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The interest of life would be multiplied by its own square power could we communicate with the myriad dead watching us from their mountain summits. Mr. Zangwill, in a poem that should live, draws for us a pathetic picture of blind children playing in a garden, laughing, romping. All their lives they have lived in darkness; they are content.
This has been shown with great force and clearness by Mr. Zangwill under his excellent image of the "Melting Pot."
Zangwill of amalgamation. I think most of us at Crunden do not like to feel that our branch and others like it are melting pots; at any rate of a heat so fierce that it will melt away the national characteristics of each little stranger so fierce that it will level all picturesqueness into deadly sameness.
I called it the 'Female Club' instead of 'An Old Maids Club, as Mr Zangwill did, for there were no old maids waiting near the oven.
His importance to us does not lie in the circumstance that his autobiography "that wonderful bit of Autobiography," as George Eliot speaks of it, or "that curious and rare book," as Dean Milman calls it and the pictures drawn of him by Berthold Auerbach and Israel Zangwill have made him the hero of some of the world's best biographies and novels.
Zangwill, in his vivid sketch, "The Maker of Lenses," makes this single love-episode in the life of Spinoza the controlling impulse of his life, probably reasoning on the premise that men who mark epochs are ever and always, without exception, those with the love nature strongly implanted in their hearts.
But it is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill.
HUMPHRY WARD, journalist and author, sometime Fellow of Brasenose College, editor of several biographical and historical works. H.G. WELLS, novelist, author of "Tono Bungay" and "Ann Veronica." MARGARET L. WOODS, poet; her "Wild Justice" and "The Invader" have placed her in the front rank. ISRAEL ZANGWILL, novelist, poet, dramatist, interpreter of the modern Jewish spirit.
Perhaps some of them, or of their friends, begin to believe that Mr Zangwill was not quite untruthful in his phrase that "players are only men and women spoilt," which, of course, he did not intend to be of universal application. Still, it can hardly be denied that "G.B.S." was needlessly severe.
I will not rob the reader by quoting from "The Primrose Sphinx" that gem of letters must ever stand together without subtraction of a word. It belongs to the realm of the lapidary, and its facets can not be transferred. Yet when Mr. Zangwill refers to the Mephistophelian curl of Lord Beaconsfield's lip, the word is used advisedly.
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