Chapter 20

What are the sublimest poems of universal literature? Let this stand as a tentative reply: Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Job, author unknown. To rank as a sublime production, theme and treatment must both be sublime, and the poem must be of dignified length. Prometheus has a Titan for subject; has magnanimity for occasion; has suffering, on account of his philanthropy, as tragic element; and the barren crags of Caucasus as theater; and the style is the loftiest of Aeschylus, sublimest of Greek dramatists. Perhaps "Oedipus Coloneus" is nearest approach among Greek tragedies to the elevation of "Prometheus Bound," and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" has much of the Greek sublimity and more than the Greek frigidity. Dante is nearest neighbor to Aeschylus, though fifteen hundred years removed, and the "Divine Comedy" has all elements of sublimity. The time is eternal. The havoc of sin, the might of Christ, the freedom of the human spirit, the righteousness of God, the fate of souls, are materials out of which sublimer cathedral should be built than ever Gothic Christians wrought in poetry of stone. "Hamlet" is the sublimity of a soul fighting, single-handed, with innumerable foes, and dying--slain, but undefeated. "Paradise Lost" might easily be mistaken for the deep organ music of a stormy ocean, so matchless and sublime the melody. In theme, epic; in treatment, epic; in termination, tragic,--which melts into holy hope and radiant promise as a night of storm and fearful darkness melts into the light and glory of the dawn and sunrise when the sky is fair. I can hear and see this blind old Puritan, chanting the drama of a lost cause as a David lamenting for his Absalom dead. Milton is sublime in history, misfortune, range of ideas, warrior strength, and prowess to fight and die undaunted. Not even his darkness makes him sob more than a moment. A rebellion in heaven, a war in consequence; the flaming legions of the skies led by Christ, God's Son; a conflict, whose clangor fills the vaulted skies in heaven with reverberating thunders, ending in defeat for evil which makes all Waterloos insignificant; the fall of Satanic legions from the thrones which once were theirs, when, with dolorous cry, they stumbled into hell; the counterplot of Lucifer; the voyage across the wastes "of chaos and old night;" the horrid birth of Sin; the apocalypse of Sin and Death in Eden; and the Promise, whose pierced hand, held out, saved from utter ruin those who,

"Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

Musician, instrument, and oratorio,--all sublime. "Last named, though first written, is the drama of Job, in which all things conspire to lift the argument into sublimity. Are seas in tempests sublime? What are they, matched with Job's stormy soul? Are thunders reverberating among mountains sublime? What are they when God's voice makes interrogatory? But above all, God walks into the drama as his right is to walk into human life; and God's appearance, whether at Sinai or Calvary, or in the weary watches of some heart's night of pain, makes mountain and hour and heart sublime.

Thomas Carlyle once, reading at prayers in a friend's house from the Book of Job, became oblivious to surroundings, and read on and on, till one by one the listeners arose and slipped out in silence, leaving the rapt reader alone, he holding on his solitary way until the last strophe fell from the reader's lips; nor can we wonder at him, for such must be the disposition of every thoughtful peruser of Job. As we will not care to lay Hamlet down till Fortinbras is taking Hamlet, with regal honors, from the scene, so we cling to Job till we see light break through the clouds, and the storm vanish, and the thunder cease.

Job is a prince, old, rich, fortunate, benevolent, and good. Life has dealt kindly with him, and looking at his face you would not, from his wrinkles, guess his years. The great honor him; the good trust him; the poor, in his bounty find plenty; no blessing has failed him, so that his name is a synonym of good fortune,--such a man is chief person of this drama, written by some unknown genius. Singular, is it not, that this voice, from an antiquity remoter than literature can duplicate, should be anonymous? Not all commodities have the firm's name upon them. Some of the world's noblest thoughts are entailed on the generations, they not knowing whence they sprang. He who speaks a great word is not always conscious it is great. We are often hidden from ourselves. But our joy is, some nameless poet has made Job chief actor in the drama of a good man's life. "The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord," the Scriptures say, and such a man was Job; and the theme of this drama is, how shall a good man behave under circumstances ruinously perverse, and what shall be his fate? The theme has rare attraction, and appeals to us as a home message, dear to our heart as a fond word left us by a departing friend.

The drama has prologue, dialogue, and epilogue. The actors are Job's friends, Job's self, Satan, and God.

Temporarily, as an object lesson to children in the moral kindergarten, God gave prosperity under the Mosaic code as proof of piety. This _regime_ was a brief temporality, God not dealing in giving visible rewards to goodness, else righteousness would become a matter of merchandise, being quotable in Dun's. When we reason of righteousness, that the good are blest seems a necessary truth; yet they do not appear so. They are afflicted as others, "the rain falls on the just and the unjust;" nay, more, the wicked even seem favored; "he is not in trouble as other men;" prosperity smiles on him, like a woman on her favored lover; and the spirit cries out involuntarily, as if thrust through by an angry sword, "How can these things be?" And this bitter cry, wrung from the suffering good man, is theme for the drama of Job; and in this stands solitary as it stands sublime.

A first quality of greatness in a literary production is, that it deals with some universal truth. "How can good men suffer if God be good?" How pressingly important and importunate this question is! "Does goodness pay?" is the commercial putting of the question. Such being the meaning of Job, how the poem thrusts home, and how modern and personal is it become! When conceived as the drama of a good man's life, every phase of the discussion becomes apparently just. Nothing is omitted and nothing is out of place.

Job sits in the sunshine of prosperity. Not a cloud drifts across his sky, when, without word of warning, a night of storm crushes along his world, destroys herds and servants, reduces his habitations to ruins, slays his children, leaves himself in poverty, a mourner at the funeral of all he loved. Then his world begins to wonder at him; then distrust him, as if he were evil; his glory is eclipsed, as it would seem, forever; and, as if not content at the havoc of the man's hopes and prosperity and joy, misfortune follows him with disease; grievous plagues seize him, making days and nights one sleepless pain; and his wife, who should have been his stay and help, as most women are, became, instead of a solace and blessing, querulous, crying, like a virago, shrilly, "Curse God, and die!" Job opens with tragedy; Lear, and Julius Caesar, and Othello, and Macbeth, and Hamlet, close with tragedy. Job's ruin is swift and immediate. He has had no time to prepare him for the shock. He was listening for laughter, and he hears a sob. You can fairly hear the ruin, crashing like falling towers about this Prince of Uz; and you must hear, it you are not stone-deaf, the pant of the bleeding runner, who half runs, half falls into his master's presence, gasping, "Job, Prince Job, my master--ruin! ruin! ruin! Thy--herds--and thy servants--ruin--alas! Thy herds are taken--and thy servants slain--and--I--only--I--am--left;" and ere his story is panted forth, another comes, weary with the race, and gasps, "Thy flocks--are slain--with fire--from heaven--and thy servants--with them--and I--alone--am--am--" when another breathless runner breaks that story off, crying, "Thy sons--and daughters--" and Job turns his pale face, and fairly shrieks, "My sons and daughters--what? Say on!" "Thy sons and daughters were feasting--and--the storm swept through--the--sky, and crushed the house--and slew--thy daughters--and--thy--sons--and I, a servant, I only, am escaped--alone--to tell thee;" and Job wept aloud, and his grief possesses him, as a storm the sea--and was very pitiful--and he fell on his face, and worshiped! The apocalypse of this catastrophe is genius of the most splendid order. Tragedy has come! But Job rises above tragedy, for he worshiped.

In his "Talks on the Study of Literature," Arlo Bates, in discussing Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg oration, instancing this sentence, "We here highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain," says, "The phrase is one of the most superb in American literature, and what makes it so is the word 'highly,' the adverb being the last of which an ordinary mind would have thought in this connection, and yet, once spoken, it is the inevitable and superb word." To all this I agree with eagerness; but submit that, in this phrase from Job, "I only am escaped _alone_ to tell thee," the word "alone" is as magical and wonderful; and I think the author of this drama may well be claimed as poet laureate of that far-off, dateless time.

And the good man's goodness availed him nothing? What are we to think of Job now? Either a good man is afflicted, and perhaps of God, or Job has been a cunning fraud, his life one long hypocrisy, his age a gray deception. Which? Here lies the strategic quality in the drama. The three friends are firmly persuaded that Job is unrighteous and his sin has found him out. His dissimulation, though it has deceived man, has not deceived God. Such their pitiless reasoning; and the more blind they are, the more they argue, as is usual; for in argument, men convince themselves, though they make no other converts. In Job's calamity, all winds blow against him, as with one rowing shoreward on the sea, when tides draw out toward the deep and winds blow a gale off shore out to the night; and they blow against Job, because he is not what he once was. His life, once comedy, glad or wild with laughter according to the day, is now tragedy, with white face and bleeding wounds, and voice a moan, like autumn winds. Alas! great prince, thy tragedy is come! Tragedy; but God did not commission it. This drama does not misrepresent God, as many a poem and many a sufferer do. Satan--this drama says--Satan sent this ruin. God has not seared this man's flesh with the white heats of lightning, nor brought him into penury nor suspicion, nor made his heart widowed. God is dispenser of good, not evil; for while an argument is not to be enforced against punitive justice, seeing justice is a necessity of goodness, yet we are to affirm that the notion of God slaying Job's children (or anybody's children, so far as that runs), or blotting out his prosperity, is obnoxious to reason and to heart. This drama perpetrates no such blunder. Satan sent these disasters; for with him is evil purpose. The very nobility of Job stings him to enmity and madness; for iniquity is his delight, and ruin his vocation and pleasure. A power without man working evil is consonant with history and experience, and to suppose this power a person rather than an influence is as rational as to suppose God not a barren principle, but a Person, fertile in love and might and righteousness. In the drama of Job, God is not smirched. He is not Hurter, but Helper. In "Prometheus Bound," Zeus is tyrant; in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," Zeus is tyrant run mad. In Job, God is majesty enthroned; thoughtful, interested, loving; permitting, not administering evil; hearing and heeding a bewildered man's cry, and coming to his rescue, like as some gracious emancipator comes, to break down prison doors and set wronged prisoners free. In Job, God is not aspersed, a thing so easy to do in literature and so often done. Here is no dubious biography, where God is raining disaster instead of mercies. To misrepresent God seems to me a high crime and misdemeanor--nay, _the_ high crime and misdemeanor; because on the righteousness of God hangs the righteousness of the moral system embracing all souls everywhere, and to misconceive or misinterpret God, sins against the highest interests of the world, since life never rises higher than the divinity it conceives and worships. The permissive element in Divine administration is here clearly distinguished. Complex the system is, and not sum-totally intelligible as yet, though we may, and do, get hints of vision, as one catches through the thick ranks of forest-trees occasional glimpses of sky-line, where room is made by a gash in the ranks of woods, and the open looks in like some one standing outside a window with face toward us.

This drama of goodness gives words and form to our perplexity. How can a good life have no visible favors? How are we to explain prosperity coming to a man besotted with every vice and repugnant to our souls, while beside him, with heart aromatic of good as spice-groves with their odors, with hands clean from iniquity as those of a little child, with eyes calm and watching for the advent of God and an opportunity to help men,--and calamities bark at his door, like famine-crazed, ravenous wolves at the shepherd's hut; and pestilence bears his babes from his bosom to the grave; and calumny smirches his reputation; and his business ventures are shipwrecked in sight of the harbor; and his wife lies on a bed of pain, terrible as an inquisitor's rack; penury frays his garments, and steals his home and goods, and snatches even the crust from his table,--and God has forgotten goodness? Here is no parable, but a picture our eyes have seen as we have stumbled from a garret, blinded by our tears as if some wild rain dashed in our faces.

God does not care; more, God's lightnings sear the eyeballs of virtue, tall and fair as angelhood,--this is our agonized estimate betimes, and we are troubled lest, unwittingly and unwillingly, we malign God. To an explanation of this fiery tangle of adversity the drama of Job sets itself. How prodigious the task!

But the poem breathes perfume in our faces as we approach until we think we neighbor with honeysuckle blooms. What hinders to catch the fragrance for a moment ere we enter this room of suffering lying a step beyond? "Job" has beauty. "Job" has bewildering beauty. This is no hasty word, rather deliberate and sincere. An anthology from Job would be ample material for an article. All through the poem, thoughts flash into beauty as dewdrops on morning flowers flash into amethyst, and ruby, and diamond, and all manner of precious stones. In reading it, imagination is always on wing, like humming-birds above the flowers. You may find similes that haunt you like the sound of falling water, and breathe the breath of surest poetry in your face.

"Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: Let it look for light, but have none; Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning."

"There the wicked cease from troubling, And the weary are at rest,"--

a beautiful, thought, which Tennyson has put bodily into his "Queen of the May," where, as here, the words sob like a child sobbing itself to sleep when its mother is dead and missed.

"There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster."

And to prisoners of hope, how healing such words are, and full of balm! But to us who have known not the blinding grief of prisoners, the poetry of the thought is "rainy sweet."

"My roarings are poured out like water."

"Men which are crushed before the moth!"

"For man is born unto trouble As the sparks to fly upward."

"The counsel of the froward is carried headlong: They meet with darkness in the daytime, And grope at noonday as in the night."

"For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, And the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee; And thou shalt know that thy tent is in peace."

Can one recall a description of peace more searching and ample, not to say fraught with more tender suggestion?

"My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, As the channel of brooks that pass away."

For my part, I know no cry that paints pain with surer pathos than a passage now to be quoted.

I see and hear the lonely sufferer, and watch beside his bed as if to subdue his pain.

"Is there not warfare to man upon the earth? Are not his days like the days of a hireling? As a servant that earnestly desireth the shadow, And as a hireling that looketh for his wages? So am I made to possess months of vanity, And wearisome nights are appointed to me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise? But the night is long; And I am full of tossings to and fro until the dawning of the day. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, And are spent without hope."

"I would not live alway: Let me alone; for my days are vanity."

In a passage now to be adduced is sublimity passing the sublimity of Milton the sublime:

"God, which removeth the mountains, and they know it not When he overturneth them in his anger; Which shaketh the earth out of her place, And the pillars thereof tremble; Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; And sealeth up the stars; Which alone stretcheth out the heavens, And treadeth upon the waves of the sea; Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades, And the chambers of the South; Which doeth great things, past finding out; Yea, marvelous things without number: He breaketh me with a tempest."

Before words like these one may well stand dumb, with the finger of silence on the lips. Hear Job wail:

"Now my days are swifter than a post: They are passed away as the swift ships, As the eagle that swoopeth on the prey, My soul is weary of my life."

"Thou shalt forget thy misery: Thou shalt remember it as waters that are passed away."

"He poureth contempt upon princes, And looseth the belt of the strong; He discovereth deep things out of darkness, And bringeth out to light the shadow of death."

This "bringeth out to light the shadow of death" appears to me as bold and transfiguring a figure as is to be found in literature. It is majesty itself.

"They grope in the dark without light, And he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man."

"Wilt thou harass a driven leaf, And wilt thou pursue the dry stubble?"

"I am like a garment that is moth-eaten."

"He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."

"He breaketh me with breach upon breach; He runneth upon me like a giant."

"Aforetime I was as a tabret."

"His strength shall be hunger-bitten, And calamity shall be ready at his side."

"My purposes are broken off."

"His remembrance shall perish from the earth, And he shall have no name in the street."

"Ye break me in pieces with words."

How vigorously descriptive this is of what many a man has endured from hammering speech of violent men!

"They waited for me as for the rain."

"He overturneth the mountains by the roots."

"Out of the north cometh golden splendor."

"God hath upon him terrible majesty."

"Deck thyself now with excellency and dignity; And array thyself with honor and majesty."

Has not this putting all the strength and beauty of a Shakespearean couplet? Shakespeare uses such figures as this often, and in them he is his greater self. His is the splendor of imagination and clearness of vision of a prince of poets. Time hastes. This task is decoying. To cease is a hardship; for "Job" lends itself with such wealth to these nobler passages as to urge on our quest. Whole chapters are poems, rich as if carven on blocks of solid gold. They blaze with splendor. But the drama bears on its way like an invading army, and will not wait.

Disaster has overtaken a good man with its utter demolition; but, as has been shown, the prologue of the drama settles the paternity of the disaster. Evils come, but not necessarily from God. In a complex moral system, God has found it good to administer by general rather than by special laws, and their operation does not work exact justice to either wickedness or purity. God's administration being an eternal one, he dares take scope to bring rewards to goodness and to evil. God does not need to haste. He has eternity, and dares therefore be pacific and not perturbed. Haste savors of lack in time. God must not haste. That he could pour swift retribution on the head of offending men, we dare not doubt. That he does not is patent. Another scene is plainly the purpose of God. He has a scene behind a scene. If this world were an end, there is rank and unforgivable injustice done. Men have not been dealt fairly with, and may, with legitimacy, make acrimonious reply; but we are clearly taught that this world is a stage for the display of character, not for its reward, and the next scene will be for the reward of character, and not for its display. God will recompense, but we are not told God does recompense. Such is the lofty argument of the drama, and may be named as major theme.