ELIZABETHAN PROSE--TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS--ROGER ASCHAM--HIS
BOOKS AND STYLE--WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM--THE SENTENCE--EUPHUISM--THE
‘ARCADIA’--SIDNEY’S STYLE--SHORT STORIES--NASH’S ‘UNFORTUNATE
TRAVELLER’--NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS--MARTIN MARPRELATE--ORIGIN
OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS--THE ‘DIOTREPHES’--COURSE OF THE
CONTROVERSY--ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY--HOOKER--‘THE
ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.’
[SN: _Elizabethan prose._]
The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the
period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry
and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some
of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true
that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and
were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon,
belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their
greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and
Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very great
name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around
him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or
curious--anything, in fact, but great--and of not a few of them it has
to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable.
The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is
not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to
contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or
their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly
mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style
and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing
_Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, or _Have with you to Saffron Walden_,
or _The Unfortunate Traveller_. We shall be better able to make a
survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in
England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style,
and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be
dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate.
[SN: _Two schools of writers._]
If this classification, then, is permitted, we may divide the
Elizabethan prose-writers into those whose aim it was to give “English
matter in the English tongue for Englishmen,” and those who strove for
something better, more ornate, lofty, peculiar, and, as they held,
more literary, than was to be reached by the pursuit of this modest
purpose. The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham, who,
however, belonged to an earlier generation, though he died in the
queen’s reign, and part of his work was published after his death.
The great exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the
followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which
is not in Ascham. The _enredados razones_--the roundabout affectations
of the authors of the Spanish _Libros de Caballerías_--may have had
some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino
were much read and imitated by some who also “parled Euphues.” But the
distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who,
having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the
other were those who, whether they had something to say or whether
they were simply determined to be talking, were careful to give their
utterances some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable to
become pedestrian, the second were threatened by an obvious danger.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
the writer who has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk the
bull, to escape sheer affectation--which affectation, again, is in the
great majority of cases a trick, a juggle with words repeated over and
over again.
The prose which was first written for literary purposes in Elizabeth’s
time was an inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain
downright style of Ascham--the style of a man who thought in Latin, and
turned it into good current English.
[SN: _Webbe and Puttenham._]
Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham
do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s _Discourse of
English Poetrie_, printed in 1586, or the _Arte of English Poesie_,
published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614,
are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important
place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The
_Arte of English Poesie_ is indeed a very sane and thorough critical
treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan
writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their
time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form.
The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for
elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound
words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous,
no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade,
but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is Brantôme’s excuse for
the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring
deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought
naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling
in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian.
[SN: _The sentence._] Their general inability to confine themselves
to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much,
and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange.
Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the
light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware
of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of
Martin Marprelate’s _Epistle_ may have been--Penry, Udall, Barrow,
or another--he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne
men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of
clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s _Defence
of the Government of the Church of England_. “And learned brother
Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath
before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page
69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time,
you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great
part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as
the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not
ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites
had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause
never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with
tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c.,
and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists,
and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying,
and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those
gifts or graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the grace of
God’s election to be of necessity to salvation.’”
The Dean’s meaning reveals itself at the third or fourth reading, but
this is the style of Mrs Nickleby. Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and
noted on the margin, “Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it again,”
as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges is no authority in English
literature, but he was a learned man, and must have had some practice
in preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion which at any
time after the seventeenth century would have been a proof either of
extreme ignorance, or of some such defect of power to express himself
as accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean Bridges shows only
the disastrous consequences of that disregard of the proper limit of
the sentence which was common with some of the greatest writers of
his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s
account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins
admirably: “All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes
were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest
hurt.” Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] “Sir
Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make
resistance having endured in this fifteen hours’ fight, the assault of
fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation
eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and
entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the
enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge not able
to move one way or other but as she was moved with the waves and billow
of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most
resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might
remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many hours’
fight, and with so great a navy they were not able to take her, having
had fifteen hours’ time, fifteen thousand men, and fifty and three sail
of men of war to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or as
many as he could induce to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy
of none else, but as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so
many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation,
by prolonging their own lives for a few hours or a few days.”
This is the style of a writer who does not know when a sentence
has come to an end, and who, when he writes one which is properly
constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible
than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies at least partly in
this, that Raleigh had the easier task to perform. He had only to state
facts, not to expound doctrine.
While making allowance for the inward and spiritual cause of the
invasion of English by the long, confused, overladen sentence, it must
also be confessed that the evil was largely due to the prevalence of
affected styles of writing, which lent themselves to over-elaboration.
Two bad models were set before Englishmen about the middle of the
queen’s reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long,
exceedingly popular--Lyly’s euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style
of Sidney’s _Arcadia_, to which no name has ever been given. The lives
of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their
style, as shown in their stories, and its effect on English literature,
are the matters in hand. Euphuism and the manner of the _Arcadia_
appear to have been elaborated by their authors about the same time,
though Lyly takes precedence in the order of publication. _Euphues, the
Anatomy of Wit_, was printed in 1579, _Euphues and his England_ in the
following year.[79]
[SN: _Euphuism._]
Euphuism has become a name for literary affectation, and is in that
sense often used with very little precision. It is a very peculiar form
of affectation. The two main features of the style--the mechanical
antitheses and the abuse of similes--have been described already.
_Euphues_, in so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught. The
hero from whom it takes its name is the grandfather of all virtuous,
solemn, and didactic prigs. He makes two excursions into the world
from his native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at Naples to
jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her most justly jilted in turn.
He floods southern Italy with antithetical platitude, and retires to
Athens. Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where the second,
after philandering with one lady, marries another. Euphues remains
didactic and superior. At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra.
There is a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second
part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her time as high
as Shakespeare’s plays and the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. There are
also pages of such matter as this: “But as the cypress-tree the more
it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped
the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave
advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth
to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as
that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile.” Unbridled
youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for
the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and
watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which was unbridled
enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and
grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated
him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside
the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was
an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book
heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that
a time which loved _Tamburlaine_ and produced the great lyric, should
also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps,
again, it is not so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan time
a liking for what looked superior to the common herd. About the Court
there was much foppery, and there were many who wished to resemble
the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviving morality of the
age, compatible as it was with much individual profligacy, made men
respectful of virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward VI.
and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII. close behind them, it
was as yet hardly the case that “the cardinal virtues were to be taken
for granted among English gentlemen.” Surrey may have been jesting
when he told his sister to make herself the king’s mistress, but what
a society that must have been in which a brother, and he “a mirror of
chivalry,” thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly was very moral, a fop
to his fingers’ ends, and with all his oddity and his pedantry, there
is a real, though very artificial, distinction about him. Finally,
there were as yet few and insignificant rivals. It is not then at all
surprising that his style was taken up at Court as “the thing,” and
accepted by the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snobbery, of
the outer world.
Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence
(for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula,
“As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,”
can make it. [SN: _The_ Arcadia.] With Sidney’s _Arcadia_[80] we come
to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was
written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please
his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a
_précieuse_, and who was all her life the centre of some literary
coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were
towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen.
The _Arcadia_, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have
been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written
by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The
date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was
not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a
fragment, though a large one. The _Arcadia_ is much longer than the
“tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account
the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is
also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it
as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it
is much more a _Libro de Caballerías_. There is a pastoral element
in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de
Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly
Deeds”--challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of
cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single
arm of the knight. There are wicked knights who drag off ladies on
the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue
these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere
the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the
_Amadis_ or the _Palmerin_. It is a very entangled book, and is not
made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as
an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does
achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his
reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of
the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain
and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has
also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious
morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are
either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most
shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them.
[SN: _Sidney’s style._]
The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its
style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all
fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible
to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for Góngora
without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and
the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the
number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at
least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form
of affectation by the _Libros de Caballerías_, published from thirty
to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as
these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady,
the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness
of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life
consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning
and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and
fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the
inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances
of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base
person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be
without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s _Don Quixote_,
and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The
reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth
so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your
beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie
you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts
that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]
We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of
imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings
the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later
authors of _Libros de Caballerías_. Yet the juggle on the two forces
of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate
success of _Don Quixote_ in England may be explained not only by the
permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our
examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of
labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and
counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences,
while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which
Sidney abounds.
[SN: _Short Stories._]
Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations of the Italians,
and notably Bandello, with imitations of _Euphues_ and the Pastorals,
were common in Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps because it suffered
from the overpowering rivalry of poetry and the stage, the prose
tale is rarely among the good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and
Breton[82] are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said, with
any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the
English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time,
but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too
soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash’s
_Unfortunate Traveller_, to which attention has again been attracted
of late. It is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic
force should have put the model of the _Novela de Pícaros_ before
English readers five years earlier than the publication of _Guzman
de Alfarache_ in Spain, and that it should have been so completely
forgotten that when this model was again introduced among us by Defoe,
his inspiration came from Le Sage.[83]
[SN: _Nash’s_ Unfortunate Traveller.]
Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known as a pamphleteer,
published _The Unfortunate Traveller_ in 1594. It is difficult to read,
at any rate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt that the
author had seen, if not the original of the _Lazarillo de Tormes_, then
at any rate the French version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If
his work is quite independent, then we have a very remarkable instance
of exact similarity in the method and spirit of two writers separated
from one another in race and by an interval of nearly half a century,
during which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity. This is difficult
to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo’s doings than the tricks
which Nash’s hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and
the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when
the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash
wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and the
Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero’s love-affairs
with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at
Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his
“courtezan,” and gives himself out to be the Earl of Surrey. From the
time the hero and Diamante reach Rome the picaresque tone disappears,
and Nash drops into familiar Elizabethan “blood and thunder.” With the
inconsequence of his time he gives at the end a defiant last dying
speech and confession of an Italian malefactor, who bears the English
name of Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an air there
is about it of being hasty work done to make a little money, injured
its effect. Yet _The Unfortunate Traveller_ did show Englishmen a way
they were to follow in the future, and it came before the _Guzman de
Alfarache_.
[SN: _Nash and the pamphleteers._]
Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and
certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan
men of letters. He was born at Lowestoft, “a son of the manse,” in
1567, and was educated at St John’s, Cambridge. It has been supposed
on the strength of some passages in his writings that he travelled
abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his _Unfortunate
Traveller_ like a man who had seen Venice and Rome. He was settled
in London by 1588, and lived the very necessitous life of a man of
letters who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death in 1601.
It was the misfortune of Nash and of many of his contemporaries that
they were born too soon for the magazine or newspaper. His work
consists mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes of the
time. _Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, a long, wordy, and decidedly
pretentious collection of preachment, and denunciation of the sins
of London, his violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with
the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in pamphlets for the
amusement of the world, his collection of ghost stories, _The Terrors
of the Night_, and what he called _Toys for Gentlemen_, which are lost,
and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were
journalism before its time. His _Have with you to Saffron Walden_, a
piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey,
is an excellent pamphlet of its kind--in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr
Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called _A wonderful strange and
miraculous Astronomical Prognostication_, though undoubtedly suggested
by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn
fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas
of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which
also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial
manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the
fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful
things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the
Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud
enough some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their youth and
primitive simplicity of nature that when they were angry they gave way
to the instinct which leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with
no regard to their application to the subject. To call a very eminent
man on his trial for treason--and on the most flimsy evidence too--“a
spider of hell” would now be thought not less silly than ignoble.
But that is what Coke called Raleigh, and it is a very fair specimen
of Elizabethan satirical controversy. Around Nash was a whole class
of men engaged in the same work of writing little stories--pastoral
or euphuistic--and pamphlets moral, satirical, political, which were
often in verse. When they dealt with the low life of London, as in
the case of Dekker (1570?-1641?), they possess a certain value as
illustrations of contemporary manners. It is curious, when their bulk
and their popularity are considered, that no London printer thought of
bringing out a miscellany of them at regular intervals. He would have
found abundant matter ready to his hand, and the magazine, if not the
newspaper, would have been founded at once.
[SN: _Martin Marprelate._]
One section of the pamphlet literature of the time possesses an
enduring interest, if not for its intrinsic value, though that is not
inconsiderable, then for historical reasons. This was the famous Martin
Marprelate controversy, which was not the first example of an appeal
to the people by the press on religious and political questions, for
that had been done on the Continent by the Huguenots, but was the
earliest effective instance among us. It grew out of the conflict
between the Church, which was fighting for uniformity with the hearty
support of the queen--at least from the day on which she found her
power sufficiently established to allow her to disregard the Calvinist
princes of the Continent--and a body of Englishmen who were desirous
to adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model.[84] According to our view
the question was one to be argued peacefully, and those who could not
believe the same things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not
the opinion of any country, or of either side in the sixteenth century.
The Puritans were as convinced of the need for uniformity as the Church
or the Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it with no sparing
hand if they had had the power. They complained quite as bitterly of
the toleration which they alleged was shown to the Papists (who for
their part cried out loudly of persecution), as of the severities
exercised on themselves. As the power was with the bishops, those who
would not conform were expelled from the universities and from their
livings. The persecution to which they were subjected was enough to
exasperate, but not to crush, and the embittered Puritans cast about
for a weapon to use against their opponents. The pamphlet lay ready to
their hand.[85]
[SN: _Origin of the Marprelate Tracts._]
The chief dates in the controversy were these. In 1587 Dr John Bridges,
Dean of Salisbury, and afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published _A
Defence of the Government established in the Church of England for
Ecclesiastical Matters_, in answer to the Puritan controversialists
Cartwright and Travers--a very long, well-meant, and learned,
but lumbering book. Just at this time the Act of Uniformity was
pressing heavily on the Puritans. There were two who were especially
aggrieved,--John Udall, who had been expelled from his pulpit at
Kingston because, as his friends alleged, he had denounced a local
money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow
£100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or
about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded
title, which is called for short _The Equity of a Humble Supplication_.
It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected
state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained
one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State
prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might be represented to
be treasonable. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented to
leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality. The press was then
under censorship. Only two printers were allowed out of London--one
at Oxford, another at Cambridge. In London the number was limited. No
press could be held except by a member of the Stationers’ Company, and
any one could be confiscated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of
London had general powers of control as censor. Penry’s treatise was
suppressed, and he was in great peril.
Here then were two men, both angry, both able, both accustomed to
appeal directly to ignorant audiences with whom it was necessary to
make things clear. Both, too, were bold men, and honest in the sense
that they were ready to risk their lives for their cause. It would
have been strange if they had not seized on the pamphlet, as their
one remaining weapon against the bishops. [SN: _The_ Diotrephes.]
Udall began by publishing, in April 1588, his dialogue commonly called
_Diotrephes_.[86] The choice of the name was not the worst stroke of
satire in the controversy. Diotrephes was that person mentioned in the
ninth verse of the Third Epistle of St John “who loveth to have the
pre-eminence” and who “receiveth us not.” It was a great belief among
the Puritans that no minister should have authority over another, and
that the bishops who had “pre-eminence” were “antichrists” and “petty
popes.” The dialogue tells how a bishop, a papist, a money-lender, and
an innkeeper were all rebuked by Paul, a preacher. The usurer alone
shows signs of compunction, while the bishop goes off thirsting for
the blood of the saints, with the hearty approval of the papist,
and of the tavern-keeper, who explains that he lives by the vices of
his neighbours, and is like to be ruined by the preaching of such
men as Paul. This pamphlet was printed by John Waldegrave, a Puritan
printer in London, who was deprived of his licence in consequence. His
press was broken up, but he contrived to conceal a fount of type. A
printing-press was smuggled in by Penry, and a campaign of unlicensed
pamphlets was begun.
[SN: _Course of the controversy._]
The details are obscure. The names of the authors can only be guessed
at. The controversy lasted from the end of 1588 to the end of 1590.
At first the Puritans swept all before them. They had many friends
at Court, where indeed their doctrine that the bishops’ lands should
be taken and given to gentlemen who could serve the queen was not
likely “to want for favourable or attentive hearers.” Some country
gentlemen gave them help--notably Sir R. Knightley of Fawsley, in
Northamptonshire (always a Puritan county), and Job Throckmorton, who
appears to have been what we should now call a bitter anti-clerical.
The press was concealed by them in different parts of the country till
it was captured by the Earl of Derby. Penry was probably the leader of
the fight on the Puritan side. It began by the publication of Martin
Marprelate’s _Epistle_ directed against Dr John Bridges, in November
1588. This drew a grave _Admonition to the People of England_ from Dr
Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in or about January 1589. Martin
followed up his attack on Dr Bridges by the _Epitome_, printed before
the _Epistle_, but not issued till February of 1589. Then he turned on
the Bishop of Winchester in _Hay any Work for Cooper_.[87]
The success of those pamphlets was great. A well-known story tells how
when order was issued that they were not to be read, the Earl of Oxford
pulled one of them out of his pocket, and presented it to the queen.
Solemn “admonitions” were found to be too awkward in such a conflict,
and counter-pamphleteers were called in on the bishops’ side. This
part of the controversy is no less obscure than the other. It has been
guessed that Lyly and Nash struck in for the bishops. Both have been
credited with the authorship of a _Pappe with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond
for a Parrot_, which appeared respectively at the end of 1589 and the
beginning of 1590. They are now generally attributed to Lyly. Then
third parties struck in and denounced both houses, or endeavoured to
hush the clamour, by such appeals as _Plain Perceval the Peace-Maker of
England_.
Although they naturally fell into neglect so soon as the occasion
had passed, the Martin Marprelate pamphlets are of great importance
in the history of English literature. The euphuistic, pastoral, and
other tales of the time served a mere fashion of the day, and are
forgettable as well as forgotten. But when Martin Marprelate published
his unlicensed _Epistle_ he set an example which has been excellently
well followed. His pamphlet stands at the head of the long list which
includes the _Areopagitica_, the _Anatomy of an Equivalent_, the
_Public Spirit of the Whigs_, the _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_,
the _Letters of Junius_, the _Regicide Peace_, and it is not absurd
to say the _Reflections on the Revolution in France_, which is a very
long, great, and eloquent pamphlet, but a pamphlet still. The _Epistle_
and its immediate successors were not unworthy to be the beginners of
so vital a part of English literature.
“Si nous avions l’ambition d’être complet, et si c’était l’être que
de tout dire,” it would be necessary to examine all the pamphlets in
detail. But many are practically inaccessible, and there is so much
repetition among them that they can be adequately judged by selected
examples. The vital examples are those which set the model. On the
Puritan side there are four,--the _Diotrephes_, which, though strictly
speaking antecedent to Martin, gave tone and marked the lines, the
_Epistle_, the _Epitome_, and the _Hay any Work for Cooper_. The _Pappe
with a Hatchet_ and _An_ _Almond for a Parrot_ may stand as examples
of the anti-Martinist pamphlets. The peacemakers were of less account.
The proposition that there is a great deal to be said on both sides,
and the appeal “Why cannot you be reasonable?” may be full of good
sense, but they seldom inspire men to words or deeds of a decisive
character. Looking at the leading things on either side, one sees that
they have one feature in common. They are extremely unfair. But there
is a great difference in their way of being unjust, and on that depends
their literary value. The distinction is all to the honour of the
Puritan pamphlets. _Diotrephes_ shows both the doctrine and the spirit
of the writers. They started by laying down the law to the effect
that whoever exercises pre-eminence over his brethren in the ministry
is an “antichrist” and a “petty pope,” and that no church office not
explicitly mentioned in the New Testament is Christian. Therefore they
endeavoured to discredit the bishops by showing that they habitually
did such acts as an antichrist and petty pope might be expected to do.
We need not stop to argue that this was unjust. Of course it was, but
from the literary point of view the interesting question is, How was
the injustice worded? The Martin Marprelate men had a firm grip of the
pamphlet style. The ridicule they poured on the long-winded sentences
of Dr Bridges and Bishop Cooper shows that they were perfectly well
aware of the advantages of a simple direct manner. Their own sentences
are brief, and stab with a rapid alert movement. Their abuse is
furious, but it is seldom mere scream. “Sodden-headed ass” is bad
language, but if it is ever to be pardonable, it is when you have
caught your adversary reasoning badly, and this the Martinists at least
tried to do. It was indecent to call the Bishop of Winchester “Mistress
Cooper’s husband.” It is a foul hit to remind your opponent that his
wife is a profligate termagant, but more ingenuity is needed to do
that, by naming what it would have been more fair to pass in silence,
than merely to bawl the slang name for the husband of an unfaithful
wife, and apply it to a whole class of men at large. And Martin had
intelligence enough to understand that a show of fairness can be
effective. He could bring himself to allow that if John of Canterbury
(Dr Whitgift) did ever marry, he would no doubt choose a Christian
woman.
When we turn to the anti-Martinist pamphlets we find the same
unfairness of spirit, with little and often none of the cleverness and
the ingenious form. If Lyly wrote the _Pappe with a Hatchet_, he was
in a better place when he was in Euphues his lonely cave in Silexedra.
The elegance, real of its artificial kind, is gone, and in place of it
we get a loud vaunting howl of abuse. One-half of the qualification of
the “slating reviewer” was wanting to the anti-Martinists. They hated
the man, but they did not know the subject. The Royalist general who
answered Fairfax’s self-righteous boasting of the good discipline of
the Parliamentary soldiers by telling him that the Puritan had the sins
of the Devil, “which are spiritual pride and rebellion,” struck him
harder, and showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it has
been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable points, they bellow
bad language and accusations of the kind of misconduct from which the
Puritan was as free as the universal passions of humanity permitted.
The difference between the two may be quite fairly put this way. The
worst calumny of the Martinists can be quoted, but the anti-Martinists
are naught when they are not using language which is nearly as
unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of the Restoration.
The least nauseous passages are those in which these defenders of the
Church gloat over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife of
Ball the Hangman. Now Martin rarely goes beyond threatening the bishops
with a _premunire_, and when he does he stops at a “hemp collar.”
[SN: _Its place in literary history._] The Martin Marprelate men were
fighting in a now obsolete cause, in a style which has manifest faults
of taste and temper. But they were on the right path, they set the
example of pamphlet controversy from which the press was to come in
time, and they did it in a way which only needed amending. The author
of the _Anatomy of an Equivalent_ had learnt that when you have proved
your opponent to be “a sodden-headed ass,” it is superfluous to pelt
him with the name. Yet he was truly the successor of Martin, while the
line of the anti-Martinists ended in Ned Ward.
[SN: _Hooker._]
It is sometimes said that the Martinists were routed by Lyly and Nash,
which is certainly unfair to the Earl of Derby, and not quite just to
Ball the Hangman. As far as they were routed by literary weapons, the
honour of defeating them is due to a very different hand. The doctrine
of the Puritans was confuted in the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ of Richard
Hooker--the greatest masterpiece of Elizabethan prose.[88] Hooker was
born at Heavitree, near Exeter, in 1553. His family was poor, and,
like many of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kindness of
patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, and Edwin Sandys, then
Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of York, successively
protected him at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys’ sons. If Isaac Walton
was correctly informed, he was somewhat tamely annexed by a scheming
landlady as husband for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship
upon his marriage in 1584, and was appointed to the living of Drayton
Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In the following year he was appointed
Master of the Temple. Here he became widely known by a controversy
with the Puritan Walter Travers, conducted on both sides with more
moderation than was usual in those times. After holding the Mastership
for seven years, he resigned it for a living in Wiltshire. He died at
Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, in 1600.
[SN: _The_ Ecclesiastical Polity.]
In the chapter of his _Constitutional History_ which deals with
Elizabeth’s laws against the Non-Conformists, Mr Hallam has written:
“But while these scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of
sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the bosom of the
English Church, she found a defender of her institutions in one who
mingled in these vulgar controversies like a knight of romance among
caitiff brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be proved
in a nobler field.” If this sentence is to be understood to mean--as
from the context it perhaps must--that Hooker mingled in the Martin
Marprelate conflict, it is inaccurate. He answered Cartwright and
Travers, as Dr Bridges had done, and whatever may be said of these
men it would be silly to call them caitiff brawlers, while it would
be difficult to say what nobler field Hooker could have found for
his arms than that in which he justified the faith and religious
practices of Englishmen. Yet Mr Hallam has fairly singled out the
predominant characteristic of Hooker. There is something knightly about
him, something of the chivalry of Sir Galahad. He could strike with
telling force, as he does in the one passage of fine scorn devoted
to the jeering Puritan pamphlets--beside which all the scolding of
their proper opponents is mere brutal noise. Yet what prevails with
him so completely that the exceptions are hardly noticeable is the
moderation which has earned him his name of “Judicious.” It is not the
easy moderation of one who does not care much, but of a man who was
very convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The _Ecclesiastical
Polity_ is not chiefly valuable as a piece of reasoning. It has for one
thing not reached us complete. The first four books, which must have
been begun while he was at the Temple, were published in 1594. The long
fifth book appeared in 1597. The three, which make up the total number
of eight, were left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless,
if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted books were enough to
do Hooker’s work for the Church of England, and they did not do it by
presenting his readers with such a closely reasoned and compact system
as they might have found in the _Institutions_ of Calvin. Englishmen
have never cared much for consistency of system. It was enough for
them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and forms of Church
government to which they were accustomed, against the “Disciplinarians”
who condemned them for wanting the express authority of the New
Testament, by proving that they had prevailed among pious men of former
times, were in themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted by
sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good example, even if
they had no “divine right,” when they were imposed by authority. In
substance this was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had been
saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift and Bridges, and all the
defenders of the Establishment. But what they did by dry injunction
or laboured scholastic argument, Hooker did by persuasion, by pathos,
and by noble rhetoric. The criticism that he sometimes gives eloquence
where he ought to give argument, does not go far when the purpose of
his book is allowed for. It was not by logic that God elected to save
His Church in former centuries, nor yet in the sixteenth. In Hooker’s
case, as fully as in the case of any poet, literature vindicated
itself. The beauty of the style, always essentially pure English in
spite of an occasional Latin turn of the sentence, is the great merit
of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. The famous eloquent passages arise
naturally because they always correspond to the greater pathos, or
sanctity, or the deeper passion of that part of his subject which he
is handling at the moment. The Englishman stood between the Calvinist
on the one hand and the Roman Catholic on the other, both appealing to
him on religious grounds. There was a real danger that his own Church
would find nothing to tell him except that decency was decent, that he
had better not trouble himself about debatable matters he would never
understand, and that he must obey the Queen. If this was all it could
find to say, Englishmen who were concerned about religion--the majority
of thinking men, whether ignorant or learned--would assuredly have gone
either to Geneva or to Rome, while the unthinking mass alone would have
remained to the Church. In that case it would have gone down for ever
in the Civil War. From that fate it was saved by Hooker.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] These two sentences are reprinted as one by Petheram, but it is
obvious that the want of a full stop after “book” is a printer’s error.
No changes in the punctuation can reduce Dean Bridges to order. It
would be necessary to treat him as Cobbett did Castlereagh.
[78] _Last Fight of the Revenge_ in Arber’s English Reprints. I have
suppressed the full stop after “assaults and entries,” which is
plainly a printer’s error. Raleigh would have been as inarticulate as
Dr Bridges if he thought that a new sentence could begin at “and that
himself.” When the full stop is replaced by a comma, what we have is a
grammatical though overladen and redundant sentence.
[79] Arber’s English Reprints. John Lyly, M.A., _Euphues_. 1868.
[80] We still await a good edition of the _Arcadia_. The old are
numerous. Dr Sommer’s reprint (London, 1891) is useful.
[81] The first of these sentences hardly gives the full absurdity
of the Spanish. “La razon de la sinrazon que á mi razon se hace de
tal manera mi razon enflaquece, que con razon me quejo de la vuestra
fermosura”--_i.e._, “The cause of the wrong, which is done to my right,
so weakens my reason, that with reason I complain of your beauty.” The
Spaniard punned on the different meanings of the word _razon_. Accurate
translation does not diminish the likeness to Sidney, who must have
known the original.
[82] Greene and Breton have been reprinted by Dr Grosart. Lodge’s
_Euphues’ Golden Legacy_ is in the Shakespeare’s Library, vol. ii.
[83] Complete works of Thomas Nash, in six vols. Dr Grosart in “The
Huth Library,” 1883-1884. _Guzman de Alfarache_ was translated into
English by Mabbe, the translator of the _Celestina_, in 1623, and was
imitated in _The English Rogue_, but the inspiration for _Colonel Jack_
and _Moll Flanders_ did not come from either.
[84] The Puritan position is very clearly stated in John Udall’s
_Demonstration of Discipline_. Arber’s “English Scholar’s Library.”
[85] Maskell’s _History of the Martin Marprelate Controversy_, 1845,
and Mr Arber’s “Introduction,” give accounts of the conflict from very
different points of view. Mr Arber has reprinted Udall’s _Diotrephes_
and _Demonstration of Discipline_ in his “English Scholar’s Library.”
The chief among the succeeding tracts were reprinted in 1845-1846 by
Petheram under the title of _Puritan Discipline Tracts_.
[86] The full title is, “The state of the Church of England, laid
open in a Conference between Diotrephes a Bishop, Tertullus a Papist,
Demetrius a Usurer, Pandochus an Inn-Keeper, and Paul a Preacher of the
Word of God”; with quotations from Psalm cxxii. 6 and Revelations xiv.
9, 10. The titles of all these pamphlets are long, and commonly also
abusive.
[87] The titles of these pamphlets were very important parts of them,
and this may be quoted as an example: “Hay any Work for Cooper, or a
briefe Pistle directed by way of hublication to the reverend Byshopps,
counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up, for fear of
smelling in the nostrels of her Magestie and the State, that they would
use the advice of reverend Martin, for the providing of their Cooper.
Because the reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is meant either
the bouncing Parson of _Eastmeane_, or Tom Coakes his Chaplaine) hath
showne himself in his late Admonition to the people of England to bee
an unskilfull and deceytfull tub-trimmer. Wherein worthy Martin quits
himselfe like a man, I warrant you, in the modest defences of his self
and his learned Pistles, and makes the Cooper’s hoops to fly off, and
the Bishops’ tubs to leake out of all crye. Penned and compiled by
_Martin_ the Metropolitane. Printed in Europe, not farre from some of
the Bounsing Priests.”
[88] Works of Richard Hooker. Oxford, 1841.