The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Since 1611, the King James Version has fed quantities of the writing in English of prose and poetry. As the twentieth century developed, other cultures, using English, came into the fold with their own influences – based in India or Africa, for instance, but even in the latter the Bible’s influence is often present. But from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century, the Bible can be claimed to be unarguably the most pervasive presence in the language and in the literature. And although its religious grip has slackened in some countries, the force of its stories, its imagery, its vocabulary, its moral teaching, its acts of cruelty and villains, and its verses of wisdom even now remain uniquely important.

  John Donne, poet and essayist, began work at about the same time as the Bible was published. He shares a Tyndale overlap with Shakespeare. He wrote: ‘there are not so eloquent books in the world as the Scriptures . . . we may be bold to say that, in all their Authors, Greek and Latin, we cannot find so high and so lively examples of those Tropes, and those figures as we may in Scriptures . . . The style of the Scriptures is a diligent and artificial style; and a great part thereof is a musical, is a metrical, is a measured composition, in verse.’

  His preferences were for the Psalms and the Epistles of St Paul: ‘because they are Scriptures, written in such form as I have been most accustomed to; St Paul’s being letters and David’s being poems.’ He believed that ‘God’s own finger had written the scriptures’.

  It will be impossible here to give more than a taste of the total immersion of Donne and other supreme poets in the faith and the language of the Bible. At times it seems everything they write is connected to it. Even an illness is described in high biblical terms. In ‘Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse’, Donne writes:We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie,

  Christs Crosse and Adams tree, stood in one place;

  Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;

  As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,

  May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.

  He finds in the Christian story, strata of tenderness and meaning which could seem to outsoar the original save that they are so anchored in it.

  In the ‘Divine Poems, Nativitie’ he begins with Christ in the womb and the holy birth:Immensitie cloistered in thy deare wombe,

  Now leaves his well belov’d imprisonment,

  There he hath made himselfe to his intent

  Weake enough, now into our world to come;

  But oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome?

  Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,

  Starres, and wisemen will travell to prevent

  Th’effect of Herods jealous generall doome.

  Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he

  Which fils all place, yet none holds him, doth lie?

  Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,

  That would have need to be pittied by thee?

  Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,

  With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe.

  Among so much else, the idea of the Christ Child making himself ‘weak enough’ to come into the world is a marvellous insight into the faith which John Donne, later in his life, would preach from the pulpit.

  John Milton, from his adolescence until his death just before the last quarter of the seventeenth century, devoted himself to biblical subjects. He had the King James Version of 1612, and also a Geneva Bible, but his scholar’s mind made him familiar with other versions – in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Yet his chief work builds on the King James Version. At times he threatens to rewrite it.

  Milton came out of a classical education into a world of religious and political ferment in which he played his part as a rousing pamphleteer, a champion of liberty and a defender of what he saw as the true, Puritan faith. His greatest works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes – are so lavishly doused in the embroidery of a great vocabulary, so much a tapestry of poetic show that they can appear, to our palates, to be over-rich. The high style, I think, was partly to out-bible the Bible, the Authorised Version, to show what an inspired poet could really do. Despite his standing as the second great poet in English after Shakespeare, there can be – a blasphemous suggestion to Milton scholars – a sense that the ornate language and the embossed imagery load it too heavily.

  Yet Milton’s genius has been too long celebrated by fine poets and scholars to be doubted here and his place, following Shakespeare, is authoritatively sealed. The story of God’s work obsessed him. It was as if he wanted to re-imagine the whole of it.

  Writing of the beginning, in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, his lines include:. . . Heav’n opened wide

  Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound

  On golden hinges moving, to let forth

  The King of Glory in his powerful Word

  And Spirit coming to create new worlds.

  On heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore

  They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss

  Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,

  Up from the bottom turned by furious winds

  And surging waves, as mountains to assault

  Heaven’s highth, and with the center mix the pole.

  There are those who would prefer the direct words of Tyndale but Milton is undoubtedly magnificent.

  He wrote about time, about his blindness, about destiny and character especially in Samson Agonistes; he personified Satan in a way so vivid and memorable that famously he made him the most attractive of the heavenly host, and hell more popular than heaven. He wrote political and social pamphlets. But it was the Bible that was the keystone of a body of work so loaded with quotations from it that it can seem not only a commentary but at times practically a parallel universe.

  He elaborated continually. For instance the line ‘the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters’ became:. . . on the watery calm

  His broadening wings the Spirit of God outspread,

  And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth

  Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged . . .

  . . . and earth self-balanced on her centre swung.

  Milton’s work showed how inspirational the Bible could be, and how deeply you could read into it. His life and dedication confirmed the biblical association. That such a superior poetic and philosophical mind as that of Milton could so passionately take up the Bible was an example which was to be followed. He was a master on whom to model oneself, at least in part, as Wordsworth, among others, was to do. More beloved today of scholars, perhaps, than of general readers, Milton still, in this history, plays a major role. His total acceptance of the faith and his mighty efforts to reimagine and rework what had already been written so memorably were an immense tribute to the power of the Scriptures.

  John Bunyan is the first lower-class hero to appear in this story. The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of his sixty books, has, since its publication, outsold every other book except the Bible. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and been praised by Ruskin, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. It describes the journey of an ordinary, sinful, frail Christian towards salvation. Its storytelling and landscape could be seen as an original compound of religious ecstasy and magical realism. I remember being enthralled by it first in a pictorial edition and later in full print. Bunyan has the great gift of provoking empathy and though his subject matter and the characters might seem to some now to be quaint and outdated, the book remains and will keep. Who knows, as times change again, it may regain its place in the canon of imaginative faith-literature. And he touches the common nerve.

  ‘ “Pilgrim’s Progress” seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture,’ wrote Matthew Arnold. Bunyan wrote: ‘I was then never out of the bible either by reading or meditation.’ His education was basic. ‘My parents . . . put me to school to learn me to both read and write . . . though to my shame I did soon lose that little I learned
.’

  In the 1640s, aged sixteen, he was conscripted into the Parliamentary Army and would have met the extremes of a brutal war, religious passion and politics: the Levellers, who believed you should only obey those you had voted for; the Fifth Monarchists, who anticipated the imminent return of Jesus Christ; the Diggers, who believed the land belonged to all. Their religious passion appears to have embraced him, but not so their politics, even though in the 1660s he spent two spells in prison ‘for holding unlawful meetings’ – that is, for preaching. He was a biblical literalist and the story of Christ was, in his view, both a true and a divine history.

  Bunyan’s prose not so much quoted from the Bible as lived inside its skin. This is as Christian and Hopeful wade into the river of death.

  They then addressed themselves to the water: and entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said ‘I sink in deep waters, the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me. Selah!’

  Then said the other ‘Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom and it is good.’ Then said Christian ‘Ah my friend, the sorrows of death have compassed me about, I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey.’ And with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian so that he could not see before him; also here he in great measure lost his senses so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of these sweet refreshments that he had met with on the way of his pilgrimage.

  McAfee points out:Christian’s two sentences are a mixture of quotation, allusion and imitation clearly intended to evoke the Psalms without ever becoming an exact quotation. His first sentence could easily be mistaken for a quotation, especially as it uses the characteristic refrain ‘Selah!’, but it is an adaptation of Psalm 42 verse 7 ‘All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me’ and Psalm 69 verse 2 ‘I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me’, while ‘the sorrows of death have compassed me about’ is nearly a direct quotation from Psalm 18 verse 4. And the ‘land that flows with milk and honey’ is the land promised to the oppressed and suffering Israelites.

  The vocabulary of The Pilgrim’s Progress is evidence of the literacy of a substantial minority. That literacy was founded and as it were funded by the King James Bible. It was both faith-driven and faith-fed. Together with the Bible itself, Bunyan’s work rooted into the English-speaking Protestant reading classes a knowledge of and a loyalty to a particular period and style of Bible language which was reinforced and made sublime by Shakespeare and to some extent Milton. These three, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, point the different but conjoined ways in which the Bible will be used by writers over the next four centuries. From its publication, the King James Bible did not walk alone but gathered around it three champions whose own writings fortified the English Scriptures of 1611 and helped the genius of that translation not only to endure, but to be quoted, and looted, ever since.

  To list every writer whose work owes debts to the King James Bible would be to write another book and several have already been written. In this book which looks at its overall impact and its penetration into many aspects in the history of English-speaking Protestants, there is not the space for many mansions. Even so, this and one other chapter will be needed . . .

  John Dryden (1631 – 1700) was a political pamphleteer as well as being a satirical poet. His most famous poem, the epic Absalom and Achitophel is an attack on Charles II’s bastards and a denunciation of the politics of that time, of what was called the Exclusion Crisis. He is prime evidence of the elasticity in the legacy of the Bible. In his hands it is an instrument of political torment, beginning with his scarcely veiled comment on the public promiscuity of Charles II: apparently applauding it:In pious times, ere Priest-craft did begin,

  Before Polygamy was made a sin:

  When man, on many, multipli’d his kind,

  Ere one to one was cursedly confin’d:

  When Nature prompted, and no Law deni’d

  Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

  Then Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

  His vigorous warmth did variously impart

  To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

  Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

  Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), is the father of the English novel according to Valentine Cunningham, who has written convincingly of Defoe’s close kinship with the Bible. He was ‘a lifelong Dissenter. He was brought up from the age of two in the “gathered” congregation of the Reverend Samuel Annesley,’ which his parents had joined in 1662. Daily Bible reading, meditation, copying chunks of it out in shorthand, Defoe at one stage was set on a career in the Presbyterian ministry before he went into business. The Bible permeated everything he wrote: pamphlets, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe all draw on a ‘huge repertoire of direct quotation’. It was ingrained in him whether claiming that Moses gave the world its first knowledge of letters when he brought the tablets down from Mount Sion, or having the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year open the Bible with apparent casualness to light on a quotation which would arm and uplift him for the fight. As for the plague itself, there are two explanations according to Defoe. It is certainly the will of God. But it also arises from the ‘natural causes’ which ‘Divine Power’ has put in place.

  Everything is explained and excused through God by this writer, who was also acclaimed for bringing the news of his times into vivid and enduring fiction. Robinson Crusoe, for instance, is shot through with religion. Cunningham takes up the matter of the barley:Famously, some barley unexpectedly springs up, to be rationalised as all at once completely providential and completely natural. When Crusoe first sees the shoots of English barley he supposes it God’s miraculous provision. Then he remembers he had earlier shaken a ‘little bag of corn that had been reduced to Husks and Dusty by rats’ and this natural explanation abated ‘my religious thankfulness to God’s Providence’. But then he had a further thought that ‘it really was the work of Providence as to me’ in that the rats must have left ‘ten or twelve grains of corn’ unspoiled in the bag and he happened to shake them out in a place where they would flourish.

  Jonathan Swift, apart from his satires which included at least one work of genius, Gulliver’s Travels, was a devout clergyman. Whatever his mockery, he, not unlike Defoe, held closely to the faith and to the way in which it was expounded. In A Letter to a Young Gentleman in 1720, he explains how seriously a sermon should be undertaken, how carefully prepared and delivered. Of his own sermons, it was said ‘they emit hardly a breath of his fabulous spirit and are surely unadorned in respect of wit and fancy.’ The wild and rude riot of some of his writing, like that of Dryden, runs in apparently comfortable harness with a solid Anglicanism. And in his case too it could be argued that one reason for his rage against the world is because of its failure to live in the morality of the New Testament.

  William Blake in his engravings and paintings, his poems and commentaries, is a man wholly immersed in the King James Bible. He is also in a perpetual argument with it. He has, as it were, surfing on it, his own meditative, even mystical philosophy which spoke directly across the centuries to the ‘hippies’ of the mid-twentieth century for whom he became a poetic guru. Allen Ginsberg, the American poet and a big cylinder of the hippie engine, seems to have worshipped him. He became a T-shirt, a pop icon. What travelled down the years was to do with his spiritual implacability quarried out of the Bible.

  He recreated the first lines of Genesis in The Book of Urizen:Lo, a shadow of horror is risen

  In Eternity! Unknown, Unprolific,

  Self-closed, all-repelling: what Demon

  Hath form’d this abominable void;

  This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? Some said

  ‘It is Urizen.’ But unknown, abstracted,

  Brooding, secret, the dark power hid.

  And in his ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ he would write of a child left wee
ping in the snow by parents who have gone to church:And because I am happy, and dance and sing,

  They think they have done me no injury,

  And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King

  Who make up a heaven of our misery.

  And then he could write the hymn of the Women’s Institute of Britain, a hymn that seems to capture the yearning of many who want to be anciently anchored in a place, a church and a faith by imagining Christ in their own land.

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  And was the holy Lamb of God

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

  Blake shows yet another side of himself when, in a letter to a friend, he writes: ‘Why is the Bible more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual sensation but mediating to the Understanding or Reason?’

  It was beginning to seem that a well could be sunk in the Bible at any point and it would find energy for any view. It was available across the waterfront. Women poets at this time, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, also sought a voice in what appeared to many women to be a monopoly of patriarchs past and present. But Mary Wollstonecraft, like Defoe a Dissenter, would draw on her Bible reading to energise her campaign for women’s rights. In the Romantic Revival (which overlapped the Englightenment!) the most influential woman living in England in the Romantic era was Hannah More, whose radical pamphlets have pushed her religious literature into the background. In 1782 she published Sacred Dramas. She writes about ‘David and Goliath’, ‘Belshazzar’ and ‘David’.

  In the drama Moses in the Bulrushes she brings together women both Hebrew and Egyptian and gives them common qualities. In this and other instances she is a key figure in bringing women on to the page. Her transparent faith exemplifies the religious nature and the learning of the women writers to come. For many of them, the Bible and other religious works were their only way to get an education and find a source which could give them the chance of literary equality.