were sure to set a dangerous example. I believe, indeed, that if Sidney had lived he might have pruned his style not a little without weakening it, and then the richness of his imagination would probably have made him the equal of Bacon and the superior of Raleigh. But as it is, his light in English prose (we shall speak and speak very differently of his verse hereafter) was only too often a will-o'-the-wisp. I am aware that critics whom I respect have thought and spoken in an opposite sense, but the difference comes from a more important and radical difference of opinion as to the nature, functions, and limitations of English prose. Sidney's style may be perhaps best illustrated by part of his Dedication; the narrative parts of the Arcadia not lending themselves well to brief excerpt, while the Apology is less remarkable for style than for matter.
"Here have you now, most dear, and most worthy to be most dear, lady, this idle work of mine; which, I fear, like the spider's web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than wove to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth, as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of good will, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were, and shall be when God will, having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in than that they gat out. But his16 chief safety shall be the walking abroad; and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name, which, if much good will do not deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender. This say I because I know thy virtue so; and this say I because it may be for ever so, or, to say better, because it will be for ever so."
The difference referred to above is again well exemplified by the difference of opinions on the style of Hooker as compared with that of Sidney. Hooker wrote considerably later than the other authors here criticised, but his work is so distinctly the climax of the style started by Ascham, Cheke, and their fellows (the style in which English was carefully adapted to literary purposes for which Latin had been previously employed, under the general idea that Latin syntax should, on the whole, rule the new literary medium), that this chapter would be incomplete without a notice of him. For the distinguished writers who were contemporary with his later years represent, with rare and only partly distinguished exceptions, not a development of Hooker, but either a development of Sidney or a fresh style, resulting from the blending in different proportions of the academic and classical manner with the romantic and discursive.
The events of Hooker's neither long nor eventful life are well-known from one of the earliest of standard biographies in English – that of Izaak Walton. He was born at Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, in 1554(?). Though he was fairly connected, his parents were poor, and he was educated as a Bible clerk at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He entered here in 1567, and for some fifteen years Oxford was his home, latterly as Fellow and Lecturer of Corpus. The story of his marriage is slightly pathetic, but more than slightly ludicrous, and he appears to have been greatly henpecked as well as obliged to lead an uncongenial life at a country living. In 1585 he was made Master of the Temple, and held that post for seven years, distinguishing himself both as a preacher and a controversialist. But neither was this his vocation; and the last nine years of his life were spent, it would seem more congenially, in two other country livings, first in Wiltshire, then in Kent. He died in 1600. The first four books of the Ecclesiastical Polity were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. The last three books, published after his death, lie under grave suspicion of having been tampered with. This, however, as the unquestionably genuine portion is considerable in bulk, is a matter rather of historical and theological than of purely literary interest. Hooker himself appears to have been something like the popular ideal of a student: never so happy as when pen in hand, and by no means fitted for the rougher kind of converse with his fellow-men, still less for the life of what is commonly called a man of the world.
But in the world of literature he is a very great man indeed. Very few theological books have made themselves a place in the first rank of the literature of their country, and if the Ecclesiastical Polity has done so, it has certainly not done so without cause. If there has been a certain tendency on the part of strong partisans of the Anglican Church to overestimate the literary and philosophical merit of this book, which may be called the first vernacular defence of the position of the English Church, that has been at least compensated by partisan criticism on the other side. Nor is there the least fear that the judgment of impartial critics will ever deprive Hooker of the high rank generally accorded to him. He is, of course, far from being faultless. In his longer sentences (though long sentences are by no means the rule with him) he often falls into that abuse of the classical style which the comparatively jejune writers who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifested itself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries – the abuse of treating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflected language, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender and number help to connect adjective with substantive, and relative with antecedent. Sometimes, though less often, he distorts the natural order of the English in order to secure the Latin desideratum of finishing with the most emphatic and important words of the clause. His subject leads and almost forces him to an occasional pedantry of vocabulary, and in the region which is not quite that of form nor quite that of matter, he sometimes fails in co-ordinating his arguments, his facts, and his citations, and in directing the whole with crushing force at his enemy. His argument occasionally degenerates into mere illustration; his logic into mere rhetoric.
But when all these things are admitted, the Ecclesiastical Polity remains a book in which matter and manner are wedded as in few other books of the same kind. The one characteristic which has been admitted by Hooker's faintest praisers as well as by his warmest – the golden moderation and judiciousness of his argument – is perhaps rather calculated to extort esteem than to arouse admiration. Moderation, like other kinds of probity, laudatur et alget: the adversary is not extremely grateful for not being pushed to extremity, and those on the same side would at least excuse a little more vehemence in driving advantages home. But Hooker has other qualities which are equally estimable and more shining. What especially distinguishes him from the literary point of view is his almost unique faculty of diversifying dry and technical argument with outbursts of rhetoric. These last are not mere purple patches; they do not come in with the somewhat ostentatious usherment and harbingery which, for instance, laid the even more splendid bursts of Jeremy Taylor open to the sharp sarcasm of South. There is nothing theatrical about them; they rise quite naturally out of the level of discussion and sink into it again, with no sudden stumble or drop. Nor are they ever (like some of Sidney's poetical excrescences) tags and hemistichs of unwritten sonnets or songs stuck in anyhow upon the prose. For instance, Sidney writes: "About the time when the candles had begun to inherit the sun's office." Now this in a somewhat quaint and conceited fashion of verse would be excellent. It would also be excellent in burlesque, and in such prose as Browne's it might conquer its place victoriously. But except in such a context (which Sidney cannot weave) it is a rococo ornament, a tawdry beautification. Compare with it any of the celebrated passages of Hooker, which may be found in the extract books – the encomium on law, the admirable passage, not so admirable indeed in the context as it might be but still admirable, about angels, the vindication of music in the church service. Here the expression, even at its warmest, is in no sense poetical, and the flight, as it is called, connects itself with and continues and drops into the ordinary march of argument in the most natural and imperceptible manner. The elevated passages of Hooker's style resemble more than anything else those convenient exploits common, probably, in most persons' dreams, in which the dreamer, without any trouble to himself or any apparent
Apparently = the book's.
