408 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



natural feeling, unaided by art and uncoloured by reflec 

 tion. These faults are in some measure due to the far too 

 early date to which the criticism of the age referred many 

 parts of the Old Testament ; but it is singular that any 

 critical prepossession should make it possible for so acute 

 an observer to read off the simple prose of Genesis as 

 verse, or to ignore the very high degree of conscious art 

 that runs through so much of the poetry which Herder 

 assigns to the remotest and most primitive antiquity. 1 



With all these defects, the labours of the poet and 

 philosopher of Weimar made an epoch in the study of 

 Hebrew poetry, for they vindicated for that study its 

 proper place as an integral portion of the larger historical 

 problem of reconstructing in its totality the life, growth, 

 and vital activity of the Hebrew nation. Thenceforth 

 progress in this department of criticism was bound up 

 with the general progress of historical research into the 

 Old Testament development, and no great advance on 

 Herder was possible except in connection with enlarged 

 and more accurate views of the history of Israel as a 

 whole. Such views grew but slowly. During the first 

 decennia of our century speculation on Old Testament 

 problems was little more than a chaos of acute but dis 

 jointed and arbitrary conjecture. It is not therefore 

 surprising that nearly forty years elapsed between Herder s 

 death and the appearance of the next really important 

 contribution to our subject ; and it was fitting that this 

 contribution should come from the pen of the scholar who 

 more than any other man has succeeded in gathering up 

 the many-sided material of the Hebrew records into the 

 oneness of a living, organic structure. The characteristic 

 power of Ewald is the intuition by which, without conscious 

 induction or articulate proof, he comprehends within his 

 gaze the whole heterogeneous data of a complicated 

 historical or critical problem, and divines the unity in 



1 On this last point compare the instructive remarks of Ewald in his 

 Eighth y ear-Book, p. 599. 



