A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

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 régime 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."