I: Drab Age Prose: Religious Controversy and Translation
I
In England, as elsewhere, the Reformation was a process that occurred on three planes: firstly in the thought and conscience of the individual, secondly in the intertangled realms of ecclesiastical and political activity, and thirdly on the printed page. All are connected but only the third is our direct concern. We are to consider what men wrote, and our judgement on it must, of course, attempt to be literary, not theological. This does not mean that we are to confine ourselves rigidly to questions of style. Though we must not judge our authors’ doctrine as doctrine, we must certainly attempt to disengage the spirit and temper of their writings to see what particular insights or insensibilities went with the varying beliefs, what kinds of sentiment and imagination they unwittingly encouraged. It will not be easy to do so without giving offence: I ask my readers to believe that I have at least intended to be impartial. Unfortunately the very names we have to use in describing this controversy are themselves controversial. To call the one party Catholics implicitly grants their claim; to call them Roman Catholics implicitly denies it. I shall therefore call them Papists: the word, I believe, is not now used dyslogistically except in Ulster, and it is certainly not so intended here. ‘Reformation’ is a term equally ambiguous. Reform of the Church, in some sense or other, was desired by innumerable laymen and many clergy of all parties. The controversy was fought about ‘Reformation’ in a different, almost a technical sense: about certain changes in doctrine and order. To call these changes ‘reformation’ again begs the question: but the word is now so deeply entrenched in historical usage that I shall continue to employ it—as a mere label, intending no petitio.
Thus no man could be, in one sense, more of a ‘reformer’ than Dean Colet (1467?–1519), more given to exposing ecclesiastical abuses and to demanding amendment. His celebrated sermon to Convocation in 1511 lashes the vices of the clergy as fiercely as any Protestant could desire. But he has no wish for any alteration in the doctrine or structure of the Church. ‘The waye whereby the churche may be reformed into better facion’ (I quote from the almost contemporary translation of the sermon) ‘is not for to make newe lawis For there be lawes many inowe.’ Colet is, in fact, a declamatory moralist. By calling him declamatory I do not at all mean that he is insincere, but that his methods are those of the declamation; repetition, hyperbole, and a liberal use of emotional adjectives. The morality he wishes to enforce is harsh and ascetic. He maintains the very questionable though popular belief that all the evil in man arises from his animal nature—‘omne malum homini ei suboritur ex inferiori sua parte quae animal et hominis bestia potest vocitari’ (Enarratio in Ep. ad Romanos, vii). In his lectures on First Corinthians he strongly reaffirms the doctrine that marriage is merely a concession to human infirmity—‘infirmitas ab indulgenti Deo exegit nuptias’ (Enarratio in Ep. I ad Corinthios, vii). Everyone should wish to be able to do without it. It is true that if we all did, the human race would cease to live on this earth and survive only in heaven: but what consummation is more devoutly to be wished, quis aut magis opportunus aut magis optatus finis? In the meantime, marriage has to be tolerated, but ‘no step further downward is allowed’ (ultra quem gradum descensus non conceditur), as though lechery were not a different kind of thing from marriage but simply a further move in the same direction. This is not a new doctrine but a return to earlier severity. And there is likewise, I suggest, no real novelty in Colet’s communism. The crucial passage comes in the fourth chapter of his Expositio (not to be confused with his Enarratio) on Romans where we are told that the law of corrupt or fallen nature first introduced meum and tuum: unspoiled Nature would have all things in common. Modern readers are apt to misunderstand this if they forget that medieval thought had inherited from both the Bible and the Stoics a sharp contrast between a lost, prehistoric state of innocence and the world as we actually know it, and that things like slavery and private property were normally attributed to the latter. This did not usually imply a belief that they could or should be abolished as the world now is. Though contrary to pure Nature, they have a sort of justification, as necessities, or even as punishments, for the nature man now has. Though they can, in some degree, be judged by the standard of perfection with which they are contrasted, there is no direct route back to Eden. The doctrine has been abundantly illustrated by A. J. Carlyle and should be remembered when we come to consider the Utopia. Colet was no communist. He is very ready to declaim against avarice but he has no notion of encouraging a revolution.
The truth is that Colet is a Platonist at heart and has really little interest in the temporal and mutable world below the moon. The sooner it comes to an end the better. Till then it is his business to thunder against it from the platform of his perfectionism, without perhaps considering very carefully how all his lessons are to be applied in detail. This helps to explain what might otherwise seem a not very creditable episode in his career. On Good Friday 1513, at the outset of the war with France, he preached a sermon before the king which appears to have come within measurable distance of what we now call ‘pacifism’. He was immediately summoned to Greenwich, had a conversation with Henry in the garden, came away, and shortly afterwards preached a sermon so different that it is said to have filled all who heard it with martial ardour. But we need not assume that he had been either bought, or flattered, or frightened into subservience. A cloistered perfectionist, who happens to be also a rhetorician, often says, not exactly more than he means, but more than he understands. He leaves out the reservations: he has really no idea of the crudely literal applications which will be made. He forgets that his audience are much less serious than he about the fallen and perishable and makeshift character of all earthly institutions alike, and much more serious than he about the difference between one war and another or one king and another.
Colet has two other characters besides that of the moralist; he has an important place in the history of Biblical studies and he is the most virulent of the humanists. In the first capacity he is one of those who helped to banish the old allegorical methods of interpretation, at least as regards the New Testament, and made some attempt to see the Pauline epistles in their real historical setting. In the Epistolae ad Radulphum he himself allegorizes freely on the opening chapters of Genesis, as St. Augustine had done before him, but he is seeking a scientific or philosophical, rather than a moral or spiritual sense. It is one among many attempts made in this century to reconcile the Mosaic account of the creation with the cosmological ideas of the day. In this difference between Colet’s treatment of St. Paul and his treatment of Genesis there is inherent the recognition that the Bible contains books very different in kind. It was not exactly new—St. Jerome had allowed what we should now call the ‘mythical’ element in Genesis—but it was timely and useful. In his capacity of humanist we see Colet at his worst. Two ideas were uncomfortably united in his mind. On the one hand, he shared, to excess, the humanistic belief in the virtues of ‘classical’ Latin; his feeling about medieval Latin was one not so much of critical disapproval as of rankling, personal animosity. On the other hand, he had a distrust of pagan literature which carries us back to the earliest ages of the Church. The spirit of the classical writers was to be avoided like the plague and their form to be imposed as an indispensable law. When Colet founded St. Paul’s School this extraordinary position was embodied in its statutes. The boys were to be guarded from every word that did not occur in Virgil or Cicero, and equally from every idea that did. As an inevitable result, their fare was to be Lactantius, Prudentius, Sedulius, Mantuan, and Erasmus. No more deadly and irrational scheme could have been propounded—deadly, because it cuts the boys off from nearly all the best literature that existed in Latin, and irrational because it puts an arbitrary value on certain formal elements dissociated from the spirit which begot them and for whose sake they existed. To Colet, however, this seemed a small price to pay for excluding ‘all barbary, all corrupcion, all laten adulterate which ignorant blynde foils brought into this world’; and later (even in a statute he cannot contain himself) ‘that ffylthinesse’, that ‘abusyon’ which ‘more rayther may be called blotterature thenne litterature’. Thus Bernard and the Summa, Alanus and Pange lingua are kicked out by the one door; Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Catullus by the other.
Colet’s claims to be regarded as an English writer are tenuous—a possibility that he is the translator of his own Latin sermon to Convocation, a modest little work of practical divinity called A Ryght fruitful monicion, and the Proheme to his Latin grammar. The Monicion appears to have been popular; it is the sort of book that is given to godchildren. The Proheme, encouraging the ‘lytel babys’, the ‘lytel chyldren’ with the hope that they may ‘come at the last to be gret clarkes’, and bidding them ‘lyfte up their lytel whyte handes’ to pray for their founder, has (for adults with no children of their own) a certain prettiness: I am afraid the real boys may have pulled snooks at it in private—especially if they knew that the dean had by statute forever forbidden all ‘remedies’, that is, all holidays.
The same strongly ascetic strain is to be found in John Fisher (1459–1535) the Bishop of Rochester. I have put Fisher in this chapter partly because I did not wish to separate him from the other martyrs and partly because he preached against Luther; but on literary grounds he might equally well have been dealt with in the last. He is almost a purely medieval writer, though scraps of what may be classified as humanistic learning appear in his work—a reference to ‘the Georgycke’ (that is, the Gorgias) of Plato, to the virtue of ‘epicheia’ (έπειείκεια), to the Platonic desire for philosophic kings (Henry VIII’s book against Luther, it is suggested, almost admits him to the class), and a sympathetic mention of the Cabala. His vernacular works include devotional treatises—a Consolation to his sister and The Ways to Perfect Religion—and sermons; a series on the Penitential Psalms, funeral orations for Henry VII, and for the Countess of Richmond, and the famous sermon against Luther in 1521.
Fisher’s style is grave and a little diffuse, never comic (though the pulpit then admitted that excellence), mildly rhetorical, and at times really eloquent. The apostrophe to the corpse in the funeral sermon, ‘A kynge Henry, Kynge Henry, yf thou wert on lyve agayne many one that is here present now wolde pretende a full grete pite and tendernesse vpon thee’ has been rightly praised by critics. The address of the soul to the body in the Consolation (‘Now my wretched body thy bewtie is faded’, &c.) is as good; the passage on the beauty of Christ in Perfect Religion (‘Behold the Rose, the Lillie, the Vyolet, beholde the Pecocke’) perhaps better. Many of his comparisons, such as that of the Blessed Virgin to morning in the sermon on Psalm xxxviii or of faith and works to the sunbeams in the sermon on Luther, are ingeniously beautiful and, if compressed and versified, would be exactly what we call ‘metaphysical’ poetry. His chief weakness is that he is too leisurely: he is in no hurry to end a sentence or to let an idea go. His translations from the Vulgate enlarge on the original and pass imperceptibly into glosses. How beautiful such floral elaboration can be we know from Taylor, but Fisher’s style, though sometimes sweet, is not great enough to carry it off. At times his love of elaboration leads him into something like absurdity. In the Perfect Religion, the Nun is very properly encouraged to be thankful that God created her in a Christian society: this is well. She is also to be thankful that He created her at all; it is still well and orthodox, but troublesome questions are drawing near. She is to be especially grateful to God for making her a human being when He might have made her a stone or a toad. Made whom or what a stone or a toad? Finally, she is to be grateful because God created her instead of all the other people whom He might have created and who might have been better than she is if they had existed (ibid., The first consideration). The fate of the virtuous heathen is problem enough: it is too much to be saddled with the potentially virtuous nonexistent. He would be a bold man who blamed Fisher for not solving these questions; the trouble is that he does not seem to know that he is raising them. His sincerity is undoubted; but while his heart is earnest, his intellect is perhaps not so hard at work as he supposes.
Some of the medieval sweetness and richness still hangs about the prose of Fisher as it hangs about the verse of Hawes; but for our present purpose he matters less as a literary figure than as a convenient representative of the religion in possession at the very beginning of the English Reformation. He was a bishop and died for his faith: in him we ought to find what men like Tyndale were attacking. It was not in all respects what they imagined it to be. The Pelagianism of which they implicitly accused the Roman Church is, like the antinomianism of which the Papists accused them, a figment of controversy. Some of Fisher’s statements seem, at least to a layman, to be very close to Tyndale’s own, as when Fisher writes:
From the eyen of almyghty God whiche may be called his grace shyneth forth a meruaylous bryghtnes lyke as the beme that cometh from the sonne. And that lyght of grace stereth and setteth forthwarde the soules to brynge forth the fruyte of good werkes. (Sermon on Psalm xxxii.)
And again, on Psalm li, ‘no creature of himselfe hath power to do good werkes without the grace and help of God’. What Tyndale would have regarded as the cloven hoof appears chiefly when Fisher is talking of penance. By penance, on his view, sinners can ‘make due satysfacion’ so as to be ‘clene out of dette’ (Sermon on Psalm xxxii), and so ‘iustyfyed by the sacrament of penaunce’ that ‘God can ask no more of them’ (ibid.). It was this suggestion of balancing an account that the Protestants felt to be so repulsive and illusory. They would have also been repelled by that type of asceticism with its deep distrust of the body, which Fisher shares with Colet. Tyndale, almost in his first work, takes over from Luther the important recognition that ‘flesh’ in St. Paul does not mean primarily the sins of appetite; how could it, since such eminently spiritual sins as envy and magic are among the works of the flesh? Fisher, on the other hand, takes it for granted that ‘synne is caused and cometh of the vnlawfull pleasures of the body’ (Sermon on Psalm vi), that ‘dyrtie corruption’, that ‘sachell full of dunge’ (Consolation), and calls the deed of kind, here making no distinction between marriage and promiscuity, ‘the foule and fylthy pleaaure’. He thinks it unwholesome, too, and produces medical opinion to the effect that that ‘effusyon’ does more harm than to lose ten times the amount of blood (Sermon on Psalm xxviii). Even more important, if we are to understand why the Reformers, whether rightly or wrongly, felt that they were escaping from a prison, is Fisher’s conception of purgatory. A modern tends to see purgatory through the eyes of Dante: so seen, the doctrine is profoundly religious. That purification must, in its own nature, be painful, we hardly dare to dispute. But in Fisher the pain seems to have no intrinsic connexion with the purification at all: it is a pain which, while it lasts, separates us from God. Since even in this life pain ‘will not suffre the soul to remember itselfe, moche lesse therefore it shall haue ony remembrance abydynge in tourmentes, for cause also the paynes of purgatory be moche more than the paynes of this worlde, who may remember God as he ought to do, beynge in that paynfull place? Therefore the prophet sayth quoniam non est in morte qui memor fit tui?’ (Sermon on Psalm vi.) Thus the pains which in Dante were genuinely purgative have become, it would seem, merely retributive. Tyndale’s reaction to such a doctrine can be gathered from a sentence in his answer to More, ‘To punish a man that has forsaken sin of his own accord is not to purge him but to satisfy the lust of a tyrant’. Perhaps Fisher might not mean exactly what he said: or, meaning it, might not do justice to the doctrine of his own church. That is not here our concern. We want to know how people in England felt; we shall not succeed if Dante’s picture dominates our minds.
One merit, very unusual in that age, Fisher can claim: he is hardly at all scurrilous. His attack on Luther is not, indeed, masked under those forms of politeness which are usual between theological (though not between political) opponents today. But there is hardly any real abuse; compared with More, or even with Tyndale, Fisher is almost courteous.
We must now turn to those two less courteous, but far greater figures, the opposed martyrs Thomas More and William Tyndale; and though they were deeply divided by temper as well as by doctrine, it is important to realize at the outset that they also had a great deal in common. They must not, except in theology, be contrasted as the representatives respectively of an old and a new order. Intellectually they both belonged to the new: both were Grecians (Tyndale a Hebraist as well) and both were arrogantly, perhaps ignorantly, contemptuous of the Middle Ages. And if the view be accepted (it is said to be very doubtful) that a feudal world was at this time being replaced by something harsher in the social and economic sphere, then More and Tyndale both belonged to the old. Both inveighed against enclosure and sheep-farming and demanded that the desires of the ‘economic man’ should be completely subordinated to traditional Christian ethics. Both disapproved of the annulment of the king’s marriage. To the men themselves what they had in common doubtless seemed a mere ‘highest common factor’: but it was enough, had the world followed that only, to have altered the whole course of our history. Nor is it, perhaps, irrelevant to add that they were alike in their fate; even curiously alike, since both risked death by torture and both were mercifully disappointed, for More was only beheaded (not disembowelled alive) and they strangled Tyndale at the stake before they lit the fire.
Thomas More (1478–1535) who held his place in our older critical tradition on the precarious tenure of one Latin work, has in recent years been restored to his rightful place as a major English author. Of his poems I have spoken already. His remaining works fall into three classes; first those of ‘pure’ or comparatively ‘pure’ literature, secondly the controversies, and thirdly the moral and devotional treatises.
His Latin prose, with the exception of the Utopia, may be ignored in a history of English literature, the more so because its chief glory, the Historia Ricardi Tertii, can be read in his own unfinished English version. It is an ambitious undertaking modelled on the ancient historians, and in it the long set speeches dear to Thucydides and Livy claim the lion’s share. Although their dramatic function is not neglected the author is more interested in them as rhetoric, and Queen Elizabeth pleading for her child’s right to sanctuary is not really much less ‘facundious’ and forensic than Buckingham addressing the citizens in the Guildhall. More, who had been so purely medieval in his poetry, is here medieval and humanistic at once; he writes for an audience in whom the medieval love of fine talk had been slightly redirected and heavily reinforced by classical example. He expects us to share the enjoyment of the citizens when Buckingham ‘rehersed them the same matter again in other order and other wordes, so wel and ornately and natheles so euidently and plaine, with voice, gesture and countenance so cumly and so conuenient, that every man much meruailed that herd him’. More is also a lawyer writing for an audience whose education had for the most part a legal twist, and law is the worst influence on his style. He sets out for a whole column the proclamation of Hastings’s treasons and probably regards its conveyancing prolixity as an ornament rather than a blemish to his page. The character sketches, pithy and sententious and much indebted to the ancient models, will be more congenial to a modern taste. The portrait of Hastings would not disgrace Tacitus, and that of Jane Shore is a beautiful example of the author’s mingled charity and severity. The book now pleases best in those passages which are most intimate—Hastings chatting with his namesake, Richard calling for the mess of strawberries, Richard with his eyes ‘whirling’ and his hand on his dagger ‘like one always ready to strike again’, or the lively picture of a queen moving house with ‘heavinesse, rumble, haste and businesse . . . chestes, coffers, packes, fardelles, trusses . . . some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more’. It is not an economical style, but it lives. We must not, however, represent a sixteenth-century book as a modern one by overemphasizing merits which are really subordinate. More is not an early Strachey nor even an early Macaulay. The Historia in its entirety will succeed only with readers who can enjoy the classical sort of history—history as a grave and lofty Kind, the prose sister of epic, rhetorical in expression and moral in purpose. If read in the right spirit, More’s performance will seem remarkable. He brings to his work a great knowledge of affairs, a sufficient measure of impartiality, a sense of tragedy, and a sense of humour. He makes an attempt, something more than half-hearted, to sift fact from tradition; and to his dramatic molding of the story Shakespeare’s close discipleship is sufficient testimony. He produces a much more interesting example of the new kind of history than Boece.
In 1516 came the Utopia which, though it was written in Latin, is so good and has given rise to so many controversies that I should hardly be forgiven if I passed it over in silence. All seem to be agreed that it is a great book, but hardly any two agree as to its real significance: we approach it through a cloud of contradictory eulogies. In such a state of affairs a good, though not a certain, clue is the opinion of those who lived nearer the author’s time than we. Our starting-point is that Erasmus speaks of it as if it were primarily a comic book; Tyndale despises it as ‘poetry’; for Harpsfield it is a ‘iollye inuention’, ‘pleasantly’ set forth; More himself in later life classes it and the Praise of Folly together as books fitter to be burned than translated in an age prone to misconstruction; Thomas Wilson, fifty years later, mentions it for praise among ‘feined narrations and wittie invented matters (as though they were true indeed)’. This is not the language in which friend or enemy or author (when the author is so honest a man as More) refer to a serious philosophical treatise. It all sounds as if we had to do with a book whose real place is not in the history of political thought so much as in that of fiction and satire. It is, of course, possible that More’s sixteenth-century readers, and More himself, were mistaken. But it is at least equally possible that the mistake lies with those modern readers who take the book au grand sérieux. There is a cause specially predisposing them to error in such a matter. They live in a revolutionary age, an age in which modern weapons and the modern revolutionary technique have made it only too easy to produce in the real world states recognizably like those we invent on paper: writing Utopias is now a serious matter. In More’s time, or Campanella’s, or Bacon’s, there was no real hope or fear that the paper states could be ‘drawn into practice’: the man engaged in blowing such bubbles did not need to talk as if he were on his oath. And here we have to do with one who, as the Messenger told him in the Dialogue, ‘used to look so sadly’ when he jested that many were deceived.
The Utopia has its serious, even its tragic, elements. It is, as its translator Robinson says, ‘fruteful and profitable’. But it is not a consistently serious philosophical treatise, and all attempts to treat it as such break down sooner or later. The interpretation which breaks down soonest is the ‘liberal’ interpretation. There is nothing in the book on which the later More, the heretic-hunter, need have turned his back. There is no freedom of speech in Utopia. There is nothing liberal in Utopia. From it, as from all other imaginary states, liberty is more successfully banished than the real world, even at its worst, allows. The very charm of these paper citizens is that they cannot in any way resist their author: every man is a dictator in his own book. It is not love of liberty that makes men write Utopias. Nor does the Utopia give any colour to Tyndale’s view that More ‘knew the truth’ of Protestantism and forsook it: the religious orders of the Utopians and their very temples are modelled on the old religion. On the other hand, it is not a defence of that old order against current criticisms; it supports those criticisms by choosing an abbot as its specimen of the bad landlord and making a friar its most contemptible character. R. W. Chambers, with whom died so much that was sweetest and strongest in English scholarship, advanced a much more plausible view. According to him the Utopians represent the natural virtues working at their ideal best in isolation from the theological; it will be remembered that they hold their Natural Religion only provisionally ‘onles any godlier be inspired into man from heuen’. Yet even this leaves some features unaccounted for. It is doubtful whether More would have regarded euthanasia for incurables and the assassination of hostile princes as things contained in the Law of Nature. And it is very strange that he should make Hedonism the philosophy of the Utopians. Epicurus was not regarded by most Christians as the highest example of the natural light. The truth surely is that as long as we take the Utopia for a philosophical treatise it will ‘give’ wherever we lean our weight. It is, to begin with, a dialogue: and we cannot be certain which of the speakers, if any, represents More’s considered opinion. When Hythloday explains why his philosophy would be useless in the courts of kings More replies that there is ‘another philosophy more ciuil’ and expounds this less intransigent wisdom so sympathetically that we think we have caught the very More at last; but when I have read Hythloday’s retort I am all at sea again. It is even very doubtful what More thought of communism as a practical proposal. We have already had to remind ourselves, when considering Colet, that the traditional admission of communism as the law of uncorrupted Nature need carry with it no consequences in the world of practical sociology. It is certain that in the Confutation (1532) More had come to include communism among the ‘horrible heresies’ of the Anabaptists and in the Dialogue of Comfort he defends private riches. Those who think of More as a ‘lost leader’ may discount these later utterances. Yet even at the end of the Utopia he rejects the Utopian economics as a thing ‘founded of no good reason’. The magnificent rebuke of all existing societies which precedes this may suggest that the rejection is ironical. On the other hand, it may mean that the whole book is only a satiric glass to reveal our own avarice by contrast and is not meant to give us directly practical advice.
These puzzles may give the impression that the Utopia is a confused book: and if it were intended as a serious treatise it would be very confused indeed. On my view, however, it appears confused only so long as we are trying to get out of it what it never intended to give. It becomes intelligible and delightful as soon as we take it for what it is—a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all) of invention, which starts many hares and kills none. It is written by More the translator of Lucian and friend of Erasmus, not More the chancellor or the ascetic. Its place on our shelves is close to Gulliver and Erewhon, within reasonable distance of Rabelais, a long way from the Republic or New Worlds for Old. The invention (the ‘poetry’ of which More was accused) is quite as important as the merits of the polity described, and different parts of that polity are on very different levels of seriousness.
Not to recognize this is to do More grave injustice. Thus the suggestion that the acquisitive impulse should be mortified by using gold for purposes of dishonour is infantile if we take it as a practical proposal. If gold in Utopia were plentiful enough to be so used, gold in Utopia would not be a precious metal. But if it is taken simply as satiric invention leading up to the story of the child and the ambassadors, it is delicious. The slow beginning of the tale, luring us on from London to Bruges, from Bruges to Antwerp, and thence by reported speech to fabulous lands beyond the line, has no place in the history of political philosophy: in the history of prose fiction it has a very high place indeed. Hythloday himself, as we first see him, has something of the arresting quality of the Ancient Mariner. The dialogue is admirably managed. Mere conversation holds us contented for the first book and includes that analysis of the contemporary English situation which is the most serious and the most truly political part of the Utopia. In the second book More gives his imagination free rein. There is a thread of serious thought running through it, an abundance of daring suggestions, several back-handed blows at European institutions, and, finally, the magnificent peroration. But he does not keep our noses to the grindstone. He says many things for the fun of them, surrendering himself to the sheer pleasure of imagined geography, imagined language, and imagined institutions. That is what readers whose interests are rigidly political do not understand: but everyone who has ever made an imaginary map responds at once.
Tyndale’s belief that More ‘knew the truth and forsook it’ is a crude form of the error which finds in the Utopia a liberalism inconsistent with More’s later career. There is no inconsistency. More was from the first a very orthodox Papist, even an ascetic with a hankering for the monastic life. At the same time it is true that the Utopia stands apart from all his other works. Religiously and politically he was consistent: but this is not to say that he did not undergo a gradual and honourable change very like that which overtook Burke and Wordsworth and other friends of liberty as the Revolutionary age began to show its true features. The times altered; and things that would once have seemed to him permissible or even salutary audacities came to seem to him dangerous. That was why he would not then wish to see the Utopia translated. In the same way any of us might now make criticisms of democracy which we would not repeat in the hour of its danger. And from the literary point of view there is an even greater gulf between the Utopia and the works which followed. It is, to speak simply, beyond comparison better than they.
It is idle to expect that More’s polemical writings, to which I now turn, should be as good in their own kind as the Utopia is in its. In the first place they are commissioned work, undertaken at the instance of the Bishop of London and conscientiously carried out not because More wants to write them but because, on his view, they must be written by someone. There is no evidence that he ever felt a literary and intellectual, as distinct from a religious, vocation to this kind of work. His weariness, until the task has become a habit, is apparent. ‘Would God,’ he says in the Confutation, ‘after all my laboure done, so that the remembrance of their pestilent errours were araced out of Englishe mennes heartes and their abominable bookes burned up, myne owne were walked with them, and the name of these matters vtterly putte in oblivion.’ In the second place More was limited by the very terms of his commission to write for the vulgar, simplicibus et idiotis hominibus. He was not allowed to fly very high in theology: how high he could have flown if free, I am not qualified to judge. Hooker, writing many years later, gave it as his opinion (Sermon on Justification) that More, though a very learned man, had not fully understood the position that his own church was defending against the Lutherans.
One work in this group, the Dialogue of 1528, stands apart from the rest. It is the first and the iron has not yet entered into More’s soul. The plan of it is good. More feigns a series of visits from a mysterious Messenger who puts forward the Lutheran positions with a disinterested air, disclaiming all belief in them but sometimes betraying it. Considerable dramatic humour results from this device. The discussion is brought to life in true Platonic style by notes of time and place, by interruptions, and by references to Lady More. Passages of hard dialectic are relieved by ‘merry tales’ and by lengthier speeches which aim at eloquence. As controversy it does not rank very high and perhaps in the circumstances could not: the main questions at issue hardly admit of so popular a treatment. It is easy to put the case for justification by faith as it appears to a text-hunting and ignorant fanatic, and easy to reply in terms of commonplace good sense and morality. But the real problem, set by the very nature of Christian experience, remains where it was. On saints’ miracles More does better, and the marvelous story of the young couple of Walbrook is at once a piece of excellent comedy and an effective argument; but too many pages are wasted on that facile interchange of anecdotal credulity and anecdotal incredulity which you may hear in any casual conversation about spiritualism or flying saucers. A lawyer, we feel, ought to have had something more pertinent to say about the whole nature of evidence. But if this book is not great theology, it is great Platonic dialogue: perhaps the best specimen of that form ever produced in English. Berkeley is urbane and graceful and more profound, but his Hylas and Philonous are mere men of straw beside More and the Messenger. The latter is perhaps too stupidly obstinate and repeats himself too often. No doubt this is so because More wishes to depict the patience of the Papists, but he has not foreseen how severely he would also exercise the patience of his readers. But for the most part the thing is admirably alive. We watch with delight the slow, inevitable progress of the Messenger into snare after snare; and this, together with the richness of its colloquialisms and the wholly excellent humour of its funny stories, will always make the Dialogue worth reading.
One more work is worth separate mention before we reach the real slough. The Supplication of Souls (1529) is a defence of the doctrine of purgatory and More has chosen to put it into the mouth of the souls whom purgatory now contains. The first book, which is almost entirely factual and statistical, contains some of More’s best and most muscular prose—for More is happiest when he is not trying to be eloquent. The second book, which has a peculiar literary merit of its own, illustrates a further stage in the degradation of the idea of purgatory. In Fisher the pain has been separated from any spiritual purification, but the torments had at least been inflicted by angels. In More this last link with heaven is severed. The attendants (if that is the right word) are now devils. ‘Our keepers’, say the imprisoned souls, ‘are such as God kepe you from, cruell damned spirites, odious enemies and despitefull tormentours, and theyr companye more horrible and grieuous to vs than is the payn itself and the intollerable tourmente that they doo vs, wherewith from top to toe they cease not to teare vs’. The length of the sentence has thus become the sole difference between purgatory and hell. Purgatory is a department of hell. And More’s humour, continued even here, somehow increases the horror. Instead of the psalms and litanies which resounded on the sunlit terraces of Dante’s mountain from souls ‘contented in the flame’, out of the black fire which More has imagined, mixed with the howls of unambiguous physical torture, come peals of harsh laughter. All is black, salt, macabre. I make the point not to disgrace a man before whom the best of us must stand uncovered, but because the age we are studying cannot be understood without it. This sort of thing, among others, was what the old religion had come to mean in the popular imagination during the reign of Henry VIII: this was one of the things a man left behind in becoming a Protestant. Nor, I think, is that its only relevance for the history of taste. Has not the wildness of the ‘eldritch’ poetry in Scotland a secret affinity with it? The thing cannot be proved: but I feel that the burlesque heaven of Kynd Kittok springs from the same mood as the serious, yet dreadfully comic, purgatory of the Supplication.
Although we have now skimmed more than four hundred columns of the 1557 folio, the greater part of More’s controversial writings remains—the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532 and 1553), the Letter (against Frith) (1532–3), the Apology (1533), the Debellation of Salem and Byzance (1533), and the Answer to the Poisoned Book (1533). The earliest criticism ever made on these works is recorded by More himself (‘The brethren cannot beare that my writing is so long’) and it cannot be seriously questioned. There are indeed differences between them. The Confutation is the longest, the harshest, and the dullest. The Letter is exceptional not only for its brevity but for its charitable and almost fatherly tone. In the Apology we see More being drawn, as all controversialists are drawn, away from the main issue into self-defence. In the Debellation what was first undertaken as a duty is only too plainly becoming a habit. More is at pains to excuse himself for answering what in his own judgement needed no answer, and tells us the illuminating fact that this huge treatise was composed in a few days. A not unwelcome air of senility is perceptible in the rambling pages with which it opens and there is charm in the passage where the old lawyer pictures himself once more a young man at a moot. In the Answer to the Poisoned Book this loss of grip becomes even more noticeable and we repeatedly escape from the matter in hand into digressions—on gluttony, on the Arian heresy, on the Annunciation, on Free Will, on Judas Iscariot. This twilight is welcome after the heat of such a day.
But in spite of these differences the controversial works, after the Dialogue, may well be criticized in the lump. Pure literature they do not aspire to be; and theologically More’s commission confines him to stating the ‘stock’ case for orthodoxy in an entirely popular form. It only remains, therefore, to judge them as specimens of the art of controversy. That this art can produce masterpieces which outlive their occasion, no one who remembers Plato, Hooker, Burke, or Newman will deny. But More’s controversies are not on that level. Apart from the deficiencies of his style (a point we must return to) he is hampered by two self-imposed principles which are fatal to the highest kind of success. In the first place he has decided that his case against the heretics should be in his books as the soul is in the body—tota in toto et tota in qualibet parte; that the reader, whatever page he lights upon, should find there all that he needs for refutation of the enemy. He is monotonously anxious to conquer and to conquer equally, at every moment: to show in every chapter that every heretical book is wrong about everything—wrong in history, in logic, in rhetoric, and in English grammar as well as in theology. And secondly his method of attacking a book is to go through it page by page like a schoolmaster correcting an exercise, so that the order and emphasis of the discussion are in fact dictated by his opponent. How to throw the grand arguments into bold relief and to condense the lesser, how to decline small points and to answer others while seeming to decline them, where to refresh the reader with some eloquent assault over the ruins of a lately demolished fortification—of all this More has no notion.
Yet even in these books his real talent sometimes appears. Wherever he allows himself to use the weapon of low comedy he is at once excellent. Even the faintest hint of it—as in the last book of the Confutation where he transfers the case against Barnes to two imaginary old women—is sufficient to refresh us; and the fully developed ‘merry tales’ will bear comparison with anything of the same kind in Chaucer or Shakespeare. It is true that the best of them all, the story of Richard Hunne, comes in the Dialogue: but even in the later works we have the good-wife of Culham, Te igitur clementissime pater, the lady who stopped her husband’s lecture on astronomy, and the woman who talked in church. About these there can be only one opinion; but More has other devices bordering on the comic which do not seem to me so successful. He has the Arnoldian trick of catching up some phrase used by the enemy and ridiculing it by repetition. No instance of this is as good as ‘Wragg is in custody’, but it can be effective enough when the pilloried phrase has the rhythmic qualities that go to make a good refrain; like ‘the great, brode, bottomless ocean sea of euils’ in the Supplication. But at times it may descend to a kind of nagging or snarling which is unattractive—‘I have not contended with Erasmus my derling because I founde no such malicious entente with Erasmus my derling as I fynde with Tyndall. For hadde I founde with Erasmus my derling the shrewde entente and purpose that I fynde in Tyndall, Erasmus my derling should be no more my derling’, &c. What is this but the rhetoric of the preparatory school?
The mention of More’s humour brings us to the question of his scurrility. From the moral point of view no very serious charge can be made; More is not much more scurrilous, only more amusingly scurrilous, than many of our older controversialists. Even if we judged his scurrility to be a fault it would be hard to wish away a fault so intertwined (or even identical) with what is the chief and often the only merit of these works: that is, the gusto of their hard-hitting, racy, street-corner abuse. It was More’s business to appeal to the vulgar, to play to the gallery, and it suited one side of him extremely well. He is our first great cockney humourist, the literary ancestor of Martin Marprelate and Nashe. It would be a loss to his polemical writings if they were purged of their references to heretics who ‘haue as much shame in their face as a shotten herring hath shrimps in her tail’, to ‘lowsy Luther’ and his disciples’ ‘long babelary’, to ‘hammer-heads meete to make horse-shoon in helle’. If he would talk a little less about faggots and Smithfield and about Luther’s ‘abominable bichery’, a theme that almost obsesses him, I for one should have no quarrel with his comic abuse. It is when he is being serious that his abusiveness becomes a literary fault. To rebuke magnificently is one of the duties of a great polemical writer. More often attempts it but he always fails. He loses himself in a wilderness of opprobrious adjectives. He cannot denounce like a prophet; he can only scold and grumble like a father in an old fashioned comedy.
As we read these controversies we become aware that More the author was scarcely less a martyr to his religion than More the man. In obedience to his conscience he spent what might have been the best years of his literary life on work which demanded talents that he lacked and gave very limited scope to those he had. It may well have been no easy sacrifice.
I turn with relief to his devotional works. One of these, the meditation De IV Novissimis was early work and might on that account have been treated at the very beginning. I have preferred to place it here, side by side with the Dialogue of Comfort, in order to bring out the almost laughable, wholly beautiful, contrast between them. The late work written under the shadow of the scaffold, is full of comfort, courage, and humour; the early meditation is a piece of unrelieved gloom. Thus some men’s religion fails at the pinch: that of others does not appear to pluck up heart until the pinch comes. The De IV Novissimis is, for its darkness, a pendant to the Supplication. It may justly be called a religious ‘exercise’ provided that we do not associate with that word any idea of insincerity. That is to say, it is not an outpouring of individual experience. The theme comes first and is selected for its intrinsic and objective importance; the business of the writer is to find reflections suitable to it. Self-improvement, not self-expression, is the purpose. More’s scheme consisted in applying each of the four last things to each of the seven deadly sins in turn, and he gave it up in the middle of applying the first Novissimum (death) to the sixth sin (sloth), having thus completed five of the twenty-eight panels or niches intended. Of its value as a devotional work who dares consider himself a judge? If most of it now seems helpless either to encourage or to alarm, the fault may be ours: but not, I think, all ours. Almost everywhere it tries to prove too much. Gross exaggeration of the part played by gluttony in our diseases leaves the conscience undisturbed. The passage in which all life is compared to an illness shows some inability to distinguish between a conceit and an argument. The colours are too dark. In the true late medieval manner More forgets that to paint all black is much the same as not to paint at all. What was intended to be a rebuke of sin degenerates almost into a libel upon life and we are forced into incredulity. It is true that More once assures us that even in the natural order ‘virtue bringeth his pleasure and vice is not without pain’ but this little taper does not cast its beam very far in the general gloom. The real merits of the book are incidental. The medieval homiletic tradition wisely admitted the grotesque and the comic and where More avails himself of this licence he writes well. The picture of the glutton ‘with his belly standing a strote like a taber and his noll totty with drink’ is as good as that in the Ancren Riwle. We are reminded of Falstaff’s death when we read of the dying man ‘thy nose sharping, thy legges cooling, thy fingers fimbling’. Few pictures of the deathbed are more vivid than the following:
Haue ye not ere this in a sore sicknes felt it very grieuous to haue folk babble to you, and namely such thynges as ye sholde make aunswere to, whan it was a pain to speake? Thinke ye notnow that it wil be a gentle pleasure whan we lye dying, al our body in pain, al our mind in trouble, our soul in sorow, our hearte al in drede, while our life walketh awaiward, while our death draweth toward, while the deuil is busy about vs, while we lack stomak and strength to beare any one of so manifold heynous troubles, wil it not be as I was about to say, a pleasaunt thing to see before thine eyen and heare at thine eare a rable of fleshly frendes, or rather of flesh flies, skipping about thy bed and thy sicke body (now almost carreyn) crying to thee on euery side, What shal I haue, what shall I haue. . . . Than shall thyne executours ask for the kayes. . . .
But I have done the author a little more than justice by making one omission and by stopping where I did. More sows from the sack, not from the hand.
The Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534) is the noblest of all his vernacular writings. It was written in the Tower while More waited for death (for all he knew, death by torture, hanging, cutting down alive, and disemboweling). Its form is an imaginary conversation between two Hungarian gentlemen who foresee the possibility of martyrdom if the Turk comes much nearer. It is thus a fairly close parallel to Boethius’ De Consolatione and the difference between them is interesting. In Boethius the thought that would be uppermost in any modern mind—that of physical pain—is hardly present at all; in More it is ubiquitous. We feel that we are reading the work of a man with nerves like our own, even of a man sensitive in such matters beyond the norm of his own coarse and courageous century. He discusses at length whether a man should envisage such horrors beforehand. To do so may clearly lead either to false confidence (reckoning with pain’s image, not pain) or to despair (reckoning without the grace which will not perhaps be given before the need). His reply is that there is no choice. When once the matter has been raised we cannot refuse to think about it, and to advise us otherwise is ‘as much reason as the medicine that I haue heard for the toothache, to go thrice about a churchyard and never think on a fox tayle’. He would therefore have everyone, of whatever sex or age, ‘often to thinke thereupon’. We must do the best we can, meditating much on the Passion of Christ, never ‘full out of feare of fallynge’ but ‘in good hope and full purpose’ to stand. There is no attempt to disguise the situation; ‘whan we remember the terrour of shamefull and painefull death, that poynt sodaynly putteth us in obliuion of all that shold be our comfort’. There is here a precision unusual in More. ‘Whan we remember’—the mind is numb for hours even in a condemned cell, and then the terror rushes back: and ‘sodaynly’. Worse even than this is the haunting fear that the pain itself might force a man ‘to forsake our Saviour even in the myddes, and dye there with his synne, and so be damned foreuer’. Yet when all’s said, a man must ‘stand to his tackling’ and any Christian would be very glad today to have so suffered yesterday.
The theme is almost the gravest that the human mind can entertain, but it must not be supposed that the book is a gloomy one. The Dialogue of Comfort justifies its title; it overflows with kindliness and humour and the beautiful self-mockery of old age aware of its own garrulity and its own limitations. The ‘merry tales’ are here in abundance, the old medieval jokes about women, so stale in themselves yet, after all, so amusingly handled, and so touching when we remember the hard road which they are now helping the author to travel. In a slightly different vein the longer story of a false alarm in war (ii. 12) is admirably told. But I would not quote much from this book: it is (or was) accessible in a cheap reprint and should be on everyone’s shelves.
Of the Treatise on the Passion in its English form, we have only part from More’s own hand; the rest, translated from his Latin by Margaret Roper’s daughter. Those who turn to it expecting to find the beauties of the dialogue continued will be disappointed. It is as much exegetical as devotional and takes the form of a commentary on Gerson’s Monatesseron (a gospel concordance made on a rather clumsy plan). As a Biblical commentator More is wholly medieval. Long ago in the Supplication he had used as a proof of the existence of purgatory the fact that Hezekiah wept when told that he must die; here he allegorizes in the old fashion on Our Lord’s repetition of the word Father, on the name Simon, and on Malchus. From the literary point of view the most unfortunate feature of the book is the indiscretion with which More puts words into the mouth of Christ. It can be done successfully; witness the Imitation. But More seems wholly unaware of the dangers involved: it is indeed remarkable how one who had been, as a man, so attentive to the spirit of the Dominical utterances, could have remained, as a critic, so deaf to their style. Already in the Answer to the Poisoned Book this insensibility had led him to grotesque results (‘For I am, as I dyuers times now haue told you, the very bread of life’); here it leads to the following:
Thys is the shorte whyle that is graunted yee and the libertie geuen vnto darknesse, that now ye maye in the night, which till this howre ye could neuer be suffered to bring to passe in the daye, like monstruous raueninge fowles, like skriche owles and hegges, like backes, howlettes, nighte crowes and byrdes of the hellye lake, goe aboute with your billes, your tallentes, your teeth and your shyrle shrychinge, outrageouslye, but all in vayne, thus in the darke to flee uppon me.
All this (and there is much more than I have quoted) is a gloss on the words ‘This is your hour and the power of darkness’; and More cannot see that he is weakening them. It is true that the words quoted are his granddaughter’s translation: but those who know More’s English best will not say that the style is much inferior to his own, and those who look at the Latin will not find its bubones striges and nycticoraces much of an improvement on their vernacular equivalents. Yet these errors (of which there are plenty in the Treatise) are balanced by passages of exquisite pathos and insight. The following, also put into the mouth of Our Lord and explaining the final cause of the agony in the garden, is noteworthy—though more, I confess, for the matter than for the style.
Plucke up thy courage, faint heart, and dispaire never a deale. What though ye be feareful, sory, and weary, and standest in great dread of most painful tormentry that is like to falle uppon thee, be of good comfort for all that. For I myself have vanquished the whole worlde, and yet felt I far more feare, sorowe, wearinesse, and much more inward anguish too, whan I considered my most bitter, painful passion to presse so fast uppon me. He that is strong harted may finde a thousand gloryous valiant martyrs whose ensample he right joyfully follow. But thou, now, o temerous and weke sely shepe, thynke it sufficient for thee onely to walke after me.
Great claims have in modern times been made for More’s English prose; I can accept them only with serious reservations. To compare it with that of the Scale of Perfection or the Revelations of Lady Julian will, in my opinion, only reveal its inferiority to them. The man who sits down and reads fairly through fifty pages of More will find many phrases to admire; but he will also find an invertebrate length of sentence, a fumbling multiplication of epithets, and an almost complete lack of rhythmical vitality. The length of sentence in More is quite different from the fullness of impassioned writers like Cicero or Burke or Ruskin, or from that of close thinkers like Hooker or Coleridge. It is not even the winning garrulity of Montaigne, or not often. Its chief cause is the fact that More never really rose from a legal to a literary conception of clarity and completeness. He multiplies words in a vain endeavour to stop up all possible chinks, where a better artist forces his conceptions on us by the light and heat of intellect and emotion in which they burn. He thus loses the advantages both of full writing and of concise writing. There are no lightning thrusts: and, on the other hand, no swelling tide of thought and feeling. The style is stodgy and doughlike. As for the good phrases, the reader will already have divined their nature. They come when More is in his homeliest vein: their race and pith and mere Englishry are the great redeeming feature of his prose. They ring in our ears like echoes of the London lanes and Kentish villages; ‘whispered in hukermoker’, ‘damn us all to Dymmingesdale’, ‘the goose was ouer the moon’, ‘every finger shall be a thumb’, ‘fume, fret, frot, and foam’, ‘sauing for the worshipfull name of wine ichad as leue a drunken water’. They belong to the same world as his merry tales. Nearly all that is best in More is comic or close to comedy.
We think of More, and rightly, as a humanist and a saintly man. On the one hand, he is the writer of the Utopia, the friend of Erasmus, the man whose house became a sort of academy. On the other, he is the man who wanted to be a Carthusian, who used a log of wood for his bolster and wore the hair, the martyr who by high example refused the wine offered him on his way to execution. The literary tragedy is that neither of these sides to his character found nearly such perfect expression in his writings as they deserved. The Utopia ought to have been only a beginning: his fertility of mind, his humour, and his genius for dialogue ought to have been embodied in some great work, some colloquies meatier than those of Erasmus, some satiric invention more gravely droll than Rabelais. As for his sanctity, to live and die like a saint is no doubt a better thing than to write like one, but it is not the same thing; and More does not write like a saint. ‘Unction’ (in the good sense of that word) is noticeably lacking in his work: the beauty of holiness, the fragrance of the Imitation or of St. François de Sales or of Herbert. What is actually expressed in most of his work is a third More, out of whom both the saint and the humanist have been made and with whom (that is both his glory and his limitation) they never lose touch—the Tudor Londoner of the citizen class. However high he rises he remains unmistakably rooted in a world of fat, burgher laughter, contentedly acclaiming well-seasoned jokes about shrewish wives or knavish servants, contemptuous of airs and graces and of what it thinks unnecessary subtleties; a world not lacking in shrewdness, courage, kindness, or honesty, but without fineness. No man even half so wise and good as Thomas More ever showed so little trace of the cuor gentil. There is nothing at all in him which, if further developed, could possibly lead on to the graces of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. It might have led to things which some would prefer, but very different things.
Of Tyndale (?–1536) as a Biblical translator something will be said in a later section: our present concern is with his theological works. To give a detailed account of these one by one would be tedious. Tyndale’s message is always the same and a single abstract would serve for nearly all his books. This repetition is intentional, as appears from his Prologue to Leviticus where, repeating what he has said elsewhere of allegories, he adds ‘though I haue spoken of them in another place, yet, lest the boke come not to all mens handes that shall read this, I will speake of them here also a woorde or twayne’. He never envisaged the modern critic sitting down to his Works in three volumes: he is like a man sending messages in war, and sending the same message often because it is a chance if any one runner will get through.
The early translation of Isocrates has not survived and presumably stood as much apart from his life’s work as an academic thesis in our own days may stand apart from the mature work of a professional writer. His version of Erasmus’s Enchiridion arose out of an argument when he was still an unknown private tutor in the house of Sir John Walsh. From these early and private controversies sprang the famous béotword ‘if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the scriptures than thou dost’, and the fulfillment of that vaunt is the history of his life. The constancy of his purpose triumphed not only over perpetual danger, exile, poverty, and persecution, but even (which may be rarer) over all that was personal in the vaunt itself. In May 1531, speaking to one of the numerous spies whom Henry sent to entrap him, he offered that ‘if it would stand with the king’s most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the scripture to be put forth among his people’, he would in return write no more and would put himself in England at the king’s mercy—thus throwing life and life-work together to the wolf. Every line he wrote was directly or indirectly devoted to the same purpose: to circulate the ‘gospel’—not, on his view, to be identified with the Gospels—either by comment or translation.
The earliest work of the fully dedicated Tyndale is the prologue to the 1525 edition of his New Testament which Cochlaeus succeeded in strangling at birth. Of this edition only a few sheets are now known, but they contain the Prologue. It was later enlarged into A Pathway into the Holy Scripture. Next follows the beautiful Prologue to Romans (1526) which is mainly translated from Luther’s Praefatio in epistolam ad Romanos (1523), and in 1528 the Parable of the Wicked Mammon, whose title is not much truer to its real contents than Montaigne’s Of Coaches. In the same year the Obedience of a Christian Man was published; an ill-planned and digressive book on which, for various reasons, we had better pause.
When it is remembered that in the Obedience Tyndale makes his famous statement that ‘the kyng is in thys worlde without lawe and may at his lust doe right or wrong and shall geue accomptes but to God onely’, and also that the favour of Henry might have turned the whole situation in the Protestants’ favour, it is easy to suspect that Tyndale is here deliberately using carnal policy to advance his cause. A reading of the Obedience dissipates the suspicion. The work has, indeed, a political occasion. The enemies have been saying that those who demand a vernacular Bible are a source of insurrection and even of communism. In answer to this Tyndale develops his real political philosophy. It is not one flattering to kings, though we are told that Henry read it with pleasure. They are, according to Tyndale, cradled into tyranny by bishops who murmur ‘Your grace shall take your pleasure’. They are the dupes and puppets of the Pope who ‘geueth to some a rose, to another a cappe of mayntenaunce: one is called Most Christen King, another Defender of the Fayth’. Lechery and pride are ‘the common pestilence of all princes. Read the stories and see.’ They must be obeyed—because it is better to suffer one tyrant than many and because by resistance we generally get something worse. We are not very far from Rousseau’s epigram, ‘Every King comes from God: so does every plague.’ As we look deeper, and supplement the Obedience from Tyndale’s other writings, we find ourselves in the presence of a political theory almost identical with Shakespeare’s.
Tyndale asserts the doctrine of ‘Degree’ or natural hierarchy in its most uncompromising form. Of his parents a child is exhorted to think ‘thou art theyr good and possession’. The marriage of children ‘perteineth unto their elders’; without their elders’ consent it is unlawful. As for husband and wife, ’Sara, before she was maried, was Abrahams sister and equall with him; but as soon as she was maried . . . became without comparison inferior.’ Of kings Tyndale accepts (in the Exposition on Matthew V, VI, and VII, 1533) the medieval doctrine that their office is in some way ultimately derived from the people, but he expressly denies the conclusion that the people can therefore depose them. For in a sense ‘God and not the common people chuseth the Prince though he chuse hym by them; for God commaundeth to chuse officers. Now hath God geuen no commaundement to put them downe agayne.’ Therefore they must be suffered. Insurrection even against a heathen prince is forbidden to Christian subjects. And their temporal authority is not to be interfered with by a spiritual authority. That the Roman church had intolerably so interfered was, of course, common ground to all the Reformers. But Tyndale has, I think, no Calvin-like hankering to set up a new spiritual interference in its place. I can recall no passage in his writings that favours theocracy.
Such obedience to the temporal sovereign is, of course, an affair of this world. Sovereigns are ‘to be obeyed onely as their commaundements repugne not against the commaundement of God: and then, Ho’ (Pathway). After that, not rebellion, but martyrdom. Of such temporal subordination temporal welfare is the reward: hence the Turks who excel us in obedience also ‘farre exceede vs Christen men in worldly prosperity’. Of all this, for Tyndale as for Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses are an illustration drawn by the hand of God.
Let Englande look about them and marke what hath chaunced them since they slue their right kyng whom God had annointed ouer them, King Rycharde the Second. Their people, townes, and villages are minished by the third parte; and of their noble bloude remayneth not the third nor I beleue the sixte, yea, and if I durst be bolde, I wene I might safely sweare that their remaineth not the sixteneth part. Their owne sworde hath eaten them vp (Exposition of Matthew).
In two respects Tyndale carries Shakespeare’s philosophy of history further than Shakespeare himself. Henry V’s famous victories do not lead him to let sleep the question ‘whether he were right heyre vnto England or held the land with the sworde as an heathen tyraunt agaynst all right. . . . And I ask whether his father slew not his leige King?’ (Answer to More). He also traces the story a stage further back. As Britain’s disregard of Gildas’s preaching was punished by the Saxon invasion, so England’s disregard of Wycliffe was punished by York and Lancaster’s long wars (Prologue to Jonas).
In the Practice of Prelates (1530) Tyndale returns to politics and finds himself unexpectedly on the same side as Sir Thomas More and the Pope. His object is to dissuade Henry from the repudiation of Catherine of Aragon and his contention is that marriage with a deceased brother’s wife is not unlawful. This leads him into an interesting discussion on the whole conception of incest. Like St. Augustine, he refuses to accept it as a mere taboo, and seeks for reasons. He finds them in his doctrine of hierarchy: the wife being inferior to the husband, a man may not marry any woman who is his natural superior—as aunts, for example, are. Hence marriage with one’s foster-mother would be scarcely less objectionable than marriage with one’s mother, and marriage of brother and sister might in certain circumstances be tolerated.
The same year saw the publication of his Pentateuch, enriched with prologues, and in the following year came the Answer to More, which suffers from the same structural defects as More’s own polemical writings. The Exposition upon Matthew V, VI, VII (1533) comes nearest of all Tyndale’s works to offering us a system of Christian ethics. The Supper of the Lord, also 1533, is attributed to him on internal evidence. Revisions of his earlier translations, new translations of Jonas and of the books from Joshua to Second Chronicles (left in manuscript), and a Brief Declaration of Sacraments occupied the rest of his life.
I have already explained why I do not propose to analyze these works separately: but what emerges from them all, taken in the mass, is so important for our understanding of the whole period that we must attempt to disengage it. I shall begin with the periphery of his thought and work gradually to the centre.
Mr. Gavin Bone, the deeply lamented Marcellus of our faculty at Oxford, gave it as his opinion that ‘Tyndale hated literature’. It is too strong. Tyndale certainly dismissed ‘Beuis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector, and Troylus’ in the Obedience as ‘fables of loue and wantonnes and of ribauldry, as filthy as hart can thinke’, and oddly included Robin Hood in the same class. This is the ordinary attitude of the humanist to medieval story: it is very unlikely that More would have thought otherwise. He also repeatedly twits More with being a ‘poet’: but everyone knew that poets were feigners and under the rules that then governed controversy the jibe was almost inevitable. Even now a writer who has ventured on any imaginative work is likely to have the fact used against him when he turns to criticism or theology. In the Wicked Mammon again Tyndale speaks with contempt of the ‘railing rhymes’ in Rede me and Be not Wroth: but they were really contemptible. What is true is that Tyndale thought very little about belles lettres, about literature for its own sake: he had matters in hand which seemed to him more important. He also speaks with great harshness (as More had spoken with droll mockery) of scholasticism, and, unlike More, extends his disapproval to the real Aristotle and the pagan philosophers in general. Near the end of the Wicked Mammon he attributes to Aristotle views which I do not think Aristotle held. But later, in the Obedience, it appears that Tyndale’s objection is not to Aristotle as such but to Aristotle as a substitute for, and contamination of, the Biblical revelation. Let men be first grounded in scripture, and then ‘if they goe abroad and walke by the fieldes and medowes of all maner doctors and philosophers, they could catch no harme: they should discerne the poyson from the hoonny and bring home nothyng but that which is holsome’. Modern critics do not perhaps always remember that where the premise (‘there has been a revelation’) is accepted, some such conclusion is logically unavoidable.
On scripture Tyndale has naturally much to say. He has learned that Greek and Hebrew both go better than Latin into an English version, and even ‘worde for worde’, whereas, ‘thou must seeke a compasse in the Latin and yet shalt haue much worke to translate it well fauouredly, so that it haue the same grace and sweetenesse’—not the words, surely, of a man who in all senses ‘hated literature’. He thinks Deuteronomy ‘the most excellent of all the books of Moses’ and Romans ‘the most principal and excellent part of the New Testament’. He leaves the real authorship of Hebrews an open question, and refuses to follow Luther in rejecting the Epistle of St. James. It need hardly be added that he departs entirely from the medieval method of interpreting the sacred text. ‘Scripture’, he says, ‘speaketh after the most grossest maner: be diligent therefore that thou be not deceaued with curiousnes’, and elsewhere more beautifully ‘God is a spirit and all his wordes are spirituall. His literal sense is spirituall.’ Parables are not to be tortured ‘word by word’ into detailed allegories; the meaning is in the whole story only. At the same time he shows real critical balance by allowing allegories in what he conceives to be their proper place. We may draw an allegory from scripture ‘in the liberty of the Spirit’ provided we know what we are doing—provided that we know it is our own work and not the sense of the text, provided that we do not claim to prove anything by it and say nothing by it which cannot be proved from the literal sense of some other passage. The use of such allegories is not to prove but to impress, ‘for a similitude doth printe a thing much deper in the wittes of a man than doth a plaine speakyng and leaueth behynd him as it were a stinge’.
The ‘gospel’, for whose sake everything else in Tyndale’s work exists, is easy to misrepresent in quotation. When he says (in the Wicked Mammon) that the divine law ‘damneth’ us not for our refusal, but precisely for our inability, to obey it, or again (in the Prologue to Genesis) that in God’s sight ‘the deede is good because of the man and not the man because of his deede’, we seem to be faced with a doctrine both irrational and repellent. In reality Tyndale is trying to express an obstinate fact which meets us long before we venture into the realm of theology; the fact that morality or duty (what he calls ‘the Law’) never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others. It is shocking, but it is undeniable. We do not wish either to be, or to live among, people who are clean or honest or kind as a matter of duty: we want to be, and to associate with, people who like being clean and honest and kind. The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty subtly poisons it. In philosophical language, the ethical category is self-destructive; morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself. In theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the ‘gospel’, for Tyndale, is to deliver us from morality. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘puritan’ of modern imagination—the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it—is precisely the enemy which historical Protestantism arose and smote. What really matters is not to obey moral rules but to be a creature of a certain kind. The wrong kind of creature is damned (here, as we know; hereafter, as Tyndale believes) not for what it does but for what it is. ‘An adder is hated not for the euill it hath done but for the poyson that is in it.’ ‘We must first be euill ere we do euill, and good before we do good.’ And we cannot change our own nature by any moral efforts.
Another way of putting it would be to say that Tyndale, as regards the natural condition of humanity, is a psychological determinist. Action necessarily obeys the strongest impulse—‘the greatest appetite overcometh the less’ (Prologue to Romans). Man is like a hound ‘that cannot but folow his game when he seeth it before him if he be louse’ (Exposition on Matthew). By nature we can ‘do no good worke freely without respect of some profit either in this world or the world to come’ (Wicked Mammon). That the profit should be located in another world makes, as Tyndale clearly sees, no difference. Theological hedonism is still hedonism. Whether the man is seeking heaven or a hundred pounds he can still ‘but seeke himself’ (Prologue to Numbers). Of freedom in the true sense—of spontaneity or disinterestedness—Nature knows nothing. And yet, by a terrible paradox, such disinterestedness is precisely what the moral law demands. The law requires not only that we should do thus and thus but that we should do it with ‘a free, a willing, a lusty, and a louing hart’. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbours. It demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what merely moral men—those who are now called ‘puritans’ though Tyndale, I am afraid, identified them with the Papists—never understand. The first step is to see the Law as it really is, and despair. Real life does not begin till ‘the cockatrice of thy poysoned nature hath beheld herselfe in the glasse of the righteous law of God’ (Brief Declaration). For, when God ‘buildeth he casteth all downe first. He is no patcher’ (Obedience).
After the ‘thunder’ of the law comes the ‘rain’ of the gospel. Though Nature knows nothing of freedom, Supernature does. There is one will in existence which is really free and that will can join us to itself so that we share its freedom: ‘as a woman though she be neuer so poore, yet when she is maried, is as rich as her husband.’
The transition comes by the gift of faith which immediately and almost by definition passes into love. We are confronted with the redemption which God performed ‘to winne his enemye, to ouercomme him with loue, that he might see Loue and loue againe’. The essence of the change is that we now have power ‘to loue that which before we could not but hate’. The ‘fretting voice of the law is now the will of the Beloved, already in principle (if not at every moment) our own will, and a man can ‘be glad and laugh from the low bottome of his hart’ (Pathway). Here at the centre—miles inward from all the controversies about pardons and indulgences and relics and images—one sees how tragically narrow is the boundary between Tyndale and his opponents, how nearly he means by faith what they mean by charity. The idea that his doctrine of faith dispensed a man from works is a gross misunderstanding. They are not, for him, the cause of salvation, but they are its inseparable symptom. We are ‘loosed from the law’—by fulfilling it. ‘Deedes are the fruites of loue and loue is the fruit of fayth.’ ‘Whatsoeuer fayth has receaued . . . that same must loue shed out, euery whit, and bestow it.’ This is indeed inevitable for ‘as a man feeleth God in hymselfe, so is he to his neighbour’ (Wicked Mammon). In Christ we are all one—‘I am thou thyselfe and thou art I myselfe, and can be no nearer of kyn.’ Where deeds of love—to enemies, to Turks, to ‘the very beasts’ (Prologue to Exodus)—do not follow what seemed to be faith, we may conclude with certainty that it was not faith but ‘a dreame and an opinion’. Hence Tyndale’s social ethics are exactly the same as those of More. ‘To bye as good chepe as he can and to sell as deare as he can, to rayse the market’—all the deeds of Economic Man—are damned by God (Wicked Mammon). Not to give alms is ‘murder and theft’. Rent-raising and enclosure are forbidden—‘God gaue the earth to man to inhabit; and not unto sheep and wild deer’ (Obedience).
A modern is tempted to say that if both parties were thus agreed about practice the difference between them must have been an idle subtlety. Is it not a little pedantic of Tyndale to insist so vehemently that all these works, however indispensable, could never earn the divine approval? But to answer Yes would be to overlook the gigantic effort which Tyndale’s theology is making to leave room for disinterestedness and the desperate need for such an effort which then existed. Christianity is in constant danger of relapsing into theological hedonism. It had so relapsed in the eighteenth century when Boswell could say (without contradiction from Johnson) that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments was its very essence. And few, of any school, will deny that it had similarly relapsed in the later Middle Ages. Heaven, hell, and purgatory had been too long and too vividly presented. If in the resulting religion, with its fasts, pilgrimages, penances, and treasuries of ‘merits’, Tyndale could see nothing but a system of prudential bargaining, I will not say that he was right: but he was not grossly, nor inexplicably, wrong. From all this spiritual commercialism—this system in which the natural and economic man could be as natural and economic about religion as about anything else—he had found freedom in his doctrine of faith. Here at last a man could do something without a business motive. Once the tree had been made good (by no merit of its own) of course it would bear good fruit, almost as a by-product—‘naturally’, ‘of hys owne accorde’, ‘without commandment, even of his own nature’, ‘without looking after any reward’. Eternal life will of course follow good works in fact ‘without seekyng . . . though no man thought thereon’: nay ‘we are in eternal life already’; no longer bribed, no longer acting like a baby ‘for payne of the rod or for fear of bugges or pleasure of apples’ (Prologue to Exodus).
In all this we may be very sure that what Tyndale is attacking is a mere travesty of what his best opponents held; as what they attack is also a travesty of his own view. In these controversies each party writes best when he is defending what (well considered and in a cool hour) the other did not really deny. But it is important for us as historians to see how the Roman system appeared to Tyndale and to numbers of Englishmen in that century. It seemed to them the religion of gloom and anxiety, the service of a hard taskmaster. ‘If thou trust in thy workes, there is no rest. Thou shalt thinke, I haue not done inough. If thou trust in confession, then shalt thou thinke, haue I told all? Haue I told all the circumstances? Did I repent inough?’ But, equally, it seemed to them the religion of self-righteousness. If the devout person thinks that his good works are done ‘of his own natural strength and of the natural power of his free will’ he must, according to Tyndale, draw the conclusion ‘that euery man hath might euen so to do’ and thence despise those who do not: they could if they liked. It reads more like an answer to Pelagius than to the Church of Rome: but Tyndale thought the Church of Rome Pelagian.
The questions left unanswered and the difficulties raised by Tyndale’s gospel will be visible to all, but we are not here obliged to judge him as a theologian. What concerns us more as literary historians (seeking to get into men’s minds, to taste tempers rather than to judge doctrines) is the beautiful, cheerful integration of Tyndale’s world. He utterly denies the medieval distinction between religion and secular life. ‘God’s literal sense is spiritual.’ Wiping shoes, washing dishes, nay, our humblest natural functions (he uses all these examples) are all equally ‘good works’, and the ascetic life wins ‘no higher room in heaven’ than ‘a whore of the stews if she repent’. I do not know that many had exactly denied this, but it was usefully said. Pain and hardship sent by God or self-inflicted may be needed to tame the flesh. They had, Tyndale thought, no other value: therein differing from More who thought that God might have many other ways of taming yet chose pain ‘for His godly delight in justice’. Finally, Tyndale said something long overdue, and set his heel on one of the ugliest tendencies in medieval thought, when he wrote:
Beware that thou get thee not a false fayned chastitie made with the vngodly persuasions of St. Hierome or of Ouid in his filthy booke of the remedy agaynst loue; lest, when throughe such imaginations thou hast vtterly despised, defied, and abhorred all womankynde, thou come into such case thoroughe the fierce wrath of God, that thou canst neither lyue chast nor finde in thy hart to mary (Prologue to Numbers).
If much that was holy and lovely in medieval asceticism was lost at this time, some genuinely vile and Manichaean elements were rejected also.
As a writer, Tyndale is almost inevitably compared with More. In one quality he is obviously inferior to his great antagonist: that is, in humour. He ventures on an occasional pun (‘Nicholas de Lyra delirat’), and he has contemptuous coinages—chopological for tropological is the best. Nor would he be a man of his age if he could not sometimes fling out a happy violence, as when he speaks of a sickly stomach ‘longing after slibbersauce and swash’. Only once does he venture on to More’s own territory and then with a joke (to my thinking) so good that, however he detested the application, the Chancellor’s lips must have twitched when he read it. Tyndale has been attacking the doctrine that we can profit by the superfluous merits of the religious orders; and ends with the advice ‘If thy wife geue thee nine wordes for three, go to the Charterhouse and bye of their silence’. But it is only one flash against More’s recurrent summer lightning. In scurrility they are about equals; except that hard words sound less unlovely from the hunted than from the hunter. Digressions are a fault in both, not always from the same causes. Tyndale’s is the digressiveness of a stretched mind, full of its theme and overflowing all bounds in its impetuous and happy prodigality: More’s, sometimes, the rambling of a brooding, leisurely mind—a man talking, with the whole evening before him and the world full of interesting things. Where Tyndale is most continuously and obviously superior to More is in style. He is, beyond comparison, lighter, swifter, more economical. He is very unadorned (an occasional alliteration, some rhetorical repetitions, some asyndeton) but not at all jejune. The rhythm is excellent, the sort of rhythm which is always underlining the argument. In its sharpness of edge, its lucidity, and its power of driving the reader on, it has certain affinities (allowing for the difference of period) with the prose of Mr. Shaw’s prefaces. What we miss in Tyndale is the manysidedness, the elbow-room of More’s mind; what we miss in More is the joyous, lyric quality of Tyndale. The sentences that stick to the mind from Tyndale’s works are halfway to poetry—‘Who taught the Egles to spy out their pray? euen so the children of God spy out their father’—‘that they might see Loue and loue againe’—‘where the Spirit is, there it is always summer’ (though that last, we must confess, is borrowed from Luther). In More we feel all the ‘smoke and stir’ of London; the very plodding of his sentences is like horse traffic in the streets. In Tyndale we breathe mountain air. Amid all More’s jokes I feel a melancholy in the background; amid all Tyndale’s severities there is something like laughter, that laughter which he speaks of as coming ‘from the low bottom of the heart’. But they should not be set up as rivals, their wars are over. Any sensible man will want both: they almost represent the two poles between which, here in England, the human mind exists—complementary as Johnson and Shelley or as Cobbett and Blake.
More and Tyndale easily make good their claim to the attention of the literary critic: among the lesser writers on either side the controversy gradually fades away into regions that concern us not much more than state papers. But there is one man of real genius still to be considered. Hugh Latimer’s character may be ambiguous or even repellent: his sermons, in their own kind, are resounding successes, ‘though, to be sure, not very theological’. Latimer assents, indeed, to the doctrine of justification by faith, but he is no theologian; some of his apparent tergiversations may perhaps result from the bewilderment (even the impatience) of a ‘plain man’ entangled in matters above his capacity. Whatever he may say (when he remembers) about faith, he is really so exclusively interested in works that not only a Papist but a Pelagian or even a good pagan could read nine-tenths of his sermons without a qualm. Nor is he a humanist: ego non calleo Graece, he professed in his final examination. He is one of the purest examples in English of the ‘popular’ preacher in the fullest—if you will, the lowest—sense of that word. He boasts himself the son of an English yeoman and works in ‘the uprightly, plain Dunstable way’. He is full of anecdotes, jibes, digression, and simple vituperation; he takes his hearers into his confidence, explains how this or that illustration came into his head, forgets himself and recalls himself: all sounds as if it were extemporaneous. We should probably be naïve if we took the style at its face value. An appearance of casualness (‘I am no orator as Brutus is’) is one of the rhetorician’s weapons: and I suspect that everything which seems to fall by chance from Latimer’s lips is consciously devised to hold the attention and undermine the resistance of the audience. He establishes intimacy with them in order to sway them. It is a well understood homiletic technique which descends to him from the Middle Ages (his method has affinities with that of Chaucer’s Pardoner) and which has survived into our own days under the opprobrious names of ‘straight talkism’ or ‘high pressure Christianity’. Some cannot endure it. They have a right to their taste, but they must not infer from the style that Latimer is a charlatan. The spiritual cheapjack and the sincere preacher both have equal, though different, motives for wishing to arrest and control a congregation and therefore may both (if they can) adopt a manner which will certainly achieve this end. ‘Young feller’, said General Booth to Kipling, ‘if I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by playing the tambourine with my toes, I’d—I’d learn how.’ The only test which Latimer would admit as relevant for his sermons is their practical efficacy. And they were efficacious. We are told that when he preached on the duty of restitution it was not long before certain anonymous donations began to reach the king’s treasury. That does not perhaps justify us in calling his work literature: but the mere strength and pith and urgency of his sentences, in that age so given to verbiage, is a literary virtue. He is as importunate as Hazlitt. He would have been a fine broadcaster.
Thomas Cranmer’s great achievements as a translator are sunk in the corporate anonymity of the Book of Common Prayer. As an original writer he is a much more shadowy figure than Latimer. That he had thought about the art we know from the very interesting annotations which he made on Henry VIII’s corrections of the Institution of a Christian Man in 1538. The frankness of these comments does credit to both parties. Most are naturally doctrinal, but some are stylistic; ‘These sentences, methinks, come not in aptly in some places as they be brought in but rather interrupt and let the course and phrase of the paraphrasis’, or ‘the sentence as it is printed runneth more euenly’. This is our only glimpse into Cranmer’s workshop: the finished product, except in the Prayer Book, is so severely utilitarian that we might not have suspected any conscious concern for style in the author. His preface to the Great Bible of 1539, after some preliminary flourishes which are a very faint anticipation of euphuism, consists mainly of translation, and very good translation too, from Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzene. The three pieces certainly known to be his in Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) are those on salvation, on faith, and on good works. They aim neither at subtlety nor eloquence. Cranmer’s only concern is to state an agreed doctrine with the least possibility of misunderstanding: the thing could hardly be done delightfully but it is done well. His Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament (1550), revised in 1551 as An Answer to . . . Stephen Gardiner, nowhere rises above the usual level of controversy in that age. In all these works Cranmer writes a prose with which it is difficult to find any fault, but it gives curiously little pleasure. It never drags and never hurries; it never disappoints the ear; and (pace John Foxe) there is hardly a single sentence that leaves us in doubt of its meaning. He could have taught More and even Tyndale some things about the art of English composition: but they can be loved and he cannot. This is partly because while avoiding their vices he lacks their virtues. He is not stodgy and verbose like More: but then he has neither humour nor pathos. He is not digressive like Tyndale, but then he lacks Tyndale’s fire. The explanation is that Cranmer always writes in an official capacity. Everything he says has been threshed out in committee. We never see a thought growing: his business is to express the agreed point of view. Everyone who has tried to draw up a report knows how fatal such conditions are to good writing. Every phrase that really bites or flashes has to be crossed out in the end: it would offend one party, or be misunderstood by another, or unduly encourage a third. What remains when all the necessary erasures have been made is inevitably flat and gray. In Cranmer the wonder is that what remains is even so lively as it is. Compared with official publications either by Church or Civil Service in our own day, it is almost magnificent: but in such a book as this we are comparing it with real literature. By that standard it cannot rank high. It is praiseworthy: it is (if I may put it that way) devastatingly praiseworthy. What Cranmer might have written if the burden of responsibility had ever been lifted from his shoulders and he had made a book to please himself, we can only guess. He did his proper work and he did it very well, but I do not think I shall often re-read him. I had much rather hear Latimer thump his tub.
Four other controversialists may be briefly mentioned. Simon Fish’s Supplication for the Beggars (1529) provoked More’s Supplication. Fish writes more as a politician and economist than as a theologian: his rhetoric is monotonous and commonplace but not quite ineffective. John Rastell’s Book of Purgatory (1530) on the opposite side is more happily conceived, under the influence of More. It is an imaginary dialogue between a Turk and a German which attempts to defend the doctrine of purgatory on philosophical grounds. It lacks More’s humour and dramatic invention and Rastell does not understand his opponents well enough to be dangerous. John Frith whom they tied to a post in Newgate so that he could neither stand nor sit and who died at the stake praying for his enemies in 1533, looms larger as a man than as an author, though he is not contemptible even in the second capacity. His works include a Disputation of Purgatory (against Rastell, More, and Fisher), an Antithesis (of Christ and the Pope), a second book Against Rastell, a Mirror to know thyself, and treatises on Baptism and the Sacrament. Most of these were written in the Tower where he was forbidden books and writing materials and therefore ‘when I heare the keyes ryng at the dore, strayte all must be conuayed out of the way; and then if any notable thing had been in my minde it was cleane lost’. His style, if a little wordy, is alive and he is fond of such rhetorical questions as are learned in conversation rather than in the schoolroom. He is not without humour. Robert Barnes (1495–1540) is in every way a lesser man. His tracts, which cover the usual topics, are all combined in John Day’s folio with his Supplication to Henry VIII. His style is not good enough to enliven dull matter nor bad enough to spoil a plain tale; hence the account of his trial before the chapter of Westminster is still readable. Barnes, Frith, and Fish all share More’s faults without his virtues, and all bring into the field the same undisciplined armies of adjectives. Rastell is more concise, but he is dry and jejune.
Before turning from the controversies to the translations it will be convenient to deal with two Scotch writers, Knox and Winzet. They carry us beyond the proper chronological boundaries of the present chapter, but I deal with them here lest they should trouble us later when better game is before us.
The six volumes into which Laing collected the works of John Knox (1505–72) are of absorbing interest to the historian; of less, I suspect, to the theologian who may find nothing in them which is not said better elsewhere. On the literary historian their claim, though by no means negligible, is smaller. One might assess it by saying that Knox is about as important a literary figure as More would have been if he had written neither the Utopia nor the Comfort against Tribulation.
If the Vindication (of the doctrine that the Mass is idolatry) represents exactly what Knox said before the Bishop of Durham in 1550, it must be almost his earliest work; but in it he has already reached his maturity. He writes a good, level prose, not notably Scotch, nor notably Ciceronian, nor even, despite the years that have passed, notably archaic. The humanist peeps out when he complains of the Canon that ‘thairin is indigest, barbarous, fulische congestioun of wordis’, but he attempts no classicisms.
At the accession of Mary, Knox, who had been preaching in England since 1549, fled to the Continent, and thence poured forth short pieces to his persecuted co-religionists at home. They are his most moving, though not necessarily his best, works. In the Confession and Declaration of Prayers he recalls his days in the French galleys, how he ‘called to the Lord when not onlie the ungodlie but evin my own faithfull brether, yea and my own self (that is, all naturall understanding) judgeit my cause to be irremeadable. . . . I know the grudgeing and murmuring complayntes of the flesche: I know the angeir, wraith and indignatioun.’ In the Exposition upon the Sixth Psalm his conscience seems to be troubled about his flight from England. ‘Some will ask then, why did I flie? Assuredlie I can not tell: but of one thing I am sure, the feir of death was not the chief cause. . . .’ He had learned, beyond his expectation, to love England as well as Scotland. The Godly Letter to the Faithful in London which begins by disclaiming oratory is in fact the most rhetorical pamphlet he had yet written. But it is the rhetoric of passion, not of affectation. The Epistle to His Afflicted Brethren in England is full of his exulting certainty that the persecutors will be punished in this life and in the next. It is impossible to suppress the uneasy remembrance (even though we dare make no judgement) that these fiery exhortations are uttered by a man in safety to men in horrible danger. The peak of violence was reached in the Faithful Admonition: ‘that outrageous pamphlet’ which as the English congregation at Frankfort protested to Calvin himself had ‘added much oil to the flame of persecution in England’. Knox is already becoming the enfant terrible of Calvinism; and in the Admonition we see both why and how. He imagined that his error lay in just the opposite direction. He thought himself a timid temporizing, culpably gentle preacher. Others (inexplicably) accused him of ‘rude plainness’: he knew in his heart that he constantly sinned by not speaking out. He was ‘not fervent and faithfull enough’; partly through cowardice, ‘the blynd love that I did beare to this my wicked carcase’, but partly for a reason which no man who had ever met him would have remotely suspected. ‘My wicked nature desired the favours, the estimation, and the prayse of men . . . so prively and craftily dyd they enter into my breast that I could not perceive myself to be wounded tyl vainglory had almost gotten the upper hand.’ One is tempted to say that no equal instance of self-ignorance is recorded until the moment at which Johnson pronounced himself ‘a very polite man’.
In 1558, now once more in Geneva, excommunicated and burnt in effigy, he addressed an Appellation (that is, an appeal) from this ecclesiastical sentence to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland. It is at once an appeal against persecution and (in the long run) an appeal for counter-persecution: in a word, it develops the whole plan of Presbyterian theocracy. The civil magistrate is mistaken if he thinks it is not his concern to ‘feed Christ’s flock’. On the contrary, the ‘ordering and reforming of religion’ is his special business. Kings are told in scripture to serve the Lord; how can they do so unless they punish and ‘by a godlie severity’ forbid whatever is done against His command? But perhaps a king may fail in this duty: then the nobles must ‘correct and repress’ him. For ‘none provoking the people to idolatrie oght to be exempted from the punishment of death’, and Moses laid the duty of inflicting this punishment not on kings only but on the whole people, even on every individual. ‘To a carnal man’, it is true, some of the Old Testament judgements on idolatrous cities may seem too rigid: so much the worse for the carnal man. This for the nobility: for the Commonalty he adds another letter explaining that if they do not accept their share of the duty it will not avail them in the day of wrath to say ‘we were but simple subjects’. Knox, in fact, undisguisedly appeals to every section of the community to use instant violence for the establishment of a revolutionary theocracy. The writing is admirably lucid.
In the same year, though it was probably written earlier, appeared the most embarrassing of all his works, the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. It was embarrassing because in a certain sense nearly everyone (except regnant queens) agreed with Knox. Everyone knew that it was contrary to natural and divine law that women should rule men. But then a great many political arrangements as the world now is are equally contrary to Natural Law. We are fallen. It is no use trying to make a sudden return to the Golden Age: prescription, usage, municipal law, must all be respected. Spenser knew as well as Knox that the ‘regiment’ of women was ‘monstruous’. The whole point of the story of Radigund is that women are ‘borne to base humilitie’, but then Spenser, as a practical man and as the loyal citizen of a concrete state, adds the qualification ‘Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie’. Calvin knew as well as Knox that the rule of women ‘was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature’ and ‘to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments of the fall of man’. But since ‘by custom, public consent and long practice’ certain principalities do descend to women by inheritance, it is unnecessary to raise the question, because it is ‘unlawful to unsettle governments’. Bullinger thought the same. Of course, if you press it, women should be subject to men. But if positive laws have in fact placed the crown on a woman’s head pious persons had better mind their own business and say nothing about it. St. Philip never told the Ethiopian eunuch to depose Candace. Knox had, in short, acted exactly like himself. No book more calculated to damage the Protestant cause could have been written—and all, as Calvin says, ob inconsideratum unius hominis fastum, because one conceited man would not think what he was doing. No one wanted the thing to be said, yet no conscientious doctor could answer it in the resounding style which alone would satisfy Queen Elizabeth. No woman likes to have her social position defended as one of the inevitable results of the Fall.
The First Blast was intended to be the first of three. But it was loud enough alone. Knox admits exceptions to the general principle, but they are not based on law or hereditary right. They are such women ‘as God, by singular privilege . . . hath exempted from the common rank of women’. As for the rest (‘women as nature and experience do this day declare them . . . weake, fraile, impacient, feble, and foolish’) no merely human law can sanction their rule. It is not only in itself ‘monstruous’ but ‘monstriferous’. St. Paul has said in so many words that he permits not a woman to bear rule over a man; therefore, ‘Nowe let man and angell conspire against God, Let them pronounce their lawes and say, We will suffre women to beare authoritie, who then can depose them? Yet shall this one word of the eternal God spoken by the mouth of a weake man, thruste them everie one into hell.’ He concludes by pronouncing it the duty ‘as well of the Estates as of the People’ to depose all sovereign queens and to kill all who defend them, previous oaths of allegiance notwithstanding. And he never to the end of his days seemed quite to understand why Elizabeth disliked this little book. He had advanced proofs from scripture; if they were invalid, let them be answered. If not, as he wrote to her in 1559, ‘Quhy that youre grace be offendit at the authore of such ane worke, I can perceave no just occasion.’
The two works of Knox which come nearest to being books are the History of the Reformation in Scotland and the treatise on Predestination. The latter, printed in 1560, is An Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations, an answer, that is, to an otherwise unknown Anabaptist tract entitled Careless by Necessity. Its tone is harsh and vindictive. The burning of Servetus is applauded and Knox itches to use the sword of the civil magistrate against his opponents. But the tone of the Anabaptists and (in their brief moment of power) their action had been equally harsh. It was an age very like our own. Behind every system of sixteenth-century thought, however learnedly it is argued, lurks cruelty and Ogpu.
The four books of the History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland were composed between 1559 and 1566; the fifth book added in David Buchanan’s edition of 1644, though of historical value, is not by Knox. From the literary point of view it may be said that too much scissors and paste went to the making of Knox’s History: original documents, a popular poem, large passages from Foxe and other authors are inserted at length and spoil its narrative flow. There is some Latinism in the style, not in the long sentences but in the short, where historic presents and extreme conciseness at times give a faintly Tacitean effect. In the cast of his mind, too, there is something not unlike Tacitus’ sombre pungency, though Knox’s humour, as becomes a countryman of Dunbar, is more boisterous and ferocious. Sometimes, indeed, it is so ferocious that we should not recognize it at all if we were not told; as when after describing the murder of Cardinal Beaton down to the last grim detail of packing the corpse in salt (‘the wether was hote’) he proceeds, ‘These thingis we wreat mearelie: but we wold that the reader should observe Goddis just judgementis’. He was apparently afraid lest the fun of the thing might lead us to forget that even an assassination may have its serious side. More to modern taste is the spirited farce of the following ecclesiastical rough and tumble:
Then begane no litill fray but yitt a meary game; for rockettis war rent, typpetis war tome, crounis war knapped, and syd gounis mycht haue been sein wantonly wag from the one wall to the other. Many of thame lacked beardis and that was the more pitie, and tharefore could not bukkill other by the byrse as bold men wold haif doune.
Much alliterative verse lies behind such a passage. And though it is intended to make us laugh, it has also a very different function in the narrative where it occurs. Knox is working out an elaborate parallel between the passion of George Wishart (his most beautiful martyr) and the Passion of Christ. As the trial of Christ reconciled Herod and Pilate, so that of Wishart reconciled Cardinal Beaton and the Archbishop of Glasgow. To know why they needed reconciliation we must know how they quarrelled, and thus the comic story of the previous fray between their attendants comes in. Elsewhere the comedy is unconscious, as in the whole account of Knox’s dealings with Elizabeth. It was at the moment when English aid was all-important to the Scotch Protestants that he saw fit to write her the letter in which he protests that she has no reasonable cause to be offended at his Monstrous Regiment. He is, of course, not ‘myndit to retract or call back’ a word of it. Elizabeth, however, need not feel her withers wrung provided she recognizes herself as one of those rare exceptions to whom a special divine mercy has made lawful what is not naturally lawful to her sex, and does not show herself ‘ungrate’ by claiming anything on the grounds of inheritance. ‘Forgeteth youre birth and all tytill which thairupoun doth hing’; and then, as a timely inducement to humility, ‘consider deiplie how for feir of your lyef ye did declyne from God and bow till idollatrie’. His relations with Mary Stuart make even better reading. In graver merits the history is not very rich. Except for Wishart, none of his martyrs is made lovely: usually brutal arrogance in the judge confronts brutal courage in the prisoner. His battles are harder to follow than those of Pitscottie; which does not at all prove that they are less accurate.
Although this survey has omitted several of Knox’s works (notably the ‘Familiar Epistles’ in which we see him as a spiritual director) it is perhaps sufficient to give the reader some idea of his scope and quality. It might be supposed that to read a body of work so occasional, so little varied in subject-matter, and so fierce in temper, was a hard task. In reality, the surprising thing is that it is not harder. He has humour: in places he even has tenderness. But his chief merit is his style. Except for a few alliterative passages (‘wyly Winchester, dreaming Duresme, and bloudy Bonner’—‘glorious Gardener and treacherous Tunstall’) and some apostrophes, it is very unadorned: and one’s praise of it tends to be in negatives—a mere list of the faults that it avoids. But it is safe and dependable prose; a better prose than any (except Tyndale’s) which we have met in this chapter. It is not the style that keeps readers away from John Knox.
Knox’s chief opponent in the vernacular was Ninian Winzet (1518–92) who began his career as master of the Grammar School in Linlithgow and ended it in exile as Abbot of St. James’s in Ratisbon. The Reformation ejected him from his mastership and he replied with Certane Tractatis in 1562. The ‘tractates’ are three: an address to Queen Mary, an open letter to John Knox, and what Winzet truly calls a ‘declamation’ on the suppression of Christian festivals. The Last Blast of the Trompet, which he tried to publish in the same year, was suppressed by government and only a few pages survive. He was soon driven from the country and his most important vernacular work, the Buke of Four Scoir Thre Questions, was printed at Antwerp in 1563. His earlier books, being written by one of the defeated party and not yet in exile, are distinguished from most polemical writings of that age by the absence of direct insult. They gain by it immensely: Winzet adopts an ironical (almost a demure) tone which is, to a modern taste, far more effective than scurrility. The schoolmaster is very clearly discernible. In the ‘Third Tractat’ he admits that his matter is such as he had often set to his pupils for original Latin composition and that he is now ‘almaist for pastyme’ working it up into a vernacular ‘declamation’. As an account of his motive for writing this is, no doubt, ironical, but as an account of his method it is true enough. The artful dispositio, the opening paragraphs which begin far away from his real theme, and the long sentences, unmistakably though not grotesquely Latin in structure, all tell the same tale. In this respect, though in no other, his prose sometimes suggests that of a Scotch Milton. When he gets down to business in the Buke of Questions he is more idiomatic. The burden of his complaint is that for all his questions, challenges, and open letters he could never get an answer out of the ‘Calvinians’, except for a few inadequate words in a sermon by Knox. This seems to be true; whether that Knox feared his opponent or that Power was already beginning to learn the shabbiest arcanum imperii—‘Never answer’. Abbot Ninian was a serious critic and well worth meeting, though his place in literary history is naturally a small one. One leaves this brave, clever man with regret. He must have been a pleasant dominie, for his memory recalls ‘children of happy ingynis, mair able to leir than I wes to teche’. He writes a pure Scots and is disgusted, honest man, with Knox’s anglified affectations—‘Gif ye, throw curiositie of novationis hes foryet our auld plane Scottis quhilk your mother lerit you, I sall wryte to you my mynd in Latin, for I am nocht acquyntit with your Southeron.’
II
The English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are achievements of much more lasting value than the original works of More and Tyndale. The Prayer Book is the one glory of the Drab Age; so glorious indeed that it would throw doubt on the justice of the epithet ‘Drab’ if we forgot that it was principally a work of translation. The qualities which raise it above its period are due, in the main, to its originals. The story of the English Bible might be denied a place in our account of the Drab Age on a different ground; that age saw only the beginnings of the work. But those beginnings coloured the entire process, and it will be convenient to treat the story as a whole in this section, even though we are thereby forced to run over its chronological boundaries.
There is no occasion for saying anything here about the Wycliffite versions of scripture. Tyndale tells us that he made no use of any English predecessor and we have no reason to doubt his word. He was making a fresh start. The new scholarship, even without the new theology, was sufficient to determine this; translators who knew only Latin were now out of date. The first Hebrew Psalter was printed in 1477, the Pentateuch at Bologna in 1482, the complete Soncino Bible in 1488. The Hebrew Grammar of Pellicanus Rubeaquensis (1503) had been followed in 1506 by the Grammar and Dictionary of Reuchlin. The years 1514 to 1517 produced two works of capital importance. At Alcala (the Latin Complutum) Cardinal Ximenes superintended the monumental Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot, in which St. Jerome’s Latin, the Vulgate, appeared flanked by Hebrew on the one side and Greek on the other, thus placed between the Synagogue and the Greek Church (as the cardinal pleasantly remarks) like Christ crucified between two thieves. The other great work was Erasmus’s Greek text and new Latin version of the New Testament. He is said to have used manuscripts inferior to the cardinal’s: he was working in haste, for his publishers were anxious to forestall the Polyglot. They won the race by getting his New Testament out in 1516: not, perhaps, to the lasting advantage of Biblical scholarship. In 1522 came Luther’s New Testament, largely his independent work on the Greek. ‘No fine words’ was his avowed principle, and the tradition of homely simplicity passed from his work, through Tyndale, to the English translators. During the years in which Tyndale and Coverdale were at work (1525–40) new helps to study were produced; Münster’s Hebrew Grammar in 1525, the great Zurich Bible (based on Luther but worked over by Zuinglius with several learned assistants) in 1529, the French versions of Lefèvre (1534) and of Olivetan (1535). Most important of all were the two Latin translations of the Old Testament by Sanctes Pagninus (1528) and by Münster (1534–5). The English translators were taking part in a general European effort, which, though predominantly, was not exclusively, Protestant.
In England itself the story is most easily disentangled if we distinguish three streams, or groups. There is firstly what may be called the central Protestant tradition, which starts with Tyndale and passes through Coverdale into those officially approved translations the ‘Great’ Bibles and the ‘Bishops’ Bible. Secondly, there are what may be called the Protestant irregulars—Taverner, Sir John Cheke, Whittingham, and his collaborators in the Geneva or ‘Breeches’ Bible. Thirdly, there are the popish versions, the Rheims New Testament and later the Douay. The central Protestant group begins by being predominantly Lutheran but becomes less so as time goes on. The Geneva Bible is the work of Calvinists. All three groups affect one another and all affect the Authorized Version. Though there was little charity between translators in rival camps they remained in some degree united by the common humility of scholarship and most of them recognized the principle fas est et ab hoste doceri. Thus Tyndale accepts corrections of his work flung out in controversy by More; the Jesuits who make the Rheims version draw upon Coverdale’s Diglott and Geneva; and it is pretty to see that some phrases pass from Geneva through Rheims into the Authorized. In spite of its divisions all western Christendom is involuntarily collaborating: it is as if ‘this rich thing’ (like the Grail) ‘went about’ among them of its own will.
I begin, then, with the central Protestant tradition. In 1525 the heretic-hunter Cochlaeus (or in the vernacular Dobneck; he was not fortunate in names) discovered that Tyndale and an assistant were seeing a translation of the New Testament through the press at Cologne. He raised the hue and cry, and the culprits fled up the Rhine to Worms, carrying the printed sheets with them. By chance a single fragment survives of the quarto whose printing was interrupted at Cologne: it goes as far as the twenty-second of Matthew and is now in the British Museum. In 1526 the interrupted work was issued at Worms in octavo by Peter Schoeffer: two copies of it are known. In 1530 came Tyndale’s version of the Pentateuch, in 1531 his Jonah; in 1534 revised editions both of his Genesis and his New Testament. A still further revision of the latter followed in 1535. He is also judged (on good evidence both external and internal) to have made the translation of the books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles which was included in the so-called Matthew’s Bible of 1537.
Ever since his own day Tyndale’s translation has been blamed for being tendentious. If we are thinking of his violent marginal glosses, this is fair enough; if of his peculiar renderings (congregation for ἐκκλησία, senior or elder for πρεσβύτερος, favour for χάρις and the like), a little explanation seems to be needed. The business of a translator is to write down what he thinks the original meant. And Tyndale sincerely believed that the mighty theocracy with its cardinals, abbeys, pardons, inquisition, and treasury of grace which the word Church would undoubtedly have suggested to his readers was in its very essence not only distinct from, but antagonistic to, the thing that St. Paul had in mind whenever he used the word ἐκκλησία. You may of course disagree with his premise: but his conclusion (that Church is a false rendering of ἐκκλησία) follows from it of necessity. Thomas More, on the other hand, believed with equal sincerity that the ‘Church’ of his own day was in essence the very same mystical body which St. Paul addressed; from his premise it followed of course that Church was the only correct translation. Both renderings are equally tendentious in the sense that each presupposes a belief. In that sense all translations of scripture are tendentious: translation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary. It can become less tendentious only by becoming less of a translation. Hence when Bishop Gardiner in the Convocation of 1542 tried to stem the tide of Protestant translation he found himself driven by the logic of his position to demand that in all future versions nearly a hundred Latin words (his list included Ecclesia, Penitentia, Pontifex, Sacramentum, and Gratia) should be left Latin or only morphologically ‘Englished’. This is not popish dishonesty, and Tyndale’s renderings are not Protestant dishonesty: both follow from the nature of translation. It need hardly be added that the merely aesthetic or emotional grounds on which some moderns would prefer church to congregation would have disgusted More and Tyndale alike by their frivolity; souls were at stake.
As a scholar, Tyndale, while always retaining his independence, is deeply indebted to Erasmus’s Latin version of the New Testament, to Luther, and to the Vulgate. He is also in full sympathy with Luther’s conception of what Biblical translation should be—a homely, racy affair that can reach the heart and mind of a plough-boy. Partly for this reason, and partly because he is still steeped in the medieval blindness to anachronism, he naturalizes his originals in a way that will seem quaint to modern readers. Thus the gates of Lystra in Acts xiv become a ‘churche porche’, a centurion is an ‘under-captain’, there are ‘shyre touns’ in Palestine, and St. Paul ‘sayled away from Philippos after the Ester holydayes’ (Acts xx. 6). He uses at times more homely language than the Authorized Version wished to retain; ‘when ye praye, bable not moche as the hethen do’ at Matt. vi. 7, or ‘choppe and change with the worde of God’ at 2 Cor. ii. 17. Such, at least, is his general tendency, but there are times when he uses the foreign and harder word without need, so that in the first two chapters of Romans (i. 3, 8 and ii. II) we find perteyning, published, and parcialite, where only Geneva follows him in the two first and none that I have seen in the third. He is a free translator and does not scruple to omit a noun where he thinks a pronoun will serve better or to interpolate a clause when he thinks the meaning would be difficult without it. He is, of course, sometimes astray: the details of St. Paul’s shipwreck proved too much for him as for nearly all the early translators. All critics have rightly praised him for some of his coinages: shewbread (to which he was helped by Luther), peacemaker, passover, long-suffering, and scapegoat, and also for some unforgettable phrases such as ‘Die the death’, ‘The Lord’s Anointed’, ‘flowing with milk and honey’, and ‘filthy lucre’. He has also expressions less fortunate, such as the word blessedfulness in Romans. He established in English the form Jehovah, and was among the first who used the word beautiful.
Tyndale’s immediate successor was Myles Coverdale (1488–1568) whom we have already met as a versifier. He claims the honour of having produced the first complete English Bible. It is almost certain that this was first printed at Zürich by Froschover in 1535 and the original title-page claimed that it was translated ‘out of Douche and Latyn’. It will be noticed that there is no mention of Greek, still less of Hebrew: it is disputed whether Coverdale knew any Hebrew and agreed that he did not know much. ‘Douche’ of course means German: the title-page stamped Coverdale’s work as Lutheran, dangerous therefore to the author. Whether because his fears increased or because the changing policy of governments soon encouraged him to hope for a permitted circulation in England, his work was reissued in the same year by James Nycholson at Southwark with a new title-page in which the words ‘Douche and Latyn’ were omitted. Only a part of this Bible was new. Coverdale used the Pentateuch, Jonah, and New Testament of Tyndale; the residue of the Old Testament he translated himself with help from the Vulgate, Pagninus, Luther, and the Zürich Bible. From this onward Coverdale becomes, in a sense, the official government translator, repeatedly employed on authorized revisions of his own and other men’s work for the Matthew’s Bible and the Great Bibles. The tendency of his revisions was influenced by the official policy of the moment. We need not accuse him of insincerity. He had not learning enough to have solid grounds of his own for choosing between the various interpreters who all lay together on his desk: ignorance, in a sense, left him free to be accommodating.
It may also be suspected that ignorance left him free to indulge aesthetic preferences, to follow this or that interpretation according as it agreed with his own, often exquisitely melodious, English style. But the suspicion must not be too readily accepted. Thanks to the labours of Mr. Clapton it is easy to compare his 1535 version of the Psalms with that which he made for Cromwell’s Great Bible in 1539, and which survives in our prayer books today. Here we find change after change which so improves the rhythm that one might suppose it made for that purpose alone, but which in fact brings his rendering nearer to that of Münster, whom he somewhat overvalued. Thus in i. 4 ‘His leaves shall not fall off’ becomes ‘His leaf also shall not wither’; in ii. i ‘Why do the heathen grudge?’ becomes ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?’; or ‘How long?’ in vi. 3 is expanded to ‘How long wilt thou punish me?’ All these alterations appear to be made in deference to Münster. There is also in the later version a tendency (I think) to move away from Luther and Zurich and certainly a tendency to make more use of the Gallican Psalter (that is, St. Jerome’s earlier version from the Greek, not to be confused with his later version from the Hebrew). This is doubtless accounted for by the ‘moderate’ policy of the bishops for whom Coverdale was working in 1539. Yet much remains which seems to have its principal source in his own poetic impulse. We owe to him, and to some primers, the beautiful ‘even’, ‘neither’, and ‘yea’ to introduce a Hebrew parallelism. From nothing more than oculus in Jerome and Gestalt in Luther he produced ‘my beauty is gone for very trouble’ (vi. 7). He blended Jerome’s earlier patientia with his later expectatio to get ‘the patient abiding of such as be in trouble’ (ix. i8), and likewise in medio umbrae mortis with in valle mortis to get ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ (xxiii. 4), and out of Münster’s in imagine pertransit conjured his own ‘walketh in a vain shadow’ (xxxix. 4). ‘Daughter of Babylon wasted with misery’ (cxxxvii. 8) is compounded of vastata in the Gallican Psalter and misera in the later Jerome. In one sense his work is hardly translation at all, but a mixed production like Pope’s Homer or Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat. Sometimes the misunderstood original sets his own imagination working with results that are not beautiful but ridiculous: as in Acts xxvii. 16, 17 where he gives ‘We coulde scarce get a bote. Which they toke vp and vsed helpe, and bounde it under harde to the shippe.’ Sometimes he can be unsuitably familiar, as when he begins Isa. v with the words ‘Now well then I will synge my beloved frende a songe of his vyneyarde’. He can be misleading even where (I think) he understands the text, as at Rom. v. 7 where ‘Now dyeth there scarce any man for the righteous’ would be taken by most readers as a general reflection on the decay of charity and thus ruin the argument. But there are felicities everywhere. He is responsible for ‘baptized into his death’, for ‘tender mercies’, and for ‘lovingkindness’; ‘respect of persons’ instead of ‘parcialite’ was also his. Compared with great divines and scholars like Ximenes, Erasmus, Tyndale, and those who made the Geneva, the Rheims, and the Authorized, Coverdale might perhaps be regarded as a mere hack: but he is often an inspired hack.
In 1537 while Nycholson was still reprinting Coverdale’s first Bible, the curious production known as the Matthew’s Bible was already in the press, probably at Antwerp. It professes to be ‘truly and purely translated . . . by Thomas Matthew’. In reality it is mainly Tyndale (including his Joshua to 2 Chronicles) and Coverdale, corrected by one John Rogers, a pupil of Tyndale’s. It is doubted whether any real Thomas Matthew had a finger in it. The important thing is that it is ‘set forth with the kinges most gracyous lycence’, is at last an ‘authorized’ version. The shadowy Matthew is probably government’s device to make it appear that they are producing a new thing and not merely sanctioning a fait accompli. In 1538 came Coverdale’s Diglott, consisting of the Vulgate and a close English rendering. After this the Bibles of the central tradition are so related that nothing short of actual collation would much help the reader. In 1539 under the auspices of Cromwell came the Great Bible, a revision by Coverdale: in 1540 another Great Bible (with Cranmer’s Prologue) which was a further revision by Coverdale. Its second edition in the same year claims to have been revised by the bishops of Durham and Rochester, but scholars have not discovered traces of their work. In 1542 the reaction began, and it was then that Bishop Gardiner produced his list of words that should never be translated. In 1543 it became illegal for all except the higher classes of society to read the Bible in English: in 1546 all subjects whatever were forbidden to ‘have, take or keep’ either Tyndale’s or Coverdale’s New Testament. By 1554, Mary being now on the throne, the mere painting of a text on a church wall became illegal. In 1559 Elizabeth’s government ordered the Bible once more to be set up in the churches, but the central Protestant tradition did not produce a new one till the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. It was based on the Great Bible from which the revisers were ordered not to ‘recede’ except where it was in manifest error. They were also, in accordance with Elizabeth’s policy, forbidden ‘bitter notes’. The chief novelty of principle in this version is that the revisers were instructed to see that ‘all such wordes as soundeth to any offence of lightness or obscenitie be expressed with more convenient termes and phrases’; prudery had been as unknown to the earlier translators as to the originals. In other respects the Bishops’ Bible is blamed by scholars for its conservatism, for neglecting real progress which had been made since the Great Bibles appeared.
Of the Protestant irregulars an account on this scale must confine itself to the Geneva Bible of 1560, for Cheke’s work (mainly remarkable for his personal hobby horse about ‘pure English’) was not published till the nineteenth century and therefore had no influence on the tradition, and Whittingham’s 1557 New Testament is eclipsed by his share in the Geneva itself. His collaborators were Anthony Gilby and Thomas Sampson. With this group we find ourselves at Geneva among the Marian exiles. Whittingham had married a sister of Calvin and Calvin contributed an epistle to his New Testament. What Coverdale had called ‘the Douche’ becomes less important; new influences are at work—Calvin himself, Beza, and the French translators. To the eye, the Bible now first takes on its familiar aspect, printed in Roman, using italics for words supplied by the translator (as Beza had done) and dividing the verses—an innovation which improved it as a book of reference but made sad work of narrative and argument. In translation it attempts, like Tyndale, to keep close to the Hebrew, and it has none of the Bishops’ prudery. In many ways it marks a great advance. Of the versions I have seen Geneva first makes sense out of the nautical passage in Acts xxvii. Some of its most felicitous turns have gone into the Authorized—‘smite them hip and thigh’, ‘vanity of vanities’, ‘except a man be born again’. It has its share of odd, and unnecessary, words such as ‘guiltieship’ (Rom. v. 16), and perhaps ‘patron’ for ναυκλήρω in Acts xxvii. II may be regarded as a Gallicism. One of its most familiar contributions to our text I find difficult to judge. At Isa. xl. I Coverdale first wrote ‘Be of good cheer my people’. In Cranmer’s Great Bible he changed this to ‘comfort my people’. Geneva has ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’, reproducing (I am told) the rhythm of the Hebrew but obscuring the construction. This illustrates the extreme uncertainty of our literary judgement on all the translators. What chance has Coverdale’s second rendering with us against the familiarity of the Geneva adopted by Authorized and most unfairly backed by Handel? A man would need to unmake himself before he was an impartial critic on such a point. But on almost any view, Tyndale who inaugurated, and the Genevan translators who first seriously advanced, our tradition, tower head and shoulders above all others whom I have yet mentioned.
There remains the Roman tradition, represented within our century by one work, the New Testament printed by Fogny in 1582 and translated at the English College of Douay (temporarily housed at Rheims from which this version derives its name). The work was directed by Cardinal Allen and assisted by Richard Bristow; the actual translator was Gregory Martin, Lecturer in Hebrew, and sometime a scholar of St. John’s, Oxford. The Council of Trent in 1546 had pronounced the Vulgate to be the only authentic Latin version and Martin worked from it, not from the original. This, however, does not by any means remove his work from serious consideration; he had the Greek also before him, he used Geneva, and was himself used by the Authorized Version. The principles on which he proceeded are set out in the preface to the Rheims Testament: ‘We presume not in hard places to mollifie the speches or phrases, but religiously kepe them word for word and point for point, for fear of missing or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie’. The results of this principle led to the Protestant criticism that Papists, when at last forced to translate the scriptures, took good care to make their translation unintelligible. It was an irresistible debating point, but it misses the real problem. All parties were agreed that the Bible was the oracles of God. But if so, are we entitled to worry out the sense of apparently meaningless passages as we would do in translating Thucydides? The real sense may be beyond our mortal capacity. Any concession to what we think the human author ‘must have meant’ may be ‘restraining the Holy Ghost to our phantasie’. If this line of thought is followed far enough we shall be forced to abandon the design of writing down what (we think) the sacred text means, and merely write down the English of what it actually says, whether this makes sense or no. Translators who are agreed on the oracular character of the original are thus faced with a dilemma. If you follow the one alternative you may arrive at nominal ‘translations of scripture’ in which the originals are made to mean anything that the translator and his sect happen to believe. If you follow the other you may arrive at the idea of a magical text (like the hymn of the Salii) whose virtues are quite independent of meaning—at devotions to ‘the blessed word Mesopotamia’. Fortunately none of our translators is at either extreme; but Tyndale is nearer to the first and Rheims to the second. This does not mean that Tyndale is dishonestly periphrastic or Rheims nonsensical: both are honest and skilful attempts to solve the problem. Thus Rheims leaves many words as near the Latin as it can, writing veritie instead of ‘truth’, benignity instead of ‘kindness’, justice instead of ‘righteousness’ (which is misleading) and longanimity instead of ‘patience’ (which can be very strongly defended). Sometimes it offends quite unnecessarily against English idiom as in Rom. i. 22—‘saying themselves to be wise’. The medieval naturalizations of the earlier translators are dropped; the ‘under-captain’ becomes a ‘centurion’ and what Tyndale had called ‘a flaw of wind out of the Northeaste’ becomes ‘a tempestuous wind that is called Euro Aquilo’. But to pick out such renderings gives a false impression. A great deal of Rheims is vigorous and genuine English, and there are even places in which it finds homelier renderings than its precursors; as in Acts xxvii. 3 where all other versions say that Paul was allowed ashore to ‘refresh himself’, but Rheims ‘to take care of himself’. It has contributed some beautiful turns to the Authorized. In Rom. vi. 1 where Tyndale had ‘that there may be abundance of grace’, and Geneva ‘that grace may more abound’, Rheims by omitting more produced the rhythm which the Authorized took over: and in v. 9 it first introduced the word ‘dominion’ (Geneva and the rest have ‘power’) which contributes so much to our own text’s ‘Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more: death hath no more dominion over him’.
These examples illustrate the difficulty of making literary judgements on the several translations. The variants are individually so small, the steps by which perfection is achieved so gradual, that it is almost impossible to allot to each translator his share of praise. We can seldom be sure that the changes which seem to us to add beauty were made with that purpose. I do not know whether Martin when he changed ‘power’ to ‘dominion’ was attentive to its phonetic superiority, or whether he merely obeyed the same principle which led him to write ‘verity’ and ‘benignity’ instead of ‘truth’ and ‘kindness’. I do not know whether the Authorized translator, having accepted ‘dominion’ from Rheims, then retained ‘being raised’ from the earlier English versions (as against Rheims’ ‘rising’) because of its rhythm, or to keep close to the Greek, or for theological reasons. Even a few hours spent in actual collation will, I think, leave the impression that the vast majority of variants result neither from differences in doctrine nor from literary taste but from the steady advance of scholarship.
The Authorized Version is treated, by a more learned pen than mine, in a later volume, and little need be said of it here. Some accounts of the subject do not, I think, sufficiently emphasize its debts to Geneva and Rheims. It is in a sense true that Tyndale and Coverdale remain the base: but after Tyndale nearly all that is of real value was done by Geneva, Rheims, and Authorized. Our Bible is substantially Tyndale corrected and improved by that triad—almost in collaboration. The literary value and literary influence of the final result are singularly difficult to assess. The effect of any passage from it depends in so high a degree on the qualities of the original (which contributes the images and tropes as well as the matter) and on the qualities of an English that is to us archaic, and these in turn are both so overlaid with liturgical associations, that very little remains to be attributed to the translators and still less to the last translator in the long succession; and that small residuum is hard to isolate. Some endeavour to isolate it by concentrating on the book’s rhythm: but I am not convinced that its rhythms (they are various) are very different from those of any good prose that is written for the most part in short sentences, nor that they would strike us as noticeably fine if divorced from their matter. ‘After the cocktail, a soup—but the soup was not very nice—and after the soup a small, cold pie’. It is not a bad sentence: but it is very different from its rhythmical equivalent ‘After the earthquake, a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice’ (1 Kings xix. 12). Is it not possible that critics whose philosophy forbids them to attach much value to the matter of scripture are tempted to attribute to rhythm, and indeed to style in general, more than its due—as Mr. Pickwick and his friends were agreed that whatever had so affected them at the party, it couldn’t have been the wine? As for the influence of the Authorized Version, we must make a distinction. An influence (on thought and feeling) of ever present quotation, or half-quotation, or parody, recognized as such, is different from fully assimilated influence which has become unconscious. Obviously the Bible has plenty of the first. This reaches its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: in writers like Swinburne, Trollope, and Kipling its use as a ready recipe for solemnity or irony becomes distressing. Of the second kind of influence it has, perhaps, less than we should have expected. I doubt if its style penetrates us so much as Dryden’s. Fragments of it indeed are, or were, on everyone’s lips—‘the fear of the Lord’, ‘the fatted calf’, ‘whom the king delighted to honour’, ‘coals of fire’, and the like. But they are always felt as quotations, or at least as archaisms, which stand out from the surrounding texture of the language and which (whether in reverence or derision) are valued for that very reason. It is indeed remarkable that so common a turn as ‘it came to pass’, after so many centuries, is never used except in this way, has never penetrated into the blood-stream of the language. The Authorized Version, in fact, haunts our prose not as Mr. Eliot haunts modern poetry or as Macaulay used to haunt journalists, but much more as Homer haunts the prose of Plato; that is, as something set apart, like plums in a cake or lace on a frock, not like wine mixing in water. As the metre and dialect set every scrap of Homer apart from the Plato in which it is embedded, so the archaism and sanctity tend to set apart the fragments of scripture embedded in English literature. I am not of course denying that it has some influence of the deeper and less obtrusive kind, but the wonder is that it has so little.
There is no such sharp break between the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and earlier liturgical prose as there is between Tyndale and the medieval translators of scripture. It is an anonymous and corporate work in which Cranmer bore the chief part, and it is almost wholly traditional in matter though some of the excellences of its style are new. It has two main sources. One of these is that form of the Latin service used during the Middle Ages in the diocese of Salisbury and known as the Use of Sarum. The other is the long series of books of devotion called hours or primers which had sometimes appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in English as well as in Latin and which after a long interval are again found in English from 1534 onwards—reflecting, of course, many doctrinal changes. For the psalms, gospels, and epistles, Coverdale’s revised version in the Great Bible of 1539 was used, with a few alterations. The litany made by Cranmer for the king’s Exhortation unto Prayer in 1544 was taken over unchanged. Sometimes, but very sparingly, the compilers borrowed from the recent liturgical experiments of the continental Reformers. Some prayers they translated from the Greek; and some they added of their own, but these were closely modelled on scripture. They wished their book to be praised not for original genius but for catholicity and antiquity, and it is in fact the ripe fruit of centuries of worship.
From the vernacular primers we can see just how far writing of this kind had developed before the book was made. And in one respect, as I said in a previous chapter, the primers have a doleful story to tell. Their hymnody shows the ruin of our poetry. But prose (which, of course, fills far the greater part of them) is fairly steadily improving. In the medieval primer it is still awkward and enslaved to the Latin: ‘Thee the preisable noumbre of prophetis, thee preiseth the whit oost of martris.’ That rendering, indeed, seems to me to have, by chance, its own exotic beauty: but not so (from Psalm xcv) ‘Before occupie we his face in knowleching’, nor (in the Te Deum) ‘Thee, endeles Fadir, every erthe worschipeth’. In the sixteenth-century primers, though all difficulties have not been overcome, we are already well on the way to the grace and freedom of the Prayer Book. The twelfth verse of Psalm li gives a good deal of trouble. A 1535 book printed by Byddell for Marshall does fairly well—‘and a stedfast right spirit make anew within me’; but John Gowghe’s Latin-English Primer is reduced to ‘strengthen me with a spiritual spirit’ and a primer of 1539 reads ‘with a principal heart’. On the other hand, the 1535 version of Psalm xix, whatever its value as translation, can vie with Coverdale as English literature; ‘One day following another whetteth continually our thoughts, and one night following another increaseth our knowledge. . . . He hath fastened in them a tabernacle for the sun and he cometh forth of his clouds like a bridegroom; yea, like a fresh valiant knight to make his course.’ This knight, especially to those who had seen the dazzling splendours of a Tudor tournament, is better than the ‘giant’ who has replaced him. A single petition in the litany well illustrates the same process. ‘That thou vouchesaaf to give us fruits of the erthe’, says the medieval book, plainly and perhaps not very idiomatically. In 1535 we have, ‘That the fruits, Lord, on the erthe may give good increase and thou wilt conserve them’; and in 1539 ‘That thou vouchsafe to give and preserve the fruits of the earth’. Notice in the first of these the love of adjacent strong syllables (fruits, Lord) and in the second the coupling of give and preserve, which both anticipate the style of the Prayer Book. Then in 1544 we get the master’s touch—‘That it may please thee to give to our use the kindly fruits of the earth so as in due time we may enjoy them.’
In the vernacular books, then, the compilers of 1549 found worthy predecessors, and in the Use of Sarum they had an original which might tax the powers of any translator. The chief characteristic of its orationes, from which the book takes our collects, are three. In the first place they are what the Elizabethans called ‘pithy’: they condense in a few complex sentences matter which a more ejaculatory type of prayer would distribute over many petitions, and leave us much to chew on. Secondly, they show a distinct though restrained love of antithesis and epigram: this gives them an air of finality which only the polysyllabic character of Latin saves from being abrupt. And finally they rely for their musical effect on a great use of what scholars call the cursus, that is, on certain regular distributions of accent at the end of a sentence or clause, which are an accentual adaptation of the quantitative patterns used by classical prose writers.
The first great service which the compilers did us was to sweep away all the wretched attempts at hymnody which had made some primers ridiculous. They wanted very much to have hymns but had the good taste and humility to realize that they could not make them. ‘Mine English verses’, said Cranmer, ‘want the grace and facility that I could wish they had’—a statement which in his age shows more loyalty to poetry than a wilderness of sonnets. But their great positive achievement is in translation. Their version of the collects is perhaps the supreme example of the virtues required for translating highly-wrought Latin. In the art of finding for Latin phrases free equivalents which, when found, will seem inevitable and carry no tang of alien speech about them, they set a standard which has hardly ever been equaled. In a sense, no doubt, their devices are obvious and prescribed by the very nature of the two languages; securi videamus (may with sure confidence behold him), celestia simul et terena (all things in heaven and earth), stella duce (by the leading of a star), presta in nobis religionis augmentum (increase in us true religion). Yet any one of these could easily have gone wrong. The test is to start from the Latin at a place where you do not remember the English and see what your own rendering is like.
I have so far been considering passages where the book follows its originals closely. Its departures from them (when they are literary, not doctrinal) are equally interesting. Its most obvious difference from the Latin is its habit of coupling together synonymous or nearly synonymous words, so that peccata becomes ‘sins and wickednesses’ mortifica ‘mortify and kill’, videant ‘perceive and know’, tradi ‘to be betrayed and given up’. It has sometimes been supposed that the second word is added in order to explain the first to the unlearned, but this is a mistake. Sixteenth-century writers (including Cranmer himself in his Homilies) do sometimes add synonyms for this utilitarian purpose, but much more often they add them to adorn their style. In the example I have just quoted it is most improbable that ‘betrayed’ needed to be explained to anyone, and impossible that anyone either did not know the word ‘sins’ or would find it clarified by ‘wickednesses’. It is worth noticing that ‘acknowledge and confess’ is matched by agnoscimus et fatemur in the Liturgia Sacra (1551) of the Flemish Protestant Pollanus. The truth is that the rule ‘one idea, one word’ is arbitrary and pedantic. To ring the changes, wordum wrixlan, was as natural a delight to the men of that age as it had been to Virgil or the Anglo-Saxon scop. The device can be abused, as Ascham knew, but the Prayer Book does not abuse it, and often derives from it, as from other expansions of the original, great rhythmical benefits. Thus in que agenda sunt videant (first after Epiphany), que agenda sunt by the mere nature of English has to become at least ‘what they ought to do’. This, in obedience to the book’s choice of a strongly supported rhythm, is made into ‘what things they ought to do’, and videant then has to be expanded to produce a balance: ‘That they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do’. Similarly, on Ash Wednesday ‘create and make’ balances ‘new and contrite’. The same motive which prompts pairs of synonyms also prompts additions. Thus in vota humilium (third in Lent) English forces us to have a noun with humilium so that we get ‘thy humble servants’. It then seems to the translator’s ear that vota also should have a satellite, and, selecting (for he is an Englishman) one that alliterates, he writes down ‘the hearty desires of thy humble servants’, where a medieval translator would probably have been content with ‘vowes of us humble’. In addition to such rhythmical motives I suspect the influence of a feeling, and, I believe, a just feeling, that the resonant Latin words carry more not only to the ear but also to the heart and the imagination than their short English equivalents, so that ‘faithfully to fill’ is not an excessive allowance for ad implenda nor ‘in the midst of so many and great dangers’ for in tantis periculis.
Since the cursus of medieval Latin was, in comparatively recent times, rediscovered, many scholars have searched the Prayer Book to find how far the compilers endeavoured to reproduce in English this feature of their original. In my opinion some have found in it more specimens of the cursus than it contains and sometimes tortured the rhythm of the English to do so; but many of their claims may be just. There are four kinds of cursus; the Planus, as nostris infunde or ‘help and defend us’; the Planus B, as esse videatur or ‘written for our learning’; the Tardus, as tradi nocentium or ‘them that be penitent’; and the Velox as gloriam perducamur or ‘glorious resurrection’. Now it is obvious that such endings must often occur whether we intend them or not. Thus in the last paragraph but one, though I intended no such thing, I find that I have used three of them; ‘highly-wrought Latin’ (Planus), ‘wilderness of sonnets’ (Planus B), ‘Primers ridiculous’ (Tardus); and even ‘achievement is in translation’ might pass for a Velox. The question is whether they occur in the Prayer Book too often to be the work of chance. The reader must judge for himself. In the collects up to Trinity Sunday I count thirty-five: in a longish chapter of Caxton’s Malory (vii. 16) three: in a page of the preface to Crockford’s Clerical Directory containing thirty sentences I made out seven. Mathematically the results are not strikingly favourable; but we must take into account Cranmer’s remarks to Henry on ‘the course of the paraphrasis’ and indeed the certainty that all the compilers were aware of the cursus in their Latin reading. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that some, at least, of the instances of it in the Prayer Book were intentional. But I am no less convinced that it does not hold the secret of the Prayer Book’s music. It is very doubtful if these endings have the same value in English that they had in Latin: what English ear would find ‘them that be penitent’ (or ‘higgledy piggledy’) a slow movement? Anglo-Saxon verse is probably a better guide here than Latin prose. In English ‘happen to the body’ is essentially the rhythmical equivalent of ‘hurt the soul’, and its resemblance to esse videatur is probably quite unimportant. Certainly the compilers were fond of clashing strong syllables together in a manner that is purely native—‘thy bright beams of light’, ‘borne of a pure virgin’, ‘all desires known’.
Such collisions of strong syllables are closely connected with what I have called the ‘strongly supported’ rhythms of the Prayer Book. A sentence may be regarded phonetically as a succession of peaks and valleys, the peaks being those syllables on which (at least) there is a full accent, and perhaps long quantity and emotional value as well. A strongly supported rhythm occurs when the peaks come close together and the valleys are short, and such rhythm is characteristic of the Prayer Book: as in ‘our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found’, where at least six (possibly eight) out of the sixteen syllables are peaks. Where necessary this rhythm is kept up by insertions; by adding to Son the words Jesus Christ where the original had filium only or by using ‘the same’ where mere clarity does not demand it. It is chiefly this, I think, that gives to almost every sentence its aquiline movement—‘upborne with indefatigable wings’. We find also, as in all good prose, a nice use of the principle idem in alio. Thus long monosyllables in one clause balance pairs of short syllables in the next, so that we ‘cast away’ the works of darkness but ‘put upon us’ the armour of light. Clauses which are co-ordinate, or in other respects similar, unexpectedly vary in length, so that we have a sudden sense of expansion and liberation at ‘and from whom no secrets are hid’ or ‘by thy glorious resurrection and ascension’.
In tone, the differences between our Prayer Book and the Use of Sarum are not great but they are interesting. The translators tended to smooth out what was epigrammatic and to reject whatever might by the severest standards be thought exuberant. Sometimes they removed antitheses. Te largiente regatur in corpore et te servante custodiatur in mente became ‘that by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore both in body and soul’. The Tacitean trenchancy of quem nosse vivere cui servare regnare est is abandoned; they are too wise to compete with Latin where Latin is supreme. And regnare is reduced to ‘perfect freedom’. Regnare cannot have been thought unscriptural: but it is just on the far side of a line which the compilers do not willingly cross. Here, as elsewhere, we come on the affinity between the Drab Age and the eighteenth century. Of all things, the Prayer Book dreads excess. It has almost an Augustan shrinking, not from passion, but from what came to be called enthusiasm. Its preferences reveal themselves sometimes in tiny details. Where the Latin exhorts us on St. Stephen’s day to pray ‘even for our enemies’, the English has simply ‘for our enemies’. Speciem tue celsitudinis, tempting as it must have been in an age of ink-horn terms, is chastened into ‘thy glorious godhead’: celesti pietate becomes plain ‘mercifully’, omnes celos, ‘thy kingdom in heaven’, omnis voluntas loquitur, ‘all desires known’, and crucis tormentum and crucis patibulum both merely ‘death of the cross’. The litany is made less exclamatory, the baptismal service less dramatic. And if we compare the book not with the Use of Sarum but with the primers we find a much sharper contrast. These, in the XV O’s and elsewhere, strike a note utterly foreign to the Prayer Book—‘Have mind, blessed Jesu of all the great dreads, anguishes, and sorrows thou suffredest in thy tender flesh. . . . O Jesu, sweetness of hearts. . . . O bountiful Jesu, O sweet Jesu, the son of the pure virgin . . . the solatious comfort of all creatures. . . . O my sweet love and potential lord.’ Our book is as sparing as the Gospels themselves of references to wounds, hearts, flames, blood, and tears.
The difference here does not exactly coincide with that between Roman and Anglican piety, though it comes near to doing so. It is partly the difference between private and public prayer; the tone of the XV O’s is not so alien to our hymns as to our liturgy. It is partly, too, the difference between the freely emotional Middle Ages with their ready tears and boyish ardours and the graver, more deliberative period that was coming in. The book may even be said to owe something to the Drabness of the Age in which it was composed. Sobriety is the reverse side of Drabness. In the Prayer Book that earnest age, not itself rich either in passion or in beauty, is matched in a most fruitful opposition with overwhelming material and with originals all but overripe in their artistry. It arrests them, binds them in strong syllables, strengthens them even by limitations, as they in return erect and transfigure it. Out of that conflict the perfection springs. There are of course many good, and different, ways both of writing prose and of praying. Its temper may seem cold to those reared in other traditions but no one will deny that it is strong. It offers little and concedes little to merely natural feelings: even religious feelings it will not heighten till it has first sobered them; but at its greatest it shines with a white light hardly surpassed outside the pages of the New Testament itself.