s hero achieve that
greatest of all defeats, victory, _he_ knew. He knew what would come
of it, even if it came. He understood the fate of Christ and of all
idealists, doomed to see themselves worshipped and their ideas
rejected in a religion or a State founded like a national monument to
perpetuate their defeat. But the Jewish State would not even come. He
had met his Viennese brethren but yesterday; in the Leopoldstadt,
frowsy with the gaberdines and side-curls of Galicia; in the Prater,
arrogantly radiant in gleaming carriages with spick-and-span
footmen--that strange race that could build up cities for others but
never for itself; that professed to be both a religion and a
nationality, and was often neither. The grotesquerie of history!
Moses, Sinai, Palestine, Isaiah, Ezra, the Temple, Christ, the Exile,
the Ghettos, the Martyrdoms--all this to give the Austrian comic
papers jokes about stockbrokers with noses big enough to support
unheld opera--glasses. And even supposing another miraculous link came
to add itself to that wonderful chain, the happier Jews of the new
State would be born into it as children to an enriched man,
unconscious of the struggles, accepting the luxuries, growing
big-bellied and narrow-souled. The Temple would be rebuilt. _Et
apres?_ The architect would send in the bill. People would dine and
dig one another in the ribs and tell the old smoking-room stories.
There would be fashionable dressmakers. The synagogue would persecute
those who were larger than it, the professional priests would prate of
spiritualities to an applausive animal world, the press would be run
in the interests of capitalists and politicians, the little writers
would grow spiteful against those who did not call them great, the
managers of the national theatre would advance their mistresses to
leading parts. Yes, the ox would come and drink the water, and
Jeshurun would wax fat and kick. "For that which is crooked cannot be
made straight." Menander's comedies were fresh from the mint, the Book
of Proverbs as new as the morning paper. No, he could not dream. Let
the younger races dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race
that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the
first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man
under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit
disintegrated! _Omnia Vanitas_, this too was vanity.

_And the slaughterer came and slaughtered the