men, ere the quiver rattles against them, the glittering spear and the shield; ere they swallow the ground with fierceness and rage; ere they say among the trumpets "Ha, ha!" and smell the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.

I am not attacking the Revised Version on its textual or its theological accuracy to the originals, but simply as literature. As literature, what honest man of letters will not endorse my offensive? As scholarship, the meed of rendering the Hebrew more exactly may be the Revised Version's translators. But, measured thus, Langhorne's Plutarch is a better translation than North's, Cotton's Montaigne than Florio's, Johnes's Froissart than Berners's, Jarvis's and Phillips's Don Quixote than Shelton's. If the Revised Version shows an improvement in accuracy of translation, it hardly shows to the same advantage in accuracy of meaning. If it did, what matter? The Authorized Version is a living thing in itself; it is the nurse of literature. The Revised may belong to theologians-but no further, if you please. But my Telamonian antics leave me exhausted at the end of this letter.

XXIII

MYSTICISM OLD AND NEW (II)

MY DEAR X,

No, a committee, even though it sat upon the top of Mount Helicon, ought not, by most canons of reason, to expect its chairman's ruler to be Apollo's laurel bough. The Revised Version is indeed the worst in literary taste and feeling that has appeared in England. If anyone doubts this let him read the thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, first in the Authorized, then in the Genevan, and lastly in the Revised Versions. "As in a mirror darkly" (think of it !) is not the only instance of the academic mutilations of the last mentioned —as indeed might be despairingly expected, after reading the Preface, wherein the "archaisms" of King James's Bible are, with Laputan head-shakings and beard-strokings, solemnly animadverted upon. Here are a few of the modernisms in that same chapter: A.V. "a tinkling cymbal," R.V. "a clanging cymbal"; A.V. "so that I could remove mountains," R.V. so as to remove mountains"; A.V. "seeketh not her owne, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil," R.V. "seeketh not its own [poor dehumanized charity !], is not provoked, taketh not account of evil"; A.V. “Rejoiceth not in iniquitie but rejoiceth in the truth," R.V. "Rejoiceth not in un

righteousness but rejoiceth with the truth"; A.V. "whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away," R.V. "whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away"; A.V. "But when I became a man, I put away childish things," R.V. "Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things"; A.V. " but then shall I know even as also I am knowen," R.V. " but then shall I know even as also I have been known " (one would have thought it an elementary knowledge in a translator that the English language is not susceptible to such particularities of tenses). These are only the more prominent "improvements in accuracy" in a prose poem of thirteen verses. I have taken no account of the exasperating changes of "though" to "if," "and" to "but," and vice versa. Perhaps I have carried this digression into the jungle, but it seems to me that the Revised Version cannot be dismissed as the mere peddling of scholiasts, but is a kind of tumour that has gathered out of a diseased body-a disease which has corrupted English thought and utterance and through which the Authorized Version no longer permeates our blood, inspires our speech, ripens our feeling, and indurates our mind.

Now, of course, I do not want to put any doctrinal construction upon the noble felicity of the Authorized Version; I am treating it as literature and not as religion. All I would imply is that Victorian materialism has something to do with the Revised Version. All I would imply is that genius makes strange voyages, that imagination is the ladder to and from heaven, and that Shakespeare and the Bible are islands of Hesperides shot from a deep whose visionary treasures the eye of man hath not seen nor the mind conceived.

All great art, all genius, is indeed symbolic-the only measure we possess of man's eternal inheritance. It absorbs religion; it absorbs and transmutes all human activities, from their most degraded to their most exalted. Its processes are invariably alchemic-a refining of baser metals. Actual realism that is to say must always diverge from true art. It is not enough to make a transcript, however exact and methodical, of human character or natural objects. The personality of the artist is not enough; the themes appropriate to his instruments and purpose are not enough. A something objective, absolute, infinite enters into the composition of the greatest works of art, and in gusts and flickers even into the lesser. Only the perfect combination of the various perceptions and ferments that go to make the unity of a work of art can make it shall I say-a microcosm of reality. But in the accomplishment, it has passed out of the hands of the artist. He is the instrument and not the creator. No contradiction is involved by the admission that the personality of the artist is still implicit and perceptible in the culmination of his work. Keats' "Oft have I travelled in the realms of gold," Shelley's "I met a traveller in an antique land” both attain that consummation; there is a similarity of sound between them over and beyond word identities. But no one could mistake the one for the other. It would seem as though the personality of the artist also became objective—enlarged and unconfined, the goal rather than the prisoner of his ego.

Consider the impression on the reader of a perfect line or stanza. You are conscious of two preoccupations. Such lines or stanzas are at once familiar to you; you knew

them from the beginning of the world; you will carry their moral and artistic stamp with you to its end. You are affected by a sense of permanence, of diuturnity, of a stability mastering time and place-so permanent, so everlasting, and so stable that you can feel the wind of temporal and vanishing things rushing by you through space. It is a truism, but great art is a mystical revelation, the seal and imprimatur of the divine.

I don't want to labour the point, but I think that a revival of art may be predicted from a renewed interest not so much in the spiritual phenomena as in the spiritual implications of the universe. The movement is perhaps getting hold of the wrong end of the stick; but you may be sure that wherever that curiosity exists art will ultimately embrace and recreate it. Modern poetry, as it is, is full of philosophic speculation; is it too much to hope that one day poetry will again become a metaphysic in itself?

The present revival of poetry is perhaps artificial. It is a reaction from an agonized sickness and disgust at the war. But that reaction may very well be a cautionary sounding before a truer voyage towards a more permanent vitality. The work of Ralph Hodgson and a few others is a warrant that poetry is beginning to realize that it can express the divine and the abstract only by means of forcible, vivid, and concrete symbols of them-by becoming, that is to say, at once classical and popular. That is the best and truest hope for the future. Great literature takes this form, and the moderns, with so much experience behind them, should surely be able to do great things with it. And from the point of view of the