THE KEYSTONE OF ENGLISH STYLE.
Under the foregoing heading the place of the Bible in English literature is most excellently described, by Mr. J. H. Gardiner, in the Atlantic Monthly for May, as follows:— In all study of English literature, if there be any axiom which everyone has accepted without question, it is that the ultimate standard of English prose style is set by the King James Version of the Bible. For examples of limpid, convincing narratives, we go to Genesis, to the story of Ruth, to the quiet earnestness of the Gospels; for the mingled argument and explanation and exhortation in which lies the highest power of the other side of literature, we go to the prophets, and still more to the epistles of the New Testament; and for the glow of vehemence and feeling, which burns away the limits between poetry and prose, and makes prose style at its highest pitch able to stand beside the stirring vibrations of verse, we go to the psalms or to the book of Job or to the prophecies of Isaiah, or to the triumphant declaration of immortality in the epistle to the Corinthians. If one were to figure the whole range of English prose style in the form of an arch, one would put the style of the Bible as its keystone; and one would put it there not only because it is the highest point and culmination of prose writing, but also because it binds the whole structure together. On the one side would be the writing, which tends more and more to the colloquial, which, beginning with such finished and exquisite talk as Dryden crystallized in his writings, runs off into the slack and hasty style of journalism; on the other side, such more splendidly and artfully colored prose as Sir Thomas Browne's or the ponderous weight of Dr. Johnson, degenerating in the hands of lesser men into precocity or pedantry. And with such explanations we fold our hands in the comfortable feeling that here, at any rate, is one question of literature settled for good; the standard of English prose style is the standard of the authorized version of the Bible; that style is so clear and so noble that there is nothing more to be accounted for.