That neither ideas nor style alone can keep literature alive is shown by literary history after Shakespeare.Just after him you have the "mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough, but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died.Who knows Drayton or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with ideas in abundance, but not style, and their works have died.
Here, then, is the English Bible becoming the chief English classic by the wedding of great ideas to worthy expression.From one point of view this early seventeenth century was an opportune time for making such a classic.Theology was a popular subject.Men's minds had found a new freedom, and they used it to discuss great themes.They even began to sing.The reign of Elizabeth had prepared the way.The English scholar Hoare traces this new liberty to the sailing away of the Armada and the releasing of England from the perpetual dread of Spanish invasion.He says that the birds felt the free air, and sang as they had never sung before and as they have not often sung since.But this was not restricted to the birds of English song.It was a period of remarkable awakening in the whole intellectual life of England, and that intellectual life was directing itself among the common people to religion.Another English writer, Eaton, says a profounder word in tracing the awakening to the reformation, saying that it "could not fail, from the very nature of it, to tinge the literature of the Elizabethan era.It gave a logical and disputatious character to the age and produced men mighty in the Scriptures."[1] A French visitor went homedisgusted because people talked of nothing but theology in England.Grotius thought all the people of England were theologians.James's chief pride was his theological learning.It did not prove difficult to find half a hundred men in small England instantly recognized as experts in Scripture study.The people were ready to welcome a book of great ideas.Let us pass by those ideas a moment, remembering that they are not enough in them- selves to give the work literary value, and turn our minds to the style of the English Bible.
[1] T.R.Eaton, Shakespeare and the Bible, p.2.
From this point of view the times were not perfectly opportune for a piece of pure English literature, though it was the time which produced Shakespeare.A definite movement was on to refine the language by foreign decorations.Not even Shakespeare avoids it always.No writer of the time avoids it wholly.The dedication of the King James version shows that these scholars themselves did not avoid it.In that dedication, and their preface, they give us fine writing, striving for effect, ornamental phrases characteristic of the time.Men were feeling that this English language was rough and barbarous, insufficient, needing enlargement by the addition of other words constructed in a foreign form.The essays of Lord Bacon are virtually contemporaneous with this translation.Macaulay says a rather hard word in calling his style "odious and deformed,"[1] but when one turns from Bacon to the English Bible there is a sharp contrast in mere style, and it favors the Bible.The contrast is as great as that which Carlyle first felt between the ideas of Shakespeare and those of the Bible when he said that "this world is a catholic kind of place; the Puritan gospel and Shakespeare's plays: such a pair of facts I have rarely seen save out of one chimerical generation."[2] And that gives point to the word already quoted from Hallam that the English of the King James version is not the English of James I.
[1] Essay on John Dryden.
[2] Historical Sketches, Hampton Court Conference.
Four things helped to determine the simplicity and pure English-- unornamented English--of the King James version, made it, that is, the English classic.Two of these things have been dealt with already in otherconnections.First, that it was a Book for the people, for the people of the middle level of language; a work by scholars, but not chiefly for scholars, intended rather for the common use of common people.Secondly, that the translators were constantly beholden to the work of the past in this same line.Where Wiclif's words were still in use they used them.That tended to fix the language by the use which had already become natural.
