in absence, thinks of the humble actors of humble dramas with a vague and unconscious aspiration towards peace and oblivion.' In both cases it is the wonted aspiration of the jaded worldling. This dilettante enjoyment of the contrast involved in the narration of lowly sorrows to dames of high degree ill accords with any rightful theory of the uses of realistic art. Further, the moral or conclusion which Verga proceeds to draw from 'I Malavoglia,’ namely, that there is a fatal necessity for the poor and weak to cling together; and that, if one of them sins against this religion of family, and wanders forth into the world, he is lost himself and brings ruin upon his ownthis conclusion, however admissible or disputable, would make 'Ntoni the younger wholly responsible for the many misfortunes of his family. Verga, in fact, had widened the conclusion when he wrote the preface of 'I Malavoglia.' The book is to be the first of a series, entitled 'The Vanquished,' which shall illustrate the struggle for existence, or rather the path of progress, fatal and incessant, feverish and weary, that humanity treads.' In view of the whole result of human activity we neglect, he says, to consider the weak who fall by the way; but the observant novelist will repair this neglect. 'I Malavoglia' describes the first rudimentary struggles for bare material needs. These satisfied, we pass to the greed of wealth, incarnated in MastroDon Gesualdo.' Upon that, the Duchessa di Leyra' will typify aristocratic vanity, the 'Onorevole Scipioni' will display ambition, and the Uomo di Lusso' will comprise all these emotions, understand them, suffer from them, and die of them. Meanwhile, till these long-delayed volumes are published, we notice that in 'I Malavoglia the author seeks to demonstrate how 'the first uneasy desires of well-being must spring and develop in the most humble conditions, and what perturbations the vague yearning for the unknown, the perception that things are not well and might be better, must produce in a family hitherto relatively happy.' But surely this is an explanation all too grandiose and philosophic of a simple and pathetic story in which the misfortunes of a family date from an unjust debt contracted in the hope to get a dowry together, as Sicilian duty requires. And 'The Vanquished'? Verga adds that the victor of to-day is the victim of the morrow, 'beaten down by the brutal feet of the next comer,' throughout all the ascending scale of society. Of course there is a sense in which it is true that we all belong to the vanquished, since we are so constituted that mortal life cannot satisfy us. But Verga has no such transcendental intentions. He might have quoted Schopenhauer's 'our life is a struggle for existence, with the certainty of being vanquished' as the sufficient summary of his design. For, once more, we discover that Verga's realism is a pessimistic realism. Pessimism is as unphilosophical as optimism, since neither embraces the whole truth. Pessimistic realism is partial, and therefore false. An inverted idealism, it admits only evil as real, and thereby virtually denies the reality of good. It necessarily fails in its effort truthfully to reproduce human character and motive, because these cannot be understood without sympathy and moral appreciation. At least, in 'I Malavoglia,' Verga has not denied the existence of good; and in Mastro-Don Gesualdo,' sympathy-intelligence illuminated by love-has enabled him to comprehend his hero and make us comprehend in turn. The pessimism of his short stories is sincere and temperamental, not due to any passing fashion of hostile and superficial observation, as is too frequently the case with his French colleagues in realism. He maintains his attitude of the passionless and uncritical reporter of the spectacle of human life, but it is none the less evident that he is moved to make his report, not by an aching sense of disagreement between the laws of things and the claims of the heart, but rather by scorn and weary disgust. His art, strong and vivid by reason of this very pessimism, yet misses the height of strength and vividness, just because this pessimism guards the mask of indifference. Art. III.-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM. 1. The Jewish Year Book, 1901-2. Edited by Rev. Isidore 2. The Jewish Encyclopædia. Prepared by specialists America, 1900. 4. The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century. By Leo Wiener. London: Nimmo, 1899. 5. The Modern Jew. By Arnold White. London: Heinemann, 1899. 6. The Jew in London. Being two essays prepared for✓ the Toynbee Trustees. By C. Russell and H. S. Lewis. London: Fisher Unwin, 1900. 7. The Ancient Scriptures and the Modern Jew. By David Baron. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1900. IN the long annals of Israel the calendar is marked with red days and with black. Reddest of the red, for instance, is the glorious Fifteenth of Nissan (corresponding in 1902 to April 22nd), the day of the Redemption from Egypt by the hand of Moses the Deliverer. This, the earliest feast of freedom, is still religiously celebrated by the Jews with the fine old hymn of liberation, 'I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.' A black day is the fateful Ninth of Ab (in 1902 it is August 12th), which the Jews observe as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Nebuzaradan, chief of the guard to Nebuchadnezzar. The fast appointed for this date is no longer, we believe, universal in Israel, though the Jew repeats the words of Jeremiah : 'Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? ... For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets.' But the nearness of the white fast in Tishri (on October 11th this year), which is literally kept as a solemn day of fasting and atonement at the end of the penitential season, and before the week of rejoicing, has detracted a little from the severity of the ordinance for the fast of Ab. Still, it is marked with black in that curiously complicated calendar, with its sacred new year and its civil new year, its Greek astronomy and Babylonian nomenclature, its refinements of Rabbinical law, unaffrighted by Copernican astronomy, and its wonderful procession of feast-days and fast-days-Simchat Torah, Hanukah, Purim, Sebuyot-names that have been music in the ears of countless generations of Israelites, in Zion and in exile, and that come home to them to-day-come verily to their homes-with so intimate a thrill. Time has added to the record. February the 4th, for instance, is marked in the calendar of English Jews as Resettlement Day-the supposed anniversary of Cromwell's repeal of the prohibition in 1655; and two hundred years later we come to July 26th, 1858, when Baron Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons. It had required nearly six centuries for this victory of tolerance after the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. But the medieval additions to the Jewish calendar consist, for the most part, of days marked with black. Jews massacred at Munich,'' Jews martyred at Heilbronn,'' Jews expelled from England,' 'Jews executed at La Guardia,' Jews expelled from France,' Auto-da-fé at Seville,' Pius V expelled the Jews,' 'Jews slain at Worms,'' Jews of York slay themselves,' Massacre of Jews by Crusaders,' 'Four thousand Jews slain at Toledo,' 'Jews expelled from Spain,' 'Six thousand Jews slain at Mayence'-up and down the Jewish year these entries, and entries like these, commemorate in a line of cold print the unspeakable agony and suffering of the long-drawn-out Middle Ages. 6 Time is still adding to the record. The last day marked with black in the almanac of Israel is perhaps the blackest of all because it comes so late in his annals. At the end of the nineteenth century, which Mr Gladstone in his hasty way described as an era of emancipation, the Jews might surely have expected that active persecution would cease, and that they would be free to devote them selves to the work of conquering and correcting the passive forces of prejudice and dislike. Yet, according to the contributor of the admirable article' Anti-Semitism' in the first volume of the new Jewish Encyclopædia,' the birthday of that movement and its father are both of very recent memory. There was a dissolution of the German Imperial Diet in the late summer of 1878, shortly after Hödel's attempt on the life of the old Emperor William. The general election of July the 30th, 1878, brought an increase of Conservative members; and 'this,' continues the writer of the article, 'may be considered the birthday of anti-Semitism.' Later on in the same paragraph we learn that Adolf Stöcker, the Court chaplain, was the author of the cry. His influence went to establish the party of Christian Socialists, which was to 'win the masses of the people to the Conservative programme by a judicious admixture of socialistic ingredients. To the black days, accordingly, in the memorial calendar of Israel, July the 30th, 1878, is now indelibly added. Twenty years earlier, almost to a day, Baron Rothschild, as we have seen, had taken his seat in the British House of Commons, thus ending, for England at least, the long history of religious disability. And now the interminable cycle was renewed: anti-Semitism was born in Germany. We may minimise the movement as we will, and carefully discriminate between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, between Stöcker's propaganda of Christian Socialism, involving a boycott of financiers, and Torquemada's programme of Christianisation, involving the burning of heretics; yet the fact remains that at the opening of the twentieth century, as at the opening of the sixteenth there is a persecution of the Jews. In the careful words of the editor of The Jewish Year Book,' 'the dawn of the twentieth century finds the Jews in many countries groaning under disabilities . . . which seem to mock at all ideas of human progress. As one reads of them one almost fancies that time must have moved backward instead of forward. . . . For the unpleasant truth is forced upon us that a large portion of Europe is still plunged in the darkness of the Middle Ages.' Why is this? Why are the Jews, who still worship the God of their fathers, subject to this terrible fate? |