r interpretation and the completer exposition. The Bible
is not distinctively an intellectual achievement.

In all earnest I protest that to write about the Bible in such a
fashion is to demonstrate inferentially that it has never
quickened you with its glow; that, whatever your learning, you
have missed what the unlearned Bunyan, for example, so admirably
caught--the true _wit_ of the book. The writer, to be sure, is
dealing with the originals. Let us more humbly sit at the feet of
the translators. 'Highly gifted individuals,' or no, the sort of
thing the translators wrote was 'And God said, Let there be
light,' 'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The Kingdom of Heaven is
like unto leaven, which a woman took,' 'The wages of sin is
death,' 'The trumpet shall sound,' 'Jesus wept,' 'Death is
swallowed up in victory.'

Let me quote you for better encouragement, as well as for
relief, a passage from Matthew Arnold on the Authorised
Version:

The effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred
in a foreign language as the effect of other great
poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is
and must be in great measure lost in a translation, because
their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and
the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make
a good English poem with the matter and thoughts of Homer
and Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or rhyme:
but the metre and rhyme will be in truth his own, and the
effect will be his, not the effect of Homer or Dante. Isaiah's,
on the other hand, is a poetry, as is well known, of
parallelism; it depends not on metre and rhyme, but on a
balance of thought, conveyed by a corresponding balance of
sentence; and the effect of this can be transferred to another
language.... Hebrew poetry has in addition the effect of
assonance and other effects which cannot perhaps be
transferred; but its main effect, its effect of parallelism of
thought and sentence, can.

I take this from the preface to his little volume in which Arnold
confesses that his 'paramount object is to get Isaiah enjoyed.'

VI

Sundry men of letters besides Matthew Arnold have pleaded for a
literary study of the Bible, and specially of our English
Version, that we may thereby enhance our enjoyment of the work
itself and, through this, enjoyment and understanding of the rest
of English Literature, from 1611 down. Specially among