All reviews copyright 1984-2007 Evelyn C. Leeper.
ON THE ART OF READING by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/02/2007]
ON THE ART OF READING by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (ISBN-13 978-1-42805-7487, ISBN-10 1-4280-5748-X) is a series of lectures on how reading is taught, or rather, mis-taught in British public schools of his time (the 1910s). His complaints that the method of testing students does not encourage students to read the great works for their own sake, but rather to learn about them what is required for the tests, are still quite relevant. But most intriguing is his discussion of reading the Bible as literature. First of all, he apparently has to defend this idea against the more religious people, who do not want the Bible read as literature, but only as a sacred text. Some may say that the tables have turned and now it is the religious people who are trying to get the Bible *into* the schools, but I suspect that many of them are trying to get it in as sacred text, not as literature.
In any case, Quiller-Couch goes on to explain the problems in reading the Bible as literature. First, he says, "Imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this: Paradise Lost, Darwin's Descent of Man, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map, Mill['s] On Liberty, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, The annual Register, Froissart, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le Morte d'arthur, Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Boswell's Johnson, Barbour's The Bruce, Hakluyt's Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley's Prometheus, ...,, Bailey's Festus, Thompson's Hound of Heaven." Now further assume, he says, that "most of the authors' names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have found there way into wrong places; that Ruskin, for example, is credited with Sartor Restatus ...; and that, as for the titles, these were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?"
And further, poetry is printed as prose, paragraphs and even sentences are broken into short verses, and then we "pepper the result all over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with a marginal gutter on each side, each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross-references."
In short, Quiller-Couch does not say the problem is the language. He is not calling for a new translation; he thinks the King James version is fine, and indeed what should be taught. He just wants the Bible that students read as literature to be printed like any other work of literature. And indeed, the purpose of the "Revised Standard Version", the "New English Bible", the "New International Version", the "Good News Bible", the "Black Bible Chronicles", or any of the many other translations is evangelical, not artistic.
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