impregnable fortress (ver. 10), and, armed only with her own beauty and innocence, has been in his eyes as one that found peace. The English version is quite arbitrary in rendering favour for peace. The sense is that, like a virgin fortress, she has compelled her assailant to leave her in peace. To these marks of identity with the heroine of ch. i. are to be added that she appears here as dwelling in gardens, there as a keeper of vineyards (i. 6, and viii. 13), and that as there it was her brethren that prescribed her duties, so here she apparently quotes words in which her brothers, while she was still a child, speculated as to her
future conduct and its reward (viii. 8, 9).If this analysis of the commencement and close of the book is correct, it is certain that the poem is in a sense dramatic, that is, that it uses dialogue and monologue to develop a story. The heroine appears in the opening scene in a difficult and painful situation, from which in the last chapter she is happily extricated. But the dramatic progress which the poem exhibits scarcely involves a plot in the usual sense of that word. The words of viii. 9, 10 clearly indicate that the deliverance of the heroine is due to no combination of favouring circumstances, but to her own inflexible fidelity and virtue. In accordance with this her role throughout the poem is simply a steadfast adherence to the position which she takes up in the opening scene, where she is represented as concentrating her thoughts on her absent lover with all that stubborn force of will which is characteristic of the Hebrews, and as frustrating the advances of the king by the mere naive intensity of pre-occupied affection. This conception of the principal part in the poem implies a very elementary amount of dramatic skill. But it is just the conception which tho analogy of Hebrew poetry in general, and especially of the book of Job, leads us to expect. The characters of Job and his friends are carefully dis criminated. But there is no action and reaction between the speakers. Each adheres to his own vein of thought almost untouched by what the others say, and the skill of the author appears only in the variety of poetical develop ments in which the fundamental idea of each character expresses itself. The reader who, with this analogy to guide him, runs through the parts of Canticles which must be assigned to a female speaker, cannot fail to see that the role indicated at the beginning and close of the book is carried out with perfect consistency.
The constant direction of the maiden s mind to her true love is partly expressed in dialogue with the ladies of the court (the daughters of Jerusalem), who have no dramatic individuality, and whose only function in the economy of the piece is to give the heroine opportunity for a more varied expression of her feelings. In i. 8 we found them contemptuous. In chapter iii. they appear to be still indifferent ; for when the heroine relates a dream in which the dull pain of separation and the uneasy consciousness of confinement and danger in the unsympathetic city disappear for a moment in imagined reunion with her lover, they are either altogether silent or reply only by taking up a festal part song describing the marriage pro cession of King Solomon (iii. 6-11), which stands i jarring contrast to the feelings of the maiden.[1] A second dream (v. 2-8), more weird and melancholy, and con structed with that singular psychological felicity which characterizes the dreams of the Old Testament, gains more sympathy, and the heroine is encouraged to describe her beloved at large (v. 10- vi. 3). The structure of these dialogues is so simple, and their purpose is so strictly limited to the exhibition of the character and affection of the maiden, that it is only natural to find them supplemented by a free use of pure monologue, in which the heroine recalls the happiness of past days, or expresses her rising hope of reunion with her shepherd, and restora tion to the simple joys of her rustic life. The vivid reminiscence of ii. 8-17 takes the form of a dialogue within the main dialogue of the poem, a picture within a picture the picture of her beloved as he stood at her window in the early spring time, and of her own merry heart as she laughingly answered him in the song with which watchers of the vineyards frighten away the foxes. It is, of course, a fault of perspective that this reminiscence is as sharp in outline and as strong in colour as the main action. But no one can expect perspective in such early art, and recollection of the past is clearly enough separated from present reality by ii. 16, 17.[2] The last monologue (vii. 10-viii. 3), in which the hope of immediate return with her lover is tempered by maidenly shame, and a maiden s desire for her mother s counsel, is of special value for a right appreciation of the psychology of the love which the poem celebrates, and completes a picture of thid flower of the northern valleys,[3] which is not only firm in outline but delicate in touch. The subordinate action which supports the portraiture of the maiden of Galilee is by no means easy to understand. It may be regarded as certain that, in iv. 1-7, the king is again introduced, and describes the personal charms of the heroine. His language is still that of cold admiration, suitable enough to the character of Solomon, and strongly contrasted with the beautiful and passionate outburst which follows (iv. 8- v, 1), and which suits no lips but those of the true lover. The latter passage offers great difficulties on any theory which finds a strict drama in Canticles. To sup pose that the shepherd appears in Jerusalem at so early a point in the action is not plausible, and it seems equally violent to assume with Ewald that the whole passage is to be put in the mouth of the heroine rehearsing words of her beloved. Perhaps the plan of the poem did not forbid the author to place a song of the absent shepherd in juxtaposition with the words of Solomon so as to bring out the contrast between mere sensual admiration and genuine passion. But the passage presents on any theory diffi culties of detail which no critic has satisfactorily removed.
praises of the heroine, and takes occasion in this connection to introduce, with the same want of perspective as wo observed in ch, ii., a dialogue descriptive of Solomon s first meeting with the maiden. We learn that she was an inhabitant of Shulem or Shunem in Issachar, whom the king and his train surprised in a garden on the occasion of a royal progress through the north. Her beauty drew from the ladies of the court a cry of admiration. The maiden shrinks back with the reply " I was gone down into my garden to see its growth. .... I know not how my soul hath brought me among the chariots of princes;" but she is commanded to turn and let herself be seen in spite of her bashful protest, "Why do ye gaze on the Shulamite as at a dance of Mahanaim (a spectacle)."[4] Now the person in whose mouth this relation is placed must be an eye-witness of the scene, and so none other than the king. But in spite of _the
verbal repetition of several of the figures of ch._iv., which,
- ↑ Ewald and others make this song a distinct scene in the action of the poem, supposing that the author here exhibits the honourable form of espousal by which Solomon thought to vanquish the scruples of the damsel. This view, however, seems to introduce a complication foreign to the plan of the book.
- ↑ " My beloved is mine, and I am his, who feedeth his flock among lilies. Before the day cool and the shadows fly, haste thee hither, my love, . . . over the mountains of separation."
- ↑ The rose (narcissus) of Sharon (ii. 1) must be placed in the north ern Sharon between Tabor and the Lake of Tiberias. Onom. Sacra, ed, Lagarde, pp. 154,296.
- ↑ The purport of these verses was divined by Ewald.
