01 - A Literary Marvel

I. A LITERARY MARVEL. The characters in Scripture are a literary marvel.

It is very hard to write characters in one country to be popular in every land and age.

Especially hard in narrative. (Drama parades characters by numberless speeches, and autographs them by soliloquy — an expedient false in nature, but convenient in art.)

Hardest of all to create such world-wide and everlasting characters in few words, a bare record of great things said and done.

One test of difficulty is rarity: number, then, the world-wide characters — if any — in Thacydides and Herodotus, and observe whether Josephus, when he leaves watering the Bible and proceeds to supplement it, has added one deathless character to the picture-galleries of Holy Writ. Shall we carry the comparison higher, and include poetic narrative? then go to the top of the tree at once, and examine the two great epics of antiquity. The ’AEneid’ — what a stream of narrative! what fire of description! what march and music of words! But the characters? — Eneas mediocre, his staff lay figures. Dido just interesting enough to make one angry with -Eneas. Perhaps the strongest colour is in the friendship and fate of Nisus and Euryalus; and there a Jewish pen had shown the way. The less polished but mightier Homer has achieved the highest feat of genius; he has made puny things grand, and fertilized pebbles.

He has bewitched even scholars into thinking his Greeks wiser and braver than the Trojans; whereas, if you can shut your ears to his music, his Greeks were barbarians besieging a civilized city for a motive and in a manner incompatible with one ray of civilization. The motive: from the first dawn of civilization no country with independent states ever got those states to unite in leaving home and besieging a distant city to recover the person of a sohtary adulteress. The manner: the first dawn of civilization showed men that cities placed like Troy can always be taken by one of two methods, blockade or assault. But Homer’s Zulus had neither the sense to blockade that civilized city and starve it out, nor the invention to make ladders, covered ways, and battering-rams, nor the courage to scale walls, nor even to bum or break through a miserable gate. The civilized Trojans had a silver currency, the Tyrian shekel, called by scholars with Homer on the brain ’ the Homeric shekeL’ Homer never mentions it, never saw it. The uncivilized Greeks had no currency but bullocks; no trade but exchange of commodities. The attack and defence of Troy were of a piece with the two currencies: the civilized Orientals, with a silver currency, barred out the Zulus, with a bullock currency and calves’ brains, like a pack of schoolboys, and showed their contempt of them by coming out and attacking them in the open with their inferior numbers. Yet the genius of Homer could dazzle men’s eyes, and bewitch their ears, and confound their judgments, and sing black white. So behold the barbarians gilt for ever, and the civilized people smirched. Carent quia vote sacTO. But turn from the glories of the wondrous tale this magician has built on a sorry subject — fitter for satire than epic — to his characters, and he is no longer supreme. To be sure, he does not dose us with monotonies, abstractions, lay figures; oremgue Gyan, fortemqne Cloanthwm: he discriminates the brute courage of Ajax and the airy valour of Tydides, the wisdom of Nestor and the astuteness of Ulysses. But his gods and goddesses? — mere human animals; blue blood for red, and there ends his puerile invention in things divine. His leading heroes are characters, but not on a par with his descriptions, his narrative, and his music. They are the one ephemeral element in an immortal song. Achilles, with his unsoldierlike egotism, his impenetrable armour, his Zulu cruelty to his helpless foe, and his antique tender friendship, is a brave Greek of the day, but he is not for all time; two-thirds of him no modem soldier would deign to copy. The twenty-four books devoted by so great a poet to Ulysses have not engraved ’ the much enduring man on the Western heart. In short, the leading heroes of Homer’s epics are immortal in our libraries, but dead in our lives.

Now take the two little books called Samuel. The writer is not a great master like Homer and Yirgil; he is artless, and careless to boot; forgets what he had said a few pages before, and spoils more than one good incident by putting the cart before the horse — I mean by false transposition, by presenting events out of their true and interesting sequence: a sad fault in composition. But the characters that rise from the historical strokes of that rude pen are immortal: so solid and full of colour, too, that they stand amidst the waves of time like rocks, carved into statues by Phidias, and coloured by Apelles.

Yet this writer has no monopoly of the art m ancient Palestine; he shares it with about sixteen other historians, all Hebrews, though some of them write Hebrew and some Greek. In our day character-painting is much attempted by certain writers of fictitious narrative; but their method excludes them from a serious comparison with Homer, Virgil, and the sacred historians. They do not evolve characters by simple narration. They clog the story with a hundred little essays on the character of each character. They keep putting their heads from behind the show, and openly analyzmg their pale creations, and dissecting them, and eking them out with comments, and microscoping their poodles into lions. These are the easy expedients of feeble art. They succeed with contemporaries, and, indeed, are sure to be popular for a time, because most readers have slow or lazy minds, and love a writer who will save them the trouble of studying and penetrating character by doing it for them in the very text of the story. But it would be paying this false method—which microscopes real mediocrity into false importance —too great a compliment to compare its fruits with the characters that are self-evolved in the sacred writers, and, indeed, in Homer and Virgil, for their method was, at all events, the true one, though its results in the single particular of character were inferior. In further support of my present position let me submit a few truths to be taken in conjunction.

First Moderate excellence in writing is geographical; loses fiftypercent, in human esteem by crossing a channel or a frontier.

Second. Translation lowers it tenpercent.

Third, But when you carry into the West a translation of a work the East admires ever so much, ten to one it will miss the Western mind.

Eastern music is a dreamy noise to a Western ear, but one degree beyond the sweet illogical wail of an iEolian harp. Eastern poetry is to the Western a glue of honeyed words, a tinkling cymbal, or a drowsy chime. The sacred Koran, the Bible of a hundred million Orientals, is to your Anglo-Saxon the weakest twaddle that ever drivelled from a human skulL It does not shock an Occidental Christian, or rouse his theological ire. It is a mild emetic to his understanding, and there’s an end of it.

Fourth. The world is a very large place: Palestine is a small province in the East.

Fifth. What the whole world outside Palestine could very seldom do at all, this petty province did on a very large scale. About seventeen writers, all Israelites, some of them with what would nowadays be called a little learning, some without, some writing in Hebrew, some in Greek, all achieved one wonder. They sat down to record great deeds done, and great words spoken in Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, which districts united are but a slice of the East, and they told them wondrous briefly, yet so that immortal and world-wide characters rise like exhalations from the record.

Written in the East, these characters live for ever in the West; written in one province, they pervade the world; penned in rude times, they are prized more and more as civilization advances; product of antiquity, they come home to the business and bosoms of men, women, and children in modem days.

Then, is it any exaggeration to say that the "THE CHARACTERS OF SCRIPTURE ARE A MARVEL OF THE MIND!"