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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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[Pg 268] 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[Pg 269] 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[Pg 270] 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[Pg 271] 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.[Pg 272] 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,"[Pg 273] 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?"[Pg 274] "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 t............