Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
from Cicero: like his model Thucydides, who “wrote his storie, not at home in Grece, but abrode in Italie, and therefore smelleth of a certaine outlandish kinde of talke” (66r), Sallust loses the ease and familiarity of the native speaker, holding his mother tongue at an awkward and unmistakable remove.
Cheke offers Sallust as proof of the urgency of choosing one’s models wisely: Plato and Isocrates, “the purest and playnest writers, that euer wrote in any tong,” are the “best examples for any man to follow whether he write, Latin, Italian, French, or English” (66r). But his fanciful vision of Sallust laboring in a North African study with only Cato and Thucydides for company bears a striking resemblance to Ascham’s vision of the ideal English schoolroom, in which scripted interchanges with dead Latin authors take the place of conversation, and the familiar contours of the mother tongue are gradually refashioned to fit the impress of a language now found only in books. The Scholemaster ends shortly after these reflections, with Ascham noting simply that “these … reules, which worthie Master Cheke dyd impart vnto me concernyng Salust,” are to be taken as guides for the “right iudgement of the Latin tong” (67r). His readers are left with the surmise that, as far as the English tongue is concerned, the pedagogy of Cheke and Ascham seems liable to produce not a nation of Ciceros but an island of Sallusts.
As far as we can tell, few English schoolboys were subjected regularly to the rigors of double translation,35 and even fewer, if any, must have learned Latin at the breast, but the ideals of English humanist pedagogical theory nonetheless threatened to alter the course of vernacular usage.36 So argues Richard Mulcaster, master of London’s Merchant Taylors’ School (where his pupils included a young Edmund Spenser) and outspoken critic of humanist efforts to impose classical standards on the mother tongue. Mulcaster was a humanist by training, steeped in the example of classical authors, but he took from his study of antiquity a very different lesson than Elyot or Ascham did: rhetoric and pedagogy are, he concludes, essentially local arts. As he writes in Positions, his 1581 treatise on the education of children, in seeking to fashion England along the lines of Athens or Rome, a schoolmaster may overlook the fact that “the circunstance of the countrie, will not admit that, which he would perswade.” This inattention to local particularities makes the schoolmaster like the biblical parable’s foolish builder who erects his house on sand: “mistaking his ground, [he] misplaceth his building, and hazardeth his credit.”37 The same care, he points out, is required of the orator: it is only by “mastering of the circunstance”—that is, both the rhetorical circumstances of his case and the actual circumstances of the place in which he speaks—that he may effectively instruct and persuade his fellow citizens. Both travel and an undue regard for alien traditions jeopardize such mastery, since they distance the orator from the ground on which his argument must be built. In the very causes he chooses to espouse, Mulcaster writes, an orator reveals the depth of his loyalty to his native land: “by it each countrie discouereth the travellour, when he seeketh to enforce his forreigne conclusions, and clingeth to that countryman, which hath bettered her still, by biding still at home” (9). Excessive devotion to Greek or Latin, he emphasizes, constitutes just such an enforcement of “forreigne conclusions.” Even the most revered ancient authorities must bow to the imperative of local circumstance, for in rhetorical matters, “where circunstance is prescription, it is no proufe, bycause Plato praiseth it, bycause Aristotle alloweth it, bycause Cicero commendes it, bycause Quintilian is acquainted with it … that therfore it is for vs to vse.” “What if our countrey honour it in them,” Mulcaster asks, “and yet for all that may not vse it her selfe, bycause circunstance is her check” (11)?
On this basis Mulcaster makes his radical case for a pedagogy of the mother tongue: an orthography, grammar, rhetoric, and poetics fashioned specifically for English, according to English models and English habits. He challenges fidelity to Latin exemplars as a servile remainder of England’s colonial past: as he reminds readers of his 1582 treatise on English spelling, The First Part of the Elementarie, “[t]he Romane autoritie first planted the Latin among vs here, by force of their conquest,” and “the vse thereof for matters of learning, doth cause it continew, tho the conquest be expired.”38 He reproaches “the opinion of som such of our peple, as desire rather to please themselues with a foren tung, wherewith theie ar acquainted, then to profit their cuntrie, in hir naturall language, where their acquaintance should be” (255); such misplaced allegiance, he argues, grants the classical tongues and the contemporary continental languages an unjust advantage over the English vernacular. “No one tung is more fine then other naturallie,” Mulcaster argues, “but by industrie of the speaker, … [who] endeuoreth himself to garnish it with eloquence, & to enrich it with learning” (254). To claim that rude countries inevitably breed rude tongues is, he continues, to misunderstand the character of eloquence, which thrives in every place such industry is employed; sounding rather like Elyot, he writes that true eloquence is “neither limited to language, nor restrained to soil, whose measur the hole world is” (258). But where Elyot deplores England’s provinciality, blaming its rusticity for the roughness of its speech, Mulcaster proclaims his pride in all aspects of English identity: “I loue Rome, but London better, I fauor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English” (255). Instead of being “pilgrims to learning by lingring about tungs,” he argues, English authors may find “all that gaietie [to] be had at home, which makes vs gase so much at the fine stranger” (256).
To the charge that English is “vncouth,” Mulcaster responds that it is merely “vnused” and must attain praise “thorough purchace, and planting in our tung, which theie [that is, Greeks and Romans] were so desirous to place in theirs” (256–57). His own treatise, devoted to the establishment of rules for pronunciation and spelling in the vernacular, is meant as a mere pretext to such purchase and planting; ultimately, he writes, the English language must cultivate the whole of the art of rhetoric, becoming “enriched so in euerie kinde of argument, and honored so with euerie ornament of eloquence, as she maie vy with the foren.” In pursuit of that enrichment, he cheerfully advocates the adoption of foreign words and phrases, cautioning only that spelling be anglicized: “For if the word it self be english in dede, then is it best in the natural hew, if it be a stranger, & incorporate among vs, let it wear our colors, sith it wil be one of vs” (227). In Mulcaster’s view, England’s relationship to foreign languages ought not to be construed as a choice between alienation and dependence. Instead, he urges, English may partake freely of all other linguistic models while retaining a strong sense of its own local virtues.
Mulcaster admits that England’s geographic insularity and remoteness have contributed to its lack of rhetorical polish; he acknowledges that the vernacular has been treated as if it were “of no compas for ground & autoritie” because “it is of small reatch” and “stretcheth no further then this Iland of ours, naie not there ouer all.” But concerns about England’s isolation and peripherality miss the mark, he argues. The very geography responsible for the vernacular’s modest reach is also the guarantee of its rhetorical sufficiency: “[t]ho it go not beyond sea, it will serue on this side.” In the same way he admits that England’s place in the world is limited—“our state is no Empire to hope to enlarge it by commanding ouer cuntries,” and “no stranger, nor foren nation, bycause of the bounder & shortnesse of our language, wold deal so with vs, as to transport from vs as we do from other”—but this too he regards as a point in its favor: “tho it be neither large in possession, nor in present hope of great encrease, yet where it rules, it can make good lawes, and as fit for our state, as the biggest can for theirs, and oftimes better to, bycause of confusion in greatest gouernments, as most vnwildinesse in grossest bodies” (257).
He concludes by revising England’s history of foreign conquest and colonial subordination, imagining a newly pacific invasion of its borders by strangers who come not to conquer or pillage but to satiate their desire for learning and eloquence. If Latin is the language of England’s colonial past, English is the tongue of its mercantile future: “Why maie not the English wits … in their own tung be in time as well sought to, by foren students for increase of their knowledge,” he wonders, “as our soil is sought to at this same time, by foren merchants, for encrease of their welth?” As yet, he concedes, wisdom and eloquence are not counted