Job is the Divina Commedia. Dante has the same purpose of edification as the author of Job and even of Faust, though he has not been able to fuse the didactic and narrative elements with such complete success as Goethe. Nor is he so intensely autobiographical as either Goethe or the author of Job; his own story is almost inextricably interlaced with the fictions which he frames as the representative of the human race. He allows us to see that he has had doubts (Parad. iv. 129), and that they have yielded to the convincing power of Christianity (Purgat. iii. 34-39), but it was not a part of his plan to disclose, like the author of Job, the vicissitudes of his mental history. In two points, however—the width of his religious sympathies (which even permits him to borrow from the rich legendary material of heathendom[1]) and the morning freshness of his descriptions of nature—he comes nearer to the author of Job than either Goethe or Milton, while in the absoluteness and fervour of his faith Milton is in modern times his only rival.
The preceding comparison will, it is hoped, leave the reader with a sense of our great literary as well as religious debt to the author of Job. His gifts were varied, but in one department his originality is nothing less than Homeric; his Colloquies are the fountain-head from which the great river of philosophic poetry took its origin. He is the first of those poet-theologians from whom we English have learned so much, and who are all the more impressive as teachers because the truths which they teach are steeped in emotion, and have for their background a comprehensive view of the complex and many-coloured universe.
- ↑ On the parallel phenomena in Job, see Chap. IX.
