The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 22, August, 1859. Various
in Italy, and are annually reproduced in Spain.
The Bible is incapable of representation. For a man to act the Supreme Being would be as revolting in idea as profane in practice. One may in words portray the divine character, give utterance to the divine will. This every preacher does. But to what is the effect owing? Not to proprieties of attitude or arrangement of muscle, but to the spirit of the man magnified and flooding with the great theme, and to the thought of God that surrounds and subdues all; in other words, the imagination is addressed, not the sight,—the sentiments and affections are engaged, not the senses. As Lamb says of the Lear of Shakspeare, it cannot be acted; so, with greater force, we may say of the Bible, it cannot be acted. When we read or hear of the Passion of the Saviour, it is the thought, the emotion, burning and seething within it, at which by invisible contact our own thought and emotion catch fire; and the capabilities of impersonation and manufacture are mocked by such a subject.
But the Bible abounds in dramatic situation, action, and feeling. This has already been intimated; it only remains that we indicate some examples. The history of David fulfils all the demands of dramatic composition. It has the severe grandeur of Aeschylus, the moving tenderness of Euripides, and the individual fidelity of Shakspeare. Could this last-named writer, who, while he counterfeited Nature with such success, was equally commended for his historical integrity,—could Shakspeare have performed that service on this history, which Milton, More, and others have undertaken on other portions of the sacred volume,—could he have digested it into a regular dramatic form,—he would have accomplished a work of rare interest. It would include the characters of Samuel and Saul; it would describe the magnanimous Jonathan and the rebellious Absalom; Nathan, Nabal, Goliah, Shimei, would impart their respective features; it would be enriched with all that is beautiful in woman's love or enduring in parental affection. It is full of incident, and full of pathos. It verges towards the terrible, it is shaken with the passionate, it rises into the heroic. Pursued in the true spirit of Jewish theology, the awful presence of God would overhang and pervade it, while the agency of his providence should attend on the evolutions of events.
There is one effect which, in the present arrangement of the canon, is entirely lost to view, and which could be revived only by the synchronizing of the Psalms with their proper epochs. For instance, the eighth Psalm is referable to the youth of David, when he was yet leading a shepherd life. The dramatic form of his history would detach this from its present place, and insert it amid the occasions and in the years to which it belongs. What a scene we should then have! The youthful David, ruddy he was, and, withal, of a beautiful countenance, (marginal reading, fair of eyes,) and goodly to look to; and he was a cunning player on the harp. There is the glow of poetic enthusiasm in his eyes, and the fervor of religious feeling in all his moods; as he tends his flock amid the quietness and beauty of his native hills, he joins to the aspirations of his soul the melodies of music. So the night overtakes him, the labors of the day are past, his meditations withdraw him from the society of men, he is alone with Nature and with God;—at such a moment the spirit of composition and utterance is upon him, and he hymns himself in those lofty and touching stanzas,—
"O Jehovah, our Lord,
How excellent is thy name in all the earth!
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained,
What is man that thou art mindful of him,
And the son of man that thou carest for him?
Yet thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,
Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor;
Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hand,
Thou hast put all things under his feet,—
All sheep and oxen,
Yea, and the beasts of the forest,
The birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea,
And whatsoever passes through the deep.
O Jehovah, our Lord,
How excellent is thy name in all the earth!"
Again, the fifty-seventh Psalm is assigned, in respect of place, to the cave of En-gedi, into which David fled from the vengeance of Saul. Here, surrounded by lofty rocks, whose promontories screen a wide extent of vale, he breaks forth,—
"Have pity upon me, O God, have pity upon me,
For in thee doth my soul seek refuge!
Yea, in the shadow of thy wings do I take shelter,
Until these calamities be overpast!"
Dramatically touched, and disposed according to the natural unities of the subject, these sublime and affecting songs would appear on their motive occasions, and be surrounded by their actual accompaniments.
The present effect may be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them simply in a dramatic view, we claim the right to suggest their dramatic force and pertinency. This effect, we might remark, is particularly and most truthfully regarded in the Lament of David over Saul and Jonathan. That monody would be shorn of its interest, if it were inserted anywhere else. The Psalms are more impersonal and more strictly religious than that, and hence their universal application; only we say, we can easily conceive that the revival of them in the order of their history, and in all the purity of their native pathos, would render them more attractive.
In connection with what we would further observe of the Psalms of David, let us again call attention to the ancient chorus,—how it was a species of melodrama, how it sang its parts, and comprised distinct vocalists and musicians, who pursued the piece in alternate rejoinder. What we would observe is, that many of the Psalms were written for the chorus, and, so to speak, were performed by it. There are some of them which it is impossible to understand without attention to this dramatic method of rehearsal. Psalm cxviii., for instance, includes several speakers. Psalm xxiv. was composed on the occasion of the transfer of the ark to the tabernacle on Mount Zion. And David, we read, and all the house of Israel, brought up the ark with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet. In the midst of the congregated nation, supported by a varied instrumental accompaniment, with the smoke of the well-fed altar surging into the skies, the chorus took up the song which had been prepared to their hand,—one group calling out, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?"—the other pealing their answer, "He that hath clean hands and a pure heart." Meanwhile, they dance before the Lord,—that is, we suppose, preserving with their feet the unities of the music.
It was during a melodrama like this, in the midst of its exciting grandeur and all-pervading transport, executed at the Feast of Tabernacles, in the open area of the Temple, when the Jews were wont to pour upon the altar water taken from the pool of Siloam, chanting at the same time the twelfth chapter of Isaiah, and one division of the chorus had just sung the words,—
"With joy we draw water from the wells of salvation,"
and before the other had replied,—it was at this moment, that Christ, as Dr. Furness very reasonably conjectures, took up the response in his own person, and overwhelmed attention by that memorable declaration, "If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink; and from within him shall flow rivers of living water."
It is what we may term the dramatic proprieties that give to many of the Psalms, in the language of a recent commentator, "a greater degree of fitness, spirit, and grandeur"; and they impart to the history of David a certain decorousness of illustration and perspicuity of feature which it would not otherwise possess. They would produce upon it the same result as is achieved by the sister arts on this and other portions of the sacred volume, without marring the text or doing violence to truth. Not, let us repeat, that the Bible can be theatrized. Neither church nor playhouse can revive the forms of Judaism, without recalling