William Hale White and Literary Interpretation

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 17; p. 57
• Main Author: Harland, Catherine R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2013
• Subjects: Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888); British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Mark Rutherford, protagonist of The Autobiography, accepts the inevitability and the validity of recent historical criticism of the Bible, but when he hears in a 'free-thinking hall' an ironic, destructive and seemingly self-serving critical attack on the Scriptures, he concludes that such analyses often provide only 'a message of negations', a depressingly futile message when there is so much 'positive work' to be done.13 Hale White himself wrote similarly to his father about the 'cold negativism' and 'heartless emptiness' he encountered in his work as a vendor of 'heretical' books when he worked for the publisher John Chapman after his departure from New College.14 'Positive', 'life-giving', 'help', are the words White uses to discuss Byron, for example - 'a mass of living energy' (PJ, 147) - or The Faerie Queene (LP, 14), or Wordsworth, in relation to whom White remarks, 'Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live' (PJ, 108). [...]in his essay on Wordsworth, for example, Arnold like White insists that poetry must address the question 'how to live' and is therefore 'at bottom a criticism of life'.16 Literature accomplishes this goal not merely through affective individual phrases subjectively constructed as personal 'touchstones,' but through what Northrop Frye would call an 'educated imagination'.17 The reader's mind and response to life are transformed, like the dyer's hand, through the medium in which it is immersed. [...]White argues that 'it is necessary to read over and over again all that a man of any note has written and to know all that we can discover about him, before the light arises on us which discovers what his inner self might be. [...]White's early experience with Biblical interpretation contributed dynamically to his subsequent insistence on genuine, experiential, truthful criticism as well as to his need to find the living heart of a work and illuminate the essence of a writer's imaginative vision so that readers might find help with the question, 'how to live'.