Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
(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 it is with double translation, for the crucial step of the process, what transforms it from a display of rote repetition or memory to an exercise of eloquence in the making, is the gap that Ascham imposes at its center. Once the child has completed his initial translation, from Latin into English, the master is to “take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin againe, in an other paper booke” (1v, emphasis mine). The hour or more that intervenes between the two Latin versions—Cicero’s original and the child’s imitation—during which the child is left alone with his own English, recapitulates in miniature the infelicitous gap of time, country, and language that divides sixteenth-century England from ancient Rome. What survives that lapse is an inevitably partial reconstruction, akin to “the shadow or figure of the ancient Rhetorique” that Elyot just barely discerns in English legal discourse (56v). Of course the loss of an original perfection is not the only problem: in the schoolroom as in the course of history, errors and barbarisms accumulate in the interval. The child, as Ascham confesses, is likely to “misse, either in forgetting a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence” (1v). As Jeff Dolven suggests, this “meantime” between tongues is “a window of necessary risk” since learning “depend[s] … on the hazards of the middle.”31
But such language is perhaps unduly monitory, for Ascham is surprisingly sanguine about the likelihood of forgetfulness and confusion, urging the teacher not to “froune, or chide with him, if the childe haue done his diligence, and vsed no trewandship therein” (1v–2r). Indeed such errors are what the pause of an hour or more is designed to produce; they are essential to the cultivation of eloquence. “For I know by good experience,” Ascham assures his readers, “that a childe shall take more profit of two fautes, ientlie warned of, then of foure thinges, rightly hitt…. For than, the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him. Tullie would haue vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would haue placed this word here, not there: would haue vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender” (2r).