itness of the scene,
and so none other than the king. But in spite of the verbal repetition
of several of the figures of ch. iv.... the tone in which the king now
addresses the Shulamite is quite changed. She is not only beautiful but
terrible, her eyes trouble him, and he cannot endure their gaze. She is
unique among women, the choice and only one of her mother. The unity of
action can only be maintained by ignoring vii. 1-9, and taking the words
of Solomon in chapter vi. in their obvious sense as implying that the
king at length recognizes in the maiden qualities of soul unknown in the
harem, a character which compels respect, as well as a beauty that
inflames desire. The change of feeling which was wrought in the
daughters of Jerusalem in the previous scene now extends to Solomon
himself, and thus the glad utterances of vii. 10, seq., have a
sufficient motive, and the _denouement_ is no longer violent and
unprepared.

The _nodus_ of the action is fully given in chapter i., the final issue
in chapter viii. The solution lies entirely in the character and
constancy of the heroine, which prevail, in the simplest possible way,
first over the ladies of the court and then over the king.

The attractiveness of the above theory cannot be denied; but it may be
asked whether the attraction does not lie in the appeal to modern taste
of a story which is largely the product of modern imagination. It
supposes a freedom of intercourse between lovers inconceivable for the
East. The initial situation of the maiden in the harem of Solomon is
left as a problem for the reader to discover, until he comes to its
supposed origin in vi. 11; the expedient might be granted in the case of
one of Browning's _Men and Women_, but seems very improbable in the
present case. The more elaborate dramatic theories can find no parallel
in Semitic literature to the "drama" of Canticles, the book of Job being
no exception to this statement; whilst even the simpler theories ask us
to believe that the essential parts of the story--the rape of the
Shulamite, the change in Solomon's disposition, her release from the
harem--are to be supplied by the reader from obscure and disputable
references. More serious still is the fact that any progress of action
from first to last is so difficult to prove. In the first chapter we
listen to a woman speaker desiring to be kissed by the man who has
brought her into his chambers, and speaking of "our bed"; in the last we