by Melvyn Bragg
The Romantic poets sought answers and questions in nature as much as in a biblical God. Wordsworth wrote: She has a world of ready wealth
Our minds and hearts to bless –
Spontaneous wisdom breath’d by health
Truth breath’d by cheerfulness.
And, much more ominously:One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
The Old and the New Testament both put briskly aside! All the history and storytelling grandeur of the Old and the morality of the New deleted in a simple quatrain. Yet Wordsworth’s pantheism often seems to merge with Protestantism:Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Without at least the inheritance of a religious sensibility it is doubtful if he would have written his greatest poetry. The Prelude is shot through with a sense of the divine.
Lord Byron wrote: ‘I am a great reader of those books [the Bible] and had read them through and through before I was eight years old; that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task but the other as a pleasure.’
We know that Byron was iconoclastic, at the very least sceptical. In Childe Harold he writes:. . . Religions take their turn:
’Twas Jove’s – ’tis Mahomet’s – and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds.
Again, though, as often happened, the effect of the King James Bible was felt by believers and unbelievers alike. Byron dug deeply into the Bible, often taking the Old Testament stories at their own value. ‘Jephthah’s Daughter’, ‘Song of Saul Before his Last Battle’, and others are faithful to the original story. Even in Childe Harold and Don Juan in which there are many references to Adam and Eve and the Fall, though there is mockery there is relish in the knowledge. The Bible continued to be a necessary resource. George Gordon Brown in his essay on Byron says of the ‘dust and clay metaphors’ that each of them appears well over a hundred times in his poetry.
As the centuries rolled through, the Bible’s literary and historical wealth often grew detached from its spiritual mission. Yet it remained no less powerful in the influence it maintained among great writers.
There is an extreme example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the work of the atheist, Percy Bysshe Shelley. He had studied carefully much of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Psalms, Job and Isaiah. Queen Mab is given as one example in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, tells the Bible story in detail only available to a close reader.
Coleridge is the apotheosis of the Romantic movement, even though he bowed to Wordsworth as the greater poet. He was born in 1772 and before Coleridge was three he could read a chapter of the Bible. ‘He continued to read both Testaments all his life, and read them in the hope that they would reveal, and help create in him, the being of Christ. He valued the bible above all other books.’ Coleridge himself wrote: ‘the words of the bible find me at greater depths of my being.’ We are told that ‘when you read Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix you may as well be reading the 19th Psalm.’ He said: ‘intense study of the bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.’
His philosophical works, which have been a steer in literary criticism, are also suffused by his belief in the Bible as a source for both faith and literature. ‘Only a Man is capable of ideas . . . and as far only as he is capable of an Ideal . . . is man a Religious being. But neither the one nor the other is possible except through the Imagination.’ Imagination for Coleridge is the key to a sense of the divine as well as a guide to a perception of beauty. He had a mission as determined as a Wesley. ‘This is my aim,’ he wrote, ‘to bring back our faith and affections to the simplicity of the Gospel Facts, by restoring the Gospel facts to their union with the Ideas or Spiritual Truths therein embodied or therein revealed.’
Coleridge’s intellectual religious passion existed alongside an appreciation of the powers of nature, especially in its extreme manifestations. He, like Wordsworth, can be seen to be at a turning point. The Bible still infused much literature but other primary inspirations were coming into view. The greatest of these was science, what Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century had described as the ‘Book of Nature’. It threatened to eclipse Scripture but not for a surprisingly long time and, even recently, not for some key writers.
Coleridge was contemporaneous with Jane Austen, not generally much thought of in the context of the biblical consensus. But her concerns with honouring parents, with the sin of pride, the obligation to care for the weak, as well as her interest in the social and domestically political place of the Anglican clergy in the society she portrays, bring her into the orbit of what might be called the tradition of Anglican-Protestant literature. Her grasp of the Bible was sure and her grip on the value of good deeds can be tracked back to the Beatitudes and other teachings in the New Testament.
Jane Austen represents another layer – the moving of the religious content from the foreground into the background of literature. Once again, there are exceptions. But as we roll through some of the giants of the nineteenth century, there is some sense of an ebbing tide, and yet it has not left the shore.
Charles Dickens frequently uses phrases from the Bible to make a dramatic moment swell even larger with spiritual and emotional significance as when in Bleak House little neglected, starved Joe lies dying. A friend teaches him the Lord’s Prayer as he sees the Light coming. It was at the time thought to be of one of Dickens’s most affecting scenes, and it is still very moving. It evokes deep feeling and through religion it gives it even greater depth. While A Christmas Carol is a masterpiece of biblical Christian art.
For all that, the Bible is not at the forefront of Dickens whom some claim as England’s greatest novelist. Yet his books are always morality tales, a mix of New Testament Christ-ness and Old Testament vengeance. Who is good and who is bad is determined, fundamentally, by what Christ preached. Who will be punished and how savagely, by the acts of Jehovah. But the specific biblical instances and the use of the stories which are dominating in earlier writers have started to slide away. The Bible remains, however, as a resource, a hope and as a warning. There is salvation in Dickens, but it is as often in marriage as in heaven. Dickens would be appalled not to be included among the Christian writers – but the blunt and total embrace of John Bunyan is no longer in the great fiction of the day.
George Eliot, another novelist whose admirers claim her as ‘the greatest’, is as inevitably and dynamically related to the Bible as any other of her countrymen and women but, again, she is an agent of change. She was a distinguished biblical scholar whose engagement with the German biblical textual analysts of the day led her to abandon her belief in the literal truth of her original faith. But rather than move away altogether, she took the standpoint of a cultural commentator on this deeply embedded phenomenon called Christianity which rested its case on unassailable revealed truths. She saw much in it that was good, morally, socially and even intellectually. Her novels are perhaps the last in the line of the novelist as genius to embrace closely the religion – its morality and spirituality – described in the King James Version, in such resonating language.
She moves from the false simplicity of Silas Marner – practically a straight addition to Christ’s own parables – to the moral imaginative amplitude of Middlemarch, often using discrete dramatic devices from the Bible. George Eliot is forever resting on and taking nurture from her young pre-scholarly years of open belief as well as her reconsidered post-faith position.
Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, explains her point of view in a chaste early love scene which is imbued with Christian sentiment:‘. . . by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is an
d cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’
‘That is a beautiful mysticism – it is a—’ [says Laidlaw]
‘Please not to call it by any name,’ said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. ‘You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.’
And his great novel closes with words from the Old Testament: ‘in their death they were not divided’.
It would be possible to embark on a long run of nineteenth-century English novelists and poets. And Scots too. There are few books as darkly saturated in the King James Version as James Hogg’s The Confession of a Justified Sinner. And of course alongside there were those for at least a couple of centuries who did not take much from the Bible and followed classical or non-religious models.
But its soul went marching on. Charles Kingsley was a minister and a Christian Socialist more likely now to be included in a chapter on social change but his novels, such as The Water Babies and Alton Locke were wildly popular in his day and were heavily banked on biblical quotations. His intense Bible reading went directly into books that changed attitudes and manners.
All three Brontë sisters were schooled in the Bible and the evidence is there in their novels. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the outstanding example: David Norton, author of a textual history of the King James Bible says of it, ‘In Jane Eyre, Romantic Religion and the King James Bible come together to create important artistic effects and the result is sometimes an insight into the King James Bible.’
The novel, published in 1847, is distinguished, according to McAfee, by ‘the ease with which the King James Bible was able to slip into Brontë’s novel without announcement’. He cites Rochester analysing and describing Jane Eyre’s character. ‘Strong wind, earthquake, shock and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.’ An allusion to the vision in 1 Kings.
Like John Bunyan, she quotes from the Psalms – in one case the same Psalms 42 and 69 – as he had. After the broken wedding, she writes: ‘That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, “the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.” ’
This is not a direct quotation but an adaptation, yet the quality of it, by eliminating the linking words, heightens the effect and justifies McAfee’s large claim that she gives ‘an insight into the King James Bible’. Her own prose in 1847 takes up the prose of the King James Bible from 1611 seamlessly: the Bible has again spliced with literature.
Finally, to a poet who all but rounds off the century: Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 92). Dr van Dyke a Bible scholar writes that ‘we cannot help seeing that Tennyson 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 illusions 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.’
As with all the other King Jamesian writers, there are many references – over 400 – spread through the poems. In his elegy for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam, he uses the resurrection of Lazarus:When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,
And home to Mary’s house return’d,
Was this demanded – if he yearn’d
To hear her weeping by his grave?
This brief sweep through English literature in Britain spanning 300 years, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, has, I hope, shown how deep, varied and persistent has been the impact of the King James Bible on English literature. It will be seen at work again when American literature and the twentieth century are discussed and in both cases, I think, the impact is every bit as deep even into our alleged secular times. It seems that the Bible’s essential poetry and the beauty of its prose carried into literature even when the main matter, the religious content, waned in importance or was challenged or doubted. It became a unique living thing in the language and in the books it bred.
This is from Tennyson, on the story of Moses striking the rock so that water will flow.
O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer’d years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY - THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE (2)
When the King James Version was shipped across the Atlantic and landed on the eastern seaboard, it was an event which was to play an immeasurable part in shaping the modern world, the American world.
American English is bred from the Jacobean-approved translation of the Word of God. American books – both literary and popular – drew from and dredged the Bible. In the construction of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin equally, the Bible is in the beams and in the joists. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, direct reference occurs in thirty-eight of the novel’s forty-five chapters and the book is rooted in the faith nurtured in the Bible. There seems little doubt that Uncle Tom’s passionately convinced embrace of American Protestant Christianity made the novel not only a bestseller but a book that changed the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers. It worked as benign propaganda and brought them to an abhorrence of the evils of the slavery Harriet Beecher Stowe described so movingly.
One way to gauge the effect of the Bible is to check the impact it had on writers. As we saw with the small selection from the enormous number of ‘biblically’ literate writers in the previous chapter on literature in Britain, this Book of Books has spawned innumerable books. The writers knew that their references would be picked up. They knew they could illuminate and fortify a point by apt or jarring biblical reference. They knew their readers. And the readers knew their Bible. It is impossible to name any single book in the English-speaking world which has had and still has anything approaching that congregation of a readership. And as it was also a preachers’ Bible there were listeners, too, scarcely literate, some of them, but surely intelligent and earnest enough to want to hear the truth of the Word of God and its progeny.
Professor Mark A. Noll writes persuasively on the dimension of the Bible’s presence in America’s early history. He points out that the first English book published in North America was commonly known as The Bay Psalm Book. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, thought the miracle stories were ‘a ground work of vulgar ignorance . . . superstitions, factitious, fabrications’. Yet during his first term as President, he prepared his own editions of Jesus’s sayings (in Greek, Latin and French) and read the Gospels daily for the last forty years of his life. Towns were named from the Bible. So were children. It was a totem as well as the Word of God. In Philadelphia in 1844 when the Roman Catholic bishop tried to persuade the city officials to let Catholic children hear teachings from the Douay-Rheims translation instead of the King James Version, there were riots and the Protestants tried to burn down the Catholic churches.
It took some time for the Bible to be printed legally and profitably in America. The monopoly of the London printers held hard and across the ocean they went, these sacred cargos, Bible-bound boats. The Bible in America was translated into German, Spanish and several Native American languages before the War of Independence released the new states from the printing monopoly of London. The flo
w of new American-printed Bibles after an initial slow start (not unlike its publishing history in London) quickly became a flood. The American printing presses sent their Bibles down the great rivers, and across the plains and the mountain ranges into every corner of what became a Christian continent.
We’re told there were almost one hundred presses printing copies of the Bible and the New Testament in America in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century. Just after 1800, a travelling Bible salesman wrote to his publisher: ‘I tell you this is the very season and age of the Bible. Bible dictionaries, Bible tales, Bible stories, Bibles plain or paraphrased, Carey’s Bibles, Collins’s Bibles, Clarke’s Bibles, Kimpton’s Bibles, no matter what or whose all, all will go down – so wide is the crater of public appetite at this time.’ And underpinning all of them was the King James Version. New translations flopped. Even the version of Noah Webster, the phenomenal bestselling dictionary compiler and educator of American children in their spelling and pronunciation, failed to touch the King James Version.
The American Bible Society was founded in 1816. By 1830, it was printing 300,000 Bibles a year at a time when the population was 13 million. By 1991 that had gone up to 2,283,000 in a population of 252.8 million.
There was so much new and daunting about the American experience, so much heroic and cruel, violent, severe and unexpected, that it would be rash to claim too much for a book in this often wild landscape. But substantial evidence is there, in the multitude of the small churches, in the roving preachers and the often rabid prayer meetings. There is widespread proof that the Bible was cleaved to for its confirmation of a faith often profoundly felt and followed, a source of wisdom and morality. But also it provided a justification for the very opposite of what Christ stood for. The devil’s work was given scriptural authority too. It could and it did champion the causes of two wholly opposite sides in the most bitter conflicts – as it had done on the Civil War battlefields of Britain and would do so over and again around the English-speaking empires. This was nowhere more vivid than in the arguments and often vicious struggles over slavery which has a chapter of its own.
