But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is the
whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation
of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the
Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasure
we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a
bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of
God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations
as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There
is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth
symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to
a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is,
except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter
Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.
Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of
the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young;
so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally;
for there will come to all of them that period between dawning
adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art
will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become
morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified
otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it
must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary
purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young
people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only
a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for
Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan
as a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us in
our nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book
for a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of
visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and
the Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy of
fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a
well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spend
his pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be rather
disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he
is ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as
far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century: everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History of
Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I have
never read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library
would go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I
should probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian
Nights and their like to occupy me better. In art, children, like
adults, will find their level if they are left free to find it, and not
restricted to what adults think good for them. Just at present our
young people are going mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated
rhythms are new to them. If they had learnt what can be done with
syncopation from Beethoven's third Leonora overture, they would enjoy
the ragtimes all the more; but they would put them in their proper place
as amusing vulgarities.