9 - The early eighteenth century and the King James Bible

Summary

‘ALL THE DISADVANTAGES OF AN OLD PROSE TRANSLATION’

The superior language

Yet how beautiful do the holy writings appear, under all the disadvantages of an old prose translation? So beautiful that, with a charming and elegant simplicity, they ravish and transport the learned reader, so intelligible that the most unlearned are capable of understanding the greater part of them.

(A Miscellany of Poems, p. 30)

So exclaims in 1731 the very minor poet and critic, John Husbands (1706–32). He seems to be saying that the KJB, in spite of being rather bad by his standards, is, after all, very good. This curious combination of praise and dispraise is one of a line of such remarks that reflects conflicting forces among the literati of Augustan England. Before exhibiting these remarks, some of the forces need to be sketched.

The phrase ‘an old prose translation’ suggests the three main negative elements. The disadvantage of being a translation needs no comment – everybody believed that translation must necessarily be inferior to the original, especially if that original was divinely inspired – but we are accustomed to admiring prose and do not think of the language of a hundred years ago or less as particularly old. In contrast, the eighteenth century was vividly aware that the English it used for literature (to look no further) was very different from – and, most thought, far better than – that of pre-Restoration literature: ‘the language of the present times is so clean and chaste, and so very different from our ancestors, that should they return hither they would want an interpreter to converse with us’.