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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It is not hard to see Alexander Pope's attitude toward the life of his times—and indirectly therefore toward the totality of life in general—couched in the neatly clipped, antithetically framed structure of his couplets, or Coleridge's sense of the harmony of the whole conveyed in the smooth flow of the Ancient Mariner. Critics have always sought in the framework of poetry some harmony with its theme and with the author's philosophy of life central to the theme. But belief in the relationship between views of life and prose style has had a more interrupted life history.
1 De oratore in, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, 1942), 17,19.
2 Ciceronianus,“ in Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero (New York, 1910), p. 129.
3 The Idea of a University (London, 1947), pp. 240–241.
4 Appreciations (London, 1924), pp. 23–24.
5 Atlantic Monthly, CLX (Oct. 1937), 503–512.
6 Understanding Fiction (New York, 1947), p. 324.
7 “Style and Certitude,” ELH, xv (1948), 167–172.
8 Many recent studies of Renaissance prose suggest such relationship. See Morris Croll's series of studies in 17th-century prose; Douglas Bush, English Literature of the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945); and George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951). But no one has made an explicit examination of the philosophy of life and prose style in a given work.
9 Erasmus did not find his friend a narrow “Ciceronian.” See “Ciceronianus,” pp. 103–104.
10 Francis Bacon, “De Augmentis,” Works, ed. Spedding, ix, 123.
11 See particularly “The Dialogue Concerning Tyndale,” The English Works, ii, ed. Campbell (London, 1931), Ch. 23, 85, for More's explanation of the harmony between reason and faith, and the Utopia for the harmony within man himself, the primacy of the spiritual, and the need for the supernatural to complete the natural. R. W. Chambers shares this well known interpretation of the Utopia when he remarks (Thomas More, London, 1935, p. 128) that its root doctrine is “Reason is servant to Faith, not enemy.”
12 Chambers calls Richard III an attack on the “non-moral statecraft of the early Sixteenth Century” (Thomas More, p. 117). Bacon found every wise history “pregnant (as it were) with political precepts and warnings …” (Works, viii, 433). For further examination of his views on history's teaching value, see Leonard F. Dean, “Sir Francis Bacon's Theory of Civil History-Writing,” ELH, viii (1941), 161–183, and Vincent Luciani, “Bacon and Guicciardini,” PMLA, LXIH, 96–113.
13 “The History of Richard the Third,” The English Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. Campbell (London, 1931), i, 451. The deathbed oration is on pp. 404—405.
14 The present study is concerned with the sentence structure of the English Richard III, although whether or not the Latin version is also More's is a related question. It seems reasonable to conclude with R. W. Chambers, “The Authorship of the History of Richard III,” English Works, i, 24–41, and Thomas More, pp. 115–116, that both are More's—the Latin being written for humanists abroad and the English for friends at home. A careful study of the Latin Richard III would be rewarding.
15 C. S. Baldwin uses the term “aggregative” to describe this sentence. See Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (New York, 1939), p. 200.
16 There is actually a philosophy of man also involved in the sentence structure used by More and Bacon. More, in following the traditional period, also follows the traditional view of the harmony within man's faculties. A study of the De Oratore reveals this view in Cicero; a study of the Utopia reveals it in More. Bacon is more suspicious of the faculties of man, devising a system of checks and balances for keeping the affections at peace (Works, ix, 220–224). A rich but functional use of sound figures in Cicero and More parallels their belief that with reason in control man can be trusted to function harmoniously, while the almost total lack of sound figures in Bacon (there are perhaps two examples of alliteration in Henry VII) parallels his distrust of the emotions.
17 Bunyan, e.g., expresses a view of life somewhat similar to More's in a different style. Yet the lack of fullness of joy in him is paralleled by a missing quality in his expression.
18 See Samuel Bethell, The Cidiural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), p. 63.
19 Letters and Life, ed. Spedding, vii, 303. In the question of Henry's being Bacon's hero (Spedding's Preface, Works, xi, 20–32), textual and extra-textual evidence support the conclusion that he is at least presented as a model in the conduct of government.
20 Bacon mentions but does not emphasize Henry's remorse for the excesses of his tax-gatherers. He does not suggest that it mars the king's peace on his deathbed or that Henry feels remorse for his own general policies.
21 “The Baroque Style in Prose,” Studies in English Philology, ed. Malone and Ruud (Minneapolis, 1929), p. 435.
22 The making and breaking of symmetry is characteristic of the anti-Ciceronian sentence, as Croll observes (p. 435).
23 Spedding tells us that where Bacon inserts a speech he alters it or composes it in its entirety. See Works, xi, 116, n. But the Perkin speech, except for the first three sentences, is from Speed and Vergil.
24 The significance of this fact would make a separate study. It could be shown that Bacon's view of reality had much in common with the Stoic view, shared by Seneca and Tacitus.
26 The most penetrating comment on More's style is still Joseph Delcourt's Essai sur la langue de Sir Thomas More (Paris, 1914). A thorough analysis of Bacon's views on the traditional period and his own “insinuating” style is M. B. McNamee's “Bacon's Theory of Literary Decorum,” St. Louis Univ. Studies, i (1950), 1—49.
27 Helen C. White, Ruth C. Wallerstein, and Ricardo Quintana, Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (New York, 1951), i, 19.