On the Art of Reading

of the Church of England, a medievalist with an ardent passion for ritual; the other a gentle Congregational minister, a mere holy and humble man of heart. They became great friends in the course of these expeditions, and they brought back this report⁠—“It is positively wicked to let these children grow up being taught that there is no difference in value between Joshua and St. Matthew: that the God of the Lord’s Prayer is the same who commanded the massacre of Ai.” Well, perhaps it is. Seeing how bloodthirsty old men can be in these days, one is tempted to think that they can hardly be caught too young and taught decency, if not mansuetude. But I do not remember, as a child, feeling any horror about it, or any difficulty in reconciling the two concepts. Children are a bit bloodthirsty, and I observe that two volumes of the late Captain Mayne Reid⁠—The Rifle Rangers, and The Scalp Hunters⁠—have just found their way into The World’s Classics and are advertised alongside of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies and the De Imitatione Christi. I leave you to think this out; adding but this for a suggestion: that as the Hebrew outgrew his primitive tribal beliefs, so the bettering mind of man casts off the old clouts of primitive doctrine, he being in fact better than his religion. You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob was a better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, I hope, rejected every such explanation. Esau was a gentleman: Jacob was not. The instinct of a young man meets that wall, and there is no passing it. Later, the mind of the youth perceives that the writer of Jacob’s history has a tribal mind and supposes throughout that for the advancement of his tribe many things are permissible and even admirable which a later and urbaner mind rejects as detestably sharp practice. And the story of Jacob becomes the more valuable to us historically as we realise what a hero he is to the bland chronicler.

VII

But of another thing, Gentlemen, I am certain: that we were badly taught in that these books, while preached to us as equivalent, were kept in separate compartments. We were taught the books of Kings and Chronicles as history. The prophets were the Prophets, inspired men predicting the future which they only did by chance, as every inspired man does. Isaiah was never put into relation with his time at all; which means everything to our understanding of Isaiah, whether of Jerusalem or of Babylon. We ploughed through Kings and Chronicles, and made out lists of rulers, with dates and capital events. Isaiah was all fine writing about nothing at all, and historically we were concerned with him only to verify some farfetched reference to the Messiah in this or that Evangelist. But there is not, never has been, really fine literature⁠—like Isaiah⁠—composed about nothing at all: and in the mere matter of prognostication I doubt if such experts as Zadkiel and Old Moore have anything to fear from any School of Writing we can build up in Cambridge. But if we had only been taught to read Isaiah concurrently with the Books of the Kings, what a fire it would have kindled among the dry bones of our studies!

Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller’s field.

Scholars, of course, know the political significance of that famous meeting. But if we had only known it; if we had only been taught what Assyria was⁠—with its successive monarchs Tiglath-pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Sennacherib; and why Syria and Israel and Egypt were trying to cajole or force Judah into alliance; what a difference (I say) this passage would have meant to us!

VIII

I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through The Arabian Nights: to let him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well and what then? He will certainly get less of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob’s sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul⁠—great Saul⁠—by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:

All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart.

Or consider⁠—to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous procession⁠—consider Michal, Saul’s royal daughter: how first she is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how loving him she saves his life, letting him down from the window and dressing up an image on the bed in his place: how, later, she is handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her back, and she goes:

And her husband [Phaltiel] went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned.

Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul’s daughter, as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone to weep in his bed:

And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter⁠—

Mark the three words⁠—

Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the