mention of Solomon or any suggestion of his personality. The disconnected brevities are examined: there is no trace of Solomon, and much that is totally unlike a royal speaker. Four out of the five essays are equally blank as to evidence of this or other authorship. Only one single essay out of the five connects itself with Solomon; and when the matter of this essay is examined it is seen to take the form of an imaginary experiment, in the investigation of wealth, wisdom and power, put into the mouth of Solomon as the one character in history for whom such an experiment was possible. When the author or 'preacher' — has finished with this experimental search for wisdom he drops altogether the personality of Solomon, and speaks for himself. All claim to Solomonic authorship disappears from Ecclesiastes when it is read in its true literary structure; and the lay reader may open his mind to the unanimous testimony of critical evidence in favour of a later date. Examples such as these illustrate, not merely the immediate point, that structural should precede all other analysis, but also my general contention for the separation and independence of historical and literary investigation. The history of the Sacred Scriptures is a branch of Semitic studies; the discrimination of their literary forms belongs to the science of Comparative Literature. The confusion between these two distinct spheres has appeared at other periods besides the present, and in relation to other departments of the literary field. When the Romantic Drama, that was destined to produce a Shakespeare, was slowly establishing itself, the force which opposed it, and pronounced it a violation of all literary art, came from the scholarship of the age. But it was Classical scholarship, drawing its conceptions and canons exclusively from Greek and Latin authors. Time was necessary before the irresistible power of Shakespeare and his contemporaries widened the field of view, and forced upon criticism so much of the comparative method as led them to recognise a new region of literary form, equally worthy of investigation with the older Classical types. Not less important and original will be found the varieties of literary form yielded by the Sacred Scriptures, when these are investigated in the spirit of Comparative Literature. I have spoken so far from the point of view of those who are specially Bible students. But a consideration of a different kind has had weight with me in the production of this book: the place in liberal education of the Bible treated as literature. It has come by now to be generally recognised that the Classics of Greece and Rome stand to us in the position of an ancestral literature, — the inspiration of our great masters, and bond of common associations between our poets and their readers. But does not such a position belong equally to the literature of the Bible? if our intellect and imagination have been formed by the Greeks, have we not in similar fashion drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought? Whence then the neglect of the Bible in our higher schools and colleges? It is one of the curiosities of our civilisation that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves: literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of intoxication; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law to the remotest corner of the universe, we go at school for literary impulse to the poetry that dramatises the burden of hopeless fate. Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace, our first poetic lessons are in an Iliad that cannot be appreciated without a bloodthirsty joy in killing. We seek to form a character in which delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are training our taste in literatures which, if published as English books, would be seized by the police. I recall these paradoxes, not to make objection, but to suggest the reasonableness of the claim that the one side of our liberal education should have another side to balance it. Prudish fears may be unwise, but there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely good that our youth, during the formative period, should have displayed to them, in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature — in lyrics which Pindar cannot surpass, in rhetoric as forcible as that of Demosthenes, or contemplative prose not inferior to Plato's - a people dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of all moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid, and speech as musical, as when Sappho sang of love or Æschylus thundered his deep notes of destiny. When it is added that the familiarity of the English Bible renders all this possible without the demand upon the time-table that would be involved in the learning of another language, it seems clear that our school and college curricula will not have shaken off their mediæval narrowness and renaissance paganism until Classical and Biblical literatures stand side by side as sources of our highest culture. It remains to add that, in the present edition, the work has been revised, and partly re-written. The structural printing of Scripture, for which I contended in the first edition, has since been carried into effect in the volumes of the Modern Reader's Bible. This has enabled me to reduce some of my lengthier illustrations; and also to be more precise in part of my systematisaIn particular, I have attempted in a new Appendix (III) to reduce to a system Biblical Versification, with all its elaborations, so far as it is based upon parallelism of structure. The other Appendices, that which I call a Literary Index to the Bible (I), and another which contains a technical Table of Literary Forms (II), have been considerably revised. The order of the six books has been altered, and the matter of the first two books recast, chiefly in the interest of a more logical plan. As so much recasting might create difficulties in regard to references made in other books to the present work, I have (page 557) given a Refer 1 Published by Macmillan. ence Table which connects the paging of the first and the present editions. The citations, as before, are from the Revised Version of the Bible and Apocrypha, for the use of which I am under obligation to the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge. It is with the greatest satisfaction that I have noticed, in the four years which have intervened since the first edition of this work, the rapid advance in public recognition of the specially literary study of the Bible. And the testimony of all who promote it concurs in confirming what is the foundation axiom of my work-that an increased apprehension of outer literary form is a sure means of deepening spiritual effect. June, 1899. RICHARD G. MOULTON. |