olitary marble figure of a girl that
looked in on the Ghetto alley from a boundary wall. Yes; he had
worshipped at the shrine of the Beautiful; he had prated of the
Renaissance. He had written--with the multiform adaptiveness of his
race--French poems with Hellenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics--half
felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden
intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save
perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence
of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of
the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking of life.

_And a staff came and smote the dog which had bitten the cat, which
had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad
Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

Yes, he was a Jew at heart. The childhood in the Ghetto, the long
heredity, had bound him in emotions and impulses as with
phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! The very melody awakened
associations innumerable. He saw in a swift panorama the intense inner
life of a curly-headed child roaming in the narrow cincture of the
Ghetto, amid the picturesque high houses. A reflex of the child's old
joy in the Festivals glowed in his soul. How charming this quaint
sequence of Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles; this
survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, this living in the
souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their
booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap
himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of
prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren
ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His
imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo,
bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants
in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers
rowing round and round the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow
cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be
persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for
emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they
were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring
into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German
merchants, then Levantines, helping to build up the commercial capital
of the fifteenth century. He saw the later ac