The Bible as Raw Material

Mr. George Moore’s new novel, The Brook Kerith, is a Biblical story. Mr. Moore has adopted the legend which says that Our Lord survived the Crucifixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony of the Essenes, complications afterwards arising with St. Paul. The book is named after the site of the Essene settlement; Mr. Moore personally toured the Holy Land looking for a really eligible position. The story opens with a description of the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea: a beginning which at least avoids the reproach of being obvious.

One might almost say that literature about Biblical personages can only hope to be good if its writers either deal with episodes that are not related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible stories from an entirely novel and unconventional point of view. Anatole France’s story about Pontius Pilate, The Procurator of Judaea, has this last quality, and owes its success mainly to the odd and unexpected angle from which the subject is approached. The unusual angle we may at least expect from Mr. George Moore. Attempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at amplifying an already fine thing, are almost predestined to failure. One can understand the temptation. A modern writer comes across a noble story or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, “What a scandal that this should be buried away out of sight in the Old Testament! It is just the theme for me.” The lure is so strong that one contemporary poet has attempted, and failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite David’s Lament for Jonathan, and another has endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem Job to the modern stage. It was a lamentable affair, redeemed only from complete inconspicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus inspired by Swinburne and by an arresting entry of Satan with the salutation:

No modern—but I have not thoroughly ransacked my memory—has really succeeded in rewriting a Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts was Mr. Sturge Moore’s Judith. Mr. Robert Trevelyan’s poem, The Foolishness of Solomon (a title that, for some vague reason, I always resent), belonged to the other class of works dealing with Biblical personages (though he brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at elaborate treatment of the New Testament story was, I suppose, Maeterlinck’s Mary Magdalene. But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty (at least as far as the Bible is concerned, for some of it was borrowed from a German) of the incidents, that play scarcely competed, in point of dialogue or dramatic force, with the more old-fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Milton is the one English writer who has done anything with Biblical materials on a large scale. It will be observed, however, that in Paradise Lost he enormously elaborated the story in Genesis; that his Adam and Eve are somewhat colourless; and that the finest parts of his poem are not directly concerned with “man’s first disobedience and the fruit,” but deal with regions into which the author of Genesis did not penetrate. In Samson Agonistes he did take a story from the Bible and make out of it a work of art equal to almost anything in our language. Byron’s Cain might mostly have been about Nietzsche for all the connexion it has with the Bible: but it is not very good. Almost every fine subject in the Scriptures must have been attacked at one time or another. There have been a few good short Biblical poems, like Browning’s Saul. But the only other really reputable Biblical poem on a large scale that I can think of is Charles Wells’s Joseph and His Brethren, which has strength as a story and some passages of fine imagery. Wells belonged to the generation of Keats and lived on into our own time. He was an engineer, stopped writing when young, and was admired by Rossetti and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really be considered such good reading as the Bible account of the same story. One of the episodes that came within his purview, that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, has been a subject for poets in all ages. The last endeavour that I can recall to make something out of it was a somewhat bejewelled one of Sir Edwin Arnold’s. The longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester’s intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled The Maiden’s Blush. Why he conferred that title upon such a poem I don’t know, unless he was thinking of what might happen to the less robust of his female readers. Those parts of Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest have not been freely drawn on by English writers. I don’t remember that much has been done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of the Kings of Israel, which supplied Racine with a subject for his Athalie, have left English writers cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son of Nebat made Israel to sin, and Rehoboam afflicted his people with scorpions instead of whips; but their violence does not seem to fire the poetic imagination as does that of Herod, about whom we know very little more. But Herod, of course, was fond of the Russian ballet; which brings him closer to us.