former friends, the
Hegelians, have turned out scamps. Human misery is too great for men to
do without faith."

The completest picture of the transformation, truer than any given in
letters, reports, or reminiscences, is in his last two productions, the
_Romanzero_ and the "Confessions." There can be no more explicit
description of the poet's conversion than is contained in these
"confessions." During his sickness he sought a palliative for his
pains--in the Bible. With a melancholy smile his mind reverted to the
memories of his youth, to the heroism which is the underlying principle
of Judaism. The Psalmist's consolations, the elevating principles laid
down in the Pentateuch, exerted a powerful attraction upon him, and
filled his soul with exalted thoughts, shaped into words in the
"Confessions":[106] "Formerly I felt little affection for Moses,
probably because the Hellenic spirit was dominant within me, and I could
not pardon the Jewish lawgiver for his intolerance of images, and every
sort of plastic representation. I failed to see that despite his hostile
attitude to art, Moses was himself a great artist, gifted with the true
artist's spirit. Only in him, as in his Egyptian neighbors, the artistic
instinct was exercised solely upon the colossal and the indestructible.
But unlike the Egyptians he did not shape his works of art out of brick
or granite. His pyramids were built of men, his obelisks hewn out of
human material. A feeble race of shepherds he transformed into a people
bidding defiance to the centuries--a great, eternal, holy people, God's
people, an exemplar to all other peoples, the prototype of mankind: he
created Israel. With greater justice than the Roman poet could this
artist, the son of Amram and Jochebed the midwife, boast of having
erected a monument more enduring than brass.

As for the artist, so I lacked reverence for his work, the Jews,
doubtless on account of my Greek predilections, antagonistic to Judaic
asceticism. My love for Hellas has since declined. Now I understand that
the Greeks were only beautiful youths, while the Jews have always been
men, powerful, inflexible men, not only in early times, to-day, too, in
spite of eighteen hundred years of persecution and misery. I have learnt
to appreciate them, and were pride of birth not absurd in a champion of
the revolution and its democratic principles, the writer of these
leaflets would boast that his ancestors belonged to the noble house