See the conquering hero comes,
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums.
But the words make one shudder. They are so turgid, so inappropriate. Judas Maccabæus, of all men, to strut forth to such a welcome—he, who belonged to the first of those who declared:
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us
But unto Thy name give glory!
Tennyson speaks of “perfect music set unto noble words.” Handel’s music may be as perfect as art is capable of, but his librettist betrayed him by supplying words far from noble. They would better have suited Antiochus than Judas. In fact, Handel originally wrote the melody for Joshua who would have approved them as little as the Maccabee.
We still have to wait for a really great drama written round Judas Maccabæus as hero. The most has therefore been made of Longfellow’s attempt, which was turned into Yiddish by Belinson (1882) and into Hebrew by Massel (1900). Judas is not an easy character to draw. He was truculent enough, yet there must have been a fascinating sweetness in him. The key-note is struck in a phrase supplied by the First Book of the Maccabees. He and his brethren “fought with gladness the battle of Israel.” The joyousness of duty is a touch which marks off the Maccabees from the Puritans, and which, developed in Israel’s after-history, helped to form the Jewish character. Longfellow, who wrote his Judas Maccabæus in 1872, when he had passed the zenith of his powers, misses the point altogether.
Yet he realizes other aspects of his hero’s disposition. He partly, though not completely, shares Handel’s mistake of turning Judas into a braggart. But he atones by presenting very fully the sentimentality of the Maccabee. To dub a warrior sentimental may seem contradictory, but the finest soldiers have been just the most sentimental. In Judas, sentimentality shows itself chiefly in his seizing upon associations aroused by local scenery. Wherever he happens to be—so the historians of his age inform us—he recalls past incidents which occurred there. Here, again, we have in Judas a quality which afterwards became a deep-seated characteristic of the Jew, his romanticism. Longfellow was himself a romantic as well as a Puritan, and perfectly presents this side of Judas’s disposition. Thus at Beth-horon Judas recalls how, on the same battlefield, Joshua,
The great captain of the hosts of God,
A slave brought up in the brick-fields of Egypt,
O’ercame the Amorites. There was no day
Like that, before or after it, nor shall be.
The sun stood still, the hammers of the hail
Beat on their harness; and the captains set
Their weary feet upon the necks of kings,
As I will upon thine, Antiochus,
Thou man of blood!—Behold, the rising sun
Strikes on the golden letters of my banner,
Be Elohim Yehovah! Who is like
To thee, O Lord among the gods?—Alas!
I am not Joshua, I cannot say,
“Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou Moon
In Ajalon!” Nor am I one who wastes
The fateful time in useless lamentation:
But one who bears his life upon his hand
To lose it or to save it, as may best
Serve the designs of Him who giveth life.
The “nor shall be” which closes the fourth line of this quotation is a false note. The Maccabee did expect to repeat Joshua’s glory; that expectation of recurrent providences was the basis of Israel’s belief in Providence. Again, even though in his day Hebrew had given way to Aramaic as the national speech (let some of our Hebrew zealots remember that Judas Maccabæus did not talk in Hebrew!), none the less Judas would hardly have been guilty of the error to begin a Hebrew sentence in the middle. Yet Longfellow repeats this curious slip later on, making Judas rush to battle, shouting Be Elohim Yehovah! as though “Among the gods, O Lord” (for that is what the Hebrew words mean) could possibly be a war-cry. No doubt he knew that in one theory the name Maccabee is explained as the initials of the Hebrew text “Who is like unto Thee among the mighty (or the gods), O Lord.” But it was a queer confusion that made him employ the second half of the verse as a signal, and to substitute elohim for the elim of the Song of Moses (Exod. 15. 11). I say nothing of his putting into Judas’ mouth the monstrosity Yehovah—a misspelling (more common in the form Jehovah) which was invented about the year 1520 by the reformers. As is well known, the misspelling arose by reading the vowels of adonai (Lord), as the Name was quite early read, with the consonants of the Name as written in the Hebrew text.
In another aspect Longfellow is perhaps unfairly kind to Judas. Henry V, as Shakespeare drew him, was something of a braggadocio. But the dramatist might almost have been thinking of Judas when he makes his Henry exclaim before Agincourt: “I pray thee, wish not one man more.” Judas, too, knew that much of the glory of victory depended upon the success of the few over the many, “the fewer men the greater share of honour.” Judas, unlike Henry, would have meant the more signal would be the revelation of God’s power, if the human means by which the battle was won were weaker. On the other hand, the Books of the Maccabees do not, so far as one’s memory goes, indicate that Judas, any more than Henry, was chivalrous in the narrower sense. The Jewish exemplar of the chivalrous warrior is David not Judas. Longfellow, however, presents Judas as the chivalrous knight. One hesitates what to think of the third scene in Act III of Longfellow’s play. In “mysterious guise,” Nicanor enters the Jewish camp, a herald “unheralded,” gliding “like a serpent silently” into the very presence of Judas. Nicanor discovers himself.
Judas: Thou art indeed Nicanor. I salute thee.
What brings thee hither to this hostile camp
Thus unattended?
Nicanor: Confidence in thee.
Thou hast the noble virtues of thy race,
Without the failings that attend those virtues.
Thou can’st be strong, and yet not tyrannous,
Can’st righteous be and not intolerant.
Let there be peace between us.
Judas: What is peace?
Is it to bow in silence to our victors?
Is it to see our cities sacked and pillaged?
Our people slain, or sold as slaves, or fleeing
At night-time by the blaze of burning towns;
Jerusalem laid waste; the Holy Temple
Polluted with strange gods? Are these things peace?