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'?"