VII. General Character. — 1. It is well to be reminded bj" the above survey that we have before us, not a book in five chapters, but five separate poems, each complete iu itself, each having a distinct subject, yet brought at the same time under a plan which includes them all. It is clear, before entering on any other characteristics, tliat \ve find, in fuU predominance, that strong personal emotion which mingled itself, in greater or less measure, with the whole prophetic work of Jeremiah. There is here no " word of Jehovah," no direct message to a sin- ful people. Tlie man speaks out of the fulness of his heart, and, though a higher Spirit than his own helps him to give utterance to his sorrows, it is yet the lan- guage of a sufferer rather than of a teacher. There is this measure of truth in the technical classification whicli placed the Lamentations among the Hagiogra- pha of the Hebrew Canon, in the feeling which led the K.il)binic writers (J\\mc\\i, Prwf.in Psalm.) to say that tliey and the other books of that group were written in- deed by the help of the Holy Spirit, but not with the special gift of prophecy.
2. Other differences between the two books that bear the prophet's name grew out of this. Here there is more attention to form, more elaboration. The rhytlim is more uniform than in the prophecies. A complicated alphabetic structure pervades nearly the whole book. It will be remembered that this acrostic form of writing was not peculiar to Jeremiah. Whatever its origin, whether it had been adofited as a help to the memory, and so fitted especially for didactic poems, or for such as were to be sung by great bodies of people (Lowth, Pnel. xxii), it had been a received, and it would seem popu- lar, framework for poems of very different characters,
and extending probably over a considerable period of time. The 119th Psalm is the great monument which forces itself upon our notice ; but it is found also in the 25th, 34th, 37th, 111th, 112th, U5th— and in the singu- larly beautiful fragment appended to the book of I'rov- erbs (Prov. xxxi, 10-31). Traces of it, as if the work had been left half finished (De Wette, Psalmen, ad loc), appear in the 9th and 10th. In the Lamentations (con- fining ourselves for the present to the structure) we meet with some remarkable peculiarities.
It has to be remembered, too, that in thus speaking the writer was doing what many must have looked for from him, and so meeting at once their expectations and their wants. Other projjhets and poets had made themselves the spokesmen of the nation's feelings on the death of kings and lieroes. The party that contin- ued faithful to the policy and principles of Josiah re- membered how the prophet had lamented over his death. The lamentations of that period (though they are lost to us) had been accepted as a great national dirge. Was he to be silent now that a more terrible calamity had fallen upon the people? Did not the ex- iles in Babylon need this form of consolation? Does not the appearance of this book in their canon of sacred writings, after their return from exile, indicate that during their captivity they had found this consolation in it?
The choice of a structure so artificial as that which has been described above may at first sight appear in- consistent with the deep, intense sorrow of which it claims to be the utterance. Some wilder, less measured rhythm would seem to us to have been a titter form of expression. It would belong, however, to a ver}^ shal- low and hasty criticism to pass this judgment. A man true to the gift he has received will welcome the disci- pline of self-imposed rules for deep sorrow as well as for other strong emotions. In proportion as he is afraid of being carried away by the strong current of feeling will he be anxious to make the laws more difficult, the dis- cipline more effectual. Something of this kind is trace- able in the fact that so many of the master-minds of European literature have chosen — as the fit vehicle for their deepest, tenderest, most impassioned thoughts — ^ the complicated structure of the sonnet ; in Dante's se- lection of the terza rinia for his vision of the unseen world. What the sonnet was to Petrarch and jMiltoii, that the alphabetic verse-S3'stem was to the writers of Jeremiah's time, the most difficult among the recognised forms of poetry, and yet one in which (assuming the earlier date of some of the Psalms above referred to) some of the noblest thoughts of that poetry had been uttered. We need not wonder that he should have em- ployed it as fitter than any other for the pur[)ose for which he used it. If these Lamentations were intended to assuage the bitterness of the Babylonian exile, there was, besides this, the subsidiary advantage that it sup- plied the memory with an artificial help. Hymns and poems of this kind, once learned, are not easily forgot- ten, and the circumstances of the captives made it then, more than ever, necessary that they should have this help afforded them.
De Wette maintains {Comment, iiher die Psalm, p. 5G) that this acrostic form of writing was the outgrowth of a feeble and degenerate age dwelling on the outer struc- ture of poetrv when the soul had departed. His judg- ment as to the origin and character of the alpliabetic form is shared by Ewald {Poet. Biich. i, 140). Tliat thia is often the case cannot be doubted; the 119th Psalm is a case in point. It is hard, however, to reconcile this sweeping estimate with the impression made on us by such Psalms as the 25th and 34th; and Ewald himself, in his translation of the Alphabetic Psalms and the Lam- entations, has shown how compatible such a structure is with the highest energy and beauty. With some of these, too, it must be added, the assignment of a later date than the time of David rests on the foregone con-» elusion that the acrostic structure is itself a proof of it