‘If thou shouldst send me greeting in the grave,
The cold breath of the grave itself were sweet;
Oh, take my life, my life, ’tis all I have,
If it should make thee live, I do entreat.
I think that I shall hear when I am dead,
The rustle of thy gown, thy footsteps overhead.’(1)
And another, which reads like a marriage hymn:—
‘A dove of rarest worth
And sweet exceedingly;
Alas, why does she turn
And fly so far from me?
In my fond heart a tent,
Should aye preparèd be.
My poor heart she has caught
With magic spells and wiles.
I do not sigh for gold,
But for her mouth that smiles;
Her hue it is so bright,
She half makes blind my sight,
. . . .
The day at last is here
Fill’d full of love’s sweet fire;
The twain shall soon be one,
Shall stay their fond desire.
Ah! would my tribe could chance
On such deliverance.’(1)
On a first reading, these last two lines strike one as oddly out of place in a love poem. But as we look again, they seem to suggest, that in a nature so full and wholesome as Halevi’s, love did not lead to a selfish forgetfulness, nor marriage mean a joy which could hold by its side no care for others. Rather to prove that love at its best does not narrow the sympathies, but makes them widen and broaden out to enfold the less fortunate under its happy, brooding wings. And though at the crowning moment of his life Halevi could spare a tender thought for his ‘tribe,’ with very little right could the foolish, favourite epithet of ‘tribalism’ be flung at him, and with even less of justice at his race. In truth, they were ‘patriots’ in the sorriest, sincerest sense—this dispossessed people, who owned not an inch of the lands wherein they wandered, from the east unto the west. It is prejudice or ignorance maybe, but certainly it is not history, which sees the Jews as any but the faithfullest of citizens to their adopted States; faithful, indeed, often to the extent of forgetting, save in set and prayerful phrases, the lost land of their fathers. Here is a typical national song of the twelfth century, in which no faintest echo of regret or of longing for other glories, other shrines, can be discerned:—
‘I found that words could ne’er express
The half of all its loveliness;
From place to place I wander’d wide,
With amorous sight unsatisfied,
Till last I reach’d all cities’ queen,
Tolaitola[4] the fairest seen.
. . . .
Her palaces that show so bright
In splendour, shamed the starry height,
Whilst temples in their glorious sheen
Rivall’d the glories that had been;
With earnest reverent spirit there,
The pious soul breathes forth its prayer.’
The ‘earnest reverent spirit’ may be a little out of drawing now, but that ‘fairest city seen’ of the Spanish poet,[5] might well stand for the London or Paris of to-day in the well-satisfied, cosmopolitan affections of an ordinary Englishman or Frenchman of the Jewish faith. And which of us may blame this adaptability, this comfortable inconstancy of content? Widows and widowers remarry, and childless folks, it is said, grow quite foolishly fond of adopted kin. With practical people the past is past, and to the prosperous nothing comes more easy than forgetting. After all—
‘What can you do with people when they are dead?
But if you are pious, sing a hymn and go;
Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,
But go by all means, and permit the grass
To keep its green fend ’twixt them and you.’[6]
In the long centuries since Jerusalem fell there has been time and to spare for the green grass to wither into dusty weeds above those desolate dead whose ‘place knows them no more.’ That Halevi with his ‘poetic heart,’ which is a something different from the most metrical of poetic imaginations, cherished a closer ideal of patriotism than some of his brethren may not be denied. ‘Israel among the nations,’ he writes, ‘is as the heart among the limbs.’ He was the loyalest of Spanish subjects, yet Jerusalem was ever to him, in sober fact, ‘the city of the world.’
In these learned latter days, the tiniest crumbs of tradition have been so eagerly pounced upon by historians to analyse and argue over, that we are almost left in doubt whether the very A B C of our own history may still be writ in old English characters. The process which has bereft the bogy uncle of our youthful belief of his hump, and all but transformed the Bluebeard of the British throne into a model monarch, has not spared to set its puzzling impress on the few details which have come down to us concerning Halevi. Whether the love-poems, some eight hundred in number, were all written to his wife, is now questioned; whether 1086 or 1105 is the date of his birth, and if Toledo or Old Castille be his birthplace, is contested. Whether he came to a peaceful end, or was murdered by wandering Arabs, is left doubtful, since both the year of his death[7] and the manner of it are stated in different ways by different authorities, among whom it is hard to choose. Whether, indeed, he ever visited the Holy City, whether he beheld it with ‘actual sight or sight of faith,’ is greatly and gravely debated; but amidst all this bewildering dust of doubt that the researches of wise commentators have raised, the central fact of his life is left to us undisputed. The realities they meddle with, but the ideals, happily, they leave to us undimmed. All at least agree, that ‘she whom the Rabbi loved was a poor woe-begone darling, a moving picture of desolation, and her name was Jerusalem.’ There is a consensus of opinion among the critics that this often-quoted saying of Heine’s was only a poetical way of putting a literal and undoubted truth. On this subject, indeed, our poet has only to speak for himself.
‘Oh! city of the world, most chastely fair;
In the far west, behold I sigh for thee.
And in my yearning love I do bethink me,
Of bygone ages; of thy ruined fane,
Thy vanish’d splendour of a vanish’d day.
Oh! had I eagles’ wings I’d fly to thee,
And with my falling tears make moist thine earth.
I long for thee; what though indeed thy kings
Have passed for ever; that where once uprose
Sweet balsam-trees the serpent makes his nest.
O that I might embrace thy dust, the sod
Were sweet as honey to my fond desire!’(1)