THE BIBLE'S PROSE EPIC OF 'EVE AND HER SONS.* ALL
groat literature has been subjected to a process of " reading in., All the great writers of the past, we suppose, would be astonished if they knew what an amount of extraneous meaning has been read into them. It is perhaps the test of the greatness of a writer that his work can bear this I The Bible is of course the most obvious case in point. Hebrew literature has been made to express almost everything which the heart of man has conceived upon the subject of religion and morals, including the whole of Christian teaching, which is in many respects foreign to its genius. On the other hand, not much has been added to its non-moral values. Tho romance of the Bible appeals chiefly to children.
In his new work called The Bible's Prose Epic of Eve and her Sone Mr. Robertson treats Genesis from the romantic standpoint, and cer- tainly he proves that it is a great romance. " Let us go back to the Bible, determined to enjoy zestfully its story-telling proclivities," he boldly urges. "Never wore stories more boldly interesting, and more characterized by that curious felicity of words which causes an outline
to grow upon the mind, until the work of art is discerned as suggesting deep thought about most things that go to the building up of human society." Our author is frankly out of sympathy with what he calls the " modern school " of history, by which ho means the disciples of bare accuracy :— " They sniff at Froissart's Chronicle, and Sir Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather—all gleaming and tinted and curious on the surface.
No, no,' says the modern school, ' bring hither these tapestries ; we will return them to you after they have been passed through our Bleach- works. You will thon possess them purged and useful, reduced to the elemental warp and woof which are the staple of truth.' We are finding that these modern reactionary methods become practically a cult of professional dullness. The spirit of man can never be wholly inter- preted by such expensive analytical processes, expensive, because they abandon, as negligible, so much of the song and colour of life in action."
All this is very frank. We are told we are going to be shown some embroidery, but in spite of the warning the colours seem to us a little over-bright. " The Birth of Woman " is thus set before us :- " The Creator resigns his first child to an ecstasy, the ' deep sleep' into which Abraham was to be thrown during the promise of descendants as tho stars and the sea-sand in multitude. Hero is man's mate. Adam might have remained an immortal, though a lonely soul. Mayhap, soul and immortality both essentially mako for an orbing off into rounded completeness, perfect loneliness. Adam gains and yet loses part of his very self in giving the rib from which the fateful mate is formed. Adam at creation had become a living soul. No such breath of spiritual life is breathed into this woman, by God. Earthly happy, she is clasped by the arms of Adam as bond of his bone, flesh of his flesh. To the very end of her story, even after having earned the curse of her Creator her desire is to bo unto her husband. So stands the tragedy. .ZEsehylus or Sophocles never put before us more direct simplicity of dramatic motion towards woe."
Now is that a reasonable interpretation of the Creation story ? Well, anyhow, it is a romantic one, and we begin with interest to read the next chapter, headed " The Birth of War." Cain and Abel are repre- sented like their mother in a new light. Abel is " a type of the countless good people who are creatively good for nothing, the respectable nega- tives who might as well never have been born." Is that really what his Creator meant him to represent P " Abel, amid the bleating. of his peripatetic possessions, will never get beyond sheepish ideas. To fight the soil, and conquer its secrets by labour, is Cain's choice." The two fall out—the subject of the quarrel is, Mr. Robertson believes, property—and war begins.
Next comes the Flood and the "Birth of Wine." When the floods withdrew, Noah planted a vineyard, " drank of the wine, and was drunken." Here is " a brand-new curse rising from the tormented ground." The Flood could not wash out the curse of Jehovah.
In Abraham wo are supposed to find the supreme idealist. We find him "in the wilderness with the wild beasts,"- pondering humanity, The notion of a curse is gone. Man and God are pleased with one another. Ho is, as it were, a second Adam, a great colonist who realizes that the men who founded a city and said : " Come and let us make a name for ourselves " by trade, were doomed to failure. When he casts his eyes to the horizon he hears a voice saying : " I will bless thee and make thy name great " " Sinful Abraham is vastly greater than the sinless automaton J found in tradition as Adam. Creation widens on man's view. Man, at his best, is a brave struggler. A universe in which to struggle is better than a walled city of ant-like traders, better even than a walled paradise wherein is the atmosphere of perennial strifelessness. To believe in the men who are to follow us, and to bequeath to them a growing i certitude that life on earth is a divine adventure, is better religion than getting one's self saved.' "
This now Adam, Mr. Robertson points out, has "a shrew Eve by his side," and so on and so on.
Thero is no doubt that the book is very good reading, partly, we think, because Mr. Robertson writes so very _well. The story as he tells it reminds us very much of the Bible, partly again because of the identity of the names.
• The Bible': ProseEpie of Eve and Aar Sena. By Eric S. Robertson. London: Williams and Norgate. Los. need
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