Yes, the careers which we may observe from day to day may certainly prove stumbling blocks to some of us. The thriving politician or contractor, for instance, Dives in his barouche, the blooming members of literary cliques, the fashionable clergymen and poets, chorusing gently to feminine audiences, who listen intent, perhaps even "weeping in a rapturous sense of art," as Heine tells us the women of his day wept when they heard the sweet voices of the evirates singing of passion, of
Liebes fehnen, Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss--
how admirable are all these characters! These, indeed, are careers to move any but the steadfast mind.
And yet, even in Philistia, it is not every one that will yearn after successes like these. In Philistia, far from the promised land, the exile may yet contemplate without desire all these desirable things, envying neither them nor their possessors. He may even indulge in a saving scorn of them, a scorn of the main achievements, the popular men of the Philistine community; bathing himself in irony as a tonic against the spiritual malaria. Such a man I once knew, a man of Askelon. He lived in that rich city as a recluse, and according to any standard recognized in Askelon, he was not rich. On this text he would sometimes quote delightful old Rutebeuf:
Je ne sai par ou je coumance, Tant ai de matyère abondance Por parleir de ma povretei.
Yet this man was not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember, came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it, gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was "a Sunday's child," referring to some superstition not current in that community--and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was really there. But they were legends which would have startled the residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fashionable street in the place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and as we passed slowly before the Greek houses he pronounced, one by one, these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator, Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of our furtive men lives there--one of our men of three letters. We have as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for the palace, did not see the owner.
