Whilst the leaders of society, the licentious crusader and the celibate monk, were stumbling so sorely in the shadow of the Cross, and whilst the rank and file throughout Europe were steeped in deepest gloom of densest ignorance and superstition, the lamp of learning, handed down from generation to generation of despised Jews, was still being carefully trimmed, and was burning at its brightest among the little knot of philosophers and poets in Spain. Alcharisi, the commentator and critic of the circle, gives, for his age, a curiously high standard of the qualifications essential to the sometimes lightly bestowed title of author. ‘A poet,’ he says, ‘(1) must be perfect in metre; (2) his language of classic purity; (3) the subject of his poem worthy of the poet’s best skill, and calculated to instruct and to elevate mankind; (4) his style must be full of “lucidity” and free from every obscure or foreign expression; (5) he must never sacrifice sense to sound; (6) he must add infinite care and patience to his gift of genius, never submitting crude work to the world; and (7) lastly, he must neither parade all he knows nor offer the winnowings of his harvest.’
These seem sufficiently severe conditions even to nineteenth-century judgment, but Jehudah Halevi, say his admirers and even his contemporaries, fulfilled them all.
That a man should be judged by his peers gives a promise of sound and honest testimony, and if such judgment be accepted as final, then does Halevi hold high rank indeed among men and poets. One of the first things that strike an intruder into this old-world literary circle is the curious absence of those small rivalries and jealousies which we of other times and manners look instinctively to find. Such records as remain to us make certainly less amusing reading than some later biographies and autobiographies afford, but, on the other hand, it has a unique interest of its own, to come upon authentic traces of such susceptible beings as authors, all living in the same set and with a limited range both of subjects and of readers, who yet live together in harmony, and interchange sonnets and epigrams curiously free from every suggestion of envy, hatred, or uncharitableness. There is, in truth, a wonderful freshness of sentiment about these gentle old scholars. They say pretty things to and of each other in almost school-girl fashion. ‘I pitch my tent in thy heart,’ exclaims one as he sets out on a journey. More poetically Halevi expresses a similar sentiment to a friend of his (Ibn Giat):
‘If to the clouds thy boldness wings its flight,
Within our hearts, thou ne’er art out of sight.’
Writes another (Moses Aben Ezra), and he was a philosopher and grammarian to boot, one not to be lightly suspected of sentimentality, ‘Our hearts were as one: now parted from thee, my heart is divided into two.’ Halevi was the absent friend in this instance, and he begins his response as warmly:—
‘How can I rest when we are absent one from another?
Were it not for the glad hope of thy return
The day which tore thee from me
Would tear me from all the world.’
Or the note changes: some disappointment or disillusion is hinted at, and under its influence our tender-hearted poet complains to this same sympathetic correspondent, ‘I was asked, Hast thou sown the seed of friendship? My answer was, Alas, I did, but the seed did not thrive.’
It is altogether the strangest, soberest little picture of sweetness and light, showing beneath the gaudy, tawdry phantasmagoria of the age. Rub away the paint and varnish from the hurrying host of crusaders, from the confused crowd of dreary, deluded rabble, and there they stand like a ‘restored’ group, these tuneful, unworldly sages, ‘toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,’ with Jehudah Halevi, poet and physician, as central figure. For, loyal to the impulse which in times long past had turned Akiba into a herdsman and had induced Hillel in his youth and poverty to ‘hire himself out wherever he could find a job,’[1] which, in the time to come, was to make of Maimonides a diamond-cutter, and of Spinoza an optician, Halevi compounded simples as conscientiously as he composed sonnets, and was more of doctor than of poet by profession. He was true to those traditions and instincts of his race, which, through all the ages, had recognised the dignity of labour and had inclined to use literature as a staff rather than as a crutch. His prescriptions were probably such as the Pharmacoœia of to-day might hardly approve, and the spirit in which he prescribed, one must own, is perhaps also a little out of date. Here is a grace just before physic which brings to one’s mind the advice given by a famous divine of the muscular Christianity school to his young friend at Oxford, ‘Work hard—as for your degree, leave it to God.’
‘God grant that I may rise again,
Nor perish by Thine anger slain.
This draught that I myself combine,
What is it? Only Thou dost know
If well or ill, if swift or slow,
Its parts shall work upon my pain.
Ay, of these things, alone is Thine
The knowledge. All my faith I place,
Not in my craft, but in Thy grace.’[2](1)
Halevi’s character, however, was far enough removed from that which an old author has defined as ‘pious and painefull.’ He ‘entered the courts with gladness’: his religion being of a healthy, happy, natural sort, free from all affectations, and with no taint either of worldliness or of other-worldliness to be discerned in it. Perhaps our poet was not entirely without that comfortable consciousness of his own powers and capabilities which, in weaker natures, turns its seamy side to us as conceit, nor altogether free from that impatience of ‘fools’ which seems to be another of the temptations of the gifted. This rather ill-tempered little extract which we are honest enough to append appears to indicate as much:—