people, whom no word of their God nor any of His heavy judgments
could move to repentance. He paints a hopeless picture of society in
Jerusalem and Judah under Jehoiakim, rotten with dishonesty and vice.
Members of the same family are unable to trust each other; all are bent on
their own gain by methods unjust and cruel--from top to bottom so
hopelessly false as even to be blind to the meaning of the disasters which
rapidly befal them and to the final doom that steadily draws near. Yet,
for all the wrath he pours upon his generation and the Divine vengeance of
which he is sure, how the man still loves and clings to them, and takes
their doom as his own! And, greatest of all, how he reads in the heart
that was in him the Heart of God Himself--the same astonishment that the
people are so callous, the same horror of their ruin, nay the same sense
of failure and of suffering under the burden of such a waste--_on Me is the
waste!_(467) _What I built I have to destroy!_

Except that he does not share these secrets of the Heart of God, it is of
Victor Hugo among moderns that I have been most reminded when working
through Jeremiah's charges against the king, the priests, the prophets and
the whole people of Judah--Victor Hugo in his _Chatiments_ of the monarch,
the church, the journalists, the courtiers and other creatures of the
Third French Empire. There is the same mordant frankness and satiric rage
combined with the same desire to share the miseries of the critic's people
in spite of their faults. I have already quoted Hugo's lines on Napoleon
III as parallel to Jeremiah's on Jehoiakim.(468)

Here are two other parallels.

To Jeremiah's description of his people being persuaded that all was well,
when well it was not, and refusing to own their dishonour, VIII. 11, 12,
take Hugo's "on est infame et content" and

Et tu chantais, en proie aux eclatants mensonges
Du succes.

And to Jeremiah's acceptance of the miseries of his people as his own and
refusal to the end to part from them take these lines to France:--

Je te demanderai ma part de tes miseres,
Moi ton fils.
France, tu verras bien qu'humble tete eclipsee
J'avais foi,
Et que je n'eus jamais dans l'ame une pensee
Que pour toi.
France, etre sur ta claie a l'heure ou l'on te traine
Aux cheveux,
O ma mere, et porter mon anneau de ta chaine
Je le veux!