the Bible would be by way of reaction; but it is not so. However he may
have hated the "accursed Book of God," his wife tells in her note on "The
Revolt of Islam" that Shelley "debated whether he should devote himself
to poetry or metaphysics," and, resolving on the former, he "educated
himself for it, engaging himself in the study of the poets of Greece,
England, and Italy. To these, may be added," she goes on, "a constant
perusal of portions of the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms, Job, Isaiah,
and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with delight." Not only
did he catch the spirit of that poetry, but its phrases haunted his
memory. In his best prose work, which he called _A Defense of Poetry_,
there is an interesting revelation of the influence of his Bible reading
upon him. Toward the end of the essay these two sentences occur: "It is
inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but
posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their
errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if
their sins are as scarlet, they are now white as snow; they have been
washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time." There is no more
eloquent passage in the essay than the one of which this is part, and yet
it is full of allusion to this Book from which all pages must be torn!
Even in "Queen Mab" he makes Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, recount the
Bible story in such broad outlines as could be given only by a man who
was familiar with it. When Shelley was in Italy and the word came to him
of the massacre at Manchester, he wrote his "Masque of Anarchy." There are
few more melodious lines of his writing than those which occur in this
long poem in the section regarding freedom. Four of those lines are often
quoted. They are at the very heart of Shelley's best work. Addressing
freedom, he says:
"Thou art love: the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and, like him following Christ,
Gave their substance to the free,
And through the rough world follow thee."
Page after page of Shelley reveals these half-conscious references to the
Bible. There were two sources from which he received his passionate
democracy. One was the treatment he received at Eton, and later at Oxford;
the other is his frequent reading of the English Bible, even though he was
in the spirit of rebellion against much of its teaching. In Browning's
essay on Shelley, he reaches the amazing conclusion that "had Shelley
lived, he would finally have ranged himself with the Christians," and
seeks to justify it by showing that he was moving straight toward the
positions of Paul and of David. Some of us may not see such rapid
approach, but that Shelley felt the drawing of God in the universe is
plain enough.
The influence of the Bible is still more marked on Byron. He spent his
childhood years at Aberdeen. There his nurse trained him in the Bible;
and, though he did not live by it, he never lost his love for it, nor his
knowledge of it. He tells of his own experience in this way: "I am a great
reader of those books [the Bible], and had read them through and through
before I was eight years old; that is to say, the Old Testament, for the
New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure."[34] One of the
earliest bits of his work is a paraphrase of one of the Psalms. His
physical infirmity put him at odds with the world, while his striking
beauty drew to him a crowd of admirers who helped to poison every spring
of his genius. Even so, he held his love for the Bible. While Shelley
often spoke of it in contempt, while he prided himself on his divergence
from the path of its teaching, Byron never did. He wandered far, but he
always knew it; and, though he could hardly find terms to express his
contempt for the Church, there is no line of Byron's writing which is a
slur at the Bible. On the other hand, much of his work reveals a passion
for the beauty of it as well as its truth. His most melodious writing is
in that group of Hebrew melodies which were written to be sung. They
demand far more than a passing knowledge of the Bible both for their
writing and their understanding. There is a long list of them, but no one
without a knowledge of the Bible would have known what he meant by his
poem, "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept." "Jephtha's Daughter" presumes
upon a knowledge of the Old Testament story which would not come to one in
a passing study of the Bible. "The Song of Saul Before his Last Battle"
and the poem headed "Saul" could not have been written, nor can they be
read intelligently by any one who does not know his Bible. Among Byron's
dramas, two of which he thought most, were, "Heaven and Earth" and "Cain."
When he was accused of perverting the Scripture in "Cain," he replied that
he had only taken the Scripture at its face value. Both of the dramas are
not only built directly out of Scriptural events, but imply a far wider
knowledge of Scripture than their mere titles suggest.
There are striking references in many other poems, even in his almost vile
poem, "Don Juan." The most notable instance is in the fifteenth canto,
where he is speaking of persecuted sages and these lines occur:
"Was it not so, great Locke? and greater Bacon?
Great Socrates? And Thou Diviner still,
Whose lot it is by men to be mistaken,
And Thy pure creed made sanction of all ill?
Redeeming worlds to be by bigots shaken,
How was Thy toil rewarded?"
In a note on this passage Byron says: "As it is necessary in these times
to avoid ambiguity, I say that I mean by 'Diviner still' _Christ_. If ever
God was man--or man God--He was both. I never arraigned His creed, but the
use or abuse of it. Mr. Canning one day quoted Christianity to sanction
slavery, and Mr. Wilberforce had little to say in reply. And was Christ
crucified that black men might be scourged? If so, He had better been born
a mulatto, to give both colors an equal chance of freedom, or at least
salvation." Byron could live far from the influence of the Bible in his
personal life; but he never escaped its influence in his literary work.
Of Coleridge less needs to be said, because we think of him so much in
terms of his more meditative musings, which are often religious. He
himself tells of long and careful rereadings of the English Bible until he
could say: In the Bible "there is more that finds me than I have
experienced in all other books together; the words of the Bible find me at
greater depths of my being." Of course, that would influence his writing,
and it did. Even in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" much of the
phraseology is Scriptural. When the albatross drew near,
"As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name."
When the mariner slept he gave praise to Mary, Queen of Heaven. He sought
the shriving of the hermit-priest. He ends the story because he hears "the
little vesper bell" which bids him to prayer. When you read his "Hymn
Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix" you find yourself reading the
Nineteenth Psalm. He calls on the motionless torrents and the silent
cataracts and the great Mont Blanc itself to praise God. Coleridge never
had seen Chamounix, nor Mont Blanc, nor a glacier, but he knew his Bible.
So he has his Christmas Carol along with all the rest. His poem of the
Moors after the Civil War under Philip II. is Scriptural in its
phraseology, and so is much else that he wrote. Frankly and willingly he
yielded to its influence. In his "Table Talk" he often refers to the value
of the Bible in the forming of literary style. Once he said: "Intense
study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of
style."[35]
The very mention of Coleridge makes one think of Wordsworth. They had a
Damon and Pythias friendship. The Wordsworths were poor; they had only
seventy pounds a year, and they were not ashamed. Coleridge called them
the happiest family he ever saw. Wordsworth was not narrowly a Christian
poet, he was not always seeking to put Christian dogma into poetry, but
throughout he was expressing the Christian spirit which he had learned
from the Bible. His poetry was one long protest against banishing God from
the universe. It was literally true of him that "the meanest flower that
grows can give thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears." If this
were the time to be critical, one would think that too much was sometimes
made of very minute occurrences; but this tendency to get back of the
event and see how God is moving is learned best from Scripture, where
Wordsworth himself learned it. If you read his "Intimations of
Immortality," or the "Ode to Duty," or "Tintern Abbey," or even the rather
labored "Excursion," you find yourself under the Scriptural influence.
There remains in this Georgian group the great prose master, Walter Scott.
Mr. Gladstone said he thought Scott the greatest of his countrymen. John
Morley suggested John Knox instead. Mr. Gladstone replied: "No, the line
must be drawn firmly between the writer and the man of action--no
comparison there."[36] He went on to say that Burns is very fine and true,
no doubt, "but to imagine a whole group of characters, to marshal them, to
set them to work, and to sustain the action, I must count that the test of
highest and most diversified quality." All who are fond of Scott will
realize how constantly the scenes which he is describing group themselves
around religious observances, how often men are held in check from deeds
of violence by religious conception. Many of these scenes crystallize
around a Scriptural event. Scott's boyhood was spent in scenes that
reminded him of the power the Scripture had. He was drilled from his
childhood in the knowledge of its words and phrases, and while his writing
as a whole shows more of the Old Testament influence than of the New, even
in his style he is strongly under Bible influence.
The preface to _Guy Mannering_ tells us it is built around an old story of
a father putting a lad to test under guidance of an ancient astrologer,
shutting him up in a barren room to be tempted by the Evil One, leaving
him only one safeguard, a Bible, lying on the table in the middle of the
room. In his introduction to _The Heart of Midlothian_, Scott makes one of
the two men thrown into the water by the overturned coach remind the other
that they "cannot complain, like Cowley, that Gideon's fleece remains dry
while all around is moist; this is the reverse of the miracle." A little
later a speaker describes novels as the Delilahs that seduce wise and good
men from more serious reading. In the dramatic scene when Jeanie Deans
faces the wretched George Staunton, who has so shamed the household, she
exclaims: "O sir, did the Scripture never come into your mind, 'Vengeance
is mine, and I will repay it?'" "Scripture!" he sneers, "why I had not
opened a Bible for five years." "Wae's me, sir," said Jeanie--"and a
minister's son, too!" Anthony Foster, in _Kenilworth_, looks down on poor
Amy's body in the vault into which she has fallen, in response to what she
thought was Leicester's whistle, and exclaims to Varney: "Oh, if there be
judgment in heaven, thou hast deserved it, and will meet it! Thou hast
destroyed her by means of her best affections--it is the seething of the
kid in the mother's milk!" And when, next morning, Varney was found dead
of the secret poison and with a sneering sarcasm on his ghastly face,
Scott dismisses him with the phrase: "The wicked man, saith the
Scripture, hath no bonds in his death."
His characters use freely the familiar Bible events and phrases. In the
_Fortunes of Nigel_, a story of the very period when our King James
version was produced, Hildebrod declares that if he had his way Captain
Peppercull should hang as high as Haman ever did. In _Kenilworth_, when
Leicester gives Varney his signet-ring, he says, significantly: "What thou
dost, do quickly." Of course, Isaac, the Jew in _Ivanhoe_, exclaims
frequently in Old Testament terms. He wishes the wheels of the chariots of
his enemies may be taken off, like those of the host of Pharoah, that they
may drive heavily. He expects the Palmer's lance to be as powerful as the
rod of Moses, and so on.
Scott was writing of the period when men stayed themselves with Scripture,
and his men are all sure of God and Satan and angels and judgment and all
eternal things. His son-in-law vouches for the old story that when Sir
Walter was on his death-bed he asked Lockhart to read him something from
the Book, and when Lockhart asked, "What book?" Scott replied: "Why do you
ask? There is but one book, the Bible."
All this is scant justice to the Georgian group; but it may give a hint
of what the Bible meant even at that period, the period when its grip on
men was most lax in all the later English history.
* * * * *
It is in the Victorian age (1840-1900) that the field is most bewildering.
It is true, as Frederick Harrison says, that "this Victorian age has no
Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott--no supreme
master in poetry, philosophy, or romance whose work is incorporated with
the thought of the world, who is destined to form an epoch, to endure for
centuries."[37] The genius of the period is more scientific than literary,
yet we would be helpless if we had not already eliminated from our
discussion everything but the works and writers of pure literature. The
output of books has been so tremendous that it would be impossible to
analyze the influences which have made them. There are in this Victorian
period at least twelve great English writers who must be known, whose work
affects the current of English literature. Many other names would need
mention in any full history or any minute study; but it is not harsh
judgment to say that the main current of literature would be the same
without them.
A few of these lesser names will come to mind, and in the calling of them
one realizes the influence, even on them, of the English Bible. Anthony
Trollope wrote sixty volumes, the titles of most of which are now
popularly unknown. He told George Eliot that it was not brains that
explained his writing so much, but rather wax which he put in the seat of
his chair, which held him down to his daily stint of work. He could boast,
and it was worth the boasting, that he had never written a line which a
pure woman could not read without a blush. His whole Framley Parsonage
series abounds in Bible references and allusions. So Charlotte Brontë is
in English literature, and _Jane Eyre_ does prove what she was meant to
prove, that a commonplace person can be made the heroine of a novel; but
on all Charlotte Brontë's work is the mark of the rectory in which she
grew up. So Thomas Grey has left his "Elegy" and his "Hymn to Adversity,"
and some other writing which most of us have forgotten or never knew. Then
there are Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. We may even remember that
Macaulay thought Jane Austen could be compared with Shakespeare, as, of
course, she can be, since any one can be; but neither of these good women
has strongly affected the literary current. Many others could be named,
but English literature would be substantially the same without them; and,
though all might show Biblical influence, they would not illustrate what
we are trying to discover. So we come, without apology to the unnamed, to
the twelve, without whom English literature would be different. This is
the list in the order of the alphabet: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning
(Mrs. Browning being grouped as one with him), Carlyle, Dickens, George
Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Macaulay, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Swinburne, Tennyson, and Thackeray.
It is dangerous to make such a list; but it can be defended. Literary
history would not be the same without any one of them, unless possibly
Swinburne, whose claim to place is rather by his work as critic than as
creator. Nor is any name omitted whose introduction would change literary
history.
Benjamin Jowett thought Arnold too flippant on religious things to be a
real prophet. At any rate, this much is true, that the books in which
Arnold dealt with the fundamentals of religion are his profoundest work.
In his poetry the best piece of the whole is his "Rugby Chapel." His
_Religion and Dogma_ he himself calls an "essay toward a better
apprehension of the Bible." All through he urges it as the one Book which
needs recovery. "All that the churches can say about the importance of the
Bible and its religion we concur in." The book throughout is an effort to
justify his own faith in terms of the Bible. The effort is sometimes
amusing, because it takes such a logical and verbal agility to go from one
to the other; but he is always at it. He is afraid in his soul that
England will swing away from the Bible. He fears it may come about through
neglect of the Bible on one hand, or through wrong teaching about it on
the other. Not in his ideas alone, but markedly in his style, Arnold has
felt the Biblical influence. He came at a time when there was strong
temptation to fall into cumbrous German ways of speech. Against that
Arnold set a simple phraseology, and he held out the English Bible
constantly as a model by which the men of England ought to learn to write.
He never gained the simplicity of the old Hebrew sentence, and sometimes
his secondary clauses follow one another so rapidly that a reader is
confused; but his words as a whole are simple and direct.
There is no need of much word on the spell of the Bible over Robert
Browning and Mrs. Browning. It is not often that two singing-birds mate;
but these two sang in a key pitched for them by the Scripture as much as
by any one influence. Many of their greatest poems have definite Biblical
themes. In them and in others Biblical allusions are utterly bewildering
to men who do not know the Bible well. For five years (1841-1846)
Browning's poems appeared under the title _Bells and Pomegranates_. Scores
of people wondered then, and wonder still, what "Pippa Passes" and "A Blot
in the Scutcheon" and the others have to do with such a title. They have
never thought, as Browning did, of the border of the beautiful robe of the
high priest described in the Book of Exodus. The finest poem of its length
in the English language is Browning's "Saul"; but it is only the story of
David driving the evil spirit from Saul, sweeping on to the very coming of
Christ. "The Death in the Desert" is the death of John, the beloved
disciple. "Karshish, the Arab Physician" tells in his own way of the
raising of Lazarus. The text of "Caliban upon Setebos" is, "Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." The text of
"Cleon" is, "As certain of your own poets have said." In "Fifine at the
Fair" the Curé expounds the experience of Jacob and his stone-pillow with
better insight than some better-known expositors show. In "Pippa Passes,"
when Bluphocks, the English vagabond, is introduced, Browning seems to
justify his appearance by the single foot-note: "He maketh His sun to rise
on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust"; and Mr. Bluphocks shows himself amusingly familiar with Bible
facts and phrases. Mr. Sludge, "the Medium," thinks the Bible says the
stars are "set for signs when we should shear sheep, sow corn, prune
trees," and describes the skeptic in the magic circle of spiritual
"investigators" as the "guest without the wedding-garb, the doubting
Thomas." Some one has taken the trouble to count five hundred Biblical
phrases or allusions in "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Browning's "Drama of
Exile" is the woman's side of the fall of Adam and Eve. Ruskin thought her
"Aurora Leigh" the greatest poem the century had produced at that time. It
abounds in Scriptural allusions. Browning came by all this naturally.
Raised in the Church by a father who "delighted to surround him with
books, notably old and rare Bibles," and a mother Carlyle called "a true
type of a Scottish gentlewoman," with all the skill in the Bible that that
implies, he never lost his sense of the majesty of the movement of
Scripture ideas and phrases.
We need spend little time in discussing the influence of the English Bible
on Thomas Carlyle. He does not often use the Scripture for his main
theme; but he is constantly making Biblical allusions. On a railway
journey when I was rereading Carlyle's _Historical Sketches_, I found a
direct Biblical reference for every five pages, and almost numberless
allusions beside.
The "Everlasting Yea," of which he says much, he gets, as you at once
recognize, from the Scripture. His "Heroes and Hero Worship" is based on
an idea of heroism which he learned from the Bible. He is an Old Testament
prophet of present times; and, while he degenerated into a scold before he
was through with it, he yet spoke with the thunderous voice of a true
prophet, and much of the time in the language of the prophets. Some one
said once that the only real reverence Carlyle ever had was for the person
of Christ. Certainly there is no note of sneer, but of the profoundest
regard for the teaching, the ideas and the history of the Scripture.
The name of Charles Dickens suggests a different atmosphere. He is a New
Testament prophet. Where Carlyle has caught the spirit of rugged power in
the Old Testament, Dickens has caught the sense of kindly love in the New
Testament. Dickens's love for the child, the fact that he could draw
children as he could draw no one else and make them lovable, suggests the
value to him of those frequent references which he makes to Christ setting
a child in the midst of the disciples. It is notable, too, how often
Dickens uses the great Scripture phrases for his most dramatic climaxes.
There are not in literature many finer uses of Scripture than the scene in
_Bleak House_, where the poor waif Joe is dying, and while his friend
teaches him the Lord's Prayer he sees the light coming. A Christmas season
without Dickens's _Christmas Carol_ would be incomplete; but there again
is the Scripture idea pressed forward.
George Eliot surely, if any writer, was under the spell of the Scripture.
One of her critics calls her the historian of conscience. All of her
heroes and heroines know the lash of the law. She knows very little about
the New Testament, one would judge; but the one thing about which she has
no doubt is certainly the reign of moral law. If a man will not yield to
its power, it will break him. There is no such thing as breaking the moral
law; there is nothing but being broken by it. Her characters are always
quoting the Bible. They preach a great deal. She tells that she herself
wrote Dinah Morris's sermon on the green with tears in her eyes. She meant
it all. While her own religious faith was clouded, her finest characters
are never clouded in their religious faith, and she grounds their faith
quite invariably on their early training in the Scripture. It is an
interesting fact that George Eliot has no principal story which has not in
it a church, and a priest or a preacher, with all that they involve.
Charles Kingsley is grouped hardly fairly in this list, because he was
himself a preacher, and naturally all his work would feel the power of the
Book, which he chiefly studied. Professor Masson says that "there is not
one of his novels which has not the power of Christianity for its theme."
No voice was raised more effectively for the beginning of the new social
era in England than his. _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_ are epoch-making books
in the life of the common people of England. Even _Hypatia_, which is
supposed to have been written to represent entirely pagan surroundings, is
full of Bible phrases and ideas.