A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

Prince Job, smitten from his throne of prosperity and influence into a pit of ignominy, in his abasement cries, "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?" And in his conscious integrity he might well shrill a cry to his own breaking heart. Job is sure (some things calamity reveals) integrity is not awarded according to its character and worth, while his three friends see in Job's downfall a disclosure of his wickedness. They urge him to repent. They think there can be no arguing against doom. God has smitten him for his sins,—this they all agree, and say no other thing. Poor Job! His friends consider his hypocrisy proven, and his wife has become foreigner to him in his day of disaster; disease climaxes his calamities, and he half says, half moans: "When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise and the night be gone? and I am full of turnings to and fro until the dawning of the day. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit. I will confess the bitterness of my soul." Surely his affliction breaks like some desperate sea, and he is as a sailor hurled on jagged rocks, bleeding, half-drowned, shivering cold, and again the storm-waves leap like mad tigers at his throat, and the sailor scarce knows well how to beat one stroke more against the sea. This is Job. He is bewildered. His first cry is as of one whose reason staggers. His face, his voice, his words—all are unnatural. To hear, I would not know nor think this was Prince Job. Strangely, sadly, terribly changed he is when he cries: "Let the day perish wherein I was born. Let that day be darkness. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it. Let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it. Let it not be joined unto the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be solitary; let no joyful voice come therein. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day." "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery; and life unto the bitter in soul, which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave? For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came." Alas, Prince Job, your voice is a-sob with tears; and we had not known it was he! But did grief ever tell its beads with deeper music? Has not this bankrupt prince given sorrow words forever? His pain and grief are unutterable in sadness, yet is he not alone. Multitudes have taken up his lament. There is no pathos deeper than his, "digging for death more than for hid treasures." I fear Job's grief unmans him, and he hath gone mad with Lear. Pray, think you he is not as passionate, gray Lear, mad as the stormy night? It seems so, but is not so. He is baffled. He is a good man, but blinded for a moment, as a lightning-flash stupifies the sight. His cry is the cry wrung from the white lips of pain through the ages. We can not blame him, but only be pitiful to him. His disasters are so varied and so terrible; but we feel sure of him, and if he have lost footing and sight, 't will not be for long.

But there he sits in ashes, fit to make marble weep; and his three friends—stately, aged, gray, friends of many years—come to comfort him; for which service he has need, sore need. There are times when a heart is hungry for tenderness, when a word of love would be a gift of God, when a touch of some tender hand would be a consolation wide as heaven; and such a word and hand had melted Job to tears, and his tears would have done him good, as prayer does. Sometimes tears clear the throat and heart of sobs that choke. But these men were inquisitors rather than comforters; they were philosophers, when they ought to have been men. They sat in silence seven days, but should have maintained their quiet. These men lacked imagination, which is a fatal omission from character; for they who came to comfort, became polemic, pitiless, belligerent, and their voices sound metallic. If a child had crept toward the afflicted prince, and had reached out a pitiful hand, and, with childish treble, had said, "Poor Job; poor Job!" that word had salved his wounds, and helped him through his morass of pain and fear and doubt. But instead, his friend Eliphaz hectors his pain by saying, in stately fashion, "Thy words have upholden him that was failing, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees; but now it has come upon thee, and thou faintest." Shame, Eliphaz! What a bungler! A child had known better. What ails you? Do you not know this man needs tenderness, and not lectures and disquisitions in moralities? Can you not see his heart is breaking, and his eyes turn to you as if he were watching for the coming of some succor infinite? Have you no balm with fragrance? But he hears us not, or heeds us not, but measures out his periods as if he were orator at some state occasion: "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. Lo, this, we have searched it, so it is; hear it, and know thou it for thy good." Pray, is this friend mad, or foe, or fool, that he knows no better than to pour contempt on distress? Will not a foe, even, have pity on an enemy wounded and bleeding and prostrate in the dust? But this man thinks he has a mission to teach an overthrown prince a lesson, harsh, cold, unrelenting, lacking sentiment. Job's pitiful affliction is enough to lift such a man into pity. No, no; he urges his lesson, like some dull schoolmaster who will instruct his pupil while he knows him dying.

Job's broken voice calls, "O that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together. Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh brass? I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway; for my days are vanity. To him that is afflicted, pity should be shewn from his friend." And to this pitiful appeal for considerate judgment, and for a word or look of compassion, another friend finds answer, with cruelty like the touch of winter on an ill-clad child: "If thou wouldst seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; if thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous." What winter wind is bitter and biting as these words?

Job's friends now are his worst calamities. They are thrusting into his naked and diseased flesh a cruel spear, and into his heart a sword. Are these men clad in steel that they are so impervious to pity? And yet, if we pause to consider, this dramatist has not spoken rashly nor unnaturally; for we can recall that often, often, when the window-panes of a life are smoky with the breath of suffering, just such criticisms as these are offered voluminously. We are hard folks. There seems a strain of cruelty in our blood which sometimes gloats over suffering as at a carnival. Were these men vultures, that wait to watch with joy a wounded soldier die? Of what is our nature builded, that we are cruel as the unreasoning beasts? These harsh friends are voices from our own pitiless hearts, and ought to make us afraid.

There are three friends in number, but there is one voice and two echoes,—three men debating with one moaning sufferer, and each saying the same thing. Had only one of them been present, all the three said had been spoken. These men were poor in ideas; for amongst the three is only one thought, as if they had one sword among them, which betimes each one brandishes. Besides, they have a polemic's pride; they are eager to make out a case, and thirst to prove poor Job a sinner. One of them (it might as well be any other of them) runs on: "The hypocrite's hope shall perish: whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider's web. Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man; but the dwelling-place of the wicked shall come to naught." This is savage cruelty, pouring nitric-acid into sword-gashes. Nothing moves your plain man; for he delights in making people wince. He is not angry, but natural, and his naturalness is something worse than the choleric man's anger. He is saying: "Ah, Job, see now—comfort, comfort? Why the house of the wicked shall come to naught." And has not Job's house been splintered by the tempest? And this friend of many years is saying, "Hypocrite!" But this word recalls Job to himself. He rises above his pain, scarcely feeling the twinges. His thought is drawn away from his physical calamity, and that is a good anodyne for torture. His character is attacked, and he must run to its succor as he would to the rescue of wife or child. Now Job ceases sobbing, and becomes attorney for himself. He pleads his cause with full knowledge of his own heart. He therefore speaks ex cathedra so far. Job is on the defensive—not against God, but against men. His "tongue is as the pen of a ready writer." Job is himself again. His perturbation is passed as a cloud swims across the sky.

Job is the misjudged man, than which few things are harder to bear. That enemies misconstrue your motives and misjudge your conduct is to be expected, though even then the spirit is lacerated; but when friends misjudge us, our pain seems more than we can bear. This was Job's case. His familiar friends become His accusers, rasping such words, "How much more abominable and filthy is man which drinketh iniquity like water!" and Job's cry crosses the centuries and reaches our ears this day, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me!" Old Lear's cry, "Stay a little, Cordelia," is no more pitiful than this strong man reaching for a hand and finding none, and pleading for sympathy, and pleading in vain.

I see him sitting, with his gray beard blowing about him like a puff of fog; I hear him when his pitiful voice intones its grief as if it were a chant; I see the pleading in his eyes, and it fills my breast with heart-break. You who love great delineations of passion, what think you of our dramatist's vision of Job? You who count King Lear among the demigods of creative art, what think you of this Lear's older brother? His nature is so deep we can not fling plummet to its bottom. Lear was weak and wrong; but Job, with all his grief upon him, like a cloud upon a mountain's crest—Job has violated no propriety of man or God, so far as we have seen, and his cry fills the desert on whose verge he sits, and clamors like the winds on stormy, winter nights.

Job, misjudged, has the mercy of conscious integrity. Himself rises to his own vindication, a course just and compatible with sincerity and modesty. You will misjudge Job if you think him egotist. He is rather one who knows himself, and feels sure of his purity in motive; has self-respect therefore—a hard thing for a soul to have, and the possession of which is a benediction. To know we meant well, to be able to justify us to ourselves, is next in grace to being justified of God; for next to Him, self is the most exacting master and judge. He feels misjudged, knows these men have misinterpreted him, being deceived by his calamities, and he therefore is thrown on the defensive, and becomes his own attorney, pleading for his life. "Pray you, my friends, do not misjudge me," is his tearful plea, while they press their cruel conclusions as a phalanx of spears against his naked breast. This conception will clear Job of the blame of being self-righteous. I do not find that in his utterances; but do find sturdy self-respect, and assertion of pure motive and pure action; for his argument proceeds thus: "I know my heart; I know all my purposes; I meant right, and tried to do right. You think me hypocrite. I pray you rectify your judgment, since neither in intent nor yet in execution have I been other than I seemed, and who can bring accusations against my doings? God breaketh me with a tempest, yet will I cry to him, Do not condemn me: show me wherefore thou contendest with me. I call on God to vindicate me, who knoweth my life to the full. Will God break a leaf, driven to and fro by the wind? Though to you, my friends, I seem smitten of God, your logic is wrong. I am not vile. O that I knew where I might find Him! I would order my cause before him, seeing he knows the way that I take." Job is himself confounded by his calamity, so that he does not see clearly; finding no reason why God should afflict him, he being as he is and as he has been, just in purpose; for Job had yet to learn that lesson he has taught us all; namely, that not God, but Satan, sent his disaster. He thought God was sowing ruin, as the rest thought; whereas God was letting Satan work his evil way, while God was to vindicate his servant by an apocalypse of himself. Job, though bewildered as to the meaning of his troubles, asserts his innocency; and as he presents his case, his sky clears, and his voice strengthens, and his argument rises in its eloquence, sonorous as the sea: "Know now that God hath overthrown me. He hath fenced my way, that I can not pass. He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer. My breath is strange to my wife, though I entreated for my children's sake of mine own body. Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh. Have pity upon me! Why do ye persecute me as God? Have pity upon me!" If in literature there is a more passionate passage to incarnate in words a life wholly bereft and utterly alone, I know not of it. Oedipus Coloneus had Antigone, and King Lear had the king's fool and loyal Kent, and Prometheus had visitors betimes, who brought him balm of sympathy; but Job's servants will not obey him, and little children make sport of him, and his wife turns away from him, and will not hear his sobbing words, nor hear him as he calls the names of their children whom he loved. Tragic Job! Not Samson, blind and jeered at by the Philistine populace in Dagon's temple, is sadder to look upon than Job, Prince of Uz, in the solitude of his bereavement. This old dramatist, as I take it, had himself known some unutterable grief, and out of the wealth of his melancholy recollections has poured tears like rain. He has no master in pathos.

This lament of Job is one aspect, and but one; for as he rises toward God, his calamities seem slipping away from him as night's shadows from the hills at dawn. God knows his case, and Job, conscious of his integrity, looks God in the face, and his voice lifts into triumph, passing out of complaint and bemoaning into sublime utterances, which constitute the sublimest oration man ever pronounced, and is contained in those parts of the poem reaching from chapter xxvi to chapter xxxi, inclusive. I have read this oration, recalling the occasion which produced it, and noted the movement of this aged orator's spirit, and have compared it with Marc Antony's funeral oration over Caesar, given, by common consent, the chiefest place among orations in the English tongue. For that noble utterance my admiration is intense and glowing. I answer to it as waters to the touch of violent winds; and in conclusion, from comparing the orator Marc Antony with the orator Job of Uz, I am compelled to confess that I love not Antony the less, but Job the more. Marc Antony's oration was diplomatic, tragic, masterful, pathetic; but Job's oration is spent in the realm of the pathetic and sublime. The theme is the appeal to God. He has turned from man and toward God. His thought swings in circles majestic as the circuits of the stars. He fronts himself toward the Eternal as if to certify, "To God I make my plea." His harshness is kinder than the kindness of man. Job's orbit includes life. He runs out to God, but he runs to God. Himself is point of departure on this long journey. This oration is an apology, a plea of a great soul, pleading for what is above life. The words have pathos, but they lift to sublime heights. Job sweeps on like a rising tide. His false comforters sit silent, perplexed, but silenced. His argument rises as a wind, which first blows lightly as a child's breath on the cheek, then lifts and sways the branches of the trees, then trumpets like a battle troop, then roars like storm-waves beating on the rocks, until we hear naught but Job. What begins an apology, ends a paean. At first, he spoke as, "By your leave, sirs." Later, he seizes the occasion; masses his lifetime of experience and thought and faith and attempted service; deploys his argument to show how God's wisdom fills the soul's sky, as if all stars had coalesced to frame a regal sun; makes his argument certify his conscious integrity in motive and conduct, until he thunders like a tempest: "My desire is that the Almighty would answer me. I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him,"—and on a sudden his trumpet tones sink into softness, and his dilated frame stoops like a broken wall, and he murmurs, "The words of Job—are ended." Yet so potent his self-defense, that his three comforters sit silent as the hushed night. Their argument is broken and their lips are dry. The words of the comforters, like the words of Job, are ended.

Elihu, a youth, has been listening. Age has had its hour and argument, and age is silenced, when, like the rush of a steed whose master is smitten from the saddle, this impetuous youth speaks. At this point, genius is evidenced by this unknown dramatist. A young man speaks, but his are a young man's words, hurried, fitful, tinctured with impertinence, headlong in statement and method; for he is youth, not experienced, not deliberate, and easily influenced by the aged argument, and taking strong ground, and is infallible in his own eyes; and in him are visible the swagger and audacity of a boy. He makes no contribution to the argument. His is a repetitional statement, though himself does not know it. He thinks he is original. How delightful the audacity of his opening: "If thou canst answer me, set thy words in order before me. Stand up. Behold, I am according to thy wish in God's stead." Clearly this is a young man speaking. A novice he, yet with all the assurance of a man whose years have run more than fourscore. He is bursting with speech and impudence, not perceiving that to answer where old men have failed is a valorous task, to say the least; and to attempt answer to Job, who has unhorsed every opponent in the lists, is a strong man's work; but beyond this, Elihu undertakes to answer for God. He will be in God's stead. See in this a young man's lack of reverence. What the old men hesitated to attempt, knowing the work lay beyond their united powers, this youth flings into as he would into a swelling stream, swollen by sudden rains among the uplands. His ears have been keen. Nothing has escaped him. All the words of everybody he has in mind, his memory being perfect, since he is young and no faculty impaired, and as the debate has proceeded and he has seen old men overborne by the old man Job, his impetuous youth has seen how he could answer. This is natural, as any one conversant with himself (not to go further in investigation) must know. We itch to reply, thinking we see the vulnerable joint in the harness. Job has spoken last, and silenced his adversaries, and Elihu recalls practically but one thought of Job's reply; namely, that he was not unrighteous in intent, and gets, as most of us do, but a part of the afflicted man's meaning, and concludes that Job is glaringly self-righteous, missing the true flavor of Job's answer; for what Job was, was self-respecting. And so Elihu gives Job a piece of his mind; takes up the thread of argument where the old men had broken it, and drives on, with many words and few ideas, to prove Job is wrong and bad, and that God has simply meted out justice, no more. Elihu's words fairly trample on each other's heels, and though only giving a weakened statement of what had been said before, like a strong voice weakened by age, he thinks his is a sledgehammer argument, illuminative, convincing, unanswerable; yet because he thinks he speaks in God's behalf and in God's stead, he rises into eloquence withal, though his words are pitiless; for himself knows not suffering, nor can he compass Job's calamity. Elihu mistakes the sight of his eyes for the truths of God, a blunder of not infrequent recurrence. He is not all wrong, nor is he all wrong in his desire to help to the truth, but is as a lad trying to lift a mountain, which, planted by God, requires God to uproot it.