Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, no. 22, August 1859 | Page 9

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