_THE THEME_
No more pathetic subject ever inspired a poet than that which became
the theme of the Lamentations. Wave after wave of invasion had swept
over Jerusalem, until at length the miserable city had been reduced to
a heap of ruins. After the decisive defeat of the Egyptians at the
great battle of Carchemish during the reign of Jehoiakim,
Nebuchadnezzar broke into Jerusalem and carried off some of the sacred
vessels from the temple, leaving a disorganised country at the mercy
of the wild tribes of Bedouin from beyond the Jordan. Three months
after the accession of Jehoiakin, the son of Jehoiakim, the Chaldæans
again visited the city, pillaged the temple and the royal palace, and
sent the first band of captives, consisting of the very élite of the
citizens, with Ezekiel among them, into captivity at Babylon. This was
only the beginning of troubles. Zedekiah, who was set up as a mere
vassal king, intrigued with Pharaoh Hophra, a piece of folly which
called down upon himself and his people the savage vengeance of
Nebuchadnezzar. Jerusalem now suffered all the horrors of a siege,
which lasted for a year and a half. Famine and pestilence preyed upon
the inhabitants; and yet the Jews were holding out with a stubborn
resistance, when the invaders effected an entrance by night, and were
encamped in the temple court before the astonished king was aware of
their presence. Zedekiah then imitated the secrecy of his enemies.
With a band of followers he crept out of one of the eastern gates, and
fled down the defile towards the Jordan; but he was overtaken near
Jericho, and conveyed a prisoner to Riblah; his sons were killed in
his very presence, his eyes were burnt out, and the wretched man sent
in chains to Babylon. The outrages perpetrated against the citizens at
Jerusalem as well as the sufferings of the fugitives were such as are
only possible in barbarous warfare. Finally the city was razed to the
ground and her famous temple burnt.
The Lamentations bewail the fall of a city. In this respect they are
unlike the normal type of elegiac poetry. As a rule, the elegy is
personal in character and individualistic, mourning the untimely death
of some one beloved friend of the writer. It is the revelation of a
private grief, although with a poet's privilege its author calls upon
his readers to share his sorrow. In the classic model of this order of
verse Milton justifies the intrusion of his distress upon the peace of
nature by exclaiming--
"For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?"
And Shelley, while treating his theme in an ethereal, fantastic way,
still represents Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude, in the person of one
who has just died, when he cries--
"But thou art fled,
Like some frail exhalation which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,--ah! thou hast fled!
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius."
Gray's well-known elegy, it is true, is not confined to the fate of a
single individual; the churchyard suggests the pathetic reflections of
the poet on the imaginary lives and characters of many past
inhabitants of the village. Nevertheless these cross the stage one by
one; the village itself has not been destroyed, like Goldsmith's
"Sweet Auburn." Jeremiah's lamentation on the death of Josiah must
have been a personal elegy; so was the scornful lament over the king
of Babylon in Isaiah. But now we have a different kind of subject in
the Book of Lamentations. Here it is the fate of Jerusalem, the fate
of the city itself as well as that of its citizens, that is deplored.
To rouse the imagination and awaken the sympathy of the reader Zion is
personified, and thus the poetry is assimilated in form to the normal
elegy. Still it is important for us to take note of this
distinguishing trait of the Lamentations; they bewail the ruin of a
city.
Poetry inspired with this intention must acquire a certain breadth not
found in more personal effusions. Too much indulgence in private grief
cannot but produce a narrowing effect upon the mind. Intense pain is
as selfish as intense pleasure. We may mourn our dead until we have no
room left in our sympathies for the great ocean of troubles among the
living that surges round the little island of our personal interests.
This misfortune is escaped in the Lamentations. Close as is the poet's
relations with the home of his childhood, there is still some approach
to altruism in his lament over the desolation of Jerusalem viewed as a
whole, rather than over the death of his immediate friends alone.
There is a largeness, too, in it. We find it difficult to recover the
ancient feeling for the city. Our more important towns are so huge
and shapeless that the inhabitants fail to grasp the unity, the
wholeness of the wilderness of streets and houses; and yet they so
effectually overshadow the smaller towns that these places do not
venture to assume much civic pride. Besides, one general tendency of
modern life is individualistic. Even the more recent attempts to rouse
interest in comprehensive social questions are conceived in a spirit
of sympathy for the individual rights and needs of the people, and do
not spring from any great concern for the prosperity of the
corporation as such. No doubt this is an indication of a movement in a
right direction. The old civic idea was too abstract; it sacrificed
the citizens to the city, beautifying the public buildings in the most
costly manner, while the people were crowded in miserable dens to rot
and die unseen and unpitied. We substitute sanitation for splendour.
This is more sensible, more practical, more humane, if it is more
prosaic; for life is something else than poetry. Still it may be worth
while asking whether in aiming at a useful, homely object it is so
essential to abandon the old ideal altogether, because it cannot be
denied that the price we pay is seen in a certain dinginess and
commonness of living. Is it necessary that philanthropy should always
remain Philistine?
The largeness of view which breaks upon us when we begin to think of
the city as a whole rather than only of a number of isolated
individuals is more than a perception of mass and magnitude. The city
is an organism; and not like an animal of the lower orders, such as
the _anelids_ or _centipedes_, in which every segment is simply a
_replica_ of its neighbour, it is an organism maintained in efficiency
by means of a great variety of mutual ministeries. Thus it is a unit
in itself more elaborately differentiated, and therefore in a sense
higher in the scale of being than its constituent elements, the
individual inhabitants. The destruction of a city constituted in this
way is a serious loss to the world. Even if no one inhabitant is
killed, and quite apart from the waste of property and the ruin of
commerce, the dissolution of the organism leaves a tremendous gap. The
scattered people may acquire a new prosperity in the land of their
exile, but still the city will have vanished. The Jews survived the
destruction of Jerusalem; yet who shall estimate the loss that this
destruction of their national capital involved?
Then the city being a definite organic unit has its own history, a
history which is immensely more than the sum of the biographies of its
inhabitants--stretching down from remote ages, and joining the distant
past with present days. Here, then, time adds to the largeness of the
city idea. The brevity of life seems to assign a petty part to the
individual. But that brevity vanishes in the long, continuous story of
an ancient city. A man may well be proud of his connection with such a
record, unless it be one of wickedness and shame; and even in that
case his relations to a great city deepen and widen his life, though
the result may be, as it was with the devout Jew, to induce grief and
humiliation. But Jerusalem had her records of glory as well as her
tales of shame. The city of David and Solomon held garnered stores of
legend and history, in the rich memories of which each of her children
had a heritage. The overthrow of Jerusalem was the dissipation of a
great inheritance.
And this is not all. The city has its own peculiar character--a
character which is not only more than a summary of the morals and
manners of the men and women who live in it, but also unique when
compared with other cities. Every city that can boast of real civic
life has its distinctive individuality; and often this is as striking
as the individuality of any private person. Birmingham is very unlike
Manchester; nobody could mistake Glasgow for Edinburgh. London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, Melbourne, New York--each of these cities is unique. The
particular city may be said to be the only specimen of its kind. If
one is blotted out the type is lost; there is no duplicate. Athens and
Sparta, Rome and Carthage, Florence and Venice, were rivals which
could never take the place of one another. Most assuredly Jerusalem
stood alone, stamped with a character which no other place in the
world approached, and charged with a perfectly unique mission. For
such a city to vanish off the face of the earth was the impoverishment
of the world in the loss of what no nation in all the four continents
could ever supply.
In saying this we must be careful to avoid the anachronism of reading
into the present situation the after history of the sacred city and
the character therein evolved. In the days before the exile Jerusalem
was not the holy place that Ezra and Nehemiah subsequently laboured to
make of it. Still looking back across the centuries we can see what
perhaps the contemporaries could not discover, that the peculiar
destiny of Jerusalem was already shaping itself in history. At the
time, to the patriotic devotion of the mourning Jews, she was their
old home, the happy dwelling-place of their childhood, the shrine of
their fathers' sepulchres--Nehemiah's thought about the city even at a
later date;[107] in a word, the ancient centre of national life and
union, strength and glory. But another and a higher meaning was
beginning to gather about the word Jerusalem, a meaning which has come
in course of time to give this city a place quite solitary and
unrivalled in all history. Jerusalem is now revered as the religious
centre of the world's life. Even in this early age she was beginning
to earn her lofty character. Josiah's reformation had so far succeeded
that the temple of Solomon had been pronounced the centre of the
worship of Jehovah. Then these elegies bear witness to the importance
of the national festivals, which were all held at the capital, and
which were all of a religious nature. It is impossible to conjecture
what would have been the course of the religious history of the world
if Jerusalem had been blotted out for ever at this period of the life
of the city. More than five centuries later Jesus Christ declared that
the _time_ had come when neither at the Samaritan mountain nor at
Jerusalem should men worship the Father, because God is spirit and can
only be worshipped in spirit and in truth. Thus the possibility of
this spiritual worship which was independent of the sanctity of any
place was a question of time. The time for it had only just arrived
when our Lord made His great declaration. Of course the calendar could
not rule this matter; it was not essentially an affair of dates. But
the world required all those intervening ages to ripen into fitness
for the lofty act of purely spiritual worship; and even then the great
advance was not made by a process of simple development. It was
necessary for Christ to come, both to reveal the higher nature of
worship by revealing the higher nature of Him who was the object of
worship, and also to bestow the spiritual grace through which men and
women could practise the true worship. Therefore these very words of
our Lord which proclaim the absolute spirituality of worship for those
who have attained to His teaching most plainly imply that such worship
must have been beyond the reach of average people, at all events, in
earlier ages. Jerusalem, then, was needed to serve as the cradle of
the religion revealed through her prophets. When her wings had grown
religion could dispense with the nest; but in her unfledged condition
the destruction of the local shelter threatened the death of the
broodling.
[107] Neh. ii. 3.
There is a hopeful side to these reflections. A city with such a
character may be said to bear the seeds of her own revival. Her
individuality has that within it which fights against extinction. To
put it another way, the idea of the city is too marked and too
attractive for its privileged custodians to let it fade out of their
minds, or to rest satisfied without attempting once more to have it
realised in visible form. Carthage might perish; for Carthage had few
graces wherewith to stir the enthusiasm of her citizens. Rome, on the
other hand, had developed a character and a corresponding destiny of
her own; and therefore she could not be blotted out by savage Huns or
Vandal hosts. The genius for government, unapproached by any other
city, could not be suppressed by the worst ravages of the invader.
Even when political supremacy had passed away in consequence of the
vices and weakness of the degenerate citizens, the power that had
ruled the world simply took another shape and ruled the Church, the
supremacy of Rome in the papacy succeeding to the supremacy of Rome in
the empire. So was it with Jerusalem. There was immortality in this
wonderful city.
We may look at the subject from two points of view. First, faith in
God encourages the hope that such a destiny as is here foreshadowed
should not be allowed to fail. So felt the prophets who were permitted
to read the counsels of God by inspired insight into the eternal
principles of His nature. These men were sure that Jerusalem must rise
again from her ashes because they knew for a certainty that her Lord
would not let His purposes concerning her be frustrated.
Then even with the limited vision which is all that can be attained
from the lower platform of historical criticism, we may see that
Jerusalem had acquired such an immortal place in the estimation of the
Jews, that the people must have clung to the idea of a restoration
till it was realised. To say this is to shew that the realisation
could not but be accomplished. Such passionate regrets as those of the
Lamentations are seeds of hope.
May we go one step further? Is not every true and deep regret a
prophecy of restoration? There is an irrecoverable past, it must be
owned. That is to say, the days that are gone cannot return, nor can
deeds once done ever be undone; the future will never be an exact
repetition of the past. But all this does not forbid the assurance
that there may be genuine restoration. Jerusalem restored was very
unlike the city whose fate the elegist bewailed; nevertheless she was
restored, and that with her essential characteristics more pronounced
than ever. Henceforth she was to be most completely what her earlier
history had only faintly adumbrated--the typical seat of religion.
Thus, though the Lamentations are not at all cheering or prophetic in
tone, or even in intention, but the very reverse, wholly mournful and
despondent, we may still detect, in the very intensity and
persistence of the sorrow they portray, gleams of hope for better
days. There is no hope in stolid indifference; it is in the penitent's
tears that we discover the prospect of his amendment. Repentance weeps
for the past, but at the same time it looks forward with a changed
mind that is the promise of better things to come. Why should not we
apply these ideas that spring from a consideration of the five Hebrew
elegies to other elegies--to the dirges that mourn the loved and dead?
If we could willingly let the departed drop out of thought we might
have little ground for believing we should ever see them again. But
sorrow for the dead immortalises them in memory. In a materialistic
view of the universe that might mean nothing but the perpetuity of a
sentiment. But then it may by itself help us to perceive the
superficiality, the utter falseness of such a view. Thus Tennyson sees
the answer to the crushing doubts of materialism and the assurance of
immortality for the departed in the strength of the love with which
they are cherished:
"What is it all if we all of us end but in being our own corpse
coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps of
a meaningless Past!
What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees
in their hive?
. . . . . . . .
Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever. The dead are
not dead, but alive."