They have in them plenty of dramatic force, and also clear and effective strokes of argument. But they do not stop with these ; the dramatic thrust gives place to ornate moralising which, from the dramatic point of view, seems so much waste; and the point of the argument is again and again lost in an accumulation of beautiful irrelevancy. He would be a very perverse reader who should cry out against these characteristics of Job as literary faults: on the contrary, they are evidence that the character of the work is insufficiently described by the terms drama and discussion. A further element comes in of Rhetoric: not in the debased sense which the word is coming to bear to modern ears, but the Rhetoric of antiquity which was the delight in speech for its own sake. Each delivery of a speaker in the poem of Job is to be looked upon as a work of art in itself. If Job in the course of the discussion interjects the parenthetic thought, "What is the good of arguing?" this parenthesis is found to be a finished. meditation of twenty-eight lines. The speech in which it occurs is answered by Bildad, and he meets Job's eloquence by a tour-de-force of imagery painting the whole universe watching to destroy the sinner, and this piece of word-beauty runs to thirty-four lines. Zophar in the same round of discussion varies the beauty by a string of wise saws on the same topic, and these extend to sixty lines. All this is over and above the portions of the speeches which are strictly argumentative. It is clear then that the personages of the poem answer one another, not only with argument and dramatic passion, but also with counterpoises of rhetoric weight. The whole becomes like a controversy carried on in sonnets, a discussion waged in perorations. Once more the many-sidedness of the Bible is apparent; and the student who would fully appreciate it must train himself in the literary interest of Rhetoric. xvi. 6-17 xviii. 5-21 XX. 4-29 One word more has yet to be said. The literary varieties mentioned so far are such as appeal chiefly to the mind. But there is one main distinction in literature that appeals to the eye and the ear also; the distinction between the 'straight-forward' speech Interest of called 'prose,' and that kind of speech which measures' itself into metres and verses. A glance at the Book of Job in any properly printed version shows that this work, like the plays of Shakespeare or the later stories of William Morris, presents an interchange between the two fundamental forms of language, being a dialogue in verse enclosed in a frame of prose story. When however the English reader calls in his ear to supplement his eye, he finds that the verse passages of Job differ essentially from what he is accustomed to find in English verse. There is no rhyme, nor do the lines correspond in meters or syllables. The Book of Job, then, in addition to its other literary suggestiveness, raises the elementary questions of Biblical versification. Plan of the whole work The purpose of this Introduction is now accomplished. I have engaged the reader's attention with a single book of the Bible; we have seen that, over and above what it yields to the theological faculty or the religious sense, the Book of Job is a piece of literature, the analysis of which brings us into contact with all the leading varieties of literary form. What the Introduction has done in reference to a single book, the work as a whole is to do in reference to the whole Bible, proceeding however by a method more regular than has been necessary so far. The work will be divided into six books. The first book will start with the point last reached — Biblical Versification — and widening from this will search out other distinctions which may serve as a basis for the Classification of Literature under such heads as Lyric, Epic, Philosophic, Prophetic, Rhetoric. The subsequent books will take up these departments one by one, illustrating each, with the subdivisions of each, from the most notable examples in the Sacred Writings. The reader who has thus given his attention to the general literary aspects of the Bible will then find, in an Appendix, Tabular arrangements into which the whole of the Bible enters, intended to assist him when he desires to read the Sacred Writings from the literary point of view. BOOK FIRST FIRST PRINCIPLES OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE PAGE CHAPTER I. THE FUNDAMENTAL LITERARY FORM OF VERSIFICATION 45 II. THE LOWER PARALLELISM of Rhythm and the Higher 64 III. CLASSIFICATION OF THE HIGHER LITERARY FORMS IN 74 IV. APPLICATION OF LITERARY CLASSIFICATION TO BIBLICAL LITERATURE 83 |