Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

The subtle melody of the German tongue-that sort of tartness in it which is really more agreeable than the smoother and sweeter voices of the children of the south, enabling it in the hands of masters like Luther and Heine to strike with unerring touch the sternest notes of rebuke and the most plaintive notes of grief, and making it to a peculiar degree the language of human feeling-effects in these opening lines of the Prologue a preparation of the heart for the coming scene"Alle seien gegrüsst, welche die Liebe

hier

Um den Heiland vereint, trauernd ihm nachzugeh'n

Auf dem wege des Leidens

Bis zur Stätte der Grabesruh." 1

The Christus enters, meek and riding upon an ass, and passes into the great open area which lies between the Houses of Pilate and Annas. In the little covered stage behind, the traders are driving their bargains with a foretaste of that critical acumen which has made their descendants, in default of a nobler destiny, the shrewdest merchantmen in Europe. The indignant rebuke of the Christus breaks through the noise of the business. This traffic is twicecursed. It is not only that God is dishonoured, but that man is wronged. "My House shall be called of all nations the House of Prayer."

In

neglecting the reverence due to Jehovah the race has lost sight of its mission in the world.

When the opposition begins to gather strength the justice of the reproach becomes apparent. The nation is morally rotten. The Merchants, aflame with petty vengeance and bent on making good their losses; the Priests, full of zeal for their ritual; the Rabbis, jealous for the Law; Annas, with his blind and fanatical conservatism; Caiaphas, with his larger outlook, a prey to expediency, equally fearful of the power of the Romans and of Christ; the mob, with its judgment at the mercy of every fresh gust of passion, all these elements, dangerous in themselves and yet more terribly dangerous when reconciled for the destruction of goodness, display a condition of the public mind in face of which no disaster, however great, can seem tonishing.

seem as

[blocks in formation]

1 Hail to ye all, whom Love of Christ
Assembles here for solemn tryst,
To follow Him who came to save,
His road of sorrow to the grave !

already, as by some subtle affinity, in the very colours which the executioners are afterwards seen to wear, breaks in rudely upon this communion of peace:-"It might have been sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor." The spectator is conscious of a character, which in its actuality, its definiteness, stands alone. The Christus has so much of that spectral, haunting beauty, which a subtle critic has pointed to as the distinguishing trait of trait of the Suffering Servant, that His seems rather a gracious presence moving behind a veil. The other figures are mostly rough blocks of character, in which we may perhaps detect here and there a finely carved fragment. But Judas is chiselled with the care of a modern dramatist. We can all of us, besides, move upon his plane. For it is no splendid Archangel of wickedness, as in the Rubens in the Brera at Milan, whose tremendous power for evil seems to dwarf the weaker characters of his companions, but only the poor, mean Judas of Leonardo that we see here. In a touch, probably the most striking in the play, he is made to develop to the full the low cunning of his nature. dares to play fast and loose with the conscience of Christ. He revolves in his mind the advantage of the offer he has received, and determines to accept it, since he seems to stand to gain much and lose nothing. If Christ is ruined, the reward will be his. But, if not, he will throw himself at Christ's feet,

He

for his Master appears too loving and gracious to be able to refuse him pardon.

The play now reaches its uttermost simplicity and splendour. The Last Supper is presented as Leonardo imagined it and as it will evermore be dreamed of by the western world. The Eleven, so insufficient as they seem to us throughout the rest of the great tragedy, are suddenly raised by the sacred food to a supernatural love and courage. "O Liebevollster! Ewig wollen wir in Liebe mit Dir vereinigt bleiben!" Judas alone is silent, and, having also received the Cup as well as the Bread, passes out into the darkness. With his departure the deep love of the Church, the New Commandment, eclipsed by the horror of the preceding moments, breaks forth again and seems, during the brief paraphrase of St John's record and the concluding hymn of praise, to attain that mysterious and impenetrable radiance which makes of the whole scene the pearl of great price, the imperishable memory in the Passion Play. The thought of "a great thing done for us long ago" takes possession of the mind. And with it the play changes its character and assumes a sort of inevitableness, so that all that follows appears rather to be the necessary sequel to that tremendous occasion than a series of events independent of it and still able to be averted by mortal men. The very Crucifixion, which seems beforehand so impossible a subject for dramatic

treatment, is gradually felt to be the only possible or sufficient conclusion to the rest, a scene to be patiently and reverently endured. Yet there is no temptation to depreciate; to forget, as we are carried through the final acts, as we behold the agony, the insult, the torture, or that yet more tremendous indignity when the Christus is placed beside Barabbas and rejected by the crowd, that "He, to whom all these things were done, was the Son of God." For the Chorus lays a careful emphasis on that double aspect of the Passion, on that cardinal division in the nature of Christ's suffering, without which the whole becomes an insoluble enigma and upon which the unearthly pathos of it wholly turns. The distinction between His attitude towards the load of sin which He had undertaken to bear and that which He took up towards His own physical and mental pain is never confused. The Agony in the Garden, so hopelessly inexplicable on the modern assumption that Christ was concerned at His own impending fate, is presented in its true light as the shrinking of an exceeding righteous Man from contact with the sins of Humanity. But His trial, His

bitter pains and death, He meets with that perfect dignity of silence, which came new into the earth with Him and has set a whole world of nobility between the Greeks, with their endless exclamations of personal distress or their later self- complacent stoicism, and ourselves. The proffered alleviation of His sufferings is even deliberately refused until it is required to give the natural forces strength for the last act of resignation.

Much has dropped out of the Passion Play since Judas was a comic character to whom a simpler body of spectators looked for relief from the awful gloom of the rest. Something more may some day disappear-the Figure springing rapidly from the grave on Easter morning and the final ineffective Tableau of Christin-glory. The Empty Tomb and the Appearance to Mary are the appropriate ending to a play the strength of which lies in the purity of its intention and the depth of its feeling.

"Christen, senkt am Pilgerstabe

Hier das Haupt in Ehrfureht still
Denn ihr steht am heiligen Grabe
Dessen, der statt goldner Gabe
Nur ein Herz voll Einfalt will."

TSUNE-AND THE O JO-SAN.

BY ANNE HEARD DYER.

THE O Jo-san will never forget the first time she saw Tsune; nor the naïveté expressed to her Occidental mind by the latter's innocent little pink heels upturned to view, as she knelt before them. Tsune's earnestness of expression, and the soft flood of staccato Japanese addressed passionately to Robert, vividly stirred the O Jo-san's curiosity.

"What does she say, Robert?" demanded his sister eagerly. "Tell me what she says.

[ocr errors]

"She says," replied Robert, smiling reassuringly at Tsune, "that she is in much trouble,or, as she puts it, her 'foolishness is great,'-and she desires us to augustly-intercede for her with Suzuki, her father.""

"Suzuki! Good gracious! I didn't know he had a grownup daughter," ejaculated the O Jo-san in amazement. Suzuki was their silken-robed majordomo, the keeper of their temporal possessions and the arbiter of their domestic destinies. Smooth, silent, capable, picturesque, he appeared to be not a day over twenty-eight.

"Tsune is his daughter by a former wife; and the poor little thing is in a mix-up. She says her father has arranged a marriage for her; and she does not wish to marry."

"Of course she can't be married against her will," cried his sister indignantly. "I am surprised at Suzuki.”

"But you know, dear——” "Wait, Robert," interrupted the O Jo-san impressively. "Ask her if there is any one else she does wish to

marry. And guilefully she watched Tsune while this leading question was put.

That maiden laughed and shook her head, blushing until she glowed like a wild mountain-azalea, while the syllabic counterpoint flowed more emphatically than ever.

"No," translated Robert, "there is no one else whom she wishes to marry; only she wishes not to marry zesshite nai! [never at all!] Of course she knows that every one must marry. And twice already has her father yielded to her foolish and unworthy whim, so that now she dares say no more. But if only we of so great importance and power, and having moreover different marriage customs in our honourable country would deign to speak with him—

"She would be willing to work, oh yes! Perhaps the O Jo-san would like a maid, or perhaps she would be desiring a seamstress. Yes, she could sew!" And proudly Tsune held up a little plump forefinger adorned with the ridiculous perforated band the Japanese call a thimble.

As for the O Jo-san, she was quite lost in contemplating

the aforesaid pink heels, and in listening to the soft minor timbre of Tsune's voice,-which, she told herself, was doubtless due entirely to the construction of the Japanese larynx, and not to emotional stress of feeling. Meantime, was there ever, since the days of Græco- Buddhist Kwannons, such a line of cheek and chin and throat?

Robert, at his sister's peremptory entreaty, gave the desired promise to Tsune; and the pretty thing, with many pleasing dips of her small person, much embarrassment, more blushes and smiles, finally managed to reach that port of safety-the open door,-careful not once to turn upon her hosts her charmingly decorative back, with its highly convolute chignon, its stiffly arranged loops of embroidered obi, and its delicious bare pink heels.

he may appear to concede in the present.

"You know, dear," said Robert, in the course of the heated discussion that followed,-if a discussion may be called heated in which the warmth is all on one side,"you know, we can't expect to overturn the customs of the country in order to gratify our own sentiment. It is quite true what Suzuki says, twenty is a mature age for an unmarried girl in Japan; and fathers here look to their children for the maintenance of their old age. Besides which, Suzuki has a young wife and a brood of small children to look after."

"I always said Suzuki had a crafty eye," declared the O Jo-san vindictively.

Robert laughed outright. "What, Suzuki the beautiful! Suzuki the perfect!" he teased. "A week ago, who could say enough in praise of Suzuki? His smile alone, you used to declare—”

[ocr errors]

Being young and ardent, new to the country and its customs, and still brimming with the bewildering enchantment of Japan itself, and the delight "One can smile, and smile, of coming over to keep house and be a villain still,' was for her adored brother, -now the obvious retort. "Robert, growing all too fast into a darling," changing her tactics, staid university professor-this "do find out what is the true little intimate touch with the reason the real little truly very heart of things domes- reason, hidden 'way down deep tic seemed to the O Jo-san in the nest of alleged reasons intensely and dramatically in--why Tsune does not want to teresting. marry. And if it's a good one, I mean to see that she doesn't have to."

Suzuki was duly "spoken to," cautiously and guardedly, by Robert, to whom the smiling and deferential major - domo returned the polite evasions of the subtle, patient Oriental, who means to have his own way in the end, however much

"I knew it! I knew there was something back of it all," exclaimed the O Jo-san triumphantly, when the pathetic little story finally came out.

For it would seem that

« PredošláPokračovať »