II: Prose in the ‘Golden’ Period

II: Prose in the ‘Golden’ Period

In the last quarter of the century we find a greatly increased output of literature. There is on the whole a remarkable improvement in quality; but even if this had not been so, the mere quantity would be striking. Part of the explanation is that literature is now finding its feet as a commercial art and printers are eager for saleable copy. Many of the authors are victims of that academic overproduction which Mulcaster deprecated, men who have been helped through the universities by friends who could help them no further and who try to live (if nothing better turns up) by the pen. The more fortunate of them make plays for the new theatres; the others depend on the patron and the bookseller. There are also, of course, many ‘gentle’, pious, or learned authors who write from other motives.

Among the forms which commercial prose took at this time fiction holds a very important place; so important that we may wonder why this vein was so little exploited again before the eighteenth century. But the truth is that Elizabethan fiction points only rarely and uncertainly towards the novel properly so called. It appealed to rather different tastes and the eighteenth-century novelists had to make a new start. The other dominant form was the pamphlet; if indeed we can call it a form. Often it contains matter that might well have been served as fiction: presumably the taste for confessed fiction was then (as it still is) rarer than the taste for sensational reading which claims to be ‘news’. The lowest sort of reader wants to be assured (like Shakespeare’s Mopsa) that what he reads is true. Hence the pamphlet absorbed much that would now go into the daily or Sunday papers; murders, apparitions, spy-stories, executions, advertisement. Mr. H. Platt of Lincoln’s Inn, in his Discovery of certain English Wants (1595) finds himself ‘forced even by the bond of charity . . . and the tender loue and affection which he owes his natiue countrey’ to draw attention to the great utility of ‘colebals’ and of an incredibly cheap and long-lived candle that can be ‘sodainly made’; interested readers may get his address from the publisher. Controversy, if properly seasoned with personal abuse, was a good line; a man who had bought any one number of, say, the Harvey-Nashe flyting, would find it hard not to buy the next. Moralizing, preferably of an indignant, censorious kind, was highly popular. It need hardly be added that I attach no note of infamy to any text in calling it commercial. Many of the best books have been written for money.

I will deal first with the pamphlets, and where a pamphleteer has also written fiction, his work in that kind, if of sufficient importance, will be reserved for later treatment.

I

Stephen Gosson (1554–1624) and his School of Abuse (1579) are remembered because in that pamphlet he contributed to what is sometimes called the puritan attack on the theatre; a subject naturally interesting to historians of the drama. Taken in conjunction with his other works, it appears in a slightly different light. Gosson was no puritan; he came from Corpus, Oxford, the fountain head of pure Canterbury doctrine; in his sermon, The Trumpet of War (1598) he quotes Aquinas and Cajetan. At Corpus he imbibed, along with Anglicanism, the latest rhetoric, attending the lectures of Rainoldus who is the greatest single influence on his work. He was the son of a poor man and failed to get a fellowship; finding himself presently in London with empty pockets, he became a playwright. His plays appear to have been failures and have not survived. According to Meres, he also wrote pastorals; and however we rate Meres’s authority, it is not unlikely that he did. Then, just as Lyly had done, he became a stern moralist, attacking in the School of Abuse not only drama but the arts in general, and working up his attack into a euphuistic oration well stuffed with classical anecdotes. I know nothing about his sincerity, and he may not have known much himself. There is some evidence to suggest that he was paid for writing the School by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen: but that is not inconsistent with a real change of his opinion. What Gosson has not changed is his general literary character. We must not contrast his plays as ‘art’ with his pamphlet as ‘theology’. In the School he is still the artist, still indeed the commercial artist, catering for a well established taste in rhetoric. It advertises itself on the title-page as not only ‘profitable for all that wyll follow vertue’ but also ‘pleasaunt for gentlemen that fauour learning’. The dedication to Sidney is significant. Gosson is just as modish and saleable in attacking plays as he had hoped to be in writing them. I doubt whether, at this stage, his quarrel with the players was very serious; later, when they had hit back, he warmed to his work, but in 1579 he may have valued his case against the stage mainly as a suitable peg for chria and simile. His next work, the Ephemerides of Phialo (in the same year) is equally moral and equally in the fashion. It derives from Euphues, and hangs many sententious discourses on a frail trellis of narrative. To it he added A Short Apology for the School. In 1582 he returned to the attack in Plays Confuted. By now (for all controversies gather momentum) he seems to be more in earnest. In 1595 he returned to poetry in the worthless book variously known as A Glass to view the Pride of vainglorious women and the Quips for Upstart Gentlewomen. Some critics have thought its coarseness inconsistent with the moral severity which Gosson elsewhere displays: but this is a misunderstanding. In those days it was the moralist who was expected to call a whore a whore; it was the ‘vayne’, ‘wanton’, or ‘filthie’ poet who called her Amaryllis and gave her goddesses for companions. Gosson’s latest work, the sermon, is his best. The School, if taken seriously as argument, must be judged feeble in the extreme. Gosson mentions the ‘right vse of auncient Poetrie’ but gives us no criterion for distinguishing this from the later abuse. He admits that various ancient censures do not apply to the theatre of his own day but never answers an objection so apparently damaging to his main thesis. His pamphlet is hardly explicable except on the assumption that his main, almost his sole, purpose was rhetorical display. We take Gosson far too seriously if we try to give him a place in the history of English criticism.

The same is true of Thomas Lodge (1558?–1625) replying to Gosson, apparently in 1579. This reply exists in two copies only, both corrupt and both without title-page. Lodge, as we know, was refused a licence and the surviving texts are specimens of a privately printed and ‘vnperfect coppye’. Its title, almost certainly, was Honest Excuses. It is, like Gosson’s School, mainly a display of rhetoric, sometimes euphuistic, sometimes Biblical, and always heavily loaded with unreliable learning. Lodge’s defence of poetry is substantially Boccaccio’s. The authorship of this pamphlet has been questioned. But we know that Lodge answered Gosson and we know that his answer was suppressed: this book is an answer to Gosson and this book appears to have been suppressed. Nor can I see any internal evidence that it is not by Lodge. This is not demonstrative proof but it is as strong as the circumstances entitle us to look for.

To follow the details of the controversy which thus began is hardly, I think, the literary historian’s business. As literary criticism it was not serious. It was of course serious enough in another way, which concerns historians of manners and of the theatre. Parents, employers, and magistrates (not all of them necessarily puritans in the proper sense) were very anxious to abolish the theatre; because it broke the Sabbath, because it drew young people away from their work and encouraged them to spend money, because it collected crowds (a thing both medically and morally suspect) and finally because, if you please, these players were becoming quite rich. All new ways of earning money at first excite indignation. The whole thing is very intelligible. But we must not build it up into an essential conflict between the claims of the moral and the aesthetic point of view. The defenders and the assailants shared the same moral premises. I shall content myself with noticing one author, who is of permanent interest.

Philip Stubbes (c. 1555–1610+) began his literary career with broadside ballads, highly moral and poetically negligible. Success came to him in May 1583 with the Anatomy of Abuses, which reached a second edition in August of the same year and a fifth by 1595. It was followed, still in 1583, by a Rosary of Christian Prayers and the Second Part of the Anatomy, in 1585 by the Intended Treason of Doctor Parrie, in 1591 by the Christal Glass, in 1593 by A Motive to Good Works, and in 1610 by the Perfect Pathway to Felicity. He was probably not a commercial writer and in the preface to the Anatomy is nervously apologetic about his style. The ‘palpable barbarisme’ (plus quam Vandalica) which he confesses is apparent in his sad mangling of a line from Virgil, and what has since been christened ‘elegant variation’ never revealed itself more helplessly than in the sentence, ‘as one doth ease the painfulness of the way, so doth the other alleuiate the yrksomnes of the iourney intended’. But when Stubbes warms to his work and forgets to be literary, his style is serviceable enough. Courage came to him with success and in later editions he removed most of the neologisms which abound in the 1583 Anatomy. In narrative he is not contemptible, but he breathed no life into the dialogue form (used in the Anatomy) and failed to exploit his own promising idea of representing England as a remote island called Ailgna. Indeed, later editions removed the Erewhonian names.

The formula ‘a Puritan attacking plays’ does little justice to Stubbes. He was no extreme puritan and the Second Part of the Anatomy explicitly, though reluctantly, allows bishops’ titles and the surplice. Nor did the question of the theatre loom nearly so large in his mind as in the minds of his modern readers. Stage-plays are one item in his list of twenty-two profanations of the Sabbath. He attacks usury, astrology, the growing exclusion of the poor from the universities, the decay of alms-giving, and the state of prisons as strongly as he attacks the theatre. Stubbes is in fact a man much closer to Cobbett than to Gosson; a man who feels, and hardly understands, a great change creeping over society and attacks every manifestation of it. The Motive to Good Works, full of things seen and well worth reprinting, has indeed something in common with the Rural Rides. He is not so wise a man nor so good a writer as Cobbett; but when you have come to know him you may feel inclined to extend to his hatred of plays the same sort of indulgence we extend to Cobbett’s hatred of tea. Of all the ‘abuses’ that he denounced, clearly the one that excited Stubbes most was vanity and extravagance in dress. He is very naïve on this topic. Sometimes vanity means no more than novelty, as when he condemns the ‘assy’ use of hats without hatbands; and he is delightfully credulous of assurances from ‘my Father and other wyse sages’ that everyone had better health before all the new-fangled clothes came in. This preoccupation with dress should be connected with his statement that Pride is his ‘chiefest argument’. That is not the only point at which Stubbes, despite his Protestant theology, strikes a medieval note. The whole lay-out of the Anatomy, with its inset stories of dreadful judgements, would have commended itself to Chaucer’s Pardoner.

Though not a puritan of the first water, he is of course a precisian. Like Gosson he begins by allowing that there is, besides the abuse, a lawful use of plays, dances, and rich attire; and like Gosson he makes no such distinction when he comes to particulars. But then, unlike Gosson, he notices the inconsistency, and removes the milder preface in his later edition. This leaves his position one of great severity. But he is not the most repellent kind of precisian; his angers are hot, not cold, and compassion is a marked characteristic of his mind. It is of some historical interest that he has an almost nineteenth-century feeling for animals. Of bear-baiting he asks, ‘What christian heart can take pleasure to see one poore beast to rent, teare and kill another’. Of hunting (save for necessary food) he says that our estrangement from the brutes is a result of the Fall ‘which we are rather to sorrow for’ than to exploit for pastime. This oddly sensitive side of Stubbes comes out stiffly, old-fashionedly, but beyond mistake in the Christal Glass, written to commemorate his young wife. The marriage, clearly, had been in reality what Dorothea Brooke vainly hoped her marriage with Casaubon would prove, and the bride ‘(let me speak it without offence), I think, the rarest in the world’. Less mawkish death-bed scenes than hers are not easily found in literature, for she lay ‘red as the rose and most beautiful to beholde’, and then, after her last conflict with Satan ‘fell suddenly into a sweet, smiling laughter, saying . . . Now is he gone: do you not see him flie like a beaten cocke?’ Stubbes did not at that moment care to note that her metaphor came from the cockpit.

George Whetstone (1544?–1587), a third son, an unsuccessful courtier, charged with dissipating what fortune he had on dice and bona robas, but himself charging others with having cheated him and thence plunging into ruinous litigation, was almost predestined to be a pamphleteer. The best of his adventuring lay outside literature, on active service in Holland (where he won some distinction as a soldier) or sailing with Gilbert for the North-West Passage in 1578: and the best of his literary adventuring lay outside the pamphlet. He tried everything—plays, poetry, and fiction; such is the ‘sad variety’ to which the commercial writer is often driven. In the pamphlet, grave moral warnings were his favourite line. The Mirror for Magistrates of Cities (1584, but re-issued as the Enemy to Unthriftiness in the following year) instructs magistrates by the example of Henry VII and Alexander Severus, whose oration fills most of the book. With the Mirror came also A Touchstone for the Time. Here, after a preliminary glance at the ‘abuse’ of the stage for ‘scurylitie and vnchaste conveiance’, Whetstone proceeds to an attack on dicing houses, ordinaries, ‘the braue Shifter’ (who ‘hath inheritance in the Ile of Snatch’ and ‘adventureth to Cape Gripe’), the bawd, and the broker. It is not exactly bad, but other writers of the period have done the same kind of thing better. The English Mirror (1586) is less interesting, a moral and political tract in two books, the first a warning against Envy, the second a defence of ‘femenine gouernment’, and a caveat against Jesuits.

Anthony Munday (1553–1633), exemplifies the life of commercial authorship at its lowest level and has more place in the history of police methods than in that of literature. He was a playwright except when attacks on the theatre became saleable, a spy, an agent provocateur, an evidence, the commune refugium (as one of his victims said) of tottering prosecutions, the dirty card that even government plays last. He hunted Jesuits and puritans with equal obedience: Jesuits paid best because, in addition to the profits of the chase, there was money in a good ‘write-up’ of the execution. His English Roman Life (1582) describes his journey to Rome and his residence there in the English College. It is readable. It would be even admirable if it were a picaresque novel, if its realism argued invention and its self-exposure were ironical. Being true (or at best being lies, not fiction), it is nothing. The style can sink very low: there is a sentence in chapter ii as helpless as those quoted before from Harpsfield and Grafton. The gap between this style and that of his Zelauto (which I reserve for treatment under the head of Fiction) shows how completely the rhetoric of such an author is laid on as an extra. Munday did not dream of being ‘literary’ when he had in hand work which would be bought for its matter. He wears his ‘dicky’ only when waiting at table.

Barnaby Rich (1540?–1617), though I must dismiss him briefly, is a more interesting writer than Munday. He was a soldier and anxious (what English soldier is not?) to arouse public feeling about the inadequacy of our army and the ill usage of our troops. To that side of his work belong the Alarm to England (1578), the Pathway to Military Practice (1587), and A Soldier’s Wish (1604). In the first of these he argues the lawfulness of wars against radical pacifists, whom he calls by a livelier name, peacemongers, basing his case on scripture and on Cicero’s maxim that it is ‘as great iniustice not to defend an iniurie as to offer an iniurie’. Rich shows some of Burton’s cheery garrulity in complaint. The Pathway is more technical. Rich comes nearest to Munday in his True Report of a late practice by a Papist (1582) which purports to give us the confession of a girl who was induced by ‘a vile runnagate Papist’ to set up as a prophetess. His best attempts at fiction will be dealt with later, but we may here notice his Farewell to Military Profession (1581), now chiefly remembered because one of its eight inset novelle, Apolonius and Silla by Belleforest out of Bandello, was used in Twelfth Night. The stories, though not badly told, are more rhetorical than modern taste easily endures. His military grievances sometimes overflow into the narratives amusingly enough: ‘this noble duke had no maner of skill in carpet trade’ or ‘now the Emperour beganne to repent hym of the slender accoumpt he had made of souldiours in the tyme of peace’.

Robert Greene (1560?–1592) is in quite a different class from the Mundays and the Riches. His immense contemporary popularity, his early death, his miseries, and his somewhat heavily publicized but not therefore insincere repentance make him in some sort the hero and spokesman of all the commercial writers. As a poet he has permanent claims and as a ‘novelist’ (it is not quite the right word) he has at least historical importance: his pamphlets, in my opinion, contain little of his best work. Except for two translations (the Debate Between Folly and Love from the French, and The Royal Exchange from the Italian) and for the Spanish Masquerado (1589) which is mere victory-parade stuff, they fall into three classes. First in time—some would add, and in merit—come the ‘conny catching’ pamphlets. The first of these, A Notable Discovery of Cousenage (1591) comes as a welcome relief to a modern reader who reaches it by a chronological progress through Greene’s works. Up till now he will have found in Greene mainly a rhetorical writer, the disciple and rival of Lyly; here at last is life and London and slang and humour. But this in itself does not prove that Greene is succeeding better than he had done in Morando or Euphues his Censure: only that he is now working in a genre which our age happens to prefer. In this genre his achievement is respectable but by no means brilliant. Harman’s rogues had talked better. Lodge in Wits Misery, Greene himself in the Quip, Nashe almost everywhere, have more race and bustle. Greene blurs his point, without much comic effect in compensation, by making the Conny, in intention, as great a rogue as his Catchers. He makes a trickster avow flatly ‘As my religion is smal, so my deuotion is lesse—the two ends I aime at, are gaine and ease.’ This is the language of an allegorical person introducing himself in a Morality. In the Second part of Conny-catching (1592) it is interesting to notice that Greene finds it necessary to defend (it would not have been necessary a few years later) that unadorned style which, for a modern, sets these pamphlets so clearly above his earlier work. He explains that he had abandoned his rhetoric in obedience to ‘decorum’ lest he ‘should dishonour that high misterie of eloquence, and derogate from the dignitie of our English toonge, eyther to employ any figure or bestow one choyce English word vpon such disdained rakehels as those Conny-catchers’. The passage suggests that Greene felt himself not to be essaying a new kind of excellence but to be absolved from caring how he wrote, and the pamphlet itself confirms this. There are some long jog-trot sentences (notably near the end of the section on ‘Vincents Law’) which make us sigh for euphuism again. The latter part of the book is merely a collection of ‘merry tales’ and undistinguished. The Disputation Between a He Conny-Catcher and a She Conny-catcher (1592) is in part an advertisement for the previous pamphlets; the speakers, Nan and Lawrence, complain that their trade has suffered severely from that ‘peevish scholler’ R. G. The Black Book’s Messenger, which appeared in the same year, is a collection of ‘merry tales’ about ‘cross-biting’ put in the form of an impenitent confession by one Ned Browne. He hardly comes to life.

The Defence of Conny catching (also in 1592) raises a problem. Grosart laughs at those who attributed it to Greene without noticing that it is an attack on him, but the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It purports to be written by Cuthbert Cunny-catcher who complains, like Nan and Lawrence, that his business has been ruined by R. G. In exasperation he has read Greene for himself and finds no mention of the greatest Catcher of all—the usurer. No book better calculated to increase the fame of Greene’s recent pamphlets, and to sell some intended pamphlets, could be imagined. It is true that ‘Cuthbert’ accuses Greene of having written frivolous stuff which ‘had better seemed T. D.’ (probably Thomas Deloney). But this echoes what Greene (perhaps advertising a new line of goods for a new type of customer) had said himself in the epistle to his Mourning Garment. So far, the Defence, though ostensibly an attack is in reality a puff. The only passage which does not advertise Greene is the famous, ‘Aske the Queens players if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admirals men for as much more. Was not this plaine Conny catching?’ One would suppose that only a real enemy could have written this; on the other hand, only one who was too big a fool to have written it at all would have been fool enough to write the rest of the Defence with the intention of harming Greene. Add to this that the Disputation—another oblique advertisement of the same type—was printed ‘by A. I. for T. G.’ and the Defence ‘by A. I. for Thomas Gubbins’, and we may perhaps conclude that the taunt about the Orlando Furioso is a slap-stick blow intended to be audible in the pit but innocuous to the actor who is struck, and that the Defence is either by a friend or, more probably, by Greene himself.

The second class of Greene’s pamphlets is represented by a single work, the Repentance (1592). Its authenticity has of course been questioned but strenuously defended. From the purely literary point of view it is not very important. The modern reader will feel that the few lines written by Greene to his wife the night before he died (unless these also are spurious) are more moving than the Repentance itself. There, by painting himself totally black, Greene naturally fails to convince us. But he was not trying, like a modern author, to produce a ‘portrait of the artist’. He was writing the kind of thing which the Elizabethans, accustomed to the ‘last confessions’ of bad men, well understood.

In the third class we have two pieces which come nearer to being ‘pure’ literature. The Vision, though said to be ‘written at the instant of his death’ and prefaced with an apology for previous ‘lasciuious Pamphletting’ (‘Pouertie is the father of innumerable infirmities’), has none of the urgency of the Repentance, being in fact a fantasy with many medieval characteristics. Greene, fearing that his ‘amorous trifles’ will disgrace him after death, is comforted by Chaucer’s ghost but scolded by Gower’s. The two poets debate the question, Chaucer producing a list of twenty sound moral maxims from his client’s works, and tell tales. Greene confesses, a little ungratefully, that he has followed Chaucer too much, and resolves for the future to devote himself to moral and natural philosophy: an illuminating comment on the claim that the Vision was composed at the ‘instant’ of death. Solomon then appears and explains that all sciences but theology are vain. The style of this piece, which is livelier than an abstract can suggest, is sometimes euphuistic. The Quip for an Upstart Courtier: or, a quaint dispute between Velvet breeches and Cloth breeches (1592) is the best of all Greene’s pamphlets. The epistle, written in a style which is no longer euphuistic but has profited by the euphuistic discipline, is the finest specimen we have of Greene the rhetorician. The body of the work is medieval in conception. The allegorical garden, its sudden vanishing, the waste land, and the appearance of the velvet breeches (‘I supposed it to be some monster nourished vppe in those desertes’) are medievally vivid. The cloth breeches are ‘seamed with a little couentry blewe, such as in Diebus Illis our grandfathers wore when neighbourhood and hospitality had banished pride out of England’. What follows is, of course, one of those laments for a vanished age of kindness and simplicity which men have made at all times, perhaps with as much reason as those who at most times have praised the new order. The difficulty of finding impartial arbitrators between the two pairs of breeches leads artfully to a lively satire on various professions. In this work Greene shows a balanced control of his powers which I do not find elsewhere. The story of the tailors ‘eatinge their pease with their needels pointes, one by one’ is worthy of Nashe.

A few pages ago I said that the playwrights had the same moral premises as their ‘puritan’ critics. Greene illustrates this. He is not always moral at all, but when he is, his morality is of startling severity. He deplores his ‘lasciuious pamphletting’, his ‘loue-trash’. Yet in our days a man who found his chastity endangered by the works of Greene would have to be, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘more combustible’ than most.

Greene’s career can roughly be divided into a rhetorical period and a period beginning in 1591, in which he attempts a more colloquial style. Lodge, as will be seen presently, though revealing a command of the colloquial style as early as 1584, does not venture to exploit it fully till 1596. Nashe, who was toying with a kind of semi-euphuism in 1589, achieves his own unmistakable manner in 1592. Thus, still very roughly, we may distinguish stylistically an earlier period when formal rhetoric dominated the pamphlet, and a later period in which the illusion of ex tempore speech is attempted. The dividing-line comes somewhere about the year 1590. It is natural to connect it with the outburst of Martinist and Anti-Martinist publications which began in October 1588 and lasted into 1590.

By the autumn of 1588 the bishops, what between their control of the press and the powers of the detested High Commission established in 1582, had reduced their puritan critics to silence. At that moment, printed nobody knew where by Robert Waldegrave, appeared Oh read over D. John Bridges by ‘Martin Marprelate gentleman’. The controversy to which ‘Martin’ was contributing will receive some attention later and from a different point of view. In that warfare Martinism was only a guerrilla episode and can the more easily be detached for our present purpose because, on the intellectual level, it was of no serious importance. Martin himself had of course a serious intention and must, for all his motley, be regarded as a heroic figure. Nor have I any sympathy with those who make prim mouths at him for introducing scurrility into a theological debate, for debate was precisely what the bishops had suppressed. Those who refuse to let their opponents dispute have no right to complain if they hear instead lewd catcalls in the streets; in a sense, it is what they have chosen. But Martin was speedily disowned by the graver members of his own party, and by his very choice of a weapon he was committed to methods which could hardly convert a critical inquirer. His importance as a controversial theologian is therefore small: his real place is in the history of prose.

The racy, fleering, cockney manner which Martin adopted was not, indeed, a complete novelty; we have seen something like it used, and used on the most serious subjects, by More, Latimer, and Poynet. What was new was, first, its sudden introduction into this particular controversy, and secondly, its continuous and exaggerated employment. Martin tells us quite clearly (in Hay any Worke for Cooper, 1589) why he adopted this manner. ‘The most part of men could not be gotten to read anything in the defence of one and against the other. I bethought me therefore of a way whereby men might be drawn to do both.’ He uses all the old devices and some new ones to draw attention to himself; imitation of inarticulate noises (Ha, ha, ha—Tse-tse-tse), coinages or feigned mispronunciations (Confocation house, Fickers General, Paltripolitans, fathermillerly, dissimblation), interruptions or encouragements from voices in the margin (‘Now I pray thee good Martin speake out’) and again replies to these voices (‘Why sauceboxes, must you be prating?’). He utters threats with a fine ogreish glee: ‘I will watch you at euery half turne . . . I will place a young Martin in every diocese.’ More maddeningly, he represents threats as promises. He will publish his other books; and ‘Why, my masters of the clergy, did you neuer heare of my books indeede? Foh, then you neuer heard of good sport in your life.’ Perhaps his best piece of sustained denigration is the long speech (The Just Censure, 1589) which he represents Whitgift as making to his dirty crew of pursuivants, the Mundays and their like.

Much of his invective falls on deaf ears today. We are not shocked that a bishop should swear ‘like a lewd swag and say, By my faith’. We hardly believe that Lord Dumb John (the Bishop of London) stole cloth. We do not much care whether clergymen play bowls or even primero. Our sympathy goes all to the other side when Martin jeers at Whitgift because ‘all the world knoweth him to haue been a poor scholler . . . so poore as he had not a napkin to wipe his mouth’ and had to carry Dr. Perne’s cloak-bag. Whitgift had the sense to reply that if it were true it would be no disgrace. But Martin’s taunt was justified by the canons of that age: then, and long after, it was considered fair sport to expose your opponent’s poverty. (In Lamb we see poverty turning from a topic of bitter, into one of tender and sympathetic, raillery.) What can hardly be excused by standards that Martin himself must have acknowledged is the passage (in Oh Read Over) where Whitgift is blamed for not truckling to worldly greatness. The Archbishop had apparently refused to put a parson into a benefice without subscription to the three special articles which had been made obligatory in 1583. That, of course, is a fair target for Martin: this subscription was a principal grievance to his party. But the point of the story in Martin’s eyes, the aggravating circumstances which makes it worth telling, is that Whitgift had refused this non-subscriber despite a request in his favour from the Earl of Warwick. Martin quotes his words—‘I would uery gladlie gratifie my lord, but surely there is a lord in heauen whom I feare’. Without the slightest perception that this redounds to the archbishop’s credit, Martin continues ‘I will tell you true, John of Canterbury, if I were a nobleman and a Councillor too, I should be sicke of the spleen, nay I could not beare this at your hands’. (It will be remembered that the puritans were accused of relying on great friends.)

The Martinist pamphlets were seven in all. Oh read over D. John Bridges in its two parts (the Epistle and the Epitome) appeared in 1588, Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints, Hay any Worke for Cooper, the Theses Martinianae (ostensibly by Martin’s younger brother), the Just Censure (in which Martin senior affects to reprove Martin junior), and the Protestation, all in 1589. After that the printers were caught and the pamphlets ceased. Martin puts a bold face on it to the end though even in the Epitome he is already rejected by his own side—‘I am fauoured of all estates (the Puritans only excepted)’. Later, in the Theses, he adds, ‘I see my doings and my course misliked of many both the good and the bad’. It is possible that the bishops exaggerated the practical importance of the whole affair (slanders against oneself seldom seem trivial) and were ill advised to reply. Its literary importance I have already suggested. Martin certainly displayed a new manner in controversy and probably his successors learned from him. It can hardly be claimed that in this new kind he attained excellence. He seems at times a little tired of it himself. He is not best when he is rowdiest. I believe a quieter and more ironic prose, a prose closer to Swift’s, would have been more congenial to him.

According to Strype it was Bancroft who first suggested among the bishops that the Martinists should be ‘answered after their own vain writings’. Counter-attack by imitation was thus enjoined from above. This programme was partly carried out on the stage; in the Theses Martin junior taunts his brother with having been ‘clean put out of countenance’ by ‘stage players, poore silly hunger starued wretches’ who, having ‘not so much as an honest calling’ to live by, will be glad for a penny ‘on open stage to play the ignominious fooles for an houre together’. (The other popular charge against the actors was that they were far too rich.) These vanished plays do not concern us. Of the literary anti-Martinist flytings we may mention, besides the three attributed to ‘Pasquil’, Pappe with an hatchet (in 1589) and an Almond for a Parrot (1590). Of these, Pappe with an hatchet almost certainly by Lyly.

The Pasquils deserve more attention if only because the older scholars, from Collier to Sir Sidney Lee, attributed them to Nashe. This claim has been overthrown, but one sees, nevertheless, how it seemed reasonable. The first of the three pieces by Pasquil, the Countercuff, is a little like Nashe, but very much weaker; such stuff as Nashe might have written before he came to his strength. The Return of Pasquil of England is much more formidable. The sympathy which might go to the puritans as the hunted and endangered party is skilfully diverted by the references to their influential backers: ‘some of the cittie fauour’ Martin, he ‘hath great upholders’, ‘take heed . . . the faction of Martinisme hath mightie freends’. And perhaps there lurk among Martin’s friends ‘some few that are as readie as himselfe to rob the Church’. In the third pamphlet, the First part of Pasquil’s Apology, Pasquil tells us, ‘the sente of Church-robbers is in my nostrils’. All this is good tactics and not all of it is necessarily unjust. A higher note is struck when Pasquil exhorts the puritans to peace ‘that the weake may not see vs runne at one another like furious Bulles foming and casting out those reproches which hereafter we shall neuer be able to wipe awaie’. The weakness of the pamphlet is that Pasquil often accuses his opponent of wresting scripture but does not very strongly substantiate the charge. It would not have been difficult.

Critics have always been reluctant to deny that Nashe wrote An Almond for a Parrot and an American scholar has produced external evidence to support his claim. It is certainly stronger meat than we find in Pasquil. Its main line of attack is that the puritans, by disturbing the Protestant settlement in the English Church, are really the Pope’s best friends—a role which the puritans of course allotted to the bishops. The author narrates how, on inquiring one night at Bergamo why all the bells were ringing, he was told by his host that the town was rejoicing at news of ‘a famous Schismatike, one Martin, newe sprung vp in England’ who would soon fulfill the dearest wish of Rome and Spain by setting us all at odds and leaving us an easy prey to invasion. He also emphasizes the puritan threat to the universities: ‘it were not two pins hurt if your Colledges were fired ouer your heades, and you turnde a begging forth your fellowshippes like Fryers and Monkes’. All this might come from any fighting journalist with his wits about him; what is more like Nashe is such a vocative as ‘good munckie face Machiuell’ and the almost nightmare quality of certain passages. Such are the (quite serious) picture of Martin’s damnation, ‘swimming to hell’ on the ‘innocent bloude’ of those who ‘shall carrie the name of Martine on their foreheads to the vale of confusion’ or the appalling humour about Penry—‘Predestination, that foresaw how crooked he should proue in his waies, enioyned incest to spawne him splay-footed: Eternitie, that knew how awkward he shoulde looke to all honesty, consulted with conception to make him squint-eyed . . .’, &c. We are driven to conclude aut Nashius aut Diabolus; and may even wonder if the second alternative is purely formal. This pamphlet is strong as sulphur. The unhappy Martin who first used gas in this war found at the same time that he was repudiated by his own higher command and that the enemy had gases much more deadly than his.

Thomas Lodge, the son of a bankrupt (who had once been Lord Mayor), the black sheep of his family, prodigal, imprudent in all things, and most honourably so in hardly at all disguising his adherence to the old religion, an adventurer to the Azores in 1586 and to Magellan in 1591, was driven by need to attempt almost every form of literature. Of his pamphlets, which alone concern us here, the Honest Excuses has already been noticed. He shows from the first a talent for realistic humour which, however, he did not venture to exploit fully until Martin Marprelate and Nashe had shown the way. In his Alarm against Usurers (1584) it peeps out but soon hides again behind rhetoric. We have vivid pictures of a typical gull, a typical ‘heavy father’, a typical broker, and a typical moneylender. But all these, except the broker whose speech rings fairly true, plunge us back into euphuism the moment they open their mouths. Those who hope to see in the father a portrait of the elder Lodge will be disappointed at his conversational style; ‘Agree light and darknesse? Or the Icknewmon with the Aspis? Doeth the Weesell loue the Cockatrice?’ At the very end Lodge rises into a strain of genuine and moving eloquence. The Catharos Diogenes in his Singularity . . . a Nettle for Nice Noses (1591?) is arrant bookmaking. Matter borrowed from the fifteenth-century Dyalogus Creaturarum Moralisatus and Jean Benedicti’s Somme des Pechez (1584) is worked up into a sermon against usury and lechery, thinly veiled as a colloquy held at Athens between Diogenes and two worldlings; so thinly that these Athenians refer to Littleton’s Tenures. The earlier part shows traces of euphuism: some of the railing dialogue anticipates Shakespeare’s prose. The Devil Conjured (1596) is much the same kind of thing; a defence of the ascetic life and an attack on magic and astrology, heavily indebted to Angles’s Flores in Librum Secundum Sententiarum (Madrid, 1586) and presented as a dialogue between St. Anthony and three visitors. It is seasoned, but only sporadically, with euphuism. Lodge’s Romanism is made very clear. Far better than these, and possibly Lodge’s best work, is Wits Misery (also in 1596). Here, encouraged and perhaps assisted by Nashe’s Piers Penniless, he all but abandons his earlier rhetoric and develops his racier vein. The structure is that of a medieval sermon on the seven deadly sins. Each is subdivided and each subdivision becomes a character, allegorical indeed, yet hailed before us more vividly than those of Theophrastus—‘But soft who comes here with a leane face and hollow eyes biting his lips for feare his tongue should leape out of his mouth.’ Of Worldly Fear we read ‘if a butchers hook do but catch him by the sleeues, he cries out, At whose suit?’ The puritan is attacked under the head of sedition as one lately ‘flying under colour of religion beyond the sea’ and now on his return ‘telling wonders of the enterteinment of good Wits in other countries’ and whispering to farmers that ‘these rackt rents are the vtter ruine of the yeomanry’. In the picture of the ‘malecontent’ it is interesting to see how Lodge accepts motiveless malignity as a familiar fact calling for no explanation. The ‘right malecontent Deuill . . . his hat without a band, his hose vngartered . . . if he walkes Poules he sculks in the back Isles . . . hating his countrie of meer innated and corrupt villanie’. This whole pamphlet is full of interest, and not all the credit need go to the influence of Nashe. An apostrophe such as ‘Beelzebub the enuious, grand god of flies, Archduke of Grecian fantacies and patron of the Pharisies’ is almost certainly learned from him; but in many of his best passages Lodge is giving us simply more and better of the sort we had in parts of the Alarm.

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) is undoubtedly the greatest of the Elizabethan pamphleteers, the perfect literary showman, the juggler with words who can keep a crowd spell-bound by sheer virtuosity. The subject, in his sort of writing, is unimportant.

His highly individual style is still unformed in his earliest works. The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589) is a long, rambling, grumbling invective against women and (to adopt its own point of view) other evils. The style is embellished with rhymes and euphuistic similes, but beneath these decorations we often catch something not unlike the debased alliterative rhythm of Langland. The preface to Greene’s Menaphon (also 1589) is somewhat rhetorical, and, what with tantalizing allusions and obscurity, has set scholars many problems. Nashe’s views on contemporary literature are hidden somewhere in this preface if we could get at them. He clearly has something to tell us about English prose style but I have failed to understand him, except in that passage (significant in relation to Nashe’s later work) where he cries ‘but giue me the man whose extemporall vaine in anie humour will excell our greatest Art-masters deliberate thoughts’. There, and in one or two other places, he is beginning to achieve that style himself. The preface to Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, which followed in 1591, is better work; its opening sentence, irresistible. But it is in Piers Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592) that he really found himself.

Nashe was later to tell us (in the Epistle to Lenten Stuff) that of all styles he most affected and strove to imitate that of Aretine. Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) was the yellow press of his day: his fame hung on the strong triple cord of flattery, libel, and pornography. The latter Nashe certainly never imitated in prose, and some doubt whether in claiming to follow Aretine’s ‘stile’ he meant anything more definite than that he aimed at the greatest possible violence.

Wherever it came from, the style which appears in Pierce Penilesse offered the Elizabethan reader a new sort of pleasure. The core of the work is medieval, a satiric homily on the seven deadly sins in the grimly humorous temper of Langland or the Ancren Riwle. But this is enclosed in a petition to the Devil thus enabling Nashe to give a spirited account of his search for a suitable postman and to add some saleable Platonic demonology from Georgius Pictorius. There are several digressions, including a defence of plays (especially chronicle plays) and an attack on Richard Harvey, of which came afterwards a long and ludicrous paper war. It is very easy to see the faults of Piers; its shapeless garrulity, the reckless inconsistency of its attitudes, and the author’s nasty pleasure in describing cruelty. It is more useful to try to see why it was once liked, for this was the most popular of Nashe’s works and was even, if we can trust his own statement, translated into French. Its appeal is almost entirely to that taste for happy extravagance in language and triumphant impudence of tone, which the Elizabethans have, perhaps, bequeathed rather to their American than to their English descendants. The catchpenny lure of the title (carefully underlined by the printer’s note to the reader) is characteristic of the whole thing. The opening words of the epistle, ‘Faith, I am verie sorrie, Sir,’ establish at once an intimacy between the performer and the audience: it is the same technique that Donne often uses in verse. Throughout the work Nashe’s phrasing has the vividness of a clown’s red nose. We read of old trots ‘in the wrinckles of whose face ye may hide false dice and play at cherrypit in the dint of their cheekes’; the Devil is ‘Master Os foetidum, Bedle of the Blackesmithes’; women have lips ‘as lauishly red as if they vsed to kisse an okerman euery morning’; Nashe ‘has tearmes (if he be vext) laid in steepe in Aquafortis and gunpowder, that shall rattle through the skyes and make an Earthquake in a Pesants eares’. He concludes his belabouring of Richard Harvey with a delightful vos plaudite—‘Haue I not an indifferent prittye vayne in spurgalling an Asse? if you knew how extemporall it were at this instant and with what hast it is writ, you would say so.’

As this passage was the shoeing-horn to draw on the whole Nashe-Harvey quarrel, it will be convenient here to group together Nashe’s other contributions to it, the Strange News of 1592 and Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596). The rights and wrongs of this great flyting must be sought in Dr. McKerrow’s magnificent edition, and in fact they do not matter much. Nashe certainly, the Harveys not impossibly, were well aware that such stuff would sell. The example of great humanistic dog-fights like that between Poggio and Valla could hardly be absent from their minds. And whatever Nashe’s extra-literary motives may have been, an enemy to bespatter was clearly an artistic necessity to one who had just discovered a style so suited for invective. The obscurity of the quarrel need deter no reader from exploring these pamphlets, which are their author’s liveliest works. You must come to them as to a ferocious game: if you are looking for serious debate you will find them unreadable. The very qualities which we should blame in an ordinary controversialist are the life and soul of Nashe. He is unfair, illogical, violent, extravagant, coarse: but then that is the joke. When a half drunk street-corner humorist decides to make a respectable person (say, from Peebles) ridiculous, it is useless for the respectable person to show that the charges brought against him are untrue—that he does not beat his wife, is not a cinema star in disguise, is not wearing a false nose. The more eagerly he refutes them, the louder the spectators laugh. When the butt is anyone so unamiable, so grotesque, as Gabriel Harvey, we enjoy the fun with (almost) a clear conscience. The very names that are flung at him confer a grievous immortality—Gilgilis Hobberdehoy, Braggadochio Glorioso, Timothy Tiptoes, Gerboduck Huddleduddle. Nashe’s satire, in other respects the very reverse of Dryden’s, always has Dryden’s unanswerable ease and gusto, seems to cost the writer nothing, kills with nonchalance. Poor Harvey may writhe at allusions to his father the ropemaker; the more fool he, says Nashe, for ‘had I a Rope maker to my father and somebody had cast it in my teeth, I would foorthwith haue writ in praise of Ropemakers and prou’d it by sound sillogistry to be one of the 7 liberal sciences’. He would have, too.

In Christs Tears over Jerusalem (1593) Nashe attempts a serious theme with very little success. The bones of the work are, once more, medieval. We begin with a long speech put into the mouth of Christ, and of course Nashe fails as conspicuously as More had failed in a similar audacity. We pass thence to a lurid account of the siege and fall of Jerusalem in which we are alternately nauseated by physical horrors and lulled asleep by ineffective rhetoric. When we reach Schimeon’s proclamation, the author’s irrepressible relish for roguery rather overwhelms his (presumably) moral purpose. The book ends with a call upon plague-stricken London to repent, set in a complicated framework of eight vices which are the five sons and three daughters of pride. This is a thoroughly bad piece of work: the descriptions of the vices produce neither laughter nor compunction. Nashe’s peculiar richness of phrase sometimes appears, as in the description of the courtier whose ‘backe bandieth colours with the Sunne’ and in many images of famine and corruption which are veritably nightmares ten words long. But in the main Nashe seems to be trying, and not very happily, to alter his style—unless, indeed, the Tears is early work rehashed. The Dedication, to Lady Elizabeth Carey, uses a heavy ink-horn rhetoric foreign to his mature manner. In the speech given to the Saviour he uses a strange artifice of which I do not know the history (the 119th Psalm might be the ultimate model). A series of keywords (stones, gather, echo, would not, and desolate) are used in turn like leitmotifs.

The Terrors of the Night, published in 1594, is said to have been written ‘a long time since’, but is more characteristic of Nashe’s developed manner than the Anatomy of Absurdity had been. Perhaps it was re-worked and added to. It is a rambling attack on demonology and oneiromancy. As usual, Nashe is quite indifferent to consistency. He starts off by regarding night as Spenser regarded it and dwells, movingly enough, on the horrors of nocturnal conscience and solitude, when we are ‘shut separately in our chambers’ and Satan (who rules the night, as God the day) ‘reuealeth the whole astonishing treasurie of his wonders’. Presently, however, night becomes the friend: almost, as in Kipling’s story, our kind protector against Policeman Day. For ‘he that dreames merily is like a boy new breetcht, who leapes and daunceth for joy his paine is past’, but soon ‘his master the day, seeing him so iocund and pleasant, comes and dooes as much for him againe, whereby his hell is renued’. Corda oblita laborum—who would have expected this Virgilian pity from burly Nashe? Unless, having read our way so far into his mind, we come to suspect—and I think every reader of Nashe will—that the ‘burliness’ is by no means the whole story: may indeed be only the ‘manic’ peak, balanced in private by a ‘depressive’ trough. The Terrors is ostensibly a skeptical work written to remove night-fears. And Nashe gets great fun out of the minor devils of whom ‘infinite millions wil hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose’ or ‘entrench themselves’ in the wrinkles of a hag, or the Druids in Man who were positively ‘lousie with familiars’. But these, like nearly all Nashe’s comic images, are comic only if you see them in a flash and from exactly the right angle. Move a hair’s breadth, dwell on them a second too long, and they become disturbing.

The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) will be treated under the head of fiction. I mention it here only to notice that its long scene of torture deepens the impression of something in Nashe which is the reverse of comic, though also closely connected with his peculiar kind of comedy. The grotesque is a ridge from which one can descend into very different valleys.

On learning that Lenten Stuff (1599) is a panegyric on red herrings, the modern reader may feel inclined to yawn. Nashe was moved to adopt such a theme partly by the desire to repay some kindness shown him in the town of Yarmouth and partly by emulation of the great wits who had written paradoxes in praise of trifles or evils—Synesius of Baldness, Erasmus of Folly, de Mornay of Death, de la Noue of Imprisonment. His pamphlet is thus both a comic advertisement and a display of the skill that can talk on any subject. The latter task suited Nashe admirably. Lenten Stuff is one of his best works. The description of Yarmouth is a relief after the somewhat feverish unsubstantiality of his other pamphlets, in so far as it at last brings our minds to bear on real things like walls, sand, ships, and tides. The comic myths of the coronation of King Herring and the Pope’s dinner are good, if not excellent. The first of them is prefaced with a serio-comic rehandling of the story of Hero and Leander, ‘of whom Musaeus sang, and a diuiner Muse than him, Kit Marlow’. Our taste is a little offended by Nashe on this theme, as it is offended when we read Mark Twain on Arthur or Eloise. But his treatment has its own merits and works up to a vivid conclusion, when, as Hero stooped to kiss the dead Leander, ‘boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides came rowling in and raught him from her’.

Though Nashe owed much to his predecessors he is one of our most original writers. The groundwork of his style comes to him, as I have indicated, through Martin, from the old, native tradition which we see in Latimer and More. He is the supreme master of literary sansculottisme. To these cheap-jack and guttersnipe elements (I use the words to define, not to dispraise, for these also require genius) he added, however, something quite different; comic ink-horn terms, burlesque rodomontade, gigantic hyperbole, Rabelaisian monstrosity. It is this second element which he himself refers to when he claims that his style ‘is no otherwise puft vp than any mans should be that writes with any spirite’ and prefers it to ‘this demure soft mediocre genus that is like wine and water mixt together: but giue me pure wine of itself, and that begets blood and heates the brain thorowly’. The effect of this extravagance, most happily married to the colloquial, was new and strong. His predecessors had talked merely like Shakespeare’s rogues: Nashe talked like Falstaff. Or, to put it the right way round, when Falstaff promises that his cudgel shall hang like a meteor over the horns of Mr. Ford, he owes something to Nashe.

Paradoxically, though Nashe’s pamphlets are commercial literature, they come very close to being, in another way, ‘pure’ literature: literature which is, as nearly as possible, without a subject. In a certain sense of the verb ‘say’, if asked what Nashe ‘says’, we should have to reply, Nothing. He tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude. Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions. In his exhilarating whirlwind of words we find not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void. There is that in Nashe which connects him with artists like Bosch and the later Picasso. If he took himself seriously he would at once create horrors: he has all the material. In fact, however, in his pamphlets (as in the Hunting of the Snark) this material, if not quite controlled by, is usually exploited for, a comic purpose. In Chesterton’s phrase he rides the nightmare, not the nightmare him, though his seat is not always secure. Hence he is closer to Mr. Thurber’s pictures than to Picasso’s. He is a great American humorist.

Within this century Nashe had no successor of stature comparable to his own. Henry Chettle in his Kind-Heart’s Dream (1593) arraigns ballad-mongers, quack doctors, ‘maligners of honest mirth’, greedy landlords, magicians, and pettifoggers. He works his matter up into the form of a dream in which the ghosts of the actor Tarlton, Robert Greene, and others appear to him. The pamphlet is mainly remembered because it contains a defence of Chettle’s integrity as transcriber and editor of the Groatsworth, an olive-branch to Shakespeare (‘his demeanour no lesse ciuill than he excelent in the quality he professes’), and some information about contemporary balladry. It was probably readable while it was new. A more spirited work, published in the same year, was Bacchus’ Bounty by ‘Philip Foulface of Ale-foord’, relating the adventures of one Tom Typsay who was invited to the gods’ Whitsuntide party. There is some burlesque euphuism, and some burlesque ‘poetical’ prose; as when Bacchus ‘from a muddie muse so cleered vp his cherrylike countenance that the majestie of his nose seemed as the beames of the sunne shining along the Coastes of Archadie’. The Bacchanalian spirit is well evoked but wearies us before the end. It is, however, a good book for a man who wants to enrich his vocabulary: here are the ‘coppernosed crue, the knuckledebunions of Rome’ and ‘that old Huddle and Twang, Aristodemus’.

In Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) and its successor, the Anatomy, there is a quality (hard to describe) which makes us feel that we are emerging from the Elizabethan age. Coprological humour was no novelty; nor was the solemn praise of things that might seem least fit for eulogy. The style is modelled (in places closely) on that of Rabelais. Yet Harington is very unlike his master. Rabelais was a fighter, defending humanism and attacking the monks. He was also an inventor in the realm of Nonsense, a follower of Lucian, and a predecessor of Lewis Carroll. Harington lacks both qualities. That is why the Water Babies, also modelled on Rabelais, is, for all its propriety, more genuinely Rabelaisian. Nor is Harington very close to the earlier English humorists. He is too frivolous, too detached, to be as robustly comic as they. More had been a grave droll and Nashe a clown; Harington is only a wag.

William Kemp the actor (who almost certainly ‘created’ the part of Dogberry) has left us in the Nine Days Wonder (1600) an account of his great feat of endurance in dancing every yard of the way from London to Norwich, for a wager and doubtless also as what we should now call a ‘publicity stunt’. This pamphlet has unexpected merits. At first we think we are in for one more exhibition in the cheap-jack manner (‘myself, thats I, otherwise called Caualiero Kemp, high head-borough of heighs and only tricker of Trill-lilles’, &c.). But very soon the narrative develops a quite different interest; the details of the exploit, the entertainment at each resting place, the behaviour of the crowds, and the adventures of the road, build up into something that shares the fascination of George Borrow. But Kemp, unlike Borrow, makes me believe every word he writes. The innkeeper of Rockland, clearly drawn from the life, is far funnier than anything in those earlier passages where Kemp had laboured harder to be funny. The prose is often such as, for its purpose, could not be bettered. Of the girl who undertook to dance with him for a mile (and did) Kemp writes, ‘I lookt vpon her, saw mirth in her eyes, heard boldnes in her words, and beheld her ready to tuck vp her russet petticoate. I fitted her with bells which she, merily taking, garnisht her thick short legs and with a smooth brow bad the Tabrer begin.’ In the Wonder we meet agreeable people of all social classes; the old century could not have gone out more sweetly.

It is saddening to think how much less convincingly, indeed how nauseatingly, an exploit like Kemp’s would be ‘written up’ in the newspapers of our own time. It is a reflection which comes often to mind as we read the pamphlets of that age. I have concentrated, as (I think) reason was, on those that have some literary pretensions; but we should do grave injustice to the Elizabethans if we left the subject without noticing what good work there often was in its least literary productions. The True Report of the lamentable Death of William of Nassawe (1584) is, in a sense, merely the equivalent of our ‘front page news’. But compare even our better journalism with this; ‘two of those Bullets went through the Princes Body and the third remained in his Bellie, through which wicked strokes the Prince fell downe suddainly, crying out saying Lord have mercy vpon me and remember my little Flocke. Wherewith he changed his life. . . .’ It is not enough (though it is doubtless true) to say that the author of this passage did not suppose himself to be writing ‘literature’ at all. That might secure him from affectation: but our reading of the Drab Age has shown us that it would not necessarily secure him from being clumsy or even unintelligible. Somehow or other during the latter part of the sixteenth century Englishmen learned to write.

II

The prose fiction of this period—we invite misunderstanding if we call it ‘the novel’—may be divided into three classes: the romantic, the realistic, and one other for which I can find no satisfactory name. Its characteristic is that it subordinates narrative to rhetoric. We are expected to be interested not in what the characters were or felt or did but in what they said, or (less often) in the fine things the authors say about them. Criticisms of such books on the assumption that they are unsuccessful attempts to tell a good story are out of court. The two earliest specimens of the kind are John Grange’s Golden Aphroditis (1577) and Lyly’s Euphues (1578). Scholars have disputed which of these should be called ‘the first English novel’. In my opinion neither should be so called. The kind to which both belong is further from the true novel than medieval romance had been: its place in the history of fiction is that of a branch line going off to a different terminus. It is related about equally to the novel and to the colloquy: the individual specimens of course inclining now to the one and now to the other. Euphues I have already described. The Golden Aphroditis is equally rhetorical, but not usually euphuistic. Its rhetoric is more poetical and less sententious, florid, and loaded with mythology like the Latin Kunstprosa of the Middle Ages. What story there is, deals with the loves of Diana’s and Endymion’s daughter.

In 1580 came Austen Saker’s Narbonus and Anthony Munday’s Zelauto. Both are very closely modelled on Euphues, not only nor chiefly in their style but in their scanty story and their love of speechifying. Munday’s literary ideal is amusingly displayed when he tells how Strabino’s ‘conceytes began to come so nimbly together that he now rolled in his Rethoricke like a Flea in a blanquet’. He is not often euphuistic for long at a stretch, and we find ink-horn terms and poetical passages where verse rhythms intrude. He is a jackdaw who will catch at any sort of finery. In 1582 we get a much better book, George Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses. This leans towards the colloquy, for though there are several inset stories, including Promus and Cassandra which he also dramatized, they make only a small part of the whole. None of them displays half so much novelistic talent as Whetstone’s opening: the ride through the forest on Christmas Eve and the first sight of the palace might well be the beginning of an excellent story. Whetstone, however, is interested only in the gorgeous interior of the palace and the sophisticated courtesy of the debates (some of them quite serious) which he heard there. His aim is to re-create for a moment that world of high formalized flirtation and dispute which Castiglione had shown him. The tone is well exemplified by the scene in which the narrator, momentarily spell-bound by the richness of his surroundings, recovers himself with the thought that ‘it belongeth vnto a gentleman to see and not to stare vpon the strangest Nouell that is; for base is his mynde whose spirit hourely beholdeth not greater matters then eyther beautie, buylding or braverie’.

In 1583 there appeared Brian Melbancke’s Philotimus and Greene’s first attempt, the Mamillia. The chief use of Melbancke is to reconcile us to the other euphuists; his heavier alliteration, his total lack of daintiness and melody, teach us that Lodge and Greene, in mastering the style, had done something not within everyone’s reach. It is only against the background of this absurd book that Mamillia could seem tolerable. This is nearer to the novel than any of the works I have yet mentioned, but for that very reason all the worse: Greene teases us by seeming to offer a story and then frustrating us with endless digressions, tirades, and letters. His Mirror of Modesty (1584) is a rhetoricized version of Susanna and the Elders. Here his original inevitably forces some true narrative qualities upon him, but none of his additions were, I think, made for the purpose of enhancing them. Far better reading was provided by Barnaby Rich’s Second Tome of the Travels of Don Simonides, published in the same year. The first ‘tome’, which will meet us in a few pages, is a romance: this is a quite different kind of book, a very pure specimen of the rhetorical genre. After a long debate between a divine, a lawyer, and a soldier we accompany Simonides to Athens with a letter of introduction to Euphues himself. By some extraordinary whim of fortune Simonides found him in a fit of taciturnity, but presently ‘he broke off their unnecessary silence’ and was himself again. In the dialogue that follows euphuism is, very properly, confined to the speeches of Euphues. The result is extremely funny, but I am not sure whether this was intended.

All the remaining specimens of this rhetorical genre are by Greene. The Planetomachia (1585) departs from pure colloquy only by having two inset ‘tragedies’. Morando the Tritameron of Love (1587) is closer to Whetstone’s work, a dialogue in a country house; and though Greene is no Plato nor even a Castiglione, not ungraceful. Euphues his Censure (also in 1587) uses the same method. There is a truce at Troy and the Greek lords and Trojan ladies exchange visits. Greene meets all the demands for pomp, ceremony, eloquence, and irony which his theme makes upon him. It is one of his happiest works. The play of passions and personalities underneath an exalted formality is well suggested. It is only when the inset stories begin that we lose interest: we are once more teased with a proffer of narrative and plunged back in the soliloquies and epistles of Euphues. Ciceronis Amor (1588) and Orpharion (licenced in 1589) show the vitality of medieval motifs. In the latter the hero speaks in the first person, presents a suit to Venus, visits an allegorical temple, meets Sloth as a porter, and is finally ‘ledde alongst the galupin or silver paued way of heauen to the hie built house of Ioue’, where he hears divine conversation and, unfortunately, stories. The Farewell to Folly (1591) is built on the same plan as Morando, but furnished with a lively, abusive preface that suggests the influence of Nashe. Philomela (1592) has most of the same characteristics as Ciceronis Amor.

I have now perhaps said all that modern ears can endure about this static and declamatory school of fiction. The taste which it gratified is long dead. If we hope even momentarily to recover it, we must carefully avoid reading these books for the story. Morality, eloquence, sometimes (but even this rarely) sentiment, are the things we must attend to. We must try to feel how bright, how civilized, how ‘artificial’ (then a term of praise) they all looked at the time. There is no direct line of descent from them to the genuine novel.

This is much less true of the romances: they, like the realistic stories, foreshadow later fiction. By separating these romances from the previous genre I do not imply that they are always less rhetorical, still less that their rhetoric is not often pure euphuism. The difference is that, beneath all the rhetoric, there is a genuine narrative interest. The authors aim at arousing curiosity, pity, terror, and admiration. There is often a complex plot, reminiscent of chivalric or Greek romance. High sentiment and florid descriptions of natural beauty are not uncommon.

Rich’s original Simonides—his Strange and wonderful adventures (1581)—is the most rhetorical of them all, except at the end where the dialogue between Simonides and Anthonio is in a racier style. The more laboured passages are only at times euphuistic. The author prefers a slow and languorous piling up of images which is the very reverse of Lyly’s manner. The story, which also moves slowly, is drenched in devout, rarefied, melancholy emotion. And it is not entirely a failure. The effect is like breathing in an air heavy with incense. These qualities set Simonides apart. Far more typical of the genre, though by no means a good specimen, is Lodge’s Forbonius and Prisceria (1584). The ingredients are lovers, cruel parents, a ‘gymnosophical’ magician, shepherds, and disguise. Lodge shows his literary allegiance by making his heroine the granddaughter of Heliodorus’ Theagines. In the same year came Greene’s Arbasto. It may be doubted whether Greene often enjoyed writing pure romances as he almost certainly enjoyed writing things like Euphues his Censure. Arbasto has all the appearance of being written for necessity by a man who took very little interest in his own story. Arbasto, while narrating his adventures in the first person, nevertheless gives detailed accounts of other people’s thoughts as though he were the omniscient author. Then in mid-stream Greene forgets who is speaking and lapses into the third person. Doralice’s change from hate to love is wholly unconvincing and the treason of Egerio too obviously dragged in to cobble up an unhappy ending. Worst of all in a story which cannot be regarded as realistic, there is not one really sympathetic character. Greene’s sub-title was the Anatomy of Fortune; the anatomy of villainy would have been more accurate. He followed this with the Card of Fancy in 1587. I classify this as a romance because it has a fairly complex plot and adventures that ought to have excited our interest: it even ends with a combat between father and son. Yet as we read we can hardly keep our minds on the events. Characters are placed in situations only that they may talk. The youthful profligacy of Guydonius serves as a peg for moral lectures and as a pretext for reducing him to poverty: when it has served its turn, Greene seems to forget all about it.

In these books we see Greene still hankering after the pattern of Euphues and treating the narrative element as task work. In Pandosto (1588) a great change has come over him. Here at last the story is the thing. Dialogue and soliloquy, though still mostly euphuistic, have been reduced to reasonable proportions, and there is even some attempt to distinguish between courtly and rustic speakers. The narrative portions are often written without rhetoric in a plain, factual style; sometimes, indeed, too plain and factual to kindle our imagination. A consciousness that their plain prose tended to be low and dry (except in vituperation) may well have been one of the reasons why the minor Elizabethans welcomed so eagerly a ready-made recipe for beauty such as euphuism. Pandosto is thus a far more efficient piece of work than Arbasto or the Card, but it is unattractive. A story so improbable needs to be transfigured by high sentiment and enthusiasm. In Greene it is bleached bare of any moral feeling whatever. Pandosto, unlike Leontes, remains at the end what he was at the beginning, a bloody and treacherous tyrant; and though we meet shepherds there is no pastoral softness. There is a coldness, even a brutality, about Greene’s mind, which unfits him for telling this sort of tale. Menaphon (1589) marks an advance, though it repeats devices which Greene had already used in Pandosto. Here again we have an infant abandoned to the mercy of the waves, and here again disguise leads to the threat of incest. This time, indeed, Greene goes one better: the lady is wooed simultaneously by her father and her son. The real interest of Menaphon is that it carries further that escape from rhetorical rigidity which was beginning in Pandosto. We have here at times a different rhetoric that can really convey emotion: ‘I tell thee he made the chamber bright with his beautie whan he was born.’ Sometimes in the dialogue there is a sparkle of wit. Elsewhere Greene’s new freedom leads him astray, Olympia becomes a mere scold in a scene where (I believe) that effect was not intended, and Pleusidippus replies to her in the manner of Pistol. There are some admirable poems, and more feeling for external nature than Greene had yet displayed.

Pandosto deserves to be remembered, as it is, chiefly in connexion with the Winter’s Tale: but the celebrity of Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) is not entirely due to our modern interest in Shakespeare’s sources; it had run through nine editions by 1624. It is generally supposed to be based on the fourteenth century Gamelyn. If Lodge read this he must have read it in manuscript. The thing is not impossible, though the extensive medieval reading which a modern scholar has traced in Lodge seems to have been directed to useful compendiums (‘Mirrors’ of this, and ‘Flowers’ of that) rather than to ballads and romances. There may well be some intermediate version still undiscovered. If Lodge worked directly from Gamelyn he must be given credit for considerable invention, for Rosalynde is further from it than As You Like It from Rosalynde.

Gamelyn is a simple, fierce tale addressed to all who have reasons for hating elder brothers, abbots, sheriffs, and top-dogs in general. Lodge had plenty of reasons for disliking his own elder brother: but if it was this that first attracted him to the story, the compensatory element in his imagination was soon subordinated to the disinterested. He softens, lightens, sentimentalizes the whole thing. Once we reach the forest, as in Shakespeare, no one has any further business than to make love and poetry and play at the pastoral life. This poverty of action in the book’s second half is doubtless a fault; but the poems, and a certain freshness that comes through all the literary pastoralism, carry it off.

After Rosalynde it is a disappointment to turn to Lodge’s Robert Duke of Normandy (1591). He here spoils the old tale of Robert the Devil by omitting the Devil’s share in it. Euphues Shadow (1592) only just slips across the frontier between our previous category and that of the romances. William Longbeard (1593) is a piece of mere book-making.

The last of Lodge’s romances, A Margarite of America (1596) is his best: if indeed it is his at all. Lodge himself tells us that he found the story written in Spanish, in the library of the Jesuits at Santos ‘some four yeares since, being at sea with M. Candish’. Of course this tale of a Spanish book may be untrue. On the other hand, the commercial writers of Elizabeth’s time were not inclined to waste their own invention if another man’s would serve. Melbancke’s Philotimus, Lodge’s own Catharos and Devil Conjured, are full of borrowed stuff. And Margarite is suspiciously above Lodge’s usual level. There are, to be sure, passages that could not have occurred in any Spanish original, but these could easily have been interpolated. What seems to me the strongest argument for Lodge’s authorship will be thought paradoxical by some. I disbelieve his debt to the Spanish precisely because he acknowledges it. In Catharos and the Devil he pilfers silently. I think that a writer who hides his real debts would be quite likely to boast a false one if it lent an exotic flavour to his work.

The Margarite is closer to Heliodorus and Sidney than any of the romances I have yet mentioned, but harsher and (in some ways) more splendid than either. The scene is laid in the empires of Mosco and Cusco, both conceived as high pagan civilizations in some undefined period of the past. Its haste in medias res is admirable. Rhetoric (for the dialogue is highly rhetorical) is raised to quite a new power. Far from being a mere external decoration, it becomes in the best passages at once an ironic contrast to, and a subtle expression of, the pride and passion of the speakers. If the book is not realistic, it is real; the compulsive imagination of a larger, brighter, bitterer, more dangerous world than ours. It is hard romance with gorgeous backgrounds provided for scenes of lavish bloodshed: it is rather like the romances of Eddison.

Before proceeding to the realistic stories, we must notice a few works which do not fit exactly into any of my three classes. One of these, Greene’s Mourning Garment (1590) is in a way very close to the Mirror of Modesty: as that retold Susanna and the Elders, it retells (and spoils) the parable of the Prodigal Son, tricking it out with inset stories, a pastoral interlude, and euphuistic diatribes, yet at other times reproducing the exact words of scripture. It has just too much story to be grouped with the family of Euphues, and parts of that story are, in matter if not in style, too realistic—indeed too close to what we surmise of Greene’s own life—to be called romantic. Only this possible biographical interest could cheat us for a moment into thinking it a good book. The virtuous Rabbi Bilessi has a disquieting resemblance to Polonius. The two other books which Greene brought out in the same year, Never too Late and Francesco’s Fortunes are really a single story. In it we see Greene struggling towards, but not quite reaching, a purely realistic type of fiction. An abstract of the story might sound like that of a true novel but this would be a little deceptive. Only through a meeting with a mysterious palmer at Venice do we reach the main theme; we end with a pastoral tale; and there are euphuistic letters and soliloquies. In between these the style is fairly plain. Taken as an imagined satisfaction of the unavailing wishes which may have beset Greene in the wretchedness of his last years, the story of Francesco is deeply moving. Taken as a work of art in its own right, it will not stand very high. I cannot agree with an earlier critic that Francesco’s passion for Infida is ‘depicted with terrible intensity and vividness’.

The works of John Dickenson defy classification for rather different reasons. The two which date from 1594, The Shepherd’s Complaint and Arisbas are heavily influenced by the Arcadia. The Complaint is almost as static as Euphues but it does not at all belong to the same type. The story (what there is of it) is essentially a frame for ornate prose and for some charming poems. All is melting, amorous, ‘Golden’ to the last degree. Arisbas has stronger narrative elements. The style is poetic prose, not euphuistic: so poetic that it sometimes reads like a not very lucid translation from real poetry in some other language. Many of the poems are perfect in their kind, and Dickenson handles classical metres better than most of his contemporaries. His third work, Greene in Conceit New raised from his grave to write the Tragic History of Fair Valeria of London (1598) is of quite a different sort. Greene’s ghost, risen from an afterworld which is neither Christian nor pagan but merely satirical, appears to the author and relates the story of a wicked wife. We begin with Dickenson’s poetical prose but soon lapse into euphuism, and the debate between Giraldo in love and the sage old misogynist is exactly in Lyly’s manner. The book improves when jockie, ‘a sillie boy borne in the north of Albion’, comes on the scene. We now have some tolerable realism, and once a flash of fancy that suggests Dickens; a bankrupt’s house ‘growing queasie stomacht through a long consumption of the moueables, did in a generall vomit spewe out the master, the mystris, and all their traine’.

Chettle’s Piers Plainness (1595) also mixes romance and realism, but far more artfully than Greene. Like the Victorian novelists who catered for family reading by combining many different kinds of interest, Chettle contrives a single complex story which will enable him to regale us now with lovers, forests, shipwrecks, and battles, now with gulls, brokers, and moneylenders. This is quite a different thing from the medieval interweaving, and I do not know of anyone who did it before Chettle. The more comic and sordid scenes will probably appeal most to the modern reader. They are certainly excellent in their own kind. Chettle has a gift for describing personal appearance: witness the Merchant who was a ‘man of meane stature with a sulphurous face, his eyes sanguine, his breath strong, his gate stately’. But the romantic parts are equally well done. Queen Aeliana, except for one euphuistic soliloquy (no heroine could then fall in love without it) is more credible and likeable than any woman in Lyly, Greene, or Lodge. The political affairs are strangely convincing. And the whole is couched in a style that never gets between us and the matter. Why, then, we may ask, has everyone heard of Euphues and Pandosto while only students have heard of Piers? The real reason, I fear, is that even posthumous fame depends largely on accident. Catch-phrases about our ‘first novel’, interest in euphuism itself, the link between Pandosto and Shakespeare are, the real causes.

I now come to the realistic stories, and must at once confess that the adjective is here used mainly in a negative sense. They are ‘realistic’ only in so far they generally avoid rhetoric and the supernatural, write their dialogue in ‘language such as men do use’, and deal chiefly with the life of humble people. They have their own idealism, but it is of a homely sort. They have, too, their own improbabilities: but these are admitted for the sake of farce or sensationalism.

Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a million of Repentance (1592) might almost be classed among pamphlets: but in so far as it is fiction at all, it is realistic. Greene is anxious to parade rather than to conceal the autobiographical element in his story of Roberto and passes finally into direct confession. The historical interest with which we follow Greene when he paints the misery and conscious degradation of the first professional playwrights, and the famous attack on the ‘vpstart’ Shakespeare, will always ensure readers for the Groats-Worth. As a work of art it is a slight thing. The style, generally free from euphuism, is lively enough, and the portrait of the old usurer is effective coarse painting.

The ancestors of Elizabethan realistic fiction are the jest-books and a short digression on these will be relevant. The last specimen of this kind which I noticed was the Hundred Merry Tales of 1526. Several works, which hardly belong to literature more closely than the comic papers of our own time, fill up the gap between it and the date we have now reached. Among them are the Tales and Quick Answers (1535?), the Sackful of News (entered 1557/8), Gests of Scoggin (entered 1565/6), the Merry Tales made by Master Skelton (1567), with Tarlton’s Jests, the Mad Men of Gotam, and others. Their dates, authorship, and bibliography are often obscure. This is the less to be regretted because we must admit that they show no progress towards connected fiction. Even when the jests are all attributed to a single hero there is no attempt at chronological sequence, and hardly any character: neither Skelton nor Skoggan comes so near to being a character as Ally Sloper or Ruggles. The transitional work between these and real comic fiction is the Life and pranks of long Meg of Westminster (1590). Despite its popularity (in versions that may differ from one another as widely as those of a ballad) it is not of much value: you will hear better jokes ex tempore in any third-class carriage today. Its importance lies in the fact that it has some faint sequaciousness: it begins with Meg’s first arrival in London and marries her (unemphatically) somewhere near the end. To that extent there is some ‘life’ as well as ‘pranks’ and Meg’s stature, if nothing else, makes her at least an image. It is possible to think of her existing in between her jokes: and it is made clear that her heart was in the right place. Skelton, Skoggan, and Tarlton had been mere names.

The approach to unity in Long Meg is still, however, so faint that it left Nashe and Deloney with almost everything still to do.

The Unfortunate Traveller (1593), whether or not indebted to Lazarillo de Tormes (a subject on which different views have been held), is a novelty in English literature in so far as it combines old elements in a new way. Yet it remains rather a medley with picaresque elements than a fully fledged picaresque novel. It begins with jest-book material which is, however, greatly improved by the continuity of the narrative and the liveliness of the dialogue. We pass thence into a digression on Puritanism where Nashe seems to forget that he is not now writing a pamphlet. It is only in the latter part of the book that the bloodcurdling stories begin to succeed one another with tolerable freedom from interruption: and even of these Heraclide’s tragedy is mainly a peg for the heroine’s speeches. Whether Nashe finds narrative invention a strain and gladly escapes from it, or whether the exuberance of his mind was uncontrollable, he does not drive on so steadily as we could wish. The characters, vividly particularized by a few ludicrous gestures or the like, are good in their way, which is the way of the better pamphleteers: hardly ‘characters’ in the later novelist’s sense of the word. Perhaps an exception should be made in favour of Cutwolfe. That grandiose depravity momentarily captures the imagination. The Traveler is far from being Nashe’s best book, and cannot in my opinion be rated as the best Elizabethan ‘novel’. It yields to Chettle’s work in construction, to Margarite in passion, and to the Arcadia in ordered harmony. But it has those qualities which to some tastes (not all) will compensate for everything: it is emphatically what those who like it call ‘full-blooded’.

Compared with Nashe, Thomas Deloney (who died about 1600) may appear almost tame. Jacke of Newbury (1597) comes nearest of his works to the shape of a true novel; The Gentle Craft (1597 and 1598) and Thomas of Reading (1598?) are rather narrative medleys. All alike are written to please a coarse, kindly, thrifty, and ambitious society of urban tradesmen. There are occasional, and not very happy, digressions into romance and even patches of borrowed euphuism; but for the most part we are in a world of industrious apprentices who either turn out to be disguised noblemen or else marry their masters’ widows and are soon happily affluent widowers. They run model factories and make prodigious fortunes while treating their workpeople with the greatest generosity. It is, no doubt, a wishful sort of imagination: but the wishes were good ones. The comic parts are often (not always) either too coprological or too violent for the tastes of my own generation; I can hardly regard burying a man alive (even if he was a ‘massing priest’) as a ‘mad pranke’. The real excellence of Deloney is in his dialogue; he has a peculiar talent for reproducing the chatter of silly women.

With Deloney our account of Elizabethan fiction may end. When we consider the copious and varied production in all its three classes, the surprising thing is that so little came of it in the end. In Richard Johnson, whose Seven Champions appeared in 1596 and 1597, we return to what is substantially medieval romance, though of the feeblest, and smirched with rhetoric. Emmanual Forde, whose Ornatus and Artesia (1595) and Parismus (1598) fall within our century, is likewise romantic and rhetorical and, though uninspired, less crude than Johnson. He and Deloney both continued to be reprinted within the eighteenth century.

III

Of those who attempted at this time to write about literature not all deserve the name of critics, and Sidney, who deserves it best, has already been mentioned. William Webbe is in a class by himself uniquely bad. His Discourse of English Poetry (1586) displays an ignorance even then hardly credible. He is a perfect specimen of the literary ‘hanger-on’ who without knowledge, sensibility, or sense volunteers support for all that his betters are doing when they are least wise and praises all who are already popular. One need hardly add that he is very fierce against ‘ryming Ballet makers’ and ‘unlearned Pamphlets’.

The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) of Abraham Fraunce, who wrote also the Lawyer’s Logic and a Latin comedy Victoria, is remembered chiefly because its author had the happy idea of illustrating each precept not only by Greek and Latin but by English, Italian, French, and Spanish examples. His English examples come chiefly from Sidney, then unprinted. From Spenser he quotes passages both of the printed Calendar and the still unprinted Faerie Queene. This little textbook thus provides evidence both for the prevalence of circulation in manuscript and for the growing fame of the two recent poets whom it cites side by side with Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and ‘Sallust’ (that is, Du Bartas). Fraunce also quotes Richard Willey (or Willes) and ‘the booke called Pierce Plowman’.

Francis Meres (1565–1647) is accidentally more useful to posterity than Webbe, but has no more claim to be a critic. His Palladis Tamia or Wits Treasury (1598) is an anthology of apophthegms or wise saws from various sources, grouped according to their subject-matter. The sections on Poetrie and Poets draw on Plutarch, Cato, Sidney, Harington, and others. To these Meres adds a Comparative Discourse of our English poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian poets; and this, because it helps to date some of the works he mentions and also provides evidence for contemporary reputations, has given him a twilit immortality in prefaces and footnotes. His method may be represented by the formula ‘As A among the Ancients or Italians, so B among the English’. The point of the comparison may be almost anything from mere chronology (‘As Greece had three poets of great antiquity . . . so hath England three auncient poets, Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate’) to a play upon words (‘As Anacreon died by the pot: so George Peele by the pox’). Meres’s patterned equivalences bear about the same relation to real criticism as Fluellen’s comparison of Macedon and Monmouth bears to real geography.

So much for the lumber; we may now turn to two works of real, though limited, merit, the Schort Treatise conteining some rewlis and cautelis . . . in Scottis Poesie which was included in the Essayes of a Prentise (1584) by James, still Sixth and not yet also First, and the anonymous Art of English Poesy (1589). The early and traditional attribution of the latter to one Puttenham has been questioned, but the case for George Puttenham (born c. 1529) is strong and I shall assume that he was the author. King James’s book might, no doubt, have been treated in our very first chapter, but he is more use to us here, for the Scotch king and the English courtier provide an interesting contrast. Puttenham was obviously ten times the man that James could ever be, yet on versification James shows himself master of his subject and Puttenham is fumbling. This would not be very important if, as some suppose, James were merely copying Gascoigne, but of that I find no evidence. Their common subject compels them to raise the same questions and where both answer correctly both must of course give the same answer. Of identity in error, in terminology, or in the choice of examples, which might really prove a debt, there is no trace. What keeps James right is not Gascoigne but the great Scotch tradition which he inherits. His use of fute for ‘syllable’ is curious, but, being consistent, does no harm. He recommends a more wooden regularity than his great models, or he himself, practised, but that is his only serious fault. A man could still be grounded, though not perfected in English prosody by studying the Schort Treatise. He could even learn from it something of poetics in general, something about the use of ‘wilfull reasons’ in love poetry (how much better this is than Puttenham’s book on rhetoric!) and the different style suitable to flytings. James is, in fact, a good prentise who has had good masters and attended to them. Puttenham in comparison is only a bewildered pioneer; poetically, though not in other respects, a barbarian. He has indeed grasped the idea of stress, which he calls ‘sharpe accent’, ‘shrill accent’, or simply ‘accent’; but he handles the concept with great difficulty; notice the astonishing passage (at the end of II. iv) about a line of Surrey’s, where for a moment his metrical unit seems to be not the syllable but the word, though he perhaps knows better. I do not believe we can conclude from this that stress within the line was really ignored by poets or the better sort of readers in the Drab Age. Gascoigne’s theory, and the thumping regularity of most Drab poets, tell quite an opposite tale. The fault was Puttenham’s own. Yet even he dimly heard what he failed to analyze. He points out that the verse God graunt this peace may long endure would fall less ‘tunably’ if you tried to read it in what we now call trochaic or falling rhythm (Gód graunt thís peace) and disarmingly admits that he can’t think why (II. xviii). And here we touch on one of his excellences: few critics are so honest.

It cannot even be claimed that Puttenham’s taste compensates for his lack of science. His work embodies the standards of the Drab Age and most of it was probably written long before it was printed. It was clearly much added to and revised. The list of poets in I. xxxi and the discussion of classical metres in II. xiii–xvi are almost certainly later work. But whatever may have been added later, Puttenham’s taste was formed in the Drab Age: formed indeed principally on Tottel. Though he lived to praise Raleigh and Spenser, there is no sign that he perceived any difference between their poetry and that which delighted his youth. He loved, though his own verses seldom attained, ruthless regularity. He also liked what he called ‘ocular proportion’, by which he meant poems that present some geometrical figure to the eye; a beauty, he had heard, very common in China, Tartary, and Persia. His examples suggest rather the court poetry of Lilliput in the age of Gulliver. It is perhaps more interesting that he regards the poet as a ‘pleader’ (III. vii, xix) who must use all the tricks of debate, anticipating answers and ‘making wise as if he set but light’ by some points which he has really no intention of conceding. It will be noticed that ocular proportion was still dear to Herbert and that the conception of the poet as ‘pleader’ was magnificently realized by Donne. The methods have indeed something in common (however they differ in value) both with one another and with Gascoigne’s Rule of Invention. All bear witness to a taste for something curious and clever in poetry—as Puttenham says ‘a certaine noueltie and strange maner’ unlike ‘our ordinarie talke’ (III. i). And Golden poetry did not in any new degree, or any peculiar fashion, cater for it. We may therefore suspect that, even before the Golden Age began, the impulse which was to lead to the metaphysical already existed, and perhaps lived through the Golden Age without exactly noticing it. That would explain why Puttenham sees no particular novelty in Spenser and Raleigh. They gave in fact more than the Drab poets, but not much more of the thing he liked best. I suspect that he would have welcomed Sylvester’s Du Bartas much more warmly. Certainly his own best (or least helpless) verses seem to me to have a post-Elizabethan flavour:

How swift the circle stirre aboue,

His centre point doth neuer moue:

All things that euer were or be

Are closde in his concauitie (II. xii).

Without knowledge, without much poetic sensibility, Puttenham might be expected to have made a very bad book. Actually, it is a refreshment to turn to him. Along with the weaknesses, he has also the merits of a gentleman and an amateur. He addresses himself to taste, even if not the best taste, as hardly any of his rivals do. He writes for courtiers, for the ‘courtly Maker’, for the ‘learned eare’ indeed, but learned in ‘courtly trifles’ not ‘scholastical toyes’ (II. xii), for men (and ladies) to whom ‘schollerly affectation’ would be ‘very irkesome’ (III. xxv). With him poetry escapes from the lecture room, becomes again the gay science. Cheap moralizing and misogyny disappear: ‘the first founder of all good affections is honest loue’ (I. xxii). Slavish humanism disappears, though his classical erudition is far more reliable than Greene’s or Lyly’s. He does not believe that poetry need be didactic: trifles are freely admitted as ‘conuenient solaces and recreations of man’s wit’ (II. xii), and even moderate wantonness (I. x). He is quite free from the snobbish or envious acrimony which the commercial authors usually show to the ‘rakehelly rout’ of popular rhymers. He sees no reason why metrical romances of Arthur and the rest should be put down, for there are ‘sundry formes of poems and not all one’ (I. xix). Nor is his theory of poetry at bottom less serious than anyone else’s. In two places (I. xxii, III. xxv ad fin.) he comes astonishingly near the conception of poetry as expression; even more astonishing, for that age, is the passage on imagination (I. viii). This is the paradox of Puttenham, that though he could not scan a line nor tell a good poem from a bad, he wrote more sense about poetry than any man of his age. The explanation is to be found in the quality of his mind; small and poor though his poetical experience was, he reflected on it with a mind at ease, disinterested, candid, well stored with ‘experience and observation of the world’ (I. i). If barbarous as a critic, he is highly civilized as a man. His prose style is free both from rhetoric and from the clumsiness of much Drab prose; the bad sentence at the end of II. xiii being, I think, the only exception.

Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) and Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Ryme (1603), despite their dates, fall properly within our province since they conclude—for a time—the characteristically sixteenth-century controversy about classical metres in English. Each states its case better than it had been stated before. Campion’s doctrine is far removed from the crudities of Harvey and Spenser: he knows that dactylic metres are unsuitable to our language and feels, with a musician’s sensibility, that five feet in English are equivalent to six in Latin. He is not in the least deceived by spelling; ‘we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write’. Yet when all is said his theory has very little to do with English practice, even his own. Thus in analyzing the line

Men that do fall to misery, quickly fall,

he explains that the syllables to miser- are a ‘Tribrack’. So they are; but the stress-accent on the first of misery has been ignored as if it had nothing to do with the movement of the line. Yet his temporary concern with quantitative metres bore delightful fruit in ‘Rose-cheekt Lawra come’. I suspect that a poetic impulse towards the unrhymed lyric came first and the theory was devised to mitigate the innovation. Campion (quite erroneously) thought he could not swim without these classical bladders. And they are not at all becoming. He adopts the humanistic attitude in all its boastful ignorance: everything before Erasmus, ‘Rewcline’, and More is to him ‘illiterate Monks and Friers’, and rhyme in its metrical use must be bad because it is listed as a mere figure in the books of rhetoric.

It was this negative side of Campion’s essay that chiefly provoked Daniel to reply, and the merits of his Defence are quite different from those of the Observations. As an artist Daniel is completely overmatched by Campion; there is more poetry in one of Campion’s Airs than in all Daniel’s epic and epistles, and there are passages in the Defence which suggest that the author is very little concerned with poetry, as poetry, at all. ‘It is matter’, not form, he says, ‘that satisfies the iudiciall.’ New metres will not make our poems ‘the wiser’. And his own preferences in verse (he modestly declines to set them up as rules) do not suggest so fine an ear as Campion’s. The value of the Defence is that, quietly, soberly, and irresistibly, it refutes all that was arbitrary and ignorant in the humanist position. To the oft-repeated charge that rhyme is used by ‘barbarous’ nations, Daniel very sensibly replies that ‘the vniuersallitie argues the generall power of it’, sweeps aside the ‘tyrannicall estimate of idle Rhetorique’, and presently questions that whole estimate of the Middle Ages which most of his contemporaries assumed. He lacks the historical knowledge necessary for a full support of his position, but he has the historical sense. He knows (and this is very rare) that what we call ‘history’ is ‘but a Mappe’ and ‘dooth no otherwise acquaint vs with the true Substance of Circumstances, than a superficiall Card dooth the Sea-man with a Coast neuer seene, which alwayes prooves other to the eye the imagination forecast it’.

We have still left untreated a great body of translations and of prose written not to entertain but to instruct; and most of it, in a book of this length, must be omitted. I shall pass over translations in silence: they no longer have the literary importance they had earlier in the century. Among original writers two theologians claim the chief place. But first a few pages must be spared for Hakluyt and for two authors who, to their lasting credit, tried to stem the cruel fury of the witch-scare.

Reginald Scot, who had written on the hop garden in 1574, lives by his gigantic Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). Discovery here means what we should call ‘refutation’ or exposure: Scot addresses himself primarily to judges, and his work, according to Wood, ‘did for a time make great impressions on the Magistracy and Clergy, tho afterwards condemned by James’. Genuine humanity was clearly his motive when he began. He is the champion of ‘manie poor old women’ against those ‘vnnaturall people’ who delight ‘to pursue the poore, to accuse the simple, and to kill the innocent’. But I think he was also actuated, intermittently, by a quality of mind which, if it had come to dominate him completely, would have lifted him right out of his own century and made him more at home in the period of Sprat and Locke. At times he seems on the verge of rejecting the whole outlook which made witchcraft credible. He thinks that the Devil took Christ into the high mountain only ‘in a vision’ (V. vii). He doubts, with Calvin, whether the Book of Job is res gesta or exempli gratia. He takes for granted the cessation of all miracles and all prophecy (VIII. i, ii). Finally, in the ‘Discourse upon Devils and Spirits’, he reduces all that is said of such beings in scripture to something not much more than metaphor. ‘This worde [sc. Spirit] doth signifie a secret force and power wherewith oure mindes are mooued and directed: if vnto hoIy things then is it the motion of the holie spirit . . . if vnto euill things then is it the suggestion of the wicked spirit.’ The supernaturals are turning into abstract nouns. Against the dominant doctrine of aerial bodies he asserts that ‘spirits and bodies are by antithesis opposed to one another’: we are near the Cartesian dualism. Such is the skeleton of Scot’s thought: but in the book with its fat flesh about it, it makes a different impression. In the thirteenth book, on that ‘naturall magike’ which he thinks both real and lawful, he seems credulous not only to the same degree but in the very same way as his contemporaries. He is also very full of anecdotes: the unsavoury, but sometimes funny, stories in Book IV do not seem necessary to the argument. Finally, when in XII we find whole chapters of spells, and in XV of Salomonic conjurations, set out verbatim till the brain reels, we begin to wonder what our author would be at. In effect Scot has begun to make his refutation of magic into a magician’s handbook, and has really little right to complain when an anonymous writer adds to the 1665 edition of the Discovery more chapters of magical instruction which give no hint of either skepticism or disapproval. Scot fell a victim to that psychological law whereby disbelief, equally with belief, will fascinate. Something, too, must be allowed to his love of rambling. His vast book, with its stories, curiosities, anti-popery, and theology, ends by being good ‘mixed reading’ like Burton’s Anatomy. His style, which never attempts eloquence, is clear, muscular, and often vivid; VII. xv on ‘Bugs’ is especially good.

George Giffard (ob. 1620), the puritan incumbent of Malden, wrote two books on this subject, the Subtle Practices (1587) and the Dialogue concerning Witches (1593). He believes that devils really consort with witches but not that they give or receive any real power by doing so: the juries who condemn witches are often, he thinks, more ensnared by the devil than those they condemn. Giffard’s tone is manly, and the Dialogue has some dramatic merits. Samuel, the countryman in a neighbourhood poisoned with fear and cruelty, lives as a tragicomical character. He talks as Shallow might talk on the verge of a nervous breakdown: ‘truely we dwell here in a bad countrey, I think euen one of the worst in England . . . when I goe but into my closes I am afraide, for I see now and then an Hare . . . and there is a foule great catte sometimes in my Barne, which I have no liking vnto’. His wife at first promises to be equally good, but after a speech or two relapses into highly improbable silence.

If we could allot Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) space proportional to his deserts, he would have a chapter: but he is hardly an author. To his scientific zeal, his patriotism, and his ‘huge toile’ as a collector and editor of travels, we are immensely indebted. The Principal Navigations . . . of these 1500 years (1589), which afterwards became the three-volume Principal Navigations . . . of these 1600 years (1598, 1599, and 1600), was one of the most useful and delightful publications of the century. The first-hand narratives which Hakluyt used wherever he could are of very various origin; reprinted from books already published, translated, found in ‘an old ligier book,’ found in possession of a captured ‘Portugall’, ‘collected’ out of Hakluyt’s own ‘notes and examinations’, or written at his request. At one end of the scale we have reprints of Raleigh’s Report of the Fight about the Azores (1591) and Discovery of Guiana (1596), works by a courtier and an accomplished writer. The second of these combines almost every charm that a prose narrative could have—substantial truth, a quest for a fabulous city that might have come out of Rider Haggard, a sound prose, pathos, chivalry, a gift for description. Few things in fiction are more enchanting than Raleigh’s picture of the manless forests from which ‘still as we rowed, the deere came down feeding by the water side as if they had been vsed to a keeper’s call’. And he knows the secret; not to tell too much, even when it clamours to be told, for many details ‘are more pleasing in describing than reading’. Below Raleigh, but still with literary pretensions, comes a writer like Laurence Keymis: no bad pen, but better in argument than in narration. After these (and one or two other exceptions) come the ordinary ships’ officers who write only to be understood and have perhaps never written before. It would be pleasant (in a certain mood) to believe that the plain man of action need only set down what he saw to be sure of beating the literary men at their own game. But it is not true. Hakluyt’s untaught authors differ very widely in merit, and some are bad. The narrator of the 1595 voyage on which Drake and Hawkins both died often has matter which no one could make dull, but he brings it nearer to dullness than one would have thought possible. John Sparke, recording Hawkins’s voyage in 1564, is livelier—the Samboses ‘doe jagge their flesh as workemanlike as a Jerkin-maker with us pricketh a jerkin’—but can sometimes sadly mar a good episode. Thomas Cates, who tells of Drake’s West Indian voyage begun in 1585, brings off the feat (great writers have tried it in vain) of so describing a physical object, the coco-nut, that those who have not seen it would really know what it is like. Two of the narratives (Anthony Sherley’s voyage in 1596 and James Lancaster’s in 1594) are of great literary interest. Both the authors insert speeches in the classical manner, obviously not because they are imitating the ancients, but because mere nature has in them rediscovered this technique. The second of these two pieces is perhaps the best of all those in Hakluyt which seem to owe nothing to art. I make these distinctions not to obscure the fact that voyage after voyage is excellent reading but to separate out those in which our enjoyment owes something to the teller as well as to the thing told. Hakluyt himself, though he is usually behind the scenes, comes vividly before us in the epistle to the first edition where he records the day and hour which first kindled his lifelong passion for geography: it is a passage that warms the heart.

The two theologians who deserve most attention from a literary historian are Cardinal William Allen (1532–94) on the Roman side and Richard Hooker (1554?–1600) on the Protestant. Much of Allen’s work was, naturally, in Latin; but the Defence and Declaration (1565), edited by Fr. Bridgett under the title Souls Departed in 1886, the Treatise in Defence of the Power of Priesthood (1567), the Apology of the English Seminaries (1581), and the True, Sincere and Modest Defence (1584) give him a higher place as a vernacular writer than our older critical tradition recognized. Like Hooker, he rises above the usual controversial methods of the time; he neither carps nor snarls and trusts more to a steady exposition of what he believes to be the truth than to a fussy detection of errors. This makes him in the long run more formidable. The autobiographical method adopted in the Treatise (II. i) is especially effective. And he is always at the centre of the controversy, always defending that which, not by polemical accident but by deep cleavage of spirit, was most repellent to the adversary. To him, as to all the Roman writers, Protestants were the very reverse of ‘puritans’: they were ‘soft physitions’ (Defence and Declaration, I, Preface), against whom he must assert a doctrine admittedly sterner and darker, ‘the behoulding whereof must neades ingender som sorowe and sadnesse of minde’ and even (such is our ‘frailetie’) ‘a certaine bitter taediousnesse’ (ibid. II, Preface). Significantly, he writes not only to refute but also ‘for the stirring vp of the feare of God in myself’ (ibid. I, Preface). Purgatory is for him essentially a balancing of accounts, a ‘satisfaction of Gods iustice’ (ibid. I. i, Treatise, II. viii) where sin is ‘recompensed’ by ‘payne’ (Defence and Declaration, I. iv). There is light as well as gloom in his theology, as we see in his beautiful chapters on heaven (ibid. I. vi) and on the communion of saints (ibid. II. ii). But he is very deeply impressed with the fact that ‘gods trueth, for terrour and bitternes it beareth’, is not always followed even where it is known (Treatise, Preface).

Allen will appeal most easily to moderns in the Apology and Modest Defence when he pleads, with great feeling but with great restraint, the sufferings of his church at the hands of Elizabeth’s government, and disputes the claim that his brethren were killed and tortured not for religion but for treason. Yet we have with him the same disturbing experience as with all sixteenth-century theologians: when they speak for the persecuted we feel that they are men we can understand, but next moment they speak as persecutors themselves and a gulf yawns between us. Allen’s opponents twitted him with the Marian persecution of Protestants, and his withers were completely unwrung. That was quite different. The whole argument of the third chapter in the Modest Defence leads up to the conclusion ‘that as no lawe of God or man can force vs to be protestantes, no more can any reason be alledged nor iust excuse made for either yong or old why, being baptized or brought vp amongst Arrians or Calvinists, they may not be forced to returne to the Catholique Church’.

The true quality of Allen’s prose style has, in my opinion, been much obscured by a theory which Professor J. S. Phillimore suggested in 1913. According to this theory Allen’s style (and that of some other Recusant authors) represents ‘the true main-stream’ of English prose, ‘dammed’ at home and not recovered till the time of Dryden. Now all that is really common to the mature style of Allen and that which came in with Dryden is a negation. I say Allen’s mature style, because Allen in his youth sometimes writes as an Ur-Euphuist. He knows all the tricks of Drab Age rhetoric and has left us sentences that Lyly might have envied; ‘commit what you list, omit what you list, your preachers shall praise it in their wordes and practice it in their workes’, or ‘Feasting hathe wonne the fielde of fasting and chambering allmost banished chastitye’ (Defence and Declaration, Preface). This kind of decoration, however, disappears in his later work. His style then, admittedly, shares with Dryden’s (or Sprat’s or Swift’s or Defoe’s) the negative characteristic that both lack fantastical tropes and figures. But if that lack is enough to identify the ‘true main-stream’, then this stream was never ‘dammed’ in sixteenth-century England. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of pages of unadorned prose were produced at home in the age of Elizabeth: the plainness which separates the later Allen so neatly from a Lodge or a Sidney does not separate him from Knox, Bridges, Scot, Henry Smith, or most of Hakluyt’s voyagers. Nor does Allen in the least anticipate the short and easily intelligible sentences of Dryden. Fr. Bridgett, who knew him as only a transcriber can, was under no such illusion. He feared that readers would find the ‘length and intricacy’ of his sentences an obstacle, and tried to sign-post them by a revised punctuation. The staple of Allen’s style is the long sentence, but not the long sentence braced (as in Winzet or Hooker) with a latinized structure: rather the long sentence spreading like a pool. This is a very dangerous instrument, as previous quotations from the Drab authors have shown. The real merit of Allen lies partly in the trenchancy of the short sentences with which he varies his style and partly in the fact that he came as near as any man could to succeeding in that type of long sentence. Some of them are surprisingly vigorous in rhythm. None, I believe, ever comes quite to grief. The apparent exception in Fr. Bridgett’s edition of the Defence and Declaration (II. iii. 189) is corrupt: the editor has dropped out an essential if. But many are jaw-breakers. Let anyone who still holds Professor Phillimore’s theory try to read aloud, in the Apology, cap. ii, the 357–word sentence which begins ‘And for vs of the schoole’ and ends ‘domesticals of faith’. Even if a man likes that way of writing, he must not call it ‘the true main-stream’. However we may judge it aesthetically, we must admit as historians that the long sentence, unstiffened by foreign idiom, had no future before it. The path which Allen followed did not lead either to Dryden, Defoe, and Cobbett on the one hand, or to Browne, Taylor, Gibbon, De Quincey, and Ruskin on the other. It was a dead-end. In that dead-end Allen, I confess, did wonders. He is a virile, dignified, and abundantly interesting author. The trouble is not so much that he has been overpraised, as that he has been praised amiss.

In order to give the work of Hooker its proper setting we must now retrace our steps and make some mention, however slight and selective, of the controversy which occasioned it. Since our subject is not ecclesiastical history, it may suffice if we begin our story in the year 1572. During the earlier part of the queen’s reign the dress of the clergy (both in and out of church) had been the chief question at issue among Protestants. The puritan clergy had from the outset disliked, and had at first disobeyed with impunity, the regulations on this matter. Their dislike, of course, sprang from a deeper disagreement between their conception of the Church and Elizabeth’s. Much that she regarded as essential was to them only tolerable; much that she intended to be permanent would, they hoped, soon ‘wither away’ (like the State in the Marxist millennium) and leave a purer, a more radically Protestant, Church. During the Vestiarian controversy this divergence was ‘a sleeping dog’. But it was not allowed to lie. In the sixties serious coercive action was taken. And when it was, the dog soon woke and began to bark: indeed it never ceased barking until the restoration of Charles II. Men who had been deprived or suspended for refusing to wear a surplice soon questioned loudly (what they had always more or less distrusted) the validity of that whole Elizabethan settlement under which they suffered. The year 1572 marks a turning-point because it saw the publication of the Admonition to Parliament by John Field and Thomas Wilcox. The title is significant. They do not petition but admonish. They address Parliament, not Convocation, because in Convocation they have already failed. But in Elizabeth’s view they had no right to address Parliament. Parliament might advise her on ‘commonwealth matters’: it was for Convocation to advise her as Head of the Church. The whole thing smelled of insubordination.

The controversy soon became copious. In the same year an unknown writer supplemented the Admonition with a Second Admonition: on the episcopal side John Whitgift produced an Answer of a certain Libel entitled an Admonition. This was directed against the original manifesto by Field and Wilcox, but the Second Admonition reached Whitgift in time to be briefly mentioned at the end of his own pamphlet. In 1573 Cartwright retaliated with A Reply to an Answer to M. Doctor Whitgift: in 1574 Whitgift published his Defence of the Answer. That same year came Walter Travers’s Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae Explicatio, translated by Cartwright as A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline. In 1575 Cartwright continued his assault on Whitgift with the Second Reply, which he followed up in 1577 with The Rest of the Second Reply. Whitgift at this point abandoned the fight. In 1584, perhaps by Dudley Fenner but more probably by William Fulke, came A Brief and Plain Declaration, commonly known (from its running title) as The Learned Discourse, on the puritan side. This was answered in 1587 by John Bridges in his enormous Defence of the Government Established. In 1588 John Udall, for the puritans, brought out both his Diotrephes and his Demonstration of the Truth of that Discipline. In 1589 Thomas Cooper, for the Anglicans, published An Admonition to the People of England. By that time, as the reader may remember, the guerrilla episode of Martin was already in full swing.

This list, which omits a great many works, will, I think, give us a sufficient acquaintance with the controversy. I may note that Cartwright’s Reply, Second Reply, and Rest of the Second Reply are respectively the T. C. Lib. I, Lib. II, and Lib. III which may have puzzled some students in the footnotes to Hooker. I shall use these same symbols here.

The modern reader, to whichever side he leans, will misunderstand this whole affair if he thinks that either party was defending liberty as we now understand it. This often appears to be the case, but the appearance is deceptive. ‘It is allowed and commaunded to Christian men’, says the Second Admonition ‘to holde that which is good, whosoever forbidde without exception, Prince or other.’ It sounds like a manly assertion of religious freedom. But next moment we read that when proper ecclesiastical rules have been deduced from scripture it is the prince who ‘should see euery one of these things put in practice and punish those that neglect them’. How this would work we learn later. The civil power must force Papists to attend sermons and ‘cause them to be examined, how they profit, and if they profit not, to punish them’ and gradually increase the punishment, and finally ‘cut them off’ (T. C. i. 34, 35). Similarly, when the Learned Discourse says that princes ‘are seruauntes of the Lawes and of the common wealth’ (p. 143) we seem to hear the voice of Bracton: and when Bridges (xvi. 1370) replies that princes make the laws, he sounds like the spokesman of Tudor sovereignty treading out the last sparks of medieval justice. But in their context both passages have a rather different value. The Learned Discourse is arguing that as the prince is guided by wise counsel in civil matters, so he must be guided by a consistory, that is, by the puritan party, in setting up an ecclesiastical regimen to which he must then bind his people by law. Those who are ecclesiastically censured will be also ‘punished in body’ (p. 141). To be sure, the Church is to be distinct from the State, not (as now) ‘shuffled wyth the common wealth’ (T. C. i, Ep.). She will punish any Papist, adulterer, or blasphemer ‘in body’: she will only hand him over to the civil power—as the Inquisition did.

Neither side questions the medieval assumption that unorthodoxy is sinful and that sin must be treated as crime. Their picture of Christianity always includes that disastrous figure ‘the Christian magistrate’ or ‘godly prince’. As a result of his presence the puritan maxim ‘that nothing be don’ in the Church ‘but that which you haue the expresse warrant of Gods worde for’ (Admonition) has very serious political consequences. ‘Gods worde’ means the Bible as interpreted by a consistory. The prince, enforcing by law what the consistory declares to be God’s will, thus becomes in effect merely the executive officer of the Church, and, as Bridges complains (Defence, xvi. 1335), the Church will thus have that very dominion over the State which the puritans blamed the Pope for usurping. The Anglican position, on the other hand, by freeing the prince from this strict dependence on scripture and yet making adherence to the prince’s church compulsory, leaves the religious life of every individual in bondage to political power. Whatever they say, even whatever they wish, the puritans are driven to put the Church above the State, and the Anglicans to put the State above the Church. And until the confusion between sin and crime is cleared up, there is no escape. Prince and priest in the sixteenth century both still desire to ride the pale horse theocracy: and when two men ride a horse we know where one must sit.

I have used the word Priest advisedly, though the puritans violently rejected it as a name for their ‘ministers’. But Milton was quite right. The belief that Puritanism necessarily tended to leave the layman ‘alone with God’ by abolishing any caste of spiritual intermediaries, seems to me a strange delusion. In Bunyan the women who are finally entrusted to Greatheart are first reproved for not having craved a ‘conductor’. The preacher is as necessary in the puritan system as the ‘massing priest’ and the confessor had been in the Roman. Apart from a miracle, a ‘wonderful worke’, faith comes only from hearing sermons (T. C. i. 126). And ‘sermons’ does not include private discourses from a man’s parents or religious friends; they can be preached only by one who is sent (ibid. 114)—that is, by a duly ‘called’ Presbyterian minister. It is only when they hear such sermons that men will ‘fal down . . . acknouledging the great power of God in his ministers’ (Learned Discourse, p. 68). The words which I have ventured to italicize are significant. Until preached, the Bible is ‘as it were shut and clasped’; that is why the preachers who ‘open’ it are said to ‘have the keyes off the kingdome’ (T. C. ii. 380). Yet in another sense the ‘assembly’ or consistory has received the key of heaven from Christ: it can shut the door by excommunication (Full and Plain Declaration, p. 161).

The original Admonition of 1572 is a work not without literary pretensions: there are traces in it of euphuistic antithesis and even of rhyme. At that period such embellishments would not have seemed to any reader inconsistent with its high, prophetic attitude. Isaiah does not speak with more confidence of his mission than Field and Wilcox. Accept our ‘platfourme’ of church discipline, they say, or else ‘be without excuse before the maiestic of our God who . . . hath by vs reuealed vnto you at this present the sinceritie and simplicitie of his Gospel’. The Genevan scheme of deacons, elders, ministers, and ‘Seignorie’ is then advanced, with the usual claim that it is all laid down in the New Testament. One disquieting feature of the puritan temper appears when the authors tell us that ‘then’ (in Apostolic times) church discipline brought it about that ‘the congregation by the wickednes of the offender grieued, was by his publique penance satisfied’. One had hardly supposed that the main object of penance was to satisfy one’s fellow parishioners. But this vicarious or disinterested ‘grief’ was ever-present to the puritan’s mind. The ‘godly’ or ‘tender’ or ‘weak’ brother (ancestor of Mr. Podsnap’s ‘young person’) is never told to mind his own business: the agonies he endures if his next door neighbour plays tennis on Sunday must be most carefully considered.

The Second Admonition was formerly attributed to Cartwright but Mr. Scott Pearson has, I think, sufficiently disposed of that claim. His opponents never accuse him of having written it: he himself speaks of it as if it were another man’s work: and its style differs from his widely, and for the worse. It has hardly any literary merit. The sentences are very long and, though not exactly obscure, heavy and sapless. It differs from its predecessor by being more detailed and practical. The author knows how the revolution could be carried out tomorrow. But he seems to have little hope of efficient popular support. The godly discipline must be imposed from above. The Church will never keep these orders in peace ‘except the comfortable and blessed assistance of the states and gouernors linke in to see them accepted in their countray and vsed’.

John Whitgift (1530–1604), though more memorable as an archbishop than as an author, writes much better than the second Admonisher. He is the most severe of those who wrote on the Anglican side, but severe without either scurrility or humour; as if he followed Bacon’s precept that ‘reproofs from authority ought to be grave and not taunting’. He thinks that ‘lacke of seueritie is the principall cause’ of the puritans’ ‘licentious libertie’. The main importance of his Answer is that it lays down the lines on which the controversy will run in the three books of Cartwright.

Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603) is the most striking figure on the puritan side, unless, perhaps, we should give that position to Martin’. He was a stormy petrel from his early years. He had conscientious objections to nearly everything. He himself tells us that when he was made a D.D. only the importunity of his friends persuaded him to ‘swalow the fond and idle ceremonies’ of degree-giving. An enemy describes him as ‘highly conceited of himself for learning and holiness and a great contemner of others’. He lived to be the ‘patriarke’ of the party. Mr. Pig writes to Mr. Field in 1586 to ‘moue Mr. Cartwright or some other our reuerend brethren to deliver their iudgements whether all layinge out of hayre be forbidden to all women’. He found it necessary in later life to deny that he had miraculous powers: no one ever accused him of healing the sick but it had got about that he killed sinners with his rebuke, as St. Peter killed Ananias and Sapphira.

No one doubts Cartwright’s sincerity and learning, but there are passages in his works which might at first lead us to question his intelligence. He argues that the Apocrypha and the Homilies must not be read in church because unsanctified pans and besoms were not allowed in the Temple at Jerusalem (i. 157). Asked by Whitgift how he can prove that intending communicants were examined in the Apostolic period, he replies (1. 130) ‘after this sort’; all things necessary were done, this thing is necessary, therefore this thing was done. These occasional absurdities, however, illustrate, not imbecility of mind, but the desperate shifts to which a strong mind may be put when hag-ridden by a premise which it will never allow itself to reconsider. Cartwright’s thought is twisted from the outset by the dangerous certitude (we have met it elsewhere) that God ‘must have done’ certain things. God does what is best for the church, this is best for the church, therefore God ‘must have’ done this; so runs the argument. The kind of faith which might be legitimately given to the major then gets attached to the minor, and facts repugnant to the conclusion have to be distorted. There ‘must be’ a ‘platfourme’ of church government in the New Testament, even though no one outside the puritan party can find it there. Whitgift is quite mistaken in saying that you cannot argue negatively from scripture: because scripture is perfect, even the negative argument from it is valid (ii. 50). It is injurious to the sacred text to suppose that it teaches only ‘the principal pointes’ of religion, only a ‘rude, vnfashioned matter’. The Word of God did not merely cover the Church’s nakedness: it gave her also all her ‘chains and bracelets and rings and other jewels’ (i. 14). Indeed, being perfect, it went much further: it contains the rule not only ‘of all things pertaining to the Church’ but of all things that ‘can fall into any parte of mans life’ (ibid.). For we are told to glorify God in all our actions, even in eating and drinking, and we cannot not glorify except by acting in faith and cannot have faith except in the Word (ibid.). Thus all human tradition, all doctrines of Natural Law, and (equally) the new theory of sovereignty, are swept away to make room for what may be called a bibliocracy, the rule of the Book.

This position, however, is limited—perhaps confused—partly by certain concessions which Cartwright is forced to make, and partly by a second principle which has no logical connexion with it. He cannot deny that some practices must vary with time and place and are therefore left to the Church’s discretion: but these variables will still be determined by scripture because they will obey the Pauline ‘decently and in order’. This line of thought, if pursued, would threaten to blunt the antithesis between the puritans and their opponents. But Cartwright’s distinction between variables and invariables would not coincide with the Anglican distinction between things indifferent and things essential to salvation. To an Anglican the essential was the Gospel, and many things in Discipline were indifferent. Cartwright will allow no separation of that sort; the Discipline is ‘a parte off the gospell’ (ii), nay, is the Gospel itself (ibid. 5), necessary to salvation, and ‘of faith’ (i. 14). The second principle which really, though never admittedly, supplements for Cartwright the bare text of scripture is the necessity of receding as far as possible from Roman practice. When you have to straighten a bent stick, he says, you bend it as far as it will go in the opposite direction (i. 103). Hence it would be better, in our ‘indifferent ceremonies’, to resemble the Turks than the Papists (i. 103).

This last startling assertion must not be taken as a mere ebullition of the spleen. Cartwright never forgets himself, says nothing he will not stand to. The Papists’ practices are more to be avoided than the Turks’, ‘they being heretics and so near about vs’ (i. 102). There is, of course, hatred as well as policy in Cartwright’s attitude to the Papists; there was a desire, by no means unconscious, for revenge. This vengeance appeared to him not as a sin but as a duty. The ‘vnreuenged and vnpurified shedinge of giltlesse blood’ in the Marian persecution, so long as they remained unrevenged, were a national danger. That blood cried, like Abel’s, from the cobble-stones of Smithfield, and ‘the least drop’ of it ‘might be the destruction off a great and most mighty kingdome’. (This comes in the preface to his translation of Travers’s Disciplinae Explicatio.) It will of course be understood that this ‘perfect hatred’ is leveled against Papists as Papists: of the men as men he doubts not that many will in God’s good time be called to ‘the knowledge of hys truthe’ (i. 133).

The Discipline which Cartwright wished to impose, though ecclesiastical in name, would certainly have covered all things that ‘can falle into anie parte of mans life’. Already in the opening pages of his first Reply he had promised that, under his system, not only great crimes but ‘the smaller faultes of lying and vncomely iesting, of harde and cholericke speaches’ would be corrected. But it is in the Second Reply that we really discover what tasks the Consistory was to lay upon its obedient ‘godly magistrate’. Christ abrogated the ceremonial, but not the moral, law; and the moral law, on Cartwright’s view, includes not only the second table of the Commandments but much of the criminal law of the ancient Hebrews (ii. 95, 96). The criminal law of England must be altered accordingly. There must be capital punishment for every ‘stubbern Idolater, blasphemer, murtherer, incestuous person and suchlike’ (ibid.). The penitent idolater may be pardoned once: but after ‘willing sliding backe and mouing others to do the same’, a second repentance ought not to lead to mercy (ii. 115). (The principle of receding as far as possible from Roman practice seems here to be momentarily in abeyance.) Whitgift is blamed for the ‘imagination of choice’ which he leaves the civil magistrate. The magistrate is to God simply as the sheriff is to the magistrate: he must carry out the sentence prescribed in Scripture (ii. 99, 100). But a few pages later Cartwright relents. He will leave the magistrate a little more freedom: he will leave him free ‘to appoint the maner of death sharper or softer’ (ii. 103). He must not pardon those whom scripture (interpreted by the Consistory) condemns: but he may—Cartwright would fain be reasonable—he may add a few tortures. As for the common idea that the reign of Christ was to be more merciful than that of Moses, Cartwright turns it by an astonishing argument. God, we see, has rather given up His old practice of sending temporal ‘judgements’ on offenders. We no longer see the earth opening to swallow up the congregation of Abiram. But that is exactly why the magistrate must now ‘kepe by so much a harder hande ouer the punishmente off synne’ (ii. III). As God does less, obviously He means us to do more. Finally, ‘if this be bloudie and extreme I am contente to be so counted withe the holie goste’ (ibid.).

In Cartwright we meet at last the ‘puritan’ of popular tradition and satire. What is harder to determine is the degree in which he deserved Hooker’s most characteristic criticism. To Hooker Cartwright was the opponent of reason, the light of Nature: it was in answer to that aspect of Cartwright’s teaching that Hooker, to our endless joy, drew out all the tranquil beauty of the old philosophy. Certainly there is in Cartwright a core of what we may venture, very loosely, to call Barthianism: a flattening out of all things into common insignificance before the inscrutable Creator. He does once mention the Natural Law ‘written in the tables off the hartes off all men’. Both the occasion and the manner of his doing so are characteristic. The law which he finds written in the heart (so, I think, did Othello) is that which pronounces death against adultery (ii. 102). And he introduces it as a piece of ‘equitie’ which is still discernible even to ‘this glymmering sight which remaineth in the accursed nature off men’ (ii. 101). I think this is his only concession to nature. In ‘diuine matters’ human authority is ‘off no force at all’ (ii. 19). Hence, while Cartwright will quote the practice of the early Church when it supports him, he has no hesitation in condemning it when it does not (i. 17, 136). Even in ‘humane sciences’ the authority of men is of little value (ii. 19); of so little that you cannot argue from it either positively or negatively (i. 13). He derides Whitgift for talking as if there were ‘some star or light off reason’ which could lead us to ordain rightly anything in the Church without the guidance of scripture (ii. 56). Such passages are, I think, sufficient to show that Cartwright, at any rate sometimes, held the anti-rational views of which Hooker accuses him. I do not think they interested Cartwright so much as a reader of Hooker might suppose. It does not follow that Hooker’s emphasis was mistaken. A man may (rightly) diagnose as the radical evil in another man’s thought something which that other does not parade or is not even fully aware of.

Cartwright’s prose is sound, if not great, and the Ciceronian exordium of the first Reply has been lovingly laboured. He writes with great resentment, using direct insult, innuendo, taunts, and irony, but all these with hardly any humour. Hatred so massive as his, so completely reconciled to the conscience, leaves no room for fun.

In the round between the authors of the Learned Discourse (1584) and Bridges the literary honours fall entirely to the puritan side. A student who wishes to get an idea of the puritan position without spending too much time on it would be well advised to concentrate on the Discourse. It is clear, systematic, and economical; there is even some humour in its sketch of ‘old Sir John lacke latine’. Bridges in his Defence (1587) adopted a method which is almost unendurable. He first quotes a passage from the enemy. He then proceeds to answer the first sentence of that passage, using its own words as much as possible and dribbling in his own objections five or six words at a time. He then probably requotes the sentence for a fresh attack (we feel as if we were reading the words of an oratorio by Handel), adding quotations from the Fathers, Calvin, Beza, Gellius, Snecanus and who not? Then we are ready for the next sentence from the Learned Discourse. We thus hardly ever get a whole paragraph of Bridges’s own work or of anyone else’s work free from Bridges’s interruptions. Few men at any period can have obeyed Martin’s light-hearted command to ‘rede ouer Doctor Bridges’; I have skipped some pages myself.

In John Udall we meet a more literary puritan than Cartwright. The Diotrephes (1588) is an Erasmian colloquy. The scene is an inn; the persons, a melodramatically wicked bishop, a Papist in league with him, a usurer, the innkeeper, and a virtuous puritan preacher, modestly named Paul. (The wicked bishop’s name, Diotrephes, comes of course from 3 John ix.) Paul is a guest as unwelcome to an innkeeper as Uncle Joseph in the Wrong Box—‘if I had euery night such a guest, within one moneth all men would refraine from comming to my house’. Paul’s conversation at first is such that we rub our eyes and wonder whether Udall is not intending a satire on puritans. But Paul mends as the dialogue goes on and is in places impressive. If Diotrephes would convince no hostile reader, Udall’s other piece, the Demonstration (also 1588), might positively alienate a wavering adherent. The argument is developed in a series of syllogisms, but they all prove nothing unless you are prepared to take certain scriptural texts in the peculiar sense which the party gave them. And here that element of democracy which the party programme seemed to offer by the parish councils is revealed as spurious. The people are, no doubt, to choose their own ministers. But then black sheep, such as drunkards, being no true part of the Church, will not be allowed to vote; and if the remaining ‘people’ make a bad choice, the ‘eldershyppe’ must just ‘reforme’ it. There is much vituperation; bishops continue in ‘damnable and deuellish courses’, parsons are ‘ignorant and filthy swine . . . in league with hell’.

Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, brought out his Admonition to the People of England in 1589. It contains, though it was not probably designed as, a reply to Martin. This, though not a distinguished, is a reasonable, well written book, rising in one passage to something like eloquence. Much of his argument, perhaps unwisely, is based on political and cultural grounds. Cooper keeps his temper and his syntax and is still readable.

Up till now there had, however, been no work on the Anglican side which could be called a resounding success: but a far stronger champion was at hand. In 1585 Richard Hooker, then newly appointed Master of the Temple, had seemed to the puritans to confirm their darkest suspicions by his sermon Of Justification in which he said of our popish ancestors, ‘God, I doubt not, was merciful to save thousands of them’. He had bidden his hearers ‘Beware lest we make too many ways of denying Christ’. As if this were not scandal enough, he had gone on to say that even a contemporary Papist, ‘yea, a cardinal or pope’, truly penitent, and erroneous only on the doctrine of ‘merit’, will not be rejected by ‘a merciful God ready to make the best of that little which we hold well’, no ‘captious sophister which gathereth the worst out of everything wherein we err’. Those who find ‘arrogance’ in such a sermon, preached at such a date, hardly recognize that Hooker is going to the very limits of what his premisses allowed him and far beyond the limits of personal or controversial prudence. Nor, I think, do they do justice to the humility and the almost agonized charity which vibrates in sentence after sentence; ‘Woe worth the hour wherein we were born except we might persuade ourselves better things’, ‘the hour may come when we shall think it a blessed thing to hear that if our sins were as the sins of the pope and cardinals, the bowels of the mercy of God are larger’, and finally ‘if it be an error . . . my greatest comfort is my error; were it not for the love I bear unto this error, I would neither wish to speak nor to live’. If this is arrogance, it might be wished that divines of all three camps had more often spoken arrogantly.

I have mentioned this passionate sermon because, if it were ignored, the wholly different tone of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity might give a false impression both of Hooker’s personal, and of his literary, character. But his other minor works cannot be noticed here, and I must now turn at once to the Polity.

The adventures of this text are among the strangest in literary history. The first four books (as we now know, but Walton did not) were published in March 1593. The fifth followed in December 1597. Hooker died in 1600. In 1604 Dr. Spenser, President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, in a new edition of the Polity, stated that Hooker had finished the three further books he intended: that certain persons had rifled Hooker’s study after his death, abstracted the fair copies and left only ‘unperfect and mangled draughts’; from which draughts, nevertheless, ‘there is a purpose’ of publishing the best text now possible. After this, nearly forty years of silence. Then in 1648 we have an edition containing Books VI and VIII. In 1662 Bishop Gauden, a man suspect to the High Church party, brings out an edition which for the first time includes VII; its matter, unsatisfactory to high-flying episcopalians. In 1666 we have an edition which contains Walton’s life, discrediting the three last books. Walton wrote at the request of Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury.

What lies behind this mysterious story has been dug out by brilliant scholarship in our own time, but it is far too complicated to be retold here. Nor do the stolen fair copies concern the literary historian: if they ever existed, at least neither we nor our fathers have ever read them. What does concern us is the authenticity of Books VI to VIII as they exist, and of this, in a general sense, there is now no doubt. Book VI is only a fragment, and VII and VIII have not reached the perfection which Hooker would have exacted from himself before he published them. What is a little disquieting is that Dr. Spenser spoke of bringing his ‘mangled’ materials to ‘a reasonable perfection’, words which might imply a sort of editing frowned on by modern scholars. Certainly at one place (VII. v. 8) a gloss has ‘crept into the text’. The internal evidence, however, suggests that nearly all we read in three books is pure Hooker: his style is not easily imitated. It is true that they sometimes differ, in one particular respect, from the manner of Books I to V: they are sharper, more sarcastic, less tranquil. But then so are Hooker’s manuscript notes on the Christian Letter of 1599. He admits into them a tone which he hardly ever allowed himself in the Polity. It is reasonable to suppose that his first drafts often differed from his finished productions in that way: the last labour of the file removed the asperities. And this leads to a literary conclusion of some importance. The mellow gold of the Polity is not merely the natural overflow of a mild eupeptic who has good reason to be pleased the status quo. It is the work of prudence, of art, of moral virtue, and (as Hooker would no doubt have said) of Grace. It is obedience to ‘decorum’.

Though Hooker hardly ever wrote an obscure sentence, it would seem that he has left us a very difficult book, for doctrines of varying ‘height’ (in the ecclesiastical sense) have been read into it. I approach with fear a task in which I am not likely to avoid error; first drawing attention to two elements in Hooker’s thought which must, I believe, be fully grasped before we can understand anything else about him.

1. Though Hooker is not writing to defend the freedom of the individual, he is certainly writing to defend the freedom of Man from what he believes to be a false conception of supernatural authority. He feels as his deepest enemy what I have called the ‘Barthianism’ of the puritans, the theology which set a God of inscrutable will ‘over against’ the ‘accursed nature of Man’ with all its arts, sciences, traditions, learning, and merely human virtues. In the light of that ruthless antithesis there was only one question to be asked about any institution. Is it ‘of God?’; then fall down and worship: is it ‘of Man?’; then destroy it. Hooker is always insisting that the real universe is much more complex than that. ‘All things which are in the Church ought to be of God. But they may be two ways accounted such’ (VII. xi. 10). For, often, ‘the same thing which is of men may be also justly and truly said to be of God’ (ibid.). Certain powers are given to princes ‘altogether by human right’, ‘at men’s discretion’, and yet princes may hold these same powers ‘by divine right’. ‘Unto kings by human right, honour by very divine right is due’ (VIII. ii. 5–6). For explicit divine injunction, embodied in scripture, is but ‘a part of that rule’ which we were created to live by (VII. xi. 10). There is another part, no less God-given, which Hooker calls ‘nature’ (Pref. vi. I), ‘law rational, which men commonly use to call the Law of Nature’ (I. viii. 9), ‘the light of Reason’ (I. viii. 3). The most permanent value of Hooker’s work lies in his defence of that light. We must not therefore expect him to give us clear answers if we constantly ask him what things are divine and what things ‘merely human’. The word merely conceals precisely the point of view which Hooker declines.

2. Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism. He would never have dreamed of trying to ‘convert’ any foreigner to the Church of England. It was to him obvious that a German or Italian would not belong to the Church of England, just as an Ephesian or Galatian would not have belonged to the Church of Corinth. Hooker is never seeking for ‘the true Church’, never crying, like Donne, ‘Show me deare Christ, thy spouse’. For him no such problem existed. If by ‘the Church’ you mean the mystical Church (which is partly in Heaven) then, of course, no man can identify her. But if you mean the visible Church, then we all know her. She is ‘a sensibly known company’ of all those throughout the world who profess one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism (III. i. 3). None who makes that profession is excluded from her. Heretics, idolaters, and notoriously wicked persons may be excluded from the ‘sound’ part of her or from salvation, but they are still members of the visible Church (III. i. 7, 13). That is why baptism by heretics is valid (III. i. 9) and if a heretic is killed ‘only for Christian professions sake’ we cannot deny him ‘the honour of martyrdom’ (III. i. 11). In this Church we always have been and still are. We have not left her by reforming ourselves, nor have the Papists left her by their corrupt ‘indisposition’ to do likewise (III. i. 10). No doubt many of the questions which Hooker treats are what we should now call questions between ‘denominations’. But that is not how he envisages the matter. He is not, save accidentally, preaching ‘a religion’; he is discussing the kind and degree of liberty proper to national churches within the universal, visible Church.

The first of these two principles—the refusal to oppose jus divinum to jus humanum as his opponents did—explains what would otherwise appear to be vacillation or evasiveness in Hooker’s view of episcopacy. It is true, as he freely admits, that his opinion on this subject had changed: he had once thought it ‘more probable’ than he did when writing Book VII that episcopacy was post-Apostolic (VII. xi. 8). But we must not exaggerate the importance of the change in a system such as Hooker’s. He can say much that will please a High Churchman; episcopacy is a ‘thing most lawful, divine and holy’, ‘authorized from Heaven’, ‘the Holy Ghost was the author of it’. Bishops are the apostles’ successors. But Hooker, in his own sense, could have said all this before he came to believe that bishops were of Apostolic institution. Holding his revised position, he can still warn bishops that they must not treat ‘the absolute and everlasting continuance’ of episcopacy as a thing that ‘any commandment of Our Lord doth enjoin’ (VII. vi. 8). Experience and the old custom of the Church sanction it (not even they immutably) and the actual date and mode of its institution are less important. Even if it were universally admitted to have arisen ‘a long time after the Apostles were gone’ it would not be thereby ‘disanulled’ (VII. xi. 2). Either way, it is a thing ‘which to have been ordained of God, I am for my own part even as resolutely persuaded as that any other kind of government in the world whatsoever is of God’ (VII. i. 4)—words which, in Hooker’s mouth, need not make it any more (or less) divine than constitutional monarchy. For every good gift, whether by way of revelation or reason, comes from the same source.

This readiness to accept the old practice of the Church, even if she cannot claim scriptural or Apostolic injunction for what she does, separates Hooker from the puritans and might seem at first sight to bring him nearer to the Roman position. But the appearance is deceptive. In the first place, Hooker is speaking only of order, not doctrine, the one mutable, the other not, because truth does not change and convenience does (V. viii. 2). In the second place, his theory of the relation between national churches and the universal Church would not commend itself to any Papist. Such metaphors as mother and daughters, trunk and branches, or empire and provinces, are foreign to his thought. The churches are ‘rather like diverse families than like divers servants of one family’ (IV. xiii. 6). No ‘one certain form’ of ecclesiastical polity need be common to them all (III. ii. I). In things which scripture does not expressly command or forbid each is free to go her own way simply because she thinks it ‘fit and expedient’ (IV. xiii. 3). Sovereignty over them has certainly not been granted to ‘any one mortal man’ (IV. xiii. 8). The supreme rule to which all are subject is ‘what Scripture plainly doth deliver’: lower than that come deductions from scripture made by ‘force of reason’: lastly ‘after these the voice of the Church succeedeth’ (V. vii. 2). This voice is expressed in General Councils: but councils cannot ‘let the Church from taking away that thing which is hurtful’ (IV. xiv. 5). The voice of the Church is also expressed in tradition, and it is in Hooker’s nature to listen to this voice very lovingly—to ‘uniform practice throughout the whole world’ (VII. ix. 2), ‘the use of the people of God’ or ‘ordinances of our fathers’ (III. xi. 15) which it would be ‘heathenish petulancy’ to ‘trample under foot’ (v. lxv. 9). Yet antiquity has no absolute binding force: we are not ‘bound while the world standeth to put nothing in practice but only that which was at the very first’ (V. xx. 4). Even scripture, on matters of order, turns out not to be an absolute sovereign. Things there ordered by God Himself ‘have been changed and that for the better’ (III. x. 5), not, of course, because we are wiser than He but because circumstances have changed. The result of Hooker’s ecclesiology is to leave the universal Church very free of scripture and her own past, and the local churches very free of her. I think, too, that Hooker’s ‘faith’ in the Church (in one sense he had a great deal) is clearly something different from that ‘faith’ in the Church which a Papist demands, and quite different from Hooker’s own faith in Christ, or in the Bible. He accepts the decision of a council not as part of revelation but because ‘that which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements’ (V. viii. 2). The words I have italicized are surely significant. They suggest, not so much faith in the theological or supernatural sense, as the faith of a modest historian and scholar in the consensus of properly qualified opinion. But here again we are forcing upon Hooker an antithesis which he would not have accepted without explanations and distinctions that would greatly blunt its force. For to yield, and maintain, a faith even of this kind may also be a duty imposed by the Law of Nature and therefore by God. Nor can we obey the Law of Nature, in this or any other duty, without grace (III. viii. 6). Thus, on the one hand, Hooker feels nothing but disgust for the raw, provincial arrogance which leads T. C. (iii. 171) to ask ‘why we should hang our judgement upon the Church’s sleeve’. On the other hand, he would be equally repelled by those modern Papists who say, ‘It is nothing to us how many of our doctrines you share, so long as you accept them only on the wholly irrelevant ground that you think them true.’

Hooker’s conception of the local or national churches is, almost admittedly, not applicable to the situation in which we live today. He understands of course that the Jewish Church in Babylon or the Christian Church in Neronian Rome were necessarily distinct from the ‘commonwealth’ because the commonwealth was then pagan (VIII. i. 3). But he did not at all foresee that such conditions would recur. He never envisaged a secular State in which Christians, in schism with one another, would permanently live side by side with atheist fellow citizens. He still hopes that the divisions between Christians will be healed (IV. xiv. 6) and the basic assumption of his thought is the unitedly Christian nation in which Church and State, however defined, are in fact ‘the selfsame multitude’ (VIII. i. 2). Nations are churches organized for the conduct of their temporal affairs: churches are nations organized for the conduct of their spiritual affairs. The distinction between spiritual and temporal powers within such a Church-Nation is not to be pressed too far; those persons and things which we call ‘spiritual’ are so called only ‘by an excellency’—κατ’ ε̉ξοχήν, par excellence (VIII. i. 4). The ecclesiastical ‘supremacy’ which the Church (or Nation) of England allows to the Crown, for Hooker simply expresses the right of that Church to govern herself. The ‘true original subject’ (i.e. possessor) ‘of power to make Church laws is the whole entire body of that Church for which they are made’ (VIII. vi. 1) and this power ultimately operates through the Crown. We must, of course, understand supremacy not as our opponents feign to understand it—as though the English Crown claimed ‘Head-ship’ in the same sense as Christ—but as our lawyers understand it (VIII. ii. 3). In a certain sense, no doubt, ‘our Church hath dependency upon the chief of our commonwealth’ (VIII. i. 7), but this sense must be carefully defined. She depends upon this ‘chief’ to embody her corporate will and therefore makes him supreme in order that ‘no foreign state or potentate’ (such as the Pope) and no ‘state or potentate domestical’ (such as a Presbyterian senate) can impair her freedom (VIII. ii. 3). For the prince envisaged is a wholly Bractonian prince sub Deo et lege: Hooker will have nothing to do with the new-fangled notions of sovereignty: ‘who doubteth’ that the king is under the law and, though greater in power than any, not greater than all? (VIII. ii. 3). Absolute monarchy is for Hooker a prehistoric blunder, soon retracted when society found ‘that to live by one man’s will became the cause of all men’s misery’ (I. x. 5). He is ‘Head’ intra ecclesiam non supra ecclesiam, exercising ‘dominion’ in ecclesiastical causes ‘but according to the laws of the Church’ (VIII. ii. 17). He does not ‘make’ laws for the Church in the sense of inventing or devising them: he makes or causes to be law what the Church invents or devises (VIII. vi. 12). The ‘very essence of all government’ in England lies not in the prince but in the prince with Parliament and Convocation: for ‘all are there present’ either in person or vicariously (VIII. vi. 11). Yet even this composite ecclesiastical sovereign is hardly sovereign in Tyndale’s or Austin’s sense. It would be ‘scandalous and offensive’ if it acted without regard ‘to that which of old hath been reverently thought of throughout the world’: unless, of course, some law of God (in scripture) should force us into the unhappy position of being contra mundum (VIII. ii. 17).

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

It will, of course, be obvious that Hooker’s system does not extricate us from theocracy. If not exactly ‘the Godly Prince’, yet, in the long run, the autonomous Church-Nation, is undoubtedly to coerce Anabaptists, Papist recusants, and puritans. To that extent he is at one with his puritan and Papist opponents. If either of these complain that he is a forcer of conscience, he has an easy argumentum ad hominem. It was notorious that the puritans looked to the prince to enforce the Godly Discipline (VIII. vi. 14). As for the Papists, had not Stapleton claimed for the prince the right dogmata promulgandi, defendendi, et contra violatores vindicandi? (VIII. ii. 14). It was, after all, a Parliament that had in Mary’s days resubmitted all England to the Pope; Rome did not then complain that such dominion of Parliament over men’s souls was abominable or invalid (VIII. vi. 11). Thus Hooker answers his own age: it is perhaps absurd to ask how he would answer ours. Usually, in past controversies, the premise which neither side questioned, now seems the shakiest of all.

The permanent appeal of a great philosophical work, however, seldom depends entirely on its success in solving the problem which the author had set himself. We go back, and again back, to Hooker, but not because we accept his ecclesiology as final.

In the first place the Polity marks a revolution in the art of controversy. Hitherto, in England, that art had involved only tactics; Hooker added strategy. Long before the close fighting in Book III begins, the puritan position has been rendered desperate by the great flanking movements in Books I and II. Hooker has already asked and answered questions which Cartwright and Travers had never considered and which are fatal to their narrow scripturalism. He has also provided a model for all who in any age have to answer similar ready-made recipes for setting the world right in five weeks. (Travers is dead: the type is perennial.) And all this, though excellent strategy, never strikes us as merely strategical. Truths unfold themselves, quietly and in due order, as if Hooker were developing—nay, we are sure that he is developing—his own philosophy for its own sake, because ‘the mind of man’ is ‘by nature speculative and delighted with contemplation . . . for mere knowledge and understanding’s sake’ (I. viii. 5). Thus the refutation of the enemy comes in the end to seem a very small thing, a byproduct. There had been nothing like this in English polemics before. Of his predecessors, Allen, of his successors, Burke and Newman, come nearest to Hooker. But, of course, the two last show much greater excitement.

Every system offers us a model of the universe; Hooker’s model has unsurpassed grace and majesty. From much that I have already said it might be inferred that the unconscious tendency of his mind was to secularize. There could be no deeper mistake. Few model universes are more filled—one might say, more drenched—with Deity than his. ‘All things that are of God’ (and only sin is not) ‘have God in them and he them in himself likewise’, yet ‘their substance and his wholly differeth’ (V. lvi. 5). God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent. It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular. We must not honour even heavenly things with compliments that are not quite true: ‘though it seem an honour, it is an injury’ (II. viii. 7). All good things, reason as well as revelation, Nature as well as Grace, the commonwealth as well as the Church, are equally, though diversely, ‘of God’. If ‘nature hath need of grace’, yet also ‘grace hath use of nature’ (III. viii. 6). Laws merely human, if they are good, have all been ‘copied out of the tables of that high everlasting law’ which God made, the Law of Nature (I. xvi. 2). ‘The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself’, for it is taught by Nature whose ‘voice is but his instrument’ (I. viii. 3). ‘Divine testimony’ and ‘demonstrative reasoning’ are equally infallible (II. vii. 5). Certainly, the Christian revelation is ‘that principal truth in comparison whereof all other knowledge is vile’; but only in comparison. All kinds of knowledge, all good arts, sciences, and disciplines come from the Father of lights and are ‘as so many sparkles resembling the bright fountain from which they rise’ (III. viii. 9). We must not think that we glorify God only in our specifically religious actions. ‘We move, we sleep, we take the cup at the hand of our friend’ and glorify Him unconsciously, as inanimate objects do, for ‘every effect proceeding from the most concealed instincts of nature’ manifests His power (II. ii. i). Not, of course, that our different modes of glorifying God are on a level. Equality is not a conception that has any charms for Hooker. The charm of inequality is, indeed, the mainspring of erotic love. Woman is ‘inferior in excellency unto man, howbeit in so due and sweet proportion as being presented before our eyes, might be sooner perceived than defined’. Hence ‘that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself’ (V. lxxiii. 2). There is no equality within us; the first Law of Nature is the law of internal hierarchy: that ‘the soul ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our minds the soul’ (I. viii. 6). But we must not so regard the highest in us as to forget that the lowest is still of God, nor so call some of our activities ‘religious’ as to make the rest profane. Highest of all in us are the supernatural operations of the Holy Ghost, but we shall be ill advised to try to identify them by introspection (III. VIII. 15). We do not always know when we pray, for ‘every good and holy desire hath the substance and the force of prayer’ (V. xlviii. I). Our worldly desires (unless sinful) do not fall outside our religious life: the prayers which the Church teaches us to make for temporal blessings are indeed ‘a kind of heavenly fraud’ bringing the soul to God by petty ‘baits’ that she may remain to ask and receive what is better (V. xxxv. 2). There is ‘natural intercourse between the highest and the lowest powers of man’s mind’ (V. lxv. 11). We meet on all levels the divine wisdom shining through ‘the beautiful variety of all things’ in their manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude’ (III. xi. 8).

In reading Hooker we are reminded sometimes of Tyndale, often of Traherne’s Centuries. Sometimes a suspicion crosses our mind that the doctrine of the Fall did not loom quite large enough in his universe. Logically, we must grant, it was pivotal: it is only because Adam fell that supernatural laws have come in at all, replacing that natural path to beatitude which is now lost (I. xi. 5). It is only because Adam fell that we need ‘public regiment’ (I. x. 4, cf. v. i. 2). But Hooker’s philosophy is ‘Golden’ philosophy, quite as unmistakably as the Arcadia and the Faerie Queene are Golden poesy. He writes of Man, if fallen, yet now redeemed and already partially glorified; of Man unified in ‘the mystical communion of all faithful men’ (V. xl. 3), because ‘nature doth presume that how many men there are in the world, so many gods as it were there are’ (I. x. 12); of Man the oracle whereby everlasting law ‘readeth itself to the world’ (I. xi. 2). We hope, hereafter, to ‘live as it were the life of God’ (I. xi. 2) and enjoy already ‘the honour which our flesh hath by being the flesh of the Son of God’ (V. liv. 5). The whole Polity is a soberer, yet not less exultant, De Dignitate Hominis. The distress or ‘anguish’ which is now commonly demanded as an earnest of profundity will not be found in it. Yet there is sometimes a hint to show that he had known darker and less tranquil hours than he chose to express in the Polity: such a phrase as ‘that which we tremble to do we do’ or ‘looking inward we are stricken dumb’ (V. xlvii. 4), or such an unusual passage as that wherein he turns upon Cartwright (who would deny baptism by women even if he believed the unbaptized to be ‘assuredly damned’) with his ‘O Sir, you that would spurn thus . . .’ (V. lxi. 4). But, as I have already said, trouble and passion are most apparent not in the Polity but in the sermon Of Justification. Not everything that he thought or felt was qualified for admission into the great work; its serenity marks not the limitations of his temperament but the greatness of his achievement, and was probably paid for at the right price.

The style is, for its purpose, perhaps the most perfect in English. In general it is far removed from the colloquial, yet it does not strike one as a decorated style. Exceptions to both these statements can be found. Hooker can on occasion speak with the voice of the people; ‘ifs or ands’, ‘corner-meetings’, ‘make saleable your cause in gross’, ‘the best stake in their hedge’, ‘truss up bag and baggage’. On occasion, too, he can write a paragraph so heightened that readers who have no taste for Hooker will enjoy it, detached, in an anthology. Such is the passage beginning ‘Now if nature should intermit her course’ in I. iii. 2, or that on church music in V. xxxviii. I. But this is very rare; the beauty of Hooker’s prose is functional. His characteristic unit is the long, syntactically latinized, sentence, unobtrusively garnished with metaphor, anaphora, and chiasmus. The Latin syntax is there for use, not ornament; it enables him, as English syntax would not, to keep many ideas, as it were, in the air, limiting, enriching, and guiding one another, but not fully affirmed or denied until at last, with the weight of all that thought behind him, he slowly descends to the matured conclusion. The structure mirrors the real movement of his mind. When he is not thinking so sequaciously, when he is merely reminding, defining, or reproving, he uses short sentences, often with great effect; ‘but wise men are men and the truth is truth,’ ‘they never use reason so willingly as to disgrace reason’, ‘there is nothing which is not someway excelled even by that which it doth excel’, ‘our answer therefore to their reasons is no; to their scoffs nothing’. He has plenty of humour, almost a mischievous humour, but not of the kind that could appear in quotation: the point depends not on the verbal but on the argumentative context. Indeed very few of Hooker’s beauties can be picked like flowers and taken home: you must enjoy them where they grow—as you enjoy a twenty-acre field of ripe wheat. Always an artist, he is never merely an artist. He does not reject eloquence, but he has broken and bitted her and taught her the manage. She is perfectly subdued to his task; her high mettle shows through her obedience. The great periods move steadily forward without irrelevant beauties but not without any beauties that can make ‘the face of truth’ more ‘orient’, not without melody and proportion, nor without frequent vividness of phrase (woes ‘perpendicularly hanging’ over wicked heads, Tertullian ‘a sponge steeped in worm-wood and gall’, peers spiritual ‘a courteous bridle’ to peers temporal). And always, drawn in by the very genius of his philosophy, there is a sense of ‘the beautiful variety of all things’.

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