The Book of Books (19 page)

In the 1640s, aged sixteen, he was conscripted into the Parliamentary Army and would have met the extremes of a brutal war, religious passion and politics: the Levellers, who believed you should only obey those you had voted for; the Fifth Monarchists, who anticipated the imminent return of Jesus Christ; the Diggers,
who believed the land belonged to all. Their religious passion appears to have embraced him, but not so their politics, even though in the 1660s he spent two spells in prison ‘for holding unlawful meetings' – that is, for preaching. He was a biblical literalist and the story of Christ was, in his view, both a true and a divine history.

Bunyan's prose not so much quoted from the Bible as lived inside its skin. This is as Christian and Hopeful wade into the river of death.

McAfee points out:

The vocabulary of
The Pilgrim's Progress
is evidence of the literacy of a substantial minority. That literacy was founded and as it were funded by the King James Bible. It was both faith-driven and faith-fed. Together with the Bible itself, Bunyan's work rooted into the English-speaking Protestant reading classes a knowledge of and a loyalty to a particular period and style of Bible language which was reinforced and made sublime by Shakespeare and to some extent Milton. These three, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, point the different but conjoined ways in which the Bible will be used by writers over the next four centuries. From its publication, the King James Bible did not walk alone but gathered around it three champions whose own writings fortified the English Scriptures of 1611 and helped the genius of that translation not only to endure, but to be quoted, and looted, ever since.

 

To list every writer whose work owes debts to the King James Bible would be to write another book and several have already been written. In this book which looks at its overall impact and its penetration into many aspects in the history of English-speaking Protestants, there is not the space for many mansions. Even so, this and one other chapter will be needed . . .

John Dryden (1631 – 1700) was a political pamphleteer as well as being a satirical poet. His most famous poem, the epic
Absalom and Achitophel
is an attack on Charles II's bastards and a denunciation of the politics of that time, of what was called the Exclusion Crisis. He is prime evidence of the elasticity in the legacy of the Bible. In his hands it is an instrument of political torment,
beginning with his scarcely veiled comment on the public promiscuity of Charles II: apparently applauding it:

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), is the father of the English novel according to Valentine Cunningham, who has written convincingly of Defoe's close kinship with the Bible. He was ‘a lifelong Dissenter. He was brought up from the age of two in the “gathered” congregation of the Reverend Samuel Annesley,' which his parents had joined in 1662. Daily Bible reading, meditation, copying chunks of it out in shorthand, Defoe at one stage was set on a career in the Presbyterian ministry before he went into business. The Bible permeated everything he wrote: pamphlets,
Moll Flanders
,
Robinson Crusoe
all draw on a ‘huge repertoire of direct quotation'. It was ingrained in him whether claiming that Moses gave the world its first knowledge of letters when he brought the tablets down from Mount Sion, or having the narrator of
A Journal of the Plague Year
open the Bible with apparent casualness to light on a quotation which would arm and uplift him for the fight. As for the plague itself, there are two explanations according to Defoe. It is certainly the will of God. But it also arises from the ‘natural causes' which ‘Divine Power' has put in place.

Everything is explained and excused through God by this writer, who was also acclaimed for bringing the news of his times into vivid and enduring fiction.
Robinson Crusoe
, for instance, is shot through with religion. Cunningham takes up the matter of the barley:

Jonathan Swift, apart from his satires which included at least one work of genius,
Gulliver's Travels
, was a devout clergyman. Whatever his mockery, he, not unlike Defoe, held closely to the faith and to the way in which it was expounded. In
A Letter to a Young Gentleman
in 1720, he explains how seriously a sermon should be undertaken, how carefully prepared and delivered. Of his own sermons, it was said ‘they emit hardly a breath of his fabulous spirit and are surely unadorned in respect of wit and fancy.' The wild and rude riot of some of his writing, like that of Dryden, runs in apparently comfortable harness with a solid Anglicanism. And in his case too it could be argued that one reason for his rage against the world is because of its failure to live in the morality of the New Testament.

William Blake in his engravings and paintings, his poems
and commentaries, is a man wholly immersed in the King James Bible. He is also in a perpetual argument with it. He has, as it were, surfing on it, his own meditative, even mystical philosophy which spoke directly across the centuries to the ‘hippies' of the mid-twentieth century for whom he became a poetic guru. Allen Ginsberg, the American poet and a big cylinder of the hippie engine, seems to have worshipped him. He became a T-shirt, a pop icon. What travelled down the years was to do with his spiritual implacability quarried out of the Bible.

He recreated the first lines of Genesis in
The Book of Urizen
:

And in his ‘The Chimney Sweeper' he would write of a child left weeping in the snow by parents who have gone to church:

And then he could write the hymn of the Women's Institute of Britain, a hymn that seems to capture the yearning of many who want to be anciently anchored in a place, a church and a faith by imagining Christ in their own land.

Blake shows yet another side of himself when, in a letter to a friend, he writes: ‘Why is the Bible more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual sensation but mediating to the Understanding or Reason?'

It was beginning to seem that a well could be sunk in the Bible at any point and it would find energy for any view. It was available across the waterfront. Women poets at this time, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, also sought a voice in what appeared to many women to be a monopoly of patriarchs past and present. But Mary Wollstonecraft, like Defoe a Dissenter, would draw on her Bible reading to energise her campaign for women's rights. In the Romantic Revival (which overlapped the Englightenment!) the most influential woman living in England in the Romantic era was Hannah More, whose radical pamphlets have pushed her religious literature into the background. In 1782 she published
Sacred Dramas
. She writes about ‘David and Goliath', ‘Belshazzar' and ‘David'.

In the drama
Moses in the Bulrushes
she brings together women both Hebrew and Egyptian and gives them common qualities. In this and other instances she is a key figure in bringing women on to the page. Her transparent faith exemplifies the religious nature and the learning of the women writers to come. For many of them, the Bible and other religious works were their only way to get an education and find a source which could give them the chance of literary equality.

The Romantic poets sought answers and questions in nature as much as in a biblical God. Wordsworth wrote:

And, much more ominously:

The Old and the New Testament both put briskly aside! All the history and storytelling grandeur of the Old and the morality of the New deleted in a simple quatrain. Yet Wordsworth's pantheism often seems to merge with Protestantism:

Without at least the inheritance of a religious sensibility it is doubtful if he would have written his greatest poetry.
The Prelude
is shot through with a sense of the divine.

Lord Byron wrote: ‘I am a great reader of those books [the Bible] and had read them through and through before I was eight years old; that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task but the other as a pleasure.'

We know that Byron was iconoclastic, at the very least sceptical. In
Childe Harold
he writes:

Again, though, as often happened, the effect of the King James Bible was felt by believers and unbelievers alike. Byron dug deeply into the Bible, often taking the Old Testament stories at their own value. ‘Jephthah's Daughter', ‘Song of Saul Before his Last Battle', and others are faithful to the original story. Even in
Childe Harold
and
Don Juan
in which there are many references to Adam and Eve and the Fall, though there is mockery there is relish in the knowledge. The Bible continued to be a necessary resource. George Gordon Brown in his essay on Byron says of the ‘dust and clay metaphors' that each of them appears well over a hundred times in his poetry.

As the centuries rolled through, the Bible's literary and historical wealth often grew detached from its spiritual mission. Yet it remained no less powerful in the influence it maintained among great writers.

There is an extreme example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the work of the atheist, Percy Bysshe Shelley. He had studied carefully much of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Psalms, Job and Isaiah.
Queen Mab
is given as one example in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, tells the Bible story in detail only available to a close reader.

Coleridge is the apotheosis of the Romantic movement, even though he bowed to Wordsworth as the greater poet. He was born in 1772 and before Coleridge was three he could read a chapter of the Bible. ‘He continued to read both Testaments all his life, and read them in the hope that they would reveal, and help create in him, the being of Christ. He valued the bible above all other
books.' Coleridge himself wrote: ‘the words of the bible find me at greater depths of my being.' We are told that ‘when you read
Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix
you may as well be reading the 19th Psalm.' He said: ‘intense study of the bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.'