sole evidence brought by the prosecution was that of the district surveyor, who deposed that he had measured the building and found it was larger in area and contained more cubic feet of air-that is to say, that it was a better and, according to all modern sanitary views, a healthier building-than the Council's curious by-laws allowed to a single-storied cottage not of brick or stone. Such has been my individual experience. It is by no means a solitary one in England. Two years ago a philanthropic gentleman (I do not myself claim to be philanthropic), Mr. Till, built just such another cottage in the Dartford district, and with just the same result; and in case after case landlords who have wished to help their tenants have found themselves frustrated at the outset by the tyranny of by-laws, introduced perhaps in ignorance, but maintained since, and insisted on with ever-growing intensity in local trade interests. In one case that I have heard of, it has been carried so far that a poor Cornishman possessed of a few roods of land, and who had got together during a number of years the boulders used from time immemorial in the local cottage-building, found after all his labour that he would not be allowed to build with them. But these cases have over and over again been told in print. What I wish to impress upon my readers is that it is not mere stupidity that is to blame for the enforcing in rural districts of these grotesque town laws, but that there is behind it an insistent power of speculation and trade which finds in these laws its legal way to wealth. In this, I have no wish to make any attack on individual land speculators or individual tradesmen who enter the Rural Councils to support or extend a system by which their class profits. Their position is just as honourable as that of the brewers and railway directors and shipping owners, who go into Parliament to push imperially the interests of beer and high traffic dividends, and the extension of our sea-borne trade. All of these public men, I do not doubt, are intimately convinced that they are fulfilling a patriotic duty in the line they take on the questions that interest them, but this does not prevent me from insisting on the public danger there is in a state of rural things where power has passed away from the true rural population into the hands of a class whose interest is opposed to theirs. The Building By-laws were originally framed as a check on speculative building; speculation has accommodated itself to them, and is now using them to secure to itself a monopoly of rural profit. It must be clearly understood that the inexpensive modern methods of house construction (and there are many such which dispense altogether with bricks and mortar, and even with the necessity of employing a professional builder to apply them to new houses) are a menace to the trade, and that it is the trade that is now opposing all reform. Yet reform there must be, for it is incredible that the existing state of things-which is slowly but very seriously rousing indignation everywhere among the agricultural poor, and is distinctly aggravating their position, already difficult enough, of remaining on the land-should be allowed, for national reasons and reasons of justice and humanity, to continue. I have no doubt that it will be dealt with in the coming Parliament, whichever party succeeds to power. A very short amendment of the Public Health Act would do all that is immediately necessary in regard to rural housing. It might be enacted very briefly that no by-law of any Rural Sanitary Authority shall apply to any new building to be erected on a freehold property where such building is more than a given number of yards from the nearest other dwelling, or from the property of an adjacent owner, This would encourage landowners to give sufficient ground enclosing their new cottages, as exempting them in such cases from by-law restrictions, and it would draw at once the necessary distinction between true rural and suburban conditions. The housing question, however, is in my opinion, though the most crying evil of the moment, only a small part of the rural reform I should like to see advocated. The whole condition of the rural poor requires reconsideration in the light of modern economy, modern science, and our new knowledge of the laws of human race competition. But this is a subject far beyond my present scope. To-day I can only express a hope that some influential member of the House of Commons or some enlightened Peer may take the By-law Question up and make it his own. I am convinced that, with full public light thrown on it, an end would be speedily put to the huge abuses now rampant in some of our rural districts, and the causes of the anger raging so strongly against their Councils in the bosoms of our too mute peasantry. The certainty that these are with me, at least in my own part of Sussex, in what I am saying is my best justification for pleading here publicly their cause. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT. Crabbet Park, Crawley: September 12, 1904. THE LAND OF JARGON1 THE following sketch records merely the impressions of a short excursion, undertaken about two years ago, into the land of Jargon or Yiddish literature. I should be happy could I persuade others to make the journey for themselves. Partly for my sake, that I may have someone with whom to compare experiences. Partly for their own, because there must be many who would enjoy it as much as I, and profit by it more. Partly for the sake of the land, which is in great measure ignorant of its own treasures, and allowing its unique and fragile monuments to crumble away in the atmosphere of present-day civilisation. Within their walls lurk the ghosts that have been ousted from the literatures of other lands. In one dark and dusty corner, for instance, there dwells Bovo, alias the tale of the Bevies of Hampton, of which an edition was printed-not as a literary curiosity-as lately as 1895. But even this last refuge is falling to ruin about their ears. Its disappearance, curiously enough, will coincide, not with the subjugation, but with the emancipation, both social and moral, of those who speak it. It is the language of the Russian Pale, which will vanish as surely as the Ghetto and the Jewry vanished in times past. Even the Zionists do not wish to preserve the Jargon by transplanting it root and branch to Palestine. It must ever remain associated with a period of distress and outward humiliation; it is too obviously borrowed and its corruption of the Hebrew is looked upon as unpardonable. Then, again, its composite nature and strange, but not untraceable, history are just what constitute its great interest. Professor L. Wiener has shown that the name Jargon is not really applicable to the Judeo-German language, for its elements are For nine-tenths of the information contained in this article I am indebted to Professor L. Wiener's History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, as well as to the author for the kindest personal help and encouragement. For the present sketch, however, and the translations which it includes, no one is responsiblebut myself. now closely welded together and it is pervaded by a spirit all its own. But the word Jargon has a fascination about it, and it is used, in Russia, by Russian and Jewish writers alike. I retain it in this chapter as designating the Judeo-German literature which has arisen in Russia, and with which I am mainly concerned. The traveller to the land of Jargon requires the ability to read the Hebrew printing letters; a thorough knowledge of German; a good Hebrew-English dictionary (that of Bresslau, for example). A Polish-English dictionary; and the love which is better than patience, and which may have for its object either philology, history, folklore, literature pure and simple, the people of the land, or all five together. The student should also master the fairly easy Russian alphabet, partly that he may be able to use the excellent little Russian-Jargon dictionary of Lifshitz. Harkavy's Yiddish-English dictionary (New York, 1898, published by the author), though by no means complete, is indispensable, and contains valuable information on the Jargon dialects.2 A knowledge of the Hebrew, Polish, or Russian languages is not necessary; but a certain familiarity with Hebrew is always of help. more Neither is it needful to know Turkish, though I will mention, for the special delight of the philologist, that Turkish words have been reported to occur in the Jargon, alongside the latest importations from England, France, and America. Certain books are idiomatic, and therefore more difficult than others. Some abound in Hebraisms and quotations from the Talmud, and there are cases where neither love nor dictionaries will avail, and the student must needs have recourse to a specialist. German is indispensable, because Jargon or Yiddish, which is the 'Yiddish' way of pronouncing Jüdisch, short for Jüdisch-Deutsch, is fundamentally a German dialect of the Middle Rhine. It was imported into Poland, and thence into Russia, by German-Jewish immigrants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though old German, it is no more bad German than Provençal is bad French. The Hebrew words are corrupt in pronunciation, though not in spelling, while the Slavic words are spelt phonetically. The land of Jargon Literature is a queer, topsy-turvy place, at once far and near; a land in which the soil, represented by the certainty of getting the books you want, continually gives way beneath your feet; in which a quarterly may appear three times in six years and never again, in which a serial edition comes to an end the day on which you send in your subscription, and books go out of print as fast as they come in. A land in which authors frequently apologise for writing in their 2 Yiddish books, whether printed in Russia or America, can be obtained through R. Mazin & Co., 59 Old Montague Street, London, N.E. mother tongue; in which the said authors may have not one, but several-even half a dozen-pseudonyms a-piece; in which, while the said tongue seems intended for continual joking, there is more to move to tears than to laughter; a land in which the deepest and tenderest parental love exists alongside a system of education which can only be described as medieval; a land of prayers and curses; a land of feasts and fasts, charms and superstitions numberless, of saints and relics and holy graves, where Greek and Roman Catholics are termed picture and idol worshippers; a land in which there is more internal dissension and more kindliness of feeling towards the rest of the world than is commonly supposed. The traveller's opinion of it on his return will depend, in this case also, on the spirit with which he set out. Of its interest and novelty, and all its wealth of folklore, there can be no doubt, but is it otherwise attractive? 'The Jews' (quoth the Grandmother in Meisach's Folk-Tales) 'will become, through suffering, better Jews with more Jewish hearts.' Occasional adversity is good for many of us, but that prolonged periods of oppression, isolation, poverty and ignorance, should be calculated to bring out all the best qualities of either nations or individuals, would run contrary to every law of social progress. The reader is at times tempted to wonder, if it would not be better for the credit of Jew as well as Christian were the history of Russian Judaism, in all its phases, never written. But this would involve sacrificing the record of too much that is admirable. And when that history is taken in hand, some of its most precious elements will be found in the Jargon books of the nineteenth century. Towards the first quarter of that period, still more towards its second half, certain Russian Jews awoke to a sense of the condition of their people, and they began writing about them, so that the people might see themselves as in a glass. This awakening was largely due to the influence of the followers of Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn, born in obscurity, but endowed with the noblest moral and intellectual qualities, became the friend of Lessing and the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn and the gifted Fanny Hensel. He was the first Jew to win anything like social recognition in Berlin and to open the gates of Gentile culture to his German co-religionists. The Jewish stories of Kompert, Franzos, and Zangwill, excellent in their several ways, cannot have quite the interest of the Jargon tales. These latter were written, not for a Gentile public, but for the very people they describe. This, again, makes them often very perplexing, on account of the constant allusion to Jewish rites and customs taken for granted as understood. |