l Jew's self-mastery before the
grosser-brained persecutor.

I think these things and the Sphinx yields up his secret--the open
secret of the Ghetto parvenu.

V

But as I look again upon his strange Eastern face, so deep-lined, so
haggard, something subtler and finer calls to me from the ruins of its
melancholy beauty.

Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of
ideas and wit, but--a Heine of action--the fantasy of personal
adventure, and--when audacity has been crowned by empery--of dramatic
surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant
castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.

To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its
very constitution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the
Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young
England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats
whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance
to which these young English squires and nobles are born. The
bourgeois he hates--only the pomp of sovereignty and the pathos of
poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy,
wherein the nobles shall make happy the People that is exploited by
the middle classes. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and
the poor are united in God, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into
which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is
split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in
revolt with Byron and Shelley against a Philistine world. And later,
to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the
individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters,
he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine
that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and
its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle,
popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined
executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a
great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism.
That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his
day are only dimly aware, because like their constitution it has
evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is
caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent
possibilities. And in very