How Not to Write

ONE of the forgotten books which least deserves its fate is Dr. Edward Harwood’s Liberal Translation of the New Testament, first published in London in 1768. For it is a perfect illustration of a man’s failure to distinguish between literature which guides style and literature which simply expresses the style of a period or of a man. Most of us know in our hearts that we cannot write better English than is found in the Authorized Version and that if we want to write good English we should read the Authorized Version persistently. It is of no importance whether we can expound its technique in the language of rhetoric, but it is of the greatest importance that its directness, simplicity, and force become second nature with us.

Dr. Harwood, who was a Greek scholar of some ability, was aware of his rashness in producing a ‘free and elegant translation’ of the Scriptures. He knew it ‘to be an arduous and invidious attempt to . . . diffuse over the sacred page the elegance of modern English, conscious that the bald and barbarous language of the old vulgar version hath acquired a venerable sacredness from length of time and custom, and that every innovation of this capital nature would be generally stigmatized as the last and most daring enormity.’ And yet he felt that by refining and polishing the English of the King James Version he might ‘induce persons of a liberal education and polite taste to peruse the sacred volume.’ He felt that Youth — this in 1768 — ‘could be allured by the innocent stratagem’ of what he called in italics modern style ‘to read a book which is now, alas! too generally neglected and disregarded by the young and gay, as a volume containing little to amuse and delight, and furnishing a study congenial only to the gloom of old age, or to the melancholy mind of a desponding visionary.’

The modern style whose innocent stratagem was thus to allure the young was the style of Hume, Robertson, Lowth, Lyttelton, Hurd, Melmoth, Johnson, and Hawkesworth. The allurement of these men lay presumably in their inflated Latinity and in all that wit which is derived from handling words rather than ideas. When we read, ‘Joseph of Arimathea, a person of great dignity and opulence,’ instead of ‘a rich man of Arimathea’; or, ‘The supreme Jehovah deigns to select thee as the object of his love!’ instead of ‘The Lord is with thee’; or, ‘Jesus burst into a flood of tears,’ instead of ‘Jesus wept’; or, ‘O Thou great governor and parent of universal nature,’ instead of ‘ Our Father which art in heaven,’ we feel all the puffing of the frog in the fable.

The full perfume of this style is only felt in continued passages. Since the volume is not accessible to all, it is worth reproducing one or two.

Here is the opening of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5): —

Happy are those who are endowed with true humility — for such are properly disposed for the reception of the gospel.

Happy are those who lament with unfeigned contrition the vices and errors of their past lives — for they shall be comforted with the cheering promises of the gospel.

Happy are those who are possessed with a mild and inoffensive disposition — for they shall be enriched with the greatest happiness this world can furnish.

Happy are those whose minds are inflamed with a sacred ardour to attain universal virtue — their enlarged and generous desires shall be satisfied.

Happy are those who are truly compassionate and charitable — that benevolence which they express towards their fellow creatiues shall be abundantly recompensed to them.

Happy are the sincerely virtuous — they shall be admitted to the blissful vision of God.

Happy are those who constantly study to promote harmony and peace among mankind — they shall be called the Sons of God.

Happy are those who suffer persecution for Religion and the rights of conscience with inflexible patience and fortitude — their victorious constancy shall be compensated with a superior degree of future blessedness.

Here are the words of the angels to the shepherds announcing the birth of Christ (Luke 2. 10-14): —

Dispel your terrors — for I am commissioned to report to you a most joyful and transporting event, in which the whole world is interested!

For this very day, in the city of David, the Saviour — the great Messiah — is born!

By these tokens you may easily distinguish the illustrious babe — You will find him swathed, and deposited in a manger. . . .

O let the highest angelic orders hymn the praise of God! O what happiness hath now blessed the world! O what ineffable benevolence is now expressed towards men!

Here is the opening of the parable of the Prodigal Son: —

A Gentleman of a splendid family and opulent fortune had two sons.

One day the younger approached his father, and begged him in the most importunate and soothing terms to make a partition of his effects betwixt himself and his elder brother — the indulgent father, overcome by his blandishments, immediately divided all his fortunes betwixt them.

One who has read to this point is probably in a state of exasperation and disgust. Surely this must be the work of a parodist or a fool! These sentences read like the kind of big-word humor which schoolboys love: ‘Should you enjoy a portion of the congealed lactic fluid of the domestic bovine?’ Dickens, I believe, sometimes wrote like that for comic effects. It seems incredible to us that anyone could write that way seriously. Yet there is no reason to believe that Harwood was not convinced of the superiority of his translation to the Authorized Version. And anyone who will take the time to read the account of him in the Dictionary of National Biography will find that he was not a fool by any means.

If, now, one compares this version of Harwood’s and the King James Version with the Greek, one finds that the King James Version is almost always a wordfor-word translation. Its simplicity and directness are of course legendary and would only need demonstration in an age like our

own. The same thing is true of the Vulgate, as far as we can tell. It is precisely this simplicity which Harwood was careful to eliminate. If one may judge by his results, he identified literary beauty with literary decoration. Decoration, as I use the term, — and of course there are other legitimate uses, — is always applied adornment, the ruffles and bows which are stuck on ladies’ dresses, the statues which are fixed to the corners of buildings as if arrested in flight, the elaboration of a metaphor which clarifies nothing, musical embellishments which do not grow out of the musical form being composed, but are added to it. The Greek for ‘A Gentleman of a splendid family and opulent fortune had two sons’ is, literally, ‘A certain man had two sons.’ All the rest is applied decoration which swells the bulk of the sentence, inflates it, but really gives it no more substance.

There are many signs in our own literature and in our other arts that we are reviving that tradition of embellishment. They are no doubt symptoms of fatigue or boredom. For the so-called modernistic movement was above all a struggle against applied decoration, whether it appeared in architecture or sculpture or painting. And we see on every hand propaganda directed against ‘modernism.’ When the conceit is made the mark of great poetry, and the bizarre and horrible the purpose of great fiction, then we can be sure that the flounces and puffed sleeves of our wives and daughters are not a passing fancy, but an expression of the age’s need for decoration.

To such an age Harwood’s version of the New Testament should be required reading. And I admit that if I were a professor of English in a college I should dish it out liberally to my students. Its vices are exactly those of many works of art of our time, but they appear more clearly in it than in contemporary literature. For we have no pride of kinship with it. If ever a time needed Cartesian clearness and distinctness of ideas, ours does. And the best way to appreciate them is to learn the effect of their absence.