Talks on the study of literature.

by Arlo Bates

"Intense study of the Bible," Coleridge has said most justly, "will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style." He might almost have added that appreciative study of this book will protect any reader from vulgarity in literature and life alike. The early sacred writings of any people have in them the dignity of sincere conviction and imaginative emotion. The races to which these books have been divine have revered them as the word of the Deity, but it is the supreme emotion which thrills through them that has touched their readers and made possible and real the claim of inspiration. Every responsive reader must vibrate with the human feeling of which they are full. We are little likely to have anything but curiosity concerning the dogmas of the ancient Hindoo or Persian religion, yet it is impossible to read the ecstatic hymns of the Vedas or the exalted pages of the Zend-Avesta without being profoundly moved by the humanity which cries out in them. Of the Bible this is especially true for us, because the book is so closely connected with the life and development of our branch of the human family.

If it were asked which of the classics a man absolutely must know to attain to a knowledge of literature even respectable, the answer undoubtedly would be: "The Bible and Shakespeare." He must be familiar—familiar in the sense in which we use that word in the phrase, "mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted"—with the greatest plays of Shakespeare, and with the finer portions of the Scriptures. I do not of course mean all of the Bible. Nobody, no matter how devout, can be expected to find imaginative stimulus in strings of genealogies such as that which begins the Book of Chronicles, or in the minute details of the Jewish ceremonial law. I mean the simple directness of Genesis and Exodus; the straightforward sincerity of Judges and Joshua; the sweetness and beauty of Ruth and Esther; the passionately idealized sensuousness of Canticles; the shrewdly pathetic wisdom of Ecclesiastes; the splendidly imaginative ecstasies of Isaiah; the uplift of the Psalms; the tender virility of the Gospels; the spiritual dithyrambics of the Apocalypse. No reader less dull than a clod can remain unreverent and unthrilled in the presence of that magnificent poem which one hesitates to say is surpassed by either Homer or Dante, the Book of Job. The student of literature may be of any religion or of no religion, but he must realize, and realize by intimate acquaintance, that, taken as a whole, the Bible is the most virile, the most idiomatic, the most imaginative prose work in the language.

The appearance of literary editions of portions of the Bible for general reading is an encouraging sign that there is to-day a reaction from the neglect into which the book has fallen. Unfortunately, these editions follow for the most part the text of the Revised Version, which may be excellent from a theological point of view, but which from a literary one stands in much the same relation to the King James version as the paraphrases of Dryden stand to the original text of Chaucer. The literary student is concerned with the book which has been in the hands and hearts of writers and thinkers of preceding generations; with the words which have tinctured the prose masterpieces and given color to the poetry of our tongue. To attempt to alter the text now is for the genuine literary student not unlike modernizing Shakespeare.

The Bible is a library in itself, so great is its variety; and it is practically indispensable as a companion in literary study. To neglect it is one of the most grave errors possible to the student. It has, it is true, its serious and obvious defects, and from a literary point of view the New Testament is infinitely less interesting than the Old; but taken all in all, it is a great and an enchanting book, permanent in its worth and permanent in its interest.

To go on to talk of Homer is at once to bring up the much-vexed question of reading translations. It seems to me rather idle in these days to take time to discuss this. Whatever decision be arrived at, the fact remains that the general reader will not read the classics in the original. However great the loss, he must take them in the English version, or let them alone. Even the most accomplished graduates of the best colleges are not always capable of appreciating in Greek the literary flavor of the works which they can translate pretty accurately. There is no longer time in these busy and over-crowded days for the student so to saturate himself with a dead language that it shall be as familiar to him as his own tongue. The multiplicity of present impressions renders it all but impossible to get completely into the atmosphere of a civilization bygone. A few of the men trained in foreign schools in the most scholarly fashion have probably arrived at the power of feeling sensitively the literary quality of the classics in the original; but for the ordinary student, this is entirely out of the question. It is sad, but it is an inevitable human limitation. Emerson, as is well known, boldly commended the practice of reading translations. His sterling sense probably desired the consistency of having theory agree with practice where there is not the slightest hope of making practice agree with theory. Whether we like it or do not like it, the truth is that most persons will take the Greek and Latin authors in translation or not at all.

And certainly they must be read in some tongue. No genuine student of literature will neglect Homer or the Greek tragedians. The old Greeks were by no means always estimable creatures. They not infrequently did those things which they ought not to have done, and left undone those things which they ought to have done; but the prayer-book did not then exist, so that in spite of all there was plenty of health in them. They were not models in morals, while they were entirely unacquainted with many modern refinements; but they were eminently human. They were sane and wholesome beings, manly and womanly; so that a reader is in far better company with the heroes of Homer in their vices than he is with the morbid creations of much modern fiction in their moments of the most conscious and painfully elaborated virtue. Herein, it seems to me, lies the greatest value of Greek literature. Before he can be anything else thoroughly and soundly, a man must be healthily human. Hot-house virtue is on the whole about as dangerous a disease as open-air vice; and it is far more difficult to cure. Unless a man or a woman be genuine, he or she is nothing, and the mere appearance of good or evil is not of profound consequence. To be sane and human, to think genuine thoughts, and to do genuine deeds, is the beginning of all real virtue; and nothing is more conducive to the development of genuineness than the company of those who are sound and real. If we are with whole-souled folk, we cannot pose, even to ourselves; and it seems to me that the reader who, with full and buoyant imagination, puts himself into the company of the Greeks of Homer or Æschylus or Euripides or Sophocles cannot be content, for the time being at least, to be anything but a simply genuine human creature himself.

Of course I do not mean that the reader reasons this out. Consciously to think that we will be genuine is dangerously near a pose in itself. It is that he finds himself in a company so thoroughly manly, so real and virile, that he instinctively will take long breaths, and without thinking of it lay aside the conventional pose which self is so apt to impose upon self. We do not, while reading, lose in the least the power of judging between right and wrong. We realize that Ulysses, delightful old rascal though he is, is an unconscionable trickster. We are no more likely to play fast and loose with domestic ties because the Grecian heroes, and even the Greek gods, left their morals at home for their wives to keep bright while they went abroad to take their pleasure. Manners and standards in those days were not altogether the same that they are now; but right is right in Homer, and wrong is wrong, as it is in the work of every really great poet since the world began. The whole of Greek poetry, like Greek sculpture, has an enchanting and wholesome open-air quality; and even when it is nude it is not naked. We miss much of the beauty by losing the wonderful form, and no translation ever approached the original, but we get always the mood of sanity and reality.

The mood of Dante seems sometimes more difficult for the modern reader than that of the Greeks. The high spiritual severity, the passionate austerity of the Florentine, are certainly far removed from the busy, practical temper of to-day. Far away as they are in time, the Greeks were after all men of tangible deeds, of practical affairs; they knew the taste of ginger hot i' the mouth, and took hold upon life with a zest thoroughly to be appreciated in this materialistic age. Dante, on the other hand, has the burning solemnity of the prophets of the Old Testament, so that the point of view of the "Divine Comedy" is not far removed from that of Isaiah. Of all the greatest classics the "Divine Comedy" is probably the least read to-day, at any rate in this country. The translations of it are for the most part hopelessly unsatisfactory, the impossibility of setting poetry over from the honeyed Italian into a language of a genius so different as the English being painfully obvious even to those little critical. There is a great deal that is obscure, and yet more which cannot be understood without a good deal of special historical information; so that it is impossible to read Dante for the first time without that frequent reference to the notes which is so unfortunate and undesirable in a first reading. It is practically necessary to go over the notes with care once or twice before attempting the poem. Get the information first, and then plunge into the poetry. It is a plunge into a sea whereof the brine is bitter, the waters piercingly cold, and where not infrequently the waves roll high; but it is a plunge invigorating and life-giving. The man who has once read Dante with sympathy and delight can never again be wholly common and unclean, no matter into what woful faults and follies he may thereafter fall.

To come nearer home, readers are somewhat foolishly apt to feel that it is about as difficult to read Chaucer as it is to read Homer or Dante. As a matter of fact any intelligent and educated person should be able to master the theories of the pronunciation of Chaucerian English in a couple of mornings, and to read him with ease and pleasure in a week or two at most. It is a pity that there is not a good complete edition of Chaucer pointed and accented, so that the reader might not be troubled with any consciousness of effort; but after all, the difficulty lies more in the idea than in the fact. When one has mastered the language of the thirteenth century, in company how enchanting does he find himself! The sweetness, the wholesomeness, the kindliness, the sincerity, the humor, and the humanity of Chaucer can hardly be over-praised.