THE INFLUENCE OF THE KING JAMES VERSION
ON ENGLISH LITERATURE
THE Bible is a book-making book. It is
literature which provokes literature.
It would be a pleasure to survey the whole
field of literature in the broadest sense and to
note the creative power of the King James version;
but that is manifestly impossible here.
Certain limitations must be frankly made.
Leave on one side, therefore; the immense body
of purely religious literature, sermons, expositions,
commentaries, which, of course, are the
direct product of the Bible. No book ever
caused so much discussion about itself and its
teaching. That is because it deals with the
fundamental human interest, religion. It still
remains true that the largest single department
of substantial books from our English presses is
in the realm of religion, and after the purely
recreative literature they are probably most
widely read. Yet, they are not what we mean
at this time by the literary result of the English
Bible.
Leave on one side also the very large body
of political and historical writing. Much of it
shows Bible influence. In the nature of the
case, any historian of the past three hundred
years must often refer to and quote from the
English Bible, and must note its influence. An
entire study could be devoted to the influence
of the English Bible on Green or Bancroft or
Freeman or Prescott--its influence on their
matter and their manner. Another could be
given to its influence on political writing and
speaking. No great orator of the day would fail
us of material, and the great political papers
and orations of the past would only widen the
field. Yet while some of this political and historical
writing is recognized as literature, most
of it can be left out of our thought just
now.
It may aid in the limiting of the field to
accept what Dean Stanley said in another connection:
"By literature, I mean those great
works that rise above professional or commonplace
uses and take possession of the mind of
a whole nation or a whole age."[1] This is one
of the matters which we all understand until
we begin to define it; we know what we mean
until some one asks us.
[1] Thoughts that Breathe.
The literature of which we are thinking in this
narrower sense is in the sphere of art rather than
in the sphere of distinct achievement. De
Quincey's division is familiar: the literature of
knowledge, and the literature of power. The
function of the first is to teach; the function of
the second is to move. Professor Dowden
points out that between the two lies a third
field, the literature of criticism. It seeks both
to teach and to move. Our concern is chiefly
with De Quincey's second field--the literature
of power. In the first field, the literature of
knowledge, must lie all history, with Hume and
Gibbon; all science, with Darwin and Fiske;
all philosophy, with Spencer and William James;
all political writing, with Voltaire and Webster.
Near that same field must lie many of those
essays in criticism of which Professor Dowden
speaks. This which we omit, this literature of
knowledge, is powerful literature, though its
main purpose is not to move, but to teach.
We are only reducing our field so that we can
survey it. For our uses just now we shall
find pure literature taking the three standard
forms: the poem, the essay, and the story. It
is the influence of the English Bible on this
large field of literature which we are to observe.
Just for safety's sake, accept another narrowing
of the field. The effect of the Bible and its
religious teaching, on the writer himself is a
separate study, and is for the most part left out
of consideration. It sounds correct when Milton
says: "He who would not be frustrate of
his Power to write well ought himself to be a
true poem." But there is Milton himself to
deal with; irreproachable in morals, there are
yet the unhappy years of his young wife to
trouble us, and there were his daughters, who
were not at peace with him, and whom after
their service in his blindness he yet stigmatizes
in his will as "undutiful children." Then, if
you think of Shelley or Byron, you are troubled
by their lives; or even Carlyle, the very master
of the Victorian era--one would not like to scan
his life according to the laws of true poetry.
Then there is Coleridge, falling a prey to opium
until, as years came, conscience and will seemed
to go. Only a very ardent Scot will feel that he
can defend Robert Burns at all points, and we
would be strange Americans if we felt that
Edgar Allen Poe was a model of propriety. That
is a large and interesting field, but the Bible
seems even to gain power as a book-making book
when it lays hold on the book-making proclivities
of men who are not prepared to yield to its
personal power. They may get away from it
as religion; they do not get away from it as
literature.
The first and most notable fact regarding the
influence of the Bible on English literature is
the remarkable extent of that influence. It is
literally everywhere. If every Bible in any
considerable city were destroyed, the Book could
be restored in all its essential parts from the
quotations on the shelves of the city public
library. There are works, covering almost all
the great literary writers, devoted especially to
showing how much the Bible has influenced them.
The literary effect of the King James version
at first was less than its social effect; but in
that very fact lies a striking literary influence.
For a long time it formed virtually the whole
literature which was readily accessible to ordinary
Englishmen. We get our phrases from a
thousand books. The common talk of an intelligent
man shows the effect of many authors
upon his thinking. Our fathers got their phrases
from one great book. Their writing and their
speaking show the effect of that book.
It is a study by itself, and yet it is true that
world literature is, as Professor Moulton puts it,
the autobiography of civilization. "A national
literature is a reflection of the national history."
Books as books reflect their authors. As literature
they reflect the public opinion which gives
them indorsement. When, therefore, public
opinion: keeps alive a certain group of books,
there is testimony not simply to those books,
but to the public opinion which has preserved
them. The history of popular estimates of literature
is itself most interesting. On the other
hand, some writers have been amusingly overestimated.
No doubt Edward Fitzgerald, who gave
us the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" did
some other desirable work; but Professor Moulton
quotes this paragraph from a popular life of
Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece
of old in her palmiest days--the Greece of Homer
and Demosthenes, of Eschylus, Euripides, and
Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades,
of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and
Lycurgus, of Apelles and Praxiteles--not even
this Greece, prolific as she was in sages and
heroes, can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as
Ireland can of names immortal in history!"
But "this was for Irish consumption." And
popular opinion and even critical opinion has
sometimes gone far astray in its destructive
tendency. There were authoritative critics who
declared that Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge
wrote "unintelligible nonsense." George
Meredith's style, especially in his poetry, was
counted so bad that it--was not worth reading.
We are all near enough the Browning epoch to
recall how the obscurity of his style impressed
some and oppressed others. Alfred Austin, in
1869, said that "Mr. Tennyson has no sound
pretensions to be called a great poet."
Contemporary public opinion is seldom a final
gauge of strength for a piece of literature. It
takes the test of time. How many books we
have seen come on the stage and then pass off
again! Yet the books that have stayed on the
stage have been kept there by public opinion
expressing itself in the long run. The social
influence of the King James version, creating a
public taste for certain types of literature, tended
to produce them at once.
English literature in these three hundred
years has found in the Bible three influential
elements: style, language, and material.
First, the style of the King James version has
influenced English literature markedly. Professor
Gardiner opens one of his essays with the
dictum that "in all study of English literature,
if there be any one axiom which may be accepted
without question, it is that the ultimate standard
of English prose style is set by the King
James version of the Bible."[1] You almost
measure the strength of writing by its agreement
with the predominant traits of this version.
Carlyle's weakest works are those that
lose the honest simplicity of its style in a forced
turgidity and affected roughness. His Heroes
and Hero Worship or his French Revolution
shows his distinctive style, and yet shows the
influence of this simpler style, while his Frederick
the Great is almost impossible because he has
given full play to his broken and disconnected
sentences. On the other hand, Macaulay fails
us most in his striving for effect, making nice
balance of sentences, straining his "either-or,"
or his "while-one-was-doing-this-the-other-was-
doing-that." Then his sentences grow involved,
and his paragraphs lengthen, and he swings
away from the style of the King James version.
"One can say that if any writing departs very
far from the characteristics of the English Bible
it is not good English writing."
[1] Atlantic Monthly, May, 1900, p. 684.
The second element which English literature
finds in the Bible is its LANGUAGE. The words of
the Bible are the familiar ones of the English
tongue, and have been kept familiar by the use
of the Bible. The result is that "the path of
literature lies parallel to that of religion. They
are old and dear companions, brethren indeed
of one blood; not always agreeing, to be sure;
squabbling rather in true brotherly fashion now
and then; occasionally falling out very seriously
and bitterly; but still interdependent and necessary
to each other."[1] Years ago a writer remarked
that every student of English literature,
or of English speech, finds three works or subjects
referred to, or quoted from, more frequently
than others. These are the Bible, tales of Greek
and Roman mythology, and Aesop's Fables. Of
these three, certainly the Bible furnishes the
largest number of references. There is reason
for that. A writer wants an audience. Very
few men can claim to be independent of the
public for which they write. There is nothing
the public will be more apt to understand and
appreciate quickly than a passing reference to
the English Bible. So it comes about that when
Dickens is describing the injustice of the Murdstones
to little David Copperfield, he can put
the whole matter before us in a parenthesis:
"Though there was One once who set a child
in the midst of the disciples." Dickens knew
that his readers would at once catch the meaning
of that reference, and would feel the contrast
between the scene he was describing and that
simple scene. Take any of the great books of
literature and black out the phrases which manifestly
come directly from the English Bible, and
you would mark them beyond recovery.
[1] Chapman, English Literature in Account with Religion.
But English literature has found more of its
material in the Bible than anything else. It has
looked there for its characters, its illustrations,
its subject-matter. We shall see, as we consider
individual writers, how many of their titles and
complete works are suggested by the Bible.
It is interesting to see how one idea of the
Scripture will appear and reappear among many
writers. Take one illustration. The Faust story
is an effort to make concrete one verse of Scripture:
"What shall it profit a man if he shall
gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
Professor Moulton reminds us that the Faust
legend appeared first in the Middle Ages. In
early English, Marlowe has it, Calderon put it
into Spanish, the most familiar form of it is
Goethe's, while Philip Bailey has called his
account of it Festus. In each of those forms
the same idea occurs. A man sells his soul to
the devil for the gaining of what is to him the
world. That is one of a good many ideas which
the Bible has given to literature. The prodigal
son has been another prolific source of literary
writing. The guiding star is another. Others
will readily come to mind.
With that simple background let our minds
move down the course of literary history. Style,
language, material--we will easily think how
much of each the Bible has given to all our great
writers if their names are only mentioned. There
are four groups of these writers.
1. The Jacobean, who wrote when and just
after our version was made.
2. The Georgian, who graced the reigns of
the kings whose name the period bears.