The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Great Translation

The Great Translation
The Jacobean translation of the Bible has one real claim to be English. Many of the eulogies about its Protestant purity and its Anglo-Saxon empire building are partisan and fantastic. But it is in this immense sense national, that it is anonymous. The translation, as a translation, is as English as the ballads about Robin Hood, which were written by everybody and nobody. It is true that the learned bishops and dons who translated it were far from regarding themselves as nobodies. But in the history of English literature they are nobodies; only they are immortal nobodies. It is impossible to point to a single great man who is responsible for this masterpiece of verbal music. At the very time when the translation was being made there were in England greater literary men than she is ever likely to see again. But by no conceivable trick or turn of circumstance can Bacon or Burton, Jonson or Shakespeare, have had anything to do with the translation of the Bible. It was done by a mob of bishops; that is, a mob of simple and well-meaning men. The enemies of the Bible have been heard to describe it as Jewish folklore; of course, in a bad sense. In any case, our translation is English folklore--and that in the best sense. England wrote it; no mere Englishman could have done so.

`How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good news.' That is as light and as leaping and as classically pure as Spenser. But Spenser had nothing to do with it; some ordinary parson wrote it.

`And his driving is as the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi; for he drives furiously.' That is far more vigorous than Chapman or Ford. But Chapman and Ford had nothing to do with it; it was done by some common clergyman.

`Where there is no vision the people perish.' That is as plain and picturesque as Bunyan. But Bunyan had nothing to do with it; in fact, he was not born. It may seem a strange matter that these pompous big-wigs summoned by so stiff a Scotch pedant as James I should be ultimately urged as an argument for popularism and the populace. And yet they are one of its strongest arguments. They show how well quite commonplace people can write when they are writing about something that is not commonplace.

That is the plain element of patriotic importance in the translation. It is the last collective creation of our people. It is the last case in which everybody reads the book and nobody asks the author. After that England left off writing. Englishmen rushed into the breach and tried to write, not altogether without success. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Dr Johnson, made a very good show of it. But almost at once they were flooded by forces not English; by Irishmen like Swift and Goldsmith, by Scotchmen like Hume and Scott. We are right to treat this book, even as an English book, as authoritative. It may or may not record the real origin of the Jews; but I am sure that it records the real end of the English.

There comes a perfect moment when there is no difference between language and literature. Prose is poetry without knowing it; it is as if an absentminded poet always said good morning in metre, or asked us to pass the potatoes in impromptu and unconscious rhyme. Imagine that we all talked poetry all day long; suppose we asked for a ticket with a triolet; suppose we used a post-card only for the purpose (which its shape obviously suggests) of writing a sonnet. Suppose, whenever we talk about the weather, we talk as Shelley wrote about the weather. Suppose, whenever we use a term of affection, it is like one of the great love songs. If we fancy some such condition, we may begin to imagine what really happens when a language is in its perfection. Everything said goes to an inaudible tune; as to a march of totally muffled drums. The poetry has got inside the prose of life, and moves all its limbs into a rhythm and beat of beauty.

The English of the English Bible is not merely splendid about splendid things; it is splendid about everything. In any modern leading article we might see the words `We cannot understand why English watering-places like Bath or Brighton are not as adequate as foreign watering-places like Baden or Dieppe; nor why those who seek the one should not as reasonably seek the other.' And that would be perfectly good modern English. It is not mere religious association that makes us see better English in `Are not Pharpar and Abanah, the waters of Damascus, better than all the waters of Jordan, and may I not wash in them and be clean?' It is really the perfection of style; it is poetry inside prose.

Any magazine article might contain the paragraph: `The enthusiast must always be discouraged by certain perishability in all popular things. The mass of mankind seems so plainly a mere part of nature, that it is hard to believe that all their ideas are not at once as monotonous and as fickle as the physical universe; nevertheless, the best philosopher will always return to the idea of an order and a reason in things.' That would be perfectly sound, intelligent modern English.

It is not mere religious tradition that makes us think that this is better: `The voice said, Cry; and he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.'

And then, as in an answer across an abyss: `The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.'

It is not the glamour of an ancient language. It is simply a much better use of the modern one.

In one of those tremendous passages that pierce through all languages and belong to the sacred Scripture itself, one of the prophets speaks of the perfect time as a time when all the vessels shall be as vessels before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem shall be written `Holy unto the Lord'. That is what the English translation, by a literary accident, really managed to achieve. The phrase `verbal inspiration' may be orthodox or unorthodox about the Bible in its supernatural sense. But it is very nearly true about the English translation in a secondary and merely human sense. The dull parts of the narrative are not dull; the trivial details are not trivial, because they are all lifted up on this last great wave of the poetical English language. Everyone, revolutionist and reactionary, is in our time saying that domestic things must be dull, that common things must be commonplace. Everyone is saying, though with much less literary brevity, `Surely the people is grass'. But in our sterile time we have never guessed how tall the grass can grow.