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On The Art of Reading, a non-fiction book by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
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Lecture 10. On Reading The Bible (3) |
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_ LECTURE X. ON READING THE BIBLE (III) MONDAY, MAY 6, 1918
My task to-day, Gentlemen, is mainly practical: to choose a particular book of Scripture and show (if I can) not only that it deserves to be enjoyed, in its English rendering, as a literary masterpiece, because it abides in that dress, an indisputable classic for us, as surely as if it had first been composed in English; but that it can, for purposes of study, serve the purpose of any true literary school of English as readily, and as usefully, as the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" or "Hamlet" or "Paradise Lost." I shall choose "The Book of Job" for several reasons, presently to be given; but beg you to understand that, while taking it for a striking illustration, I use it but to illustrate; that what may be done with "Job" may, in degree, be done with "Ruth," with "Esther," with the "Psalms," "The Song of Songs," "Ecclesiastes;" with Isaiah of Jerusalem, Ezekiel, sundry of the prophets; even with St Luke's Gospel or St Paul's letters to the Churches. My first reason, then, for choosing "Job" has already been given. It is the most striking illustration to be found. Many of the Psalms touch perfection as lyrical strains: of the ecstacy of passion in love I suppose "The Song of Songs" to express the very last word. There are chapters of Isaiah that snatch the very soul and ravish it aloft. In no literature known to me are short stories told with such sweet austerity of art as in the Gospel parables--I can even imagine a high and learned artist in words, after rejecting them as divine on many grounds, surrendering in the end to their divine artistry. But for high seriousness combined with architectonic treatment on a great scale; for sublimity of conception, working malleably within a structure which is simple, severe, complete, having a beginning, a middle and an end; for diction never less than adequate, constantly right and therefore not seldom superb, as theme, thought and utterance soar up together and make one miracle, I can name no single book of the Bible to compare with "Job." My second reason is that the poem, being brief, compendious and quite simple in structure, can be handily expounded; "Job" is what Milton precisely called it, 'a brief model.' And my third reason (which I must not hide) is that two writers whom I mentioned in my last lecture Lord Latymer and Professor R. G. Moulton--have already done this for me. A man who drives at practice must use the tools other men have made, so he use them with due acknowledgment; and this acknowledgment I pay by referring you to Book II of Lord Latymer's "The Poet's Charter,' and to the analysis of "Job" with which Professor Moulton introduces his "Literary Study of the Bible.'
But I have a fourth reason, out of which I might make an apparent fifth by presenting it to you in two different ways. Those elders of you who have followed certain earlier lectures 'On the Art of Writing' may remember that they set very little store upon metre as a dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this by a series of examples. We start with no rhyme at all:
But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of which Dante had an inexhaustible store, we find the English poet almost a pauper; so nearly a pauper that he has to achieve each new rhyme by a trick--which tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and the hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for sublimity, keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the inherent fault of the machine--I mean Myers's "St Paul"--a poem which, finely conceived, pondered, worked and re-worked upon in edition after edition, was from the first condemned (to my mind) by the technical bar of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily chose. I take one of its most deeply felt passages--that of St Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous vision related in the "Acts of the Apostles": Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing! How have I seen in Araby Orion, How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring 'What,' ye will say, 'and thou who at Damascus You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine. But do you not feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to Damascus has not really the time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not your own rapture interrupted by some wonder 'How will he bring it off'? And when he has searched and contrived to 'ask us,' are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not--if I may employ an Oriental trope for once--let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment[1]. As for triple rhymes--rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o' news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, hymn-book too--they are for the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can remove them, from any "Paradise Lost" or "Regained." It may sound a genuine note, now and then: But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric.
So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the question of metre, helped or unhelped by rhyme, in another way; and a way yet more practical. When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) was casting about for his subject, he had a mind for some while to attempt the story of "Job." You may find evidence for this in a MS preserved here in Trinity College Library. You will find printed evidence in a passage of his "Reason of Church Government": 'Time serves not now,' he writes, 'and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model ...' Again, we know "Job" to have been one of the three stories meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical dramas, the other two being the madness of Tasso and "Prometheus Unbound." Shelley never abandoned this idea of a lyrical drama on Job; and if Milton abandoned the idea of an epic, there are passages in "Paradise Lost" as there are passages in "Prometheus Unbound" that might well have been written for this other story. Take the lines What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of Job's words?-- For now should I have lien down and been quiet;
Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static figure: and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but souls as quick and fiery as Byron's Lucifer:
But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on the "Book of Job," it is that they no sooner tackled it than they found it to be a magnificent poem already, and a poem on which, with all their genius, they found themselves unable to improve. I want you to realise a thing most simple, demonstrable by five minutes of practice, yet so confused by conventional notions of what poetry is that I dare say it to be equally demonstrable that Milton and Shelley discovered it only by experiment. Does this appear to you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as Milton? Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in proof his paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi: to set against the Authorised Version's such pomposity as When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son or against O give thanks.... such stuff as Who did the solid earth ordain
It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as little above those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of those of Tate and Brady: for Milton made them at fifteen years old, and he who afterwards consecrated his youth to poetry soon learned to know better. And yet, bearing in mind the passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" which paraphrase the Scriptural narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though as an artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite won to _knowing_ the simple fact that the thing had already been done and surpassingly well done: he, who did so much to liberate poetry from rhyme--he--even he who in the grand choruses of "Samson Agonistes" did so much to liberate it from strict metre never quite realised, being hag-ridden by the fetish that rides between two panniers, the sacred and the profane, that this translation of "Job" already belongs to the category of poetry, _is_ poetry, already above metre, and in rhythm far on its way to the insurpassable. If rhyme be allowed to that greatest of arts, if metre, is not rhythm above both for her service? Hear in a sentence how this poem uplifts the rhythm of the Vulgate:
Is that poetry? Surely it is poetry. Can you improve it with the embellishments of rhyme and strict scansion? Well, sundry bold men have tried, and I will choose, for your judgment, the rendering of a part of the above passage by one who is by no means the worst of them--a hardy anonymous Scotsman. His version was published at Falkirk in 1869:
But where real wisdom is found can he shew? (I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really answered, in its northern vernacular, was 'Me either.')
Why, it follows that in the course of studying it as literature we have found experimentally settled for us--and on the side of freedom--a dispute in which scores of eminent critics have taken sides: a dispute revived but yesterday (if we omit the blank and devastated days of this War) by the writers and apostles of _vers libres._ 'Can there be poetry without metre?' 'Is free verse a true poetic form?' Why, our "Book of Job" being poetry, unmistakable poetry, of course there can, to be sure it is. These apostles are butting at an open door. Nothing remains for them but to go and write _vers libres_ as fine as those of "Job" in our English translation. Or suppose even that they write as well as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, not as innovators but as renewers. Nothing is done in literature by arguing whether or not this or that be possible or permissible. The only way to prove it possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not forestalled you.
Now for another question (much argued, you will remember, a few years ago) 'Is there--can there be--such a thing as a Static Theatre, a Static Drama?' Most of you (I daresay) remember M. Maeterlinck's definition of this and his demand for it. To summarise him roughly, he contends that the old drama--the traditional, the conventional drama-- lives by action; that, in Aristotle's phrase, it represents men doing, [Greek: prattontas], and resolves itself into a struggle of human wills--whether against the gods, as in ancient tragedy, or against one another, as in modern. M. Maeterlinck tells us--
To the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as though it were something that was primitive, arid and brutal.... I am shown a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens--in a word all the sublimity of tradition, but alas how superficial and material! Blood, surface-tears and death! What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, a mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death?
The Drama of Job opens with a "Prologue" in the mouth of a Narrator. There was a man in the land of Uz, named Job; upright, God-fearing, of great substance in sheep, cattle and oxen; blest also with seven sons and three daughters. After telling of their family life, how wholesome it is, and pious, and happy-- The Prologue passes to a Council held in Heaven. The Lord sits there, and the sons of God present themselves each from his province. Enters Satan (whom we had better call the Adversary) from his sphere of inspection, the Earth, and reports. The Lord specially questions him concerning Job, pattern of men. The Adversary demurs. 'Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not set a hedge about his prosperity? But put forth thy hand and touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face.' The Lord gives leave for this trial to be made (you will recall the opening of "Everyman"): So, in the midst of his wealth, a messenger came to job and says-- yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and consumed them; The Chaldeans made three bands, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and it fell upon the young men, Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and
Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.
But Job answered, soothing her: Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?
But now comes the third trial, which needs no Council in Heaven to decree it. Travellers by the mound saw this figure seated there, patient, uncomplaining, an object of awe even to the children who at first mocked him; asked this man's history; and hearing of it, smote on their breasts, and made a token of it and carried the news into far countries: until it reached the ears of Job's three friends, all great tribesmen like himself--Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. These three made an appointment together to travel and visit Job. 'And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept.' Then they went up and sat down opposite him on the ground. But the majesty of suffering is silent:
Of the drama itself I shall attempt no analysis, referring you for this to the two books from which I have already quoted. My purpose being merely to persuade you that this surpassing poem can be studied, and ought to be studied, as literature, I shall content myself with turning it (so to speak) once or twice in my hand and glancing one or two facets at you. To begin with, then, you will not have failed to notice, in the setting out of the drama, a curious resemblance between "Job" and the "Prometheus" of Aeschylus. The curtain in each play lifts on a figure solitary, tortured (for no reason that seems good to us) by a higher will which, we are told, is God's. The chorus of Sea-nymphs in the opening of the Greek play bears no small resemblance in attitude of mind to job's three friends. When job at length breaks the intolerable silence with
Seest thou not that thou hast sinned? But at once, for anyone with a sense of comparative literature, is set up a comparison between the persistent West and the persistent East; between the fiery energising rebel and the patient victim. Of these two, both good, one will dare everything to release mankind from thrall; the other will submit, and justify himself--mankind too, if it may hap--by submission. At once this difference is seen to give a difference of form to the drama. Our poem is purely static. Some critics can detect little individuality in Job's three friends, to distinguish them. For my part I find Eliphaz more of a personage than the other two; grander in the volume of his mind, securer in wisdom; as I find Zophar rather noticeably a mean-minded greybeard, and Bildad a man of the stand-no-nonsense kind. But, to tell the truth, I prefer not to search for individuality in these men: I prefer to see them as three figures with eyes of stone almost expressionless. For in truth they are the conventions, all through,--the orthodox men--addressing Job, the reality; and their words come to this:
or again Will ye speak unrighteously for God,
The words of Job are ended.
They are ended: even though at this point (when the debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer: the others keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel--it is most wonderfully conveyed--as clearly as if indicated by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm gathering; a thunder-storm with a whirlwind. It gathers; it is upon them; it darkens them with dread until even the words of Elihu dry on his lips:
Now of that famous and marvellous speech, put by the poet into the mouth of God, we may say what may be said of all speeches put by man into the mouth of God. We may say, as of the speeches of the Archangel in "Paradise Lost" that it is argument, and argument, by its very nature, admits of being answered. But, if to make God talk at all be anthropomorphism, here is anthropomorphism at its very best in its effort to reach to God. There is a hush. The storm clears away; and in this hush the voice of the Narrator is heard again, pronouncing the Epilogue. Job has looked in the face of God and reproached him as a friend reproaches a friend. Therefore his captivity was turned, and his wealth returned to him, and he begat sons and daughters, and saw his sons' sons unto the fourth generation. So Job died, being old and full of years.
Structurally a great poem; historically a great poem; philosophically a great poem; so rendered for us in noble English diction as to be worthy in any comparison of diction, structure, ancestry, thought! Why should we not study it in our English School, if only for purpose of comparison? I conclude with these words of Lord Latymer:
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