THE NEW BIBLE
SIR,—Folksongs were a popular literary form which embodied metaphorical modes of contemplating the nature of experience, sexual, and sometimes mysti- cal:
God is the branch and I the flower: Pray God send me a blessed hour. . . . Folksayings were related modes of extending the known physical experience into the unknown, the metaphysical: Thou'lt never be satisfied till thou gets thy mouth full of mould.
Intimately related to these popular modes of English speech were the sermon tradition, the Liturgy, and the Authorised Version which brought to English many remarkable transfusions, from the colourful, .baroque and ecstatic foreign sources, and the in- fluence of the work of the translators themselves, their particular kinds of devotional sincerity, and poetic, metaphorical vitality.
The folksongs, folksayings and all such popular uses of language in 'wise' forms of traditional in- quiry into the nature of life are dead, as dead as Bunyan. Now a new translation of the Bible replaces the Authorised Version. No doubt for specifically Christian religious teaching and proselytising this is a good thing. But the new version is noticeably deficient in the poetic rhythm and modes of the Authorised Version—and this is inevitable, since ours is a time when the poetic properties of lan- guage have been neglected. When, indeed, the capacities of English-speaking people to contemplate the mysterious and the metaphysical through the word are weakened and unexercised.
For such reasons the change is of great im- portance to the literary critic, because it is one further step in the 'mess of imprecision' to which language has been submitted for the last hundred
years. It is no accident that our greatest poet had to put his most mature effort into seeking to define poetic exactitude in language, in Four Quartets, To the kind of discussion of concepts which Mr. Eliot makes there, and to the wider issues of popular comprehension of religious aspects of experience of the kind Four Quartets renders, the publication of the new Bible is of central importance. And one finds, for instance, that children, even not very bright children, can possess the meaning of poetical passages in the Authorised Version often better than adults --and thus perhaps the poetry of the old ver• sion should be kept for them.
What I am writing to say, really, is that Mr. Donald Davie's statement that the literary critic should 'step aside' over the question of the literary .quality of the new Bible—the Bible being always the great best-seller—is the strangest abrogation the literary man's function I have yet come across What a would-be gelder and splayer of the word he is! Literature for him would seem to be a delightful fellows' garden—but with the flowers rootless and stock into wet sand. The Bible is still at the root of such popular metaphorical inquiry by words as there remains to us. The use of the new Bible may make Christian teaching easier, but, like other watered-down classics, or Mr. Eliot's watered- down versions of his own messages in his plays— the message, the power of contemplating life, the mystical awareness may be so much less worth having and giving, because of the less vital language. I may be wrong in this: but certainly it seems to me a matter supremely relevant to anyone who cares for the word and life.—Yours faithfully,
DAVID HOLBROOK Ducklake, Ashwell, Baldock, Herts
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