ARTICLE III. THE BOOK OF JOB. A LECTURE BY THE REV. professOR WM. G. BALLANTINE, oberlin THE Whole Bible is so real a book in all its parts that it seems unnecessary to raise the preliminary question whether the incidents and characters of the book of Job are historical or merely the creations of the poet's fancy. We shall assume it as conceded that Job and his friends were real men, Satan a real devil, the property which Job lost real marketable wealth, the disease, the ashes, and the potsherd real, the thoughts and mental states historical, and only the presentation of the facts poetical. The book of Job is, beyond question, the sublimest poem in all literature. Leaving out of view, for the moment, the fact of divine inspiration, looking at it simply as literature, as we look at the Iliad, the Prometheus, the Æneid, the Divine Comedy, King Lear, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, or Faust, it plainly surpasses all these masterpieces in the sublimity of its purpose, the consummate skill of its plot, the jewelled richness of its materials, the repose of its manner, the resistless rush of its thoughts, the consenting unity of all its parts. There has been much shallow criticism of Hebrew poetry. Our literature took its rise in Greece. Ancient and Modern Italy, France, England, Germany, and America-all trace their letters back to Cadmus. Aristotle is the father of our systematic rhetoric. Because the poetry of the Bible does not fall readily into a Greek classification, the impression has gone abroad that Hebrew poetry is of a nondescript character, lacking in artistic symmetry and perfection of type. Never was impression more unjust. The poetic types of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and of Job are as perfect as the lyric and dramatic types of Attica. The question has been debated whether Job is a tragedy. Perhaps not, if the word "tragedy" is defined in a narrow fashion, combining essential characteristics with the accidental developments or accessories of the Dionysiac stage of Athens. It is not adapted to be acted in a theatre. But all the fundamentals of tragedy are present in a striking degree. The plot, as in the best Greek tragedies, takes in God and man. The protagonist is of just that character which Aristotle has pronounced the best subject for tragedy—one not deeply guilty nor altogether innocent. In enlarging upon this canon, Barron says: “The proper characters for tragedy should be possessed of high virtues to interest the spectators in their happiness, but they should be exhibited as liable to errors and indiscretions arising from the weakness of human nature, the violence of passion, or the intemperate pursuit of objects commendable and useful. The misfortunes of such persons properly painted take hold of the mind with irresist ible effect. They engage every sympathetic feeling of the soul, and they make us tremble lest, by our indiscretion in similar indulgence of our passions, we shall throw ourselves into similar distress." The question of this drama is the one supreme question of humanity in all ages and places. What is the proper attitude of man toward the government of God? or, to change the phrase, In what mood should a good man accept the mysterious providences, the bitter disappointments, the sudden and heart-breaking calamities of life? The book answers this question by presenting in dramatic form what one great soul did pass through and did attain. There is an entanglement, a progress of action, and finally a surprising but self-evidently right solution. There is indeed in Job but little external action. The book is in this like the Prometheus of Eschylus and the Hamlet of Shakespeare. The interest of the tragedy centres in the mental experiences of the chief actor. Upon the stage of his mind there is variety and progress enough. The book of Job ends not in woe but in peace, not in horror, blood, and suicide, but in triumph. But it is not therefore excluded from the category of true tragedy. We are not therefore compelled to call it, as Dante felt compelled to call his "Vision," a comedy. Rather here is a divine superiority. Tragedies commonly end in darkness, because the poets cannot bring their heroes again into the light without relaxing the intensity of the emotions and returning to the commonplace. The Hebrew poet carries his hero onward and upward through darkness into a celestial light more sublime than the storms of passion, and thus from a merely artistic point of view achieves a double triumph in a good ending without a bathos. The claim is often made that art to reach its highest excellence must exist only for itself. A moral purpose is thought to change the winged steed into a cart-horse. But this canon of criticism cannot be accepted. Purposeless eloquence is mere declamation; purposeless verse, mere jingle. Language is but the expression of thought, and aimless thought is folly. High art must choose high themes; highest art, the highest. Tragedy must go for its intensest passions to the relations of the soul with its Creator. It must show us estrangement and reconciliation in the one great love-affair. Art is art so far as it is true and holds a mirror up to nature. In nature the religious is highest and deepest. Highest art, deepest art, will then be art portraying the deepest religious experiences of a great soul. Such is the book of Job. This book is the only divinely guided attempt to deal poetically with the greatest of human experiences. It is the only successful attempt. And therefore it is necessarily, as I have said, the sublimest poem in literature. Let us now examine in such detail as our brief time allows the structure of this wonderful book, the colors with which the author paints, and the truths which he succeeds in setting forth. As a Swiss guide who is about to lead a party up the Matterhorn I need not beg pardon if I pause a moment to remind my fellow-travellers that the ascent is high and difficult. A steady foot and a courageous heart are demanded. Not all can climb with comfort among Alpine sublimities, or breathe easily in this high air, or look without dizziness down on mountain ranges. The scene of the book of Job is laid in the unchanging East under the crystal sky of Arabia, "So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful, That God alone is to be seen in heaven." The poet recognizes and uses down to the minutest fact the artistic value of the situation. The patriarchal life of Arabia strikes with unmatched felicity the meeting-point of civilization and wildness. The freeness and mystery of the desert is in it without the stupidity and brutality of North American or African savage tribes. Profound spiritual philosophy and personal worth are as naturally in place under a black Bedouin tent with the silent desert around and the silent stars above as in university halls. By exquisite touches, through constant reference of all the speakers, all the products and aspects of nature as known in Arabia are kept before the eye of the reader. Gold and silver and ruby and topaz and onyx and sapphire lend their glitter. There is not an animal or a plant, not even a weed, unnoticed. The vines and shocks of corn, the rushes in the mire, the flags in the water, the saltwort and nettles and thistles and cockles and purselain, each has its place in the picture. Every phenomenon of plant life and death illustrates or embellishes the thought. The driven leaf, the withering bloom, the ripened grain, the sprouting stock where a tree has been felled, each suggests by analogy or contrast a human ex perience. As with the plants so with the animals. From beginning to end of the poem we see them,—the eagle nesting on the crag and swooping on the prey; the ostrich leaving her eggs in the sand, the raven, the hawk in his flight southward; the wild ass ranging the wilderness and the mountains untamable, the hinds, the wild goats, the jackals, the lions roaring and tearing the prey, the horse with his quivering mane elated in the tumult of battle, the hippopotamus, the crocodile. Insects are not forgotten. The spider's web, the corroding moth, and the worm are each in its place. All the phenomena of day and night, the opening of the eyelids of the dawn, the moon walking in brightness; the Pleiades, Orion, and the signs of the Zodiac burning in their crystal deeps; Arcturus with his sons traversing the celestial spaces under divine guidance, all these phenomena are referred to, each in a phrase that is a jewel of lit erature. For all the forms of water-mist, dew, cloud, rain, shower, torrent, flood, billow-the Hebrew language, limited as is the literature which we possess, is said to have by actual count as many separate words as the English. And in the book of Job this rich vocabulary is freely employed. Ruskin has dwelt with enthusiasm on the exquisite picture of the brook running black in winter between snowy banks but dry and gone in summer when the fainting caravan turns away confounded and perishes in the waste. We may say that lightnings flash and thunder rolls. from one end of the poem to the other. Yet with all this mass of material there is no sense of crowding or of confusion, but, on the contrary, a repose like that of the desolate palaces and tombs of the desert, crumbling unhurried, in silence, where time is of no account and even decay feels no haste. On the Arabian plains, with his flocks and herds grazing far and wide about his tent, lived Job the patriarch in prosperity as unclouded as an Arabian summer day. But |