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THE POET OF GALILEE

THE
POET OF GALILEE

BY
WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD, Ph.D.
ASSISTANT PBOFESSOB OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
WISCONSIN. AUTHOR OF " SONNETS AND POEMS,"
¦i "THE FRAGMENTS OF EMPEDOCLES." ETC

'Who do men say that I am?,"

NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH 1909

Copyright, 1909, by
B. W. HUEBSCH

PRINTED IN V. 8. A.

PATRI
NAZARENI DISCIPULO
HUNC LIBELLUM DONAT
FILIUS

FOREWORD
The following pages, written during
vacation weather three summers ago in
a sequestered village of New England,
apart from libraries and scholars, under
shade trees overlooking meadow and hill
side, and thereafter reconsidered and re
vised by the inland lakes of this beautiful
Academic City, are sincerely and humbly
offered to any reader who, realizing that
the subject is one that needs detachment
of mind and the argument one that must
be briefly suggestive rather than logically
complete, has his own quiet hours and a
willingness to do himself a share of the
thinking. William Elleey Leonard.
Madison, Wisconsin, April 7, 1909.

THE POET OF GALILEE
I.
Gods of the south and the north,
Gods of the east and the west,
Ye that arise and come forth
On the good quest —
Out of a wonderful place,
Out of the pregnant gloom,
Out of the soul of the race,
Out of humanity's womb,
Fed on humanity's breast,
On the stars and the sea,
Treading unsoiled the Augean
World and its primitive slime that so
often befouls such as we,
Cleansers with lyric and paean:
Praise be to all! but to thee,
Praise above praise, Galilean ! . . .
Even from me. II.
Gods of the coasts and the isles,
Gods of the hill and the plain,

THE POET OF GALILEE
Who with your beautiful smiles
Come not in vain —
Out of a wonderful place,
Out of the smoke and the fire,
Out of the soul of the race,
Out of its upward desire,
Nurtured with pleasure and pain,
With the rock and the tree,
Loosening us from the Circean
Drink and the cloven-hoofed beast that
too often degrades such as we,
Restorers through song empyrean:
Praise be to all! — but to thee,
Praise above praise, Galilean! . . ¦
Even from me.

III.
Gods, O our cleansers, restorers,
Coming as lovers to greet,
Of the wine for our lips the outpourers,
Of the waters for hands and for feet!
When our knees to the sly Cytherean
Were bowed in libidinous rite,
When our eyes with the tears Niobean
Were wet on a desolate night,
When we craved the ignoble Lethean
Banks for our sin or our grief,

THE POET OF GALILEE
Then ye came ! — and O thou, Galilean,
Camest the swiftest and chief.
And ye kindled the radiant fountains
Of flame, like a swift borealis,
In the Mediterranean mountains,
On the Mexican's grim teocallis;
And they who were near, by your high light
Saw upon earth a new stream,
Where golden cities your sky light
Returned, beam for beam
(Even I, who was far, in your twilight
Dreamed a new dream).
And ever the vision of fire
Gendered new fire in men
(As the sudden song of a lyre
Wakes us to singing again) —
O ye that reveal and inspire:
Praise and amen! —
But io ! and praise hymenean
And palms, dewy-fresh and unfurled,
At sunrise to thee, Galilean,
Light of the world! IV.
Gods, because more than all others,
Gods, because men at man's worth,
Ye, both our masters and brothers,
Poets of earth!

THE POET OF GALILEE
Out of a wonderful place,
Out of the ancient Design,
Out of the soul of the race,
Out of the nameless Divine,
Fed on the past and its dearth,
Fed on the fulness to be,
Whether from Ind, or Aegean,
Jordan, or Tiber, or waters that flow
through our land to the sea,
Saviors from aeon to aeon:
Praise be to all! — but to thee,
Praise above praise, Galilean! . . .
Even from me.

CONTENTS PAGE
Introduction  3
The Observer  19
The Lover  33
The Seer  39
The Inspired  , .... 67
The Man of Sorrows ....... 75
The Scourger . .  81
The Humorist  87
The Alert  .«.,.. 103
The Story-teller  115
jL HE uAYER • • ,«. *j »j p m a ¦ • 1 O i )
A Hero of Folk-lore m „ . 151

THE POET OF GALILEE

THE POET OF GALILEE
INTRODUCTION

I L~% IK THO do men say that I am?"
\ \ once asked the Man of Naza
reth; and the question has per
haps never interested the race more than
it does today.
The offspring of humble parents
among the Hebrews of ancient Galilee,
he grew up in an age of religious formal
ism and political oppression, until, fired
by the words of prophet and psalmist,
by the sturdy example of an earnest and
gloomy fellow-countryman, by his own
profound insight into the universal soul
of Man, the brother, and God, the father,
he arose to tell of the Kingdom of
[3]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Heaven, first among his peasant neigh
bors on the mountains and by the waters
of the north, afterwards among the priests
in the very temple at Jerusalem itself, to
suffer at last the penalty of his inde
pendent thought, reviled as a seditious
upstart by those who guarded his coun
try's altar, crucified by foreign soldiers,
and deserted by the members of the little
cult that had followed and loved him.
Yet to call him the martyred teacher
and reformer, though an important ser
vice of historical criticism, is but to define
his relation to society, not his essential
individuality. And to bring him before
us as he moved about on earth — his cheek
tanned by the mountain air and sun; his
feet dusty with the highways of Samaria;
his lips passing the time of day with
neighbors in Capernaum or acquaintances
about Jerusalem; his soul sometimes cast
down by doubt or disappointment; his
feelings annoyed by importunities of dis
ciples or impertinence of Scribe and
[4]

INTRODUCTION
Pharisee — though an important service of
the historic imagination, is to relate him,
after all, only to the flesh and blood, the
heart and soul of humanity at large: his
essential individuality remains as obscure
as ever.
But we have, of course, the means for a
more intimate acquaintance with the indi
vidual mind of Jesus. There was a
speaking Voice on the Galilean shores in
the days of old: that we all know.
Friendly ears heard, and friendly tongues
repeated its words; and at last friendly
hands wrote some of them down, preserv
ing them, just as other disciples preserved
the sentences of Hillel and the Rabbis
which we read in the Talmud. Those
words are few, a mere handful of frag
ments; and the scholar may ransack the
sandpits of Aegypt long years in a vain
quest for scroll or palimpsest containing
the least authentic addition. Yet they are
alive with divine breath, melodious wit
ness of one man's singular genius for high
[5]

THE POET OF GALILEE
things. From them we may not be able
to restore the outline of a system of
thought, as we have restored, from the
fragments cited by the doxographers,
something of the philosophic systems of
Heraclitus and Empedocles; from them
still less can we restore any such formal
wholes of consecutive discourse as have
come down to us from Ezekiel and the
Second Isaiah; from them least of all can
we restore, as from the words of Horace
or Cicero, a biography of external facts;
but they do furnish us the data wherewith
to restore a life.
For that restoration, however, neither
theological nor ethical exegesis, nor indeed
any study devoted exclusively to the ideas
in his utterances is sufficient. Critics have
not generally been so one-sided in the
study of other masters of thought and ex
pression. The critic of Socrates, though
he may expound the sage's practical max
ims and spiritual principles, aims above
all at an interpretation of a great soul,
[6]

INTRODUCTION
its bias and gifts, as deducible from its
words. Not any one who would compre
hend Dante stops with the intellectual
analysis of the scholastic philosophy, ethi
cal precepts, or political allegory in his
book; but the words of Dante lead the
student home to the unique temper and
talents of a great soul. The student of
Jesus should have no less an incentive to
examine bias and gifts, temper and tal
ents, implicit in the sayings and stories of
a soul more momentous than Socrates or
than Dante.
Then may come a new answer, or new
answers, to the ancient query "Who do
men say that I am?" Be it remembered
that every mind has a right to its own an
swer, and mine replies with a fresh joy
that is not shamed by the presence of a
learned and venerable host of schoolmen
and devotees: "More than all else, to
one among men, thou seemest the poet,
and I shall call thee the Poet of the
Galilean Lake." In the sunlight of that
[7]

THE POET OF GALILEE
conception my thoughts of Jesus of Naz
areth flower best. Perhaps that concep
tion may be not without meaning for
others. II
But enthusiasm cannot dispense with
the results of critical scholarship. Jesus
is known to us only through four brief
biographies, uncertain in provenience and
date. Not everything in the records can
be accepted without question. Even if
the miraculous elements be eliminated,
there still remain important difficulties.
The case is not parallel to that of the docu
ment with which Jesus' biographies are
oftenest compared. The Memorabilia of
Socrates purport to have been written by
a friend and pupil, otherwise famous as
author, soldier, and man of affairs, who
lived in that civic center of intellectual
life, the age-long synonym for enlighten
ment and culture. The work contains no
contradictions that impugn its unity of
[8]

INTRODUCTION
authorship, no tendencies that betray any
purpose save to tell honestly the thought,
and to defend zealously the memory and
fame of a beloved teacher and a good
man.1 But the Gospels were not written in
the clear light of an intellectual day whose
sun yet shines across centuries and conti
nents and seas ; and the spirit of truth can
not but point out how, quite apart from
the legendary growths of fifty or seventy
years, the "Memorabilia" of Jesus are
sometimes open to query in what they re
port both of act and of speech. We must
grant that no one event can have had
birth in one place at one time in more than
one form. Moreover, it is obvious that
one or another of Jesus' biographers had
a particular purpose in view, honorable
enough according to his lights, but detri
mental to his historic sense. Matthew, in-

i The author is aware that some recent German crit
icism denies the ingenuousness of Xenophon,
[9]

A\

THE POET OF GALILEE
deed, in his eagerness to show the Galilean
as the Messiah promised by the Old Tes
tament prophets, makes Jesus perform
the unlikely feat of riding into Jerusa
lem on an ass and the colt of an ass, thus
missing entirely the parallelism in the an
cient poetry. We know too that the early
Christian communities had their several
ideas influencing this way or that the tra
ditions which were growing up about the
Master. Again scholars have traced in the
Gospel narratives the influence of books
concerning the signs of the times and the
import of Jesus. There is an apocalypse
embedded in the Synoptics, manifestly oc
casioned by the fall of Jerusalem; and
Jesus is made to quote (in Luke XI, 49)
one book by name, the "Wisdom of God,"
written about the time of Domitian (81-
96 A. D.), words from which are appar
ently put into his mouth also in Matthew
XXIII, 37. And John, with its meta
physics derived from Philo and the gnos
tics, yields us (however beautiful it be
[10]

INTRODUCTION
as a composition and interesting as early
Christian thought) no records of the
earth-born son of Joseph and Mary, ex
cept perhaps a few pregnant sayings re
flecting the mysticism of Jesus, and the
passage in chapter VIII, usually brack
eted as spurious, but possibly from the
lost Gospel According to the Hebrews, of
which we have a few quotations in Jerome.
Finally, Jesus spoke Aramaic, and in
some brief but crucial phrases the Greek
may misrepresent him, a possibility bril
liantly illustrated by Schmidt's chapter on
"The Son of Man," in The Prophet of
Nazareth. Yet, although the critical conscience
must in these pages pass over those utter
ances certainly never delivered by the his
toric Jesus, and although it will do best
to pass over those on which there is any
doubt, the vital things are still ours: the
deepest apothegms, the shrewdest replies,
the loveliest of the parables. It is a fact
of the greatest significance that the in-
[11]

THE POET OF GALILEE
sight of a sympathetic genius like Emer
son or Tolstoi, and the results of philolog
ical investigation of scientists like Well-
hausen and Schmidt, are in practical
agreement: they both discard the same
legends and the same imputed ideas and
expressions; and they both assure us of
the same indisputable soul. These pages
are concerned only with what after long
study and reflection I have come to be
lieve to be the authentic pronouncements
of this soul. Ill
And when it is said that this soul found
its expression in poetry, we should need
no reminder that poetry consists not in
strophe, or metre, or rhyme, wonderful
devices and adornments of the imagina
tion though they may be. Without an
attempt formally to define meanings or
logically to limit the scope of the discus
sion in subsequent chapters, we may well
recall that poetry, at least as soon as it
[12]

INTRODUCTION
becomes something more than mere tu
mult in the blood, implies insight into the
realities of the spirit, the sympathetic vis
ion which seems at times almost to pene
trate the mysteries of hfe and of nature
— passions and desires of men and women,
grass and flowers beneath our too often
heedless feet, moon and stars over our un-
uplifted heads. It implies again that ex
altation which, according to an inviolable
law, forever accompanies the vision; and
finally it implies the nobler speech, which
in the elect of Apollo transmits the vision
and the exaltation to all who having eyes
can see, and having ears can hear and un
derstand. Poetry is vision, exaltation,
speech; and with Jesus it was vision, ex
altation, speech, touching the City of God.
IV
This poetry of Jesus is conventionally
bound up in a few pages near the close of
a vast book. The poetry of the Old Tes
tament is universally recognized. Shel-
[13]

THE POET OF GALILEE
ley and his gifted companion would read
the Prophets together in their Italian
nights as they read iEschylus and Shake
speare ; the sonorous passages in the royal
succession of English divines were born of
the Old Testament, and the Miltonic is
the Hebraic of the old dispensation. In
the Jewish Scriptures we find the lyric of
personal joy or grief, gnomic wisdom of
intimate experience, a lyrical drama, a
collection of love songs, plangent elegies
on cities and human hfe, and a sublime
and gorgeous oratory never equaled in the
senates of the world. The work of di
vers men in divers ages, the Old Testa
ment celebrates the moral law in individ
uals and in nations ; the mystery of afflic
tion, the beauty of holiness, the destruc
tion of the great and the proud, the
devotion of lovers, the loyalty of friends.
It gives broad surveys of the activities of
field and city, and vivid descriptions of the
phenomena of nature — the fire, the thun
der, the whirlwind, the sandstorm, the
[14]

INTRODUCTION
locust pest, the grass, the green pasture
and the rivers of waters. It has infinite
grandeur, infinite passion, infinite tender
ness, whilst its imagery ranges from the
vaguest atmospheric something, terrible
and unnamed, to the homely, concrete
metaphors of the potter and his wheel, the
sour grapes and the children's teeth set
on edge.
If one approaches our topic from a
reading of the Old Testament, let him bear
in mind that we have there many works
of a great literature, as here against a few
words of a great man, and that its oriental
blaze and prodigality of power, though
more striking, is not therefore more beau
tiful than the reserve and simplicity of
Jesus. And let us never forget that the con
summate charm of the Gospels, which
sooner or later wins us all, comes primar
ily1 from the words of Jesus himself, not

i Primarily, not exclusively: see last chapter, "A Hero
of Folk-lore."
[15]

THE POET OF GALILEE
from the compilers who quote them.
"Matthew," "Mark," and "Luke," with
chapter and verse, are ingrained habits of
speech; but these names must not stand
between us and reality, between our gaze
and the Poet himself.

[16]

THE OBSERVER

THE OBSERVER
WE are prone to take the familiar
as a matter of course. The uni
versal mechanical devices of the
race, — the wheel, the lever, the screw, its
universal cultural devices, — the alphabet,
numerical notation, the calendar — are so
famihar that they seem practically one
with organic nature about us, with the ac
tivities of plant, stream, and moon. A
proverb long familiar seems itself like a
primitive unit of our language; and the
sayings of Jesus, even when their mean
ings are but half divined, are part of our
ethical and religious consciousness, as if
one with the law that leads us to worship
and the law that leads us to desire the
Good. When thought has come thus to
deal with its objects, it gives best proof
[19]

THE POET OF GALILEE
of their fitness to human needs: but it
also makes difficult an appreciation of
their real character. The wheel and the
alphabet are the products of age-long ex
periments by our fellow-men ; the proverbs
of the race and the sayings of Jesus came
out of concrete experience not generic-
ally unlike our own.
Coming at the Master's words from this
starting point, what must strike us first is
their testimony to his wide observation.
Jesus saw the world about him with an
alertness and impressionability without
which all prayers to the muses are vain:
he had first the physical senses of the
poet. The light shone clear over the hills be
hind Nazareth ; northward it shone to the
snows of Hermon, westward to the silver
line that was the border of the midland
sea, southward across the plains and vil
lages of Gahlee on toward the heights of
Samaria, and eastward down to the broad
[20]

THE OBSERVER
blue breast of waters, the waters of Tiber
ias crowned with synagogues and cities.
Sharp and bold the cliffs and the trees
and houses and shadows stood out in the
Galilean air ; and man plied his task, and
sang his song in the open. A lovely
home it was for one with eyes to see.
And the same blue hght lay over the
Mount of Olives and the white towers of
the city to which the Galilean came at last,
and over all the hill country of Judea,
down to the Mediterranean on the one side,
and the Dead Sea and the wall of Moab
on the other; and it played among the
thick trees and shrubs of the Jordan,
among the tamarisks, acacias, silver pop
lars, terebinths, cedars, and arbutus, and
among the long grasses where caroled and
flew so many birds — sparrows, cliff -swal
lows, turtle-doves, and nightingales: a
catalogue of beautiful things of which
the very names are poetry. And over all,
north and south, in the wide homes of
[21]

THE POET OF GALILEE
night burned the clear stars, nowhere in
those days shut away from man by the
pestilential smoke.
What did the Galilean Poet see in the
holy land of his fathers? He saw the
mountain, the crag where bleats the lost
sheep; the lilies of the field; the peasant's
plot of waving grain, with sometimes the
tares scattered through it; the reeds in
the river shaken by the wind; the rock and
the sand by the dry stream on which men,
for good or ill, build their houses; the
sparrow that falls to the ground; the
moth, and the rust, and the gnat floating
in the wine ; the red evening sky that low
ers ; and the rain that falls on the just and
the unjust. He watched the ancient pro
cess : behold the fig tree and all the trees —
where they now shoot forth ; ye see it and
know of your own selves that the summer
is nigh . . . the seeds spring up and
grow, man knoweth not how . . . the
earth beareth fruit of herself, first the
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in
[22]

THE OBSERVER
the ear . . . and the cloud rising in
the west presages the shower, and the
south wind blowing the heat, and it com
eth to pass.
And toward nature, as toward all things
deep and fair, his spirit went out with an
affectionate tenderness, so simple and
genuine and waking a kindred emotion so
immediately in our own hearts that we
are scarcely aware of it as being a dis
tinctive element in Jesus' attitude to crea
tion, until we meet with some jarring
anecdote, like the cursing of the fig-tree,
the contradictory harshness of which
brings us to a sudden realization that his
song of nature has in other passages been
kindlier than we marked. Herein is the
disharmony and difficulty of the anecdote
of the fig-tree, the meaning or the au
thenticity of which has been so often de
bated: it violates Jesus' attitude to
creation. This fact alone would cast
doubt on its historicity, did it not also
plainly enough suggest the necromancy
[23]

THE POET OF GALILEE
common to that class of legends referred
to below as characteristic of the New Tes
tament Apocrypha, albeit its more spirit
ual connotations relate it to the Synoptic
class.1 Over the works of nature Jesus
pronounced his benedictions, not a curse.
He was never her enemy; he was always
her friend.
But he was a friend of nature, not like
some poet who loves her for a philosophy
which she whispers, nor like one who loves
her for a refuge, nor like one who loves
her for her picturesqueness and soft odors ;
nor could he have been touched with that
cosmic emotion which is the response of
the imagination to modern science ; nor yet
was he awed or exultant in her presence,
like Mohammed or many a prophet or
psalmist who saw in her the mighty ener
gies of the Creator. Doubtless he con
ceived nature as God's work, beautiful or
terrible; doubtless he felt her peace and

i See last chapter, "A Hero of Folk-lore."
[24]

THE OBSERVER
charm, which we quite unnecessarily as
sume to be the reaction of modern sensi
bility ; but his attitude when he spoke was
more akin to that affirmed of the sophisti
cated Greek poets after the ages of myth
had passed away, and nature appears, in
the record he has left us, as subordinated
to man, as the background or the illustra
tion of man's life and labors.
He knew the day's work. His stories
reflect the diversified activities and cus
toms of his people: tillage, vine-growing,
shepherding, fishing, baking, mending,
sweeping, affairs of money and civil law.
He saw on the caravan along the road that
passed through Nazareth the merchant
and his pearl of great price, and the rich
apparel to be worn by those who dwelt in
kings' houses; he saw the plowman that
did not look back but kept his eye on the
share and the turning glebe ahead, the
sower that went forth to sow, the peasant
that put forth the sickle because the har
vest was come, the shepherd entering the
[25]

THE POET OF GALILEE
fold, the swineherd with his charge tramp
ling and groveling in the mire, the fisher
men drying their nets in the boat, the vine
dresser who built his vineyard with press
and hedge and tower, and got him new
wine-skins for new wine, — though oddly
enough Jesus never refers to the carpen
ter's trade in his own household. He saw,
too, the woman who trimmed her lamp
and set it on the bushel, or put the leaven
in the three measures of meal, the man
who sewed a patch of dressed cloth on a
rent garment, the scribe and his roll with
the Hebrew jot and tittle in big black
letters, and the physician, and the taker of
toll at the gate.
He saw the joy-makers: the bride and
the bridegroom at festival or meal, the
children playing in the market-place, the
father that killed the fatted calf and got
out the ring and the robe, the householder
who gave the thirsty wayfarer a cup of
Nazareth's cold water.
The foolish, the sinful, and the weak
[26]

THE OBSERVER
he saw also: the virgin who forgot her
oil,1 the selfish rich man, the thief in the
night who crawled over the wall of the
pinfold or into the house of the strong
man, the harlots in alley or portico, cut
throats with their knives, and unjust stew
ards that tinkered with their masters' ac
counts, riotous young spendthrifts, and
the hypocrites who made long prayers and
got the chief seats in the synagogues and
white-washed the sepulchres in the month
Adar and garnished the tombs of the
prophets whom their fathers slew.
We need not Josephus to tell us that
Galilee was a busy world in those days,
fertile of soil, teeming with populous vil
lages on lake shore and mountain side,
intersected with highways along which
came ahke Hebrew pilgrim, Roman sol
dier, or Syrian caravaneer ; and here Jesus
accumulated an experience that never
failed him.

i Obviously these references to his inventions are not
cited as literal examples.
[27]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Doubtless all these things passed before
the eyes of his friends and countrymen;
doubtless we would have seen them too
had we been there. But we do not realize
how deeply what strikes the senses must be
absorbed ere it can become material of elo
quence or poetry, and how much energy
that absorption implies. Jesus could not
have put so much of the world into his
discourse had his mind not been plenished
with the world: his words have the abun
dance of life in a literal no less than in
a spiritual sense; and his gaze into the
unseen was no more alert than his gaze
at the seen.
So the author of the Odyssey, must have
watched — we know not when — among the
sea-faring folk of Asia Minor where the
ships were set to west and the daughters
of the isles washed their garments on the
beach; so Dante observed, going about
among the light-hearted or evil-eyed Flor
entines or in the gloom of wooded Fiesole ;
so Shakespeare won his precious material
[28]

THE OBSERVER
in the fields of Warwickshire or in the
London taverns; and so Goethe from the
lanes and meadows of Frankfort, from
the kellers of Leipzig, from the salons of
Weimar, from Rome and her ruin, created
that world —
"Die kleine, dann die grosse Welt" * —
we know as Faust.
Here Jesus is supreme among the re
ligious geniuses of the world. Not
Buddha with his subhme austerities; not
Zoroaster, who sang the Goddess of Wa
ters, having
"A golden crown with hundred silver stars,
And eight sharp rays ascending at the front
. . . clothed
With skins of beavers";
not Mohammed, with his praise of him
"who hath made the sun for shining and
the moon for light and ordained him man
sions that ye may learn the number of the

i "The little, then the larger world."
[29]

THE POET OF GALILEE
years and the reckoning of time," with
his rich imagery from earth —
"Prepared for living things,
Therein is fruit and the palm with sheaths
And grain with its husk and the fragrant herb" —
with his lyric sensuousness of color and
perfume and
"Gardens . . .
Dark green in hue
With gushing wells therein" . . .
and "The shy-eyed maidens neither man nor Jinn
Hath touched before,"
had Jesus' familiarity with the concrete
and visible universe, with all that stands
or passes before men's eyes. Nor will one
find it in the Rabbinical tales or discus
sions of the Talmud, nor in the New Tes
tament Epistles; nor in the moralists
either : not in Socrates, with all his homely
illustrations, not in Plato, dramatic artist
and psychologist though he was, nor in
Epictetus, nor in Aurelius. [30]

THE LOVER

THE LOVER
BUT the power of the poets to see
and remember depends profoundly
upon the degree of their sympa
thy. They enter into the House of Life
as the friend of Life, even though in the
end often cruelly deceived and repulsed.
Only thus can the words they would speak
have universality and pith; only thus can
they become mediators, interpreters, an
swerers. It is this sympathy which dif
ferentiates them from so many men who,
having the zeal to delight, counsel, and
uplift the race, fail so sadly in the end.
Many a sage, reformer, pulpiteer, orator,
truly feels for his fellow-men; only one
with the touch of the poet feels for and
with them, and only the supreme poet
thus feels supremely. But his is not a
[33]

THE POET OF GALILEE
petty philanthropy; his is not so much a
conscious plan as a bias and motion of the
soul. This bias and motion existed in the soul
of the Master. It was deeper than his
philosophy and deeper than his purpose to
do good and establish good ; it was the soil
out of which these grew to be so beautiful
and so strong. The son of Mary was
dowered at birth above the rest with the
impulse and the power to love and to min
ister. Out of his character sprang his
philosophy and his purpose. He loved
men not as a corollary to a philosophic
maxim that they were all children of one
God; and earth, not because it was the
footstool of the Most High; but because
he loved, it was given him so to conceive
both man and nature, and to find in that
conception, if need be, rational support
for his loving. He went about doing
good not with a sense of duty, but with
that sense of peace that comes to any crea
ture in the fulfilment of its being.
[34]

THE LOVER
His compassion for the multitudes be
cause they were distressed and scattered
as sheep not having a shepherd, his charity
for the outcast, the oppressed and the
weary, his affection for the innocence of
childhood, are among the tenderest and
sweetest chapters in the history of our
race, and seem to have made the profound
est impression both upon those whose ex
ceeding fortune it was to see his human
countenance and upon the ages that came
after. But men have neglected to note
that this was an expression of his genius
for assimilating the world to himself,
from the lilies of the field to the publicans
and sinners with whom he was so often
seen eating and drinking; an expression
of that imaginative sympathy with the
varied manifestations of life which, while
it gave his deeds their quality of beauty,
contributed also to give his words their
scope and vitality, their enduring poetry.

[35]

THE SEER

THE SEER
AND this thought leads us on; for
the sympathy of the lover is re
lated to the vision of the seer.
In attempting high themes we may lose
ourselves in the blue sky ; yet to the good
word seer, often so carelessly spoken, there
is a meaning quite definite enough for the
uses of earth. We observe a faculty or
action of mind that comes at the heart of
things directly, an intuition, an instinct
that sees through and into: it may be
balked, it may deceive itself; but it ex
ists, as something acting after its own law.
It dispenses with the discursive reason,
and may achieve results beyond the reason.
In some degree it is a faculty of all men:
of the merchant who sees at a glance the
issue of an intricate venture in business;
[39]

THE POET OF GALILEE
of the scientist who anticipates experi
ment and proof with a new application
of electricity; of the scholar who swiftly
restores a corrupted reading ; of the states
man who times without counting the pulse
of a commonwealth; of the general on
the hill, with the smoke and confusion of
contending armies before him, who divines
and orders the movement which is victory.
But it is most active in the realm of the
spirit, in the intimate relations of soul to
soul, or soul to itself, or to nature, or to
God; and it is here that we call its pos
sessor a seer.
The mother who anticipates the wants
of her child, the humanitarian who, in his
appreciation of a fellow's motives, par
dons his poor performance, the poet that
knew "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,"
is each in so far a seer. Napoleon, re
buking an arrogant English lady who re
fused to budge for a heavy-laden laborer
[40]

THE SEER
in the narrow path at St. Helena with
the quiet words, "Respect the burden,
madame," was in so far a seer. And such
was Socrates when he assured the judges
that "no harm can befall a good man,
whether he be ahve or dead," and went
quietly away to his doom.
Insight in any case depends upon an
unembarrassed famiharity with one's ob
jects of thought, upon keen interest, and,
like the power to see and remember phe
nomena (the subject of a former chap
ter), it depends, in the realm of spirit,
above all upon sympathy. Those who
possess it least are known as the tactless,
the literal-minded, the Philistines, the
bores, the plodding slaves or the recalci
trant obstacles of society, according as
their temperaments are docile or refrac
tory; those who possess it most become the
men and women of genius, discoverers,
inventors, helpers, and
"Singers of high hymns."
[41]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Jesus consecrated himself to one inter
est. In many ways he gives evidence of
high talents any one of which might have
made him distinguished ; but they were all
devoted to his vision of the Kingdom of
God. He renounced, rather it is hkely
he scarcely knew, the ordinary ambitions
of men. It is probably not literally true
that he was tempted in all things just as
we; it is probable that he never knew, as
most of us know too well, the craving for
praise of honorable achievement, praise so
often long deferred or denied altogether
at last, the craving for social standing, for
money to live generously, for a plot of
land on which to set a house. He had not
to conquer the sullen pride of the strong
man who is wounded forever by seeing the
sons of mediocrity and convention prefer
red again and again in place and fame.
It is probable that he never felt to the full
the mysterious power, old and fundamen
tal as hfe, that depends upon sex. And
[42]

THE SEER
the domestic ties, that, noble as they some
times are, may yet divide, disastrously for
his individuality and for the world, a
man's duties between his vision of things
beyond and his wife and children about
him, — these he never contracted. If in
some ways, then, his life, in spite of its
imaginative comprehensiveness, was less
varied in personal experience than
Goethe's or Shakespeare's, his masterful
singleness of purpose gives a unity to that
hfe not often paralleled in history — a
unity made perfect by a sacred martyr
dom. Thus all that he saw and all that he re
ported as seen had to do with the spiritual
hfe ; and not the least of his intuitions, as
it was the principle of his living, was that
by seeking first the Kingdom of God all
else needful would be added unto the
seeker; and, whatever regeneration or
structure of society, or empire of the fu
ture may have been in his thought, that
[43]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Kingdom meant to him, it is clear, in all
that is essential to an understanding of his
spirit, the reign of righteousness.1
Though we have no test of his validity
beyond the applause of our own souls, he
was surely the seer of seers.
He was the great seer of the real values
of life. He knew what counts when man
is estimated by eternity and not by time,
by his infinite possibilities and not by his
ephemeral whims, desires, vanities. He
knew the heritage of man, his birthright
in a kingdom not of this world, with this
world's petty and factitious successes and
honors. He knew that the body was more
than raiment, and that, as it was written,
man should not live by bread alone.
He saw through shams: the pretense of
the complacent rich and sanctimonious —
verily they have their reward, a miserable
reward equal to their miserable fatuity.

i So with the opposite conception: the outer darkness
meant essentially separation from that God in whom is'
no darkness whatever, neither shadow of turning.
[44]

THE SEER *
He saw through shams: the formalism
of long robes, chief seats, broad phylac
teries, vain repetitions, and punctilious ob
servance of sacrifice and ritual, washings
of cups and pots and brazen vessels, that
were but a cleansing of the outside of the
platter at best, and often sheer misunder
standing and spiritual loss. He knew
that the sabbath was made for man and
not man for the sabbath, and that the
altar is greater than the gift which by that
altar is sanctified.
He saw through shams: and not even
the magnificence of king or palace dis
turbed that sure vision; nor did the silver
trumpets, blown daily by the priests from
the gleaming towers of the temple to
usher in the sunrise over Jerusalem, win
his ear from sounds that told him of a
more glorious dawn. And it is recorded
that his disciples once wanted to show him
the marvels of the temple architecture:
"What manner of stones and what man
ner of buildings!" they cried, as they went
[45]

THE POET OF GALILEE
with Jesus down the majestic flights of
steps, by pillar and portico, through the
passages within the huge outer gate, on
either side, as they looked, the splendid
constructions of Herod the Great, which
Josephus described and the excavations
are now revealing and Titus desired to
spare as among the wonders of the world.
. . . But Jesus called the disciples
and went on to the Mount of Olives —
these things counted after all not much
beside the temple not made with hands.
As nothing was too imposing to distract
him, so nothing was too insignificant to
escape. There is a story that once he sat
down over against the treasury of the
temple, and beheld how the multitude cast
money into the treasury. And many that
were rich cast in much. And there came a
poor widow, and she cast in two mites,
which make a farthing. And he called
unto his disciples and said unto them,
"Verily I say unto you, this poor widow
cast in more than all they which are cast-
[46]

THE SEER
ing into the treasury : for they all did cast
in of their superfluity ; but she of her want
did cast in all that she had, even all of
her living."
He came so close to the ultimate reali
ties that we startle and draw back: even
the traditional ties and the primeval affec
tions of family and fireside, that so uni
versally influence in thought and action
the independence of men far less loving
than he, could not impede his sight or turn
his steps. Real kinship of man to man he
knew depended not upon the accidents of
a common blood and the birth of the phys
ical body from a common womb, but upon
the spiritual relationships of a spiritual
household with common spiritual aims.
He who doeth the will of the Eternal and
Divine is my brother and sister and
mother, he said; and he departed from the
Galilean roof of his infancy, and the un
happy woman who in her girlhood had
given his physical body to the world could
never call him home. [47]

THE POET OF GALILEE
He was the great seer of spiritual laws.
He knew the principles which, unseen but
sure, are forever at work building up or
breaking down the soul: except ye turn
and become as little children, ye shall in
no wise enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven; the wages of sin is death, and
he that findeth his hfe shall lose it. He
knew that love begets love, and that hate
begets hate, and that whoever takes the
sword shall perish by the sword; that to
him that hath shall be given; that whoso
ever shall humble himself shall be exalted,
and the meek shall inherit the earth. To
him man without God was man without
life. With courageous initiative and self-
reliance he shifted the emphasis from ac
tion to motive, from the outer to the inner
hfe: not that which entereth into the
mouth defileth a man, but that which pro-
ceedeth out of the mouth, this defileth a
man ; everyone that looketh on a woman to
lust after her hath already committed
[48]

THE SEER
adultery with her in his heart; the King
dom of God is within you. And even the
extravagance of the woman who broke the
alabaster cruse of ointment of spikenard
very costly, pouring it over his head, how
ever much the action clashed with the aus
tere poverty he preached, he could still
receive as a good work of impulsive love,
that should ever after be spoken of for
a memorial of her.
His use of the Scriptures of his people
shows the same man: he quotes- its hving
ideas and inspiring examples, as a great
poet rejoices to quote his peers.
For, if the Poet of Galilee was a seer,
he was also a scholar, as the poets have
always been scholars, that is, investigators,
critics and adapters of the best that their
predecessors or contemporaries, their fath
ers or their brothers in spirit, had deliv
ered unto men. There is no human occu
pation that combines originality with
tradition, the look ahead with the look
behind and around, more than that of the
[49]

THE POET OF GALILEE
poet. Hence the popularity of histories
of literature — in their essence histories of
poetry or what has significance only in so
far as it partakes of poetry. In one con
nection or another these pages will refer
to the generally unappreciated similari
ties between the words of Jesus and the
words of other wise men of his race.
There is his use of parable, of question
and answer, and of religious terminology,
indicating probably personal association
with influential Rabbis, whose methods he
adopted as they suited his needs.1 There
is his use of Hebraic parallelism and of
parabolic and invective passages from
Isaiah, which, with his ready quotations
and his incisive arguments on sacred
texts which he handled with the freedom
of a higher critic, indicate a degree of
familiarity with a past hterature that be
longs only to the makers of literature.

i He was himself sometimes addressed as Rabbi, if the
tradition be reliable.
[50]

THE SEER
And these points it has seemed necessary
to, anticipate here in connection with the
thought of the page before us: Jesus
had the scholarship of the poet. And be
cause he was poet, his scholarship never
betrayed him, as scholarship was all around
him betraying his educated countrymen,
into the pedantry of a narrow intellectual-
ism. Seer and scholar also : to these add Man
of Thought. The genius to see into real
ity, the curiosity to master and the skill to
adopt the products of other minds do not
exclude but do directly imply the medita
tive habit. The hfe of Jesus was one long
meditation, a conning over and over of
all that he heard or observed, or read or
felt or devised. Behold him, true kins
man of all the poets that he was, forever
thinking and forever thinking. Now he
is fitting the planks for a neighbor's door,
and we overhear the murmured fragments
of a proverb or a psalm. Now he is
seated at sunset before the house, while
[51]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Joseph and Mary are talking; but the
youth Jesus is silent. Now he is in the
synagogue or by the shore, now he is sail
ing across Gennesaret, now he is walking
along the mountain highways of Samaria,
now he is with friends in Bethany, olive-
crowned suburb of the Holy City. And
if we look into his eyes, wherever he be,
still is he the Man of Thought.
Note what this means. Our modern
plotting and planning for self-aggran
dizement in business, politics, or learning,
our restless reading of magazine and
newspaper and empty book after empty
book, our weeks and years of gossip in
drawing room, club, and dining hall, the
squandering of our sabbaths in the vani
ties or boredom of conventional worship,
varied only by the equally melancholy
waste of our deeper selves in vacations
devoted to aimlessly killing the creatures
of the stream and forest, or to rushing
about through galleries and museums
without why and wherefore, this manner
[52]

THE SEER
of being affording us, as it does, but the
flimsiest opportunities for thought, is as
far from the daily conduct of Jesus as is
the ultimate and abiding light of the pa
tient stars from the rolling planet on
whose burrowed and builded circumfer
ence this feverish and trivial life of ours
goes on. Out of such a life issue never
more the poets and saviors of men. But
to understand how different the thinking
of the Man of Thought was from our
own, we must remember that the differ
ence is not only in environment and habits,
but in individual capacity. Our inca
pacity to think, our resourcelessness when
alone and thrown back on the secret places
of ourselves, this it is that perpetuates a
petty and external existence. Had we
every opportunity to think, we would be
long in learning to use it; and when per
chance we had learned, how little could
we report to a thinker like Jesus of Naz
areth? But he outtopped his own generation
[53]

THE POET OF GALILEE
also. He is as far beyond Paul who came
after as he seems to be beyond John who
came before — the only men of his time
with whom he may be compared. Of
John we know too little ; but Paul, though
he mastered an idea, dynamic indeed for
those days, that neither is circumcision
anything nor uncircumcision but a new
creature, and realized that the letter kill
eth but the spirit giveth life, and rose at
times to a trumpet eloquence for his Mas
ter and the cause, is yet chiefly engrossed
with dogmatic theology and somewhat
with practical matters of form and church
discipline. Paul was a tremendous moral
force, but he was an expounder and or
ganizer rather than a seer, logician rather
than thinker. To him the Christian move
ment owes its start and direction; but it
is a question if to-day his influence has
not become a. hindrance to the truth of
Jesus. To enlarge upon these things were to
attempt a detailed interpretation of the
[54]

THE SEER
teachings of Jesus, and this were not
within my purpose, even were it within
my power. It is enough here to grasp the
fundamental fact that these teachings are
the beautiful enunciations of spiritual in
sight, like the great ideas and the great
sentences of all true answerers and poets :
like the
"Ka8Swa/ttv 8' epBeiv Up' aOavaroiai Oeolu" 1
of Hesiod, which Socrates loved to quote ;
like the '"Act yap ev rnrrTovrnv oi Aibs kv/3oi" 2
of Sophocles ; like Dante's
"In la sua volontate e nostra pace" ; s
or Goethe's
"Nur der verdient sich Freiheit, wie das Leben,
Der taeglich sie erobern muss" ; *

i "According to thine ability do sacrifice to the im
mortal gods."
2 "Nature's dice are always loaded."
3 "In his will is our peace."
4 "Only he deserves freedom and life who daily must
conquer them anew."
[55]

THE POET OF GALILEE
or Milton's
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
I cite purposely from men of different
times and tongues; but were I to name
that seer who is most like the Master in
his vision of these things, however differ
ent in respect of temperament, environ
ment, and much besides, I should name
Emerson. No man that has spoken out
since Jesus has gazed so directly, so stead
ily, so calmly into the Face of the Eternal ;
and no man that has spoken out since
Jesus has mastered so completely the laws
of spiritual being. The "Divinity School
Address" has passages almost as wonder
ful as the Sermon on the Mount, and
there, and there above all the writings of
men, it seems to me, is something like just
interpretation of the thought of Jesus.
If the great poets are the answerers, as
one of the greatest has told us they are,
and as the response of our ears tells us
they are, though the court musicians and
156]

THE SEER
singers come and go in their own right
too, then is Jesus among the great poets
— for his words are the bread of life.
But like all great poets he saw his ideals
so absolutely that he disregarded any prac
tical details of their realization: he pub
lished no catechism of morals, no "instruc
tions" for worship. And like every great
poet, he failed to exhaust his subject-
there is more day to dawn, more light;
"The sun itself," says Thoreau, "is but a
morning star." Yet, as an educator and
comforter of the spirit, he cannot soon
grow needless or old.
But it demands the poet to understand
the poet, the seer to read aright the seer.
Embrangled in literalism and logic from
the Fathers down through the Schoolmen
to the rationalism of the late Renaissance
and modern theology, distorted in the
symbolism of Catholic rhapsodist and
Protestant metaphysician, burlesqued on
the ungentle tongues of latter-day reviv
alists, the thought of Jesus, no less than
[57]

THE POET OF GALILEE
the person of Jesus, has suffered more
from our human dullness than that of any
other messenger to men.
That thought is not always easy.
There are no harder sayings anywhere
than are to be found in the logia of the
Synoptics. How many sermons have ever
fully expounded the "texts," the sayings,
quoted above, or the Beatitudes, or the
Lord's Prayer, or these? —
"Let your light shine before men, that
they may see your good works and glorify
your Father which is in Heaven."
"Where thy treasure is, there will thy
heart be also."
"He that seeketh, findeth."
• "Swear not at all."
"Follow me; and leave the dead to bury
their own dead."
"But whosoever shall blaspheme against
the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness."
"And there are eunuchs, which made
themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of
Heaven's sake." [58]

THE SEER
"It is more blessed to give than to re
ceive" (preserved by Paul in Acts).
We are told that the common people
heard him gladly; we may be sure that
they did not always understand him fully.
Indeed we get hints that they did not from
the Gospels themselves.1
We forget that the hving Jesus may
well have attracted his fellows more by
his personality — more by his gentleness,
faith, and goodness, by his tone, look, and
gesture— than by his ideas. The com
mon people understood his heart indeed
better than others in a more artificial and
calculating society have ever understood
it. They felt those generous emotions,
which, in the common people, are pecu
liarly strong to over-ride the cold dictates

1 1 have since been pleased to find this somewhat un
usual point of view taken also by one from whom I
differ so radically in other respects, the eminent evan
gelist, the Rev. W. J. Dawson of London, who says in
The Empire of Love, "He spent his wealth of intellect
upon inferior persons — fishermen and the like, who did
not comprehend one tithe of what He said."
[59]

THE POET OF GALILEE
of prudence or justice, strong also in him
(witness his forgiveness of Peter and of
the adulteress), and present also in the
stories he told them (witness the welcome
to the prodigal and the rebuke to the duti
ful son) . But this must not be mistaken
for understanding his thought. So the
stage-drivers, ferrymen, and wharf-
loungers loved Whitman the comrade, but
never divined Whitman the poet.
Moreover, there must have been among
Jesus' words, also quite apart from his
teachings, much to attract the interest of
humble men by virtue of his swift repar
tees and the lively incidents of his tales,
even though he himself seems to have used
both always only to enforce his teachings.
And, unless human nature has radically
changed in these two thousand years, they
must have heard him gladly also for his
forthright denunciations of the ruling
classes, even as they must have followed
him expectantly for his repute as a worker
of wonders. [60]

THE SEER
And though some of his precepts seem
simple enough, as "Love your enemies,"
"Do unto others as ye would that they
should do unto you," — their imphcations
are far-reaching, and they are perhaps still
not much more completely realized in the
thought than in the practice of mankind.
On the other hand, had there not been
from the beginning some to whom their
meaning was not entirely hidden, some
who guessed something of their signifi
cance, tradition would not have preserved
them for the written record, nor would
they have since become the proverbs of all
the lands.
But deep and beautiful as is his
thought, it is not in its genesis uniquely
inexplicable. His insight, be it repeated,
is the common gift of all the seers, in one
degree or another, — indeed of the whole
race in so far as it understands its seers.
Jesus still belongs to the brotherhood of
man. His ideas were his and not his. Here
[61]

THE POET OF GALILEE
and there one or another of them may
be found by the rivers of China and India,
on Persian plateaus, in Athenian market
place, grove and portico, by the seven hills
of the Eternal City, in the tombs of dead
Egypt; for the World-spirit has not at
any time long left itself without a witness
in the world which is his.
Again, if the thought of Jesus from
the point of view of the universal mind
of man is not absolutely unique, it is also
not unique from the point of view of his
tory. His ideas were his and not his.
They were among the ejaculations of the
ancient prophets and psalmists whom he
read; they were to be found even among
the maxims of the Rabbis of his own time
whom, doubtless, he heard. The phrases
of the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes,
and the Golden Rule itself, find their par
allels in contemporary Jewry. They
were the gifts of his people to Jesus. In
deed, this is so true that some Jewish critics
have affirmed that Jesus was chiefly a
[62]

THE SEER
popularizer of Hillel and others, and have
denied him originality altogether.
But a truth of the intellect, a fact in
astronomy, physics, or philology, needs to
be discovered but once, and it becomes
forthwith the possession of all. The
truths of the spirit must be forever dis
covered and spoken anew; the soul too
readily lapses with fatigue or disgust. It
becomes blind: its eyes demand to be
touched with the finger of a new prophet ;
hence the eternal need of new poets. But
reiteration of spiritual truth is only a re
discovery and brings only an awakening
when it comes from the mouth of a vital
izing personality. The originality of
Jesus was not that he alone saw the heav
enly vision, but that it gripped his whole
being as it did. The originality of Jesus
was that he spoke as one having authority
and not as the Scribes and Pharisees.
With this I do not mean that his orig
inality was not also in his seeing more and
farther, and in his speaking with more
[63]

THE POET OF GALILEE
skill than any one other ; but it is their emo
tional stress even more than their content
and their form, the sincerity of conviction,
the vital experience out of which they
spring, that makes his words carry so
far. So, more than all arguments of theo
logians, more than all assertions of pul
piteers, more than all my own reasoned
theism, is to me the assurance of Emerson:
"Ah, my brother, God exists."

[64]'

THE INSPIRED

THE INSPIRED
IN his hours of vision the poet seems
to have had from of old a feehng of
ravishment, a sense of obligation to
a superior power. With the court singers
Apollo is a literary convention, as with
the court preachers the Almighty is some
times a priestly convention; but in the
earnest times and in the earnest places of
the world they have been and still are the
great realities. The subjugation of the
Sibyl in Vergil, the divine coal that
touched the prophet's mouth in Isaiah, are
abiding symbols of the poet's belief. "The
man who is his own master knocks in vain
at the door of poetry," said Plato. "I
like my poems best [i. e., of what I have
done], for it was not I who wrote them,"
[67]

THE POET OF GALILEE
said Emerson; and they spoke for all the
poets. Whether this behef have foundation in
a spiritual fact, or be but one more delu
sion of the human soul in its growth to
ward self-realization and power, I fear
to assert. Nor is it necessary: I want
here to emphasize not a fact in the divine
economy, but a fact in the soul's life, if
indeed in the last analysis such a distinc
tion be possible. The poet feels that he
is inspired, and the greater the poet, the
greater and more immediate his convic
tion, whether he phrase it as Jehovah in
the whirlwind, or as the Sungod on Par
nassus, as
"Calliope of the beautiful dear voice,"
or as the
"Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen
seed
or simply conceive his inspiration as the
divine principle awake within him.
[68]

THE INSPIRED
No man ever experienced this conviction
more intensely than Jesus of Nazareth:
the word of the Lord was upon him, and
he was appointed to preach glad tidings.
It was not a sudden conviction, we may
well beheve; it began even in childhood,
if we may trust the striking anecdote in
Luke, when he wist he must be about his
Father's business; and it grew with long
brooding and prayer, whilst he himself
grew in wisdom and stature in his Gali
lean home. It was the law of his soul
slowly working itself out; but the form of
the law's expression depended with him,
as with all men, upon the age in which
he lived and the ages from which he came.
He knew the thought of his time and the
thought of his fathers; and out of this
knowledge he built his conception of him
self as a prophet in Israel, and, it seems
fair to conjecture in spite of some critics,
as the Messiah himself. This conception
seems to have mastered him in life and to
have sustained him in death.
[69]

THE POET OF GALILEE
With it went the consecration that ever
accompanies the poet's dream, and gives
even to those poets whose visions are of the
holiness of beauty and not of the beauty
of holiness, or perhaps of aught entirely
outside of the ethical hfe, a profoundly
ethical character. In spite of temporal
ambitions and vanities that may beset him,
in spite of mere joy of creative speech
that we call art for art's sake, every true
poet has at least his moments of conse
cration. With some it is not realized in
self -consciousness ; with others it. becomes
their silent admonition and noble pride.
I believe the consecration of Jesus in its
ultimate nature differed not from the
consecration of Milton or Wordsworth:
it was one with the consecration of the
poet conscious of his aim.
With the conviction of inspiration and
with the consecration goes, too, the seer's,
the poet's confidence of mien, which in
their imitators appears as arrogance or
conceit. They feel it is their ultimate
[70]

THE INSPIRED
right, founded in the nature of things,
to be heard and heard through ; their large
egotism silences conventional rebuke by
the sincerity and strength of its pronun-
ciamentos. Thus we may understand the
exalted confidence of Jesus.

171]

THE MAN OF SORROWS

THE MAN OF SORROWS
THE poet's vision of the unseen
Completeness makes poignant his
realization of the imperfection and
incompleteness of the world about him.
If his ideal be beauty, it renders him sen
sitive to earth's ughness and filth; if it
be goodness, then to earth's selfishness and
sloth; if it be truth, to earth's error and
confusion. Not even a faith in the ulti
mate triumph of his ideals, nor a philos
ophy that makes all things alike manifes
tations of divine energy, usually subdues
his nature altogether to resignation. His
discontent with Earth is the price he pays
for his visitings in Heaven.
Jesus was a sublimely discontented
soul. What might be on earth, what he
felt should be on earth- filled him with
[75]

THE POET OF GALILEE
grief and dismay before what he saw was
upon earth. He preached glad tidings —
tidings of the fatherhood of God, of the
brotherhood of man, and of a coming day
of righteousness; he bade men rejoice and
be exceeding glad; sometimes he sang with
triumph and joyousness; but how often
we hear the undertones of quiet sadness —
"Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst mich an." 1
And this was inevitably deepened by his
personal afflictions, by the abuse and iso
lation he endured; for he was from the
beginning the rejected of men, and while
even the foxes had their holes, the Gali
lean prophet had not where to lay his
head. Touched with the oriental melan
choly as he was, though never yielding
long to despair, he had not the tempera
mental buoyancy of Emerson, the Occi
dental, who, a rare exception among the
poets, seems grandly incapable of taking
evil seriously.

i"I feel the whole sorrow of the human race."
[76]

THE MAN OF SORROWS
The Nazarene's, as we know, was a su
preme vision of righteousness. But he
found naught like it in Gahlee, or in
Judea, or in the regions beyond the Jor
dan. This is the tragedy of his hfe, of
which the tears of Gethsemane, the
scourge, the crown of thorns, were but
the last eventful scenes. It was the dis
content of the poet; his pain was "the pain
of genius": he was crucified many times
before Calvary.
But one pain at least, let us trust, was
spared him. Legend has loved to dwell
upon Jesus as among men alone the sinless
one; but, though we have little warrant
from the fragmentary facts of the Synop
tics and from Jesus' explicit words 1 in
making him a perfect being, nothing can
impugn the essential sublimity of his char
acter. Thus one pain was spared him:
he had not to suffer the pain of mocking
his own visions by any disloyalty or
weakness in himself.

i"Why callest thou me good?"
[77]

THE POET OF GALILEE
With men of genius the power of see
ing is peculiarly greater than the power
of being: Byron, who knew
"The high, the mountain majesty of worth,"
hated himself, with defiant scorn, for his
own defection to impurity, and in this his
fellow poets have reason to understand
him best. But it was not so with Jesus;
and what he saw so little realized around
him he could feel wonderfully realized
and justified in his own hfe.
And a corollary. The validity of a
man's thought in no wise depends upon
his conduct — it is what it is. Yet when
his conduct is in accord, there is not only
the gain of joy to him, but a gain to man
in the authority of his message. So Em
erson, with his gentleness and self-control,
is more than Carlyle, the fractious and
gruff; so Socrates and Jesus emphasized
for all time their great thoughts by living
and by dying greatly. [78]

THE SCOURGER

THE SCOURGER
THE dissonance between what should
be and what is made Jesus the Man
of Sorrows; but though acquainted
with grief, he was not the weak, almost
complacent sufferer, long celebrated in
art. He was a man, and that makes his
tears the more poignant. Nor did his pity
render him a sentimentalist or coward. A
recent author explains the writing on the
ground in the scene with the woman taken
in adultery as evincing the maiden mod
esty of Jesus, and reverently commends
his delicacy toward womankind: away
with such mawkishness forever in the pres
ence of such men as Jesus of Nazareth!
Do the masters of life fear to look the
Scarlet Woman in the face? Do they
blush? Do they fidget? Jesus was a
[81]

THE POET OF GALILEE
man, and this makes his pity pity indeed.
But again, not in all moods was he the
Man of Sorrows. This eternal dissonance
of the world at times kindled within him
a quick and devastating flame. Jesus had
not the winsome serenity of Emerson, nor
the unruffled grimace of that divine old
meddler of Athens. He had not the res
ignation and supineness of the Indian
sage; in this, as perhaps in some other
things, the great Hebrew was not a typi
cal Oriental. He could lose his temper
magnificently. His indignation could
use the whip on the money-changers; it
could heap upon the Scribes and Phari
sees rebuke and sarcasm, and call them
blind guides, hypocrites, serpents, off
spring of vipers — stinging names, the
meaning of which, unlike that of his max
ims, was certainly never likely to be missed
by his hearers. He had a side that re
sembles the harsher John the Baptist, if
indeed their characters and words have
not more or less coalesced in the Apostolic
[82]

THE SCOURGER
tradition. The Lamb of God of the
Fourth Gospel is sometimes the Scourge
of God in the Synoptics.
His indignation could drive him, it
seems, even to ungraciousness and defi
ance, to gratuitous discourtesies incon
gruous with
"The first true gentleman that ever breathed,"
if Luke XI, be historical and typical ; for
the anecdote records that, accepting an in
vitation to dine with a Pharisee, he de
liberately sat down to meat without first
washing, and thus forced a discussion of
his peculiar views, which he was not slow
to follow up with hard words to his host
and the guests. Yet perhaps he sus
pected that the Pharisee had invited him,
not from courtesy, but from curiosity;
and he may have thus felt justified in
giving his drastic object lesson.
In a prophetic age he might have sur
passed the fierce "woes" of the First
Isaiah, which he obviously emulated; in
[83]

THE POET OF GALILEE
a literary environment the truculent satire
of Juvenal, without Juvenal's taint of
grossness and literary affectation; his in
vective has the same keenness and forth-
rightness, and springs from a like element
in his nature.
The "saeva indignatio" of Jesus, like
that of the First Isaiah, bears witness not
only to a fearlessness and zeal for right,
but to the essentially passionate tempera
ment of the man. When the usual re
serve of Jesus gives way we look in upon
a heart of fire.
Yet the finger of a subtler criticism
traces its heat even in his gentlest mood:
the emotions are the fountains of all speech
that rains in upon the soul; and in the
living, speaking Jesus they must have had
that intensity which is the endowment of
the poet.

[84]

THE HUMORIST

THE HUMORIST
CERTAIN conventions of Christian
ity have made its founder the
gloomiest visage in history; and
Nietzsche, looking upon that Christ, up
braided him that he never laughed : neither
Christian nor Iconoclast has dealt here
with the real Jesus. The Indignant, the
Man of Sorrows, having the humanity of
universal humanity, was the Humorist too.
Indeed such a nature, so responsive, so
subtle, so rich in emotions, in imagination,
in understanding of his fellow-men, would
have been an anomaly had it marked and
felt only the tragedy, never the comedy,
of the incongruous. But we need not
altogether theorize: a few of his jests are
on record.
According to the first chapter of the
[87]

THE POET OF GALILEE
earliest gospel, Jesus founded his little
order with a jest: after some brief ad
dresses, presumably in the synagogues,
which having no regular minister were free
on the sabbath to any speaker in Israel
wise in the Scriptures, Jesus was passing
one day along by the sea of Gahlee ; and he
saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of
Simon, casting a net into the sea, for
they were fishers. And Jesus said unto
them, "Come ye after me, and I will make
you to become fishers of men" (dA.i«s
av0ponr(ov) . Socrates once playfully used
a similar figure: "I am not altogether
unversed in the art of catching men"
(ovtc arreipais ol/iai e^eiv 777)09 Or/pav 6.v8punrw.
Mem. II. 6, 29), but without the pun
which gives point to the former.1
The homely hyperboles so habitual with
him, as in "If ye have faith as a grain of
mustard seed," may have more than once

1 The pun on the name of Peter in the Greek of Matt.
XVI, reflects the Petrine tendency of that Gospel and the
growing "hierarchy of Rome," and in the Aramaic of
Jesus would have been impossible.
£881

THE HUMORIST
been accompanied by a smile, the differ
ence after all between the meaning and
the humble symbol having a happy quaint-
ness. His fancy indulged at times in gro
tesque exaggerations, which need but to
be pictured by us as they were by his
original auditors to be recognized at once.
The picture of a busybody with a stick
of timber in his eye, solicitous for the
sight of a neighbor with a fleck of dust
in his, is itself ludicrous, and doubly as a
type of the fault-finding hypocrite; thus,
also, punctiliously to strain out the gnat
before drinking a cup of wine, only there
after to swallow a camel, is ludicrous, and
doubly as a type of the punctiliousness
and inconsistency of religious formalists.
Are not these exactly paralleled in kind
by the famous
"Parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus" 1

i"The mountains are in labor and bring forth an
absurd little mouse."
[89]

THE POET OF GALILEE
where the picture is also grotesque exag
geration, introduced in the same way to
typify a human frailty. We smile at this
line in Horace; but who ever smiled at
those lines of Jesus? I think the Gali
lean peasants did.
It was Jesus, too, who conceived the
desperate anxiety of self-interest in terms
of the short man trying by worrying about
it to add a cubit to his stature — the humor
of which was remarked by Beecher; and
we remember the comparison of the diffi
culty of the rich man, worming his way
into heaven, with the easier feat of the
camel, squeezing, legs, hump, and all,
through the eye of a needle.1
Thus the Jester could riot in wild and

1 1 take "eye of a needle" in its literal sense, rejecting
on a number of grounds the archaeological ingenuity of
those commentators who assure us that it means one of
the city gates. This term of the comparison, which has
its parallels in the proverbs of Arabia and India, may
have been current in Palestine before Jesus; but, if so,
the mere fact that he chose to make use of it would
itself bear testimony to his sense of humor — the topic
under discussion.
[90]

THE HUMORIST
grotesque whimsies; but perhaps oftener
to his mood was the delicate humor of a
gentle realism : the children in the market
place at their games of mock funerals and
weddings, chiding their comrades for not
doing their mimic roles as agreed; the dis
gruntled householder roused in the night
by an importunate neighbor come after
bread for his guest, and constrained to
• open the door at last because the man kept
up such a merciless knocking; the judge
who yielded to the widow, not because he
feared God or regarded man, but simply
to get rid of her continual coming; the
recipients of an unwelcome invitation who
straightway began to make conventional
excuses, especially the much-married man
who could not remain away from his wife
— how genially he handled such themes!
Here, too, the humor is not only in the
picture, but in the application.
Moreover, he was alert to get the humor
out of a situation in actual hfe, as exem
plified by the story of the new wine in
[91]

THE POET OF GALILEE
old bottles, told at the chief Pharisee's
table at the expense of the listeners, where
he "pricked the bubble of their assumed
superiority." And may not the Knower of men have
smiled as he saw the connoisseur drink the
old wine and smack his lips and say, "That
is good"? May he not have smiled at the
simple shepherd and the women who, find
ing their lost possessions, gleefully called
in their neighbors to gossip about it all? —
or at the unseemly haste of the guests
when he marked how they chose out the
chief seats? — or at Martha, cumbered
about much serving, who would enlist the
Master against her sister, apparently
idling at his feet? May not a sense of
humor have reinforced his appreciation of
the zeal of the little Zacchaeus with whom
he decided to take lodgings? Was there
not grim humor as well as bitter rebuke
in his comment on those who think they
shall be heard for their much speaking,
and on those who disfigure their faces to
[92]

THE HUMORIST
be seen of men to fast? No man could
look through human nature, as Jesus
looked through it, without smiling some
times in very truth.
Humor is as old as speech. Laughter
rings round the world. And even Galilee
had its mirth; and even we can hear it.
The above paragraph suggests two re
lated subjects: the adroitness of Jesus in
turning any situation, even the most try
ing, to the advantage of himself or his
cause, which will fall into the next chap
ter ; and the irony of Jesus, which it seems
proper to make a part of this.1
I mean an irony quite like that of Socra
tes, where superiority, conscious of its own,
plays the part of inferiority ; where knowl
edge pretends the ignorance, where wis
dom pretends the folly, where purity pre
tends the impurity of the other party to
the conversation, who is meanwhile com-

i It has been treated in a masterly fashion by Paulsen
(Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles; Anhang, Ber
lin, 1900), to whom I am under some obligation.
[93]

THE POET OF GALILEE
placently unaware of the situation until
the real master choose by a deft stroke to
reveal it. As Socrates pretended to hum
ble himself before the Sophists, pohticians,
and smart set of Athens, so Jesus before
the Scribes and Pharisees of Palestine.
This irony seasons, and will explain,
many of his sayings : "They who are whole
have no need of a physician," i. e., you
Pharisees whose hves are such models of
ethical and rehgious propriety, I can do
you no spiritual good; but possibly [in a
changed tone] with all your wisdom there
is something for you in the old word, "I
desire mercy and not sacrifice." The dif
ficult parable of the Unjust Steward is
certainly ironical.
Ironical, too, is his habit of clinching
an argument, or of concluding a story
with a question, the answer to which is
perfectly obvious : "Doth not each of you
on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from
the stall and lead him away to watering?"
"Whether of the twain did the will of his
[94]

THE HUMORIST
father?" "Which of them therefore will
love him most?"
At times his irony becomes bitter sar
casm, as in Luke XIII, 31ff . : "It can
not be that a prophet perish outside of
Jerusalem," i. e., as a prophet I have a
just claim to be murdered in the Holy
City which from old has murdered the
prophets; so Herod that fox — sly old
villain though he is — won't have the pleas
ure of doing with me as with John.
In the story of Lazarus is a grim hu
mor, happily compared by Paulsen with
that of a mediaeval Dance of Death, a gro
tesque, ironic politeness in Abraham's non
chalant conversation with the poor fellow
in Hell, reminding one of those gruesome
old pictures, where Death invites the rich
and great, who have fared so well at the
table of life, now to come and have a dance
with him.
The attitude of Jesus toward earthly
riches and power is ironical in that he
affects to take seriously the point of view
[95] *

THE POET OF GALILEE
of those who take these things so seriously,
as in answering the question, "Is it lawful
to give tribute to Caesar?" — itself intro
duced by the Pharisees and the Herodians
with an impertinent irony not lost on the
quick comprehension of Jesus.1 "Bring
me a denarius that I may see it," he re
plied. And they brought it. "Whose is
this image and superscription?" [As if he
did not know!] And they say unto him,
"Caesar's." And Jesus said unto them,
"Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's [i. e., you enjoy Rome's civic
protection, and use her coin, and should
not object to taxation] and unto God" —
here abandoning all pretense of concern
•for such matters, and dismissing them
i They said, "Master, we know that thou art true and
carest not for anyone: for thou regardest not the person
of men, but of a truth teachest the way of God." This
is irony toward Jesus, because they did not believe it:
they were mocking him; but Fate, in thus putting the
real truth unwittingly into their mouths of scorn, re
venged Jesus with its own irony: it made their words,
as unconscious asseverators of fact, mock their own
egregious complacence.
[96]

THE HUMORIST
with eloquent speed — "and unto God the
things that are God's."
He saw the irony in the rich man's care
of his possessions, which are not only of
no positive value, but actual hindrances
to getting the real values of life and the
Kingdom of Heaven. "The ground of a
certain rich man," — so runs one of his
stories — "brought forth plentifully, and
he reasoned with himself, saying, 'What
shall I do, because I have not where to
bestow my fruits?' And he said, 'This
will I do : I will pull down my barns and
build greater ; and there will I bestow my
corn and my goods, and I will say to my
soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up
for many years ; take thine ease, eat, drink,
and be merry!' But God said unto him,
'Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul
required of thee, and the things which
thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?'
So he that layeth up treasure for himself
and is not rich toward God."
He saw the irony in his own end : in the
[97]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Gardens of Gethsemane on the Mount of
Olives, when the coming of the chief
priests and the captains of the temple and
the elders awoke the disciples sleeping for
sorrow even as Jesus in sorrow had come
from his prayer and was standing over
them, he turned to his enemies; and to
Judas he said, "Betrayest thou the Son of
Man with a kiss?" — and to those who
seized him, "Are ye come out as against
a robber with swords and staves?"
And the bitter irony of it all must have
filled his soul before the High Priest, who
believed with fatuous ignorance that this
man, the best of his race, must perish, lest
the whole ancient order and all righteous
ness be undone; and before Pilate who,
possessing the power of this world, was
yet so powerless against the spiritual King
of the Jews, to whom Jesus vouchsafed
only the laconic "Thou sayest," as the
irony of the situation compelled him to an
irony of attitude toward it. The bitter
irony of it all must have filled his soul
[98]

THE HUMORIST
under the jeers and the scourging in the
house of Caiaphas, under the crucifixion
on the hill — until his broken spirit joined
the defeated mortality of yesterday's twice
ten thousand years with the despairing cry,
"My God, my God, why hast thou for
saken me!"
Indeed, the irony of Jesus has been suc
ceeded by the irony of history: as Jesus
mocked the sin, weakness, and folly of
Time, so has Time in its sin, weakness,
and folly mocked Jesus. It preferred
Barabbas, the destroyer, to him, the re
deemer ; it crucified the most honest of men
between two thieves.1 And thereafter it
made the lover a tyrant; him who would
suffer the little children to come unto his
bosom it transformed into the fiend that
whipped them into Hell; his spiritual in-

i But in the ironical inscription, "The King of the
Jews," Fate again, by the same subtlety as noted in the
remark of the Herodians, did revenge Jesus: it made
those who set it up tell the truth unwittingly in their
very mockery at what was but their own dull misun
derstanding thereof.
[99]

THE POET OF GALILEE
tuitions it parodied in the vast systems of
the theologizing intellect; discipleship to
him, which he said (or someone speaking
in his spirit said) was in loving one an
other, it made dependent upon a meta
physical "credo quia absurdum." The
Brother of Peace it made the source of one
half and the excuse of the other half of the
wars of the East and West and North and
South; and the rejecter of all earthly
goods, the contemner of all earthly mag
nificence, the way-faring preacher in san
dals and girdle, it gave over to be repre
sented and defended by Pontiff and
Prince, clad in robes of cardinal and pur
ple and dwelhng in palaces of marble and
of gold.

1100]

THE ALERT

THE ALERT
THE poetical mind is eminently alive,
not only quick to see, but quick to
take advantage. Though prover
bially abstracted from the world — or what
the unconscious complacency of many men
calls the world — the poet knows where he
is and what to do. His intellectual em
barrassments are most brief, his resources
most abounding, his repartees unexpected
and dangerous. The poet in Joan of Arc
confounded the brutal ecclesiastics who ex
amined her, no less than the heroine in her
confounded the executioners and the mob
which watched the transfigured white girl
in the flames. "Did not the archangel
Michael appear unto thee all naked?" ob
scenely insinuated a priestly official; and
"Of a truth," rephed La Pucelle, "Wot
[103]

THE POET OF GALILEE
ye not that God who clothes the flowers of
the valleys can find raiment for his mes
senger?" The unhappy English poet,
on trial in a sordid London court-room,
degraded, hopelessly in the wrong, could
yet force cheers from the floor by his
trenchant replies to the stolid lawyers who
cross-examined. And when a poet takes
up his pen to fight, his critics look out,
for he is apt to be an alert man of affairs
no less than a dreamer of dreams. There
are many indications of such alertness in
the Poet of Galilee. His intellectual side
has not always been sufficiently recognized.
He had something of the readiness of the
Greek intellect, of Plato, Socrates, and the
Sophists, a quality not present to such a
degree in the Hebrew prophets, or in Zoro
aster, or in Buddha, who were very dif
ferent types indeed; and present perhaps
in Mohammed, not as poet, the man of
words, but as general, the man of action.
His reformer-soul put him in hard case
with his countrymen. He knew opposi-
[104]

THE ALERT
tion, from the pettiness of provincial scribe
to the domineering of Jewish High Priest
and Roman Procurator. We can conceive
of a Jesus who would have answered ever
with a magnificent look of godlike silence
and turned away; so, indeed, at times we
may be sure he did answer. But not
always ; the historic Jesus of Nazareth did
not always let slip his opportunity, nor
abrogate his power to make a home thrust,
if it was vital to his propaganda.
In the Synoptics we read of several
efforts to entrap him: the Pharisees, Sad
ducees, or Herodians went and took coun
sel how they might ensnare him in his talk,
apropos of the tribute money, or of the
proper punishment of an adulteress, or of
marriages in Heaven, or of other things
on which they trusted he would commit
himself to his hurt in the eyes of the
people; and one has but to recall his an
swers to see how he perceived their crafti
ness, and how no man was able to answer
him a word, how even his enemies recog-
[105]

THE POET OF GALILEE
nized his adroitness and durst not there
after ask him any question. In a contest
of wits he was a genius at fence, parry or
thrust. He was a master of situations
that would have embarrassed many men
not less sure of their cause, but less sure
of the circumstances and of themselves.
He not only saw directly how the matter
stood, with that same insight which in
spiritual issues made him a seer, but he had
the presence of mind to handle it with
effect, and at times with eloquence and
dramatic eclat — a presence of mind which,
had not other elements in his character in
terposed, might have made him a political
force in the forum or a general in the
field.1 Sometimes he replied, like Lincoln, with
a story ; sometimes, like Socrates, with the

i And understanding human nature as he did, he was
also not without a certain practical sagacity. At least
there is something politic in the instruction to the
twelve, for their journey, "Be ye wise as serpents and
harmless as doves." But his moral earnestness forbade
him to employ much conciliation and compromise.
[106]

THE ALERT
irony noted above; sometimes with the
formulation of a dilemma, sometimes with
all three, as in Matthew XXI, 23-32:
"And when he was come into the temple,
the chief priests and the elders of the peo
ple came unto him as he was teaching, and
said, 'By what authority doest thou these
things? and who gave thee this authority?'
And Jesus answered and said unto them,
T also will ask you one question, which
if ye tell me, I likewise will tell you by
what authority I do these things. The
baptism of John, whence was it? from
heaven or from men ?' And they reasoned
with themselves, saying, Tf we shall say
from Heaven, he will say unto us, "Why
then did ye not beheve him?" But if we
shall say from men, we fear the multi
tude; for all hold John as a prophet.'
And they answered Jesus, and said, 'We
know not.' He also said unto them,
'Neither tell I you by what authority I do
these things. But what think ye? A
man had two sons, and he came to the
[107]

THE POET OF GALILEE
first, and said, "Son, go work to-day in
the vineyard." And he answered, and
said, "I will not;" but afterward he re
pented himself, and went. And he came
to the second, and said likewise. And he
answered, and said, "I go, sir," and went
not. Whether of the twain did the will
of his father?' They say, 'The first.'
Jesus saith unto them, 'Verily I say unto
you that the publicans and the harlots go
into the kingdom of God before you.
For John came unto you in the way of
righteousness, and ye believed him not:
but the publicans and the harlots believed
him: and ye, when ye saw it, did not even
repent yourselves afterward, that ye
might believe him.' "
His use of the dilemma is a part of an
antithetical habit of thought, illustrated
in his fondness for briefly put alternatives
and contrasts, when he supplemented the
pronouncements of intuition by the argu
ments of the discursive reason: two men
in the field, one taken, the other left; ten
[108]

THE ALERT
virgins, five wise and five foolish; the
house on the rock and the house on the
sand; John, fasting, who, as they say,
hath a devil, and the Son of Man, eating
and drinking, whom they call a glutton
and a wine-bibber ; the saving and the kill
ing of life on the sabbath ; God and Mam
mon — alternatives usually symbolic ex
pressions of the everlasting alternatives,
light and darkness, good and evil, — the
main subject matter of Jesus and of all
dialecticians of the soul.
Only once in his conversation does he
seem to have been outwitted, and then not
by one of the mighty that sat on Moses'
seat, but by one of the humble far away.
On his visit to the lost sheep of Israel on
the borders of Tyre and Sidon, a woman,
a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by race, came
to the house where the weary man had
hid himself, and fell down at his feet,
and besought him that he would cast forth
a devil out of her daughter. And he said
unto her, with what to western ears seems
[109]

THE POET OF GALILEE
a transient touch of the racial exclusive-
ness of the ancient Jew, "Let the children
first be filled: for it is not meet to take
the children's bread and cast it to the
dogs." But her anguish found her a bet
ter word, and she said unto him, "Yea,
Lord; even the dogs under the table eat
of the children's crumbs." And the keen,
no less than the tender man within him
was roused, and he said unto her, with
instant approval of her speech, and cheer
for her grief: "For this saying go thy
way; the devil is gone out of thy daugh
ter." His readiness in bending his wit to a
situation suggests his readiness in bend
ing a situation to his wit. He would often
seize on some object immediately at hand
to point his moral or adorn his tale; such
must be the force of the pronoun "this"
in "Ye shall say unto this mountain, 'Be
thou taken up,' " as Jesus passed with
his disciples one morning from Bethany
toward Jerusalem along the foot of the
[110]

THE ALERT,
Mount of Olives; and of the same pro
noun in "Ye would say unto this syca
mine tree, 'Be thou rooted up, and be thou
planted in the sea,' " the sycamine waving
even there not far from the rippling beach
of Gennesaret. It was immediately after
his melancholy conversation with the rich
young man, who asked what he should do
to inherit eternal hfe and then made the
great refusal — "il gran rifiuto" — going
away sorrowful, that Jesus looked round
about at the puzzled and grieved disciples
and commented, "How hardly shall they
that have riches enter into the Kingdom
of God !" The invitation to the fishermen
to become fishers of men, already instanced
as illustrating the Humorist, may also be
instanced here. And men will not forget
how once he answered the query, "Who,
then, is greatest in the Kingdom of
Heaven?" — one of those several queries,
by the way, that show wherein the dis
ciples really failed to appreciate their
Master's teachings — how forthwith he
[111]

THE POET OF GALILEE
called to him a little child and set him in
the midst of them, a living, breathing
symbol of his thought, and said, "Verily
I say unto you, except ye turn and become
as little children, ye shall in no wise enter
into the Kingdom of Heaven." And when
he bade those of little faith to consider the
lihes of the field, how they grew, toiling
not as men, nor spinning as women, yet
in their array more beautiful than Solo
mon in all his glory, I know that the same
lilies nodded round him out of the grass,
gleaming with speckled white and gold
in the same sunlight that fell across the
Poet's face.

[112]

THE STORY-TELLER

THE STORY-TELLER
THE stories of Jesus furnish by
words for conversation and litera
ture ; but their movement and color
and passion are too seldom felt: they
have been added to the conventionalities;
hence their significance for the mind of
Jesus may be overlooked. They bear wit
ness to a teeming, creative brain. When
Jesus walked by the lake or mountain, and
the crowds gathered, and he began to
speak to them in parables, where did he
get his abundant supplies? — were they
casual inventions of the moment? — had the
artist before worked over them in secret?
— what personal observation, experience,
or folk-gossip or reading suggested this
story or that? — did he bring them to their
present perfection by successive retelling
[115]

THE POET OF GALILEE
and remodeling, hke the modern speaker
with his favorite anecdotes? — with what
tones, gestures, pauses, did the story-teller
emphasize the pageantry of his fancy for
his oriental hearers, those proverbial lovers
of stories? To these things no man will
ever reply. But answers are not always
of chief moment. Often a question will
do more to arouse thought than an an
swer 1 — a realization that problems exist,
a stimulation of curiosity, when we begin
to understand because we begin to be
properly astonished.
These stories came out of a teeming,
creative brain that spoke to the living; and
as such it is well to recognize their posi
tion in the written records of the race,
among the fables, allegories, and apo
logues that human ingenuity has wrought
out to illustrate a point or to teach a les
son. Someone should write a book com-

i So Ibsen conceived it his mission to question and not
to answer: "Jeg sporger heist; mit kald er ej at svare."
[116]

THE STORY-TELLER
paring in their art and purpose the stories
of Jesus with the Old Testament parables
(as that of the vineyard in Isaiah V, elab
orated by Jesus), and the Old Testament
fables (those of vegetable hfe J in Judges
IX, 8-15, and II Kings XIV, 9) with
the parables of Buddha and the Talmud,
with the fables of the Hitopadesa and
iEsop, with the myths and parables of
Plato, with the allegory of Hercules at
the cross-roads of Prodicus, with the
homely apologues of republican Rome,
etc. His words begin to be examined by
the Department of Comparative Religion ;
they still await examination by the De
partment of Comparative Literature.
If, on the one hand, the stories of Jesus
are fresh creations, on the other hand as a
type and method they have not only gen
eral analogies among other peoples, but
closer parallels among his own people and

iThe beast fable is not found in the Old Testament,
[117]

THE POET OF GALILEE
in his own time than a Christian pubhc
unfamiliar with Rabbinical lore usually
suspects. But they concern us now only in the
former aspect, as stories illustrating spir
itual truths, as the manifest products of
one mind, one artist, one creator. They
belong to the world's "little masterpieces
of fiction." Not only have they delighted
the populace, but they have satisfied the
severe standards of the Academicians.
The clearness of outline and grace of
form, so unlike anything in ancient He
brew literature, is perhaps the most nota
ble manifestation of that Hellenic quahty
in the mind of Jesus which we have al
ready noted more than once. Jesus is
perhaps the greatest artist the Jewish race
has produced.
With wonderful economy of effort he
sets his characters before us as living men
and women. His device is not to de
scribe, but to show them doing or speak-
[118]

THE STORY-TELLER
ing, whether it be the Good Samaritan
binding up the wayfarer's wounds, or the
shepherd coming home rejoicing with the
lost sheep on his shoulder, or the woman
sweeping her house, or the Unjust Stew
ard with his account books, or Lazarus
begging Father Abraham to dip a finger
tip in water and cool his tongue. With
the realistic exactness of one reporting
an incident out of his own experience, he
mentions now one, now another character
istic detail such as only a poetic imagina
tion would emphasize. With him it is not
simply a grain of mustard seed, but a
grain of mustard seed that a man took and
cast into his garden, and it grew and be
came a tree and the birds of the heavens
came and lodged in the branches thereof.
Even in the brief mention of the woman
making bread, he tells us she hid the leaven
not simply in the meal, but in three meas
ures of meal — and that makes the differ
ence between a lay-figure and an actual
[119]

THE POET OF GALILEE
housewife. It is just these apparently
trivial touches that betray the born story
teller. Again, his people are always repre
sented as occupied with something inter
esting, something in which they are them
selves vitally interested — whether it be
buying land to make sure of a treasure
buried there, or hunting for a lost sheep,
or building a house, or guiding the plow —
usually something that his peasant com
panions or groups of chance listeners
would have found particularly interesting,
as a part of their own world. Though
Jesus tells the story of a king and his
army, and of a rich merchant and his pearl,
most of his inventions concern the homely
activities of fisher, and vine-dresser, and
shepherd, or the quite familiar, if learned,
professions of scribe and judge.
It is part of that homeliness that runs
through so much of his imagery, and that
doubtless characterized his speech, noun,
[120]

THE STORY-TELLER
verb, and adjective, in the original Ara
maic never to be restored.
Near to the folk also was his constant
use of what our Latin grammar calls
"direct discourse" — the lively dramatic
method of the Scotch cotter or Irish poli
tician, which is lost to the more elaborate
syntax of polite society. He reports the
householder, which went out at different
hours of the day to hire more laborers into
his vineyard, as in actual conversation in
the market-place; he does not tell us the
Prodigal said he would arise and go to
his father, but he lets us overhear the
Prodigal's own spoken resolve.
Near to the folk, again, are his repeti
tions, hke those famihar in Homer and in
ballad poetry, found in the Gospel narra
tives about Jesus as well (e. g., Luke
XIX, 31-34) , and in all primitive recitals :
as "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord"
in the parable of the Talents ; and "I have
sinned against heaven," etc., of the Prod-
[121]

THE POET OF GALILEE
igal Son; and "I pray thee have me ex
cused," in the parable of the Invitations:
each repeated with the simple directness
of an old folk-tale.
His characters belong to the hterature
of the world, even with the more devel
oped creations of so-called secular letters,
with Thersites, Nestor, Achilles, with Pa
olo and Francesca, the Canterbury Pil
grims, and Shakespeare's Theater.
The background is but lightly drawn,
even in such a vivid scene as the Prodigal
feeding the swine; or it is omitted alto
gether, where, however, the convincing re
ality of the actors suggests it so truly that
we are surprised to find on rereading that
our imaginations have supplied so much.
Here again is seen the magic of the artist :
it is not what his imagination does for
us, so much as what it is able to make our
imaginations do for ourselves, that distin
guishes from the dauber or poetaster, the
painter or poet whom we love for making
us so gloriously competent. [122]

THE STORY-TELLER
Hence the wearisome inanity of most
efforts to fill in the parables by para
phrase. Yet our world — our customs, our
tastes, the very look of our fields and
houses and markets, our occidental sky
itself — is so different that imagination,
always making use of memory, may some
times go astray; and a work of such wide
and exact archaeological information, with
such intelligent sympathy and such sweet
quaintness of manner as De Gelijkenissen
van het Evangelie 1 of Dr. Koetsveld,
hausvater, pastor, and scholar, is a delight
ful help and a welcome gift to any friend
of Jesus: he brings back to us the world
that was about Jesus, when the Poet of
Galilee spoke to his villagers from boat
or hillside ; and to Jesus' allusions he gives
for us something of the significance they
had for his countrymen.
One might expect the realistic habit that
adds so many little touches of accurate de-

i Utrecht, 1886. I doubt if the work exists in trans
lation. [123]

THE POET OF GALILEE
tail would have led him to locate, as is so
common in folk-lore and legend, his stories
in some appropriate place, feigning, for
instance, that the sower went forth to sow
in the fields back of Capernaum, or that
the Prodigal wandered from a house in
Nazareth to the rich Roman city on the
coast, or that the virgins were the daugh
ters of Cana; but he is thus definite only
in the story of the man who was going
down to Jericho. Moreover, his charac
ters are unnamed, save the beggar on
Abraham's bosom, who may have been
named by the tradition after the Lazarus
whom Jesus was reputed to have raised
from the dead. And in this way his sto
ries, with all their simple realism, acquire
something of that remoteness and mystery
characteristic of fairy tales, which usually
tell of what happened somewhere, once
upon a time, to some certain prince, or
maiden, or forest child whose names we
shall never know. The result is for us
not unhappy : the literary instinct of men
[124]

THE STORY-TELLER
has long since devised from out the stories
of Jesus signatures more significant and
pretty than proper names : The Vineyard,
The Prodigal Son, The Ten Virgins, The
Talents, the Good Samaritan.
The character of his materials — the per
sonages and incidents — and his manner of
arranging and setting them forth offer
beautiful evidence of Jesus' power to play
upon the human heart. So many-sided
and so elusive is his personality that his
critic is constantly tempted to readjust
the emphasis or alter the treatment of
chapter and paragraph. Indeed, Jesus'
power over the human heart is perhaps his
power above all other powers as poet ; and
I can imagine a discussion of the Poet of
Galilee which might be in effect but an
analysis and exposition of this truth. Not
that such a discussion would necessarily
repudiate any of the ideas in these pages ;
but that it might set some of them in
clearer relations and in a clearer light.
It is certain at least that the power over the
[125]

THE POET OF GALILEE
human heart he possessed as few ev,en of
the greatest artists who so far excelled
him in complexity and ingenuity of form,
and in quantity and variety of production.
But these stories exist not for them
selves alone; like all great art, they have
a meaning beyond themselves. Each ex
ists for an idea; they all iUustrate the
ethical or religious principles that fired the
imagination of the Poet of Galilee; and,
despite certain tendencies in modern crit
icism and art, it must never be forgotten
that the love of goodness and the love of
God have been through the ages and will
still be in the ages to come among the
passions and themes of the creative mind.
The fitness of the stories as illustrations
is quite independent of their excellence as
narrative compositions.
They are a part of the glowing con-
creteness of a poet's thinking; but in this
they are sometimes misunderstood. The
parable of the Sower (with one or two
[126]

THE STORY-TELLER
others) is really an allegory, where each
element in the story is symbolic of an ele
ment in the thought of the speaker; "it
gives us," says Menzies,1 "under a thin
disguise the experience of Jesus as a
preacher;" though the correspondences
are confused in the explanation which the
Evangelists make Jesus give privately to
his disciples.
But this is not their usual character.
They are similes. In some this is form
ally obvious: "The Kingdom of Heaven
is like a woman," etc.; "Everyone there
fore which heareth these words of mine,
and doeth them, shall be likened unto a
wise man, which built his house upon the
rock," etc. But even the longest, The
Prodigal Son, is, in relation to the thought
illustrated, a simile. The point of com
parison is that God forgives a repentant
soul as a human father a son. The vivid

i The Earliest Oospel, p. 108.
[127]

THE POET OF GALILEE
details — the patrimony, the wandering to
a far country,1 the swine, the fatted calf,
the ring and the robe — but complete and
vitalize the picture; they have not more
symbolic meaning than the details of a
Homeric simile. In either poet there is
but one point of comparison ; in either case
the poet makes the comparison interesting
and effective by dwelling on the inde
pendent characteristics of the material
which furnishes the illustration.
Thus Jesus is not to be held responsible
for the morality of people in these stories :
neither for the harshness of the king that
bade the man who owed him ten thousand
talents to be sold with his wife, and his
children, and all he had; nor for the injus
tice of the householder who gave the labor
ers of the eleventh hour as good a wage
as those who had borne the scorching heat
of the day; nor for the thrift of the
gleeful, sly fellow that found a treasure

1 Possibly this might symbolize a long journey from
the goodness of God, but it need not here.
[128]

THE STORY-TELLER
hid in a field and bought the field without
letting the man who sold it know why.
In the same way he is not always careful
of literal probability, as possibly in the
story of a certain king which made a mar
riage feast for his sons, though the more
intimately we acquaint ourselves with Je
sus, the more we appreciate how his utter
ances abound in accurate knowledge of
the customs and ways of his folk and
times. What he chiefly desires is that
these stories furnish him with a point to
his purpose.
And Jesus, leaving the moral to take
hold as it might, was loath to tag his
parables with elucidations. He had too
much literary taste : as artist he loved the
eloquence of suppression, silence, stopping
short. He had too much cleverness: he
knew human nature too well ; he knew the
greater force of a point when the listener
can catch it for himself; and though the
quick-witted Pharisees and their kind
seem to have got his drift easily enough,
[129]

THE 'POET OF GALILEE
he was, as we read, chagrined at the ob-
tuseness of his disciples in wanting glosses,
and would have been chagrined at those
glosses which, as seems likely, the Apos
tolic age was afterwards prone to put into
his mouth. Moreover, he was too adroit:
simple parabolic teaching "enabled him to
avoid harsh contradictions of the hopes
cherished by his countrymen, and to in
sinuate into their minds his own spiritual
views," x without unduly antagonizing.
But certainly he desired to be under
stood. Apparently the Apostolic age,
wondering why not more of those who
heard Jesus were converted, sought an ex
planation in the fact that he spoke in
parables, so that, in the bitter words of
Isaiah, "Seeing, they may not see;
And hearing, they may not understand."
This contradicts the nature of Jesus: he
no more intended to hide his thought un-

iMenzies, The Earliest Gospel, p. 116.
[130]

-THE STORY-TELLER
der a mystification than he advised hiding
a lamp under a bushel.
These observations have touched on the
parables, first, simply as inventions of a
unique story-telling gift, and, second, as
concrete symbols of spiritual ideas, ac
cording to the familiar function of the
poet as discoverer of analogies between
matter and spirit. A third aspect of their
poetry concerns the quality of those ideas
themselves ; but any analysis of the under
lying truths of the parables must be left
until the years make me wiser for the task.
It seems indubitable that no other body
of poetry so slight in quantity ever con
tained teachings of equal loftiness and
equal scope.

[131]

THE SAYER

THE SAYER
THE preceding chapters have inevi
tably implied Jesus' mastery of ex
pression; indeed, those on "The
Humorist" and "The Story-teller" were
compelled directly to allude to it in several
of its characteristics. But it caUs for the
emphasis of a separate discussion : had the
intellectuality, the insight, the imagina
tion, the moods of Jesus burned themselves
out within a speechless soul, he would
never have become a flame upon the moun
tains. Gifts great as his are never absolutely
tongue-tied: they always to some degree
force or awaken words, as it is their nature
to crave expression of themselves to oth
ers. In so far "always the seer is the
sayer." Yet the gift of speech is not
[135]

THE POET OF GALILEE
necessarily commensurate with other gifts.
It is possible that, of two men equally
sensitive to beauty, truth, and goodness,
one goes under to obhvion, while the other
lives to exert a wide influence and to com
pel a splendid renown. There are those
who die with all their music in them.
Two men with such similar gifts and op
posite fates have I known. For several
years of an upland boyhood it was my
rare privilege to be almost daily with an
aged clergyman whose life began with the
wonderful century. Thomas Stone (un
der the famihar maples and elms of whose
revisited house I am writing this book)
had been among the first, as he was among
the last, of the New England Transcen-
dentalists. From his first work, Sermons
on War, printed far back in 1828, down
to his last words of faith on his death-bed
in 1895, and through the long years be
tween of earnest affiliation with the spirit
ual movements of and ahead of his time,
he was in temperament prophet and seer.
[136]

THE SAYER
He was the spiritual, as he was the physi
cal, neighbor of Emerson, the intimate
friend of whom he told me so much. He
saw the same stars through the same trees.
But it was denied him, as he often re
marked in quiet reminiscence, to find the
fit words ; he could not speak out loud and
bold, like his celebrated kinsman. Those
who knew him remember ; but his volumes,
pleasingly and not greatly written, gather
the dust in the second-hand book-stores
of Boston, while Emerson's are sent round
and round the world. This enormous dif
ference in fate corresponds to no equal
difference in vision, independence, or char
acter; but the mute lips must perish.
There is the weakness, no less than the
power, of silence. The seer is not always
the sayer.
As a prime source of his influence and
of his renown, the Galilean's genius for
expression can hardly be too much
stressed, especially as it is seldom stressed
at all. Why is it that his words are quoted
[137]

THE POET OF GALILEE
on all tongues? Not alone because they
have mighty meanings. The words of
his mouth equaled the meditations of his
heart. Adequate speech is the last gift
of the Giver of gifts.
The halting tongue, used only to ask
ing for bread, or to telling the hour of the
day, must halt indeed in attempting to
speak fittingly of the speech of such men.
After all, only a poet should speak of
the words of a poet. Why did not Shel
ley, or Goethe leave us more of their
thought of the speech of Jesus? Did
they fail to recognize him as their con
temporary, an eternal master of their own
eternal stores?
But one can surmise some of the points
they might have made:
1. Jesus, the sayer, is the revealer of
Jesus, the man. He gives himself —
thought and feeling — to all the world
with the frankness of a child, with the
frankness and richness of self-expression
of the poet. "None tell more freely their
U38]

THE SAYER
deepest secrets than the truly great," says
Nathaniel Schmidt, and he is thinking of
the Prophet of Nazareth. ,
2. But he gives himself without gar
rulity or violence. His impulse to com
municate, his intensity of temperament,
was under a fine control. But this may
not be the right word: control implies
somewhat of plan and effort; and the re
serve and strength of the phrase of Jesus
depended upon the natural action and di
rection of his mind: it was not calculated
or compelled; it came. The sincerity of
a great inspiration needs no course in rhet
oric as the propaedeutic against loquacity
and loud tones: on that side it takes care
of itself. Thus the austerity and power
of his diction that wastes no energy and
never distracts has its roots in his ethical
character: it is one more witness to the
nobility of Jesus.
3. He has what is called "finality of ex
pression," a hackneyed usage which may
derive a certain freshness, thus used for
[139]

THE POET OF GALILEE
one so far from the houses of criticism and
reviewers. All his words have that fine
ultimateness which is in natural things,
in the flowers and birds and trees — per
fection of being after their kind, which,
like the flowers in their perfection, are so
beautifully adjusted to the soul of man
that he delights in them long before he
appreciates the wonder.
4. This, alone, were there not much be
sides, would prove his originality. His
vocabulary was not altogether new.
"Such terms as Redemption, Baptism,
Grace, Faith, Salvation, Regeneration,
Son of Man, Kingdom of Heaven, were
household words of Talmudical Juda
ism." x "Eternal Life" (£*»? a<.<!mos);
Jesus' name for the "summum bonum,"
was current also in Jewish teaching.
Truly it would be strange if Jesus had
not used something of the terminology of
his age. Originality is not a question of

i Emmanuel Deutsch, The Talmud.
[140]

THE SAYER
words but of context: it is not whence
they came, nor what they are, but where
they stand and what they do. These old
terms, woven into the web of his speech,
become like threads newly spun, and parts
of new patterns; just as old ideas, pass
ing through his crystallizing imagination
and vitalizing personality, were born
again, this time to larger life.
And many current expressions he
adapted to new uses. In current Rabbin
ical speech a Rabbi, distinguished for
skill in the law or excellence of character,
was called an "uprooter of mountains;"
Jesus apphed the figure to faith. "Yoke"
was current to express the relation of a
disciple to his master; the Rabbis said
"the yoke of the law;" Jesus used the
figure while drawing men away from their
influence. "In Rabbinical theology," re
marks Bruce in the Expositor's Bible,
"leaver! was used as an emblem of evil
desire: Jesus had the courage to use it
as an emblem of the best thing in the
[141]

THE POET OF GALILEE
world, the Kingdom of God coming into
the heart of the individual and the com
munity." That he spiritualized the mean
ing of the phrase "Kingdom of God," we
all know now ; and the failure of his con
temporaries to understand the new mean
ing is one reason why he was done to
death, mocked as "the king of the Jews."
5. Reference has been made to the repe
titions employed by Jesus, a formal device
of folk speech; in like manner he some
times employs parallelisms, the formal
device of Hebrew poetry, which he doubt
less caught from reading and from hear
ing read or sung the ancient Psalter of
Israel. They are scattered like httle
lyrics among his fragments :
"Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat;
Nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on:
For the life is more than food;
And the body than the raiment."
Or again:
"For of thorns men do not gather (o-uXAeyowi) figs,
[142]

THE SAYER
Nor of a bramble bush gather (rpvywn) they
grapes,"
where, it will be noticed, the English fails
to bring out the Hebraic peculiarity — ob
viously preserved in the Greek — of sub
stituting a different word, while repeating
the thought, in the second verse.1 This
couplet in both thought and form might
have found a place in the old collection of
gnomic poetry of his people ; it reads like
one of the Proverbs.
Sometimes the lyric effect is no less
strong where the parallelism is less formal :
"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy
laden,
And I will give you rest;
Take my yoke upon you,
And learn of me;
For I am meek and lowly in heart;
And ye shall find rest for your souls;
For my yoke is easy,
And my burden is light."

i Different Greek words (Koi/iw/ieiiovs and KaOeiBere),
are also unhappily rendered by one word, "sleeping,"
[143]

THE POET OF GALILEE
I think this little poem induces the same
elemental mood of unquestioning trust as
Whittier's:
"I know not where his islands lift
Their fronded palms in air:
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond his love and care."
And one other instance:
"Consider the lilies how they grow:
They toil not, neither do they spin;
Yet I say unto you,
Even Solomon in all his glory
Was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God doth so clothe the grass in the
field,
Which is to-day, and to-morrow is cast into
the oven;
'How much more you, O ye of little faith ?
Fear not, little flock;
For it is your Father's good pleasure
To give you the Kingdom

"sleep ye" in Luke XXII, 45-46, though here there is
no parallelism.
[144]

THE SAYER
Make for yourselves purses which wax not
old,
A treasure in the heavens that faileth not,
Where no thief draweth near,
Neither moth destroyeth,
For where your treasure is,
There will your heart be also."
There is in such passages an almost
elegiac tenderness by no means unknown
in old Hebrew poetry. They recall that
most perfect lyric of the Anthology of his
ancestors:"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures ;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He guideth me in the paths of righteousness for
his Name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for thou art with me:
Thy rod and thy staff", they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence
of mine enemies: [145]

THE POET OF GALILEE
Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup run
neth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the
days of my life :
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for-

The Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer
have long been chanted in all cathedrals:
they have the same inherent singing qual
ity as the Psalter.
But beautiful as such passages are, they
encounter as the work of Jesus two ob
jections: first, the English and the Greek
may have their own movement and over
tones, subtle effects, not correspondent to
anything in the lost Aramaic of Jesus;
secondly, the longer of them may some
times be centos,1 like the Sermon on the
Mount, brought together from sayings of
Jesus not originally uttered as wholes.
Yet at all events they remind us that
there must have been at times a lyrical

i They have not, like the Parables, so exact a unity as
to make this internally impossible.
[146]

THE SAYER
note of much loveliness in the Master's
voice. 6. But were a poet-critic permitted to
name but one quality of the speech of the
Poet of Gahlee, that would be, I think,
its expression of universal and spiritual
principles in particular and concrete
terms. "Jesus," says Renan, the one
biographer of Jesus who could have best
developed the theme of this book, "is at
once very ideahstic in his conceptions and
very materialistic in his expressions."
Ever is he thinking, dreaming, beholding
the invisible and intangible hfe of the
spirit, a world out of time and space; but
ever does he speak of it, as was observed
in the preceding chapter on the parables,
in figures drawn from this world of rock
and stream, with its sunbright houses and
vineyards. He almost never pronounces
maxim or idea in abstract literality: the
Golden Rule is a rare exception. Thus he
becomes a stumbling-block to literal
minds ; and creeds over which armies have
[147]

THE POET OF GALILEE
fought, and cults which have sapped the
life-blood out of men, have been evolved
from his figures: the coming of a great
poet is sometimes fraught with peril.

[148]

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE
BUT Jesus was not only the Seer and
the Sayer, but the Doer, who lived
independently, picturesquely, help
fully, bravely, and died grandly; and a
personality so extraordinary in thought,
speech, and act leaves no ordinary impres
sion behind it. It becomes a hero in the
memories of generations; in any age for
good or ill the theme of poetry — one with
the sun and the stars that fire the imagina
tions of men; in a credulous age of oral
traditions and story-telling, the center
around which develop innumerable leg
ends. So in the mediaeval Teutonic
world, Theodoric became the Dietrich of
Bern in Middle High German; Carolus
the Charlemagne, and the British king the
Arthur of Old French and Middle Eng
lish romance ; so in ancient India Gautama
[151]

THE POET OF GALILEE
became the Buddha of the stories lately
retold by Edwin Arnold. And so it is
that much about Jesus belongs to the
poetic folk-lore of the race; and it seems
fit, in concluding this essay on the Poet
of Galilee, to make some mention of the
poetry to which he gave rise.
I shall omit reference to those religious
ideas, so widespread just before the begin
ning of our era, which are reflected in such
documents as the book of Enoch and the
Psalms of Solomon, and in the Messianic
interpretations of the Old Testament
prophecies, disregarding as well the beliefs
peculiar to the Apostolic church, hke those
in the power over scorpions and in the gift
of tongues; for, although they all helped
to create and shape the biographical ma
terial of the Gospels, they do not concern
the unconscious and loving activity of
the popular imagination out of which, in
the main, the Synoptic legends must have
grown. These legends tell chiefly of marvels
[152]

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE
that happened to Jesus, or to those asso
ciated with him, and marvels that he him
self accomplished. They employ the
machinery of the divine intervention of
dreams, supernatural visits, heavenly
voices, and signs, so familiar in the legends
about other great men. The miraculous
birth of Jesus recalls Gautama's or Zo
roaster's; Pythagoras was supposed to be
the son of Apollo, ApoUonius of Tyana
of Zeus, Simon Magus of the Most High
and a virgin; and it was rumored during
Plato's own lifetime at Athens that he was
the son of Apollo, a rumor which his
nephew Speucippus took seriously enough
to deny at Plato's funeral; and on the
temple of Luxor, Egyptologists tell us,
may still be read of the birth of Amon-
hotep III (18th dynasty) from a virgin
mother, though in this instance the state
ment is not a legend but a royal boast.1

1 Cf. "Most heroes of ancient romance were born as
the fruit of a love attachment in which at least one of
the parties was originally represented as of divine origin."
[153]

THE POET OF GALILEE
They relate portentous cures and other
mighty works of their hero, not without
parallels in the legends of other heroes of
the human race. From Empedocles to
Xavier men have raised the dead. The
chronicles of the saints down to the present
day describe circumstantially their won
der-working powers.
But the legends about Jesus are pecu
liarly a factor of poetic charm in an an
cient narrative; for, though the miracu
lous in the Gospels be not true as history,
it is usually true as beauty, and may serve
the truth of history as its witness and as
its symbol.
The miraculous in the Gospels serves
as the witness to the preeminence of
Jesus, in that it could never have grown
up around a base or an inferior man.
There is no smoke without some fire. The
roots of praise grow only in a fertile soil.
The imagination has never exalted the

Schofield, English Literature from the Conquest to Chau
cer, 1906, p. 189.
[154]

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE
renegadoes to the high priests, nor the
cut-throats to the saviors. Its glowing
creations must be kindled by living coals.
Thus the legends about Jesus are welcome.
The miraculous in the Gospels serves as
a symbol of the life and thought of Jesus,
in that it powerfully interprets and en
forces their meaning. It is a translation
of a difficult spiritual into a simple ma
terial language. It is, in each case, to
borrow Carpenter's words, "the pictorial
utterance of an idea." 1 It is an uncon
scious poetic product of the folk-mind,
analogous to that translation of his spirit
ual ideas into material symbols, con
sciously made by Jesus.
Thus the myths of the immaculate con
ception, the star in the east, the voices of
angels and the descending dove, the
temptation, the transfiguration, the rend
ing of the temple veil,2 the darkness and

ij. Estlin Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth
Century. Chap. IV.
2 The rending of the veil before the Holy of Holies is
£1551

THE POET OF GALILEE
the earthquake, and the resurrection, have
meanings, which I will not be rude enough
to expound. In the leaping of the babe
in Elizabeth's womb there is the same
naive symbolism in a quaint and homely
form, and quite clear in origin and mean
ing — obviously a reflection of the historic
relations between John and one whom he
recognized as greater.
The miracles ascribed to Jesus have the
same significance. It is quite likely that
his gentle and commanding personahty
quieted the epileptic and the mentally de
ranged, who in those cruelly ignorant
times roamed at large in such numbers;
and it is quite likely that this contributed
to the legends of his cures ; as many an
other miracle might be traced by critics to
some basis in an occurrence imperfectly
remembered (for instance, the story of the
shekel in the fish's mouth hints that Peter

developed in the Hebrew Gospel into the fracture of the
lintel: "Superliminare templi infinitse magnitudinis frac-
tum esse atque divisum."
[156]

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE
eked out the small purse of the disciples
by occasionally plying his trade), or to
some basis in a parable or figurative say
ing not understood (as, for instance, the
twice reported miracle of the feeding of
the multitudes). But whatever their
source, as finally wrought out these
legends symbolize the love and the faith
that dominated a man who went about
doing good and preaching the power of
God. Truly did Jesus make the lame to
walk and the blind to see ; and he did feed
the multitudes, and cast out devils, and
those who had his faith in his truth were
made whole. And to those who were with
him his assuring voice may well have
calmed the tempest and the waters. So
legend has dealt with Gautama and with
Francis of Assisi.
Though in the so-called Apocrypha are
a few stories of the same beautiful sym
bolism — some in a vein of the miraculous,
like that of the clay birds made to live as
the child Jesus claps his hands and shouts,
[157]

THE POET OF GALILEE
"Go, fly away, and while ye live remember
me;" and others surprising us by their
simple realism, hke that of Jesus crowned
with flowers by his playmates — yet as a
whole they but bring into rehef the superi
ority of the Synoptic legends. Like the
story in John of the turning of the water
into wine, they reduce Jesus to the level
of the mediaeval wizard, delighting, like
Mephistopheles, who drew wine from au
gur holes, in astonishing by grotesque sur
prises. Such tales are the offspring of
a degraded ideal of Jesus, as one arro
gantly and aimlessly powerful, and thus
totally lack the lovely symbolic propriety
of those in the Synoptics. And they
bear no witness to the man we have there
become acquainted with.
If some great poet, after studying the
historic figure of Jesus, had devised an
epic to celebrate him with the conscious
inventions of symbolic beauty, he could
never have rivaled the unconscious crea
tions of the poet folk-soul of Palestine.
[158]

A HERO OF FOLK-LORE
Slowly and surely, with unerring imagina
tion of personal affection, it gave birth
and being to those legends which the un
known authors of our Gospels none too
soon gathered up into the story of one of
the most majestic of all the masters and
deliverers of hfe that ever came forth "out
of the bosom of humanity." r

i As a pendant to the foregoing chapter, the following
disconnected observations may be permitted.
1. Many details of the legends illustrate this symbolic
propriety, as the casting the devils into swine and the
grotesque stampede into the lake.
2. The legend of the Walk to Emmaus bears peculiarly
the folk character, in distinction to traditions of an
ecclesiastical or doctrinal origin. Its' motif is a common
one in old balladry and popular tale, and it is worked
out by the author of Luke with an artless skill beyond
all praise.
3. The myth of the resurrection is not only a symbol
of the spirit and influence of Jesus as still unsubdued,
but an outgrowth of humanity's craving for a sequel,
when Death has written at the end of the story its
blunt FINIS.

[159]

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