Chapter XV

THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER

AND now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my task--the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to all Mr. Watts-Dunton's work. I can, of course, give only one, for already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond those originally intended for it. Naturally, I thought at first that I would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo's works, such for instance as 'La Legende des Siecles,' or that profound one on 'La Religion des Religion.' But, after a while, when I had got the essay typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind. I thought that one of those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better. Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe and in America. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so. It will be noted by readers of 'Aylwin' that even so far back as the publication of this article in the 'Athenaeum ', in 1877, Mr. Watts-Dunton--to judge from the allusion in it to 'Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death'--seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin's 'Veiled Queen':--

"There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform failure of these attempts. At the time that Sternhold was 'bringing' the Psalms into 'fine Englysh meter' for Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for their own monarchs--notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. And it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any importance having been entered against it. This is astonishing, for the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a sacred book. Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come, and a literary journal may be its proper medium.

A great living savant has characterized the Bible as 'a collection of the rude imaginings of Syria,' 'the worn-out old bottle of Judaism into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.' The great savant was angry when he said so. The 'new wine' of science is a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless. But whatever may become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of Chaldaea,--the 'old bottle' is going to be older yet,--the Bible is going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul--not the knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always assume--that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this--that of a noble humility before a God such as He 'in whose great Hand we stand.' This is why--like Alexander's mirror--like that most precious 'Cup of Jemshid,' imagined by the Persians--the Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing event of human life--reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written. Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft. This is the kind of literature that never does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago. For the Bible is Europe's one book. And with regard to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every language, and in almost every dialect, under the sun.

And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms. Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful; the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible to sing so badly. It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should find it in their hearts to sing Marot's Psalms when they might have sung David's--that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable jig, 'O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation'; and that Anthony, King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, 'Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.' For, although it is given to the very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar convolution.

In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in various incarnations, are fastidious.

When Lord Macaulay's tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British Museum to study us through our books--what volume can he take as the representative one--what book, above all others, can the ghostly librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure in the earth? We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most exalted and its most abject phases. That in the same volume can be found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of Brady and Tate--masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous is an inspired bard--would be adequate evidence that the Church using it must be a British Church--that British, most British, must be the public tolerating it.

'By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver us.'

Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music are so mysteriously blended--blended so divinely that the man who can utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from some of us. Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:--'More than any race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.' And now listen to this:--

When we, our wearied limbs to rest, Sat down by proud Euphrates' stream, We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest, And Zion was our mournful theme.

Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have thus degraded the words: 'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.' For, to achieve such platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the 'Hopkins element,' an element which is quite an insular birthright of ours, a characteristic which came over with the 'White Horse,'--that 'dull and greasy coarseness of taste' which distinguishes the British mind from all others; that 'achtbrittische Beschranktheit,' which Heine speaks of in his tender way. The Scottish version is rough, but Brady and Tate's inanities are worse than Rous's roughness.

Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it come? It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end, and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for generations:--'What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental, difference between English literature--and all other Western literatures--Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?' The simple truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been bipartite as now--has always been, as now, half sublime and half homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them. For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty. When St. Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins, a heathen then, in possession of the soil.

There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says. The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous, much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by nature none of the Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is born of taste--though le style c'est la race; and though the Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone; yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of many years--just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him--so may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years. The result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in parts of Raleigh's 'History of the World,' in Jeremy Taylor's sermons, in Hall's 'Contemplations,' and other such books of the seventeenth century.

The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined. To define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life. When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental. It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace--manner is conscious power or grace. But the Great Style, both in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace in one.

And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression of a national temper? Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does. Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness of the Aryan mind--not, certainly, to those who, though producing AEschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but to the descendants of Shem,--the only gentleman among all the sons of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the face of God and live, can see not much else. The Great Style, in a word, is Semitic. It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic. For though two of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt, plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as compared with Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical writing as even that noble and well-known passage from Manu, beginning, 'Single is each man born into the world, single he dies,' etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared with the ethical parts of Scripture. The Persians have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. We might perhaps say that there were those in Egypt once who came near to the great ideal. That description of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,' the Queen of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite. Conscious power and conscious grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a deal of unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, when he who approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the Nile. It is to the Latin races--some of them--that has filtered Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain, but straight from the Hebrew.

What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have--unconsciousness; often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalite. Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too. The Hopkins element,--the dull and stupid homeliness,--the coarse grotesque, mingle with and mar its finest effects. Over it all the atmosphere is that of pantomime--singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner's libretti. Even that great final conflict between gods and men and the swarming brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Volu-seeress, when from Yotunland they come and storm the very gates of Asgard;--even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and digesting the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty-three thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement. This is why style in literature is virtue. Like royalty, the Great Style 'can do no wrong.'

Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far the largest endowment. They wanted another element, in short, not the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live; as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold--two of the finest and most delicate minds of modern times--can testify.

But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before the Bishops' Bible or Coverdale's Bible; long before even Aldhelm's time--Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon mind. From the time when Caedmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic. Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was steeped had been Hebraism at second hand--that of the Vulgate mainly--till Tyndale's time, or rather till the present Authorized Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. 'There is no book,' says Selden, 'so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into French-English. "Il fait froid," I say, 'tis cold, not it makes cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is kept.'

And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal accuracy--importation of Hebraisms--was not of itself enough to produce a translation in the Great Style--a translation such as this, which, as Coleridge says, makes us think that 'the translators themselves were inspired.' To reproduce the Great Style of the original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of circumstances was necessary. The temper of the people receiving must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and civilization, be elementally in harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it must be poetic rather than ratiocinative. Society must not be too complex--its tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying. The accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the scalpel--the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of newspaper cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered synonymous terms. Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the faintest suspicion of nineteenth century flavour. That this is the kind of national temper necessary to such a work might have been demonstrated by an argument a priori. It was the temper of the English nation when the Bible was translated. That noble heroism--born of faith in God and belief in the high duties of man--which we have lost for the hour--was in the very atmosphere that hung over the island. And style in real life, which now, as a consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen, and only among a very few Englishwomen--having given place in all classes to manner--flourished then in all its charm. And in literature it was the same: not even the euphuism imported from Spain could really destroy or even seriously damage the then national sense of style.

Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and yet must be free from any soupcon of that 'artifice,' in the 'abandonment' of which, says an Arabian historian, 'true art alone lies.' For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too sacred for that--drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.

But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon; just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new movement; let us call it 'Bible Rhythm.' And the movement was devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to Difficulty--thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls 'Hebrew phrase and English phrase,' the translators fashioned, or rather, Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor wholly the other--a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world--a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself--but a form in which 'artifice' is really 'abandoned' at last. This rhythm it is to which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps being in the Psalms--this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses have--improved! It would not be well to be too technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.

Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet's rhymes, we take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized ourselves with the poet's rhythm, having found that iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun to grow monotonous, variations occur--trochaic, anapaestic, dactylic--according to the law which governs the ear of this individual poet;--we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations with regard to caesuric effects are realized in the same proportions. Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say, to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,--we expect that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard to the initial foot of any sequence,--there must be, not far ahead, that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when this expectation of caesuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result. In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated is the law,--nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,--the more pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will read Shakespeare's plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from 'Love's Labour's Lost' to the 'Tempest,' will have no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, as in social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized music apart from a recognized law--'artifice' so completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of art--pauses so divinely set that they seem to be 'wood-notes wild,' though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the 'moving music which is life'; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words. And if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where 'the flaming steeds of song,' though really kept strongly in hand, seem to run reinless as 'the wild horses of the wind'?"