In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1897, a writer, in giving his personal reminiscences of Tennyson, relates an anecdote concerning the poet and the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Speaking of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), Tennyson said it was the one book the admission of which into the canon he could not understand, it was so utterly pessimistic—of the earth, earthy. Maurice fired up. “Yes, if you leave out the last two verses. But the conclusion of the whole matter is, ‘Fear God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.’ So long as you look only down upon earth, all is ‘vanity of vanities.’ But if you look up there is a God, the judge of good and evil.” Tennyson said he would think over the matter from that point of view.

This amusing incident must have caused a ripple of laughter in scholastic circles, now that the labors of Cheyne, Renan, Dillon, and others, have left little doubt that both of the verses cited by Maurice are later editorial additions. They alone, he admitted, could save the book, and the charm of the incident is that the verses were placed there by ancient Maurices to induce ancient Tennysons to “think over the matter from that point of view.” The result was that the previously rejected book was admitted into the canon by precisely the same force which continued its work at Faringford, and continues it to this day. Only one must not suppose that Mr. Maurice was aware of the ungenuineness of the verses. He was an honest gentleman, but so ingeniously mystical that had the two verses not been there he could readily have found others of equally transcendant and holy significance, without even resorting to other pious interpolations in the book.

Tennyson was curiously unconscious of his own pessimism. When any one questioned the belief in a future life in his presence his vehemence without argument betrayed his sub-conscious misgivings, while his indignation ran over all the conditional resentments of Job. I have heard that he said to Tyndall that if he knew there was no future life he would regard the creator of human beings as a demon, and shake his fist in His eternal face. This rage was based in a more profoundly pessimistic view of the present life than anything even in Ecclesiastes,—by which name may be happily distinguished the disordered, perverted, and mistranslated Koheleth.

It appears evident that the sentence which opens Koheleth,—in our Bibles “All is vanity, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity,”—is as mere a Jahvist chapter-heading as that of our A. S. translators: “The Preacher showeth that all human courses are vain.” It is repeated as the second of the eight verses added at the end of the work. Koheleth does not label the whole of things vanity; in a majority of cases the things he calls vain are vain; and some things he finds not vanity,—youth, and wedded love, and work that is congenial.

Renan (Histoire du Peuple d’IsraËl, Tome 5, p. 158) has shown conclusively, as I think, that the signature on this book, QHLT, is a mere letter-play on the word “Solomon,” and the eagerness with which the letters were turned into Koheleth (which really means Preacheress), and to make Solomon’s inner spouse a preacher of the vanities of pleasure and the wisdom of fearing God, is thus naively indicated in the successive names of the book, “Koheleth” and “Ecclesiastes.” We are thus warned by the title to pick our way carefully where the Jahvist and the Ecclesiastic have been before us; remembering especially that though piety may induce men to forge things, this is never done lightly. As people now do not commit forgery for a shilling, so neither did those who placed spurious sentences or phrases in nearly every chapter of the Bible do so for anything they did not consider vital to morality or to salvation. In Ecclesiastes we must be especially suspicious of the very serious religious points. Fortunately the style of the book renders it particularly subject to the critical and literary touchstone.

Is it necessary to point out to any man of literary instinct the interpolation bracketed in the following verses? “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thy age, and walk in the paths of thy heart, and according to the vision of thine eyes [but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment], and banish discontent from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh; for youth and dawn are fleeting. Remember also thy fountain in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come or the years draw nigh in which thou shalt say I have no delight in them.”

It is only by removing the bracketed clause that any consistency can be found in the lyric, which Professor Cheyne compares with the following song by the ancient Egyptian harper at the funeral feast of Neferhotap:

There is no historical means of determining what writings of Solomon are preserved in the Bible and even in the apocryphal books. One may feel that Goethe recognised a brother spirit in that far epoch when he selected for his proverb:

Koheleth too appreciated this, and also (x. 12) uses almost literally Proverbs xii. 18, “The tongue of the wise is gentleness.” (Compare Shakespeare’s words, “Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.”) The lines previously cited, “Rejoice O young man, etc.,” are also probably quoted, as they are given in poetical quatrains. There are many of these quatrains introduced into the book, from the prose context of which they differ in style and sometimes in sense.

In none of these metrical quotations (as I believe them to be) is there any belief in God, the only instance in which the word “God” is mentioned being an ironical maxim about the danger coming from monarchs because of their oaths to their God, with whom they identify their own ways and wishes. Such seems to me the meaning of the lines (viii. 2, 4) which Dillon translates—

With this compare Proverbs xxi. 1, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord (Jahveh) as the water-courses; he turneth it whithersoever he will.” This proverb is evidently by a Jahvist, and Koheleth quotes another which signifies rather “Jahveh is in the king’s caprice.” But he adopts the neighbouring proverb, “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to Jahveh than sacrifice.” Koheleth says, and this is not quoted—“To draw near to (God) in order to learn, is better than the offering of sacrifices by fools.”

Although the verses quoted by Maurice to Tennyson (xii. 13, 14) are not genuinely in Koheleth they correspond with sentences in the genuine text of very different import. Koheleth, though his quotations are godless, believes there is a God, and a formidable one. Sometimes he refers to him as Fate, sometimes as the unknowable, but as without moral quality. “To the just men that happeneth which should befall wrong-doers; and that happeneth for criminals which should be the lot of the upright” (viii. 14), and “neither (God’s) love nor hatred doth a man foresee” (ix. 1). God has set prosperity and adversity side by side for the express purpose of hiding Himself from human knowledge (vii. 14); not, alas, as the Yalkut Koheleth suggests, in order that one may help the other. God does benefit those who please him, and punish those who displease him; this is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to Him; but it has no relation with the humanly good and evil (viii. 11–14). As it is evident that God’s favor is not secured by good works nor his disfavor incurred by evil works, a prudent man will consider that it may perhaps be a matter of etiquette, and will be punctilious, especially “in the house of God”; he will not speak rashly and then hope to escape by saying “it was rashness.” His words had better be few, and if he makes any vow (which may well be avoided) he should perform it. But as for practical life and conduct, God, or fate, is clearly indifferent to it, consequently let a man eat his bread and quaff his wine with joy, love his wife,—the best portion of his lot,—and whatever his hand findeth to do that do with vigor, remembering that “there is no work, nor thought, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the inevitable grave.”

Such is Koheleth’s conception of life, which, except so far as it is marred by a vague notion of Fate which is fatal to philanthropy, is not very different from the idea growing in our own time. “The All is a never-ceasing whirl” (i. 8), and Koheleth advises that each individual man try to make what little circle of happiness he can around him. “O my heart!” says Omar KhayyÁm, “thou wilt never penetrate the mysteries of the heavens; thou wilt never reach that culminating point of wisdom which the intrepid omniscients have attained. Resign thyself then to make what little paradise thou canst here below. As for that close-barred seraglio beyond thou shalt arrive there—or thou shalt not!”

It is, however, impossible for any church or priesthood to be maintained on any such principles. Where mankind believe with Koheleth that whatever God does is forever, that nothing can be superadded to it nor aught be taken away; and that God has so contrived that man must fear Him; they will have no use for any paraphernalia for softening the irrevocable decrees of a Judgment Day already past. But Koheleth’s arrows, feathered with wit and eloquence, were logically shot from the Jahvist arquebus. It was Jahveh himself who proudly claimed that he created good and evil, and that if there were evil in a city it was his work. It was Jahveh’s own prophet, Isaiah, who cried (lxiii. 17), “O Lord, why dost Thou make us to err from Thy ways, and hardenest our heart from Thy fear?”

What then could Jahvism say when a time arrived wherein it must defend itself against a Jahveh-created world?