Francis Yates's Review of Joan Webber's "The Eloquent I"

Francis A. Yates, Bacon and the Menace of English Lit, The New York Review of Books, Volume 12, Number 6, March 27, 1969

The Eloquent "I" is also concerned with seventeenth-century prose style. Though purists will be antagonized by the deplorable title and by the author's bullying manner, this book does attempt to tackle the problem of style at a deep level. Joan Webber selects eight authors whom she takes as characteristically "Anglican" or "Puritan" and tries to define their differing attitudes to themselves as writers, and hence to their prose style. The "Anglicans" are Donne, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Traherne; the "Puritans" are Bunyan, Lilburne, Milton; and Richard Baxter is an "Anglican Puritan." The attempt made to relate differences in style to deep levels of the personality where the "'I" faces God and the cosmos through different religious traditions results in some valuable observations.

Joan Webber finds that the seventeenth-century "Anglican" is deeply concerned with man as a microcosm of the universe and hence with cultivating a "cosmic personality." She has no difficulty in finding striking passages in support of this thesis in Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, in Browne's Religio Medici, and in Traherne's Centuries. The Anglican "I," she argues, is wrapped in this contemplative cosmic awareness, which it expresses through elaborate imagery. The Puritan, on the contrary, sees himself not as here and now related to the eternal and the divine, but as journeying through time to eternity. This gives a practical urgency to his awareness of himself and a certain combativeness to his prose style. Milton's prose controversies are, of course, taken as typical of the Puritan "I" as a writer, while the chapter on Donne and Bunyan attempts, through contrasting the totally different styles of these writers, to elucidate the basic differences which the book aims to bring out.
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This book has a certain value as an attempt at tackling a very important problem, the inner, deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century, the vital period for the emergence of modern European and American man. Its best observation is the emphasis on "Puritan" shift, from "Anglican" cosmic consciousness to a "progressive" attitude toward the religious life, and hence to the emergence of a different kind of "I." The book's drawbacks are the arbitrary classification of the writers studied and a good deal of ignorance of the backgrounds of thought on which they drew. It seems curious, for example, to write a chapter on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy without once mentioning the Renaissance revaluation of the melancholy humor (which could well have been worked out according to the "I" theme) and the chapter on Sir Thomas Browne is also very unsatisfactory. The book's rigid classifications do not work for such a mind as Browne's whose whole effort was toward the avoidance of rigidity.../Though Joan Webber is less afraid of being unliterary and tackles larger issues, she too is conditioned by literature, for her book has to be about the emergence of different prose styles, or rather with style as the expression of the "I." This ever-present preoccupation distorts even her good ideas and observations and frequently leads her into painful insensitivity, particularly noticeable in the chapter on Traherne...

For example, why should seventeenth-century "Anglican" prose writers dwell on "cosmic consciousness," on man as microcosm? Should we not ask where in the period this philosophy was expressed as philosophy, and not as literature? There is no mention in Joan Webber's book of the great exponent of macrocosm and microcosm in seventeenth-century England, Robert Fludd; he did not write in English, does not figure as a literary person; therefore English Literature passes him by. The type of cosmic consciousness expressed by the Anglican writers was not a medieval survival but a new Renaissance development of medieval tradition. Francis Bacon knew this when he complained that the ancient opinion that man is a microcosm "hath been fantastically strained by Paracelsus and the alchemists.' Writers like Donne or Browne were Renaissance writers, aware of Renaissance trends from which the literary student must not draw back.

It is, I think, impossible to understand Traherne's writing without some knowledge of the Hermetic tradition by which he was obviously influenced, particularly in his religious and mystical aim of reflecting the universe within. He is also probably aware of Renaissance adaptations of the art of memory for this purpose. The "inner iconoclasm," through which Puritan Ramists attempted to destroy as idolatrous the formation of inner images, should be a basic consideration in any attempt to define the Puritan mentality.

The Puritan-Anglican antithesis itself is in need of new historical evaluation. Too little is known of what Friedrich Heer has called "Die dritte Kraft," the third, or middle, way of reconciliation or toleration pursued in this period of mystical secret societies, by "politiques," and by liberal and inquiring individuals, through which some of the most profound and fruitful tendencies of the age seem to pass undisturbed from one confessional camp to another.

Philip Sidney is a key figure here; he wore a Puritan label but probably had other mysterious affiliations, and certainly overlaps in his style with what Miss Webber would call "Anglican." A concept like Utopia is labeled Puritan by Miss Webber, because of the Utopian planning of the Puritan mind under the Commonwealth. Yet the first Utopia was written by a Catholic, Thomas More; others are by the heretical Catholic, Campanella, and by the "Rosicrucian," Valentin Andreae, not to mention Francis Bacon (to whom Miss Webber omits to apply her rules of thumb). In plotting the course of the history of Utopia one crosses and recrosses the conventional religious frontiers. And indeed the crossing of such frontiers was actually the aim of Utopians.