When writing a novel, it seems that a certain number of words must needs be expended in order to establish the setting, the characters, the plot. These words, subtle and smooth or jarring and clustered, burdened down as they are by subordinate clauses or enlightened with the grace of being, are investments; they constitute the corpus of the work no more than a stock represents the business at hand; they are a kind of rhythm, or better yet a theme -- but not melody or harmony.

They are first an indication of its health; we can judge, if they be sickly, that the novel itself is not novel at all but something very old and frail -- they limp along, they do not twirl, they do not pirouette, they do not turn with the elegance of beauty. Or perhaps the problem is that the creature is too young -- it is amusing and sentimental like a young girl at ballet, clever at best, but never ingenious; it never inspires, it never catches the breath; if there is spirit, it is too feeble; or it tests the waters; it is a nervous and untimely thing, it is still-born; or it rots. So the author's idea is either too young to know these words intimately or it is too old and hackneyed to much care for them anymore; either they are set in their ways, these words, or they haven't quite found a way -- and here we observe the bisection of age with youth, the congruence of Erasmus’ follies.

But if we measure their heart, breath, pulse, their electrostatics, and we find that they are at peace or charged, if this is by no means sound, but a fury, or a cool-flowing stream, or a rapid ardor – if there is something in them – still it is something small; we cannot judge a piece of music by the quality of the theme; the theme may be beautiful or it may be poor, but what matters is not the comparative poverty or wealth of the words but the loftiness of their character. These words are not the body of the work, but they are not either her soul – they are mere outward signs, prognostications of inner beatitude or wretchedness. An author can describe Dublin down to a par, all accurate, all correct – he might have whatever insights he desires and however deep an insight we require into psychology, motives, plot – surely these are living and breathing beings, surely these are words made flesh – and yet, what is this quintessence of dust? For the author either plays or he is played; he plucks the lyre or he is plucked from the record, because posterity has as much patience as it has grace, and it will not abide by a novel that merely lives.

This plot is the outward form, but if the work be masterful, it finds correspondence with the inner parts: the eyes as they say are the window into the soul. True pleasure comes from reading the novelist who produces something not merely new but truly novel: novel in that the universe has been recreated, not according to the laws of God but in accordance with the whims of Adam and Eve (Eve, the first work of art! Created the unknown from the known, a world from Adam’s breast). The construction is dramatic, one event flows into another; actions, gestures, descriptions, speeches correspond and play off of each other as in symphony. It is this creation that we call art – we do not simply mass nature on nature, because “life piled on life were all too little”: we take the earthly materials, disordered and without harmony, just as we take the tines of tin and metal and wood, and we reorganize them into a grandeur, into a beauty, into a whole that is absorbed and absorbing, an exorbitant reality of its own.

Here, then, is the value of a Bible: it is a formidable model for the artist who would pursue after and render his own truth; it is a veritable symphony orchestrated on a grander scale than even one of Wagner’s operas. Events clash, crash, correspond, respond, lift and hold up the theme, or tear it crashing down: this is the highest art, this is the most wonderful literature. And are their dissonances? But these are like the dissonances that must needs creep into even the most accomplished chamber piece if it is not to be unremittingly dull – there must be a tangle, the promise must be withheld. And the rougher contradictions, the peeling paint, perhaps it is the ineluctable wearing away that age engenders, but it is also a proof of antiquity and more – lose threads tease us up close, make us question that work that seemed so whole from far away: when we approach a Pissaro or a Monet we see the genius of the artist who creates such strands with only a few loose dabs of paint and play. And the Bible must be proof of a novel whose words are cheap (though they do not necessarily show any outward signs of a failing health, rather they display a vituperative and enduring vigor) but whose resonances and harmonies are rich indeed.

So the next time that I hear some reviewer on bothering about a novel’s accuracy, historicity, or complaining of flat characters or a dull plot…it is a wicked age that asks for these signs which are outward appearances! Art is not the mirror of life, nor is it even a reflection on what life should be – no, it is something more – it may sound beautiful, but moreso the beauty is mystical: art has a certain truth, even if it fails to hold true. How often an old friend demands our company, even though we have given up all pretence and hope of allegiance – but sitting in the old apartment with its peeling wall-paper and mismatched furniture, drinking staled tea and watching cracked lips a feeling comes over us, a nostalgic reverie and ecstasy, in the way a thread of light slants in from the window, and we have entered another world that is vast beyond ourselves, we are intersecting with a universe that is beyond anything we can ever know. So Augustine’s, which perfectly resembles life but is nothing like it – that grand master of fictions – Dante the eternal pilgrim, who journeys back to the creator of his own creation – all worlds and times of places known and unknown. Thus for the man who would live a life – and what man would not, regardless of his choosing it? – I think that the novel, the work of art, by its very being, cannot fail to be the noblest vessel for moral instruction. For as Rashi comments, what power would the Bible have to dispense of a moral law if it were not first an account of creation and a creation in fact?