The rise of English literary prose

Preface

This book covers the period of discovery in the history of English Hterary prose. It begins with the latter half of the fourteenth century, when the writing of prose first assumed importance in the life of the English people, and it ends with the first quarter of the seventeenth century, when practice and experiment had made of English prose, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, a highly developed and efficient means of expression.

The origins of English prose come relatively late in the~^ development of English literary experience. This appar- i ently is true of most prose literatures, and the explanation / seems to lie in the nature of prose. Even in its beginning^ the art of prose is never an unconscious, never a genuinely . primitive art. The origins of prose literature can consequently be examined without venturing far into those misty regions of theory and speculation, where the student of poetry must wander in the attempt to explain beginnings which certainly precede the age of historical documents, and perhaps of human record of any kind. Poetry may be the more ancient, the more divine art, but prose lies nearer to us and is more practical and human.

Being human, prose bears upon it, and early prose especially, some of the marks of human imperfection. Poetry of primitive origins, for example the ballad, often attains a finality of form which art cannot better, but not so with prose. Perhaps the explanation of this may be that poetry is concerned primarily with the emotions, and the emotions are among the original and perfect gifts of vi Preface

/mankind, ever the same; whereas prose is concerned with <■ the reasonable powers of man's nature, which have been

\ and are being only slowly won by painful conquest. Whether this be a right explanation or not, it is certainly true that in its first efforts English prose is uncertain and faltering, that it often engages our sympathies more by what it attempts to do than by what it actually accomplishes. In this book the purpose has been to show how the English mind approached the practical problem of the

I invention of prose, to point out what things seemed appro-

,! priately to be expressed in prose and what devices of language appropriately employed in the expression of them. The process was obviously one of the adaptation of language, a genuinely primitive inheritance like the traditions of poetry, to many differing and present needs. It was indeed closely bound up with the effort of the English people to find for itself the golden mean of expression between ephemeral colloquial discourse and the special and often highly conventionalized forms of poetic expression. The study of the origins of English prose is consequently concerned not only with the growth of the English mind, but, in the broadest sense, with the development of the English language.

Since literary prose is very largely the speech of everyday discourse applied to special purposes, it is in a way true that the origins of English prose are to be sought in the origins of English speech. No student of the speech would be content to pause short of the earliest English records in the four centuries which preceded the Norman Conquest. From the days of the first Teutonic conquerors of Celtic Britain, the English speech has continued in an unbroken oral tradition to the present time. But obviously English literary prose in its various stages has not been merely the written form, the echo, of this colloquial speech.

Preface vii

The bonds which unite the two are close, but their courses are not parallel. English literary prose has had no such continuous history as the language, and there are sufficient reasons for regarding the prose of Alfred and his few contemporaries and successors as a chapter in the life of the English people which begins and ends with itself. For its antiquity and for its importance in preserving so abundantly the early records of the language, Old English prose is to be respected ; but it was never highly developed as an art, nor was its vitality great enough to withstand the shock of the several conquests which brought about a general confusion of English ideals and traditions in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is consequently in no sense the source from which modern English prose has sprung. It has a separate story, and when writers of the early modern period again turned to prose, they did so in utter disregard and ignorance of the fact that Alfred and ^Ifric had preceded them by several centuries in the use of English for purposes of prose expression. Nor did the later writers unwittingly benefit by the inheritance of a previous discipline of the language in the writing of prose. In the general political and social cataclysm of the eleventh century, the literary speech of the Old English period went down forever, leaving for succeeding generations nothing but the popular speech upon which to build anew the foundations of a literary culture.

After the Conquest came the slow process of establishing social order. Laws must first be formulated, Normans, Scandinavians, and Saxons must learn to live in harmony with one another, above all must learn to communicate with one another in a commonly accepted speech, before literature could again lift its head. During all this period of tie making of the new England, verse remained the standard form for literary expression. Such prose as was viii Preface

written was mainly of a documentary character, wills, deeds of transfer and gift, rules for the government of religious houses, and similar writings of limited appeal. In the lack of a standard vernacular idiom, more serious efforts, such as histories and theological treatises, were composed in Latin, and to a less extent, in French. It was not until towards the middle of the fourteenth century that the various elements of English life were fused into what came to be felt more and more as a national unity. A wave of popular patriotism swept over the country at this time, ; clearing away the encumbering foreign traditions by which ; the English had permitted themselves to become burdened. / This new national feeling showed itself in various ways, in \ a renewed interest in English history, in the special respect ' now shown to English saints, and above all in the rejection I of French and in the cultivation of the English language as ^ the proper expression of the English people. At the same time men of riper and broader culture made their appearance in the intellectual life of the people. An age which <^ produced three such personalities as those of Chaucer, j Langland, and Wiclif cannot be regarded as anticipatory \ and uncertain of itself. Economic conditions also forced upon the humbler classes of people the necessity of thinking for themselves and of setting forth and defending their interests. In the larger world of international afit'airs the dissensions and corruptions of the church, culminating in the great schism of the last quarter of the century, compelled account to be taken of that whole order of theocratic government which the medieval world had hitherto accepted almost without question.

In this combination of circumstances, one man stands out pre-eminently in England as realizing the drift of events and the kind of action needed to regulate them. This man was Wiclif, a scholar and theologian, but not

Preface ix

merely a man of the study or the lecturer's chair. Wiclif's practical wisdom is particularly apparent in his deliberate choice of the English language as a means of exposition, and persuasion. If English prose must have a father, no one is so worthy of this title of respect as Wiclif. Not a great master of prose style himself, Wiclif was the first Englishman clearly to realize the broad principles which underlie prose expression. He made a sharp distinction between prose and verse, and he foresaw, at least, the ends to be attained by a skillful use of the mechanism of daily colloquial speech for broader and less ephemeral purposes than those to which it had hitherto been applied. In a word, Wiclif was the first intelligent writer of English prose, a discoverer in the truest sense of the word. With him begins the long and unbroken line of English writers who have striven to use the English tongue as a means of conveying their message as directly and as forcibly as possible to their hearers and readers. The spirit of Wiclif is the spirit of Sir Thomas More, of Tindale, of Hooker, of Milton, of Burke, of Carlyle, of all the great masters of expositional and hortatory prose in the. English language. Technical details have changed, exterior ornaments have varied, but the fundamental purpose and method have remained the same. With Wiclif and his period, therefore, we begin our study of the rise of English literary prose.

The later limits of the present undertaking have not so easily determined themselves. It would have been interesting to carry the discussion down to the masters of prose in the seventeenth century, to Milton, Clarendon, Jeremy Taylor, Burton, Dryden, for they are indeed the fruit of the sixteenth-century flower. But the close of the sixteenth century and the opening of the seventeenth century mark the end of the great originating period in the development of English prose. ■ The tentative beginnings of Wiclifite prose

X Preface

are by that time fully realized in models of the plain style not surpassed by any later writers. The literary and more narrowly artistic interests have entered, and experimentation in this direction has been carried almost to the extreme limits of the possibilities of the language. Scarcely any side of human activity remains unexpressed in English prose at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and though it by no means follows that the prose of later times is less admirable, it is nevertheless different from the prose of this first fresh and tremendously energetic age of invention and experimentation.

Since that is the subject of the whole volume, it manifestly falls outside the province of these prefatory remarks to discuss the various processes and developments of this first formative period of English prose. It may be worth while to put down, however, as a kind of preliminary scaffolding, the opinions of one of the greatest of the early moderns, of one who from the vantage-ground of the end of a long life, cast his eye backward and formulated what seemed to him the prime moving causes and tendencies of writing in his day. Starting with the discussion of the origins of the fantastic or ornate literary style in Europe, Bacon continues with an analysis which, whether true for the whole European awakening or not, certainly applies in a peculiar degree to England, where the Renascence was from the first so largely a religious and theological movement :

" Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succors to make a part against the present time, so that the ancient authors, both in divinity

Preface

XI and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the phrase or word. And again, because the great labor then was with the people, (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, qua: non novit legem,) [the wretched crowd that has not known the law,] for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess ; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and xii Preface

Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and alkire all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo: Decern aniios consnmpsi in legendo Cicerone, [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero:] and the echo answered in Greek, one, Asine. Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather toward copie than weight." ^

Bacon closes his survey with the generation which immediately preceded his own. The detachment with which he viewed the refinements of the artificial writers shows that he at least had accepted different standards and ideals of writing. To complete the sketch, it would be necessary to add certain developments of English prose in the direction of order and moderation of which Bacon's own writings are signally illustrative. And it is with these developments that the survey undertaken in the following pages will come to an appropriate conclusion.

The limits of the present undertaking imply certain exclusions. This book is neither a bibliographical nor a biographical history of English literary prose, nor is it a dictionary of reference to all prose monuments for the period it covers. No attempt has been made to give a critical survey of the paper wars that have centered about debated points, though it will be found, it is hoped, that the references given supply the clew to all the rest. Thus the earlier bibliography of Euphuism may be derived from the studies mentioned in the text or notes. Biographical details are included only when they seemed useful for the better understanding "of such writings as are discussed, and titles are mentioned only for the purpose of indicating with certainty the sources of the various passages cited or 'Bacon, Works, VI, 1 18-120.

Preface xiii

quoted in the text. Passages within double quotation marks are quoted exactly — except that, for the sake of consistency, the modern custom in the use of u and v has been followed. Passages within single marks are the author's literal modernizations. The temptation to quote more frequently and at greater length has been strong, but a single volume of reasonable size cannot be both history and anthology. Quotation can never take the place of the reading of texts, and fortunately, for those who have not access to large libraries and for students in college classes, several collections of illustrative extracts are available.

The author has assumed the liberty of saying nothing about works and about writers that, to his mind, required no mention. It might be a satisfaction to put down all the results of one's investigations, if one could only be sure in so doing that the reader's share in this pleasure would be as great as the author's. But it would be unkind for the literary critic or historian to attempt to rescue insignificant names from the " poke of oblivion " where time in its mercy has permitted them to rest in peace. In such names the sixteenth century was as rich as any other, though mere antiquity does often seem to lend a specious importance to writings otherwise not important. But the author has endeavored to choose his materials always with an eye to the main point, which has been to trace the growth of a temper and attitude of mind towards the use of speech, to show the development of taste and feeling for prose expression by directing attention to those writings which reveal some skill and originating power in the practice of the art of prose composition.

George Philip Krapp.

Columbia University, August, 1915.

Introduction

The Fourteenth Century — Chaucer's Prose — Langland — Maundevile — Trevisa — Artificial Writers : Taystek, Richard Rolle, Thomas Usk

The second half of the fourteenth century in England was a period rich both in realization and in anticipation. At such happy times, not one but many kinds of thought and action occupy men's attention. The pageant of chivalry was then still being displayed upon the stage of the great world, and was finding in Froissart a worthy chronicler. Crecy and Poitiers were living memories of young men when Edward III died. Though the changes abroad were many, at home English laws and government were rapidly assuming forms which were to be permanent. The place of the commons in the control of affairs was becoming more clearly defined, and the nation at large was entering upon a new era of patriotism and national self-consciousness. Architecture, especially domestic architecture, flourished, and the comforts and luxuries of life were increasing. Cower, Chaucer, Langland, and the unknown author of The Pearl and other remarkable poems, were lending luster to the newly-prized English language. In the humbler walks of life, the voice of the people was making itself heard, and the last remnants of medieval serfdom were disappearing as new conceptions of personal liberty came into being. Wiclif and his followers were spreading doctrines of almost incalculable importance for the future growth of the English nation. And not least in importance among these shadowings of the future, English prose was coming to be applied to English thought in ways more effective and intimate than had ever before been necessary or possible.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, the various Scandinavian and Romance additions which had enriched at the same time that they had disintegrated the old England, built up by the successive kings of the West Saxons from the time of Egbert, had united with the English base to form a new nation. During the time of disturbance the English speech had passed through a period of popular degradation. It had lost literary caste, but now, under the influence of a new national feeling and a renascence of culture, it had recovered all that had been lost and was gaining more. By the assimilation of a host of Romance words, it had acquired possibilities of expression beyond the reach of the language of the Old English period. The English were no longer an isolated people. Their intellectual life was more vigorous and more varied, and their social life was more gracious, than either had been in the most flourishing days before the Conquest. The English writer of the later fourteenth century had a richer body of thought and sentiment to express than his Anglo-Saxon ancestor, and he had a more effective medium in the language of his day to serve the purposes of expression. The Anglo-Saxon poets had seldom passed beyond the simple themes of war and religion ; and the prose of Alfred, of Wulfstan, of ^Ifric, was limited almost entirely to the second of these themes. Religion and theology remain, indeed, the principal concern of prose even into the sixteenth century, but with a very great diff'erence. Scarcely a trace of popular insurgence is to be found in English writing before the days of Wiclif. The newest, the most disturbing, and for the history of English prose, the most important element in the life of England in the fourteenth century was just this awakening of the underworld of the people. Men now first began to realize that their political and spiritual salvation lay not in the hands of overlords and ecclesiastics, but in their own. New impulses within demanded new modes of external expression. Literature could not continue to be merely artistic and courtly, learning could not expend itself entirely in theological exegesis or the formulation of dogma. The pallid legends and the summary repetitions of officially approved information and doctrine which constitute so large a part of medieval writing in the vernacular began now to disappear and their place to be taken by a fresher literature, addressed not merely to the memory, but directly to the reason and the hearts of mankind.

It was only gradually, however, that English writers acquired the courage to use prose. Long custom had established verse as the only accredited form of literary expression. From the point of view of literary art, the two most significant writers of the latter half of the fourteenth century were Chaucer, courtly, polished, and reasonable, and Langland, something of a mystic and enthusiast, a fellowsufiferer with the people, whose hard life he so intimately describes, and certainly less an artist than his greater contemporary. Chaucer's prevailing interest being in men and manners, one might suppose that prose would have been for him a more appropriate form of expression than verse. And in truth, y^\may suppose that the use of metrical form by Chauc|qMy^as largely an accident of time. He wrote in verse becai^P'^the literary conventions of his time imposed the metrica|^tm upoHvalT wniMl^jpf artistic pretension. Perhaps it w|b! fortunate for Choicer that he accepted these converftior^. In his day and hour it was easier to realize the ideals of simplicity, clarity, and control which his verse exhibits by following the conventional custom of metrical composition than it would have been if he had chosen to experiment in prose. But Chaucer was not temperamentally an experimenter or innovator. He followed clearly defined paths of literary tradition, changing and improving greatly in detail, but seldom departing widely from the practice of his predecessors and masters. He seems to have felt no impulse, therefore, to invent prose for English literature, to become an English Boccaccio.

Chaucer did not neglect altogether the writing of prose, although by universal consent his prose writings are regarded as the least interesting of all his works. They are four in number, and all of considerable length. The only one which can be dated certainly is the latest, the Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in 1391. The others were written probably within the decade preceding this year, and it is interesting to note, therefore, that Chaucer's prose works were produced at about the same time that Wiclif began to write in English. Of these four prose efforts of Chaucer, the most important is his translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, made probably in entire ignorance of the fact that it had already been translated into English by King Alfred almost five hundred years before. The De Consolatione is mentioned in the Romance of the Rose ^ as " Boece," and the original author of this section of the famous allegory, Jean de Meun, declares that he would confer a great benefit on the unlearned folk who should translate this work for them. It is not unlikely that Chaucer found in this statement of the much admired French poet the suggestion which led him to undertake his translation into English.

The original work of Boethius is divided into five books, ' LI. 5052-5056.

and each book is sub-divided into alternating metrical and prose sections, commonly known as Metres and Proses, all of which, however, Chaucer translated into prose. In general Chaucer's translation attempted to give the content of the original, but it is by no means a literal translation, such not being the custom of Chaucer's day. Neither is it altogether a true translation, for Chaucer's scholarship was not always sufficient to save him from blunders. An instructive comparison may be made between Chaucer's prose version of Boethius and those passages of the same work which he versified in Troilus and Cressida ^ and in The Former Age. Such a comparison will show that the metrical versions are decidedly more idiomatic and natural than the prose — another proof, if any were needed, that Chaucer had mastered more completely the discipline of verse than that of prose.

The main defects of the translation are crudity and awkwardness, even at times obscurity, of expression, due to imperfect adaptation of the thought to the English idiom. Chaucer's difficulties arose from the embarrassment caused by the necessity of striking a balance between a Latin and an English phrasing. In general the translations of the Proses are more idiomatic and less complicated than the translations of the Metres, obviously due to the fact that the Metres are more compact and involved in expression in the original. Chaucer wisely made little effort to introduce specifically English ornaments of style. Riming passages occur occasionally, but they are not frequent or long enough to disturb the prose intention. Alliteration is used, sometimes rather markedly, as in the phrase " fortroden under the feet of felonous folk," ^ but is never carried through long passages. The only notable mannerism of style is the omission of the definite article where the ' Bk. IV, 11. 958-1078. " Works, II, 93.

English idiom requires it. This is an obvious Latinism, found not only in Chaucer but in Wiclif and many other writers of this time who wrote English under the influence of Latin.*

Two of Chaucer's prose writings were distinguished by inclusion within the framework of the Canterbury Tales. One of these is Chaucer's own contribution to the entertainment of the pilgrims, the Tale of Melibeus, narrated by Chaucer after he has been ' stinted ' of his Tale of Sir Thopas by the disgusted Host. The other is the Parson's Tale, a long and weary treatise on the vices and virtues which serves as the pious ending to the whole series of the Canterbury Tales. It is not certain that Chaucer wrote either of these tales, granting them this title by courtesy, for the express purpose of including them in the Canterbury group. Quite possibly they were early works written when he was more deeply interested in the composition of pious prayers and other works of devotion than he was later, which were thriftily turned to account in the elaboration of the plan of the Canterbury Tales. The two prose tales have very little dramatic appropriateness. One does not expect a conventional medieval sermon on the vices and virtues from the parson, the brother of the ploughman, who is described in the Prolog in terms that suggest Wiclif's poor priests. Here was Chaucer's opportunity to give that pic-

* One or two examples will illustrate: Empted of light of his thought, Works, II, 5, translates cffeto liimine mentis, Bk. I, Metr. II ; comen to corage of a parfit man, ibid., translating in uirilis aninii robur, Bk. I, Prose II; on allone is fader of thinges, Works, II, 65, translating wins enim rerum pater est, Bk. Ill, Metr. VI ; thus, whan that night was discussed and chased awey, derknesses forleften me. Works, II, 5, translating Tunc me discussa liquerunt node tenebrae, Bk. I, Metr. III. The use of several synonomous words to translate a single Latin word is not uncommon. The literal translation of the plural tenebrae was not English idiom.

tare of actual popular movements in his day which we miss so much in his writings and which, without question, he consciously avoided giving. And the other prose tale, the Tale of Melibens, is equally inappropriate to Chaucer, who tells it. Chaucer apparently assigned this tale to himself in a moment of ironic humor. At the same time it must be kept in mind that the modern reader's impatience with these two tales is likely to be much greater than was that of Chaucer's contemporaries. In the fourteenth century both the materials and the method of them were familiar and approved, and many of Chaucer's readers doubtless received them as highly respectable and meritorious performances.

Both of these prose tales are really translations. The Tale of Melibeus is a translation of a French treatise, Le Lizre de Melibee et de dame Prudence, probably made by Jean de Meun, on the basis of a Latin work, Liber Cousolationis et Consilii, by Albertano of Brescia. The Tale is not much more than a bundle of quotations of a generally moral and sententious character, bound together by a simple thread of allegorical narrative. Melibeus is a rich man of the world who finds himself ill-treated by his enemies and who is elaborately counseled by his wife, Dame Prudence, on such topics as the choice of friends and advisers, on avenging wrongs, on the use of riches. The characters are not realistically conceived, and the wife of Melibeus is the source of all wisdom in the story because Prudentia, Justitia, Philosophia, and the other virtues were traditionally allegorized as feminine. The Tale has some resemblance to the type of didactic romance made popular in the sixteenth century by Guevara's Dial of Princes, the quotations being derived not merely from scriptural and patristic sources, but many of them from classical and post-classical literature. But the romantic and narrative interests of the Tale are held severely in hand and the main purpose of the story was to serve as a container for numerous aphoristic and sententious quotations. From the point of view of Chaucer as a writer of prose, the chief interest of the Tale lies in the fact that it is freely and idiomatically written, and that it thus shows how much easier Chaucer found it to translate from French than from Latin.