Strophe

Every one therefore which heareth these words of mine,

and doeth them,

shall be likened unto a Wise Man,

which built his house upon the Rock:
And the rain descended,

and the floods came,

and the winds blew

and beat upon that house;

and it fell not:

for it was founded upon the Rock.

Antistrophe

And every one that heareth these words of mine,

and doeth them not,

shall be likened unto a Foolish Man,

which built his house upon the Sand:

And the rain descended,

and the floods came,

and the winds blew,

and SMOTE upon that house;

and it fell:

and great was the fall thereof!

In this last example, as well as in some of the preceding, the reader may have noted that parallelism of structure has application, not only to verse, but also to such literature as is ordinarily considered prose. This rapprochement of verse and prose is one of the most interesting features of Biblical literature: its full consideration is reserved for a later chapter.

CHAPTER III

CLASSIFICATION OF THE HIGHER LITERARY FORMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE

General Plan of
First Book

Close connection

THE object of this First Book is to lay down foundation principles of literary science, so far as they are involved in the present survey of Scripture. This survey is morphological in its character: its immediate concern is with the form, not the matter, of Biblical literature. Here, however, it may be worth while to anticipate an objection. Many readers of these pages may be inclined to say, Let professed literary students look to technicalities of form: we plain people care only about the matter and spirit of Scripture. There could not be a greater misapprehension: on the contrary, we can never be clear as to the contents of a piece of literature unless we have settled the external form. To take a very simple illustration. A man sits down to read a chapter in the Bible, endeavouring, in a devotional spirit, to bring his soul into harmony with what he regards as God's message to him. Unfortunately, he has omitted to note that the chapter he is reading is the continuation of another chapter which opened with the words, "Then answered Bildad the Shuhite": now, in a later chapter God is represented as saying that Bildad and the other friends of Job have not said of him the thing that is right. Thus the simple reader has been trying to accept as God's message the words of a speaker whom God himself repudiates. How has the mistake arisen? Merely through ignoring a point of literary form the dramatic character of the Book of Job. A sentence culled from an essay may safely be taken to

of Form and Matter

:

represent the writer's views a sentence taken from a drama may well mean the opposite of the dramatist's real opinion.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

These words are found in Shakespeare: no one would dream of supposing they represented Shakespeare's own view of conscience, for he has put the lines into the mouth of the greatest villain in all literature. If the reply be made that so broad a distinction as that between drama and other literature would not often be overlooked, I would remind the reader of the instances enumerated in the preceding chapter of interpretations depending upon variations of parallel structure. A later chapter will show how upon a fine technical distinction - between a drama and a lyric idyl – rests a difference of interpretation for Solomon's Song which offers as alternatives two stories underlying the poem, totally different in facts and in moral complexion. It is no exaggeration to say that form is the foremost factor in the interpretation of matter.

The Higher

The preceding chapters have dealt with the simplest and most elementary of all literary forms, the distinction of prose and verse. I now pass to the Higher Forms: such distinctions as are expressed by the terms Epic, Lyric, Rhetoric, Literary Forms and the like. The present chapter will endeavour briefly to arrive at the fundamental conceptions underlying these terms in universal literature The next chapter will deal with the application of the terms to the literature of the Bible.

ture

Let the reader firmly fix four ideas in his mind, as what may be called the four Cardinal Points of Literature. The four Cardinal Two of these are given by the antithesis Descrip- Points of Literation and Presentation. When an incident is described to us, the incident itself belongs to the past, the words describing it are throughout the words of the author. When it is presented, the author himself nowhere appears, but he leaves us to hear the words of those personages who actually took part in the incident, perhaps to see their doings; we become spectators, and the circumstances

Description and
Presentation

make themselves present before us. Homer and Milton give us literature of description; for presentation the most complete illustration is Shakespeare, in whose pages all varieties of mankind are speaking and moving, but the poet himself is never heard.

The other two ideas are conveyed by the words Poetry and Prose. It is impossible to use other terms; and yet about these there is an unfortunate ambiguity, owing to the exiPoetry and Prose gences of language which have imposed a double duty on the word 'prose': it is antithetic to 'poetry' and it is also antithetic to 'verse.' No doubt there is a good deal in common between these two usages of the word: Poetry is mostly conveyed in verse, and Prose literature in the style called prose. But the terms must be used with a cautious recollection that Poetry is sometimes cast in the form of prose notably, we shall see, in the Bible; while in the earlier stages of literary history verse has often been utilised for works of science and philosophy which would later have been thrown into a prose form. The conception we are at present seeking will be best grasped if we translate the Greek word 'poetry' into its Latin equivalent, 'creative literature'; it assists also to remember the old English usage by which a poet was called a 'maker.' The idea underlying these words is that the poet makes something, creates, adds to the sum of existences; whereas the antithetic literature of Prose has only to discuss what already exists. When Homer has sung and Euripides exhibited plays the world is richer by an Achilles and an Alcestis. It makes no difference whether, as an historic fact, the Greek warrior and the Queen of Pheræ ever existed, or whether they are pure figments of the imagination, or whether they existed but behaved quite differently from what the poem and the play suggest to our poetic sense the Homeric Achilles and the Euripidean Alcestis are as real as the Cæsar of history. On the contrary, the literature of Prose moves only in the region limited by facts; history and philosophy have to deal only with what actually has existence, accurately describing things, or bringing out the relations between one thing and another.