“other sorte” or “waye” he will say only that it has fallen into neglect and disrepute—“bycause dyuers men that write, do not know, they can neyther folowe it, bycause of theyr ignorauncie, nor yet will prayse it, for verye arrogauncie”—but it is clear that it must bear little resemblance to Elyot’s own methods.
For Ascham, the infelicities of time and country that have consigned England and English to the cultural and intellectual margins are to be remedied not by a pedagogy that simulates proximity, familiarity, and immediacy but rather by a pedagogy that makes distance, strangeness, and the very passage of time into instruments of instruction. Estrangement may be the root cause of barbarism, but it is also the guarantor of purity: this conviction undergirds The Scholemaster’s fierce objection to the practice of sending English youths to study in Catholic Italy, and it governs the treatise’s pedagogical philosophy no less. The Scholemaster advertises itself as a method of teaching a young boy Latin “with ease and pleasure, and in short time” (1v). But in truth Ascham has little regard for—or confidence in—ease, pleasure, or quickness. He famously prefers “hard” to “quick” wits on the grounds that the former, however resistant to instruction, are liable to retain what they learn, while the latter “commonlie, be apte to take” but “vnapte to keepe,” “more quicke to enter spedelie, than hable to pearse farre,” and “delit[ing] them selues in easie and pleasant studies, … neuer passe farre forward in hie and hard sciences” (4v). That eloquence itself is such a high and hard science follows from Ascham’s insistence that, contrary to Elyot’s notion of it as a universal inheritance, proper to any “natural” tongue, true eloquence is to be found only in the remote and rarefied provinces of antiquity: “[I]n the rudest contrie, and most barbarous mother language, many be found [that] can speake verie wiselie,” he observes, “but in the Greeke and Latin tong, the two onelie learned tonges, we finde always wisdome and eloquence, good matter and good vtterance, neuer or seldom asunder” (46r).
For Ascham, as for Elyot, the rudeness of the English vernacular—its grammatical inconsistency, its inability to replicate the rhythms of classical prose and verse, its impoverished vocabulary and patchwork etymologies—is a natural consequence of England’s own inescapable rusticity, its alienation from Athens and Rome, the wellsprings of learning and eloquence. But in Ascham’s ideal schoolroom the distance between antiquity and modernity, Rome and England, becomes a productive and necessary guard against moral corruption and linguistic vulgarity. To begin with, in direct opposition to Elyot’s promotion of the use of Latin as a familiar tongue—indeed, if possible, as a family tongue—Ascham insists that Latin must not be spoken at all, neither at home nor at school, until students have mastered fully the arts of translation and composition. “In very deede,” he allows, “if children were brought vp, in soch a house, or soch a Schole, where the latin tonge were properlie and perfitlie spoken, as Tib[erius] and Ca[ius] Gracci were brought vp, in their mother Cornelias house, surelie, than the dailie vse of speaking, were the best and readiest waie, to learne the latin tong” (2v). But such homes and such mothers did not exist in sixteenth-century England, as Ascham’s notorious anecdote of Lady Jane Grey, born to parents whose crudity is matched only by their cruelty, makes plain. Indeed when he reflects on the kind of language learning that might plausibly occur in an English home, it is only to offer a cautionary tale: “This last somer,” he recalls, “I was in a Ientlemans house: where a yong childe, somewhat past fower years olde, cold in no wise frame his tonge, to saie, a little shorte grace: and yet he could roundly rap out so manie vgle othes, and those of the newest facion, and some good man of fourscore yeare olde hath neuer hard named before…. This Childe vsing moche the companie of servinge men, and geuing good eare to their taulke, did easily learne, whiche he shall hardlie forget, all daies of his life hereafter” (16v). This recollection exactly inverts Elyot’s fantasy of the child nurtured with ease and companionship into pure Latinity, or even clean and polite vernacularity: here easy learning and a good ear are the agents of moral and linguistic corruption. The best parents can hope for, Ascham suggests, is to preserve their children from the “confounding of companies” (16v): domestic intimacies are imagined strictly in negative terms.
The schoolroom presents a similar challenge, for even in “the best Scholes” the habitual use of poor Latin by masters and schoolboys alike means that “barbariousnesse is bred vp so in yong wittes, as afterward they be, not onelie marde for speaking, but also corrupted in iudgement: as with moch adoe, or neuer at all, they be brought to right frame againe” (2v). Ascham’s own pedagogical precepts work to provide this “right frame”: a space where children’s instinct for imitation—so often, for him, a source of danger—can be put to safe and profitable use. The basic method is simple: Ascham requires the student to translate a passage from Latin or Greek to English and then back again, using the original classical text to correct his own. Through its carefully regulated employment of classical models, such “double translation” remedies the estrangement of rude English from classical eloquence, facilitating exchanges between the learned and unlearned tongues, but it also guards against the dangers of straying too far from the classical precedent, by imposing a calculated retreat from and return to its bounds.
Much as Elyot’s neologistic couplets modeled for readers the enriching effects of intimacy with foreign tongues, Ascham’s distinctive prose mirrors the controlled comparisons on which his pedagogy depends: ideas are worked out by way of “fit similitude” (19r), in cautiously elaborated analogies whose resemblances are expressed in neatly balanced parallel clauses. Thus he writes of the distinction between educated and uneducated noblemen:
The greatest shippe in deede commonlie carieth the greatest burden, but yet alwayes with the greatest ieoperdie, not onelie for the persons and goodes committed vnto it, but euen for the shyppe it selfe, except it be gouerned, with the greater wisedome. But Nobilitie, gouerned by learning and wisedome, is in deede, most like a faire shippe, hauyng tide and winde at will, vnder the reule of a skilfull master: whan contrarie wise, a shippe, caried, yea with the hiest tide & greatest winde, lacking a skilfull master, most commonlie, doth either, sinck it selfe vpon sandes, or breake it selfe vpon rockes. And euen so, how manie haue bene, either drowned in vaine pleasure, or ouerwhelmed by stout wilfulnesse, the histories of England be able to affourde ouer many examples vnto vs. (13v–14r)
“But yet,” “not onelie,” “but euen,” “except,” “but … in deede,” “whan contrarie wise,” “and euen so”: where Elyot might have compressed the comparison into a single suggestive metaphor, Ascham attenuates it over several sentences, parsing the original commonplace formulation—men are like ships—into an ever more precise diagnosis of the difference between virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. Indeed the similitude, a figure of likeness, becomes in Ascham’s hands an instrument for the expression of otherwise elusive distinctions, and the ideal figure for a pedagogical philosophy founded on mistrust of what is close at hand. For as he explains via another similitude:
[T]here be manie faire examples in this Court, for yong Ientlemen to follow…. But they be, like faire markes in the feild, out of a mans reach, to far of, to shote at well. The best and worthiest men, in deede, be somtimes seen, but seldom taulked withall: A yong Ientleman, may somtime knele to their person, smallie vse their companie, for their better instruction. But yong Ientlemen ar faine commonlie to do in the Court, as yong Archers do in the feild: that is take soch markes, as be nie them, although they be neuer so foule to shote at. I meene, they be driuen to kepe companie with the worste: and what force ill companie hath, to corrupt good wittes, the wisest men know best. (14r)
Here again the initial comparison between imitation and archery is revised and revised again, yielding a taxonomy of likeness and difference: fair marks versus foul, far off versus nigh, worthy men versus the worst, seeing versus talking, kneeling versus keeping company, instruction versus corruption. In every case virtue is aligned with remoteness: if archery and seamanship are Ascham’s favored analogies for the work of moral and rhetorical education, that is surely because each case skill increases with distance.
So
