Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
verity in Roman genealogy ended when the barbarians from the West took
Rome, and camped six months upon her desolated site. Did the government
keep family histories? If so, what became of them in those dreadful
days? No, no; there is verity in our Books of Generations; and,
following them back to the Captivity, back to the foundation of the
first Temple, back to the march from Egypt, we have absolute assurance
that you are lineally sprung from Hur, the associate of Joshua. In the
matter of descent sanctified by time, is not the honor perfect? Do you
care to pursue further? if so, take the Torah, and search the Book of
Numbers, and of the seventy-two generations after Adam, you can find
the very progenitor of your house.”
There was silence for a time in the chamber on the roof.
“I thank you, O my mother,” Judah next said, clasping both her hands in
his; “I thank you with all my heart. I was right in not having the good
rector called in; he could not have satisfied me more than you have.
Yet to make a family truly noble, is time alone sufficient?”
“Ah, you forget, you forget; our claim rests not merely upon time; the
Lord’s preference is our especial glory.”
“You are speaking of the race, and I, mother, of the family—our family.
In the years since Father Abraham, what have they achieved? What have
they done? What great things to lift them above the level of their
fellows?”
She hesitated, thinking she might all this time have mistaken his
object. The information he sought might have been for more than
satisfaction of wounded vanity. Youth is but the painted shell within
which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of
man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.
She trembled under a perception that this might be the supreme moment
come to him; that as children at birth reach out their untried hands
grasping for shadows, and crying the while, so his spirit might, in
temporary blindness, be struggling to take hold of its impalpable
future. They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be?
have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the
after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is
modelling.
“I have a feeling, O my Judah,” she said, patting his cheek with the
hand he had been caressing—“I have the feeling that all I have said has
been in strife with an antagonist more real than imaginary. If Messala
is the enemy, do not leave me to fight him in the dark. Tell me all he
said.”
CHAPTER V
The young Israelite proceeded then, and rehearsed his conversation with
Messala, dwelling with particularity upon the latter’s speeches in
contempt of the Jews, their customs, and much pent round of life.
Afraid to speak the while, the mother listened, discerning the matter
plainly. Judah had gone to the palace on the Market-place, allured by
love of a playmate whom he thought to find exactly as he had been at
the parting years before; a man met him, and, in place of laughter and
references to the sports of the past, the man had been full of the
future, and talked of glory to be won, and of riches and power.
Unconscious of the effect, the visitor had come away hurt in pride, yet
touched with a natural ambition; but she, the jealous mother, saw it,
and, not knowing the turn the aspiration might take, became at once
Jewish in her fear. What if it lured him away from the patriarchal
faith? In her view, that consequence was more dreadful than any or all
others. She could discover but one way to avert it, and she set about
the task, her native power reinforced by love to such degree that her
speech took a masculine strength and at times a poet’s fervor.
“There never has been a people,” she began, “who did not think
themselves at least equal to any other; never a great nation, my son,
that did not believe itself the very superior. When the Roman looks
down upon Israel and laughs, he merely repeats the folly of the
Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Macedonian; and as the laugh is against
God, the result will be the same.”
Her voice became firmer.
“There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations;
hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A
people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the
hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of
their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.
If I were called upon to symbolize God and man in the simplest form, I
would draw a straight line and a circle, and of the line I would say,
‘This is God, for he alone moves forever straightforward,’ and of the
circle, ‘This is man—such is his progress.’ I do not mean that there is
no difference between the careers of nations; no two are alike. The
difference, however, is not, as some say, in the extent of the circle
they describe or the space of earth they cover, but in the sphere of
their movement, the highest being nearest God.
“To stop here, my son, would be to leave the subject where we began.
Let us go on. There are signs by which to measure the height of the
circle each nation runs while in its course. By them let us compare the
Hebrew and the Roman.
“The simplest of all the signs is the daily life of the people. Of this
I will only say, Israel has at times forgotten God, while the Roman
never knew him; consequently comparison is not possible.
“Your friend—or your former friend—charged, if I understood you
rightly, that we have had no poets, artists, or warriors; by which he
meant, I suppose, to deny that we have had great men, the next most
certain of the signs. A just consideration of this charge requires a
definition at the commencement. A great man, O my boy, is one whose
life proves him to have been recognized, if not called, by God. A
Persian was used to punish our recreant fathers, and he carried them
into captivity; another Persian was selected to restore their children
to the Holy Land; greater than either of them, however, was the
Macedonian through whom the desolation of Judea and the Temple was
avenged. The special distinction of the men was that they were chosen
by the Lord, each for a divine purpose; and that they were Gentiles
does not lessen their glory. Do not lose sight of this definition while
I proceed.
“There is an idea that war is the most noble occupation of men, and
that the most exalted greatness is the growth of battle-fields. Because
the world has adopted the idea, be not you deceived. That we must
worship something is a law which will continue as long as there is
anything we cannot understand. The prayer of the barbarian is a wail of
fear addressed to Strength, the only divine quality he can clearly
conceive; hence his faith in heroes. What is Jove but a Roman hero? The
Greeks have their great glory because they were the first to set Mind
above Strength. In Athens the orator and philosopher were more revered
than the warrior. The charioteer and the swiftest runner are still
idols of the arena; yet the immortelles are reserved for the sweetest
singer. The birthplace of one poet was contested by seven cities. But
was the Hellene the first to deny the old barbaric faith? No. My son,
that glory is ours; against brutalism our fathers erected God; in our
worship, the wail of fear gave place to the Hosanna and the Psalm. So
the Hebrew and the Greek would have carried all humanity forward and
upward. But, alas! the government of the world presumes war as an
eternal condition; wherefore, over Mind and above God, the Roman has
enthroned his Cæsar, the absorbent of all attainable power, the
prohibition of any other greatness.
“The sway of the Greek was a flowering time for genius. In return for
the liberty it then enjoyed, what a company of thinkers the Mind led
forth? There was a glory for every excellence, and a perfection so
absolute that in everything but war even the Roman has stooped to
imitation. A Greek is now the model of the orators in the Forum;
listen, and in every Roman song you will hear the rhythm of the Greek;
if a Roman opens his mouth speaking wisely of moralities, or
abstractions, or of the mysteries of nature, he is either a plagiarist
or the disciple of some school which had a Greek for its founder. In
nothing but war, I say again, has Rome a claim to originality. Her
games and spectacles are Greek inventions, dashed with blood to gratify
the ferocity of her rabble; her religion, if such it may be called, is
made up of contributions from the faiths of all other peoples; her most
venerated gods are from Olympus—even her Mars, and, for that matter,
the Jove she much magnifies. So it happens, O my son, that of the whole
world our Israel alone can dispute the superiority of the Greek, and
with him contest the palm of original genius.
“To the excellences of other peoples the egotism of a Roman is a
blindfold, impenetrable as his breastplate. Oh, the ruthless robbers!
Under their trampling the earth trembles like a floor beaten with
flails. Along with the rest we are fallen—alas that I should say it to
you, my son! They have our highest places, and the holiest, and the end
no man can tell; but this I know—they may reduce Judea as an almond
broken with hammers, and devour Jerusalem, which is the oil and
sweetness thereof; yet the glory of the men of Israel will remain a
light in the heavens overhead out of reach: for their history is the
history of God, who wrote with their hands, spake with their tongues,
and was himself in all the good they did, even the least; who dwelt
with them, a Lawgiver on Sinai, a Guide in the wilderness, in war a
Captain, in government a King; who once and again pushed back the
curtains of the pavilion which is his resting-place, intolerably
bright, and, as a man speaking to men, showed them the right, and the
way to happiness, and how they should live, and made them promises
binding the strength of his Almightiness with covenants sworn to
everlastingly. O my son, could it be that they with whom Jehovah thus
dwelt, an awful familiar, derived nothing from him?—that in their lives
and deeds the common human qualities should not in some degree have
been mixed and colored with the divine? that their genius should not
have in it, even after the lapse of ages, some little of heaven?”
For a time the rustling of the fan was all the sound heard in the
chamber.
“In the sense which limits art to sculpture and painting, it is true,”
she next said, “Israel has had no artists.”
The admission was made regretfully, for it must be remembered she was a
Sadducee, whose faith, unlike that of the Pharisees, permitted a love
of the beautiful in every form, and without reference to its origin.
“Still he who would do justice,” she proceeded, “will not forget that
the cunning of our hands was bound by the prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not
make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything;’ which
the Sopherim wickedly extended beyond its purpose and time. Nor should
it be forgotten that long before Dædalus appeared in Attica and with
his wooden statues so transformed sculpture as to make possible the
schools of Corinth and Ægina, and their ultimate triumphs the Poecile
and Capitolium—long before the age of Dædalus, I say, two Israelites,
Bezaleel and Aholiab, the master-builders of the first tabernacle, said
to have been skilled ‘in all manner of workmanship,’ wrought the
cherubim of the mercy-seat above the ark. Of gold beaten, not chiseled,
were they; and they were statues in form both human and divine. ‘And
they shall stretch forth their wings on high, .... and their faces
shall look one to another.’ Who will say they were not beautiful? or
that they were not the first statues?”