is;;] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 417 



of subjectivity, which is the main key to the psychological 

 criticism of the Old Testament literature. The Hebrew 

 language, as Herder has shown us, is fitted to express 

 nature, not realistically, as it presents itself to the outer 

 unsympathetic eye, nor simply sensuously idealised as in 

 the art of Greece, but as it appears when seen through the 

 medium of passionate human interest and transmuted in 

 the alembic of internal feeling. The perfection of the 

 Hebrew language as a vehicle of emotion is in truth most 

 strikingly seen in points of grammatical structure to 

 which Herder does not allude. Every nicety of form and 

 construction has for its end the expression of varying 

 relations of feeling between the thinker and his thought. 

 In the hands of David or Isaiah every word, every suffix, 

 every modification of order or of tone, expresses some 

 delicate shade of emotion hardly reproducible in another 

 language. Such a tongue is the fit organ of a fervid and 

 imperious personality which refuses to be the mere 

 interpreter of nature, and esteems nothing which cannot 

 be brought into concrete relation to itself. The un- 

 impassioned, intellectual admiration of the ideal of 

 sensuous beauty, which is the ruling principle of Greek art, 

 is unknown to the Semite. He values nature only in so 

 far as it moves and affects him, or is capable of being 

 moved and affected by him. He has no sense therefore 

 for that objective harmony of a beautiful scene which is 

 independent of the varying emotions with which men may 

 look upon it. To him nature is what he feels as he beholds 

 it : the universe is a complex of living powers with which 

 he enters into a fellowship of joy and woe, of love and 

 dread, of confidence and fear ; which awe him with the 

 utterance of infinite might, or furnish him with matter of 

 victorious boasting if he is able to bend them to his own 

 service. 



The art which corresponds to such a view of nature is 

 necessarily unplastic. The Hebrews never attained excel 

 lence in the reproduction of natural things by the pencil 



27 



