III
THE NATION
The literature of sceptical revolt, already sufficiently nourished by the superficial atheism of the eighteenth century and the romantic poses of the nineteenth, and now brought to the fine flower of its perfection by the Wellses and Shaws, receives a fresh contribution in Job, a hovel by an anonymous author, and one which is found wanting in neither the assurance nor the bold assumptions of its school. The protagonist is represented as the victim of a succession of afflictions and calamities which provoke him, in his sudden chagrin, to cry out against God. His neighbours (ridiculed by the author as stupid and shallow) come to him and attempt to console him for these distressing misfortunes, but, instead of listening to their advice to make his peace with God, or at least thanking them for their kindness in offering it, he lifts a wail of imprecation against the Deity, who is finally made to take up the bizarre position of at once refusing to explain His acts to the impatient sufferer and of nevertheless approving his complaint.
The extent to which we can enjoy Job's saeva indignatio must necessarily depend on the amount of gratification we are capable of deriving from the expression of emotions of this order, and it is perhaps unavoidable that we should be obliged to qualify our acceptance of so naive a doubt. It is made evident throughout that we are expected to feel sympathy for the arraigner of Divine Justice and at the same time to take a contemptuous view of the beliefs of the comforters; but, for all the plausibility of the author in his less gaudily rhetorical passages, we cannot but question the soundness of a judgement which holds up to derision all we have been taught to esteem as fine and honourable and which, with an easy casualness that seems not far removed from flippancy, assumes a trivial and capricious character on the part of the Deity.
