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 Khayyám" 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."[28]
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."
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."[29] 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
_Æsop'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.
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.
3. The Victorian.
4. The American.
There is an attractive fifth group comprising our present-day workers in
the realm of pure literature, but we must omit them and give our attention
to names that are starred.
* * * * *
It is familiar that in the time of Elizabeth, "England became a nest of
singing birds." In the fifty years after the first English theater was
erected, the middle of Elizabeth's reign, fifty dramatic poets appeared,
many of the first order. Some were distinctly irreligious, as were many of
the people whose lives they touched. Such men as Ford, Marlowe, Massinger,
Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher stand like a chorus around Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson as leaders. As Taine puts it: "They sing the same piece
together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at
times."[30] Cultured people to-day know the names of most of these
writers, but not much else, and it does not heavily serve our argument to
say that they felt the Puritan influence; but they all did feel it either
directly or by reaction.
Edmund Spenser and his friend, Sir Philip Sidney, had closed their work
before the King James version appeared, yet the _Faerie Queene_ in its
religious theory is Puritan to the core, and Sidney is best remembered by
his paraphrases of Scripture. The influence of both was even greater in
the Jacobean than in their own period.
It is hardly fair even to note the Elizabethan Shakespeare as under the
influence of the King James version. The Bible influenced him markedly,
but it was the Genevan version prepared during the exile of the scholars
under Bloody Mary, or the Bishops' Bible prepared under Elizabeth. Those
versions were familiar as household facts to him. "No writer has
assimilated the thoughts and reproduced the words of Holy Scripture more
copiously than Shakespeare." Dr. Furnivall says that "he is saturated
with the Bible story," and a century ago Capel Lofft said quaintly that
Shakespeare "had deeply imbibed the Scriptures." But the King James
version appeared only five years before his death, and it is in some sense
fairer to say that Shakespeare and the King James version are formed by
the same influence as to their English style. The Bishop of St. Andrews
even devotes the first part of his book on Shakespeare and the Bible to a
study of parallels between the two in peculiar forms of speech, and thinks
it "probable that our translators of 1611 owed as much to Shakespeare as,
or rather far more than, he owed to them."[31] It is generally agreed that
only two of his works were written after our version appeared. Several
other writers have devoted separate volumes to noting the frequent use by
Shakespeare of Biblical phrases and allusions and characters taken from
early versions. It is a very tempting field, and we pass it by only
because it is hardly in the range of the study we are now making.
When, however, we come to John Milton (1608-1674), we remember he was only
three years old when our version was issued; that when at fifteen, an
undergraduate in Cambridge, he made his first paraphrases, casting two of
the Psalms into meter, the version he used was this familiar one. A
biographer says he began the day always with the reading of Scripture and
kept his memory deeply charged with its phrases. In later life the morning
chapter was generally from the Hebrew, and was followed by an hour of
silence for meditation, an exercise whose influence no man's style could
escape. As a writer he moved steadily toward the Scripture and the
religious teaching which it brought his age. His earlier writing is a
group of poems largely secular, which yet show in phrases and expressions
much of the influence of his boyhood study of the Bible, as well as the
familiar use of mythology. The memorial poem "Lycidas," for example,
contains the much-quoted reference to Peter and his two keys--
"Last came and last did go
The pilot of the Galilean lake;
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)."
But after these poems came the period of his prose, the work which he
supposed was the abiding work of his life. George William Curtis told a
friend that our civil war changed his own literary style: "That roused me
to see that I had no right to spend my life in literary leisure. I felt
that I must throw myself into the struggle for freedom and the Union. I
began to lecture and to write. The style took care of itself. But I fancy
it is more solid than it was thirty years ago." That is what happened to
Milton when the protectorate came.[32] It made his style more solid. He
did not mean to live as a poet. He felt that his best energies were being
put into his essays in defense of liberty, on the freedom of the press and
on the justice of the beheading of Charles, in which service he sacrificed
his sight. All of it is shot through with Scripture quotations and
arguments, and some of it, at least, is in the very spirit of Scripture.
The plea for larger freedom of divorce issued plainly from his own bitter
experience; but his main argument roots in a few Bible texts taken out of
their connection and urged with no shadow of question of their authority.
Indeed, when he comes to his more religious essays, his heavy argument is
that there should be no religion permitted in England which is not drawn
directly from the Bible; which, therefore, he urges must be common
property for all the people. There is a curious bit of evidence that the
men of his own time did not realize his power as a poet. In Pierre
Bayle's critical survey of the literature of the time, he calls Milton
"the famous apologist for the execution of Charles I.," who "meddled in
poetry and several of whose poems saw the light during his life or after
his death!" For all that, Milton was only working on toward his real
power, and his power was to be shown in his service to religion. His three
great poems, in the order of their value, are, of course, "Paradise Lost,"
"Samson Agonistes," and "Paradise Regained." Whoever knows anything of
Milton knows these three and knows they are Scriptural from first to last
in phrase, in allusion, and, in part at least, in idea. There is not time
for extended illustration. One instance may stand for all, which shall
illustrate how Milton's mind was like a garden where the seeds of
Scripture came to flower and fruit. He will take one phrase from the Bible
and let it grow to a page in "Paradise Lost." Here is an illustration
which comes readily to hand. In the Genesis it is said that "the spirit of
God moved on the face of the waters." The verb suggests the idea of
brooding. There is only one other possible reference (Psalm xxiv:2) which
is included in this statement which Milton makes out of that brief word in
the Genesis:
"On the watery calm
His broadening wings the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs,
Adverse to life; then formed, then con-globed,
Like things to like; the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the air--
And earth self-balanced on her center swung."
Any one familiar with Milton will recognize that as a typical instance of
the way in which a seed idea from the Scripture comes to flower and fruit
in him. The result is that more people have their ideas about heaven and
hell from Milton than from the Bible, though they do not know it.
It seems hardly fair to use John Bunyan (1628-1688) as an illustration of
the influence of the English Bible on literature, because his chief work
is composed so largely in the language of Scripture. _Pilgrim's Progress_
is the most widely read book in the English language after the Bible. Its
phrases, its names, its matter are either directly or indirectly taken
from the Bible. It has given us a long list of phrases which are part of
our literary and religious capital. Thackeray took the motto of one of his
best-known books from the Bible; but the title, _Vanity Fair_, comes from
_Pilgrim's Progress_. When a discouraged man says he is "in the slough of
despond," he quotes Bunyan; and when a popular evangelist tells the people
that the burden of sin will roll away if they look at the cross,
"according to the Bible," he ought to say according to Bunyan. But all
this was only the outcome of the familiarity of Bunyan with the Scripture.
It was almost all he did know in a literary way. Macaulay says that "he
knew no language but the English as it was spoken by the common people; he
had studied no great model of composition, with the exception of our noble
translation of the Bible. But of that his knowledge was such that he might
have been called a living concordance."[33]
After these three--Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan--there appeared another
three, very much their inferiors and having much less influence on
literary history. I mean Dryden, Addison, and Pope. It is not necessary to
credit the Scripture with much of Dryden's spirit, nor with much of his
style, and certainly not with his attitude toward his fellows; but it is a
constant surprise in reading Dryden to discover how familiar he was with
the King James version. Walter Scott insists that Dryden was at heart
serious, that "his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful
man." That is generous judgment. But there is this to be said: as he grows
more serious he falls more into Bible words. If he writes a political
pamphlet he calls it "Absalom and Ahithophel." In it he holds the men of
the day up to scorn under Bible names. They are Zimri and Shimei, and the
like. When he is falling into bitterest satire, his writing abounds in
these Biblical allusions which could be made only by one who was very
familiar with the Book. Quotations cannot be abundant, of course, but
there is a great deal of this sort of thing:
"Sinking, he left his drugget robe behind,
Borne upward by a subterranean wind,
The mantle fell to the young prophet's part,
With double portion of his father's art."
In his Epistles there is much of the same sort. When he writes to Congreve
he speaks of the fathers, and says:
"Their's was the giant race before the flood."
Farther on he says:
"Our builders were with want of genius curst,
The second temple was not like the first."
Now Dryden may have been, as Macaulay said, an "illustrious renegade," but
all his writing shows the influence of the language and the ideas of the
King James version. Whenever we sing the "Veni Creator" we sing John
Dryden.
So we sing Addison in the paraphrase of Scripture, which Haydn's music has
made familiar:
"The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky."
While Dryden yielded to his times, Addison did not, and the _Spectator_
became not only a literary but a moral power. In the effort to make it so
he was thrown back on the largest moral influence of the day, the Bible,
and throughout the _Spectator_ and through all of Addison's writing you
find on all proper occasions the Bible pressed to the front. Here again
Taine puts it strikingly: "It is no small thing to make morality
fashionable; Addison did it, and it remains fashionable."
If we speak of singing, we may remember that we sing the hymn of even poor
little dwarfed invalid Alexander Pope. He was born the year Bunyan died,
born at cross-purposes with the world. He could write a bitter satire,
like the "Dunciad"; he could give the world The Iliad and The Odyssey in
such English that we know them far better than in the Greek of Homer; but
in those rare moments when he was at his better self he would write his
greater poem, "The Messiah," in which the movement of Scripture is
outlined as it could be only by one who knew the English Bible. And when
we sing--
"Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise"--
it is worth while to realize that the voice that first sung it was that of
the irritable little poet who found some of his scant comfort in the grand
words and phrases and ideas of our English Bible.
With these six--Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Addison, and
Pope--the course of the Jacobean literature is sufficiently measured.
There are many lesser names, but these are the ones which made it an epoch
in literature, and these are at their best under the power of the Bible.
* * * * *
In the Georgian group we need to call only five great names which have had
creative influence in literature. Ordinary culture in literature will
include some acquaintance with each of them. In the order of their death
they are Shelley (1822), Byron (1824), Coleridge (1831), Walter Scott
(1832), and Wordsworth (1850). The last long outlived the others; but he
belongs with them, because he was born earlier than any other in the group
and did his chief work in their time and before the later group appeared.
Except Wordsworth, all these were gone before Queen Victoria came to the
throne in 1837. Three other names could be called: Keats, Robert Burns,
and Charles Lamb. All would illustrate what we are studying. Keats least
of all and Burns most. They are omitted here not because they did not feel
the influence of the English Bible, not because they do not constantly
show its influence, but because they are not so creative as the others;
they have not so influenced the current of literature. At any rate, the
five named will represent worthily and with sufficient completeness the
Georgian period of English literature.
Nothing could reveal more clearly than this list how we are distinguishing
the Bible as literature from the Bible as an authoritative book in morals.
One would much dislike to credit the Bible with any part of the personal
life of Shelley or Byron. They were friends; they were geniuses; but they
were both badly afflicted with common moral leprosy. It is playing with
morals to excuse either of them because he was a genius. Nothing in the
genius of either demanded or was served by the course of cheap immorality
which both practised. It was not because Shelley was a genius that he
married Harriet Westbrook, then ran away with Mary Godwin, then tried to
get the two to become friends and neighbors until his own wife committed
suicide; it was not his genius that made him yield to the influence of
Emilia Viviani and write her the poem "Epipsychidion," telling her and the
world that he "was never attached to that great sect who believed that
each one should select out of the crowd a mistress or a friend" and let
the rest go. That was not genius, that was just common passion; and our
divorce courts are full of Shelleys of that type. So Byron's personal
immorality is not to be explained nor excused on the ground of his genius.
It was not genius that led him so astray in England that his wife had to
divorce him, and that public opinion drove him out of the land. It was not
his genius that sent him to visit Shelley and his mistress at Lake Geneva
and seduce their guest, so that she bore him a daughter, though she was
never his wife. It was not genius that made him pick up still another
companion out of several in Italy and live with her in immoral relation.
In the name of common decency let no one stand up for Shelley and Byron in
their personal characters! There are not two moral laws, one for geniuses
and one for common people. Byron, at any rate, was never deceived about
himself, never blamed his genius nor his conscience for his wrong. These
are striking lines in "Childe Harold," in which he disclaims all right to
sympathy, because,
"The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted,--they have torn me and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a tree."
Shelley's wife would not say that for him. "In all Shelley did," she says,
"he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own
conscience." Well, so much the worse for Shelley! Geniuses are not the
only men who can find good reason for doing what they want to do. One of
Shelley's critics suggests that the trouble was his introduction into
personal conduct of the imagination which he ought to have saved for his
writing. Perhaps we might explain Byron's misconduct by reminding
ourselves of his club-foot, and applying one code of morals to men with
club-feet and another to men with normal feet.
If we speak of the influence of the Bible on these men, it must be on
their literary work; and when we find it there, it becomes peculiar mark
of its power. They had little sense of it as moral law. Their consciences
approved it and condemned themselves, or else their delicate literary
taste sensed it as a book of power.
This is notably true of Shelley. When he was still a student in Oxford he
committed himself to the opinion of another writer, that "the mind cannot
believe in the existence of God." He tries to work that out fully in his
notes on "Queen Mab." When he was hardly yet of age he himself wrote that
"The genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed Book
of God, ere man can read the inscription on its heart." He once said that
his highest desire was that there should be a monument to himself
somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its face
smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Atheist."