On the Art of Reading

by a verb does not, at any rate, intend to sunder what he has just been at pains, however slight, to join together: he may at least have the credit, whether he be right or wrong, of asserting his subject and his object to be interdependent. Take a particular proposition⁠—John Milton wrote a poem called Paradise Lost. You will hardly contest the truth of that: but what does it mean? Milton wrote the story of the Fall of Man: he told it in some thousands of lines of decasyllabic verse unrhymed; he measured these lines out with exquisite cadences. The object of our simple sentence includes all these, and this much beside: that he wrote the total poem and made it what it is. Nor can that object be fully understood⁠—literature being, ever and always, so personal a thing⁠—until we understand the subject, John Milton⁠—what manner of man he was, and how on earth, being such a man, he contrived to do it. We shall never quite know that: but it is important we should get as near as we can.

Of the Bible this is yet more evident, it being a translation. Isaiah did not write the cadences of his prophecies, as we ordinary men of this country know them: Christ did not speak the cadences of the Parables or of the Sermon on the Mount, as we know them. These have been supplied by the translators. By all means let us study them and learn to delight in them; but Christ did not suffer for his cadences, still less for the cadences invented by Englishmen almost 1,600 years later; and Englishmen who went to the stake did not die for these cadences. They were Lollards and Reformers who lived too soon to have heard them; they were Catholics of the “old profession” who had either never heard or, having heard, abhorred them. These men were cheerful to die for the meaning of the Word and for its authorship⁠—because it was spoken by Christ.

III

There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as “mere literature.” Pedants have coined that contemptuous term to express a figmentary concept of their own imagination or⁠—to be more accurate, an hallucination of wrath⁠—having about as much likeness to a vera causa as had the doll which (if you remember) Maggie Tulliver used to beat in the garret whenever, poor child, the world went wrong with her somehow. The thoughts, actions and passions of men became literature by the simple but difficult process of being recorded in memorable speech; but in that process neither the real thing recorded nor the author is evacuated. “Belles lettres,” “Fine Art” are odious terms, for which no clean-thinking man has any use. There is no such thing in the world as belles lettres; if there were, it would deserve the name. As for Fine Art, the late Professor Butcher bequeathed to us a translation of Aristotle’s Poetics with some admirable appendixes⁠—the whole entitled Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Aristotle never in his life had a theory of Fine Art as distinct from other art: nor (I wager) can you find in his discovered works a word for any such thing. Now if Aristotle had a concept of “fine” art as distinguished from other art, he was man enough to find a name for it. His omission to do anything of the sort speaks for itself.

So you should beware of any teacher who would treat the Bible or any part of it as “fine writing,” mere literature.

IV

Let me, having said this, at once enter a caveat, a qualification. Although men do not go to the stake for the cadences, the phrases of our Authorised Version, it remains true that these cadences, these phrases, have for three hundred years exercised a most powerful effect upon their emotions. They do so by association of ideas by the accreted memories of our race enwrapping connotation around a word, a name⁠—say the name “Jerusalem,” or the name “Zion”:

And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor’s

Tanagra, think not I forget.⁠ ⁠…

But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not only what the word “Rome” has meant, and ever must mean, to thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time on The City: but it holds, too, some hint of the New Jerusalem, the city of twelve gates before the vision of which St. John fell prone:

Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem,
Would God I were in thee!
Thy Gardens and thy gallant walks
Continually are green:
There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
Quite through the streets with pleasant sound
The flood of Life doth flow;
Upon whose banks on every side
The wood of Life doth grow.⁠ ⁠…

Our Lady sings “Magnificat”
With tones surpassing sweet:
And all the virgins bear their part,
Sitting about her feet.
Hierusalem, my happy home,
Would God I were in thee!
Would God my woes were at an end,
Thy joys that I might see!

You cannot (I say) get away from these connotations accreted through your own memories and your fathers’; as neither can you be sure of getting free of any