On The Art of Reading Part 15

Michal Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

The whole story goes into about ten lines. Your psychological novelist nowadays, given the wit to invent it, would make it cover 500 pages at least.

Or take the end of David in the first two chapters of the First Book of Kings, with its tale of Oriental intrigues, plots, treacheries, murderings in the depths of the horrible palace wherein the old man is dying. Or read of Solomon and his s.h.i.+ps and his builders, and see his Temple growing (as Heber put it) like a tall palm, with no sound of hammers. Or read again the end of Queen Athaliah:

And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the people, she came to the people into the temple of the Lord.-- And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: And Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried Treason, Treason.--But Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds, the officers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth without the ranges....

--And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by the which the horses came into the king's house: and there was she slain.

Let a youngster read this, I say, just as it is written; and how the true East--sound, scent, form, colour--pours into the narrative!--cymbals and trumpets, leagues of sand, caravans trailing through the heat, priest and soldiery and kings going up between them to the altar; blood at the foot of the steps, blood everywhere, smell of blood mingled with spices, sandal-wood, dung of camels!

Yes, but how--if you will permit the word--how the _enjoyment_ of it as magnificent literature might be enhanced by a scholar who would condescend to whisper, of his knowledge, the magical word here or there, to the child as he reads! For an instance.--

No child--no grown man with any sense of poetry--can deny his ear to the Forty-fifth Psalm; the one that begins 'My heart is inditing a good matter,' and plunges into a hymn of royal nuptials. First (you remember) the singing-men, the sons of Korah, lift their chant to the bridegroom, the King:

Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty ... And in thy majesty ride prosperously.

Or as we hear it in the Book of Common Prayer:

Good luck have thou with thine honour...

because of the word of truth, of meekness, and righteousness; and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things....

All thy garments smell of myrrh, aloes, and ca.s.sia: out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.

Anon they turn to the Bride:

Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father's house....

The King's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold.

She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework: the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company. And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift. Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.

For whom (wonders the young reader, spell-bound by this), for what happy bride and bridegroom was this glorious chant raised?

Now suppose that, just here, he has a scholar ready to tell him what is likeliest true--that the bridegroom was Ahab--that the bride, the daughter of Sidon, was no other than Jezebel, and became what Jezebel now is--with what an awe of surmise would two other pa.s.sages of the history toll on his ear?

And one washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria; and the dogs licked up his blood....

And when he (Jehu) was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king's daughter.

And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.

Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This is the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel ... so that (men) shall not say, This is Jezebel.

In another lecture, Gentlemen, I propose to take up the argument and attempt to bring it to this point. 'How can we, having this incomparable work, _necessary_ for study by all who would write English, bring it within the ambit of the English Tripos and yet avoid offending the experts?'

LECTURE IX

ON READING THE BIBLE (II)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1918

I

We left off last term, Gentlemen, upon a note of protest. We wondered why it should be that our English Version of the Bible lies under the ban of school-masters, Boards of Studies, and all who devise courses of reading and examinations in English Literature: that among our 'prescribed books' we find Chaucer's "Prologue," we find "Hamlet," we find "Paradise Lost," we find Pope's "Essay on Man," again and again, but "The Book of Job"

never; "The Vicar of Wakefield" and Gray's "Elegy" often, but "Ruth" or "Isaiah," "Ecclesiasticus" or "Wisdom" never.

I propose this morning:

(1) to enquire into the reasons for this, so far as I can guess and interpret them;

(2) to deal with such reasons as we can discover or surmise;

(3) to suggest to-day, some simple first aid: and in another lecture, taking for experiment a single book from the Authorised Version, some practical ways of including it in the ambit of our new English Tripos. This will compel me to be definite: and as definite proposals invite definite objections, by this method we are likeliest to know where we are, and if the reform we seek be realisable or illusory.

II

I shall ask you then, first, to a.s.sent with me, that the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible is, as a literary achievement, one of the greatest in our language; nay, with the possible exception of the complete works of Shakespeare, the very greatest. You will certainly not deny this.

As little, or less, will you deny that more deeply than any other book--more deeply even than all the writings of Shakespeare--far more deeply--it has influenced our literature. Here let me repeat a short pa.s.sage from a former lecture of mine (May 15, 1913, five years ago). I had quoted some few glorious sentences such as:

Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.

And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land....

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality ...

and having quoted these I went on:

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, these rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established.... Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style.... It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton and Bunyan--have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars --Milton, Sir Thomas Browne--practise the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall back--'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's ant.i.thesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump; with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

If that be true, or less than gravely overstated: if the English Bible hold this unique place in our literature; if it be at once a monument, an example and (best of all) a well of English undefiled, no stagnant water, but quick, running, curative, refres.h.i.+ng, vivifying; may we not agree, Gentlemen, to require the weightiest reason why our instructors should continue to hedge in the temple and pipe the fountain off in professional conduits, forbidding it to irrigate freely our ground of study?

It is done so complacently that I do not remember to have met one single argument put up in defence of it; and so I am reduced to guess-work. What can be the justifying reason for an embargo on the face of it so silly and arbitrary, if not senseless?

III

Does it reside perchance in some primitive instinct of _taboo_; of a superst.i.tion of fetish-wors.h.i.+p fencing off sacred things as unmentionable, and reinforced by the bad Puritan notion that holy things are by no means to be enjoyed?

If so, I begin by referring you to the Greeks and their att.i.tude towards the Homeric poems. We, of course, hold the Old Testament more sacred than Homer. But I very much doubt if it be more sacred to us than the Iliad and the Odyssey were to an old Athenian, in his day. To the Greeks--and to forget this is the fruitfullest source of error in dealing with the Tragedians or even with Aristophanes--to the Greeks, their religion, such as it was, mattered enormously. They built their Theatre upon it, as we most certainly do not; which means that it had sunk into their daily life and permeated their enjoyment of it, as our religion certainly does not affect _our_ life to enhance it as amusing or pleasurable. We go to Church on Sunday, and write it off as an observance; but if eager to be happy with a free heart, we close early and steal a few hours from the working-day. We antagonise religion and enjoyment, wors.h.i.+p and holiday. Nature being too strong for any convention of ours, courts.h.i.+p has a.s.serted itself as permissible on the Sabbath, if not as a Sabbatical inst.i.tution.

Now the Greeks were just as much slaves to the letter of their Homer as any Auld Licht Elder to the letter of St Paul. No one will accuse Plato of being overfriendly to poetry. Yet I believe you will find in Plato some 150 direct citations from Homer, not to speak of allusions scattered broadcast through the dialogues, often as texts for long argument. Of these citations and allusions an inordinate number seem to us laboriously trivial-- that is to say, unless we put ourselves into the h.e.l.lenic mind.

On the other hand Plato uses others to enforce or ill.u.s.trate his profoundest doctrines. For an instance, in "Phaedo" (-- 96) Socrates is arguing that the soul cannot be one with the harmony of the bodily affections, being herself the master-player who commands the strings:

'--almost always' [he says] opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently;-- threatening, and also reprimanding the desires, pa.s.sions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself; as Homer in the Odyssey represents Odysseus doing in the words

[Greek: stethos de plexas kradien enipape mutho: tetlathi de, kradie; kai kynteron allo pot etles]