Impelled by political reasons, Wald left Russia three years ago, but before that time, which was in his twenty-fifth year, he had passed through eight mental and moral crises. Perhaps the number was a poetical exaggeration, for when I asked the poet to enumerate he gave only five. As a boy he revolted from the hair-splitting Talmudic orthodoxy, and was cursed in consequence; then he lost his Jewish faith altogether; then his whole _Cultur-Anschauung_ changed, on account of the influence of Russian literature. He became an atheist and then a socialist and perhaps a pantheist: at least he has written poems in which breathes the personified spirit of nature. Without the peace of nature, however, is the man and his work. He dislikes America because it lacks the ebullient activity of moral, imaginative life. Wald likes Russia better than America because Russia, to use the poet's words, is idealism, hope, and America is realization.
"Before I came to America," he said, "I thought it would not be as interesting as Russia, and when I got here I saw that I was right. America seemed all worked out to me, as if mighty things had already been done, but it seemed lifeless at the core. Russia, on the other hand, with no external form of national prosperity, is all activity at heart, restless longing. Russia is nothing to see, but alive and bubbling at the core. The American wants a legal wife, something there and sure, but the Russian wants a wife behind a mountain, through which he cannot penetrate, but can only dream and strive for her."
These four poets have what is distinctive of Jewish poetry--the pulse of desire and hope, in which there is strain and reproach, constant effort. The Russian Jew's lack of appreciation of completed beauty or of merely sensuous nature is strikingly illustrated by the fact that there has never been a great expression of plastic art in his history. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are nothing to the Jew in comparison with the literature and music of ideas. In nearly all the Jews of talent I have met there is the same intellectual consumption, the excitement of beauty, but no enjoyment of pure beauty of form. The race is still too unhappy, too unsatisfied, has too much to gain, to express a complacent sense of the beauty of what is.