So my mother had been my grave,
And great for ever her womb!
For what came I forth from the womb? 18
Labour and sorrow to see,
That my days in shame should consume.
Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are so irregular.[732]
Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves. Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience, honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.[733] Even with God Himself he is hasty.[734] There are signs throughout, naïvely betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about [pg 333] herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which he must drive—painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand.
So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God's words to him. Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed and I set thee this day a fenced city and wall of bronze.[735] For these last imply that in himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable disciple that Christ said, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build.
Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and care. He makes them use more than [pg 334] once a phrase about themselves in answer to his call to repent: No'ash, No use! All is up! Probably this reflects his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he had to work with.
Poet as he was he had the poet's heart for the beauties of nature and of domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride, and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have children of his own or to take part in any social merriment—in this last respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?