THE PLACE OF ALLEN, CAMPION AND PARSONS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH PROSE

Abstract

By DoM HILARY STEUERT In a remarkable article, 'Blessed Thomas More and the Arrest of Humanism in England',I the late Professor J. S. Phillimore made the following suggestion: Let me suggest a theory of the literary history of English for this epoch: namely, that there was a bifurcation: a mainstream dammed, and a new cut opened; and after the new cut had carried off most of the water, the old stream reopened. Dryden is the meeting-point of the two channels. The true mainstream of English tradition in prose was in the line of Parsons, Campion, Allen and the translators of the Douai and Rheims Bible. These are the inheritors of More. But these admirable writings, proscribed and destroyed by the Government of Elizabeth, have remained (such is the obscurantist force of ancient prejudice) unknown not merely to the blinkered schoolboy but even to many professors and students of literature in our time. This remark has been often quoted and the article itself was described by Professor R. W. Chambers as 'brilliant', but so far as the present writer is aware no attempt has yet been made to check or illustrate it. In this article I shall take some representative works of the three writers mentioned above and attempt a provisional evaluation of their quality as prose-writers. Before directly approaching Allen and Parsons it is interesting to note that in 1617, Edmund Bolton, a Recusant related to and in some way protected by the Duke of Buckingham, could remark-apparently without fear of contradiction-that 'a Princely, grave, and flourishing Peice of natural, and exquisite English is Card. Alans Apology said to be: and many have commended the Style and Phrase of Father Rob. Pearsons highly'. This remark occurs in Bolton's Hypercritica, a work designed, he tells us, to furnish'a Rule of Judgment for writing or reading our Histories', and which Anthony Hall, a Protestant antiquary, published at Oxford in 1722 in his edition of the Annals of Nicholas Trivet. More striking still is the tribute paid to Parsons by Swift in The Tatler (No. 230, 17Io). After deploring the neglect of 'Wit, Sense, Humour, and Learning which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer', Swift recommends that Simplicity which is the best and truest Ornament of most Things in Life, which the politer Ages always aimed at in their Buildings and Dress (Simplex munditis) as well as their Productions of Wit. 'Tis manifest, that all new, affected Modes of Speech, whether borrowed from the Court, the Town, or the The Dublin Review, vol. cliii, July 19x3. 272