A History of Elizabethan Literature

But the English language which he thus despised had a noble and worthy revenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the Novum Organum is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certain that, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription, even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. But with the wider and wider spread and study of English the Essays and The Advancement of Learning are read ever more and more, and the only reason that The History of Henry VII., The New Atlantis, and the Sylva Sylvarum do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparative obsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is the chief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two works noted, the Essays and The Advancement, which can go both together in a small volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and (ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writers of English prose before the accession of Charles I.

The characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same; but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of all Bacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to add to them the Henry the Seventh, which is a model of clear historical narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusions which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the credit due to him for formal excellence.

The Essays– which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten, in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which he reissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, in their final and fullest condition – are not so much in the modern sense essays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed, the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the Promus [butler or storekeeper] of Elegancies, the publication of which, as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding, and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merely quaint, analogies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflection and illustration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed and new-born condition. In the Essays they are worked together, but still sententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluent connection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Bacon is, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curt severity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminable diffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are passages in Montaigne which might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon passages which might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there is the same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity – the familiarity predominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon – and in both there is the union of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with a curious absence of passion and enthusiasm – a touch, as it may almost be called, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangely with his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of his imagination, or at least his fancy.

The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use the language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea of their author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking images and pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But the compression of them (which is often so great that they might be printed sentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author from displaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style. What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the Henry the Seventh, in the Atlantis, and in various minor works, some originally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent passage which Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of the Baconian system. In such passages the purely oratorical faculty which he undoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rare exceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that) displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going into the law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and where his mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than it brought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer and calmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to "take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted to engage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, business of politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, Jeremy Taylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberant gorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, and quite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric. For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was a rhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisen in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and splendid promises of the Novum Organum and its companions has arisen from oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He is stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates; he is inexhaustible in analogy and illustration, full of wise saws, and of instances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurate expositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suited to his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here just obscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity, there flashing with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in the reasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention of the student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather of the great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice in every kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought which constant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its practitioners to dispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and in many different styles. But of these it will always be found that two were most familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image, which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and the half-hortatory half-descriptive discours d'ouverture, where the writer is the unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identified with great ease on any chart.37

A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would in many ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here, – that both had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they been simple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, shows no poetical bent, Raleigh was homo utriusque linguæ, and his works in verse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits of poetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostly written hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the graces of style; and his masterpiece, the famous History of the World, is made up of short passages of the most extraordinary beauty, and long stretches of monotonous narration and digression, showing not much grace of style, and absolutely no sense of proportion or skill in arrangement. The contrast is so strange that some have sought to see in the undoubted facts that Raleigh, in his tedious prison labours, had assistants and helpers (Ben Jonson among others), a reason for the superior excellence of such set pieces as the Preface, the Epilogue, and others, which are scattered about the course of the work. But independently of the other fact that excellence of the most diverse kind meets us at every turn, though it also deserts us at every turn, in Raleigh's varied literary work, and that it would be absurd to attribute all these passages to some "affable familiar ghost," there is the additional difficulty that in none of his reported helpers' own work do the peculiar graces of the purple passages of the History occur. The immortal descant on mortality with which the book closes, and which is one of the highest achievements of English prose, is not in the least like Jonson, not in the least like Selden, not in the least like any one of whose connection with Raleigh there is record. Donne might have written it; but there is not the smallest reason for supposing that he did, and many for being certain that he did not. Therefore, it is only fair to give Raleigh himself the credit for this and all other passages of the kind. Their character and, at the same time, their comparative rarity are both easily explicable. They are all obviously struck off in moments of excitement – moments when the writer's variable and fanciful temperament was heated to flashing-point and gave off almost spontaneously these lightnings of prose as it gave, on other occasions, such lightnings of poetry as The Faërie Queene sonnet, as "the Lie," and as the other strange jewels (cats' eyes and opals, rather than pearls or diamonds), which are strung along with very many common pebbles on Raleigh's poetical necklace. In style they anticipate Browne (who probably learnt not a little from them) more than any other writer; and they cannot fairly be said to have been anticipated by any Englishman. The low and stately music of their cadences is a thing, except in Browne, almost unique, and it is not easy to trace it to any peculiar mannerism of vocabulary or of the arrangement of words. But Raleigh's usual style differs very little from that of other men of his day, who kept clear at once of euphuism and burlesque. Being chiefly narrative, it is rather plainer than Hooker, who has some few points of resemblance with Raleigh, but considerably freer from the vices of desultoriness and awkward syntax, than most writers of the day except Hooker. But its most interesting characteristic to the student of literature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in the least foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. Even Milton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilous invective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trot commonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason that they are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh, like Milton, seems to have had little or no humour.

The opening and closing passages of the History are almost universally known; a quainter, less splendid, but equally characteristic one may be given here though Mr. Arber has already extracted it: —

"The four complexions resemble the four elements; and the seven ages of man, the seven planets. Whereof our infancy is compared to the moon; in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants.

"The second age, to Mercury; wherein we are taught and instructed.

"Our third age, to Venus; the days of Love, Desire and Vanity.

"The fourth, to the Sun; the strong, flourishing and beautiful age of man's life.

"The fifth, to Mars; in which we seek honour and victory; and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends.

"The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter; in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding.

"The last and seventh, to Saturn; wherein our days are sad and overcast; and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that, of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities: and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired. Whom, when Time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for our Eternal Habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmanship of Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments: but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons."

But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers of prose, the company of scholarly divines who produced – what is probably the greatest prose work in any language – the Authorised Version of the Bible in English. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiece ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries – the school and training ground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses of English tongue – every one who values that mother tongue is more especially bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company appears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious that such an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thus combined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding spirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers, – an advantage which they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in the nineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best living writers of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, no known translator under James has left anything which at all equals in strictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as long may it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examination than it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to the intrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will be generally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the Old Testament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of the New Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literary value to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literary merit to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier English versions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not very accomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any way advantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner at least, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two classes. They were in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in this volume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible. They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the other side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute of proportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness and shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees, and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English prose – harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits of prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a companion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our subject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the Revised Version is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass," it having apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The Steel Glass," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation; but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in churches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original (as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story) will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib; the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the Revelation, – a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to catalogue, – will always be the ne plus ultra of English composition in their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and with any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work. The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his English Grammar, in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered, and the quaintly named Explorata or Discoveries and Timber– a collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay. In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time – a style tourmenté, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with classical grammar – and the straightforward, vigorous English of these Discoveries. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity. Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies what it preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it is true, are set down in a shorthand fashion as if (which doubtless they were) they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But others and perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin titles, though only one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attention to literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into loose construction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, and often presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dry form: —

"We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together and performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, pronunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once: and if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long."