CHAPTER VIII.
ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A LITERARY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW).
It is not every critic of Ecclesiastes who helps the reader to
enjoy the book which is criticised. Too much criticism and
too little taste have before now spoiled many excellent books
on the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes needs a certain preparation
of the mind and character, a certain 'elective affinity,'
in order to be appreciated as it deserves. To enjoy it, we
must find our own difficulties and our own moods anticipated
in it. We must be able to sympathise with its author either
in his world-weariness and scepticism or in his victorious
struggle (if so be it was victorious) through darkness into
light. We must at any rate have a taste for the development
of character, and an ear for the fragments of truth which
a much-tried pilgrim gathered up in his twilight wanderings.
Never so much as in our own time have this taste and this
ear been so largely possessed, as a recent commentary has
shown in delightful detail, and I can only add to the names
furnished by the writer that of one who perhaps least of all
should be omitted, Miss Christina Rossetti.[1] But to prove
the point in my own way, let me again select four leading
critics, as representatives not so much of philology as of that
subtle and variable thing—the modern spirit, viz. Renan,
Grätz, Stanley, and Plumptre. The first truly is a
modern of the moderns, though it is not every modern who
will subscribe to his description of Ecclesiastes as 'livre charmant,
le seul livre aimable qui ait été composé par un Juif'[2]
