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words and phrases and ideas of our English Bible.
With these six--Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Addison, and
Pope--the course of the Jacobean literature is sufficiently measured. There
are many lesser names, but these are the ones which made it an epoch in
literature, and these are at their best under the power of the Bible.
In the Georgian group we need to call only five great names which
have had creative influence in literature. Ordinary culture in literature will
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include some acquaintance with each of them. In the order of their death
they are Shelley (1829.), Byron (1824), Coleridge (1831), Walter Scott
(1832), and Wordsworth (1850). The last long outlived the others; but he
belongs with them, because he was born earlier than any other in the group
and did his chief work in their time and before the later group appeared.
Except Wordsworth, all these were gone before Queen Victoria came to
the throne in 1837. Three other names could be called: Keats, Robert
Burns, and Charles Lamb. All would illustrate what we are studying. Keats
least of all and Burns most. They are omitted here not because they did not
feel the influence of the English Bible, not because they do not constantly
show its influence, but because they are not so creative as the others; they
have not so influenced the current of literature. At any rate, the five named
will represent worthily and with sufficient completeness the Georgian
period of English literature.
Nothing could reveal more clearly than this list how we are
distinguishing the Bible as literature from the Bible as an authoritative
book in morals. One would much dislike to credit the Bible with any part
of the personal life of Shelley or Byron. They were friends; they, were
geniuses; but they were both badly afflicted with common moral leprosy.
It is playing with morals to excuse either of them because he was a genius.
Nothing in the genius of either demanded or was served by the course of
cheap immorality which both practised. It was not because Shelley was a
genius that he married Harriet Westbrook, then ran away with Mary
Godwin, then tried to get the two to become friends and neighbors until
his own wife committed suicide; it was not his genius that made him yield
to the influence of Emilia Viviani and write her the poem "Epipsychidion,"
telling her and the world that he "was never attached to that great sect who
believed that each one should select out of the crowd a mistress or a
friend" and let the rest go. That was not genius, that was just common
passion; and our divorce courts are full of Shelleys of that type. So
Byron's personal immorality is not to be explained nor excused on the
ground of his genius. It was not genius that led him so astray in England
that his wife had to divorce him, and that public opinion drove him out of
the land. It was not his genius that sent him to visit Shelley and his
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mistress at Lake Geneva and seduce their guest, so that she bore him a
daughter, though she was never his wife. It was not genius that made him
pick up still another companion out of several in Italy and live with her in
immoral relation. In the name of common decency let no one stand up for
Shelley and Byron in their personal characters! There are not two moral
laws, one for geniuses and one for common people. Byron, at any rate,
was never deceived about himself, never blamed his genius nor his
conscience for his wrong. These are striking lines in "Childe Harold," in
which he disclaims all right to sympathy, because,
"The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted,--they
have torn me and I bleed. I should have known what fruit would spring
from such a tree."
Shelley's wife would not say that for him. "In all Shelley did," she
says, "he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own
conscience." Well, so much the worse for Shelley! Geniuses are not the
only men who can find good reason for doing what they want to do. One
of Shelley's critics suggests that the trouble was his introduction into
personal conduct of the imagination which he ought to have saved for his
writing. Perhaps we might explain Byron's misconduct by reminding
ourselves of his club-foot, and applying one code of morals to men with
club-feet and another to men with normal feet.
If we speak of the influence of the Bible on these men, it must be on
their literary work; and when we find it there, it becomes peculiar mark of
its power. They had little sense of it as moral law. Their consciences
approved it and condemned themselves, or else their delicate literary taste
sensed it as a book of power.
This is notably true of Shelley. When he was still a student in Oxford
he committed himself to the opinion of another writer, that "the mind
cannot believe in the existence of God." He tries to work that out fully in
his notes on "Queen Mab." When he was hardly yet of age he himself
wrote that "The genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the
accursed Book of God, ere man can read the inscription on its heart." He
once said that his highest desire was that there should be a monument to
himself somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its
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face smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Atheist."
It would seem that whatever Shelley drew of strength or inspiration
from the Bible would be by way of reaction; but it is not so. However he
may have hated the "accursed Book of God," his wife tells in her note on
"The Revolt of Islam" that Shelley "debated whether he should devote
himself to poetry or metaphysics," and, resolving on the former, he
"educated himself for it, engaging himself in the study of the poets of
Greece, England, and Italy. To these, may be added," she goes on, "a
constant perusal of portions of the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms, Job,
Isaiah, and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with delight."
Not only did he catch the spirit of that poetry, but its phrases haunted his
memory. In his best prose work, which he called A Defense of Poetry,
there is an interesting revelation of the influence of his Bible reading upon
him. Toward the end of the essay these two sentences occur: "It is
inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but
posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their
errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if
their sins are as scarlet, they are now white as snow; they have been
washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time." There is no
more eloquent passage in the essay than the one of which this is part, and
yet it is full of allusion to this Book from which all pages must be torn!
Even in "Queen Mab" he makes Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, recount
the Bible story in such broad outlines as could be given only by a man
who was familiar with it. When Shelley was in Italy and the word came to
him of the massacre at Manchester, he wrote his "Masque of Anarchy."
There are few more melodious lines of his writing than those which occur
in this long poem in the section regarding freedom. Four of those lines are
often quoted. They are at the very heart of Shelley's best work. Addressing
freedom, he says:
"Thou art love: the rich have kissed Thy feet, and, like him
following Christ, Gave their substance to the free, And through the
rough world follow thee."
Page after page of Shelley reveals these half- conscious references to
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the Bible. There were two sources from which he received his passionate
democracy. One was the treatment he received at Eton, and later at Oxford;
the other is his frequent reading of the English Bible, even though he was
in the spirit of rebellion against much of its teaching. In Browning's essay [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]