After these three--Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan--there appeared another three, very much their inferiors and having much less influence on literary history.I mean Dryden, Addison, and Pope.It is not necessary to credit the Scripture with much of Dryden's spirit, nor with much of his style, and certainly not with his attitude toward his fellows; but it is a constant surprise in reading Dryden to discover how familiar he was with the King James version.Walter Scott insists that Dryden was at heart serious, that "his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man." That is generous judgment.But there is this to be said: as he grows more serious he falls more into Bible words.If he writes a political pamphlet he calls it "Absalom and Ahithophel." In it he holds the men of the day up to scorn under Bible names.They are Zimri and Shimei, and the like.When he is falling into bitterest satire, his writing abounds in these Biblical allusions which could be made only by one who was very familiar with the Book.Quotations cannot be abundant, of course, but there is a great deal of this sort of thing:
"Sinking, he left his drugget robe behind, Borne upward by a subterranean wind, The mantle fell to the young prophet's part, With double portion of his father's art."In his Epistles there is much of the same sort.When he writes to Congreve he speaks of the fathers, and says:
"Their's was the giant race before the flood." Farther on he says:
"Our builders were with want of genius curst,The second templewas not like the first."
Now Dryden may have been, as Macaulay said, an "illustrious renegade," but all his writing shows the influence of the language and the ideas of the King James version.Whenever we sing the "Veni Creator" we sing John Dryden.
So we sing Addison in the paraphrase of Scripture, which Haydn's music has made familiar:
"The spacious firmament on high,With all the blue ethereal sky."While Dryden yielded to his times, Addison did not, and the Spectator became not only a literary but a moral power.In the effort to make it so he was thrown back on the largest moral influence of the day, the Bible, and throughout the Spectator and through all of Addison's writing you find on all proper occasions the Bible pressed to the front.Here again Taine puts it strikingly: "It is no small thing to make morality fashionable; Addison did it, and it remains fashionable."If we speak of singing, we may remember that we sing the hymn of even poor little dwarfed invalid Alexander Pope.He was born the year Bunyan died, born at cross-purposes with the world.He could write a bitter satire, like the "Dunciad"; he could give the world The Iliad and The Odyssey in such English that we know them far better than in the Greek of Homer; but in those rare moments when he was at his better self he would write his greater poem, "The Messiah", in which the movement of Scripture is outlined as it could be only by one who knew the English Bible.And when we sing--"Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise"--it is worth while to realize that the voice that first sung it was that of the irritable little poet who found some of his scant comfort in the grand words and phrases and ideas of our English Bible.
With these six--Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Addison, and Pope--the course of the Jacobean literature is sufficiently measured.There are many lesser names, but these are the ones which made it an epoch in literature, and these are at their best under the power of the Bible.
In the Georgian group we need to call only five great names which have had creative influence in literature.Ordinary culture in literature willinclude some acquaintance with each of them.In the order of their death they are Shelley (1829.), Byron (1824), Coleridge (1831), Walter Scott (1832), and Wordsworth (1850).The last long outlived the others; but he belongs with them, because he was born earlier than any other in the group and did his chief work in their time and before the later group appeared.Except Wordsworth, all these were gone before Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.Three other names could be called: Keats, Robert Burns, and Charles Lamb.All would illustrate what we are studying.Keats least of all and Burns most.They are omitted here not because they did not feel the influence of the English Bible, not because they do not constantly show its influence, but because they are not so creative as the others; they have not so influenced the current of literature.At any rate, the five named will represent worthily and with sufficient completeness the Georgian period of English literature.
