Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/293

 her kings and princes; and at the sight of the fallen mighty, "who have descended to Hades with their weapons of war and laid their swords under their heads," Pharaoh and all his host are comforted. Throughout this remarkable picture there is no glimpse of personal punishment or reward in a future state; it is the picture of a shadow-world in which the dead in nations lie disfigured shades of their mangled bodies, a pale subterranean battle-field in which national or group distinctions are alone noticed. When Vergil in Hades sees Deiphobus with mangled body and gashed face, the idea is as materialistic as Ezekiel's; but Vergil's Hades is peopled with individuals, and contains the Pindaric ideas of personal reward and punishment; it is far removed from the clan age and clan associations. Dante's descriptions of the City of Dis, where are the tombs of the heretics burning with intense fire, has been compared with Ezekiel's picture; but the sepulchres of Dante are not the gathering-places of nations, they are abodes of torture for individuals such as Farinata degli Uberti; indeed, Dante's Hades exactly reflects the strongly individualised life of the Italian republics, Florence in particular. In Ezekiel the absence of this personal future of reward or punishment is all the more remarkable because of his open repudiation of the old clan morality. He is, therefore, in the position of a man who has discarded the traditional morality without finding any sanction to put in its place; the wicked may now prosper and the righteous perish without even the clan justice of inherited evil or good.

§ 72. How this ethical position of Ezekiel was likely to lead to pessimism the Book of Qôheleth (or Ecclesiastes, as we call it) only too sadly indicates. Individualism in