on through the hours that should have been obscure. When, however, the Sabbath had passed, the heavenly light passed with it, and Adam, to his consternation, was unable to see. Would not the wily serpent choose this as a favorable moment for insidious onslaught? Then the light that failed in nature was kindled in man’s intellect. Adam, by the friction of two stones, cleverly made artificial light, and so could see again.
So runs one form of the Jewish legend. Another (I am summarizing both from Prof. Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, vol. i, pp. 86-89) expresses the thought differently. The primeval light does not figure in this version, but it is the normal sun that sinks before Adam’s gaze on the Saturday night. Adam was filled with compunction. “Woe is me!”, he exclaimed, “I have sinned, and because of me is the world darkened; because of me it will again return to a condition of chaos.” So he passed the long vigil of the dark in tears, and Eve wept with him. But with the day he dried his eyes. For he saw the sun rise once more, and realized that the alternations of day and night were part of the divine order of nature.
In both these fancies Adam is much disturbed by his first experience of the dark, a guilty conscience made a coward of him. But not all Hebrew homilists rested in this attitude of fear. The author of the eighth Psalm is above all the poet of the night in its more uplifting aspects. He sees not the terror, but the illumination of the dark. The poet contemplates the heavens at night; he does not mention the sun, but “the moon and the stars” which God has ordained. “Unquestionably, the star-lit sky, especially in the transparent clearness of an Eastern atmosphere, is more suggestive of the vastness and variety and mystery of the universe.” So writes Dr. Kirkpatrick on Psalm 8. 3, and he refers to an eloquent passage in Whewell’s Astronomy, Book III, Chapter 3. Certainly those who have beheld the heavens on an Oriental night can conceive nothing more glorious than the spectacle, nor recall aught more wonderful than the Psalmist’s description of it.
It was left to the theologian Blanco White to combine the two thoughts of fear and illumination, expressed in the Midrash quoted above and in Psalm 8, into an exquisite Sonnet. The author’s name is queer enough. But though Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841) was born in Seville, he was an Irishman by descent. When the family settled in Spain, they translated the patronymic White into Blanco. On his coming to England, the theologian simply retained both forms of the name. As the writer in the Dictionary of National Biography recalls, Blanco White applied to himself the lines which occur in Richard II, Act i, scene 3. Norfolk, doomed to exile in a foreign land, thus laments his fate:
The language I have learn’d these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo;
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.
Strange that this passage, of which only a small part has been here quoted, has never been turned into Hebrew, with a change in one single word of the second line, by a Zionist. Yet more strange that Blanco White, who thus deplored the fact that his paternal English was not his native speech, has given us one of the greatest poems in the English language!