Forth from the folds of the cloud, and one star
followed her footsteps,
As out of Abraham's tent young Ishmael
Wandered with Hagar."
There is a great deal of that sort of thing in his
writing. He has done for many what he did
for Lowell one day. Discouraged in settling
the form of a new edition of his own poems,
Lowell took up a volume of Longfellow just to
see the type, and presently found that he had
been reading two hours. He wrote Longfellow
he could understand his popularity, saying:
"You sang me out of all my worries." That is
a great thing to do, and Longfellow learned from
the Scripture how to do that in the "Psalm of
Life" and all his other poems.
We need only a word about Lowell himself.
He was the son of a minister, and so knew the
Bible from his infancy. He belonged to the
Brahman caste himself, but a good deal of the
ruggedness of the Old Testament got into his
writing. It is in "The Vision of Sir Launfal."
It is in his plea for international copyright where
the familiar lines occur:
"In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience to our dealing,
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing will continue stealing."
There is hint of it in his quizzical lines about
himself in the Fable for Critics. He says that
he is in danger of rattling away
"Until he is as old as Methusalem,
At the head of the march to the last New Jerusalem."
Whittier needs no words of ours. His hymns
are part of our religious equipment. "Snowbound"
and all the rest of the beautiful, quiet,
Quaker-like writing of this beloved poet are
among our national assets. We join in his sorrow
as he writes the doom of Webster and his
fame, and we do not wonder that he chose for
it the Scriptural title "Ichabod."
Whatever is to be said about an individual
here or there, it is true that great American
literature shows the influence of the Bible. Like
everything else in America, it has been founded
on a religious purpose. Writers in all lines have
been trained in the Bible. If they feel any
religious influence at all, it is the Bible influence.
This has been a long journey from Shakespeare
to Whittier, and it leaves untouched the
great field of present-day writers. Let the
unstarred names wait their time. Among them
are many who can say in their way what Hall
Caine has said of himself: "I think I know my
Bible as few literary men know it. There is no
book in the world like it, and the finest novels
ever written fall far short in interest of any one
of the stories it tells. Whatever strong situations
I have in my books are not of my creation,
but are taken from the Bible. The Deemster is
a story of the Prodigal Son. The Bondman is
the story of Esau and Jacob. The Scapegoat is
the story of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel
as a little girl; and The Manxman is the story of
David and Uriah." Take up any of the novels
of the day, even the poorer ones, but notably
the better ones, and see how uniformly they show
the Scriptural influence in material, in idea, and
in spirit. What the literature of the future will
be no one can say. This much is as sure as any
fact in literary history, that the English Bible
is part of the very fiber of great literature from
the day it first appeared in our tongue to this
hour.