ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE WRITERS.
In sketching the history of the English drama from its beginnings to
the close of Ben Jonson's career, we have passed through a long tract
of years, rich in other than poetic literature. We must now return
to the writers in prose who came after Ascham and Sidney, and lived
through the last period of Elizabeth, and in the reigns of James I,
Charles I, and the Commonwealth.
The prose writers may be considered in four sets. First we have the
purely literary authors, the critics and novelists such as Lyly,
Sidney, Greene, Nash, and others, of whose style, with its "brave
conceits," euphuism, and metaphors we have already, spoken. Next (2)
we have the controversial pamphleteers, who wrangled mainly about
religion and Church government, defending or attacking the Established
Church with its usages; or Puritanism with its love of Presbyterian
discipline, and hatred of the cross in baptism, the surplice, and
other "rags of Rome". While Government supported the cause of the
Established Church and severely handled recalcitrant ministers of the
Puritan party, some Puritan writers went so far as to threaten war
against the cause of the detested Bishops. On both sides temper rose to
fever-heat, and the controversy was conducted in a prose style which
was full of abuse and satire. Meanwhile (3) Hooker wrote on the same
disputed themes in a style lofty, logical, and harmonious; and in his
"History of the World," Sir Walter Raleigh often played on language
with the effect of "a solemn music". Lastly (4) Bacon in his essays
touched on familiar themes in a style of brief sentences, witty, or
poetic, or philosophical, which was all his own; which came home, as he
says, "to men's business and bosoms"; and, of all the manners which we
have described, that of Bacon remains by far the most easily and most
commonly appreciated.
Meanwhile the common fault of men who wrote in prose was the inability
to tell a plain tale; to say succinctly, distinctly, and unmistakably
what they meant. Perhaps they did not always wish to be understood, but
even when Elizabethan and Jacobean writers were anxious to be lucid,
their fanciful tropes and long sentences often detain or defy the
modern reader.
This defect arose partly from imitation of the structure of stately
Latin sentences in Roman literature. But in Latin the nature of the
grammar does not permit the meaning to be lost. When books were
comparatively rare, and leisure was plentiful, readers did not grudge
the time passed over tall and massive folios and long stately involved
periods. Now and again, in the age of Elizabeth as in the Restoration,
the lighter authors took refuge in a style lax, colloquial, and charged
with current slang. A century must pass before we arrive at the
unadorned plain manner of Dean Swift.
It was not that the Elizabethans lacked the power to write tersely,
simply, and clearly. So luxuriant a poet as Spenser was the master of
a perfectly clear and unadorned prose style, deeply interesting in his
work on the condition of Ireland. The letters of such diplomatists as
Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's envoy to the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots,
are as clear and amusing, or, once or twice, as pathetic, to-day, as
when they were written. But the prose of literature was entangled and
encumbered by the search of ornament, of _esprit_ at all costs, and by
copious antitheses and, among the lighter writers, by "clenches" and
even by slang.
Hooker.
"It is not to be doubted but that Richard Hooker was born at Heavytree"
(near Exeter), says Izaak Walton, about 1553. But sceptics have averred
that he was born in Southgate Street, in Exeter. His parents were not
rich, and, aided by Bishop Jewel, he entered Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, in 1567, as a Bible Clerk. In 1577 he obtained a Fellowship;
in 1579 was Reader in Hebrew, a tongue with which few Oxford men were,
or are, familiarly acquainted. About four years later he took holy
orders, had a severe cold, and married a wife recommended by the lady
who had nursed him in his illness. "The good man," says Walton, "had
no cause to rejoice in the wife of his youth," for "the contentions
of a wife" (at least of Mrs. Hooker), "are a continual dropping." He
took a living in Buckinghamshire, and experienced "the corroding cares
that attend a married priest". Among these was reading Horace while he
watched his sheep, and rocking his child's cradle.
A friend, Edwin Sandys, finding him in these distressful circumstances,
obtained for him the Mastership of the Temple (1585) during the "Martin
Marprelate" controversy, in which the boisterous Nash bore a part. A
lecturer, Travers, opposed Hooker's theological positions, for Hooker,
it seems, had maintained that all Catholics are not necessarily damned
to all eternity. In 1591 Hooker obtained the living of Boscombe in
Wilts, and in 1595 moved to that of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury,
where he died in 1600.
The first four books of his "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" appeared in
1594, the fifth in 1597, the rest was posthumously published. The book
was admired by James VI, who read it in Scotland, and by the Pope and
Cardinal Allen. Hooker was a good, devout, simple man, a most laborious
parish minister, and so short-sighted that Walton accounts for his
choice of a wife (if he could be said to choose her), by this defect of
vision.
The great work of Hooker, "The Ecclesiastical Polity," is an argument
against the Puritans who, from matters like the surplice to matters
like the Liturgy, desired in all things to imitate the "discipline"
of Geneva and of Presbyterian Scotland. In the Martin Marprelate
controversy, as in all old controversy, the style, as we shall see, had
been extremely scurrilous on both sides. Hooker, on the other hand,
writes like a gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian. As the dispute
was really between men of two opposed temperaments and characters,
arguments, however learned, moderate, and logical, could not make
converts. The Reformation had brought not peace but a sword. Religious
differences, mingled with political differences, soon broke into civil
war under Charles I.
Hooker begins by stating that the opponents of the Church of England,
"right well affected and most religiously inclined minds," must,
he supposed, "have had some marvellous reasonable inducements" for
desiring to upset the existing ecclesiastical settlement. He therefore
studied the subject diligently, and could find "no law of God or reason
of man" against the attitude of the defenders of the settlement, and
no proof that the Presbyterian "discipline," "by error and misconceit
named 'the ordinance of Jesus Christ,'" was so in very deed.
After a pathetic request for a fair hearing "of the words of one who
desireth even to embrace together with you the self-same truth, if it
be the truth," he gave a history of the discipline as introduced by
Calvin at Geneva. Calvin, he said, by "sifting the very utmost sentence
and syllable" of the New Testament found that certain passages seemed
to him to enjoin that congregations should have elders with power
of excommunication (with fearful civil consequences) but Calvin had
"never proved that Scripture doth necessarily enforce these things"; or
enforce any other thing in which the Puritans differed from the Church
established. Manifestly an opponent would blow away this argument with
any isolated scriptural text, whatever its original application, which
as he thought backed his opinion.
Hooker analysed Puritan demagogic methods, spiritual pretensions, and
habit of leading women captive. "But, be they women or be they men, if
once they have tasted of that cup, let any man of contrary opinion open
his mouth to persuade them, they close up their ears, his reasons they
weigh not at all, all is answered with the words of John, 'We are of
God, he that knoweth God heareth us.'"
All this was, in fact, the case; it was superfluous to write a long
book, with quotations about the Angels from the pre-Christian Greek
Orphic poems, for the purpose of converting people who closed their
ears. When Hooker, wrote, some Puritan writers had already threatened
civil war; their martyrs, in fact, lay in Newgate, and their blood was
up. What they desired was not to be tolerated, but to dominate the
consciences of others. One text both parties could use, "_Compel them
to come in._"
The style of Hooker is somewhat rich in Latinized components. He is
remote from euphuistic conceits; and does not rise into eloquence
except when his subject elevates his mind and style. A celebrated
example is his defence of Church music.
"Touching musical harmony whether by instrument or by voice, it being
but of high and low in sounds a due proportionable disposition, such
notwithstanding is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath
in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have been
thereby induced to think that the soul itself by nature is or hath
in it harmony. A thing which delighteth all ages and beseemeth all
states; a thing as seasonable in grief as in joy; as decent being
added unto actions of greatest weight and solemnity, as being used
when men most sequester themselves from action. The reason hereof is
an admirable facility which music hath to express and represent to the
mind, more inwardly than any other sensible mean, the very standing,
rising, and falling, the very steps and inflections every way, the
turns and varieties of all passions whereunto the mind is subject; yea,
so to imitate them, that whether it resemble unto us the same state
wherein our minds already are, or a clean contrary, we are not more
contentedly by the one confirmed, than changed and led away by the
other. In harmony the very image and character even of virtue and vice
is perceived, the mind delighted with their resemblances, and brought
by having them often iterated into a love of the things themselves."
Magnificent as is the harmony of these sentences, and severe as is the
logical thought which they express, the modern reader finds that he
cannot get at the sense of them by merely running his eye over them.
The sentences must be carefully construed, and such writing cannot
possibly be popular; as, in some degree, some writings of Bacon still
remain.
The posthumously published books of Hooker were supposed to have been
tampered with by the Editors. Hooker did not publish his sermons,
of which several were put forth after his death. Even his Puritan
adversaries could not with decency have complained that they are too
short. In one sermon he speaks freely of the Pope as "The Man of Sin".
"Martin Marprelate."
We cannot here do more than mention the masters of the fierce
controversial prose; indeed their names, often, can only be guessed.
They fought like wild cats, with the yells of these animals when
enraged, in the wordy war of "Martin Marprelate," or "Bishop's bane".
Archbishop Whitgift (1586) obtained a decree from the Star Chamber
for the suppression of pamphlets that attacked the usages of the
Established Church. Till 1593 the battle of books lasted; and then
Parliament silenced the Puritans--for a while. The authors, taking the
name of "Martin Marprelate," entered the fray, on the Puritan side,
with the weapon of satire, banter, and Billingsgate, in autumn, 1588.
Martin, whoever he or they may have been, employed a secret press,
owned by one Waldegrave, that was set up now in one place, now in
another. The history of the secret presses, of Waldegrave and of his
successors, is curious. The learned Udall, John Penry ("the Father of
Welsh Dissent") and other combatants, were imprisoned; Penry was hanged.
There remain seven tracts by Marprelate, in a style of variegated
abuse, banter, and "gag": Bishop Cooper found that his name yielded
gross palpable quips and puns to the Puritan wags who wrote for "the
man in the street". Martin was no Pascal, his weapons were not the
small sword but the jester's bladder on a stick, and the bully's
bludgeon. The Anti-Martinists answered with the same weapons, as Nash
and Lyly were responsible for certain pamphlets; Greene took a hand in
the fray, and it faded out in a literary and personal squabble with
Gabriel Harvey.
The Martin Marprelate tracts were revolutionary, and afford a singular
instance in which the wit exhibited itself on the Puritan side.
Serious treatment of serious themes, on the other hand, is nobly
vindicated in the great work of Richard Hooker.
Bacon.
A style quite unlike that of Hooker is Bacon's. Francis Bacon, later
Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, was born in 1561, a younger son
of Sir Nicholas Bacon (long time Keeper of the Seals under Elizabeth),
and of his wife Elizabeth Cooke, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, and
sister of the wife of the famous Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Bacon did not
profit much by the high place of his uncle William, and his cousin
Robert Cecil. They retarded from jealousy the worldly advancement, to
secure which, and to aid the progress of Science, were Bacon's leading
desires. After leaving Trinity College, Cambridge, and studying law at
Gray's Inn, Bacon followed to Paris Sir Amyas Paulet, later the jailer
of Queen Mary Stuart at Fotheringay. He was called to the Bar in 1582,
and in 1584 entered Parliament, on the Court side. Ben Jonson has left
lofty praise of his eloquent sagacity in debate. His memoirs of advice
to Elizabeth were more admired than followed in practice. He was in
favour of moderation towards both Catholics and Puritans. He attached
himself to the fortunes of the Queen's brilliant wayward favourite,
Essex, but his wisdom was not what Essex was fitted by nature to
follow: he swayed the woman in Elizabeth by his beauty and daring
grace: his military ambitions were distasteful to the pacific and
parsimonious Queen. The mad enterprise of Essex, on Scottish models,
to seize the Royal person, was no true English political move; it led
to his trial, and Bacon was the leading speaker in his benefactor's
prosecution. "It is the wisdom of rats," says Bacon, "that will leave
a house some time before it fall" ("Essays," "Of Wisdom for a Man's
Self").
He has never been forgiven for an action which could scarcely appear
other than judicious, and praiseworthy, and even necessary, to himself.
Like Cecil he made advances to James VI of Scotland, when it was clear
that Elizabeth could not, as James feared, "last as long as sun and
moon". On James, Bacon bestowed all his wisdom, and spoke for the
project of Union between England and Scotland, a project not realized
till after the lapse of a century.
Partly through the influence of King James's favourite, Buckingham,
Bacon received promotion; he became Attorney-General; in 1617, Keeper
of the Seals, like his father; in 1618, Chancellor, and Baron Verulam;
in 1621 Viscount St. Albans. In the same year he was accused of taking
gifts from suitors (then a not uncommon practice), pled guilty, with
qualifications, and was disgraced. His last years were spent in
literary pursuits at his place, Gorhambury, near St. Albans; he caught
cold in an experiment in freezing poultry and died in March, 1626.
The industry of his biographer, Mr. Spedding, has not wholly redeemed
the character of Bacon, whose personality does not endear him to
mankind, and was not on a level with his genius. That genius was
literary in a very high degree, and was influenced by a desire to
benefit humanity through scientific knowledge of the laws of Nature and
of human nature. To this task he brought an enthusiasm which reminds us
of a man so different from himself as Shelley. In Bacon's belief, man
might be and ought to be the master of things; and a reasoned account
of all things in nature was the inventory of human possessions. To make
this inventory, and to discover a new method of "interrogating nature,"
putting her to the question and wrenching from her all her precious
secrets, was the main object of his scientific meditations.
His first important book, however, the "Essaies" (1597), was literary,
and no doubt was suggested by the Essays of Montaigne, which were also
familiar to Shakespeare. In its original form the book contained but
ten brief studies, but Bacon kept improving them and adding to their
number. There are thirty-four in the edition of 1612, fifty-eight in
that of 1625. It is dedicated to Buckingham, who is informed that he
has "planted things that are like to last," an unlucky prediction. "Of
all my other works," adds Bacon, "my essays have been most current; for
that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms". The
phrase is a proverb,--indeed the essays, as the man said of "Hamlet,"
are "made up of quotations" of phrases that are now household words.
The genius of Bacon, in the essay, and even in his scientific works,
"The Advancement of Learning" (1605), and the Latin "Novum Organum"
(1620), was not desultory, like Montaigne's, but aphoristic. He coined
Maxims or Aphorisms, brief sayings, weighty with wisdom, brilliant with
points of wit and fancy, which sometimes remind us of La Rochefoucauld.
It is interesting to compare the first drafts of the Essays in 1597
with the finished work in 1625, where they are considerably enlarged,
and altered in details. "Of Faction" is increased fourfold, and
strengthened by examples from Roman history. Like all the men of his
time, Bacon is rich in classical references and anecdotes which, with
him, are not tedious and pedantic. When he quotes Homer it is in
_Latin_ hexameters, he cites a Roman altered adaptation, "a prophecy,
as it seems, of the Roman Empire," which, of course, Homer never
predicted; but the Latin form serves Bacon's theory of "prophecies that
have been of certain memorys and from hidden causes". This wise man
notes that "the King of Spain's surname, they say, is Norway," in order
that a folk-prophecy may be fulfilled by the defeat of the Armada.
However on the whole he regards fulfilled prophecies, not scriptural,
as accidental coincidences. "Men mark when they hit, and never mark
when they miss, as they do generally also of dreams."
There is something pathetic in Bacon's wise futilities and generalities
on the most pressing political question of his time, "Unity in
religion". Concerning the means of procuring Unity, "Men must beware,
that in the procuring or muniting of religious unity they do not
dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human society." Being men,
they necessarily defaced both--Laud later had the ears of Puritans cut
off, Puritans cut off the head of Laud, "and so as to consider men as
Christians, we forget that they are men".
Bacon is not a little "Jesuitical". Secrecy is often necessary, "no man
can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation;
which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy". Simulation
is "more culpable and less politic; except it be in rare and great
matters"--rather encouraging to Charles I, for we are bidden to have
"dissimulation in seasonable use". Love is rather profitable to
the Stage than to human existence, "in life it doth much mischief,
sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury". "No great and worthy
person" (except Mark Antony and Appius Claudius, famed for his
adoration of Virginia) "hath been transported to the mad degree of
love". "It is impossible to love and be wise." Bacon certainly varied
much from Plato and all the poets "in this of love".
Bacon knew very well that atheism was apt to follow in the steps of
his adored physical science, and consoled himself by assuming that
"a little philosophy inclines man's mind to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion". He deemed that
without belief there could be no sense of honour, for atheists have
died for their opinion, whereas, if they believe that there is no
God, "why should they trouble themselves?" "Against atheists the
very savages take part with the very subtlest philosophers," which
is perfectly true. To the dog "man is instead of a God, or _melior
natura._" "As atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that
it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human
frailty," yet martyr atheists have despised human frailty. "For
martyrdoms, I reckon them among miracles; because they seem to exceed
the force of human nature."
Concerning the extreme Reformers, Bacon says "there is a superstition
in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go
furthest from the superstition formerly received," as in the Scottish
Presbyterian burial of the Christian dead with no religious service,
one of Knox's innovations. In his Essay on "Wisdom for a Man's Self,"
Bacon speaks, wittingly or unwittingly, of his own mischance: "Whereas
they have all their times sacrificed to themselves, they become in
the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune". A word
of Bacon's is always apt. "Let no nation expect to be great that is
not awake upon any just cause of arming." Of colonization, "it is a
shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of the people and wicked
condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant". "If you plant
where savages are... use them justly and graciously." Always the
counsel is excellent, always the adviser is unheard! Bacon even advises
on the stage management of Masques. On Gardening he writes at much
length and with manifest pleasure. His advice to keep caged birds in
"little turrets with a belly"--is not that of a poetical imagination.
He did not like the _Ars Topiaria_, "images cut out in juniper" or
box. His garden contained "a heath of a natural wildness," with many
artificial additions.
Bacon's _Promus of Elegancies_ is a commonplace book, full of
germs of essays, _pensées._ The essays themselves are strings of
connected aphorisms, without much consecutiveness of style or skilled
transitions. "Aphorisms," says Bacon himself, "except they should be
ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of Sciences." His
Aphorisms certainly were more popular, as he knew, than his connected
work of 1605, "The Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane".
In the Dedication of this work to James I, Bacon admires his Majesty's
genius, "a light of nature I have observed in your Majesty," who
certainly was a clever man, and interested in literature. The book is
a plea for the organization of knowledge: Bacon styles it "a small
globe of the intellectual world". He surveys all knowledge, and maps
it out, with a view to organized study. He meets religious objections
in his usual way. It is argued that ignorance is a fine thing, making
"a more devout dependence on God as the first cause". Bacon replies
in the words of Job, "will you lie for God, as one man will do for
another to gratify him?" Will you "offer the author of Truth the
unclean sacrifice of a lie"? Bacon attacks the schoolmen as darkening
counsel by words and spinning cobwebs out of assumed first principles,
instead of collecting facts, and questioning nature by experiments.
Practically, experimental philosophy, and the endowment of special
research, are the burdens of his argument. He divides knowledge into
History (the original sense of the word being _inquiry_), Human,
Natural, and Divine. Anxious that nothing should escape him, he even
classifies Ciphers, then much used in the secret correspondence of
statesmen and conspirators. He had invented a cipher when a young
diplomatist in Paris, and, in the later Latin translation of this book,
the "De Augmentis," he is copious on the subject. The secrets of each
writing were usually discovered by the simple process of torturing the
conspirators who used them.
"Poesy," he says, "was ever thought to have some anticipation of
divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting
the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth
buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." He conceived that
there was a mystic meaning, a record of lost wisdom, in the myths of
the Greeks (which are mainly decorated survivals of savage guesses
at the causes of things). He asks for more biographies, in an age
very careless of biography. He speaks of the "inductive" method, as
opposed to the scholastic reasoning from invented assumptions; and
his mind was always busy with a perfect system, "Instauratio Magna,"
of the interpretation of nature, and the encyclopædic organization of
knowledge. This work he never completed; the "Novum Organum" (1620),
written in Latin, is the most important fragment. He "had a vision
of his own," but what his great and perfect method really was, in
practical operation, he probably did not know himself. Fallacies he
could detect and classify in brilliant fashion, the "Eidola" or shadowy
Dwellers on the Threshold of Truth, bewildering men who would enter
that sanctuary. His work in this kind, especially the "Novum Organum,"
is immensely stimulating: he saw in vision the Promised Land of Science
into which he did not enter, and he would have been much disenchanted
by the results, as regards human happiness, of the discoveries which
he, not vainly, summoned men to make. He did not urge haste in
practical application--the commercializing of science. He insisted
on the collection of "contradictory instances," a method always, in
accordance with human eagerness, too much neglected.[1]
Bacon's mind, in fact, was encyclopædic, and shared the faults common
to encyclopædias. The contemporary specialist, like Gilbert with his
remarkable experiments in magnetism, is spoken of but slightingly by
Bacon; nor has he much praise for other students who, in his time, were
practising what he was preaching.
Bacon's prose, beyond the region of essays and of science, may best
be studied in his "Reign of Henry VII," the fruit of a few months'
labour, after his banishment to the country, in 1621. He had no access
to manuscripts of the period, except in copies made for him in the
great collection of Sir Robert Cotton, now in the British Museum. The
printed books concerning the reign, those of Polydore Virgil, Holinshed
(translating Polydore), Stowe, and Speed, led Bacon into some mistakes
about facts. But the book is lucid and sagacious; the character of the
king is clearly depicted, without favour or deliberate fault-finding.
The study of Perkin Warbeck is full of subtle interest. "Himself with
long and continued counterfeiting and with often telling a lie was
turned, by habit, almost into the thing he seemed to be, and from a
liar to a believer." Ford makes Henry VII express the same opinion
in his tragedy of "Perkin Warbeck". Bacon treats the strange career
of Perkin in terms of the Stage, speaks of the prompter with his
prompt-book, and, in the last Act, says, "therefore now, like the end
of a play, a great number came upon the stage at once". The nature of
the statecraft of Henry VII, not very apprehensive or forecasting of
future events, afar off, "but an entertainer of Fortune by the day," is
admirably analysed. "I have not flattered the king," says Bacon in his
dedication to Charles, Prince of Wales, "but took him to life as well
as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light." Henry's
attempt to secure the canonization of Henry VI is amusingly described.
Cardinals were set to examine that poor prince's career, "but it died
under the reference. The general opinion was that Pope Julius was too
dear, and that the king would not come to his rates." But Bacon holds
that the Pope did not wish to cheapen saintliness, and chose to "keep a
distance between innocents and Saints". The virtues of Henry VI had not
the necessary quality of being heroic.
"The New Atlantis," unfinished in 1624, was published with the "Sylva
Sylvarum," after Bacon's death, in 1627. Here our author appears as
the framer of a philosophical romance, not unlike More's "Utopia,"
but concerned, as far as it goes, with the organization of experiment
and of knowledge, as practised by the people of Bensalem, somewhere
in the southern seas. Bacon makes no long story of how he and his
company arrived at Bensalem, an unheard of land, where civilization has
survived since the time of Plato's mythical lost Atlantis. Bacon was
inclined to suspect that there must have been "in the dark backward and
abysm of time," a race more advanced in knowledge than the Greeks or
the men of his own age. The Bensalemites are survivors of that race,
people very stately, peaceable (though well provided with improved
artillery), and Christian. The tale of their miraculous conversion,
through St. Bartholomew, "about twenty years after the ascension of
our Saviour"; and of their acquisition of the Old Testament and the
New (including parts of it _not yet written_) about 53 A.D.,
is the most romantic part of the romance. The Bensalemites, who are
rich in everything, make trading voyages, not for lucre, but "for
_Light_," knowledge. They have every kind of museum, library, and
scientific apparatus which the mind of Bacon could desire, regardless
of expense, nor do they seem to have shrunk from vivisection in their
search for the secrets of nature. "We have some degrees of flying in
the air," they have Christian temples: they are extremely moral, kind,
and industrious, in fact are a sort of scientific Phæacians; "far apart
they dwell, in the midst of the wash of the waves, and with them are no
men conversant," for they help, but do not welcome mariners.
Bacon's Latin tracts are numerous: he believed that Latin was a
permanent, English a less stable speech, but of course, since his day,
knowledge of Latin has more and more decreased, owing to the progress
of education and the march of science. The prophetic enthusiasm of
his insistence on experimental philosophy, the brilliance of his
illustrations, and the sagacity of his aphoristic observations, are
the bases of his literary fame. He was not so well fitted to be an
experimental philosopher himself, as to be the cause of experimental
philosophy in others.
Raleigh.
Sir Walter Raleigh (born 1552, at Hayes Barton, Budleigh,
Devonshire), educated at Oxford, a soldier with the Huguenots
in France, familiar with the wits in 1576 (when he wrote
commendatory verses for Gascoigne's "Steel Glass"), a courtier
who enjoyed the sunshine and suffered from the frosts of
Elizabeth's favour, when supplanted by Essex went to Ireland, as
we saw, became the friend of Spenser, and was styled by him "The
Shepherd of the Ocean".
In life and in literature a fiery and indefatigable adventurer,
his productions, from sonnets and the long, and for the most
part lost poem, "Cynthia" (on Elizabeth) to tracts on practical
points; accounts of voyages and of South America, and the
gigantic" History of the World," give proof of extraordinary
energy and fertility. His description of the glorious fight of
"The Revenge," and the death of Sir Richard Grenville (published
in 1596) can never be forgotten. In 1596 appeared, too, his
account of his first exploration (1595) of Guiana, with a
description of "the great and golden City of Manoa,"--a mirage.
On the death of Elizabeth, James I, on grounds of not unnatural
if baseless suspicion, imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower, where
he was well treated enough, and, with what amount of aid
from collaborators is uncertain (Ben Jonson said that he had
much) but, in any case with portentous industry, Raleigh
compiled his "History of the World," from the creation to 130
B.C. The book (1614-1615) had a very great popularity:
even the Puritans read it with admiration. There was then no
such world-history in English, and though, as history, it is
now obsolete of course; it is admired for its vigour, for the
character it displays, and the personal observations suggested by
the author's wide experience of men; and above all for occasional
passages of lofty eloquence, and the organ-tones of a magnificent
style, as in the famous address to Death. The capacities of style
in original work had never so been exemplified in English, though
such examples are but occasional.
Raleigh's very title in "The Prerogative of Parliaments" was
offensive to the king, who doted on the prerogative of princes,
and the book was not printed till after Raleigh's execution,
following his return from his second expedition to Guiana.
He also wrote tracts on War in general, on "The Navy and Sea
Service," on "Trade and Commerce," on "A War with Spain"
(the last thing that James desired), on "The Arts of Empire"
(published by Milton, 1658, as "The Cabinet Council") and
doubtless much is lost of the 3452 sheets of Raleigh's writing
which John Hampden was having transcribed before the Great
Rebellion.
More than Bacon, Raleigh tuned the language of "lofty, insolent,
and passionate English prose": these terms were applied by
Puttenham ("Art of English Poesie") to Raleigh's "dittie and
amorous ode". "Insolent," of course, means here "out of the
common".
Overbury.
Sir Thomas Overbury was born in Warwickshire in 1581: was the son
of a Gloucestershire squire, was a gentleman commoner of Queen's
College, Oxford, 1595-1598, entered the Middle Temple, and
passed some years abroad. On his return he became, in Scotland,
the friend of Robert Carr (or Ker), son of Ker of Fernihirst,
one of Queen Mary's Border partisans. Carr, who was handsome,
became King James's minion, and, in 1613, was created Earl of
Somerset. His friend Overbury obtained a place at Court; and
was first the friend, then the foe of Ben Jonson. An ally of
Somerset, Overbury dissuaded him from his fatal marriage with
Frances Howard, who, after a child-marriage (1606) with the boy
Earl of Essex, detested him, loved Somerset, and, backed by
James's influence, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Abbott, obtained a decree of nullity against her husband. The
poet Donne, as Somerset's adviser, and the poet Campion, as a
physician connected with a courtier more or less concerned in
the affair, were entangled in this odious and mysterious matter.
Overbury, on the other hand, was opposed to the unholy marriage
of Somerset, and is thought to have written his popular poem "The
Wife," to show him that Lady Essex was not what a wife should be.
She plotted in various ways to get rid of Overbury. The offer of
a diplomatic post in Paris he refused, with insolence it seems;
he was sent to the Tower, and there, through the instigation
of Lady Essex, was poisoned, with circumstances of bungling
cruelty: for, as we know in the Spanish case of Escovedo, the
science of poisoning was then quite in its infancy. Overbury
died on 15 September, 1613. His death provoked many elegies and
gave popularity to his poem "The Wife" (1614), which is of very
slight merit, and to his "Characters," brief mordant sketches
of types of men, in prose by Overbury and his friends. They
appear to have been suggested rather by the Characters of the
Greek Theophrastus, than by Montaigne or Bacon. Some pieces
are ideal, "The Good Wife," and the charming "Fair and Happy
Milkmaid," worthy of Izaak Walton. "She is never alone for
she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and
prayers, but short ones.... Thus lives she, and all her care is
she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck
upon her winding-sheet." Most of the other characters are drawn
in a mocking style. Of "A Mere Scholar" we learn that "the
antiquity of his University is his creed; and the excellency
of his College, though but for a match of football, an article
of his faith". "The Mere Fellow of a House," or don, with his
airs of a man of the world, provokes the handsome courtier,
and ex-undergraduate of Queen's. This on the scholar is good,
"University jests are his universal discourse and his news the
demeanour of the Proctors". Overbury jests at "The Melancholy
Man". Melancholy, as Ben Jonson's Master Stephen had proved, was
the fashion; a curious proof of this is the "Niobe" of Stafford
(1611), a wonderful piece of railing at "the damnable times," of
which a copy bears the arms of Charles I when Prince of Wales.
"Straggling thoughts," says Overbury, "are the Melancholy Man's
content, they make him dream waking; there's his pleasure!"
Translators.
Translation was a great, if not to the toilers a profitable
industry between the reigns of Edward VI and James I. The wealth
of classical, French, Spanish, and Italian learning, thought,
and poetry was rapidly and strenuously conveyed into English,
sometimes rough and ready, and rich in flowers of slang,
sometimes replete with elegance and vigour. The translators
certainly produced most idiomatic English; the ancients, in
their versions, were not, as in reality, concise and classically
self-restrained. There was, as a rule, no thought of minute
accuracy. In fact, if some learned men were good Greek scholars,
they did not write translations; the earlier translators in
England used French and Italian versions of the Greek originals.
Thus, Thomas Nicolls did Thucydides, the greatest of Greek
historians, out of a French translation of an Italian version
of the difficult original (1550). Nevertheless if you turn to
the tragic pages on the utter ruin of the Athenian expedition to
Sicily, the tale is still moving and rich in melancholy. Whoever
B. R. was (Barnaby Rich?) the translator of the first two books
of Herodotus (including his account of "the beastly devices" (as
B. R. says) of the Egyptians), you cannot complain, as Macaulay
did of another version, that Herodotus is "as flat as champagne
in tumblers". B. R. uses slang, as "the Greeks were in the wrong
box". Sir Thomas North, whose translation of Plutarch (1579)
Shakespeare uses in his Roman plays, merely rendered the French
version by Amyot. Whereas Plutarch's Greek lives of great men
are, though in manner quiet, not frigid, North "picturesqued it
everywhere". In fact these translators made Greeks and Romans
speak as if they had come back to life and were writing in lusty
Elizabethan England. Unluckily their volumes are not often to be
picked up at bookstalls, and as magnificently printed in "Tudor
Translations" they are expensive.
It is strange that the great Athenian dramatists, Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic Aristophanes, were left
untranslated; probably because no contemporary foreign versions
were easily procurable. What our ancestors knew of ancient
tragedy was mainly through the rhetorical Roman imitations by
Seneca. Of Plato scarce anything was translated. By 1600 Philemon
Holland (born 1552), who actually went to the ancient originals
for his texts, published his translation of Livy. As early as
1547 John Wylkinson Englished the Ethics of Aristotle,--out of
an Italian version. Philemon was rapid, racy, indefatigable. He
translated Plutarch's "Morals" in a year, using but one quill.
It was through Florio's English version that Shakespeare read
Montaigne's Essays. It is hardly necessary to name Richard
Stanyhurst's "Four Books of Virgil's 'Æneid'" (1582) written
in hideous English hexameters; and Thomas Phaer's Virgil, in
"fourteeners" like Chapman's Homer, is even more helpless as a
reproduction of "the stateliest measure
Ever moulded by the lips of man,"
than Conington's modern version in the metres of "The Lay of
the Last Minstrel". It was clearly through Arthur Golding's
translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (1567, Four Books in 1565)
that Shakespeare knew Ovid best. Golding also did Cæsar's "De
Bello Gallico" (1565), and Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton,
undertook Tacitus.
Among books from foreign modern authors, William Painter's
"Palace of Pleasure" (1566-1567) with tales from Boccaccio, Queen
Margaret of Navarre, Bandello, and Straparola (as well as from
classical sources) was a treasure-house of plots and situations
for the playwrights. In the tragedies and comedies of the age,
Italian characters are predominant. The Spanish novel of the
roads and inns and adventures, "Lazarillo de Tormes," was done
out of Spanish in 1576, and set the example of this kind of
fiction to Nash. Ariosto and Tasso were translated, the former
by Sir John Harington (1591), the latter by Edward Fairfax (in
1600), and Richard Carew, but Dante was neglected. Of Chapman's
"Homer," elsewhere spoken of, seven books appeared in 1598, and
Shakespeare either glanced at it for his "Troilus and Cressida,"
or used, in places, a French or Latin version of Homer. It is
impossible to enumerate all the translators, most of them are
very readable, more so, in fact, than our most exact literal
renderings of Greek and Latin originals into prose.
The Authorized Version of the Bible.
The noblest and most enduring monument of Elizabethan prose is, of
course, the Authorized Version of the Bible. The nature of the texts to
be translated suppressed all tendency to wilful conceits; a substratum
of simple English from the time of Wyclif's versions in Chaucer's day,
and from Tyndale's learned rendering, was retained; the lofty poetry
of the ancient prophets was echoed in English as stately, balanced,
and harmonious; and if it be said that the English does not represent
"the speech" of any one age in the life of England, we may reply that
the original texts also are the work of a thousand years in different
languages.
Pulpit Eloquence.
It has often been remarked that sermons, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, "discharged one part of the function of
the modern newspaper" (though this is more true of Scotland than
of England), and that sermons, where published, were a favourite
form of reading. That is proved by their abundance in country
house libraries, where old sermons usually occupy much valuable
wall-space, as they cannot be sold, and present an imposing array
of calf-backed volumes. Our space does not permit us to do more
than name the famous preachers of the Elizabethan age, such as
Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester under James
I; James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656), a man of
varied learning who arranged the chronology of the Bible; Bishop
Joseph Hall (1574-1656) and Donne whose prose has many of the
merits and defects of his age.
[1] To take a very simple instance, a critic, observing that Hector,
in the "Iliad," slays some men who lived on the road from Thessaly to
Boeotia, infers that Hector's exploits are a record of the wars of
a tribe advancing in that direction. But he entirely overlooks the
"contradictory instances," those in which Hector spears men from other
remote parts of Greece.