style. Such great writing is not to be traced to any one influence. It
could not have been easy to write as Macaulay wrote. Thackeray may have
exaggerated in saying that Macaulay read twenty books to write a sentence,
and traveled a hundred miles to make a description; but all his writing
shows the power of taking infinite pains. It becomes the more important,
therefore, that Macaulay held the Bible in such estimate as he did. "In
calling upon Lady Holland one day, Lord Macaulay was led to bring the
attention of his fair hostess to the fact that the use of the word
'talent' to mean gifts or powers of the mind, as when we speak of men of
talent, came from the use of the word in Christ's parable of the talents.
In a letter to his sister Hannah he describes the incident, and says that
Lady Holland was evidently ignorant of the parable. 'I did not tell her,'
he adds, 'though I might have done so, that a person who professes to be a
critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible
at his fingers' ends.'" That Macaulay practised his own preaching you
would quickly find by referring to his essays. Take three sentences from
the Essay on Milton: "The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
growing courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In
every high place worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch,
and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of
her best and brightest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to
disgrace, until the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time
driven forth to wander on the face of the earth and to be a by-word and a
shaking of the head to the nations." In three sentences here are six
allusions to Scripture. In that same essay, in the paragraphs on the
Puritans, the allusions are a multitude. They are not even quoted. They
are taken for granted. In his Essay on Machiavelli, though the subject
does not suggest it, he falls into Scriptural phrases over and over.
Listen to this, "A time was at hand when all the seven vials of the
Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant
countries"; or this, "All the curses pronounced of old against Tyre seemed
to have fallen on Venice. Her merchants already stood afar off lamenting
for their great city"; or this, "In the energetic language of the prophet,
Machiavelli was mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw."
And if Macaulay is baffling in the abundance of material, surely John
Ruskin is worse. Carlyle's English style ran into excess of roughness;
Macaulay's ran into excess of balance and delicacy. John Ruskin's
continued to be the smoothest, easiest style in our English literature. He
also was a Hebraic spirit, but of the gentler type. Mr. Chapman calls him
the Elisha to Carlyle's Elijah, a capital comparison.[38] Ruskin is one
of the few writers who have told us what formed their style. In the first
chapter of _Præterita_ he pays tribute to his mother. He himself chose to
read Walter Scott and Pope's Homer; but he says: "My mother forced me by
steady daily toil to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart, as well as
to read it, every syllable aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the
Apocalypse about once a year; and to that discipline--patient, accurate,
and resolute--I owe not only a knowledge of the Book which I find
occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains and
the best part of my taste in literature." He thinks reading Scott might
have led to other novels of a poorer sort. Reading Pope might have led to
Johnson's or Gibbon's English; but "it was impossible to write entirely
superficial and formal English" while he knew "by heart the thirty-second
of Deuteronomy, the fifteenth of 1 Corinthians, the One hundred and
nineteenth Psalm, or the Sermon on the Mount." In the second chapter of
_Præterita_ he is even more explicit. "I have next with deeper gratitude
to chronicle what I owed to my mother for the resolute persistent lessons
which so exercised me in the Scripture, as to make every word of them
familiar in my ear as habitual music, yet in that familiarity reverenced
as transcending all thought and ordering all conduct." He tells how his
mother drilled him. As soon as he could read she began a course of Bible
work with him. They read alternate verses from the Genesis to the
Revelation, names and all. Daily he had to commit verses of the Scripture.
He hated the One hundred and nineteenth Psalm most; but he lived to
cherish it most. In his old Bible he found the list of twenty-six chapters
taught by his mother.
Not only was Ruskin well trained in the Bible, but he was a great teacher
of it. In his preface to the _Crown of Wild Olives_ he answers his critics
by saying he has used the Book for some forty years. "My endeavor has been
uniformly to make men read it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in
their own favorite verses only, but in the sum of it all; treat it not as
a fetish or a talisman which they are to be saved by daily repetition of,
but as a Captain's order, to be held and obeyed at their peril." In the
introduction to the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ he urges that we are in
no danger of too much use of the Bible. "We use it most reverently when
most habitually." Many of Ruskin's most striking titles come straight out
of the Scripture. _Crown of Wild Olives_, _Seven Lamps_, _Unto this
Last_--all these are suggested by the Bible.
It is almost superfluous to speak of Robert Louis Stevenson. John Kelman
has written a whole book on the religion of Stevenson, and it is available
for all readers. He was raised by Cummy, his nurse, whose library was
chiefly the Bible, the shorter catechism, and the _Life of Robert Murray
McCheyne_. He said that the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah was his special
chapter, because it so repudiated cant and demanded a self-denying
beneficence. He loved Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_; but "the Bible most
stood him in hand." Every great story or essay shows its influence. He was
not critical with it; he did not understand it; he did not interpret it
fairly; but he felt it. His _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is only his way of
putting into modern speech Paul's old distinction between the two men who
abide in each of us. They told him he ought not to work in Samoa, and he
replied that he could not otherwise be true to the great Book by which he
and all men who meant to do great work must live. Over the shoulder of our
beloved Robert Louis Stevenson you can see the great characters of
Scripture pressing him forward to his best work.
Not so much can be said of Swinburne. There was a strong infusion of acid
in his nature, which no influence entirely destroyed. He is apt to live as
a literary critic and essayist, though he supposed himself chiefly a poet.
His own thought of poetry can be seen in his protest in behalf of
Meredith. When he had been accused of writing on a subject on which he had
no conviction to express ("Modern Love"), Swinburne denied that poets
ought to preach anyway. "There are pulpits enough for all preachers of
prose, and the business of verse writing is hardly to express
convictions." Yet it is impossible to forget Milton and his purpose to
"assert Eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men."
Naturally, most poets do preach and preach well. Wordsworth declared he
wanted to be considered a teacher or nothing. Mrs. Browning thought that
poets were the only truth-tellers left to God. But Swinburne could not
help a little preaching at any rate. His "Masque on Queen Bersaba" is an
old miracle play of David and Nathan. His "Christmas Antiphones" are
hardly Christian, though they are abundant in their allusions to
Scripture. The first is a prayer for peace and rest in the coming of the
new day of the birth of Christ. The second is a protest that neither God
nor man has befriended man as he should, and the third is an assurance
that men will do for man even if God will not. Now, that is not Christian,
but the Bible phrases are all through it. So when he writes his poem
bemoaning Poland, he needs must head it "Rizpah." At the same time it must
be said that Swinburne shows less of the influence of the Bible in his
style and in his spirit than any other of our great English writers.
We come back again into the atmosphere of strong Bible influence when we
name Alfred Tennyson. When Byron died, and the word came to his father's
rectory at Somersby, young Alfred Tennyson felt that the sun had fallen
from the heavens. He went out alone in the fields and carved in the
sandstone, as though it were a monument: "Byron is dead." That was in the
early stage of his poetical life. At first Carlyle could not abide
Tennyson. He counted him only an echo of the past, with no sense for the
future; but when he read Tennyson's "The Revenge," he exclaimed, "Eh, he's
got the grip o' it"; and when Richard Monckton Milnes excused himself for
not getting Tennyson a pension by saying his constituents had no use for
poetry anyway, Carlyle said, "Richard Milnes, in the day of judgment when
you are asked why you did not get that pension, you may lay the blame on
your constituents, but it will be you who will be damned!" Dr. Henry van
Dyke studied Tennyson to best effect at just this point. In his chapter on
"The Bible in Tennyson" are many such sayings as these: "It is safe to say
that there is no other book which has had so great an influence upon the
literature of the world as the Bible. We hear the echoes of its speech
everywhere, and the music of its familiar phrases haunts all the field and
grove of our fine literature. At least one cause of his popularity is that
there is so much Bible in Tennyson. We cannot help seeing that the poet
owes a large debt to the Christian Scriptures, not only for their
formative influence on his mind and for the purely literary material in
the way of illustrations and allusions which they have given him, but also
for the creation of a moral atmosphere, a medium of thought and feeling in
which he can speak freely and with an assurance of sympathy to a very wide
circle of readers."
I need not stop to indicate the great poems in which Tennyson has so often
used Scripture. The mind runs quickly to the little maid in "Guinevere,"
whose song, "Late, Late, so Late," is only a paraphrase of the parable of
the foolish virgins. "In Memoriam" came into the skeptical era of
England, with its new challenge to faith, and stopped the drift of young
men toward materialism. Recall the fine use he makes, in the heart of it,
of the resurrection of Lazarus, and other Biblical scenes. Dr. van Dyke's
"four hundred direct references to the Bible" do not exhaust the poems. No
one can get Tennyson's style without the English Bible, and no one can
read Tennyson intelligently without a fairly accurate knowledge of the
Bible.
In this Victorian group the last name is Thackeray's. He is another whose
mother trained him in the English Bible. The title of _Vanity Fair_ is
from _Pilgrim's Progress_, but the motto is from the Scripture; and he
wrote his mother regarding the book: "What I want is to make a set of
people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase.)" It
is certain his mother did not count it a cant phrase, for he learned it
from the Scripture. The subtitle of his _Adventures of Philip_ says he is
to show who robbed him, who helped him, and who passed him by. Thackeray
got those expressions from the Bible. Somewhere very early in any of his
works he reveals the influence of his childhood and manhood knowledge of
the English Bible.
All this about the Victorian group is meant to be very familiar to any who
are fresh from the reading of literature. They are great names, and they
have differences as wide as the poles; but they have this in common, that
they have drunk lightly or deeply from the same fountain; they have drawn
from it ideas, allusions, literary style. Each of them has weakened as he
has gotten farther from it, and loyalty to it has strengthened any one of
them.
* * * * *
Turn now to the American group of writers. If we except theological
writers with Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, and
their like, and political writers with Jefferson, Webster, and their like,
the list need not be a long one. Only one writer in our narrower sense of
literature must be named in the earlier day--Benjamin Franklin. In the
period before the Civil War must be named Edgar Allan Poe (died 1849) and
Washington Irving (died 1859). The Civil War group is the large one, and
its names are those of the later group as well. Let them be alphabetical,
for convenience: William Cullen Bryant, poet and critic; George William
Curtis, essayist and editor; Emerson, our noblest name in the sphere of
pure essay literature; Hawthorne, the novelist of conscience, as Socrates
was its philosopher; Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose "two chief hatreds were
orthodoxy in religion and heterodoxy in medicine"; James Russell Lowell,
essayist and poet, apt to live by his essays rather than by his poetry;
Longfellow, whose "Psalm of Life" and "Hiawatha" have lived through as
much parody and ridicule as any two bits of literature extant, and have
lived because they are predestined to live; Thoreau, whose _Walden_ may
show, as Lowell said, how much can be done on little capital, but which
has the real literary tang to it; and Whittier, whose poetry is sung the
world around.
That makes only twelve names from Franklin to Whittier. Others could be
included; but they are not so great as these. No one of these could be
taken out of our literature without affecting it and, in some degree at
least, changing the current of it. This is not to forget Bret Harte nor
Samuel L. Clemens. But each is dependent for his survival on a taste for a
certain kind of humor, not delicate like Irving's and Holmes's, but strong
and sudden and a bit sharp. If we should forget the "Luck of Roaring
Camp," "Truthful James," and the "Heathen Chinee," we would also forget
Bret Harte. We are not apt to forget _Tom Sawyer_, nor perhaps _The
Innocents Abroad_, but we are forgetting much else of Mark Twain. Whitman
is not named. His claims are familiar, but in spite of his admirers he
seems so charged with a sensuous egotism that he is not apt to be a
formative influence in literary history. It is still interesting, however,
to remember how frequently he reveals his reading of Scripture.
Fortunately, all these writers are so near, and their work is so familiar,
that details regarding them are not needed. Two or three general words can
be said. In the first place, observe the high moral tone of all these
first-grade writers, and, indeed, of the others who may be spoken of as in
second rank. There is not a meretricious or humiliating book in the whole
collection. There is not one book which has lived in American literature
which has the tone of Fielding's _Tom Jones_. Whether it is that the
Puritan strain continues in us or not, it is true that the American
literary public has not taken happily to stories that would bring a blush
in public reading. Professor Richardson, of Dartmouth, gives some clue to
the reason of that. He says that "since 1870 or 1880 in America there has
been a marked increase of strength of theistic and spiritual belief and
argument among scientific men, students of philosophy, religious
'radicals,' and others." He adds that while much contemporary American
literature and thought is outside the accepted orthodox lines, yet "it is
not hostile to Christianity; to the principles of its Founder it is for
the most part sincerely attached. On the other hand, materialism has
scarcely any hold upon it." Then follows a very notable sentence which is
sustained by the facts: "Not an American book of the first class has ever
been written by an atheist or denier of immortality." That sentence need
not offend an admirer of Walt Whitman, for he "accepts both theism and the
doctrine of the future life." American thought has remained loyal to the
great Trinity, God, Freedom, and Immortality. So it comes about that while
there are a number of these writers who could be put under the ban of the
strongly orthodox in religion, every one of them shows the effect of early
training in religion and in the Scripture.[39]
Another thing to be said is that America has a unique history among great
nations in that it has never been affected by any great religious
influence except that which has issued from the Scriptures. No religion
has ever been influential in America except Christianity. For many years
there have been sporadic and spasmodic efforts to extend the influence of
Buddhism or other Indian cults. They have never been successful, because
the American spirit is practical, and not meditative. We are not an
introspective people. We do not look within ourselves for our religion.
Whatever moral and religious influence our literature shows gets back
first or last to our Scriptures. The point of view of nature that is taken
by our writers like Bryant and Thoreau is that of the Nineteenth Psalm.
Moreover, we have been strongly under the English influence. Irving
insisted that we ought to be, that we were a young nation, that we ought
frankly to follow the leadership of more experienced writers. Longfellow
thought we had gone too far that way, and that our poets, at least, ought
to be more independent, ought to write in the spirit of America and not of
traditional poetry. Whether we ought to have yielded to it or not, it is
true that English influence has told very strongly upon us, and the
writers who have influenced our writers most have been those whom we have
named as being themselves under the Bible influence.
We need not go into detail about these writers, though they are most
attractive. Bryant did for us what Wordsworth did for England. He made
nature seem vocal. "Thanatopsis" is not a Christian poem in the narrow
sense of the word, and yet it could hardly have been written except under
Christian influence. His own genial, beautiful character was itself a
tribute to Christian civilization, and his life, as critic and essayist,
has left an impression which we shall not soon lose. Professor Richardson
thinks that the three problematical characters in American literature are
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The shrewdest estimate of Poe that has ever
been given us is in Lowell's _Fable for Critics_:
"There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."
That says it exactly. Poe knew many horrible situations, but he did not
know the way out; and of all our American writers laying claim to place in
the first class Poe shows least influence of the Bible, and apparently
needs it most.
Irving was the first American writer who stood high enough to be seen
across the water. Thackeray's most beautiful essay is on Irving and
Macaulay, who died just one month apart. In it he describes Irving as the
best intermediary between the nations, telling us Americans that the
English are still human, and assuring the English that Americans are
already human. Irving was trained early and thoroughly in the Bible. All
his life he was an old-fashioned Episcopalian with no concern for new
religious ideas and with no rough edges anywhere. Charles Dudley Warner,
speaking of Irving's moral quality, says: "I cannot bring myself to
exclude it from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current
gospel of art for art's sake."[40] Like Scott, he "recognized the abiding
value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These
are beneficences, and Irving's literature, walk around it and measure it
by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature."
Then there is Emerson, a son of the manse and once a minister himself. He
was, therefore, perfectly familiar with the English Bible. He did not
accept it in all its religious teaching. Indeed, we have never had a more
marked individualist in our American public life than Emerson. At every
point he was simply himself. There is very little quotation in his
writing, very little visible influence of any one else. He was not a
follower of Carlyle, though he was his friend. If there is any precedent
for the construction of his sentences, and even of his essays, it is to be
found in the Hebrew prophets. As some one puts it, "he uttered sayings."
In many of his essays there is no particular reason why the paragraphs
should run one, two, three, and not three, two, one, or two, one, three,
or in any other order. But Mr. Emerson was just himself. It is yet true
that "his value for the world at large lies in the fact that after all he
is incurably religious." It is true that he could not see any importance
in forms, or in ordinary declarations of faith. "He would fight no battle
for prelacy, nor for the Westminster confession, nor for the Trinity, but
as against atheism, pessimism, and materialism, he was an ally of
Christianity." The influence of the Bible on Emerson is more marked in his
spirit than in anything else. Once in a while, as in that familiar address
at Concord (1873), you run across Scripture phrases: "Shall not they who
receive the largest streams spread abroad the healing waters?" That figure
appears in literature only in the Bible, and there are others like it in
his writings.
As for Longfellow, he is shot through with Scripture. No man who did not
know Scripture in more than a passing way could have written such a
sentence as this: "There are times when the grasshopper is a burden, and
thirsty with the heat of labor the spirit longs for the waters of Shiloah,
that go softly." There are two strikingly beautiful expressions from
Scripture. Take another familiar saying in the same essay when he says the
prospect for poetry is brightening, since but a short time ago not a poet
"moved the wing or opened the mouth or peeped." He did not run across that
in general current writing. He got that directly from the Bible. In his
poems is an amazing amount of reference to the Bible. One would expect
much in the "Courtship of Miles Standish," for that is a story of the
Puritans, and they spoke, naturally, in terms of the Bible; yet, of
course, they could not do it in Longfellow's poem, if Longfellow did not
know the language of the Bible very well. One might not expect to find it
so much in "Evangeline," but it is there from beginning to end. In
"Acadia," the cock crowed
"With the self-same
Voice that in ages of old had startled the penitent Peter."
And,
"Wild with the winds of September,
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel."
Evangeline saw the moon pass
"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. "Snow-bound" 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] _Thoughts that Breathe._
[28] _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1900, p. 684.
[29] Chapman, _English Literature in Account with Religion_.
[30] _History of English Literature_, chap. iii.