EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE
The history of the earlier Elizabethan prose, if we except the name of
Hooker, in whom it culminates, is to a great extent the history of
curiosities of literature--of tentative and imperfect efforts, scarcely
resulting in any real vernacular style at all. It is, however, emphatically
the Period of Origins of modern English prose, and as such cannot but be
interesting. We shall therefore rapidly survey its chief developments,
noting first what had been done before Elizabeth came to the throne, then
taking Ascham (who stands, though part of his work was written earlier,
very much as the first Elizabethan prosaist), noticing the schools of
historians, translators, controversialists, and especially critics who
illustrated the middle period of the reign, and singling out the noteworthy
personality of Sidney. We shall also say something of Lyly (as far as
_Euphues_ is concerned) and his singular attempts in prose style, and shall
finish with Hooker, the one really great name of the period. Its voluminous
pamphleteering, though much of it, especially the Martin Marprelate
controversy, might come chronologically within the limit of this chapter,
will be better reserved for a notice in Chapter VI. of the whole pamphlet
literature of the reigns of Elizabeth and James--an interesting subject,
the relation of which to the modern periodical has been somewhat
overlooked, and which indeed was, until a comparatively recent period, not
very easy to study. Gabriel Harvey alone, as distinctly belonging to the
earlier Elizabethans, may be here included with other critics.
It was an inevitable result of the discovery of printing that the
cultivation of the vernacular for purposes of all work--that is to say, for
prose--should be largely increased. Yet a different influence arising, or
at least eked out, from the same source, rather checked this increase. The
study of the classical writers had at first a tendency to render inveterate
the habit of employing Latin for the journey-work of literature, and in the
two countries which were to lead Western Europe for the future (the
literary date of Italy was already drawing to a close, and Italy had long
possessed vernacular prose masterpieces), it was not till the middle of the
sixteenth century that the writing of vernacular prose was warmly advocated
and systematically undertaken. The most interesting monuments of this
crusade, as it may almost be called, in England are connected with a school
of Cambridge scholars who flourished a little before our period, though not
a few of them, such as Ascham, Wilson, and others, lived into it. A letter
of Sir John Cheke's in the very year of the accession of Elizabeth is the
most noteworthy document on the subject. It was written to another father
of English prose, Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione's
_Courtier_. But Ascham had already and some years earlier published his
_Toxophilus_, and various not unimportant attempts, detailed notice of
which would be an antedating of our proper period, had been made. More's
chief work, _Utopia_, had been written in Latin, and was translated into
English by another hand, but his _History of Edward V._ was not a mean
contribution to English prose. Tyndale's _New Testament_ had given a new
and powerful impulse to the reading of English; Elyot's _Governor_ had set
the example of treating serious subjects in a style not unworthy of them,
and Leland's quaint _Itinerary_ the example of describing more or less
faithfully if somewhat uncouthly. Hall had followed Fabyan as an English
historian, and, above all, Latimer's _Sermons_ had shown how to transform
spoken English of the raciest kind into literature. Lord Berners's
translations of Froissart and of divers examples of late Continental
romance had provided much prose of no mean quality for light reading, and
also by their imitation of the florid and fanciful style of the
French-Flemish _rhetoriqueurs_ (with which Berners was familiar both as a
student of French and as governor of Calais) had probably contributed not a
little to supply and furnish forth the side of Elizabethan expression which
found so memorable an exponent in the author of _Euphues_.
For our purpose, however, Roger Ascham may serve as a starting-point. His
_Toxophilus_ was written and printed as early as 1545; his _Schoolmaster_
did not appear till after his death, and seems to have been chiefly written
in the very last days of his life. There is thus nearly a quarter of a
century between them, yet they are not very different in style. Ascham was
a Yorkshire man born at Kirbywiske, near Northallerton, in 1515; he went to
St. John's College at Cambridge, then a notable seat of learning, in 1530;
was elected scholar, fellow, and lecturer, became public orator the year
after the appearance of _Toxophilus_, acted as tutor to the Princess
Elizabeth, went on diplomatic business to Germany, was Latin secretary to
Queen Mary, and after her death to his old pupil, and died on the 30th
December 1568. A treatise on Cock-fighting (of which sport he was very
fond) appears to have been written by him, and was perhaps printed, but is
unluckily lost. We have also Epistles from him, and his works, both English
and Latin, have been in whole or part frequently edited. The great interest
of Ascham is expressed as happily as possible by his own words in the
dedication of _Toxophilus_ to Henry VIII. "Although," he says, "to have
written this book either in Latin or Greek ... had been more easier and fit
for my trade in study, yet ... I have written this English matter in the
English tongue for Englishmen"--a memorable sentence none the worse for its
jingle and repetition, which are well in place. Until scholars like Ascham,
who with the rarest exceptions were the only persons likely or able to
write at all, cared to write "English matters in English tongue for
Englishmen," the formation of English prose style was impossible; and that
it required some courage to do so, Cheke's letter, written twelve years
later, shows.[12]
"I am of this opinion that our own tongue should be written clean
and pure, unmixed and unmingled with borrowing of other tongues,
wherein, if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never
paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then
doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when
she borroweth no counterfeitures of other tongues to attire
herself withal, but useth plainly her own with such shift as
nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent doth
lead her unto, and if she want at any time (as being imperfect
she must) yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may
appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us
to fashion a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could
content and ease this need we would not boldly venture of unknown
words."[13]
[12] The letter is given in full by Mr. Arber in his introduction to
Ascham's _Schoolmaster_, p. 5.
[13] It will be seen that Cheke writes what he argues for, "clean and pure
English." "Other excellent" is perhaps the only doubtful phrase in the
extract or in the letter.
The _Toxophilus_ and the _Schoolmaster_ are both in their different ways
very pleasant reading; and the English is far more correct than that of
much greater men than Ascham in the next century. It is, however, merely as
style, less interesting, because it is clear that the author is doing
little more than translate in his head, instead of on the paper, good
current Latin (such as it would have been "more easier" for him to write)
into current English. He does not indulge in any undue classicism; he takes
few of the liberties with English grammar which, a little later, it was the
habit to take on the strength of classical examples. But, on the other
hand, he does not attempt, and it would be rather unreasonable to expect
that he should have attempted, experiments in the literary power of English
itself. A slight sense of its not being so "easy" to write in English as in
Latin, and of the consequent advisableness of keeping to a sober beaten
path, to a kind of style which is not much more English (except for being
composed of good English words in straightforward order) than it is any
literary language framed to a great extent on the classics, shows itself in
him. One might translate passage after passage of Ascham, keeping almost
the whole order of the words, into very good sound Latin prose; and,
indeed, his great secret in the _Schoolmaster_ (the perpetual translation
and retranslation of English into the learned languages, and especially
Latin) is exactly what would form such a style. It is, as the following
examples from both works will show, clear, not inelegant, invaluable as a
kind of go-cart to habituate the infant limbs of prose English to orderly
movement; but it is not original, or striking, or characteristic, or
calculated to show the native powers and capacities of the language.
"I can teach you to shoot fair, even as Socrates taught a man
once to know God. For when he asked him what was God? 'Nay,'
saith he, 'I can tell you better what God is not, as God is not
ill, God is unspeakable, unsearchable, and so forth. Even
likewise can I say of fair shooting, it hath not this
discommodity with it nor that discommodity, and at last a man may
so shift all the discommodities from shooting that there shall be
left nothing behind but fair shooting. And to do this the better
you must remember how that I told you when I described generally
the whole nature of shooting, that fair shooting came of these
things of standing, nocking, drawing, holding and loosing; the
which I will go over as shortly as I can, describing the
discommodities that men commonly use in all parts of their
bodies, that you, if you fault in any such, may know it, and go
about to amend it. Faults in archers do exceed the number of
archers, which come with use of shooting without teaching. Use
and custom separated from knowledge and learning, doth not only
hurt shooting, but the most weighty things in the world beside.
And, therefore, I marvel much at those people which be the
maintainers of uses without knowledge, having no other word in
their mouth but this use, use, custom, custom. Such men, more
wilful than wise, beside other discommodities, take all place and
occasion from all amendment. And this I speak generally of use
and custom."
* * * * *
"Time was when Italy and Rome have been, to the great good of us
who now live, the best breeders and bringers up of the worthiest
men, not only for wise speaking, but also for well-doing in all
civil affairs that ever was in the world. But now that time is
gone; and though the place remain, yet the old and present
manners do differ as far as black and white, as virtue and vice.
Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world: vice
now maketh that country slave to them that before were glad to
serve it. All man [_i.e._ mankind] seeth it; they themselves
confess it, namely such as be best and wisest amongst them. For
sin, by lust and vanity, hath and doth breed up everywhere common
contempt of God's word, private contention in many families, open
factions in every city; and so making themselves bond to vanity
and vice at home, they are content to bear the yoke of serving
strangers abroad. Italy now is not that Italy it was wont to be;
and therefore now not so fit a place as some do count it for
young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence. For
surely they will make others but bad scholars that be so ill
masters to themselves."
This same characteristic, or absence of characteristic, which reaches its
climax--a climax endowing it with something like substantive life and
merit--in Hooker, displays itself, with more and more admixture of raciness
and native peculiarity, in almost all the prose of the early Elizabethan
period up to the singular escapade of Lyly, who certainly tried to write
not a classical style but a style of his own. The better men, with Thomas
Wilson and Ascham himself at their head, made indeed earnest protests
against Latinising the vocabulary (the great fault of the contemporary
French _Pleiade_), but they were not quite aware how much they were under
the influence of Latin in other matters. The translators, such as North,
whose famous version of Plutarch after Amyot had the immortal honour of
suggesting not a little of Shakespere's greatest work, had the chief excuse
and temptation in doing this; but all writers did it more or less: the
theologians (to whom it would no doubt have been "more easier" to write in
Latin), the historians (though the little known Holinshed has broken off
into a much more vernacular but also much more disorderly style), the rare
geographers (of whom the chief is Richard Eden, the first English writer on
America), and the rest. Of this rest the most interesting, perhaps, are the
small but curious knot of critics who lead up in various ways to Sidney and
Harvey, who seem to have excited considerable interest at the time, and who
were not succeeded, after the early years of James, by any considerable
body of critics of English till John Dryden began to write in the last
third of the following century. Of these (putting out of sight Stephen
Gosson, the immediate begetter of Sidney's _Apology for Poetry_, Campion,
the chief champion of classical metres in English, and by a quaint contrast
the author of some of the most charming of English songs in purely romantic
style, with his adversary the poet Daniel, Meres, etc.), the chief is the
author of the anonymous _Art of English Poesie_, published the year after
the Armada, and just before the appearance of _The Faerie Queene_. This
_Art_ has chiefly to be compared with the _Discourse of English Poetrie_,
published three years earlier by William Webbe. Webbe, of whom nothing is
known save that he was a private tutor at one or two gentlemen's houses in
Essex, exhibits that dislike and disdain of rhyme which was an offshoot of
the passion for humanist studies, which was importantly represented all
through the sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, and which
had Milton for its last and greatest exponent. _The Art of English Poesie_,
which is attributed on no grounds of contemporary evidence to George
Puttenham, though the book was generally reputed his in the next
generation, is a much more considerable treatise, some four times the
length of Webbe's, dealing with a large number of questions subsidiary to
_Ars Poetica_, and containing no few selections of illustrative verse, many
of the author's own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fall
into the rather colourless but not incorrect class already described, and
are of the tribe of Ascham. Here is a sample of each:--
(Webbe's _Preface to the Noble Poets of England_.)
"Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite
fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered,
all shops stuffed, and every study furnished; the greater part, I
think, in any one kind, are such as are either mere poetical, or
which tend in some respects (as either in matter or form) to
poetry. Of such books, therefore, sith I have been one that have
had a desire to read not the fewest, and because it is an
argument which men of great learning have no leisure to handle,
or at least having to do with more serious matters do least
regard. If I write something, concerning what I think of our
English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgment of
English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and
vouchsafe my book passage, as being for the rudeness thereof no
prejudice to their noble studies, but even (as my intent is) an
_instar cotis_ to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow
travail in this matter; whereby, I think, we may not only get the
means which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad,
but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical
rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly
course of true poetry."
* * * * *
(Puttenham _on Style_.)
"Style is a constant and continual phrase or tenour of speaking
and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of the poem
or history, and not properly to any piece or member of a tale;
but is of words, speeches, and sentences together; a certain
contrived form and quality, many times natural to the writer,
many times his peculiar bye-election and art, and such as either
he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or
peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. So we say that
Cicero's style and Sallust's were not one, nor Caesar's and
Livy's, nor Homer's and Hesiodus',[14] nor Herodotus' and
Thucydides', nor Euripides' and Aristophanes', nor Erasmus' and
Budeus' styles. And because this continual course and manner of
writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the
writer's mind more than one or two instances can show, therefore
there be that have called style the image of man (_mentis
character_). For man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered
and qualified, so are his speeches and language at large; and his
inward conceits be the metal of his mind, and his manner of
utterance the very warp and woof of his conceits, more plain or
busy and intricate or otherwise affected after the rate."[15]
[14] The final _s_ of such names often at the time appears unaltered.
[15] _i.e._ "in proportion."
Contemporary with these, however, there was growing up a quite different
school of English prose which showed itself on one side in the _estilo
culto_ of Lyly and the university wits of his time; on the other, in the
extremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of the
pamphleteers, who were very often the same persons. Lyly himself exhibits
both styles in _Euphues_; and if _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for a
Parrot_ are rightly attributed to him, still more in these. So also does
Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's friend, a curious coxcomb who endeavoured to
dissuade Spenser from continuing _The Faerie Queene_, devoted much time
himself and strove to devote other people to the thankless task of
composing English hexameters and trimeters, engaged (very much to his
discomfiture) in a furious pamphlet war with Thomas Nash, and altogether
presents one of the most characteristic though least favourable specimens
of the Elizabethan man of letters. We may speak of him further when we come
to the pamphleteers generally.
John Lyly is a person of much more consequence in English literature than
the conceited and pragmatical pedant who wrote _Pierce's Supererogation_.
He is familiar, almost literally to every schoolboy, as the author of the
charming piece, "Cupid with my Campaspe Played," and his dramatic work will
come in for notice in a future chapter; but he is chiefly thought of by
posterity, whether favourably or the reverse, as the author of _Euphues_.
Exceedingly little is known about his life, and it is necessary to say that
the usually accepted dates of his death, his children's birth, and so
forth, depend wholly on the identification of a John Lilly, who is the
subject of such entries in the registers of a London church, with the
euphuist and dramatist--an identification which requires confirmation. A
still more wanton attempt to supplement ignorance with knowledge has been
made in the further identification with Lyly of a certain "witty and bold
atheist," who annoyed Bishop Hall in his first cure at Hawstead, in
Suffolk, and who is called "Mr. Lilly." All supposed facts about him (or
some other John Lyly), his membership of Parliament and so forth, have been
diligently set forth by Mr. Bond in his Oxford edition of the _Works_, with
the documents which are supposed to prove them. He is supposed, on
uncertain but tolerable inferences, to have been born about 1554, and he
certainly entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569, though he was not
matriculated till two years later. He is described as _plebeii filius_, was
not on the foundation, and took his degree in 1573. He must have had some
connection with the Cecils, for a letter of 1574 is extant from him to
Burleigh. He cannot have been five and twenty when he wrote _Euphues_,
which was licensed at the end of 1578, and was published (the first part)
early next year, while the second part followed with a very short
interval. In 1582 he wrote an unmistakable letter commendatory to Watson's
_Hecatompathia_, and between 1580 and 1590 he must have written his plays.
He appears to have continued to reside at Magdalen for a considerable time,
and then to have haunted the Court. A melancholy petition is extant to
Queen Elizabeth from him, the second of its kind, in which he writes:
"Thirteen years your highness' servant, but yet nothing." This was in 1598:
he is supposed to have died in 1606. _Euphues_ is a very singular book,
which was constantly reprinted and eagerly read for fifty years, then
forgotten for nearly two hundred, then frequently discussed, but very
seldom read, even it may be suspected in Mr. Arber's excellent reprint of
it, or in that of Mr. Bond. It gave a word to English, and even yet there
is no very distinct idea attaching to the word. It induced one of the most
gifted restorers of old times to make a blunder, amusing in itself, but not
in the least what its author intended it to be, and of late years
especially it has prompted constant discussions as to the origin of the
peculiarities which mark it. As usual, we shall try to discuss it with less
reference to what has been said about it than to itself.
_Euphues_ (properly divided into two parts, "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit,"
and "Euphues and his England," the scene of the first lying in Naples) is a
kind of love story; the action, however, being next to nothing, and
subordinated to an infinite amount of moral and courtly discourse. Oddly
enough, the unfavourable sentence of Hallam, that it is "a very dull
story," and the favourable sentence of Kingsley, that it is "a brave,
righteous, and pious book," are both quite true, and, indeed, any one can
see that there is nothing incompatible in them. At the present day,
however, its substance, which chiefly consists of the moral discourses
aforesaid, is infinitely inferior in interest to its manner. Of that
manner, any one who imagines it to be reproduced by Sir Piercie Shafton's
extravagances in _The Monastery_ has an entirely false idea. It is much
odder than Shaftonese, but also quite different from it. Lyly's two
secrets are in the first place an antithesis, more laboured, more
monotonous, and infinitely more pointless than Macaulay's--which antithesis
seems to have met with not a little favour, and was indeed an obvious
expedient for lightening up and giving character to the correct but
featureless prose of Ascham and other "Latiners." The second was a fancy,
which amounts to a mania, for similes, strung together in endless lists,
and derived as a rule from animals, vegetables, or minerals, especially
from the Fauna and Flora of fancy. It is impossible to open a page of
_Euphues_ without finding an example of this eccentric and tasteless trick,
and in it, as far as in any single thing, must be found the recipe for
euphuism, pure and simple. As used in modern language for conceited and
precious language in general, the term has only a very partial application
to its original, or to that original's author. Indeed Lyly's vocabulary,
except occasionally in his similes, is decidedly vernacular, and he very
commonly mingles extremely homely words with his highest flights. No better
specimen of him can be given than from the aforesaid letter commendatory to
the _Hecatompathia_.
"My good friend, I have read your new passions, and they have
renewed mine old pleasures, the which brought to me no less
delight than they have done to your self-commendations. And
certes had not one of mine eyes about serious affairs been
watchful, both by being too busy, had been wanton: such is the
nature of persuading pleasure, that it melteth the marrow before
it scorch the skin and burneth before it warmeth. Not unlike unto
the oil of jet, which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the
flesh, or the scarab flies which enter into the root and never
touch the fruit.
"And whereas you desire to have my opinion, you may imagine that
my stomach is rather cloyed than queasy, and therefore mine
appetite of less force than my affection, fearing rather a
surfeit of sweetness than desiring a satisfying. The repeating of
love wrought in me a semblance of liking; but searching the very
veins of my heart I could find nothing but a broad scar where I
left a deep wound: and loose strings where I tied hard knots: and
a table of steel where I framed a plot of wax.
"Whereby I noted that young swans are grey, and the old white,
young trees tender and the old tough, young men amorous, and,
growing in years, either wiser or warier. The coral plant in the
water is a soft weed, on the land a hard stone: a sword frieth in
the fire like a black eel; but laid in earth like white snow:
the heart in love is altogether passionate; but free from desire
altogether careless.
"But it is not my intent to inveigh against love, which women
account but a bare word and men reverence as the best God. Only
this I would add without offence to gentlewomen, that were not
men more superstitious in their praises than women are constant
in their passions love would either be worn out of use, or men
out of love, or women out of lightness. I can condemn none but by
conjecture, nor commend any but by lying, yet suspicion is as
free as thought, and as far as I can see as necessary as
credulity.
"Touching your mistress I must needs think well, seeing you have
written so well, but as false glasses shew the fairest faces so
fine gloses amend the baddest fancies. Appelles painted the
phoenix by hearsay not by sight, and Lysippus engraved Vulcan
with a straight leg whom nature framed with a poult foot, which
proveth men to be of greater affection their [then? = than]
judgment. But in that so aptly you have varied upon women I will
not vary from you, so confess I must, and if I should not, yet
mought I be compelled, that to love would be the sweetest thing
in the earth if women were the faithfulest, and that women would
be more constant if men were more wise.
"And seeing you have used me so friendly as to make me acquainted
with your passions, I will shortly make you privy to mine which I
would be loth the printer should see, for that my fancies being
never so crooked he would put them into straight lines unfit for
my humour, necessary for his art, who setteth down blind in as
many letters as seeing.[16]--Farewell."
[16] "Blinde" with the _e_ according to the old spelling having six
letters, the same number as seeing. This curious epistle is both in style
and matter an epitome of _Euphues_, which had appeared some three years
before.
Many efforts have been made to discover some model for Lyly's oddities.
Spanish and Italian influences have been alleged, and there is a special
theory that Lord Berners's translations have the credit or discredit of the
paternity. The curious similes are certainly found very early in Spanish,
and may be due to an Eastern origin. The habit of overloading the sentence
with elaborate and far-fetched language, especially with similes, may also
have come from the French _rhetoriqueurs_ already mentioned--a school of
pedantic writers (Chastellain, Robertet, Cretin, and some others being the
chief) who flourished during the last half of the fifteenth century and the
first quarter of the sixteenth, while the latest examples of them were
hardly dead when Lyly was born. The desire, very laudably felt all over
Europe, to adorn and exalt the vernacular tongues, so as to make them
vehicles of literature worthy of taking rank with Latin and Greek,
naturally led to these follies, of which euphuism in its proper sense was
only one.
Michael Drayton, in some verse complimentary to Sidney, stigmatises not
much too strongly Lyly's prevailing faults, and attributes to the hero of
Zutphen the purification of England from euphuism. This is hardly critical.
That Sidney--a young man, and a man of fashion at the time when Lyly's
oddities were fashionable--should have to a great extent (for his
resistance is by no means absolute) resisted the temptation to imitate
them, is very creditable. But the influence of _Euphues_ was at least as
strong for many years as the influence of the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology_;
and the chief thing that can be said for Sidney is that he did not wholly
follow Lyly to do evil. Nor is his positive excellence in prose to be
compared for a moment with his positive excellence in poetry. His life is
so universally known that nothing need be said about it beyond reminding
the reader that he was born, as Lyly is supposed to have been, in 1554;
that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Viceroy of Ireland, and
of Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the luckless Dudley, Duke of
Northumberland; that he was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church,
travelled much, acquiring the repute of one of the most accomplished
cavaliers of Europe, loved without success Penelope Devereux ("Stella"),
married Frances Walsingham, and died of his wounds at the battle of
Zutphen, when he was not yet thirty-two years old. His prose works are the
famous pastoral romance of the _Arcadia_, written to please his sister, the
Countess of Pembroke, and the short _Apology for Poetry_, a very spirited
piece of work, immediately provoked by a rather silly diatribe against the
theatre by one Stephen Gosson, once a playwright himself, but turned
Puritan clergyman. Both appear to have been written about the same
time--that is to say, between 1579 and 1581; Sidney being then in London
and in the society of Spenser and other men of letters.
The amiability of Sidney's character, his romantic history, the exquisite
charm of his verse at its best, and last, not least, the fact of his
enthusiastic appreciation and patronage of literature at a time when
literary men never failed to give aristocratic patrons somewhat more than
_quid pro quo_, have perhaps caused his prose work to be traditionally a
little overvalued. The _Apology for Poetry_ is full of generous ardour,
contains many striking and poetical expressions, and explains more than any
other single book the secret of the wonderful literary production of the
half-century which followed. The _Arcadia_, especially when contrasted with
_Euphues_, has the great merit of abundant and stirring incident and
interest, of freedom from any single affectation so pestering and
continuous as Lyly's similes, and of constant purple patches of poetical
description and expression, which are indeed not a little out of place in
prose, but which are undeniably beautiful in themselves. But when this is
said all is said. Enthusiastic as Sidney's love for poetry and for
literature was, it was enthusiasm not at all according to knowledge. In the
_Apology_, by his vindication of the Unities, and his denunciation of the
mixture of tragedy and comedy, he was (of course without knowing it) laying
down exactly the two principles, a fortunate abjuration and scouting
whereof gave us the greatest possession in mass and variety of merit that
any literature possesses--the Elizabethan drama from Shakespere and Marlowe
to Ford and Shirley. Follow Sidney, and good-bye to _Faustus_, to _Hamlet_,
to _Philaster_, to _The Duchess of Malfi_, to _The Changeling_, to _The
Virgin Martyr_, to _The Broken Heart_. We must content ourselves with
_Gorboduc_ and _Cornelia_, with _Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_, at the very
best with _Sejanus_ and _The Silent Woman_. Again Sidney commits himself in
this same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verse
is "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton,
whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the _Arcadia_ by
calling it a "vain and amatorious poem." It is a poem in prose, which is as
much as to say, in other words, that it unites the faults of both kinds.
Nor is Sidney less an enemy (though a "sweet enemy" in his own or Bruno's
words) of the minor and more formal graces of style. If his actual
vocabulary is not Latinised, or Italianised, or Lylyfied, he was one of the
greatest of sinners in the special Elizabethan sin of convoluting and
entangling his phrases (after the fashion best known in the mouths of
Shakespere's fine gentlemen), so as to say the simplest thing in the least
simple manner. Not Osric nor Iachimo detests the _mot propre_ more than
Sidney. Yet again, he is one of the arch offenders in the matter of
spoiling the syntax of the sentence and the paragraph. As has been observed
already, the unpretending writers noticed above, if they have little
harmony or balance of phrase, are seldom confused or breathless. Sidney was
one of the first writers of great popularity and influence (for the
_Arcadia_ was very widely read) to introduce what may be called the
sentence-and-paragraph-heap, in which clause is linked on to clause till
not merely the grammatical but the philosophical integer is hopelessly lost
sight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. It is not that he could
not do better; but that he seems to have taken no trouble not to do worse.
His youth, his numerous avocations, and the certainty that he never
formally prepared any of his work for the press, would of course be ample
excuses, even if the singular and seductive beauty of many scraps
throughout this work did not redeem it. But neither of the radical
difference in nature and purpose between prose and verse, nor of the due
discipline and management of prose itself, does Sidney seem to have had the
slightest idea. Although he seldom or never reaches the beauties of the
_flamboyant_ period of prose, which began soon after his death and filled
the middle of the seventeenth century, he contains examples of almost all
its defects; and considering that he is nearly the first writer to do this,
and that his writings were (and were deservedly) the favourite study of
generous literary youth for more than a generation, it is scarcely
uncharitable to hold him directly responsible for much mischief. The faults
of _Euphues_ were faults which were certain to work their own cure; those
of the _Arcadia_ were so engaging in themselves, and linked with so many
merits and beauties, that they were sure to set a dangerous example. I
believe, indeed, that if Sidney had lived he might have pruned his style
not a little without weakening it, and then the richness of his imagination
would probably have made him the equal of Bacon and the superior of
Raleigh. But as it is, his light in English prose (we shall speak and speak
very differently of his verse hereafter) was only too often a
will-o'-the-wisp. I am aware that critics whom I respect have thought and
spoken in an opposite sense, but the difference comes from a more important
and radical difference of opinion as to the nature, functions, and
limitations of English prose. Sidney's style may be perhaps best
illustrated by part of his Dedication; the narrative parts of the _Arcadia_
not lending themselves well to brief excerpt, while the _Apology_ is less
remarkable for style than for matter.
_To my dear Lady and Sister, the Countess of Pembroke._
"Here have you now, most dear, and most worthy to be most dear,
lady, this idle work of mine; which, I fear, like the spider's
web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than wove to any
other purpose. For my part, in very truth, as the cruel fathers
among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not
foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert
of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you
desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute
commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you
keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh
errors in the balance of good will, I hope, for the father's
sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in
itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is
not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear
self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of
paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto
you as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well
stayed as I would it were, and shall be when God will, having
many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way
delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be
that they came in than that they gat out. But his[17] chief
safety shall be the walking abroad; and his chief protection the
bearing the livery of your name, which, if much good will do not
deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender.
This say I because I know thy virtue so; and this say I because
it may be for ever so, or, to say better, because it will be for
ever so."
[17] Apparently = the book's.
The difference referred to above is again well exemplified by the
difference of opinions on the style of Hooker as compared with that of
Sidney. Hooker wrote considerably later than the other authors here
criticised, but his work is so distinctly the climax of the style started
by Ascham, Cheke, and their fellows (the style in which English was
carefully adapted to literary purposes for which Latin had been previously
employed, under the general idea that Latin syntax should, on the whole,
rule the new literary medium), that this chapter would be incomplete
without a notice of him. For the distinguished writers who were
contemporary with his later years represent, with rare and only partly
distinguished exceptions, not a development of Hooker, but either a
development of Sidney or a fresh style, resulting from the blending in
different proportions of the academic and classical manner with the
romantic and discursive.
The events of Hooker's neither long nor eventful life are well-known from
one of the earliest of standard biographies in English--that of Izaak
Walton. He was born at Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, in 1554(?). Though he
was fairly connected, his parents were poor, and he was educated as a Bible
clerk at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He entered here in 1567, and for
some fifteen years Oxford was his home, latterly as Fellow and Lecturer of
Corpus. The story of his marriage is slightly pathetic, but more than
slightly ludicrous, and he appears to have been greatly henpecked as well
as obliged to lead an uncongenial life at a country living. In 1585 he was
made Master of the Temple, and held that post for seven years,
distinguishing himself both as a preacher and a controversialist. But
neither was this his vocation; and the last nine years of his life were
spent, it would seem more congenially, in two other country livings, first
in Wiltshire, then in Kent. He died in 1600. The first four books of the
_Ecclesiastical Polity_ were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. The last
three books, published after his death, lie under grave suspicion of having
been tampered with. This, however, as the unquestionably genuine portion
is considerable in bulk, is a matter rather of historical and theological
than of purely literary interest. Hooker himself appears to have been
something like the popular ideal of a student: never so happy as when pen
in hand, and by no means fitted for the rougher kind of converse with his
fellow-men, still less for the life of what is commonly called a man of the
world.
But in the world of literature he is a very great man indeed. Very few
theological books have made themselves a place in the first rank of the
literature of their country, and if the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ has done
so, it has certainly not done so without cause. If there has been a certain
tendency on the part of strong partisans of the Anglican Church to
overestimate the literary and philosophical merit of this book, which may
be called the first vernacular defence of the position of the English
Church, that has been at least compensated by partisan criticism on the
other side. Nor is there the least fear that the judgment of impartial
critics will ever deprive Hooker of the high rank generally accorded to
him. He is, of course, far from being faultless. In his longer sentences
(though long sentences are by no means the rule with him) he often falls
into that abuse of the classical style which the comparatively jejune
writers who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifested
itself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries--the abuse of
treating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflected
language, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender and
number help to connect adjective with substantive, and relative with
antecedent. Sometimes, though less often, he distorts the natural order of
the English in order to secure the Latin desideratum of finishing with the
most emphatic and important words of the clause. His subject leads and
almost forces him to an occasional pedantry of vocabulary, and in the
region which is not quite that of form nor quite that of matter, he
sometimes fails in co-ordinating his arguments, his facts, and his
citations, and in directing the whole with crushing force at his enemy. His
argument occasionally degenerates into mere illustration; his logic into
mere rhetoric.
But when all these things are admitted, the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ remains
a book in which matter and manner are wedded as in few other books of the
same kind. The one characteristic which has been admitted by Hooker's
faintest praisers as well as by his warmest--the golden moderation and
judiciousness of his argument--is perhaps rather calculated to extort
esteem than to arouse admiration. Moderation, like other kinds of probity,
_laudatur et alget_: the adversary is not extremely grateful for not being
pushed to extremity, and those on the same side would at least excuse a
little more vehemence in driving advantages home. But Hooker has other
qualities which are equally estimable and more shining. What especially
distinguishes him from the literary point of view is his almost unique
faculty of diversifying dry and technical argument with outbursts of
rhetoric. These last are not mere purple patches; they do not come in with
the somewhat ostentatious usherment and harbingery which, for instance,
laid the even more splendid bursts of Jeremy Taylor open to the sharp
sarcasm of South. There is nothing theatrical about them; they rise quite
naturally out of the level of discussion and sink into it again, with no
sudden stumble or drop. Nor are they ever (like some of Sidney's poetical
excrescences) tags and hemistichs of unwritten sonnets or songs stuck in
anyhow upon the prose. For instance, Sidney writes: "About the time when
the candles had begun to inherit the sun's office." Now this in a somewhat
quaint and conceited fashion of verse would be excellent. It would also be
excellent in burlesque, and in such prose as Browne's it might conquer its
place victoriously. But except in such a context (which Sidney cannot
weave) it is a _rococo_ ornament, a tawdry beautification. Compare with it
any of the celebrated passages of Hooker, which may be found in the extract
books--the encomium on law, the admirable passage, not so admirable indeed
in the context as it might be but still admirable, about angels, the
vindication of music in the church service. Here the expression, even at
its warmest, is in no sense poetical, and the flight, as it is called,
connects itself with and continues and drops into the ordinary march of
argument in the most natural and imperceptible manner. The elevated
passages of Hooker's style resemble more than anything else those
convenient exploits common, probably, in most persons' dreams, in which the
dreamer, without any trouble to himself or any apparent surprise in those
about him, lifts himself from the ground and skims or soars as he pleases,
sure that he can return to earth also when he pleases, and without any
shock. The speculators on the causes of beauty, admiration, and the like
have sometimes sought them in contrast first of all, and it has been
frequently noticed that the poets who charm us most are those who know how
to alternate pity and terror. There is something of the same sort in these
variations of the equable procession of Hooker's syllogisms, these
flower-gardens scattered, if not in the wilderness, yet in the humdrum
arable ground of his collections from fathers and philosophers, his
marshallings of facts and theories against the counter-theories of
Cartwright and Travers. Neither before him nor in his time, nor for
generations after him--scarcely, indeed, till Berkeley--did any one arise
who had this profound and unpretentious art of mixing the useful with the
agreeable. Taylor--already mentioned as inferior to Hooker in one respect,
however superior he may be in the splendour of his rhetoric--is again and
still more inferior to him in the parts that are not ornamental, in the
pedestrian body of his controversy and exposition. As a mere
controversialist, Hooker, if not exactly a Hobbes or a Bentley, if not even
a Chillingworth, is not likely to be spoken of without respect by those who
understand what evidence means. If he sometimes seems to modern readers to
assume his premisses, the conclusions follow much more rigidly than is
customary with a good many of our later philosophers, who protest against
the assumption of premisses; but having so protested neglect the ambiguity
of terms, and leave their middles undistributed, and perpetrate illicit
process with a gaiety of heart which is extremely edifying, or who fancy
that they are building systems of philosophy when they are in reality
constructing dictionaries of terms. But his argument is of less concern to
us here than the style in which he clothes it, and the merit of that is
indisputable, as a brief extract will show.
"As therefore man doth consist of different and distinct parts,
every part endued with manifold abilities which all have their
several ends and actions thereunto referred; so there is in this
great variety of duties which belong to men that dependency and
order by means whereof, the lower sustaining always the more
excellent and the higher perfecting the more base, they are in
their times and seasons continued with most exquisite
correspondence. Labours of bodily and daily toil purchase freedom
for actions of religious joy, which benefit these actions requite
with the gift of desired rest--a thing most natural and fit to
accompany the solemn festival duties of honour which are done to
God. For if those principal works of God, the memory whereof we
use to celebrate at such times, be but certain tastes and
says,[18] as it were, of that final benefit wherein our perfect
felicity and bliss lieth folded up, seeing that the presence of
the one doth direct our cogitations, thoughts, and desires
towards the other, it giveth surely a kind of life and addeth
inwardly no small delight to those so comfortable anticipations,
especially when the very outward countenance of that we presently
do representeth, after a sort, that also whereunto we tend. As
festival rest doth that celestial estate whereof the very
heathens themselves, which had not the means whereby to apprehend
much, did notwithstanding imagine that it must needs consist in
rest, and have therefore taught that above the highest movable
sphere there is no thing which feeleth alteration, motion, or
change; but all things immutable, unsubject to passion, blest
with eternal continuance in a life of the highest perfection, and
of that complete abundant sufficiency within itself which no
possibility of want, maim, or defect, can touch."
[18] "Assays."
Hooker's defects have been already admitted, and it has to be added to them
that he was necessarily destitute of much useful vocabulary which his
successors inherited or added, and that he had absolutely no model of
style. What he lacked was the audacity to be, not like Sidney more flowery,
not like the contemporary pamphleteers more slangy, but more intelligently
vernacular; to follow in the mould of his sentences the natural order of
English speech rather than the conventional syntax of Latin, and to
elaborate for himself a clause-architecture or order, so to speak, of
word-building, which should depend upon the inherent qualities of euphony
and rhythm possessed by English. It is, however, quite certain that nothing
was further from Hooker's thoughts than the composition of English
literature merely as English literature. He wanted to bring a certain
subject under the notice of readers of the vulgar tongue, and being before
all things a scholar he could not help making a scholarly use of that
tongue. The wonder is that, in his circumstances and with his purposes,
with hardly any teachers, with not a great stock of verbal material, and
with little or no tradition of workmanship in the art, he should have
turned out such admirable work.
It would be interesting to dwell on the prose of Fulke Greville, Sidney's
friend, who long outlived him, and who anticipated not a little of that
magnificence of the prose of his later contemporaries, beside which I have
ventured to suggest that Sidney's own is sometimes but _rococo_. A place
ought to be given to Richard Knolles, who deserves, if not the name of the
first historian of England, certainly the credit of making, in his _History
of the Turks_ (1604), a step from the loose miscellany of the chronicle to
the ordered structure of the true historic style. Some would plead for
Richard Mulcaster, whose work on education and especially on the teaching
of the English tongue in his _Positions_ and _First Part of the Elementary_
(1582) is most intimately connected with our general subject. But there is
no room for more than a mention of these, or for further dwelling on the
translators already glanced at and others, the most important and
influential of whom was John Florio, the Englisher (1603) of Montaigne.