XIII.

“NOVA SOLYMA,” EDITED BY REV. WALTER BEGLEY

Nova Solyma The Ideal City; Or Jerusalem Regained

An Anonymous Romance Written In The Time Of Charles I.

Now first Drawn From Obscurity, And Attributed To The Illustrious John Milton.¹

With Introduction, Translation, Literary Essays And A Bibliography

By The Rev. Walter Begley

vol. i., ii.

London John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1902.

(_p._ 4). “The book was first presented to the public in small octavo form with this title page:

Novæ | Solymæ | Libri Sex. | Londini Typis Joannis Legati.| MDCXLVIII. |

¹ The author was Samuel Gott (1613‒1671), see “The Authorship of Nova Solyma,” by Stephen K. Jones (1910), and B.M. Catalogue.

“The book contained three hundred and ninety-two pages, of which the last contained the errata and the printer’s short notice to the reader. There was no preface or introduction of any kind, and no notes. The only printed extra was this Latin motto in the middle of the blank page facing the title:

‘_Cujus opus, studio cur tantum quaeris inani?_’ ‘_Qui legis, et frueris, feceris esse tuum._’

which I turn thus:

(_p._ 5). “‘Whose is the book?’ do you ask. ‘Why start such a bootless enquiry?

If you but read and enjoy, you will have made it your own.’” (_pp._ 5‒6). “... The next year the same book was published again――an evident attempt to utilise the unsold remainder, as there was no difference whatever, except a new title page with the old fly-leaf motto included in it and a page at the end containing the autocriticon. In the only copy I have seen, [St. John’s College, Cambridge], the title page runs as follows:

Novæ Solymæ Libri Sex; sive Institutio Christiani.

1. De Pueritia. 2. De Creatione Mundi. 3. De Juventute. 4. De Peccato. 5. De Virili Aetate. 6. De Redemptione Hominis.

_Cujus opus, studio cur tantum quaeris inani?_ _Qui legis, et frueris, feceris esse tuum._

Londini: Typis Johannis Legati, et venundantur per Thomam Underhill sub signo Biblii in vico Anglice dicto Woodstreet. MDCXLIX.”

Here we have the very useful addition that it was published by Thomas Underhill, of Wood Street.

(preface _pp._ vii‒viii). “... That such a wide-reaching, learned, and varied work should have been allowed to remain unappreciated and utterly ignored for more than two hundred and fifty years is certainly a very surprising literary fact....

“The critics seem to have been both blind and deaf. They gave no encouraging praise, and no disheartening condemnation. They simply took no notice. And so this great work of seventeenth-century art vanished from the sight of men. A few copies were put away in college libraries, where they rested for years undisturbed and dust-covered in their original positions, and have so continued to rest for two centuries and a half, lost to the world.”

(_p._ 18). “There is a spirit of pure, lofty, and unselfish morality evident throughout all the various scenes of this interesting and unaffected book. It shows us the brightest, strongest elements of God-fearing Puritanism;...” “Here are the lyric songs from ‘the law and prophets,’ Abraham’s meditation on the Mount Moriah, Cain’s lamentations for Abel, David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, and many a noble ode from the Psalms and short epics from Job....” “Here Truth and Justice and the Fear of God are all placed on the high pedestals they so well deserve; and there is withal a kindly insistence everywhere on those great teachings which tend to make life more abounding in hope, more perfect in self-restraint and more lifted-up in spirit.”

All these ideas are Hebrew, and characteristically Biblical. But the most curious fact, from our point of view, is that this work contains a description of the Ideal State on Mount Zion. Of course, the tendency is thoroughly Christian, but it is that kind of Christianity which is inspired by the Old Testament and by a sentiment of love for the old Jewish nation and the Holy Land. This book is the poetical expression of the Restoration ideas of the seventeenth century. It begins with a description of the springtime in New Jerusalem, “the city with twelve gates” (Ezekiel xlviii. 31), and “a virgin who held in her right hand a golden rod, and in her left the two tables of the Law.” The tourist-visitors, “two Englishmen and the third a Sicilian,” are told that “it is the anniversary of the founding of the city and the virgin you saw represented Zion, or, as they say, the Daughter of Zion.” “They” evidently refers to the Jews.

Strangers are received with remarkable hospitality (as in Herzl’s _Altneuland_).

(_p._ 86). “But Jacob, for that was the old man’s name, urged him all the more, ‘Come, come,’ said he, ‘it is a national duty with us to treat strangers with kindness, not unmindful that we too, long ago, were strangers in Egypt, and since then for a long time strangers and wanderers among all the nations of the earth. But now we call none aliens from Israel....’”

(_p._ 88). “We are now very close on the fiftieth year since our long and widely-scattered nation was restored to its present wonderful prosperity.” The old Jew then explains the system of education adopted in the new country, a system of physical development and moral integrity.

Joseph, who is one of the tourists and the hero of the romance, indulges in songs of Zion.

(_pp._ 175‒6) “O sacred top of Solyma, How lovely is thy place Where stands the city of our King Where faithful saints rejoice and sing O mercy, love and grace! “For there our greater Temple stands With greater glory blest And there redeemed from alien lands, Brought back at last by God’s own hands, His Israel finds her rest.”

Here the translator remarks:

(_p._ 177) note i.: “How many sighs and prayers have gone up from the dispersed children of Zion in Russian Poland, in Galicia, in Roumania and by the old broken wall of Jerusalem in these latter days! What longing for this ‘antepast of Heaven’ that Joseph here speaks of! What passionate desire for that time, when the children of Zion should no longer have to sing ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’! Is this century to see the Zionists in possession again of their Holy City――their longed-for Salem, the ‘Vision,’ the ‘Foundation,’ the ‘Inheritance’ of Peace, as expositors have variously entitled it? Who can say? From a practical point of view the prospect somehow fails to charm; but when I view it in theory, it seems as if the justice of the world as well as the justice of the Eternal One would be nobly consummated by such a termination to an earthly pilgrimage of nigh two thousand years.”

The anonymous author proceeds to describe the old-new home, and the people, new-born in benevolence, piety and purity, with their national distinctiveness, and the two tables of the Law. Thus, with all his honest and deep Christian convictions and belief in the final triumph of his religious ideas, he recognizes the right of the Jewish nation to have their country and to remain faithful to their traditions. This strange romance, after all sorts of philosophical reflections and sketches of various adventures in Sicily and elsewhere, comes back to Zion to sing the songs of the Old Testament in Latin verse in a way which shows that the author had the rhythm and atmosphere of Biblical poetry to perfection, and also that his views were much more in harmony with the notions of that time than with modern conceptions. The whole work is inspired by great enthusiasm for Israel’s glory, and abounds with sympathy and admiration for the Jewish nation.

Begley, who was a man of profound knowledge and an authority on matters of composition and style, ascribes this work to Milton. If this view be accepted, then to this poet’s glory must be added a further claim to immortality, because he was the first poet who expounded――from a Christian point of view――the idea of Israel’s Restoration in the form of a poetical romance. But from our point of view it does not matter whether Milton was the author, or another poet; the fact remains that this remarkable work is English and appeared in England in 1648.