"Thou art love: the rich have kissed Thy feet, and, like him following Christ, Gave their substance to the free, And through the rough world follow thee."Page after page of Shelley reveals these half- conscious references tothe Bible.There were two sources from which he received his passionate democracy.One was the treatment he received at Eton, and later at Oxford; the other is his frequent reading of the English Bible, even though he was in the spirit of rebellion against much of its teaching.In Browning's essay on Shelley, he reaches the amazing conclusion that "had Shelley lived, he would finally have ranged himself with the Christians," and seeks to justify it by showing that he was moving straight toward the positions of Paul and of David.Some of us may not see such rapid approach, but that Shelley felt the drawing of God in the universe is plain enough.
The influence of the Bible is still more marked on Byron.He spent his childhood years at Aberdeen.There his nurse trained him in the Bible; and, though he did not live by it, he never lost his love for it, nor his knowledge of it.He tells of his own experience in this way: "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."[1] One of the earliest bits of his work is a paraphrase of one of the Psalms.His physical infirmity put him at odds with the world, while his striking beauty drew to him a crowd of admirers who helped to poison every spring of his genius.Even so, he held his love for the Bible.While Shelley often spoke of it in contempt, while he prided himself on his divergence from the path of its teaching, Byron never did.He wandered far, but he always knew it; and, though he could hardly find terms to express his contempt for the Church, there is no line of Byron's writing which is a slur at the Bible.On the other hand, much of his work reveals a passion for the beauty of it as well as its truth.His most melodious writing is in that group of Hebrew melodies which were written to be sung.They demand far more than a passing knowledge of the Bible both for their writing and their understanding.There is a long list of them, but no one without a knowledge of the Bible would have known what he meant by his poem, "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept." "Jephtha's Daughter" presumes upon a knowledge of the Old Testament story which would not come to one in a passing study of the Bible."The Song of Saul Before his Last Battle" and the poem headed "Saul" could not have been written, nor can they be read intelligently byany one who does not know his Bible.Among Byron's dramas, two of which he thought most, were, "Heaven and Earth" and "Cain." When he was accused of perverting the Scripture in "Cain," he replied that he had only taken the Scripture at its face value.Both of the dramas are not only built directly out of Scriptural events, but imply a far wider knowledge of Scripture than their mere titles suggest.
[1] Taine, English Literature, II., 279.
There are striking references in many other poems, even in his almost vile poem, "Don Juan." The most notable instance is in the fifteenth canto, where he is speaking of persecuted sages and these lines occur:
"Was it not so, great Locke? and greater Bacon? Great Socrates? And Thou Diviner still, Whose lot it is by men to be mistaken, And Thy pure creed made sanction of all ill? Redeeming worlds to be by bigots shaken, How was Thy toil rewarded?"In a note on this passage Byron says: "As it is necessary in these times to avoid ambiguity, I say that I mean by 'Diviner still' Christ.If ever God was man--or man God--He was both.I never arraigned His creed, but the use or abuse of it.Mr.Canning one day quoted Christianity to sanction slavery, and Mr.Wilberforce had little to say in reply.And was Christ crucified that black men might be scourged? If so, He had better been born a mulatto, to give both colors an equal chance of freedom, or at least salvation." Byron could live far from the influence of the Bible in his personal life; but he never escaped its influence in his literary work.
Of Coleridge less needs to be said, because we think of him so much in terms of his more meditative musings, which are often religious.He himself tells of long and careful rereadings of the English Bible until he could say: In the Bible "there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being." Of course, that would influence his writing, and it did.Even in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" much of the phraseology is Scriptural.When the albatross drew near,"As if it had been a Christian soul,We hailed it in God's name."When the mariner slept he gave praise to Mary, Queen of Heaven.He sought the shriving of the hermit-priest.He ends the story because hehears "the little vesper bell" which bids him to prayer.When you read his "Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix" you find yourself reading the Nineteenth Psalm.He calls on the motionless torrents and the silent cataracts and the great Mont Blanc itself to praise God.Coleridge never had seen Chamounix, nor Mont Blanc, nor a glacier, but he knew his Bible.So he has his Christmas Carol along with all the rest.His poem of the Moors after the Civil War under Philip II.is Scriptural in its phraseology, and so is much else that he wrote.Frankly and willingly he yielded to its influence.In his "Table Talk" he often refers to the value of the Bible in the forming of literary style.Once he said: "Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style."[1]
[1] June 14, 1830.
