Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/303

Rh the Wandering Jew. The interest does not attach to the latter as such. The plot does not gather around him as such. He is almost uninfluenced, his career is almost unaffected, by the dread sentence, " Tarry thou till I come!" In fact, we should peruse the tale with greater interest were Salathiel not the Wandering Jew—since the supernatural destiny affixed to that traditional being goes far to remove him from the ordinary pale of human sympathies, and transplants him into the shadowy region of creatures unreal and allegorical. Dr. Croly, indeed, claims for him a share of the common repugnances, hopes, and fears of human nature—and makes him shun pain and disease as instinctively and intensely as if he held his life on the frailest tenure. But there is something incongruous and unsatisfactory in all this. Allan Cunningham observes, that we feel with Salathiel for eighty years and odd; and at the close of the usual term of human life, shut our hearts, and commence wondering. The observation almost implies, however, that "honest Allan" either had never read, or else had forgotten all about Salathiel; for Croly confines his three volumes to fewer than "eighty years and odd," concluding them with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus.

If ever the veritable Wandering Jew turns up, and gives the world his autobiography, or some one graphic section thereof, it will not be much in the vein of "Salathiel." Dr. Croly is too rhetorical by half. His excited orientals in their wildest vagaries are cool enough to sacrifice passion for a period, and not unfrequently prefer pomp to pathos. They have one and all been taught to declaim, and to speak, their speeches trippingly on the tongue. If they have something akin to Isaiah and Ezekiel, to Paul and John, they also betray their obligations to Edmund Burke and modern oratory. Another valid objection to "Salathiel," is want of unity. It is almost a thing of shreds and patches—a portfolio of ill-connected sketches. It is a rolling picture of eastern scenery, a cyclorama of moving accidents by flood and field. Many of the details are given with the hand of a master. The reader of "Salathiel" cannot but be struck by descriptions like that of the demoniac by the Dead Sea, the burning of Rome under Nero, the fight of Constantius with the lion, the surprise of the citadel of Massada, the orgies in the pirates' cave, and, above all, the solitary passage of Salathiel in the burning galley, when, plunging and tossing like a living creature in its last agony, the trireme he had boarded burst away from her anchors,—the wind was off the shore—a gust, strong as the blow of a battering ram, struck her,—and, on the back of a huge refluent wave, she shot out to sea, a flying pyramid of fire. The book contains, also, several portraits touched off with considerable talent:—Sabat the Ismaelite, first seen as the crazy beggar, the son of El Hakim, and afterwards as that terrible herald of evil, so vigorously described by Josephus, who, in Jerusalem's hour and power of darkness, wandered up and down her streets, crying "Woe! woe! woe!"—Jubal, the impetuous and ill-fated Jewish warrior—Gessius Florus, the infamous Roman procurator, "a little bloated figure, with a countenance that to the casual observer was the model of gross good-nature, a twinkling eye, and a lip on the perpetual laugh"—the Emperor Nero, "a pale, under-sized, light-haired young man, sitting before a table with a lyre on it, a few copies of verses and drawings, and a parrot's cage, to whose inmate he was teaching Greeks with great assiduity"—Titus, princely,