Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/111

 9* s. xii. AUG. s, loos.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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epigram which Burton would have quoted had it been printed in his day, I exclaim : Dieu me garde d'etre savant D'une science si prof on de : Les plus doctes le plus souvent Sont les plus sottes gens du nionde.

About all such matters we may say in the words of St. Austin :

"Quid enim opus est, ut hsec atque huiusmodi adfirmentur vel negentur vel definiantur cum dis- crimine, quando sine crimine nesciuntur ? '' 'En- chiridion ad Laurentium,' cap. lix.

In conclusion, I must confess that these quotations have to do with matters which are vastly more difficult of solution than the one I have mentioned. To discover the exact number of lines in the ' Poly-Olbion ' is a task which can be accomplished. I leave the counting of them to others, being satisfied with having read them, which I have shown to be a less formidable operation than was commonly supposed. But for either purpose let me recommend the student to procure a copy printed in larger type than the one given in Southey's 'Early British Poets,' which I have had to use.

JOHN T. CUKKY.

HEINE'S 'PRINCESS SABBATH.' I LAY down E. A. Bowring's rendering of this poem with mingled feelings of exultation and sadness. At this time of day one can hardly be expected to say anything fresh about Heine ; but as a fellow Hebre\y I may add one or two notes worth considering. For the Jew his coming and the date of his advent were priceless events. It _would take me too far to elaborate this point. I will keep closely to the intellectual side of Heine, which for every educated Jew is a storehouse of pearls and rubies. Spenser has been called the poet's poet : in precisely the same sense I may call Heine the Jew's poet. He is the poet of the Jews of modern times, albeit not in the sense that Alcharisi, Gabirol, and Hale'vi are. Yet in a political sense his labours for his brethren were more fruitful and permanent, owing to his fortu- nately not aspiring to rival the poets I have named. Nor do I believe that he ever specifically regarded himself as the champion of Jewry. Subconsciously, as the soldier fighting the battles of humanity, Heine may sometimes have plumed himself on his varying success in that warfare on their behalf. It may have settled in his mind as a remote and ultimate by-product. I said, however, that Heine is the Jew's poet. In his writing Jeshurun once more can breathe

his natural atmosphere, freed from the mephitic poisons of Ghetto life. In those airy spaces he can sport, expand, and discover that he has more than a local habitation and a name. He becomes an articulate being stand- ing, for the first, time possibly in his life, self- revealed in the full panoply of manhood. That is a joy which he can taste in excess of his English confrere, who has long enjoyed the sweets of liberty. Nevertheless, English Jews owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bowring for his rendering of the ' Hebrew Melodies' of Heine; and English literature is the richer by a translation of one whose original metres gleam and flash like a Toledo blade. All the varied glow and glitter, all the rollicksomeness and the melancholy, the spontaneity or the deeper notes, all the fun and all the fury of those inimitable Hebrew poems all these excellences and not a few of the blemishes Bowring has caught with rare finesse and accuracy. The twin character- istics of Heine's genius, which are in fact the characteristics of the Jewish mind, native or cultured, and which have won for him the name of the modern Aristophanes, are his irrepressible spirit of diablerie and his keen unrivalled sense of that Weltschmerz, of which Jewry has borne its full share the outcome of which is the Jew's rich chine (fun) and richer rachmonous (womanly tenderness). These characteristics find ample scope for illus- tration in the ' Hebrew Melodies,' even as they reached the highest state of frui- tion in Heine's mind. It is to be re- gretted that Bowring did not assist the reader by a few foot-notes explanatory of the Hebrew idioms introduced by the poet with force and grace. For example, Heine, terribly " kicked " by the "feet" of the Egyptians- poetical justice was possibly being done after thousands of years to a scandalous descendant of a scandalous race saves the situation " by his own hands " alone, pairing off yadayim (hands) with mizrayim (Egyptians). Perhaps the reader of the * Princess Sabbath ' remem- bers the uncouth line " Lecho Doudi, Likras Kallo," which is the refrain of a love song com- posed by Solomon Halevi, and not by Jehuda, as Heine avers on p. 468. Apart from the indisputable fact that the author's name is acrostically inwoven in his verses, always the birth-mark of the minor poet, the work itself discloses its origin by its scholarly coldness and theological bias. It emanates from the school of our northern pietanim (poets), of whom the choicest Hower was Kaiir. Gabirol and Jehuda Halevi belong to a nest of singing birds whose tunefulness, warmth, and passions are the offspring of