The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [151]
When the servant was quite out of sight the Jew began to curse him. “You wretched musician, you tavern fiddler! You rogue, put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings!” When he had thus given vent to his feelings he went into town to find a judge. The judge sent his people after the servant, who was brought back to town, tried, and condemned to the gallows for highway robbery. As he mounted the ladder with the hangman, however, the servant asked the judge to grant him one last wish. “I beg you let me play my fiddle one last time.” Of course as soon as he started to play, everyone began to dance, even the town dogs, until all were so tired the judge offered to free him and give him anything if he would only stop playing. The good servant put down his fiddle and climbed down from the gallows. He stepped up to the Jew, who was lying on the ground and gasping for breath. “You dirty dog, now confess where you got your money or I’ll begin to play again.” “I stole it, I stole it!” screamed the Jew, “but you earned it honestly.” The judge had the Jew led to the gallows and hanged as a thief.
This repulsive little story belongs to a group of tales in the Grimms’ collection in which the imaginative growth of the plot is cut off by some unquestionable collective attitude. It comes from a culture (early nineteenth-century Germany) that had not learned to live with the Jew in the hedge any more than Pound ever did.
The servant in the story is “softhearted,” a character at home with gift exchange but not with money. The first thing we should note is that his softheartedness, by itself, is not a weakness or failing: his gift exchange works. It has its own power. He gets his wishes. In a different tale—if, for example, the problem of the story were to find the servant a bride— things would have proceeded with no further ado after the gift exchange with the dwarf. But the problems in this story are power, greed, and social relations mediated by money. This seems to be a land where people sell their labor in the marketplace. The servant’s soft heart is not enough. He’s a naïf, somebody who just got off the boat. He’s Walt Whitman lifted from a Civil War hospital, 1862, and set down in London, 1914.
At the start of the tale the miser cheats the servant and the servant doesn’t feel the insult. On a conscious level, he has no idea what three years’ labor is worth. He goes singing and skipping down the road, and we are left waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then on his first wish our happy worker calls for a weapon! Clunk. Now we know the insult was felt. It is not yet conscious, but the servant does have a money side to him, one that felt both hurt and unarmed when he was cheated.
The Jew appears. I take the Jew to be the servant’s shadow, a personification of that part of him that felt the blow. The Jew is exactly the man the servant needs to meet, too. Here is someone who knows about money, who could tell him the market value of a year’s work. The Jew makes this clear with his parting insult: “Put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings.” The image sums up the problem: our simpleton with his three farthings is a three-quarter wit, so to speak, and needs a Jew to provide him the fourth coin.
Arthur Rackham’s illustration for “The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge.”
Although the Jew shows a touch of greed (“If only it were mine!”), he first appears as a man who responds spiritually to beauty: he is moved by the song of the bird and he praises the Lord. Also, he appears immediately after the gift exchange, as if he were drawn into the circle of consciousness not only by the servant’s need for him but by his own longing for something—something to do with song and gift.
So we have two men drawn to each other by mutual need. The servant might teach the Jew about the gift, and the Jew could teach him about money. The singing bird is the promise of their possible harmony,