So here, Gentlemen, you have Plato, Aristotle, Longinus--all
Greeks of separate states--men of eminence all three, and two of
surpassing eminence, all three and each in his time and turn
treating Homer reverently as Holy Writ and yet enjoying it
liberally as poetry. For indeed the true Greek mind had no
thought to separate poetry from religion, as to the true Greek
mind reverence and liberty to enjoy, with the liberty of mind
that helps to enjoy, were all tributes to the same divine thing.
They had no professionals, no puritans, to hedge it off with a
_taboo_: and so when the last and least of the three, Longinus,
comes to _our_ Holy Writ--the sublime poetry in which Christendom
reads its God--his open mind at once recognises it as poetry and
as sublime. 'God said, Let there be light: and there was light.'
If Longinus could treat this as sublime poetry, why cannot we,
who have translated and made it ours?
V
Are we forbidden on the ground that our Bible is directly
inspired? Well, inspiration, as Sir William Davenant observed and
rather wittily proved, in his Preface to "Gondibert," 'is a
dangerous term.' It is dangerous mainly because it is a relative
term, a term of degrees. You may say definitely of some things
that the writer was inspired, as you may certify a certain man to
be mad--that is, so thoroughly and convincingly mad that you can
order him under restraint. But quite a number of us are (as they
say in my part of the world) 'not exactly,' and one or two of us
here and there at moments may have a touch even of inspiration.
So of the Bible itself: I suppose that few nowadays would contend
it to be all inspired _equally._ 'No' you may say, 'not all
equally: but all of it _directly,_ as no other book is.'
To that I might answer, 'How do you _know_ that direct
inspiration ceased with the Revelation of St John the Divine, and
closed the book? It may be: but how do you know, and what
authority have you to say that Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," for
example, or Browning's great Invocation of Love was not directly
inspired? Certainly the men who wrote them were rapt above
themselves: and, if not directly, Why indirectly, and how?'
But I pause on the edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer
ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by
forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original--and
I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from "The
Cambridge History of English Literature"--'either proceeds from
divine inspiration, as some will have it, or, according to
others, is the fruit of the religious genius of the Hebrew race.
From either point of view the authors are highly gifted
individuals' [!]--
highly gifted individuals, who, notwithstanding their
diversities, and the progressiveness observable in their
representations of the nature of God, are wonderfully
consistent in the main tenor of their writings, and serve, in
general, for mutual confirmation and illustration. In some
cases, this may be due to the revision of earlier productions
by later writers, which has thus brought more primitive
conceptions into a degree of conformity with maturer and
profounder views; but, even in such cases, the earlier
conception often lends itself, without wrenching, to the
deeper interpretation and the completer exposition. The Bible
is not distinctively an intellectual achievement.
In all earnest I protest that to write about the Bible in such a
fashion is to demonstrate inferentially that it has never
quickened you with its glow; that, whatever your learning, you
have missed what the unlearned Bunyan, for example, so admirably
caught--the true _wit_ of the book. The writer, to be sure, is
dealing with the originals. Let us more humbly sit at the feet of
the translators. 'Highly gifted individuals,' or no, the sort of
thing the translators wrote was 'And God said, Let there be
light,' 'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The Kingdom of Heaven is
like unto leaven, which a woman took,' 'The wages of sin is
death,' 'The trumpet shall sound,' 'Jesus wept,' 'Death is
swallowed up in victory.'
Let me quote you for better encouragement, as well as for
relief, a passage from Matthew Arnold on the Authorised
Version:
The effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred
in a foreign language as the effect of other great
poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is
and must be in great measure lost in a translation, because
their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and
the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make
a good English poem with the matter and thoughts of Homer
and Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or rhyme:
but the metre and rhyme will be in truth his own, and the
effect will be his, not the effect of Homer or Dante. Isaiah's,
on the other hand, is a poetry, as is well known, of
parallelism; it depends not on metre and rhyme, but on a
balance of thought, conveyed by a corresponding balance of
sentence; and the effect of this can be transferred to another
language.... Hebrew poetry has in addition the effect of
assonance and other effects which cannot perhaps be
transferred; but its main effect, its effect of parallelism of
thought and sentence, can.
I take this from the preface to his little volume in which Arnold
confesses that his 'paramount object is to get Isaiah enjoyed.'