heart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties--but how much more
thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!
Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and
Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise
for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life,
found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.
But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The
shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men's
eyes--unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular--to discover a
literature, and the finest in the world, which _habitually philosophised
life_: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk
reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty
chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking _Why?_
'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose?
his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers--call them the
gods, or whatever you will--that guide and thwart, provoke, madden,
control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good and
evil, life, love, death?'
These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an
answer--some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content
with the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature which
answered so differently--and having other reasons to suspect what the
Church said and did--grew aware that their literature had been as a child
at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death:
it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary.
So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way--to make their report
worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery--new literary forms had to
be invented--new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the verse
in which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then,
for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek,
which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other
languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet;
or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new
meanings; or lastly, to do all three together.
Well, it was done; and in verse very fortunately done; thanks of course
to many men, but thanks to two especially--to Sir Thomas Wyat, who led
our poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which Italy had cast
its classical heritage; and to Marlowe, who impressed blank verse upon
the drama. Of Marlowe I shall say nothing; for with what he achieved you
are familiar enough. Of Wyat I may speak at length to you, one of these
days; but here, to prepare you for what I hope to prove--that Wyat is one
of the heroes of our literature--I will give you three brief reasons why
we should honour his memory:--
(1) He led the way. On the value of that service I shall content myself
with quoting a passage from Newman:--
When a language has been cultivated in any particular department of
thought, and so far as it has been generally perfected, an existing
want has been supplied, and there is no need for further workmen. In
its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in it at all is
almost a work of genius. It is like crossing a country before roads are
made communicating between place and place. The authors of that age
deserve to be Classics both because of what they do and because they
can do it. It requires the courage and force of great talent to compose
in the language at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a
permanent impression on it.
This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened up a new country to
Englishmen. But he did more.
(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive that the lyric, if it would
philosophise life, love, and the rest, must boldly introduce the personal
note: since in fact when man asks questions about his fortune or destiny
he asks them most effectively in the first person. 'What am _I_ doing?
Why are _we_ mortal? Why do _I_ love _thee_?'
This again Wyat did: and again he did more.
For (3) thirdly--and because of this I am surest of his genius--again and
again, using new thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the result
in language so direct, economical, natural, easy, that I know to this day
no one who can better Wyat's best in combining straight speech with
melodious cadence. Take the lines _Is it possible?_--
Is it possible?
For to turn so oft;
To bring that lowest that was most aloft:
And to fall highest, yet to light soft?
Is it possible?
All is possible!
Whoso list believe;
Trust therefore first, and after preve;
As men wed ladies by licence and leave,
All is possible!
or again--
Forget not! O forget not this!--
How long ago hath been, and is,
The mind that never meant amiss:
Forget not yet!
or again (can personal note go straighter?)--
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay, say nay, for shame!
To save thee from the blame
--Of all my grief and grame.
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay! say nay!
(Say 'nay,' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative.')
No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, and
will read it to you in full--
What should I say?
Since Faith is dead
And Truth away
From you is fled?
Should I be led
With doubleness?
Nay! nay! mistress.
I promised you
And you promised me
To be as true
As I would be:
But since I see
Your double heart,
Farewell my part!
Thought for to take
Is not my mind;
But to forsake
One so unkind;
And as I find,
So will I trust,
Farewell, unjust!
Can ye say nay
But that you said
That I alway
Should be obeyed?
And--thus betrayed
Or that I wist!
Farewell, unkist!
I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History of
English Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to be
expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles,
continually falling but always pressing forward.' I know not to what
wiseacre we owe that pronouncement: but what do you think of it, after
the lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the same
volume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Principal of
the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us of
Wilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that
there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the
author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and
idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe.'
The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that
the earlier English poets of the period--Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder,
and the Earl of Surrey--drew their inspiration from Petrarch and
Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from
Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the
sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish
which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude
and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some
degeneration.
Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'
(Thought for to take
Is not my mind;
But to forsake
This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of
Scotland--
Farewell unkiss'd!)
But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left
myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come
to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--
Let me not to the marriage of true Minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
Which alters where it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using
the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,'
which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it
growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books:
and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.
The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent
convulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quantity
of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted
by the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the mass of it
clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost
intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I,
at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me
little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff
as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but
of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could
write at his average. For a sample:--
English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as
'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a
frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls
of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of
Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others,
while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their
beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner
parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the
French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than
they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any
authors of like argument.
This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties
our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously
propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our
present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the
time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.
Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say
something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon,
trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing
through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it
historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the
stature of the grown man to be.
These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham,
pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue
(yet with a sure instinct he does it):--
If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or
else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him,
that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one
of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And
as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in
them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary,
everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling,
that no man can do worse.
On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and
poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two
hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance;
Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.
For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting
thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were
alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they
were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a
rhythm for its periods.
And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there
befel a miracle.
You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Authorised
Version of the Bible.
I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made
straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you
that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius.
I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version
worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis.
Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I
cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not
multiply miracles _praeter necessitatem_; and when Tyndale has been
granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men--not one of
them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent--sat
in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of
work--improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old
committee-man that this is not the way of committees--that only by
miracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were
all good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean
and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellington
in St Paul's Cathedral; and you know what _they_ did. Individual genius
such as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, we
may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of
nature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone
steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with
genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that a
committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say,
should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant,
that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many
mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble
and aghast.
Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you
'courses of study' in English Literature never include the Authorised
Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away
the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent
compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?... I
wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy,
for example, more important somehow.
'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality...'
'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:
if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it
would utterly be contemned.'
'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.'
'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the
land that is very far off.'
'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert
from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.'
When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its
dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find
the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif,
Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The
Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national
style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so
harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble
men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan--have their lips touched and
speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars,--Milton, Sir Thomas
Browne--practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our
Bible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted,
or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the
Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The
precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly
clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this
'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump
our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as
it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in
everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.
What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose
thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years,
working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its
range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by
inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your words
through life as well as your hearts.
LECTURE VII
SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED
Thursday, May 29
Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It
ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would
write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to
learn from it, moreover, how by mastering _rhythm_, our Prose overcame
the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin
instrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man's thought
however sublime, his emotion however profound.
Now in the course of my remarks I happened--maybe a little
incautiously--to call the Authorised Version a 'miracle'; using that
word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning
no more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed that
the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators--to
the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed it
eagerly in their preface:--
Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that
we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one
a good one ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones
one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against: that hath
bene our indeavour, that our marke.
(See [Footnote 1] at the end of this lecture.)
Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it will
astound you when you compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle (it
has been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that there
were certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable to
account. Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, I
spoke of the Authorised Version as a 'miracle.' It was, it remains,
marvellous to me.
Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within the
leaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear to
readers as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuing
them--almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth's Kitten with those other
falling leaves:--
That almost I could repine
That your transports are not mine.
But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by this
word 'miracle' I meant to suggest to you a something like plenary
inspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it were
sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle.
Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for that, in my plain
opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hope
to discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy--with what
meaning, if any--we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions
which have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards.
But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the
forty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark
nonsense. Remember that I used this very same word 'miracle' of
Shakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my
comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, or
at any rate stark bombast. He never blotted a line--'I would he had
blotted a thousand' says Ben Jonson: and Ben Jonson was right.
Shakespeare could have blotted out two or three thousand lines: he was
great enough to afford it. Somewhere Matthew Arnold supposes us as
challenging Shakespeare over this and that weak or bombastic passage, and
Shakespeare answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt we were
right, but after all, 'Did it greatly matter?'
So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven in asserting that here
and there they wrote nonsense. They could afford it. But we do stultify
criticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and beauty, we prostrate
ourselves indiscriminately before what is good and what is bad, what is
sublime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any reviser to put forth a
hand to the ark.
The most of us Christians go to church on Christmas Day, and there we
listen to this from Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7:--
Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation,
when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the
land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her
by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they
that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined.
Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they
joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men
rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his
shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.
For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and
garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel
of fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm. But have you ever, sitting in
church on a Christmas morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if it
mean anything more than a sing-song according somehow with the holly and
ivy around the pillars? _'Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not
increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in
harvest,'_ But why--if the joy be not increased? _'For every battle of
the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but
this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.'_ Granted the rhythmical
antithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the
improvement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better than
garments rolled in blood? And, in fine, what is it all about? Now let us
turn to the Revised Version:--
But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish. In the
former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the
land of Naphtali, but in the latter time hath he made it glorious,
by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they
that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast
increased their joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in
harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the
rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian.
For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the
garments rolled in blood, shall even be for burning, for fuel of
fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the
government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be
called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.