Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
In this manner, he insists, “nothing can be more conuenient than by litle and litle to trayne and exercise [a child] in spekyng of latyne: infourmyng them to knowe first the names in latine of all thynges that cometh in syghte, and to name all the partes of theyr bodies: and gyuynge them some what that they couete or desyre, in most gentyl maner to teache them to aske it agayne in latine” (18r). Such convenient and gentle exchanges supply the infant with a foreign speech adapted to his own possessions, his own body, his own desires: what the child acquires almost as a matter of course in Elyot’s imaginary nursery is a fully domesticated Latinity, an ease and comfort with the alien tongue that mimics the always already intimate knowledge of native speech. If Englishmen cannot possess Latin as a “maternall tongue,” they may at least adopt it as a nursemaid tongue: any well-born child might come to “use the latin tonge as a familiar langage,” Elyot promises, provided that his familiars, those “seru[ing] him or kepyng hym company,” are all “suche as can speake latine elegantly” (30r–v).
There is an obvious flaw in this plan: where, in sixteenth-century England, are such companions to be found? If, as Lynn Enterline urges, it is time to look more skeptically at the promises made by humanist pedagogical theorists, this far-fetched scheme to entrust the basics of classical instruction to nursemaids and playmates (a plan that arouses Lewis’s particular scorn15) would seem an excellent place to begin.16 Here Elyot’s logic is conspicuously self-defeating: the effort to imagine a way out of the constraints of time and country merely returns the reader to them. After all, as Elyot laments, English parents who shared his enthusiasm for classical learning were hard-pressed to find qualified tutors or schoolmasters, since even men boasting university training often possessed but a “spone full of latine” (61r). The idea of a wet nurse who speaks “pure and elegant latin” to the child at her breast may provide an appealing imaginary contrast to the scant intellectual nourishment afforded in actual English schoolrooms, but it is hardly an “expedient” basis for pedagogical practice.17
The fantasy of the Latin-speaking wet nurse nonetheless proves generative for Elyot, for it supplies him with a conceptual model both for his pedagogical program and for his prose. Both The Governour’s pedagogy and its prose gently enlarge the meaning of supposedly familiar terms, forging increasingly capacious—even far-fetched—boundaries for concepts such as “home,” the “mother tongue,” and “eloquence.” The very absurdity of the idea of a classically fluent wet nurse triggers one such subtle expansion: conscious that no such nurses exist in sixteenth-century England, Elyot quickly amends his suggestion to allow for nurses who, “at the leste way, … speke none englisshe but that which is cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced” (19v). The Latin-speaking wet nurse figures one strategy by which eloquence might be domesticated—through the adoption of Latin as a familiar tongue—but her English replacement figures another: by differentiating the vernacular from itself, creating an incremental critical distance between English speakers and their native speech.18 The Latin-speaking nurse shows how learning might be permitted to encroach on an ideal of domesticity; the English-speaking nurse shows how the vernacular might be permitted to encroach on an ideal of eloquence. If “pure” and “elegant” are not exact synonyms for “clean,” “polite,” and “perfectly and articulately pronounced,” the passage from one set of adjectives to another nonetheless begins to effect a transfer of linguistic standards from a purely classical tradition to its no longer homely counterpart.
The two strategies are not identical—Elyot’s “at the leste way” marks a significant capitulation—but that too is the point. The fact that the Latin-speaking wet nurse is so quickly supplanted by a more attainable ideal does not undo the logic of the original proposal so much as intensify it: surrogacy is the name of the game. As Robert Matz observes, the efficacy of Elyot’s Boke depends on the reader’s willingness to assent to a sequence of necessary but potentially unconvincing analogies: virtue is like dancing, reading like eating, study like leisure, and scholarly achievement like aristocratic honor.19 The same holds true of Elyot’s philosophy of linguistic refinement, which even as it is characterized by its investment in immediacy, intimacy, and ease is distinguished as well by a pragmatic willingness to effect the illusion of those qualities through substitution or approximation. “If not this, then at least that” is the modest mechanism by which one begins to narrow the gap, “by little and little,” as Elyot might say, between eloquence and an infant (which is to say, inarticulate) tongue. Each substitution or similitude repeats the service provided by the imaginary Latin-speaking nursemaid, taking the place of an elusive ideal—approximating but also distancing us from that original fantasy of truly maternal Latinity.
Thus the initial attempt to immerse the infant in Latin from birth yields to an effort to populate his world with companions who speak only pure and elegant Latin, or perhaps clean and polite English, and then to descriptions of exercises and games that provide in a more piecemeal and painstaking way the illusion of familiarity with the classical tongue. Finally the companions fall away, and the conversation becomes purely textual: nursemaids are replaced by books. But here too the pedagogical ideal is an experience of intimacy, familiarity, and proximity—by way of analogy, at least. Virgil’s poetry, Elyot writes, ought to be the first Latin any English child reads because it “so nighe approcheth to the commune daliaunce and maners of children” that nothing “can be more familiar” (32v). According to Elyot, the bucolic landscape of Virgil’s pastorals evokes the child’s own favored haunts, the husbandry of the georgics appeals to his practical instincts, and Aeneas’s escapades satisfy his longing for adventure. Indeed, Elyot insists, “there is nat that affect or desire, wherto any childes fantasie is disposed, but in some of Virgils warkes may be founden matter therto apte and propise.” Virgil thus presents himself as compensation for the impossible fantasy of the Latin-speaking wet nurse, for he “like to a good norise, giueth to a childe, if he wyll take it, euery thinge apte for his witte and capacitie” (34r). This nurselike Virgil is not just a surrogate for the unobtainable actual Latin nursemaid; he is also the stand-in for a more arduous and potentially alienating course of study. Elyot’s ideal classical education begins with Homer, “from whom as a fountaine, proceded all eloquence and learning”—“there is no lesson … to be compared with Homer,” he declares (31v–32r). But finding a comparable lesson proves necessary: Greek is more difficult than Latin, and Homer’s long epics “require therefore a great time to be all lerned and kanned,” so Virgil presents himself as the next best thing, being “most lyke to Homere, and all moste the same Homere in latine” (32v).
Elyot’s term for this miraculous aptness of Virgil’s poetry, its dual kinship both to Homer and to the interests and experiences of the English child, is “eloquence.” And although he insists on the necessity of learning Latin in order to access eloquence where it is most readily found, he insists that eloquence transcends disciplinary and linguistic boundaries, enfolding all other intellectual and cultural achievements. “They be moche abused, that suppose eloquence to be only in wordes or coulours of Rhetorike,” he declares, “for … in an oratour is required to be a heape of all maner of lernyng: whiche of some is called the worlde of science, of other the circle of doctrine, whiche is in one worde of greke Encyclopedia” (48v). Such a vast, indeed global, competence necessarily extends far beyond “the elegant speking of latin”: “latine,” Elyot observes, “is but a naturall speche, and the frute of speche is wyse sentence, whiche is gathered and made of sondry lernynges” (47v). Precisely because it transcends the boundaries of any particular language, eloquence is—paradoxically—accessible to all, inherent “in euery tonge … whereof sentences be so aptly compact that they by a vertue inexplicable do drawe unto them the mindes and consent of the herers” (47v–48r). It is this generous perception of linguistic potential and rhetorical efficacy, of the sameness of eloquence whenever and wherever it is heard—as much as any hopefulness about the hitherto untapped linguistic talents of nursemaids—that sustains Elyot’s vision of an otherwise impossible intimacy with classical antiquity. To read Virgil is to escape the infelicitous constraints of time and country: to traverse a world of learning but to experience it as inexplicably familiar, aptly compact.
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