William H. Gass - Baroque Prose — Socrates on the Beach

Excerpt from Baroque Prose — William H. Gass

“It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writings for the piano of Debussy.” Ford Madox Ford. The March of Literature. New York: Dial, 1938, 512.

The year is 1630 or thereabouts. Any Sunday. The cathedral's bells have called The Flock to quorum. Those of us who have been assigned pews will be there to listen to the scriptures as well as all those other sentences that seek to make plain the meaning of The Holy Book. Many words of many kinds will be present nonetheless: spoken, sung, chanted, recited, and in those remarkable spaces, heard. Many of us shall be expected to recognize the linguistic root, or at least the social status, of each one as they appear in their Anglicized guises: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Saxon, French, and a negligible smattering from exotic tongues brought to our shores by merchants and gentlemen pirates who packed away a bit of pidgin amongst the booty they acquired.

Here hymns, chants, sacred words are fed breath from the cathedral's vast store of space—shout it out—and their fattened reverberations diminish the listeners. Yet one can also imagine stretches of discourse lodged on distant pilasters, caught on a curl of stone, unable to return. The sermon should create its own conceptual space, a space made of well-formed words, therefore a space that is spoken to a space, to a voluminous space shaped from the coldest stone: one space deeply welled within another and voiced by a mitered bishop richly gowned who is held aloft for all to hear in the pulpit's sculptured cup.

So in the pews, on an acre of grimly surfaced ground, we listeners wait quietly above a cellar stocked with tombs; and stare upward toward our cloudland paradise where we hope to go, solemn and eager; now with our playbook in our hands, because next to the theater itself, this is the best show in town.

Baroque prose begins as prose prepared to be performed, a prose that responds to occasions and is called forth by them, a prose that is therefore far from book or paper, living, if it lives, in the listeners’ ears. This prose knows that once it reaches print, it will no longer be pronounced, no longer heard, no longer feed its breath, so no longer in being.

…when He [the Deity] would be made knowen to her after his rising, Hee did choose to be made knowen by the eare rather then by the eye. By hearing rather then by appearing. Opens her eares first, and eyes after. … With the Philosophers, hearing is the sense of wisdome. With us, in divinity, it is the sense of faith. (Note 1)

Old Saint Paul's was designed to astonish. Its nave had twelve bays, each large enough to dock a ship, as well as a matching chancel and an enormous transept where the bays of the building crisscrossed according to traditional design. Its spire pierced the sky to four hundred eighty-nine feet. Eventually, weakened by neglect and struck repeatedly by lightning, fire consumed it. Inigo Jones had already defaced the front with a porch more suitable for the pacing of an aspiring Aristotle, and inadvertently symbolizing the competition between classical and Christian sensibilities. (Note 2) New St. Paul’s would be Christopher Wren's masterpiece, and, in feeling, strongly Reformational.

The Puritans thought these previous cathedrals were idolatrous and showy, and treated them with smug destructive rage; but if you toss the chalice of the church into a muddy street; rip the images of its saints from their gilded frames; demolish the organ, topple screens, burn the hymnals, and give to the local yokels the stone and bones of the building for their profane use; your religion will have nothing left but shallow superstition and laughable ideas; because it was not the institutions, but the building, not the doctrines but the bowls, paintings, hangings, and the other trinkets, not the causes the preachers served but the words they used to justify, explain, and celebrate them, that were invaluable. The symbols, the sentiments, the devotions endure: that is why the ceremonies that rely on satins and incense should have continued; that is why the sermons should have been heard, the songs it called for robustly sung, and their church not put to the burn.

Age in anything should be given at least a survivor's respect since every person, animal, or object that has lived for very long on this earth is part martyr, part miracle, part slyboots, and deserves at least the care one devotes to one's hair. Listen well to the cries that come from the least of our condemned books. The paper burns where we have ignited it, yet those flames cannot consume a single verb. The Word is the Word and more ancient than any beard. So are the walls, windows, woodwork, glass, carvings, and art in these miracles of engineering; as is this religion and its clerical divisions; as are the paces it puts us through, for if we lag, others will kneel where we knelt.

Although they set no value on such ceremonies, the Puritans recognized how important these rites were to the recidivists: “Oh how they loathe to part with their Diana's, their Altars, Images, Crucifixes, Coapes, Surplices, and Romish vestments; no (as some of them said), they would rather lose their lives than their organs, so fast they glewed to their Pipes and Popish trinkets.” (Note 3)

We could be sitting among the clustered columns of Exeter's lengthy nave or at Ely, a place, like Canterbury, perfect for pilgrims, or in the great Norman cathedral at Norwich instead of St. Paul's. For five hundred years masons toiled over the stones that turned out to be Norwich, and talked to one another through their mutual materials about its harmonious design; yet it has suffered serious storms, ruinous riots, and Puritan mischief. Norwich's good bishop, during the period that concerns us, was Joseph Hall, another masterful rhetorician, and he gives us this account of the destruction visited upon the prized Norwich organ in a style our specialists now call “loose.”

Lord, what work was here, what clattering of glasses, what beating down of walls, what tearing up of monuments, what pulling down of seates, what wresting out of irons and brass from the windows and graves, what defacing of armes, what demolishing of curious stonework, that had not any representation in the world, but only of the cost of the founder, and skill of the mason, what toting and piping on the destroyed organ pipes, and what a hideous triumph on the market day before all the countrey, when in a kind of sacrilegious and profane procession, all the organ pipes, vestments, both copes and surplices, together with the leaden crosse, which had been newly sawne downe from over the greenyard pulpit, and the service books and singing books that could be had, were carried to the fire in the public market place; a lewd wretch walking before the train, in his cope trailing in the dirt, with a service book in his hand imitating in an impious scorne the tune, and usurping the words of the litany used formerly in the church... and the cathedrall now open on all sides to be filled with muskatiers, wayting for the majors returne, drinking and tobacconing as freely as it had turn'd alehouse. (Note 4)

Preachers of the word of God in almost every version of this Christian faith did not like His world much, and often called it a dunghill when not an anthill; often called themselves and their listeners worms who grew fat on offal or flies that gathered at these piles that were our cities and the objects of our pride; often scorned our amusements and the base routines of daily life, denigrating them as a public service, the better to turn our eyes toward an imaginary paradise, a promised end as insubstantial as the world was at its paradoxical beginning, and returning us to a time when the skies lay in front of God like a flood of empty air.

Before there is a war of weapons there is often a war of words, and the preachers were like the guns placed in defiles and in batteries. Still, when they fired off, as if into a creatureless sky, their invectives and their warnings sometimes cast doubts down upon their own positions. Heresies were encouraged by the simple act of describing them, by the passion with which they were denied, because they sounded, sometimes, more appealing than the anger that opposed them. Worse. The miseries of men were written, as it were, on the walls of their jakes and sties, but these victims of the whims of tyrants—and/or the pox, the plague, the drought, a city's smoky chimneys, wars and other risky ventures, the unpleasantness of prisons, dinners scrounged from previously scraped plates—these dupes weren't aware of the signals sent by their surroundings or any other writings that might have protested their conditions. From both suffering and its depictions, the well-to-do averted their eyes, even when the poets were blunt as a sledge.

My bowells are growne muddy, and mine eyes
Are faint with weeping: and my liver lies
Pour'd out upon the ground, for miserie
That sucking children in the streets doe die. (Note 5)

We know more now and do less. And we well-off worthies, don't we lament the nature of our lives? Even those who are well larded, amply tushed and cushy, are never satisfied. Beyond their gates the starving quietly go about their business of growing thinner than their rags. “Miserable distribution of Mankind, where one halfe lackes meat, and the other stomacke.” The treasures of the porous earth are being spent on making engine noise; while every waterless crack in the land becomes a grave not worth marking, only a hollow where the dead may be hid, packed and compressed so our earth shall seem a smooth sphere, yet flat as it's everywhere felt to be. Closing an eye to the evil that happens to others has always been easy. There has never been a favored time when kindness got the better of us. Instead, do we not attend most diligently to our own well-being, listen to the stethoscope and swallow the pill? For we “are preafflicted, superafflicted with these jelousies and suspitions, and apprehensions of Sicknes, before we can cal it a sicknes; we are not sure we are ill; one hand askes the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our urine, how we do.” (Note 6)

They are ringing the changes. It must be Easter Sunday. Or perhaps Lady Carbery has died, or Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, or merely Sir William Cokayne, Knight, Alderman of London.

John Donne—for we are awaiting him—“never gave his eyes rest,” Isaac Walton tells us, “till he had chosen out a new Text...” After the week's work was done, he would “that night cast his Sermon into a form, and his Text into divisions...” (Note 7) As if magnetized, thoughts would begin to gather around his selection, appropriate images collect, the proper tone be found; and, of course, he might reminisce with his own words, because, on any choice of lines from the Holy Book, he would have spoken his piece twice, thrice, many times already. Kings and princes, ladyships or friends, were having weddings or being buried. Demises begged for an Easter Sunday sort of sermon, consequently his dust-to-dawn themes constantly required fresh variations and old texts new illuminations. Later, when publication was considered, a good deal of polish would be applied, removing, like soil from a shoe, much spontaneity, accident, and improvisation. Reading him now we must imagine dramatic pauses, gestures, sudden changes of posture, a play of facial expressions, extemporaneous additions, and the drama of the whisper and the shout: because this is a performance, and Donne enters in robes. The Anglican Church has cut its ties to Rome but not to ceremony. So there has been an organ to herald him and an organ to bid him goodbye. In between, like unmarked paper, lies that reverential hush, the unified breathing of many, in which he will make known his judgments concerning the words, the wishes, and the enterprises of God.

Theatricality was yet another issue. Even Erasmus had been moved to complain of the popular sermonizers of his day. People got drunk on the spirits of the Lord, and preachers, whose diatribes we can dial up while driving , would brandish a crucifix rigged with red dye so that, at a vital moment in their harangue, Christ's nail wounds might spring leaks. (Note 8) The audience was to be moved (most often from the fear of God not for the love of Him), but was it to be because of the preacher's own "enthusiasms" or because of the power implicit in the words? In time, the theatricality, the showiness, the service's ritual stages and their significance, were mirrored and partly absorbed by the rhetoric.

Rhetoric had pomp aplenty to absorb. In France, for instance, the sermons of another great orator, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, when the occasion was considered deserving, were accompanied by such ceremony as only coronations were customarily afforded. When Bossuet spoke at the funeral for the Prince de Condé in Notre-Dame de Paris:

The whole nave of the cathedral was draped with dark hangings, and richness and colour were supplied by ermine and cloth of gold; bas-reliefs alternated with medallions, commemorating the hero's victories. (Note 9)

The cost for this occasion was 135,000 francs, no mean amount in those days. Condé's liberal spirit in religious and intellectual matters matched Bossuet's, and was shared, elsewhere, by Gottfried Leibniz and Jeremy Taylor too, who had dreams of establishing a harmony among men that would last longer than the harmonies of music. But reason, which was to lead us back to Eden, when applied to most of theology's absurd first principles, merely gave it a merry chase.

The intellectual atmosphere at Chantilly [where Condé retired following his remarkable military career] was tolerant and progressive: Jesuits and Jansenists, Protestants and free-thinkers were made welcome. (Note 10)

Bossuet believed his speechifying (and other equally peace-seeking maneuvers) could lure the Huguenots back to the Catholic Church from which, after all, they had only recently strayed. Taylor had similar hopes for the compromises his Church of England had made with Rome. Both became disillusioned by the stubbornness they encountered, and their liberality weakened as their hearts grew old, wearied, and discontented. The bells may still be ringing as we wait, or perhaps the organ is softly filling the lull.

I do not intend to make the congregation seem more pious and respectful than they customarily were, because, unlike ourselves, they were in the habit of attending church; they came and went like busy pigeons; and they sometimes turned noisy, ill-mannered, got out of hand. In London, at a very popular open-air cathedral called Paul's Cross, preachers with drawing-power might be asked to perform before six thousand, and be forced to endure listeners who often called out objections both to the delivery of the preacher and to the views they were receiving. Then strident outcries would warm the coolest corners. (Note 11)

At this perilous moment in English history, preaching was where the art of prose was being realized, not because the temper of so many was hot and confrontational, though the entire country was quarreling; and not because the sermons created compelling fictions, though that was their actual function; but because they made a music for ideas that had as much resonance as the organ in the organ loft, as much shape, too, as the fugues that issued from those pipes and sustained themselves in the form of echoes, lingering in the lower registers.

At notorious Paul's Cross (1), occasionally in a Lordship's private chapel (2), in St. Paul's more regularly (3), at Lincolns Inne (4), upon a visit to St. Dunstans (5), at White-Hall before the king (6), or even at The Spital (a hospice for the impoverished) (7), John Donne might have been in the pulpit, as he was on April 22, 1622. And he would be saying outrageously wonderful things: “Our God is not out of breath, because he hath blown one tempest, and swallowed a Navy...” He knows, this man Donne, how to seem to say it straight, when his task is the familiar one of bending meaning so that contradictions will appear friendly, if not wholly reconciled. “Our God hath not burnt out his eyes, because he hath looked upon a Train of Powder..” During his opening Donne is establishing, not his subject, or a textual interpretation (he has not reached this point or concluded his message yet); he is not springing an apothegm to satisfy the men or a sweet sentiment to please the ladies; rather he is gathering his ruling image and its materials as though he were a carpenter arriving at an important moment of construction. “In the light of Heaven, and in the darkness of Hell, he sees alike...” Donne's mind is always moving through the middle of a metaphor. “The reward of sin is death.” The words are ordinary enough, straightforward as a jab—”If there remaine no death, there remains no punishment”—until its opponent has been set up, and then Donne's elisions rise from the floor of the sentence like a fist: “And death complicated in its selfe, death wrapped in death; and what is so intricate, so intangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?” (Note 12)

Brevity is not a habit in the baroque, but the above sort of ellipsis is frequent: “And a death that is complicated in itself, a death that is wrapped in death.”

Among the devices of verse, rhyme is perhaps the most likely to seem mechanical, predictable as the metronome, but in prose the words that precede often generate the words to follow, like a bellow its echo, and these matching sounds more accurately resemble the force collected—say—by a drawn bow than by the come-hither beckoning of a pre-established target. Moreover, in poetry, modifiers often lie around as loose as change, so that the reader is at a loss to know into which pocket the pence should go—into Peter’s to pay Paul or into Phil’s to disconcert Eddie; whereas, in prose, number and relation, modification and consignment, are to be connected, balanced, and obeyed, in pursuit of a coherent and completed arrangement: Phil gets the shilling, Eddie the sovereign. In prose, that is to say, there are no sonnet-shaped paragraphs, or predicates as tinned as couplets, into which meaning must be cast like lead for bullets. Prose's plants grow their own pots.

Baroque prose is written as if it were the libretto of an opera; as if it had to compete with an organ; as if it were in a book made of walls; as if it were a hymn sung by a thousand eyes.

Donne will mix dictions freely—Saxon, Latin, Norman, Greek—mix figure and reflection, mix meaning and emotion, and conclude his opening statement with a music made of the sound “end” and of the word “beginning.”

Our God is not out of breath, because he hath blown one tempest, and swallowed a Navy: Our God hath not burnt out his eyes, because he hath looked upon a Train of Powder: In the light of Heaven, and in the darkness of Hell, he sees alike; he sees not onely all Machinations of hands, when things come to action; but all Imaginations of hearts, when they are in their first Consultations; past, and present, and future, distinguish not his Quando; all is one time to him: Mountains and Vallies, Sea and Land, distinguish not his Ubi; all is one place to him: When I begin, says God to Eli, I will make an end; not onely that all Gods purposes shall have their certain end, but that even then, when he begins, he makes an end: from the very beginning, imprints an infallible assurance, that whom he loves, he loves to the end: as a Circle is printed all at once, so his beginning and ending is all one. (Note 13)

Spindle Diagram #1

...past, and present,
and future,
distinguish not his Quando;
all is one time to him: Mountains and Vallies, Sea
and
Land,
distinguish not his Ubi;
all is one place to him: When I begin,
says God to Eli, I will make an end;
not onely that all Gods purposes shall have their certain end,
but that even then,
when he begins,
he makes an end:
from the very beginning,
imprints an infallible assurance,
that whom he loves,
he loves to the end:
as a Circle is printed
all at once, so his beginning and ending
is all one.

Moments later in this sermon, Donne picks up the materials he has introduced in his opening metaphors. Remember the tempest and the train of powder, flood, and fire?

The drowning of the first world, and the repairing that again; the burning of this world, and establishing another in heaven, do not so much strain a mans Reason, as the Creation, a Creation of all out of nothing. For, for the repairing of the world after the Flood, compared to the Creation, it was eight to nothing; eight persons to begin a world upon, then; but in the Creation, none.

Creating from nothing may be impossible, but finding excuses for believing that it could be managed isn't easy either.

Spindle Diagram #2

The drowning of the first world, and the repairing
that again;
the burning of this world, and establishing another in heaven,
do not so much strain
a mans Reason,
as the Creation,
a Creation
of all out of nothing.
For,
for the repairing
of the world after the Flood,
compared
to the Creation,
it was eight to nothing;
eight persons
to begin a world upon, then;
but in the Creation,
none.

And for the glory which we receive in the next world, it is (in some sort) as the stamping of a print upon a Coyn; the metal is there already, a body and a soul to receive glory; but at the Creation, there was no soul to receive glory, no body to receive a soul, no stuff, no matter, to make a body of. The less any thing is, the less we know it; how invisible, how unintelligible a thing then, is this Nothing!

The prose moves forward along a row of ohs and noes by reiterating its subject (received glory), and by repeating the patterns established by successive clauses. For the listeners this relentless redundancy is a blessing. If one's ears cannot fathom one analogy, another will be along shortly.

A Leviathan, a Whale, from a grain of Spawn; an Oke from a buried Akehorn, is a great [gain?]; but a great world from nothing, is a strange improvement. (Note 14)

Donne's doubled “for” (two quotes ago) could cause some concern, the first “for” being the “for” of “because,” and the second “for” the “for” of “good use,” with only a comma between them like a loose brick; however, the passage helps us understand the way the poet unconsciously works; because does he not follow both “fors” with an acknowledgment of the combination (so it is not due to a lapse of attention), and then register his and Noah's enjoyment of the pun? “For, for the repairing of the world after the Flood” and will he then not reiterate his intentions in the next clause, “compared to the Creation, it was eight to nothing...”? Why are the odds eight to nothing? Because Noah and his family, all on board, add up to eight, but also because we had begun with a pair of fours (For, for…). After the flood, it will again be two by two, as the animals descend the gangway.

The audiences for baroque prose admired a quick mind and the courtly flourish; they enjoyed it when their man in the pulpit showed a bit of wit and strut. There is a deep playfulness in this prose, as there is in nature itself. And if you created a pun to amuse God, somewhere a mountaintop would laugh its head off.

Repetition in baroque prose, of which there is also God’s plenty, helps the listener retain a grip on the subject; it also structures the music of the language, another aid to memory; but more profoundly, it places the identical word, or phrase, or structure in various syntactical and semantic positions within the same sentence or paragraph. When I write: “He is the man, the man who can lead us,” I have emphasized the concept through its iteration, but in addition I have transposed a predicate ‘man’ (“He is the—”) into a subject “man” (“the—who”), with help from the following “can,” which casts “man” as its shadow. The difference between writers we should study and admire, and those we may safely ignore, partly lies in their attention to such subtleties.

In those days—bless those days—in those days, the preacher was a critic. He explained texts; he unpacked images; he carved sense out of nonsense; he created his own beauty, and in a way almost blasphemously, worshipped his own words. In his best solemn Sunday voice, he reads aloud a chapter's verse, and though it says what it says, he will expand upon it; he will construe; he will bend it to his will; for the critic does not create from nothing; the critic can only feed upon the produce of the gods who do.

The Puritans were industriously clearing their prose of excessive eloquence. Such flourishings were called idle candles. Their bearers were sick of sermonizing show-offs. Even the use of rhetorical figures in the treatment of a sacred subject invited the charge of heresy. (Note 15) They had forgot or grown tired of talk punctuated by flirty signals from shaken cuffs, by the flutter of a handkerchief, or by the sniff of a pinch of snuff. Owen Felltham's language, while urging "the pleasingly-plaine" style, gives away the connection, in his mind, of rhetoric to social custom: “kemb'd, I wish it, not frizzled, nor curl'd.” The religious wars had required decades of dissembling. Manners were disguises, not so much methods of politeness. Talk had lost all trust. Words provoked riots; they calmed mobs. After a century of service St. Paul’s Cross was dismembered in 1643.

The plain style suited plain people with their plain new middle-class minds, and equally satisfactory, rapidly growing, scientific tastes. Finally—at odds in spirit with every advance in knowledge, yet agreeable to any uniform of asceticism—were the linguistic nationalists who sought to expel foreign influences (Latin, Greek, and French) from common speech, and emphasize the Saxon tongue—its simple brevities and bluntness. Sir John Cheke, nearly a century earlier, had already spoken for the virtues of “our own tung...cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borrowings of other tunges.” (Note 16) One could not help but admire Saxon its muscularity, as if it had gained its strength from field and forge, not court and cloister. Thus, though they were flowing in the same direction, the two streams of opposition to baroque prose muddied one another: the scientific spirit that emphasized clarity and exactness, and a reactionary mood which would return the English tongue to an imagined period of Saxon dominance.

Even in medieval times, the popular sermon was advised to be “simple, rough, and artless, not searching for verbal eloquence but desiring only the spiritual good of [its] hearers.” (Note 17) When passion aids persuasion it will be because of “the speaker's own ardor and from the activity of the Holy Spirit arousing [the listener's] heart and giving efficiency to his words.” This was doubtless wise advice for preachers whose linguistic resources might otherwise be minimal. In any case, the power of the sermon has long since slid from the wit of the word to the antics of its speaker.

The puritans may have favored plain speech, plain dress, and ascetic behavior, but on the way to pulpit purification, while coming to the defense of its certainties, they became fanatical, strident, demonic even, and excessive not in the use of the Lord’s word but in how noisy they became, how loud the word of God. No adornments they roared, no ceremony they shouted, no Popes, no Bishops, no Queens, no Catholic Kings. Robert South could scarcely be heard saying “there is a certain majesty in plainness; as the proclamation of a prince never frisks it in tropes or fine conceits, in numerous and well turned periods, but commands in sober, natural expressions.” (Note 18)

Simplicity and directness are required when an emotional high point is to be reached; then feelings divest themselves of complication and show their sincerity like swords drawn from their sheaths; intensity has one cry, not many; whereas emotions borne forward by the baroque are like water drawn from a deep well, cool, dark, full of earthly flavor; whereupon the feelings that form our moods ruminate, encircle, weigh alternatives, calculate costs, mind their manners, figure their occasion.

At first a quiet if persistent voice, the Royal Society (established by Francis Bacon in 1662 but expressing a point of view that had been sharpening its quill for a generation) campaigned against what was thought to be Aristotle’s evil influence. After all, The Philosopher had written a treatise on rhetoric that dealt with the persuasive powers of oratory and speechmaking, so why not blame him for the Scholastic’s worship of the word? The club of “experimental philosophers” existed for scarcely five years before Thomas Sprat began glorifying it with a History of the Royal Society (1667), and responding to clerical fulsomeness with his condescension.

They were at first, no doubt, an admirable Instrument in the hands of Wise Men: when they were onely employ’d to describe Goodness, Honesty, Obedience; in larger fairer, and more moving Images: to represent Truth, cloth’d with Bodies; and to bring Knowledge back again to our very senses, from whence it was at first deriv’d to our understandings. But now they are generally chang’d to worse uses: They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound, and unadorn’d: they are in open defiance against Reason; professing, not to hold much correspondence with that; but with its Slaves, the Passions: they give the mind a motion too changeable, and bewitching, to consist with right practice. Who can behold, without indignation, how many mists and uncertainties, these specious Tropes and Figures have brought on our Knowledge? … that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d, then this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. (Note 19)

Joseph Glanvill will feel it necessary to defend Sprat’s history the following year by extolling the virtues of that book’s prose despite the general messiness of passages like the one we have just washed our hands of. The list of Sprat’s plusses that he presents us, including the wild use of the semicolon and the bespattering of italicization, is nevertheless baroque by the bushelful, and of good quality too.

…the Style of that Book hath all the properties that can recommend any thing to an ingenious relish: For ‘tis manly, and yet plain; natural and yet not careless: The Epithets are genuine, the Words proper and familiar, the Periods smooth and of middle proportion: It is not broken with ends of Latin, nor impertinent Quotations; nor made harsh by hard words, or needless terms of Art; Not rendered intricate by long Parentheses, nor gaudy by flanting [sic] Metaphors; not tedious by wide fetches and circumferences of Speech, nor dark by too much curtness of Expression: ‘Tis not loose and unjointed, rugged and uneven; but as polite and as fast as Marble; and briefly avoids all the notorious defects, and wants none of the proper ornaments of Language. (Note 20)

So it strangely came to pass that Saxon nationalism, Puritan regulations, and Royal Society empiricism united in a war fought over English grammar, and against Anglican and Recidivist flash and flamboyance, during a period of roughly two generations from 1620 to 1690. Under these pressures the great age of English prose would weaken, and eloquence become an ill art. Upon John Donne’s death, a desperate counterattack was made by one of St. Paul's substitute preachers, the eighteen-year-old Jeremy Taylor.

(My readers will recognize the overdramatization here. But when Dr. Donne tells us, for instance, what Angels know—which angels know this and which angels know that, and why angels know anything—we follow him as we follow the creatures of the theater when they dispute upon the stage... as make-believers who remind us of the real. Angels aren’t in any sense actual, but we want to know all about them nevertheless. What of Shakespeare could surpass the drama of Creation? God made nothing so He might then make everything out of it—a feat that accounts for our own nothingness, not much on the face of it, and the fact that all things fade in front of our eyes: wavy curtains, love’s lights, indomitable enterprise.)

Death and the fear of death would be the subjects most likely to draw the Church’s clients and keep them seated inside their spiritual sphere from one Sabbath to the end of next week.

Baroque prose loves the parenthetical, the marginal, the afterthought, the postscript, which it then inserts into the middle of things like herbs are stirred into a boiling pot. Why does the stroller stroll instead of trot? …why… to look about, to survey, to ponder further, to stop thought long enough to take a good look at it. Oh, yes, and to delay the inevitable end of our journey.

So over and over, the poets and the preachers returned to the subject of mutability: death, and death again, and sometimes birth, because birth was needed if death was to stay in business. Dying was born of living since it was precisely the living who died. Plato had argued so in the Phaedo. Another obsession (which prompted my use of it as an example) concerned how God could create out of Nothing this most palpable world which we nevertheless watch wane as we wane, and dwindle as we dwindle, even our name receding from all memory, returning to Nothing like a lost dog (worse any way you look at it than dust to dust); since God was always God, long before Nothing knew knee pants, before Satan could block our path or lure us from it; therefore God had to have made us out of His own Nature, just as Nothing was made, just as I am trying to make this sentence, spinning it forth to form an idea, as imaginary as a plastic fish; so if Nothing lost its Nothingness, returning to God as living things return to it, then our situation was not half bad after all, better than becoming dust and swirling aimlessly about, only able to excite a sneeze; we would be a part of God again, after having been a part of Nothing for a while, as well as briefly a part of the suffering world, a wanderer and a worshipper, like rain and rivers, recapitulating constantly—come to think of it… come to think of it… what a futile chore.

It shouldn’t delay us long if we briefly remind ourselves how present in most things death was. Families were fruitful if you think of those plants, still fruitful, that die of their own excessive production: ten, twelve children were common as counting. And the ill circumstances of life killed half of them before noontime, the rest died of gout and bad oysters by day’s end. Life began early and ceased soon, so it was no surprise to find Sir Francis Drake half an admiral late into his twenties. It would assist our present-day youths a great deal to be given something important to do, since even the most serious of wars, let alone scads of miscellaneous killing, cannot seem to keep up with our profligate fornications. So there was death for the least reasons: from measles and other migratory germs; death from soot and sewer; death by baby, syphilitic seizure; and by rum and gin and mind-blowing concoctions. Death was arriving every day on the five-o’clock stage in company with its scythe, its skull that proclaimed itself a Memento Mori, its cute cage of ribs, its skinny knock-kneed legs; whilst wadded in the luggage, among the funeral wraps and toeless shoes, were stowed the preacher’s futile promises of immortality.

They had heard it all before, hadn't they? hadn’t this audience in the high-backed benches? Sunday after Sunday, rituals brought to their ears the same exhortations, consolations, reassurances, the same tongue-lashings and threats, the same conundrums that were then amazingly solved, not omitting the customary directions on how their souls might be saved. Still, though they received the gift of harmonious prose, they were not altogether a harmonious lot. The king and his court might grace their private pew (but whose king? which queen?). The preacher's patron could be expected to award the congregation a glimpse of himself behind his bodyguards. He would most likely be a person vital to the orator's hopes for advancement, and someone from whom the preacher could seek protection from their gracious sovereign's ungracious moods, or perhaps even from the Puritans when they chanced to get the upper hand. Inevitably the official lackeys of the Holy Office would be present, carrying like a parcel their ever-suspicious inclinations; or present persons in higher places in the church, higher than even those ledges where the steeple birds sometimes dared to perch. Certainly both parties could be counted on to play spy with all the secrecy of a shout in a closet. Nor dare we omit women of influence who might be patrons too, for they should be expected to attend, parading in their best frocks, accompanied by social climbers by the dozens, diligently working the rows. Then we should expect clusters of students, dreaming themselves in the Dean's pulpit, to take up discreet positions, the younger ones keeping careful notes. Learned fans, town worthies, the usual few plain folk who may really need the preacher's reassurance, can be counted on to be among the regulars; while here and there, indifferently through every class and kind, rest those who can't help nodding off till hellfire restores their attention, because nothing will hold an audience like a good scold. I like to think that most of this devoted gathering returned each Sunday for the music, for exquisite variations on the traditional themes, putting in their pious hymnal hours, comparing preachers as they offered, the way the body of Christ was ritually served up, the same meat each week, but each time with a different sauce—blood as wine, body as biscuit: a serving that Alexander Pope would later carve into a couplet.

Puritans were in a somewhat different quandary. They had not suffered doubt and disillusion in themselves, or appreciated how the decadence of the Roman Church, and consequentialy the decay of its traditional beliefs, often sharpened offenders’ wits and softened strictures. The Lutheran Church, they thought, was new, swept clean of pardoners and scriveners, idle monks and lascivious nuns, conniving cardinals and corrupt Popes. It was worldliness that had ruined the Church. The institution, human from apse to chalice, had simply been around too long, and needed a fresh charge of fanaticism that—in its opposition to the heresies that had multiplied during the recent turbulence—it received.

Along with the plainness in dwelling, in dress, in thought, in mood and demeanor that the Puritans encouraged, there appeared a new rigor concerning rules, those of work as well as of household habit, of social manner and schooling, and these disciplines did not neglect the grammatical, whose observance the Church and court had allowed to weaken along with their morals, and now were to be clarified, tightened, and pursued.

Indeed, for neglect of syntactical propriety, yet also for the expression of sentiment, for mildness, for delight in the play of the mind, for pure eloquence and immortal music, Jeremy Taylor was a beacon. I do not omit, in my rhapsody on rhetoric, the revered example of Sir Thomas Browne (eight years Taylor's senior), who, in terms of the depth to which his prose descended, as well as the heights of which it was capable, has no equal. Milton followed Browne by only two of those full years, a leader of all in scurrilous thunderations, rancorous argument, and methodical seriousness. Later, Alexander Pope would be equally nasty, but he is always admired for it because he was quick, clever, and witty too, even charitable, while Milton remained steadfastly mean, metrical, and humorless.

When Milton addresses the students of one of the public schools only to wipe his brow with the leaves of Scholastic Philosophy, his pages are packed with threats, not examples, with an almost amusing bludgeoning of the “flowery style” by the flowery style.

Nor does a more flowery style uplift from the earth or elevate this nerveless, languid, creeping stuff; but a diction dry and juiceless accompanies in such very close fashion the insignificance of the material that I would certainly believe without difficulty it had been written under gloomy Saturn; unless the harmless simplicity of that age was quite ignorant of those delusions and trifling inconsistencies with which these books everywhere abound. (Note 21)

I shall take a look at Milton’s use of adjectives later on. And adverbs even later.

A promise I shall probably break.

Milton formulates speeches, not sermons, addresses to a defined readership, secular as a rifle, aimed at the Parliament of England, yet including anonymous gentry, “who to states and governors direct their speech, high court of parliament!” who “write what they foresee may be the public good.”

There were other figures, among them the Earl of Clarendon and Thomas Hobbes, who should be slowly savored, but these two, as well as Browne, were not called to the pulpit every week. They wrote sonically driven history and philosophy, essay-length meditations, and each of them was deeply engaged in religious issues, but they did not preach, and therefore did not always have to begin with texts chosen from the good book, already trod upon by multitudes of heavy-footed divines, or feel faithfully constrained to defend positions of absurdity. That is to say, they could choose their own nonsense to rollick with. Browne, for instance, became obsessed with the number five. Five is certainly as deserving of such intense inspection as any of its fellows, excepting perhaps zero, which may not be a number at all, standing as it does for our hollow and friendless parent, Nothing. However, “quincunx” is a rather ungainly word that might be better used for the name of a witch than—to put it baroquely—for a dot on a die, fountain in a square, spot for a sentry.

When Lancelot Andrewes died in 1626, John Donne was entering his enfeeblement, and Owen Felltham's book Resolves (in its first youthful version) was a three-year-old toddler who would mature and prosper through eight fastidiously revised editions. But these gentlemen, one a Bishop and the other the steward of an estate, were harbingers of the plain style, not ashes from the great urn that the baroque would become. Felltham remains obscure while Andrewes regained the limelight for a moment following T. S. Eliot's famous essay on him that appeared in 1926. (Note 22)

Although neither of these writers will furnish me with specimens of the sort of prose that is my subject here, and although I am in full agreement with George Saintsbury's remark that “Bishop Lancelot Andrewes has indeed a bright and reverend name, but it is hardly due to any great accomplishment of style” (Note 23), I have not simply dragged them forth from the shadows to suffer a flogging.

For Eliot, John Donne is the bad brother whose example only helps to exhibit Andrewes's superiority as a person, a parson, and a composer of prose. The good Bishop is not given to excess. His heart is secure and undivided. He “is one of the community of the born spiritual,” Eliot says. (Note 24) About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive; and impure motives lend their aid to a facile success.

He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. (Note 25)

Donne is aware of the divided heart because he has one. He is familiar with a multiplicity of selves because he has them. He must condemn the pleasures of the flesh yet knows them well and remembers them even more vividly than his member. He preaches before the King and understands why he must deliver the sycophant's insincerities along with the clergy's encouragement and cautions. He wishes to be meek, to be modest, to pass invisibly through crowds and trail no glory; but he is proud, powerful, and can move the minds of many men as though they were wicker furniture disarrayed on a summer porch.

Eliot insists that Archbishop Andrewes’s “passion for order in religion is reflected in his passion for order in prose.” (Note 26) Not just Donne but poor Taylor will do badly if they must defend themselves on these grounds. But order, in the context Eliot places it, does not mean “form.” The military parade, when blocks of men pass the reviewing stand, exhibits order, but there is no informing form there, as each man's flight from the other will demonstrate the moment their ears hear "dismissed."

I have now allowed the "Billy Sunday" wisecrack to pass two paragraphs without remark, a sign, I should think, of the discipline Eliot admires. But Eliot is frightened of feelings unless they are a species of lassitude. Like syrup on pancakes, emotion always threatens to slip over the edge—of its stack of wheats, from its fork, off its knife—into impropriety. Nevertheless, in defense of prudence, he can become worked up, and even reach unseemly eloquence, as in the following passage, which I quote at length because here Eliot is at his most persuasive (from my point of view), as well as the most damaging to his case. It opens with a comparison that is exactly what a writer might put in the mouth of an intellectual snob to demonstrate or reaffirm the snob's sense of superiority. It is the activity we associate with a copy editor.

Reading Andrewes on such a theme is like listening to a great Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics: altering the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semicolon to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote contexts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity. To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing—when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation—Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbal.

Complaints of this kind, to whose class I have made my contribution, are almost always on the mark, since obscurantism has been with us since the caves, and shallowness at least since saucers. What really disturbs Eliot is the street-hawked popularity of Freud and the steady erosion of dogma which sees its shore lines disappear under the pounding of scientific and philosophical discourse, even though, like the surf to the shore, science is indifferent to its effects. Eliot is careful not to name his actual opponents—Marxists, Freudians, Positivists, Darwinians—and is guilty of a little tergiversation himself. (Note 27)

In bygone times—bless those bygone times—John Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry, another prelate of whom Eliot was fond, became engaged in a controversy with Thomas Hobbes concerning the freedom of the will (it is! oh no it isn't!), and the relation of the Church to the State (which of them is to be sovereign?). I find Eliot's attitude toward Hobbes... dare I invent a word? ...epiphanal. (Note 28) Eliot writes that “Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into an eminence which they hardly deserved and have never lost.” (Note 29) This dismissal of a man whom many consider (along with Hume) to be the most significant of English philosophers, as well as Eliot's almost intellectually innocent description of Hobbes's epiphenomenalism, suggests that Eliot still feels threatened by the extraordinary little upstart—a classicist who, not only incidentally, could write rings around the divines most prominent on the great poet's docket.

Eliot's animus is pertinent to my present project, which, in a way, it intersects, because his remarks about Hobbes (which continue for several pages) show how his Faith forces him to refuse to travel along another train of thought "just for the ride." Although “we can treat the Authorized translation of the Bible, or the works of Jeremy Taylor, as literature“ (and Eliot admits that they can give considerable pleasure if handled in this manner), “the persons who enjoy these writings solely because of their literary merit are essentially parasites; and we know that parasites, when they become too numerous, are pests... Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”

If we admire, among paintings, an annunciation more than most genres...though we have no Faith; and find it informative to compare rival treatments of Christian themes...though we have no Faith; if we appreciate how a pilgrimage church performs its function...though we have no Faith; if we seek out performances of Bach's B-Minor Mass...but have no Faith; if we read the lives of the saints with our hair on end...but have no Faith; if we revel in the richness and solemnity of High Church rituals...but have no Faith; we are—each of us, in our admirations, our appreciations, our revels—parasites—and the many of us—the millions—pests—while the amalgam of us—the millions—must constitute a pestilence.

And I wonder what sort of vermin those are who stand in awe on the Acropolis, since they probably do not worship Apollo or Athena either, or one of those whom the sublime subdues while they stand among the redwoods, since few Druids seem to be in public practice. We are called parasites, instead of simply “tourists,” I suppose, because we feed on the beauty of things not expressly made for that purpose. We may know all the stories, so nothing in the narrative escapes us, when we stand in San Marco's rooms simply stunned by the beauty of Fra Angelico's frescos, and—yes—by the piety that guided that brush; but the background of these scenes, the devotion of the painter, will resemble a report of music, not the sound of it, the report of a play, not its performance, the report of a feeling, not its touch; so if I were to feel the full impact of a passage from John Donne, I should have to believe in the truth of that passage, in the seriousness of its subject—the nature of angels, the suffering of the damned—and in all that his argument rests upon from the world's first making to its termination. But I don't. I shall have to give Mr. Eliot that. However, I can admire the beauty of Donne's prose and follow with appreciation the way his mind moves with a poet's touch through a point of view that I can sympathetically assume. Donne's own doubts may have enabled him to play a bit, to tango with his tongue, instead of employing it, as Fra Angelico did his brush, to depict the humble sincerity, and the peaceful resignation, of an Annunciation’s crossed hands.

Donne was bound by his time and nature to wonder how this insemination was to be accomplished; why Jesus was not placed immediately into the world; why God sent an Angel and did not Himself appear like Marley's ghost or that of Hamlet's father to confess His responsibility; yes, it was inevitable for Donne to wonder even to what degree Mary might call it rape, or how she proved her virginity afterward without then losing it. He must have seen questions, like ants from a footstep, running in all directions. Fra Angelico simply appreciated the sacred magic of the moment, for the Annunciation was not a story, not an excuse, not a violation, but a holy happening beyond sense or sex or symbolism. Hence the Holy Mother’s sweet modesty, her calm acceptance, the subdued hues, hence the masterful configuration. (Note 30)

Eliot seems to be of the opinion that a state of serene certainty regarding one's beliefs is a positive condition instead of simply a smug one; but it seems to me that Donne, who had been a profligate and become a preacher, who had been a master of verse before being one of prose, had—as the popular song says—“seen the world from both sides" and that this wider perspective might prove to be a virtue.

If the impulses of the painter are integrated and pure, while those of the poet are mixed and sometimes cacophonous, their ensuing work will most likely show signs of a similar serenity or struggle. Nor does the purist always have an advantage, for often the work that emerges is academic, too decorous by half, placid and predictable to the point of boredom, and lacking the boil that steams the pot. Lancelot Andrewes's subjects have passed on, may they rest in peace, but John Donne's (though they often be the same) have been kept alive by the author's art, as restive—well, almost as restive—as they once were, and demonstrating yet again that if poetry is one of the follies of youth, prose is the medal of advancing age. Ironically, the esthetic values of his sermons let us feel the power of these more mature commitments, and their importance to a religious community. (Note 31)

But we must recognize in both artists a shared belief in a divinely appointed way, the one true road: the painter (in this case) knows what it is and knows he is securely on it, while the poet seems always at intersections, complains that the highways are not clearly marked, and fears the hell at the end of most journeys as much as he hopes for heaven at the end of at least one. Whether the problem is what to believe about angels, the right way of life, or the proper practice of their art, both devoted saint and tormented preacher demand a map, both buy a cart, both rent a horse; but only the painter (in this case) sets out with an unharried heart.

There are so many ways to be beautiful. The ways of failure are fewer; they are just more active, more tempting, more frequent—and therefore easy of acceptance—oftener and more loudly applauded, as if they were roads of ensured success; and they do look regal, these roads, paved with conformity, lit with the praise of the people, and enlivened by the approval of their hired critics who bark as pleasantly as pets when another mediocrity rides by.

The pity of it is that inferior work often comes smothered in sincerity and good intentions, and a sometimes masterful work can be brought into being by the love of money, vengeance, apology, or political gain. Too many "authors in the news" hope to create a sensation, if not a work of art; inflict pain on copied and pilloried former partners; excuse their past with a redeeming account of it; or be elevated by praise and prizes to high places. Particularly despicable are those that think their works are licenses to misbehave. We also tend to admire writers for the wrong reasons: they flatter us; they let us in on illicit secrets or treat titillating subjects; they are echoes of our own voices; they soothe, and do not make a fuss; they sell us all sorts of exciting and salacious dreams; they lead us to love ourselves the more for having acceptable thoughts and right opinions.

Whether Andrewes, Donne, Taylor, or Hall were of one mind or many, drawn in the direction of Geneva on one issue, toward Rome or Canterbury by another, there could be no division of opinion about one thing: all roads lead to death, and death could be discussed, perhaps out of fear of it, but not from doubt. As all these gentlemen did, Donne had a strong sense of its equalizing power, and his style, like theirs, rose to the occasion (which once simply meant he got up to speak).

It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equall when it comes. The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. (Note 32)

Spindle Diagram #3

It comes equally
to us all,
and [it] makes us all
equall,
when it comes.

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney,
are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high
or how large that was;
it tels me
not what flocks it sheltered
while it stood,
nor what men it hurt
when it fell.

[Sound knits phrases like not what flocks firmly together, and meaning contrasts stood with fell and sheltered with hurt, to cite a few more binders.]

That death happens is beyond debate, but what happens when it happens is a nest of rubber snakes. Do we collect our bones and wait for resurrection? Do we burst from the ground when the last trump is played, clothed as we were on our baptismal day or ill as we were when on the painful edge of death, or in our prime and decked out in merry inches of rosy flesh? Was there a meeting place where the risen must gather so that runnels even moles might envy would have to be dug from our grave thither, or did we walk the roads on our risen way, or sail through the air like blown clothes, or float like the fluff of dandelions and the cottonwood trees? In what ways were our pets’ deaths different from our own? or from that of any other living thing? Was the body Jesus wore a reflection of Christ or a disguise? was He circumcised? Did death transform us into spirits, release our souls from the prison our bodies had been (as if at our birth we had committed a crime), and were these souls then to be cast into the flames, immediately placed on purgatory's waiting list, or lifted like soaring birds into the stratosphere? Was our fate already determined or was there an accounting to be made? and who among the hierarchy of heaven would decide it? perhaps St. Peter of common belief, but when did the poetry cease so the truth might be urged?

Many of these puzzles were pure fun, and Sir Thomas Browne seems to have been more amused by them than most. Browne approached theology as if it were a shelf of good novels, and asked of it such questions as are appropriate only to a well-appointed fiction, especially when his queries involved the pyramidal number—why David selected five pebbles from the brook as missiles for his sling when he was about to face Goliath, or why starfish favor a five-pointed form. (Note 33) He liked to pretend that God's creation was as full of purpose as a pie in a pub seeking organ meats.

When the prose of any of these writers comes face to face with the one fact we can agree upon: that life cannot win—unless, during its combat, in the very arming for it, and in every blow struck, in every word given by life to death for death to speak it, something lasting is created that even death, on this occasion, cannot kill. After all, what can death say but “I am!” While what life may say is, yes, but I put those words in your mouth, and those words—“I am”—are life itself.

***

1 Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons & Lectures. Edited by Peter McCullough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 241.

2 Paul Johnson. British Cathedrals. New York: William Morrow, 1980, p. 234.

3 Quoted by Frank Livingstone Huntley. Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962, p. 28.

4 Ibid., pp. 28-29.

5 John Donne. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Ed. Charles M. Coffin. New York: Modern Library, 2001, “The Lamentations of Jeremy” Chapter II, stanza 11, p.274.

6 Ibid., p.423.

7 Quoted by Judith H. Anderson. Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance England. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 213-214.

8 Debora K. Shuger. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988, p.64.

9 W.D. Howarth. Life & Letters in France: The 17th Century. New York: Scribner's, 1965, p. 157.

10 Ibid., p. 162.

11 Bryan Crockett. The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 38-39. Robert South asked: Can any tolerable reason be given for those strange new postures used by some in the delivery of the word? Such as shutting the eyes, distorting the face, and speaking through the nose... Quoted by Crockett, p. 13.

12 John Donne. The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne Volume Two. Eds. David Colclough. London: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 400.

13 Coffin, op. cit., 490.

14 Coffin, op. cit., 491.

15 Shuger, op. cit. p. 52. The quote from Felltham that follows is taken from Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945, p.310.

16 Ian A. Gordon. The Movement of English Prose. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1966, p. 74.

17 Shuger, op. cit., 5.

18 Robert South in a sermon, Christ Church, April 30, 1668. Quoted by Robert Foster Jones, The Seventeenth Century. Stanford University: Stanford, California, 1951, 115.

19 Thomas Sprat. History of the Royal Society, 1667. Quoted by Jones, ibid., 85-86.

20 Joseph Glanvill. Plus Ultra. Quoted by Jones. ibid., 88.

21 John Milton. The Student’s Milton, edited by Frank Allen Patterson. Revised Edition. New York, F.S. Crofts & Co., 1947. “Some Oratorical Exercises,” III In the Public Schools, Against the Scholastic Philosophy. 1104-1105, l. 50.

22 For a fine brief treatment of this neglected writer consult Lawrence Stapleton's The Elected Circle. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973, Ch. III, 73-92. Eliot's piece is in his Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950, 299-310.

23 George Saintsbury. A History of English Prose Rhythm. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1965, p.158. The original edition is dated 1912.

24 Eliot, op. cit., p. 303.

25 Ibid., p. 302.

26 Ibid., p. 304.

27 This word is one of Eliot's favorites, and his use of it got him a citation in the Third Webster's Unabridged. He also fancies 'divaricates', nearby at p. 258 of Selected Essays.

28 Just behind Shakespeare and Joyce as a lover of rare words and an inventor of new ones must be placed Sir Thomas Browne who has given us 'hallucination' 'precarious' 'insecurity' and 'literary' among others. Huntley, op. cit., p. 169.

29 Eliot, Selected Essays, op. cit., "John Bramhall," p. 312. Hobbes had an enormous dislike of "the schoolmen" and this may have put Eliot off. Saintsbury says that Hobbes is not merely one of the clearest and most cogent of English writers, but that he has also a strange and, as it were cross-grained magnificence about him—austere and gladiatorial, but undoubted... Op. cit. p. 208. Saintsbury refers to Hobbes' Human Nature as a marvelous miniature masterpiece. P. 210.

30 To the excuse, given by a woman unexpectedly pregnant, that a bath was the child's source and sire, Browne remarks that it was a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance. His reply tells us what his view of the annunciation might be. Quoted by Huntley, op. cit., p. 171. More recently, the important biography by Hugh Alderey-Wiliams.

31 In Austin Warren's essay, "The Very Reverend Dr. John Donne," a propos T. S. Eliot's complaint, he writes that As against the collective and communal voice of the liturgy, we desire to hear from the preacher an individual voice, personally affirming in his own idiom the collective wisdom of the liturgy. But this necessary degree of selfhood Donne does appear to have overpassed. When we praise the coherence and magnificence of the grandiose final sermon, "Death's Duel," we have some regret that it was the prospect of the preacher's own very imminent death which brought him to such heights. Yet, if you remove the sanctimonious deference to the liturgy, it is precisely this individual artistry that saves the day. Sermons have no other legitimacy now. Connections. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970, p. 10.

32 John Donne. LXXX Sermons. 1640. Quoted by Ian Gordon in The Movement of English Prose. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1966, p. 118.

33 For a good discussion of this point as well as Browne's characteristic mix of Latin and Saxon, see Warren as well as Huntley, op. cit.

***

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction and nine books of essays, including Life Sentences, A Temple of Texts, and Tests of Time. Gass was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. For most of his life he lived in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, Mary Henderson Gass. William Gass died in 2017.