This is cleverly conceived. Nicanor’s degrading compliments as well as his false offer of peace are rejected with due scorn. Longfellow probably got the idea for this scene from the story told of Mattathias, to whom the Syrian envoys made overtures, which the dour father of the Maccabee knew how to treat. But what one doubts is whether Nicanor would have trusted himself to the Maccabean camp. The scene ends:
Judas: Go to thy tents.
Nicanor: Shall it be war or peace?
Judas: War, war, and only war. Go to thy tents
That shall be scattered, as by you were scattered
The torn and trampled pages of the Law,
Blown through the windy streets.
Nicanor: Farewell brave foe!
Judas: Ho, there, my captains! Have safe conduct given
Unto Nicanor’s herald through the camp,
And come yourselves to me.—Farewell, Nicanor!
One wonders whether such an end to such a scene were possible? Still, if David would have acted thus generously, why not Judas? We must allow for the insight of genius. Longfellow may have understood the story more truly than his critic. If to the valor, the recklessness of self, the romanticism, the all-pervading joyousness of Judas, we may add the trait of generosity, then is he indeed among the noblest models of chivalry which history can show.
ARTOM’S SERMONS
When, in February, 1873, Haham Artom was pressed to publish a selection of his Sermons, he consented, but with reluctance. For, said he, “I am fully aware of the difficulty of speaking and writing in a language which is not my own ... a language which, some years ago, was unknown to me.” Artom never lost his Italian accent, and the slight survival of his native idiom added grace to his English orations. He was an attractive figure in the pulpit; and as effective as attractive.
He died in 1879. Having frequently heard him preach, having, indeed, been present when many of these very addresses were first given, I have again, after more than forty years, turned to the printed volume. Is any of the fire left? Has all the charm evaporated? His commanding presence, his beautiful voice, his dramatic gestures, his extempore delivery of carefully prepared impromptus—were these mannerisms answerable for the whole of Artom’s power, or was there something forceful and persuasive in the matter? In a word, do the speeches survive the speaker?
Let us remember, first and last, that Artom was an artist. He not only wrote verses, but he composed music; some of his melodies are still sung in the Sephardic synagogues. He was also an artist in prose. This gift sometimes led him astray. The faults of the speaker certainly remain in the speeches. The passages which sounded grotesque in the hearing, strike one in the reading as more grotesque still. For instance, in his sermon (November 7, 1874) against Cremation, he describes in lurid detail the scene at the burning of the body, and then he proceeds: “A sad and repeated crackling is soon heard, the combustion is going on rapidly. But to my ears that crackling seems to be the complaint of the dead person for being treated with such cruelty and disrespect.”
This is sentimentalism at its falsest. Obviously, such faults of the orator endure. Have his merits the same lasting quality? The question may be confidently answered in the affirmative.
He showed true artistry in structure. A preacher must be a builder. He has to construct a work of art. Not merely in the sense of form, but also and chiefly in substance. Judaism is the home beautiful; it fascinates the eye, but it also provides rooms for living. Artom entertained, and he also fed his guests. Out of his sermons you could easily piece together a fine edifice of Judaism. Many of its greatest truths are there, presented very solidly, and for all his decorative art very simply. Artom was not a thinker, he was a believer. Yet, though he never felt a doubt, he always realized that there were people who differed from him. He was thus frequently controversial; he had in mind some other opinions which he was determined to combat. This method impelled him to present religion in relation to the realities of his day. No preacher can be effective, unless he does so; no preacher’s words endure for other times, unless they are first vital for his own.
In another respect, Artom’s method justified itself. I refer to his use of rabbinic quotations. He seldom quoted anything else. Here we have, in part, a mere trick, a mechanical device, artificial rather than artistic. Every sermon is headed by two texts, the one scriptural, the other rabbinic. In those olden Jewish homilies called, from their opening formula, Yelammedenu a similar plan was followed, but the rabbinic passage was legal, involving some problem of Halakah or practical laws. Artom’s citations are always homiletical, and rarely add to the effect of the biblical text. Mechanical, too, is the division of each address into a Prologue, followed by three parts, ending with an Epilogue culminating in a prayer. The whole congregation almost invariably rose at the close of the Haham’s sermons, to join in these prayers, spoken with genuine but never unctious fervor. Such severe divisions of the sermon were long de rigueur on the continent. Nowadays, in the reaction against these fetters, sermons tend to lose form altogether. But where Artom showed himself a master was in his use of Midrash in the body of his addresses. He had nothing like the theological profundity of Jellinek, who employed Midrash to enforce fundamental ideas with subtlety. Nor had he Jellinek’s power of “holding the Midrash in chemical solution.” As Mr. Singer—a greater preacher far than Artom—said in his Memoir of Jellinek, midrashic quotations in a sermon are as a rule “stuck clumsily into the discourse, and leave upon the palate the flavour of undissolved spice or sugar in an ill-prepared Sabbath or Festival dish. In Jellinek the assimilation is perfect. It is the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Whether the Midrash or the preacher’s theme came first, which went the longer way to meet the other, is often as uncertain to determine as the question, in the case of some of the finest songs, whether the music suggested the words, or the words the music.”