Introductory Letter
From General Lewis Wallace
(Author of “Ben Hur”)
Crawfordsville, Ind., September 1, 1900.
Gentlemen: I have learned that you have in mind the issuance of a new edition of Croly’s story of “The Wandering Jew.” Perhaps you will lend a willing ear to a suggestion or two, so much is the book in my love.
In my judgment, the six greatest English novels are “Ivanhoe,” “The Last of the Barons,” “The Tale of Two Cities,” “Jane Eyre,” “Hypatia,” and this romance of Croly’s. If Shakespeare had never been born; if Milton, Byron, and Tennyson were singers to be, and Bacon, Darwin, and Ruskin unknown; if there had been no British dramatists, no British historians, no works in British libraries significant of British science and philosophy, no alcoves glutted with bookish remains of British moralists and preachers, still the six works named would of themselves suffice to constitute a British literature.
This is bold, I know: bold in assertion, and even bolder in the lift of Croly’s story from the ground to a place in the upper sky. Can I justify the classification? Certainly, if only your patience and my time permitted.
Here, to begin, is a broad adverse generality,—the very worst of possible arguments against the book is, that of the five great classics with which I have thrust it into association, it is the least known to-day by the general public. Yet the admission is not in the least decisive of merits; in inquisitorial phrase it serves merely to put objections to question.
It is a religious novel, says one, sneering. That used to be urged against the “Pilgrim’s Progress”; yet the Pilgrim goes marching on, and I fancy his progress will stop only when the world stops. And how is it that of late years, at least, several novels religious in tone and spirit have been more than well received? Indeed, is it not a fact that some of them have attained extraordinary popularity, thus gainsaying the narrow Puritanism which less than a century ago put the novel under ban, regardless of kind and excellence?
Another objection. The style is somewhat too exalted; and then the critic makes haste to stretch the alleged defect to the author’s want of art. Now, I would not like to be dogmatic or unkind, but such points certainly disclose a lamentable comprehension. Why, coiled up in that objection lie the very excellencies of the book. How, pray, could exaltation be avoided? Who does not know that in description the sublime always imposes its own laws? Imagine, if you can, the commonplace used by a narrator struggling to convey an idea of the tremendous in a hurricane at sea.
And as to a want of art, I would like to say mildly that the absence of art in the book is its main charm. Any, the slightest show of premeditation or design would have been gross treason to nature. Does a woman, struck to the heart, utter her grief by measure as a singer sings or a poet writes? And how is it with a man in rage or pain? Yet, verily, there was never a woman or a man in speech so impelled by a sting of soul as Salathiel.
Passing, now, the matter of criticism and mere negative dealing, I choose to be affirmative. Salathiel, the subject of the book, was a Jew, and in rank a Prince of the Tribe of Naphtali. In the persecution of Christ, his arrest, his trial, his scourging, Salathiel was the leading insatiate; and such, doubtless, he would have continued down to the last minute of the third hour of the Crucifixion but that the victim stopped him. At what stage of the awful crime the stoppage took place, the author leaves to inference; but how the incident befell and its almost inconceivable effect upon Salathiel, no man should again try to describe. This is from Croly, his words:
“But in the moment of exultation I was stricken. He who had refused an hour of life to the victim was, in terrible retribution, condemned to know the misery of life interminable. I heard through all the voices of Jerusalem—I should have heard through all the thunders of heaven—the calm, low voice, ‘Tarry thou till I come!’”
Such the retribution; now the effect.
“I felt my fate at once! I sprang away through the shouting hosts as if the avenging angel waved his sword above my head. Wild songs, furious execrations, the uproar of myriads stirred to the heights of passion, filled the air; still, through all, I heard the pursuing sentence, ‘Tarry thou till I come,’ and felt it to be the sentence of incurable agony! I was never to know the shelter of the grave!”
And then follow five paragraphs, each beginning with the same words uttered, as I imagine, in the tone of a shriek of anguish, “Immortality on earth!” And of those paragraphs, regarded as a dissection of the moral part of a man by virtue of which he is susceptible of infinite happiness or infinite misery, I say that for completeness and eloquence they are without parallel in the language. Nor is that all. In those paragraphs, one reading will find the definition of a punishment which in subtlety, in torture, and in duration is as far out of range of human origin as in execution it is out of range of human power. Yet more. Instantly with the comprehension of the punishment defined, the immeasurable difference between the agonies of death on a cross, though of days in duration, and the agonies of immortal life under curse on earth, becomes discernible. In that difference there is a divine thought in anger, an avenging impulse. The superiority in misery of the punishment of Salathiel, its term of sentence, its depth of suffering, its superhuman passion of vengeance, seem impossible to the all-patient Christ; and while we are considering its possibility, the book carries us to the question, Is there a wandering Jew?
I think so. Let smile now who will; yet, as I see, a whole race is the multiple of the man, just as the man is the incarnation of the race. Israel, the plural, merges in Salathiel, the singular, insomuch that to think of the one is to think of the other. In this instance, also, the similitudes become creative, and life, nature, history, and doom, sinking the race, make room for the wandering Jew.
Not only do I think there is a wandering Jew, but I know him intimately. To Croly he was a young man, a warrior; to me, he came an old man, a philosopher. Croly beheld him irate, passionate, vengeful. I saw him wiser by many hundreds of years, and repentant, and trying vainly to bring about a brotherhood of man by preaching the unity of God. With Croly, he was the Prince of Naphtali; with me, he was the Prince of India.
Returning now—with such a subject, dealt with so magnificently, I can not see how the great reading public in America can be indifferent to a new edition of Croly’s romance. Only take us into your faith, gentlemen, and see to it that the issue be worthy the theme. Be even luxurious with it; give it fine paper, wide margins, large type, and choice binding; and, if Gustave Doré were living, I would further beg you to have the edition illustrated by him.
Very respectfully,
To Funk & Wagnalls Company.