It is a study by itself, and yet it is true that world literature is, as Professor Moulton puts it, the autobiography of civilization."A national literature is a reflection of the national history." Books as books reflect their authors.As literature they reflect the public opinion which gives them indorsement.When, therefore, public opinion: keeps alive a certain group of books, there is testimony not simply to those books, but to the public opinion which has preserved them.The history of popular estimates of literature is itself most interesting.On the other hand, some writers have been amusingly overestimated.No doubt Edward Fitzgerald, who gave us the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" did some other desirable work; but Professor Moulton quotes this paragraph from a popular life of Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece of old in her palmiest days--the Greece of Homer and Demosthenes, of Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and Lycurgus, of Apelles and Praxiteles--not even this Greece,prolific as she was in sages and heroes, can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as Ireland can of names immortal in history!" But "this was for Irish consumption." And popular opinion and even critical opinion has sometimes gone far astray in its destructive tendency.There were authoritative critics who declared that Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge wrote "unintelligible nonsense." George Meredith's style, especially in his poetry, was counted so bad that it--was not worth reading.We are all near enough the Browning epoch to recall how the obscurity of his style impressed some and oppressed others.Alfred Austin, in 1869, said that "Mr.Tennyson has no sound pretensions to be called a great poet." Contemporary public opinion is seldom a final gauge of strength for a piece of literature.It takes the test of time.How many books we have seen come on the stage and then pass off again! Yet the books that have stayed on the stage have been kept there by public opinion expressing itself in the long run.The social influence of the King James version, creating a public taste for certain types of literature, tended to produce them at once.
English literature in these three hundred years has found in the Bible three influential elements: style, language, and material.
First, the style of the King James version has influenced English literature markedly.Professor Gardiner opens one of his essays with the dictum that "in all study of English literature, if there be any one axiom which may be accepted without question, it is that the ultimate standard of English prose style is set by the King James version of the Bible."[1] You almost measure the strength of writing by its agreement with the predominant traits of this version.Carlyle's weakest works are those that lose the honest simplicity of its style in a forced turgidity and affected roughness.His Heroes and Hero Worship or his French Revolution shows his distinctive style, and yet shows the influence of this simpler style, while his Frederick the Great is almost impossible because he has given full play to his broken and disconnected sentences.On the other hand, Macaulay fails us most in his striving for effect, making nice balance of sentences, straining his "either-or," or his "while-one-was-doing-this-the- other-was- doing-that." Then his sentences grow involved, and his paragraphs lengthen, and he swings away from the style of the King Jamesversion."One can say that if any writing departs very far from the characteristics of the English Bible it is not good English writing."[1] Atlantic Monthly, May, 1900, p.684.
The second element which English literature finds in the Bible is its LANGUAGE.The words of the Bible are the familiar ones of the English tongue, and have been kept familiar by the use of the Bible.The result is that "the path of literature lies parallel to that of religion.They are old and dear companions, brethren indeed of one blood; not always agreeing, to be sure; squabbling rather in true brotherly fashion now and then; occasionally falling out very seriously and bitterly; but still interdependent and necessary to each other."[1] Years ago a writer remarked that every student of English literature, or of English speech, finds three works or subjects referred to, or quoted from, more frequently than others.These are the Bible, tales of Greek and Roman mythology, and Aesop's Fables.Of these three, certainly the Bible furnishes the largest number of references.There is reason for that.A writer wants an audience.Very few men can claim to be independent of the public for which they write.There is nothing the public will be more apt to understand and appreciate quickly than a passing reference to the English Bible.So it comes about that when Dickens is describing the injustice of the Murdstones to little David Copperfield, he can put the whole matter before us in a parenthesis: "Though there was One once who set a child in the midst of the disciples." Dickens knew that his readers would at once catch the meaning of that reference, and would feel the contrast between the scene he was describing and that simple scene.Take any of the great books of literature and black out the phrases which manifestly come directly from the English Bible, and you would mark them beyond recovery.
[1] Chapman, English Literature in Account with Religion.
