What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of Job’s words?—­

     For now should I have lien down and been quiet;
     I should have slept; then had I been at rest: 
     With kings and counsellers of the earth,
     Which built desolate places for themselves ... 
     There the wicked cease from troubling;
     And there the weary be at rest.

There is no need for me to point out how exactly, though from two nearly opposite angles, the story of Job would hit the philosophy of Milton and the philosophy of Shelley to the very heart.  What is the story of the afflicted patriarch but a direct challenge to a protestant like Milton (I use the word in its strict sense) to justify the ways of God to man?  It is the very purpose, in sum, of the “Book of Job,” as it is the very purpose, in sum, of “Paradise Lost”:  and since both poems can only work out the justification by long argumentative speeches, both poems lamentably fail as real solutions of the difficulty.  To this I shall recur, and here merely observe that qui s’ excuse s’ accuse:  a God who can only explain himself by the help of long-winded scolding, or of long-winded advocacy, though he employ an archangel for advocate, has given away the half of his case by the implicit admission that there are two sides to the question.  And when we have put aside the poetical ineptitude of a Creator driven to apology, it remains that to Shelley the Jehovah who, for a sort of wager, allowed Satan to torture Job merely for the game of testing him, would be no better than any other tyrant; would be a miscreant Creator, abominable as the Zeus of the “Prometheus Unbound.”

Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static figure:  and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but souls as quick and fiery as Byron’s Lucifer: 

     Souls who dare use their immortality—­
     Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
     His everlasting face, and tell him that
     His evil is not good.

Very well, urge this:  urge it with all your might.  All the while you will be doing just what I desire you to do, using “Job” alongside “Prometheus Unbound” and “Paradise Lost” as a comparative work of literature.

But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on the “Book of Job,” it is that they no sooner tackled it than they found it to be a magnificent poem already, and a poem on which, with all their genius, they found themselves unable to improve.

I want you to realise a thing most simple, demonstrable by five minutes of practice, yet so confused by conventional notions of what poetry is that I dare say it to be equally demonstrable that Milton and Shelley discovered it only by experiment.  Does this appear to you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as Milton?  Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in proof his paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi:  to set against the Authorised Version’s