On the Art of Writing Part 10

For to turn so oft; To bring that lowest that was most aloft: And to fall highest, yet to light soft?

Is it possible?

All is possible!

Whoso list believe; Trust therefore first, and after preve; As men wed ladies by licence and leave, All is possible!

or again--

Forget not! O forget not this!-- How long ago hath been, and is, The mind that never meant amiss: Forget not yet!

or again (can personal note go straighter?)--

And wilt thou leave me thus?

Say nay, say nay, for shame!

To save thee from the blame --Of all my grief and grame.

And wilt thou leave me thus?

Say nay! say nay!

(Say 'nay,' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative.')

No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, and will read it to you in full--

What should I say?

Since Faith is dead And Truth away From you is fled?

Should I be led With doubleness?

Nay! nay! mistress.

I promised you And you promised me To be as true As I would be: But since I see Your double heart, Farewell my part!

Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake One so unkind; And as I find, So will I trust, Farewell, unjust!

Can ye say nay But that you said That I alway Should be obeyed?

And--thus betrayed Or that I wist!

Farewell, unkist!

I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History of English Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.' I know not to what wiseacre we owe that p.r.o.nouncement: but what do you think of it, after the lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the same volume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Princ.i.p.al of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us of Wilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that

there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe.'

The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that the earlier English poets of the period--Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and the Earl of Surrey--drew their inspiration from Petrarch and Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some degeneration.

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'

(Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake

This Princ.i.p.al of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland--

Farewell unkiss'd!)

But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--

Let me not to the marriage of true Minds Admit impediment. Love is not love Which alters where it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove.

Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,'

which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books: and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent convulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quant.i.ty of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the ma.s.s of it clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could write at his average. For a sample:--

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as 'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is pa.s.sing through a period of p.u.b.erty, of green sickness: and, looking at it historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the stature of the grown man to be.

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue (yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its ant.i.thetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there befel a miracle.

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Authorised Version of the Bible.

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius.

I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis.

Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply miracles _praeter necessitatem_; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men--not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent--sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work--improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees--that only by miracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and G.o.dly: but doubtless also good and G.o.dly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St Paul's Cathedral; and you know what _they_ did. Individual genius such as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great ma.s.s of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.

Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you 'courses of study' in English Literature never include the Authorised Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?... I wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow.

'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality...'

'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.'

'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold.'

'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.'

'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan--have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars,--Milton, Sir Thomas Browne--practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's ant.i.thesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your words through life as well as your hearts.

LECTURE VII