Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/19

 Midrasch. And yet, all that is Jewish, throughout the work, is merely foreground, just as the Hebrew cadence of its diction is only foreground, only one style element among others, only one stratum of its language which strangely fuses the archaic and the modern, the epical and analytical. In the last book is a poem, the song of annunciation which the musical child sings lor the aged Jaacob, and which is an odd composition of psalter recollections and little verses of the German romantic type. That is an example for the character of the whole work, which seeks to blend a great many things; and, because it conceives and imagines everything human as a unity, it borrows its motives, memories, allusions, as well as linguistic sounds from many spheres. Just as all the Jewish legends are based on other, timeless mythologies, and made transparent by them, thus Joseph, its hero, is also a transparent figure, changing with the illumination in vexatory fashion: he is, with a great deal of consciousness, an Adonis—and Tammuz figure; but then he perceptibly slides into a Hermes part, the part of the mundane and skillful businessman and the intelligent profit producer among the gods, and in his great conversation with Pharao the mythologies of all the world, the Hebraic, Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek are mingled so thoroughly that one will hardly be aware of holding a biblical Jewish story book in one's hands.

There is a symptom for the innate character of a work, for the category toward which it strives, the opinion it secretly has of itself: that is the reading matter which the author prefers and which he considers helpful while working on it. I am not thinking, in this connection, about factual sources and material research, but about great works of literature Which in a broad sense seem related to his own effort, models [15]