SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

Thursday, May 29

Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture.  It ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to learn from it, moreover, how by mastering rhythm, our Prose overcame the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin instrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man’s thought however sublime, his emotion however profound.

Now in the course of my remarks I happened—­maybe a little incautiously—­to call the Authorised Version a ‘miracle’; using that word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning no more than that the thing passed my understanding.  I have allowed that the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators—­to the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed it eagerly in their preface:—­

Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against:  that hath bene our indeavour, that our marke.

(See [Footnote 1] at the end of this lecture.)

Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it will astound you when you compare it with earlier translations.  Aristotle (it has been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that there were certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable to account.  Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, I spoke of the Authorised Version as a ‘miracle.’  It was, it remains, marvellous to me.

Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within the leaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear to readers as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuing them—­almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth’s Kitten with those other falling leaves:—­

     That almost I could repine
     That your transports are not mine.

But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by this word ‘miracle’ I meant to suggest to you a something like plenary inspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it were sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle.

Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort:  for that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book.  One of these days I hope to discuss with you what inspiration is:  with what accuracy—­with what meaning, if any—­we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions which have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards.