VII THE ENGLISH BIBLE FROM Chaucer's day a century and a half of stormy national life, with fierce conflicts at home and abroad, produced few writings that are now of permanent importance to the English-speaking peoples. The works that then appeared are for the most part of interest to the scholar who has time for the niceties of literature. They kept the language alive as the circulating system keeps the hibernating animal alive through a long winter. Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," published during the reign of Henry VIII (1516), is a book of immortal fame, so that its title has become a household word. Lord Berners' translation of Froissart's Chronicles (1525) is a work of lasting value. Some lovely passages occur in the poems of James I of Scotland, who, by his knowledge of English acquired during his long captivity in England, may be ranked as an English poet. Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" (1485) holds high rank as a reservoir for writers of verse, having influenced many eminent poets of later time. Surrey and Wyatt permanently influenced the form of later English verse. More important than these, the beauty and formative power of the English translations of the Scriptures by Tyndale and his successors became mighty and controlling influences upon our language, reaching on through the Authorized Version of the Scriptures to our own day. The English Bible is for the present purpose to be considered simply as literature. No question of religion, theology or doctrine is here involved. As a part of English literature the English Bible holds a remarkable and commanding position. "It is a noteworthy circumstance in the history of literature of Protestant countries that, in every one of them, the creation or revival of a national literature has commenced with, or at least been announced by, a translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular, which has been remarkable both as an accurate representative of the original text and as an exhibition of the best power of expression possessed by the language at that stage of its development. Hence, in all these countries, these versions have had a very great influence, not only upon religious opinion and moral training, but upon literary effort in other fields, and indeed upon the whole philological history of the nation. Thus the English translation of the Wycliffite school, the Danish version of 1550 and the German of Luther are, linguistically considered, among the very best examples of the most cultivated phase and most perfected form of their respective languages at the time when they appeared." -MARSH, "Origin and History of the English Language," lect. viii, p. 344. Of the books to be read, we would place first the English Bible in the authorized version. Hamilton W. Mabie characterizes this as "a library of sixtysix volumes presenting nearly every literary form, and translated at the fortunate moment when the English language had received the recent impress of its greatest masters in the speech of the imagination." The eminent English scholar, Richard Garnett, remarks: "There is no literature, at least no important literature, so largely indebted as the English to a collection of writings in a foreign language, produced under circumstances exceedingly dissimilar to any that ever existed in England, of which every individual author is not merely an Oriental but one absolutely estranged by blood from all the families. which have combined to form the British race. . . There is no other example of a literature having assimilated a foreign element so completely to itself. [This has resulted in] an elevation, a picturesqueness, and an affluence of beautiful sentiment which confers on the literature of these [English-speaking] peoples a great advantage over those which, whether from natural incapacity or the impediments created by sinister interests, have been more or less debarred from this treasury of grandeur. All modern nations, indeed, have borrowed more or less from the Scriptures, and been more or less influenced by them as literature, but the Northern nations alone, and more particularly the British, have so thoroughly assimilated them that they seem to have naturalized patriarchs and prophets as their own countrymen." -GARNETT and GossE, "English Literature," vol. i, ch. 7, p. 204. Far back in the early days appeared an AngloSaxon translation of the Gospels. Of this Marsh says: "We know not the history, the author, nor the precise date of this translation, but it belongs to the best period of the literature, and was made # “Origin and History of the English Language," lect. iii, p. 96. |