avoidance of uniformity in translating the same word. They tried to put
the meaning into English terms. So, as they say, the one word might become
either "journeying" or "traveling"; one word might be "thinking" or
"supposing," "joy" or "gladness," "eternal" or "everlasting." One of the
reasons they give for this is quaint enough to quote. They said they did
not think it right to honor some words by giving them a place forever in
the Bible, while they virtually said to other equally good words: Get ye
hence and be banished forever. They quote a "certaine great philosopher"
who said that those logs were happy which became images and were
worshiped, while other logs as good as they were laid behind the fire to
be burned. So they sought to use as many English words, familiar in speech
and commonly understood, as they might, lest they should impoverish the
language, and so lose out of use good words. There is no doubt that in
this effort both to save the language, and to represent accurately the
meaning of the original, they sometimes overdid that avoidance of
uniformity. There were times when it would have been well if the words had
been more consistently translated. For example, in the epistle of James
ii:2, 3, you have goodly "apparel," vile "raiment," and gay "clothing,"
all translating one Greek word. Our revised versions have sought to
correct such inconsistencies. But it was all done in the interest of an
accuracy that should yet not be a slavish uniformity.
This will be enough to illustrate what was meant in speaking of the effort
of the translators to achieve accuracy in their version.
III. The third marked trait of the work as a version of the Scripture is
its striking blending of dignity and popularity in its language. At any
period of a living language, there are three levels of speech. There is an
upper level used by the clearest thinkers and most careful writers, always
correct according to the laws of the language, generally somewhat remote
from common life--the habitual speech of the more intellectual. There is
also the lower level used by the least intellectual, frequently incorrect
according to the laws of the language, rough, containing what we now call
"slang," the talk of a knot of men on the street corner waiting for a new
bulletin of a ball game, cheap in words, impoverished in synonyms, using
one word to express any number of ideas, as slang always does. Those two
levels are really farther apart than we are apt to realize. A book or an
article on the upper level will be uninteresting and unintelligible to the
people on the lower level. And a book in the language of the lower level
is offensive and disgusting to those of the upper level. That is not
because the ideas are so remote, but because the characteristic
expressions are almost unfamiliar to the people of the different levels.
The more thoughtful people read the abler journals of the day; they read
the editorials or the more extended articles; they read also the great
literature. If they take up the sporting page of a newspaper to read the
account of a ball game written in the style of the lower level of thought,
where words are misused in disregard of the laws of the language, and
where one word is made to do duty for a great many ideas, they do it
solely for amusement. They could never think of finding their mental
stimulus in that sort of thing. On the other hand, there are people who
find in that kind of reading their real interest. If they should take up a
thoughtful editorial or a book of essays, they would not know what the
words mean in the connection in which they are used. They speak a good
deal about the vividness of this lower-level language, about its
popularity; they speak with a sneer about the stiffness and dignity of
that upper level.
These are, however, only the two extremes, for there is always a middle
level where move words common to both, where are avoided the words
peculiar to each. It is the language that most people speak. It is the
language of the street, and also of the study, of the parlor, and of the
shop. But it has little that is peculiar to either of those other levels,
or to any one place where a man may live his life and do his talking. If
we illustrate from other literature, we can say that Macaulay's essays
move on the upper level, and that much of the so-called popular literature
of our day moves on the lower level, while Dickens moves on the middle
level, which means that men whose habitual language is that of the upper
and the lower levels can both enter into the spirit of his writing.
Now, originally the Bible moved on that middle level. It was a colloquial
book. The languages in which it first appeared were not in the classic
forms. They are the languages of the streets where they were written. The
Hebrew is almost our only example of the tongue at its period, but it is
not a literary language in any case. The Greek of the New Testament is not
the Eolic, the language of the lyrics of Sappho; nor the Doric, the
language of war-songs or the chorus in the drama; nor the Ionic, the
dialect of epic poetry; but the Attic Greek, and a corrupted form of that,
a form corrupted by use in the streets and in the markets.
That was the original language of the Bible, a colloquial language. But
that fact does not determine the translation. Whether it shall be put into
the English language on the upper level or on the lower level is not so
readily determined. Efforts have been made to put it into the language of
each level. We have a so-called elegant translation, and we have the Bible
cast into the speech of the common day. The King James version is on the
middle level. It is a striking blending of the dignity of the upper level
and the popularity of the lower level.
There is tremendous significance in the fact that these men were making a
version which should be for all people, making it out in the open day with
the king and all the people behind them. It was the first independent
version which had been made under such favorable circumstances. Most of
the versions had been made in private by men who were imperiling
themselves in their work. They did not expect the Book to pass into common
use; they knew that the men who received the result of their work would
have to be those who were earnest enough to go into secret places for
their reading. But here was a changed condition. These men were making a
version by royal authority, a version awaited with eager interest by the
people in general. The result is that it is a people's Book. Its phrases
are those of common life, those that had lived up to that time. It is not
in the peculiar language of the times. If you want to know the language of
their own times, read these translators' servile, unhistorical dedication
to the king, or their far nobler preface to the reader. That is the
language peculiar to their own day. But the language of the Bible itself
is that form which had lived its way into common use. One hundred years
after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had
really lived. In the _Bibliotheca Pastorum_ Ruskin makes comment on Sir
Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir
Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him
to say precisely in English what David said in Hebrew; impressed the
while himself so vividly of the majesty of the thought itself that no
tinker's language can lower it or vulgarize it in his mind." The King
James translators were most eager to say what the original said, and to
say it so that the common man could well understand it, and yet so that it
should not be vulgarized or cheapened by adoption of cheap words.
In his History Hallam passes some rather sharp strictures on the English
of the King James version, remarking that it abounds in uncouth phrases
and in words whose meaning is not familiar, and that whatever is to be
said it is, at any rate, not in the English of the time of King James. And
that latter saying is true, though it must be remembered that Hallam wrote
in the period when no English was recognized by literary people except
that of the upper level, when they did not know that these so-called
uncouth phrases were to return to common use. To-day it would be absurd to
say that the Bible is full of uncouth phrases. Professor Cook has said
that "the movement of English diction, which in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was on the whole away from the Bible, now returns
with ever-accelerating speed toward it." If the phrases went out, they
came back. But it is true that the English of the King James version is
not that of the time of James I., only because it is the English of the
history of the language. It has not immortalized for us the tongue of its
times, because it has taken that tongue from its beginning and determined
its form. It carefully avoided words that were counted coarse. On the
other hand, it did not commit itself to words which were simply
refinements of verbal construction. That, I say, is a general fact.
It can be illustrated in one or two ways. For instance, a word which has
become common to us is the neuter possessive pronoun "its." That word does
not occur in the edition of 1611, and appears first in an edition in the
printing of 1660. In place of it, in the edition of 1611, the more
dignified personal pronoun "his" or "her" is always used, and it continues
for the most part in our familiar version. In this verse you notice it:
"Look not upon the wine when it is red; when it giveth _his_ color aright
in the cup." In the Levitical law especially, where reference is made to
sacrifices, to the articles of the furniture of the tabernacle, or other
neuter objects, the masculine pronoun is almost invariably used. In the
original it was invariably used. You see the other form in the familiar
verse about charity, that it "doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh
not _her_ own, is not easily provoked." Now, there is evidence that the
neuter possessive pronoun was just coming into use. Shakespeare uses it
ten times in his works, but ten times only, and a number of writers do not
use it at all. It was, to be sure, a word beginning to be heard on the
street, and for the most part on the lower level. The King James
translators never used it. The dignified word was that masculine or
feminine pronoun, and they always use it in place of the neuter.
On the other hand, there was a word which was coming into use on the upper
level which has become common property to us now. It is the word
"anxiety." It is not certain just when it came into use. I believe
Shakespeare does not use it; and it occurs very little in the literature
of the times. Probably it was known to these translators. When they came,
however, to translating a word which now we translate by "anxious" or
"anxiety" they did not use that word. It was not familiar. They used
instead the word which represented the idea for the people of the middle
level; they used the word "thought." So they said, "Take no thought for
the morrow," where we would say, "Be not anxious for the morrow." There is
a contemporary document which illustrates how that word "thought" was
commonly used, in which we read: "In five hundred years only two queens
died in child birth, Queen Catherine Parr having died rather of thought."
That was written about the time of the King James version, and "thought"
evidently means worry or anxiety. Neither of those words, the neuter
possessive pronoun or the new word "anxious," got into the King James
version. One was coming into proper use from the lower level, and one was
coming into proper use from the upper level. They had not yet so arrived
that they could be used.
One result of this care to preserve dignity and also popularity appears in
the fact that so few words of the English version have become obsolete.
Words disappear upward out of the upper level or downward out of the lower
level, but it takes a long time for a word to get out of a language once
it is in confirmed use on the middle level. Of course, the version itself
has tended to keep words familiar; but no book, no matter how widely used,
can prevent some words from passing off the stage or from changing their
meaning so noticeably that they are virtually different words. Yet even in
those words which do not become common there is very little tendency to
obsolescence in the King James version. More words of Shakespeare have
become obsolete or have changed their meanings than in the King James
version.
There is one interesting illustration to which attention has been called
by Dr. Davidson, which is interesting. In the ninth chapter of the Judges,
where we are told about Abimelech, the fifty-third verse reads that a
woman cast a stone down from the wall and "all to break his skull." That
is confessedly rather obscure. Our ordinary understanding of it would be
that she did that for no other purpose than just to break the skull of
Abimelech. As a matter of fact, that expression is a printer's bungling
way of giving a word which has become obsolete in the original form. When
the King James translators wrote that, they used the word "alto," which is
evidently the beginning of "altogether," or wholly or utterly, and what
they meant was that she threw the stone and utterly broke his skull. But
that abbreviated form of the word passed out of use, and when later
printers--not much later--came to it they did not know what it meant and
divided it as it stands in our present text. It is one of the few words
that have become obsolete. But so few are there of them, that it was made
a rule of the Revised Version not to admit to the new version, where it
could be avoided, any word not already found in the Authorized Version,
and also not to omit from the Revised Version, except under pressure of
necessity, any word which occurred there. It is largely this blending of
dignity and popularity that has made the King James version so influential
in English literature. It talks the language not of the upper level nor of
the lower level, but of that middle level where all meet sometimes and
where most men are all the while.
These are great traits to mark a book, any book, but especially a
translation--that it is honest, that it is accurate, and that its language
blends dignity and popularity so that it lowers the speech of none. They
are all conspicuous traits of our familiar version of the Bible, and in
them in part lies its power with the generations of these three centuries
that have followed its appearance.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Trevelyan, _England Under the Stuarts_.
[13] _History of England_, chap. i.
[14] _Short History of the English People_, chap. viii, sec. ii.
[15] Trevelyan, _England Under the Stuarts_, p. 107.
[16] _History of England, 1603-42._
LECTURE III
THE KING JAMES VERSION AS ENGLISH LITERATURE
Let it be plainly said at the very first that when we speak of the
literary phases of the Bible we are not discussing the book in its
historic meaning. It was never meant as literature in our usual sense of
the word. Nothing could have been further from the thought of the men who
wrote it, whoever they were and whenever they wrote, than that they were
making a world literature. They had the characteristics of men who do make
great literature--they had clear vision and a great passion for truth;
they loved their fellows mightily, and they were far more concerned to be
understood than to speak. These are traits that go to make great writers.
But it was never in their minds that they were making a world literature.
The Bible is a book of religious significance from first to last. If it
utterly broke down by the tests of literature, it might be as great a
book as it needs to be. It is a subordinate fact that by the tests of
literature it proves also to be great. Prof. Gardiner, of Harvard, whose
book called _The Bible as English Literature_ makes other such works
almost unnecessary, frankly bases his judgment on the result of critical
study of the Bible, but he serves fair warning that he takes inspiration
for granted, and thinks it "obvious that no literary criticism of the
Bible could hope for success which was not reverent in tone. A critic who
should approach it superciliously or arrogantly would miss all that has
given the Book its power as literature and its lasting and universal
appeal."[17] Farther over in his book he goes on to say that when we
search for the causes of the feelings which made the marvelous style of
the Bible a necessity, explanation can make but a short step, for "we are
in a realm where the only ultimate explanation is the fact of inspiration;
and that is only another way of saying that we are in the presence of
forces above and beyond our present human understanding."[18]
However, we may fairly make distinction between the Bible as an original
work and the Bible as a work of English literature. For the Bible as an
original work is not so much a book as a series of books, the work of
many men working separately over a period of at least fifteen hundred
years, and these men unconscious for the most part of any purpose of
agreement. This series of books is made one book in the original by the
unity of its general purpose and the agreement of its parts. The Bible in
English is, however, not a series of books, but properly one book, the
work of six small groups of men working in conscious unity through a short
period of years. And while there is variation in style, while there are
inequalities in result, yet it stands as a single piece of English
literature. It has a literary style of its own, even though it feels
powerfully the Hebrew influence throughout. And while it would not be a
condemnation of the Bible if it were not great literature in English or
elsewhere, it is still part of its power that by literary standards alone
it measures large.
It is so that men of letters have rated it since it came into existence.
"It holds a place of pre-eminence in the republic of letters." When John
Richard Green comes to deal with it, he says: "As a mere literary monument
the English version of the Bible remains the noblest language of the
English tongue, while its perpetual use made of it from the instant of its
appearance the standard of our language."[19] And in Macaulay's essay on
Dryden, while he is deploring the deterioration of English style, he yet
says that in the period when the English language was imperiled there
appeared "the English Bible, a book which if everything else in our
language should perish would alone suffice to show the extent of its
beauty and power."
The mere fact that the English Bible contains a religion does not affect
its standing as literature. Homer and Virgil are Greek and Roman classics,
yet each of them contains a definite religion. You can build up the
religious faith of the Greeks and Romans out of their great literature. So
you can build up the religious faith of the Hebrews and the early
Christians from the Old and New Testaments. "For fifteen centuries a
Hebrew Book, the Bible, contained almost the whole literature and learning
of a whole nation," while it was also the book of their religion.
As literature, however, apart from its religious connection, it is subject
to any of the criteria of literature. In so far it is the fair subject of
criticism. It must stand or fall when it enters the realm of literature by
the standards of other books. Indeed, many questions regarding its dates,
the authorship of unassigned portions, the meaning of its disputed
passages may be answered most fairly by literary tests. That is always
liable to abuse; but literary tests are always liable to that. There have
been enough blunders made in the knowledge of us all to require us to go
carefully in such a matter. The Waverley Novels were published
anonymously, and, while some suspected Scott at once, others were entirely
clear that on the ground of literary style his authorship was entirely
impossible! Let a magazine publish an anonymous serial, and readers
everywhere are quick to recognize the writer from his literary style and
his general ideas, but each group "recognizes" a different writer.
Arguments based chiefly on style overlook the large personal equation in
all writing. The same writer has more than one natural style. It is not
until he becomes in a certain sense affected--grows proud of his
peculiarities--that he settles down to one form. And it is quite
impossible to assign a book to any narrow historical period on the ground
of its style alone. But though large emphasis could be laid upon the
literary merits of the Bible to the obscuring of its other more important
merits, it is yet true that from the literary point of view the Bible
stands as an English classic, indeed, as the outstanding English classic.
To acknowledge ignorance of it is to confess one's self ignorant of our
greatest literary possession.
A moment ago it was said that as a piece of literature the Bible must
accept the standards of other literary books. For all present purposes we
can define great literature as worthy written expression of great ideas.
If we may take the word "written" for granted, the rough definition
becomes this: that great literature is the worthy expression of great
ideas. Works which claim to be great in literature may fail of greatness
in either half of that test. Petty, local, unimportant ideas may be well
clothed, or great ideas may be unworthily expressed; in either case the
literature is poor. It is not until great ideas are wedded to worthy
expression that literature becomes great. Failure at one end or the other
will explain the failure of most of the work that seeks to be accounted
literature. The literary value of a book cannot be determined by its style
alone. It is possible to say nothing gracefully, even with dignity,
symmetry, rhythm; but it is not possible to make literature without ideas.
Abiding literature demands large ideas worthily expressed. Now, of course,
"large" and "small" are not words that are usually applied to the
measurement of ideas; but we can make them seem appropriate here. Let us
mean that an idea is large or small according to its breadth of interest
to the race and its length of interest to the race. If there is an idea
which is of value to all the members of the human race to-day, and which
does not lose its value as the generations come and go, that is the
largest possible idea within human thought. Transient literature may do
without those large ideas. A gifted young reporter may describe a dog
fight or a presidential nominating convention in such terms as lift his
article out of carelessness and hasty newspaper writing into the realm of
real literature; but it cannot become abiding literature. It has not a
large enough idea to keep it alive. And to any one who loves worthy
expression there is a sense of degradation in the use of fine literary
powers for the description of purely transient local events. It is always
regrettable when men with literary skill are available for the description
of a ball game, or are exploited as worthy writers about a prize-fight. If
a man has power to express ideas well, he ought to use that power for the
expression of great ideas.
Many of us have seen a dozen books hailed as classic novels sure to live,
each of them the great American novel at last, the author to be compared
with Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot. And the books have gone the
way of all the earth. With some, the trouble is a weak, involved, or
otherwise poor style. With most the trouble is lack of real ideas. Charles
Dickens, to be sure, does deal with boarding-schools in England, with
conditions which in their local form do not recur and are not familiar to
us; but he deals with them as involving a great principle of the relation
of society to youth, and so _David Copperfield_ or _Oliver Twist_ becomes
a book for the life of all of us, and for all time. And even here it is
evident that not all of Dickens's work will live, but only that which is
least narrowly local and is most broadly human.
There is a further striking illustration in a familiar event in American
history. Most young people are required to study Webster's speech in reply
to Robert Hayne in the United States Senate, using it as a model in
literary construction. The speech of Hayne is lost to our interest, yet
the fact is that Hayne himself was gifted in expression, that by the
standards of simple style his speech compares favorably with that of
Webster. Yet reading Webster's reply takes one not to the local condition
which was concerning Hayne, but to a great principle of liberty and
union. He shows that principle emerging in history; the local touches are
lost to thought as he goes on, and a truth is expressed in terms of
history which will be valid until history is ended. It is not simply
Webster's style; it is that with his great idea which made his reply
memorable.
That neither ideas nor style alone can keep literature alive is shown by
literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the
"mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough,
but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton
or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with
ideas in abundance, but not style, and their works have died.