Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you “courses of study” in English Literature never include the Authorised Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it? … I wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality …
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
The king’s daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold.
Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.
And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men—holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan—have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars—Milton, Sir Thomas Browne—practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall back. “The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.” “Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.” “There is nothing immortal but immortality.” The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson’s antithesis come to no more than this, “Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.” The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray’s. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.
What madman, then, will say “Thus or thus far shalt thou go” to a prose thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours—to direct your words through life as well as your hearts.
Lecture VII
Some Principles Reaffirmed
Thursday, May 29
Let me begin today, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to learn from it, moreover, how by mastering rhythm, our Prose overcame the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin instrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man’s thought however sublime, his emotion however profound.
Now in the course of my remarks I happened—maybe a little incautiously—to call the Authorised Version a “miracle”; using that word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning no more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed that the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators—to the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed it eagerly in their preface:—
Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against: that hath bene our indeavour, that our marke.7
Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it will astound you when you compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle (it has been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that there were certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable to account. Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, I spoke of the Authorised Version as a “miracle.” It was, it remains, marvellous to me.
Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within the leaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear to readers as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuing them—almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth’s Kitten with those other falling leaves:—
That almost I could repine
That your transports are not mine.
But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by this word “miracle” I meant to suggest to you a something like plenary inspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it were sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle.
Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hope to discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy—with what meaning, if any—we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions which have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards.
But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the forty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark nonsense. Remember that
