Hebrew poetry has been lost, and that much of what remains is liturgical, or at least religious, in character. In considering the formal side of this poetry, Gardiner makes a useful point in showing how little effect even such artifical forms as the alphabet acrostic had in limiting the thought of the writer. He very well compares parts of "Lamentations" in this respect with the great sonnet of Milton on "The Late Massacre in Piedmont," where the scheme of the complex rhyme is absolutely ineffectual in preventing the free flow of the passionate and prophetic strain.
After his consideration of Hebrew pros- ody, Gardiner pröceeds to an intimate discussion of the language as it affected the poetry. For closely related to the fact that the Hebrew language had little apparatus for expressing complicated thought is the other fact that its vocabulary had no words except for the concrete objects of the outside. world. The ancient Jew spoke in figures and thought in tropes; his words leaped and glowed with fiery images. At the height of the development of the language, all abstractions are still vividly realized in concrete terms. Gardiner draws an interesting analogue between this characteristic of the Hebrew language and the James- Lange theory of the emotions—the theory that emotion is inseparable from a mass or complex of bodily sensations. “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” says James. The Hebrew language illustrates this theory in that it “expressed emotion always by naming the sensations of which the emotion consists” The Bible is full of illustrations of this fact, and it is indeed largely to its concreteness that the -emarkable power of Hebrew poetry is to Je attributed. For, as Gardiner remarks, “the great body of our sensations and feelings does not change from generation to generation. . . the great mass of our consciousness is the same as it has been for ages and, so far as we can see, it will be for ages to come. Thus, a literature which is able to express itself through these unalterable sensations has a permanence of power impossible to any literature which is
phrased largely in abstractions and in inferences from these sensations." Gardiner posits one additional fact in the expression of emotion: its close connection with music. Here again the Old Testament has been fortunate in its English translation. The version was made at a time when men spoke and wrote literature spontaneously; "when writing was musical." Moreover, the translators were under the strong influence of the Vulgate version, with its sonorous and rhythmic strains —a point developed at greater length later in the book. Hence, altogether, the Bible, especially in English, is very potent in its effects on the emotions.
In this chapter Gardiner considers also special poems and series of poems. The "Song of Songs" he regards as a cluster of marriage poems, where the bride and groom are crowned king and queen —such is still the custom in Syria to-day. "Job" illustrates for him the characteristic limitation of Hebrew poetry —the lack of representative or purely objective imagination. The Bible contains no dramas in the strict sense of the word. All the poetry of that book is, roughly speaking, lyrical. Yet this limitation has its compensation. There is, says Gardiner, no "play-acting" in the Bible. Everything is too much in dead earnest.
Chapter four deals with the wisdom books, with especial reference to the habit of mind they reveal. These books are full of sayings familiar to us in every-day life, and yet the fact that impresses itself upon us as we con the pithy maxims of the sages is the remarkable absence of reasoning in the modern sense of the word. What insight these wise men by the gate arrived at was by means of the emotions; here again we touch rock-bottom in the life of humanity, penetrating far below the super- ficies of the intellect. ‘There is no logical sequence in “Proverbs”; Gardiner sees none in “Koheleth;” and he points out the Jack of proportion and shifting of sides ın “Job.” Allthis was a matter of indifference to the ancient Jew. Again, the form of these works is poetic—not our modern medium for science and philosophy. Gardiner dwells on this essential difference between Hebrew