- ing, the literary form of the Book of Job as well as of the
unequally great English poem, and Coleridge is probably right in representing Milton as indebted to the former for his plan. It is however open to us to doubt not only whether Paradise Regained is a true epic poem, but whether any section of the Book of Job except the Prologue partakes of the nature of an epic. The Prologue certainly does; it is more than a mere introduction to the subsequent speeches; it is an independent poetical narrative,[1] if not a narrative poem; nor is there wanting a strong infusion of that supernatural element which tradition regards as essential to the epic. True, it is a torso, but this does not interfere with its genuinely poetic character: it is, as Milton says, a 'brief model' or miniature of an epic poem. The Colloquies on the other hand are as undoubtedly a germinal character-drama, as the Song of Songs is a germinal stage-drama. The work belongs to the same class as Goethe's Iphigenie and Tasso; only there is much more passion in it than in these great but distinctively modern poems. Some one has said that 'there is no action and reaction between the speakers' [in the Colloquies]. This is an over-statement. Not only is each speaker consistent with his type of character, but the passionate excitement of Job, and his able though fragmentary confutation of his opponents, do produce an effect upon the latter, do force them to take up a new position, though not indeed to recall their original thesis.[2]
But in order to bring the Book of Job nearer to the modern Western mind, we must not only study it from the point of view of form, but also compare its scope and range with those of the loftiest modern Western poems of similar import; only then shall we discover the points in which it is distinctively ancient, Oriental, Semitic.—The greatest English work of kindred moral and religious import is Paradise Lost. Like Job, it is a theodicy, though of a more complex character, and aims
