And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he expended it, the fidelity that resisted its temptations and made this Seder service, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Canal, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah stood as naïvely expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters—shafts from a full quiver—sat around the table variously happy and content with existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety pervaded the table.
And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled with salt tears. He would never sit at the head of his own table, carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith, gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping on—the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered—he, modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems! Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas! Modern of the moderns? But it was an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:
"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
"That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
"For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
Yes, it was all true, all true. How the Jewish genius had gone to the heart of things, so that the races that hated it found comfort in its Psalms. No sense of form, the end of Ecclesiastes a confusion and a weak repetition like the last disordered spasms of a prophetic seizure. No care for art, only for reality. And yet he had once thought he loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after forbidden gods, thrilled by that solitary marble figure of a girl that looked in on the Ghetto alley from a boundary wall. Yes; he had worshipped at the shrine of the Beautiful; he had prated of the Renaissance. He had written—with the multiform adaptiveness of his race—French poems with Hellenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics—half felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking of life.