This applies to all the great classics.There has come about a "decay of literary allusions," as one of our papers editorially says.In much of our writing, either the transient or the permanent, men can no longer risk easy reference to classical literature."Readers of American biography must often be struck with the important part which literary recollection playedin the life of a cultured person a generation or two ago.These men had read Homer, Xenophon and Virgil, Shakespeare, Byron and Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey and Coleridge.They were not afraid of being called pedants because they occasionally used a Latin phrase or referred to some great name of Greece or Rome." That is not so commonly true to-day.Especially is there danger of losing easy acquaintance with the great Bible references.
There are familiar reasons for it.For one thing, there has been a great increase of literature.Once there was little to read, and that little became familiar.One would have been ashamed to pretend to culture and not to know such literature well.Now there is so much that one cannot know it all, and most men follow the line of least resistance.That line is not where great literature lies.Once the problem was how to get books enough for a family library.Now the problem is how to get library enough for the books.Magazines, papers, volumes of all grades overflow."The Bible has been buried beneath a landslide of books." The result is that the greatest literary landmark of the English tongue threatens to become unknown, or else to be looked upon as of antiquarian rather than present worth.There our Puritan fathers had the advantage.As President Faunce puts it: "For them the Bible was the norm and goal of all study.They had achieved the concentration of studies, and the Bible was the center.They learned to read that they might read the literature of Israel; their writing was heavy with noble Old Testament phrases; the names of Old Testament heroes they gave to their children; its words of immortal hope they inscribed on their tombstones; its Mosaic commonwealth they sought to realize in England and America; its decalogue was the foundation of their laws, and its prophecies were a light shining in a dark place.Such a unification of knowledge produced a unified character, simple, stalwart, invincible." It is very different in our own day.As so-called literature increases it robs great literature of its conspicuous outstanding character, and many men who pride themselves on the amount they read would do far better to read a thousandth part as much and let that smaller part be good.
Another reason for this decay of the influence of literary knowledge of the Bible is the shallowness of much of our thinking.If the Bible wereneeded for nothing else in present literary life, it would be needed for the deepening of literary currents.The vast flood of flotsam and jetsam which pours from the presses seldom floats on a deep current.It is surface matter for the most part.It does not take itself seriously, and it is quite impossible to take it seriously.It does not deal with great themes, or when it touches upon them it deals with them in a trifling way.To men interested chiefly in literature of this kind the Bible cannot be of interest.
That is a passing condition, and out of it is certain to come here and there a masterpiece of literature.When it does appear, it will be found to reveal the same influences that have made great literature in the past, issuing more largely from the Bible than from any other book.That is the main point of a bit of counsel which Professor Bowen used to give his Harvard students.To form a good English style, he told them, a student ought to keep near at hand a Bible, a volume of Shakespeare, and Bacon's essays.That group of books would enlarge the vocabulary, would supply a store of words, phrases, and, allusions, and save the necessity of ransacking a meager and hide-bound diction in order to make one's meaning plain.Coleridge in his Table-Talk adds that "intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being VULGAR in point of style." So it may be urged that these times have and still need the literary influence of the Bible.
