Sundry men of letters besides Matthew Arnold have pleaded for a
literary study of the Bible, and specially of our English
Version, that we may thereby enhance our enjoyment of the work
itself and, through this, enjoyment and understanding of the rest
of English Literature, from 1611 down. Specially among these
pleaders let me mention Mr F. B. Money-Coutts (now Lord Latymer)
and a Cambridge man, Dr R. G. Moulton, now Professor of Literary
Theory and Interpretation in the University of Chicago. Of both
these writers I shall have something to say. But first and
generally, if you ask me why all their pleas have not yet
prevailed, I will give you my own answer--the fault as usual lies
in ourselves--in our own tameness and incuriosity.
There is no real trouble with the _taboo_ set up by professionals
and puritans, if we have the courage to walk past it as Christian
walked between the lions; no real tyranny we could not overthrow,
if it were worth while, with a push; no need at all for us to
`wreathe our sword in myrtle boughs.' What tyranny exists has
grown up through the quite well-meaning labours of quite
well-meaning men: and, as I started this lecture by saying, I have
never heard any serious reason given why we should not include
portions of the English Bible in our English Tripos, if we
choose.
Nos te,
Nos facimus, Scriptura, deam.
Then why don't we choose?
To answer this, we must (I suggest) seek somewhat further back.
The Bible--that is to say the body of the old Hebrew Literature
clothed for us in English--comes to us in our childhood. But how
does it come?
Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr Moulton, ask you to imagine a
volume including the great books of our own literature all bound
together in some such order as this: "Paradise Lost," Darwin's
"Descent of Man," "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," Walter Map, Mill
"On Liberty," Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," "The Annual
Register," Froissart, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," "Domesday
Book," "Le Morte d'Arthur," Campbell's "Lives of the Lord
Chancellors," Boswell's "Johnson," Barbour's "The Bruce,"
Hakluyt's "Voyages," Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of
Shakespeare, Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," "The Faerie Queene,"
Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Bacon's Essays, Swinburne's "Poems
and Ballads," FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyàm," Wordsworth, Browning,
"Sartor Resartus," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Burke's
"Letters on a Regicide Peace," "Ossian," "Piers Plowman," Burke's
"Thoughts on the Present Discontents," Quarles, Newman's
"Apologia", Donne's Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, "The Deserted
Village," Manfred, Blair's "Grave," "The Complaint of Deor,"
Bailey's "Festus," Thompson's "Hound of Heaven."
Will you next imagine that in this volume most of the author's
names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have
found their way into wrong places; that Ruskin for example is
credited with "Sartor Resartus," that "Laus Veneris" and
"Dolores" are ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, "The Anatomy of
Melancholy" to Charles II; and that, as for the titles, these
were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?
Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as
prose; while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into
short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out
for parsing or analysis in an examination paper?
This device, as you know, was first invented by the exiled
translators who published the Geneva Bible (as it is called) in
1557; and for pulpit use, for handiness of reference, for 'waling
a portion,' it has its obvious advantages: but it is, after all
and at the best, a very primitive device: and, for my part, I
consider it the deadliest invention of all for robbing the book
of outward resemblance to literature and converting it to the
aspect of a gazetteer--a _biblion a-biblion,_ as Charles Lamb
puts it.
Have we done? By no means. Having effected all this, let us
pepper the result over with italics and numerals, print it in
double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each
gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross
references. Then, and not till then, is the outward disguise
complete--so far as you are concerned. It remains only then to
appoint it to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get
selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to
imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the
game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have
been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they
themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with
that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example,
constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that
what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author
of "Piers Plowman" foretold it ages before.
Now a grown man--that is to say, a comparatively unimpressionable
man--that is again to say, a man past the age when to enjoy the
Bible is priceless--has probably found out somehow that the word
prophet does not (in spite of vulgar usage) mean 'a man who
predicts.' He has experienced too many prophets of that kind--
especially since 1914--and he respects Isaiah too much to rank
Isaiah among them. He has been in love, belike; he has read the
Song of Solomon: he very much doubts if, on the evidence, Solomon
was the kind of lover to have written that Song, and he is quite
certain that when the lover sings to his beloved:
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. Thy
neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools
in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim.
--he knows, I say, that this is not a description of the Church
and her graces, as the chapter-heading audaciously asserts. But
he is lazy; too lazy even to commend the Revised Version for
striking Solomon out of the Bible, calling the poem The Song of
Songs, omitting the absurd chapter-headings, and printing the
poetry as poetry ought to be printed. The old-fashioned
arrangement was good enough for him. Or he goes to church on
Christmas Day and listens to a first lesson, of which the old
translators made nonsense, and, in two passages at least, stark
nonsense. But, again, the old nonsense is good enough for him;
soothing in fact. He is not even quite sure that the Bible,
looking like any other book, ought to be put in the hands of the
young.
In all this I think he is wrong. I am sure he is wrong if our
contention be right, that the English Bible should be studied by
us all for its poetry and its wonderful language as well as for
its religion--the religion and the poetry being in fact
inseparable. For then, in Euripides' phrase, we should clothe the
Bible in a dress through which its beauty might best shine.