2008-01-16

Mitchell on Adams 04

More from W F Mitchell
... In the same year as he published The Sovles Sicknesse, five other sermons appeared from his hand under the general title of A Divine Herball. In the third of these, ‘The Contemplation of the Herbes,’ he enumerates various herbs and compares them to corresponding virtues, very much as he had previously compared diseases and vices. But, like so many who have tried to portray both virtues and vices, Adams was unable to give to his virtues the life and attractiveness of his vices. Besides, he may have wished to persuade the devout, who, it seems, looked askance at his free use of wit and fancy, that he had not really found pleasure in the lively depicting of sinners apart from his desire to warn men from sin, and have thought that a restrained and modified use of the character manner of writing would best effect the transition back from the purely entertaining to the definitely edifying. The Contemplation of the Herbes may therefore be regarded as Adams’ ‘Characters of Vertues.’ His effort, however, is dull after the parade of the Bedlamites or the ‘witty’ diagnoses of the spiritually diseased, and would not in itself have marked out Adams for mention from a number of earlier divines who essayed this kind of writing.
Apart from his characters Adams’ prose is interesting for its variety - the blending of old and new, the conceited and the rhetorical, with the freer, grander, more poetical, and, ultimately, more beautifully handled style of Bacon and Donne and Taylor. While himself playing no definite part in discarding the old and adopting the newer manner, Adams was keenly alive to the effect to be produced by reverting from time to time to the archaic manner or experimenting with the new. His sermons, in consequence, are a kind of literary workshop of the early seventeenth century, where we may see English prose in the making. Or, perhaps, a slipway might afford the better metaphor. Now and then we see the old rhetorical supports removed and the newly-built vessel ready to take the water; but just then Adams remembers that he is not there to follow the completion and subsequent adventures of his ship, but to turn out as many others as possible; and once again we are aware of the old beams - the age-old rhetorical devices - being called upon to perform their old service and support a fresh message. It was for others to choose the manner English prose should adopt; but it remains to Adams’ credit, as it gives to his work an additional importance, that he should have seen its possibilities, and amid the demands of a spiritual cure in a distracted time have experimented so interestingly with the materials he found to his hand.
All the main rhetorical forms which went to the making of the Euphuistic style, and which Professor Croll has shown in his study of that vogue to represent an attenuated but persistent survival of the Gorgianic or Isocratean figures, which descended to the Elizabethans by way of mediaevaI ecclesiastical prose, are profusely illustrated in Adams’ work. In it it is possible to study the antitheses familiar to students of Lyly in their traditional setting of the sermon, and to note the subtle transition from the old schematic prose to the more direct style of the Jacobeans. Many passages in Adams bristle with such rhetorical comparisons as the following
“... when the Sunne is hottest, the springs are coldest: and the more feruent the loue of God is to vs, the more cold is our charitie to him, and to others for him” [see note 1 below]
or;
“It is written of the Thracian flint, that it burnes with water and is quenched with oyle: fit Embleme of those wicked soules that are the worse for God’s endeauour to better them. But such contrary effects hath the Gospel in contrary natures. As by the heat of the Sun waxe is softned, and yet clay is hardned : so by the preaching of the word the hearts of such as shall be saued are mollified; but the hearts of the lost are further obdurate.” [see note 2 below]
Much in the same way the openings of some of Adams’ sermons consist of a set of Lylyan antitheses used as a kind of definition, in the manner of Bacon in his Essays, each of which sets out with a kind of general statement developed in a series of brief rhetorical parallels. Thus the commencement of Eirenopolis: The Citie of Peace reads
“Peace is the Daughter of Righteousnesse; and the mother of knowledge, the nurse of Arts, and the improuement of all blessings. It is delectable to all that taste it, profitable to them that practise it; to them that look vpon it, amiable; to them that enioy it, a benefit inualuable. The building of Christianity knowes no other materials.” ...
Notes
1. Adams’ sermons are exceptionally rich in examples of paromoion; the following are some of the many examples to be met with in his works: ed. cit., p. 473 "His brain is full of humour, his heart of tumour, his tongue of romour [= rumour]"; ibid., p. 925: “Schola crucis, Schola lucis : there is no such Schoole instructing as the cross inflicting”; ibid., p. 921: “And indeed, if wee consider what Master we have seined, and what wages deserued, we haue just cause to abhorre our selves”; ibid., p. 1002 : “ There is the Diligite of the Heart, Loue your enemies. The Benedicite of the Tongue, Blesse them that curse you. The Benefacite of the Hand, Doe good to them that hate you. Loue your enemies, there is Affectus cordis ; Doe them good, there is Effectus operis; . . .“ The readiness with which this trait follows similar expressions in Latin points back to its origin, or rather the immediate spring of its influence in that language.
2. ‘The Fatall Banket,’ ed. cit., p. 220: the passage opening: “As in a faire Summers morning when the Larke hath called up the Sunne, and the Sunne the Husbandman: when the earth bath opened her Shop of perfumes, and a pleasant wind fannes coolenesse through the ayre; when every creature is reioyced at the heart; On a suddaine, &c’ is one of the finest in the whole range of Adams’ writings.

No comments: