The Imagery of Roger Ascham

The Imagery of Roger AschamAuthor(s): LINDA BRADLEY SALAMONSource: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 5-23Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754241 .

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LINDA BRADLEY SALAMON

The Imagery of Roger Ascham

Sackville: "Seeing God did so bless you, to make you the scholar of the best master, and also the schoolmaster of the best scholar, that ever were in our time; surely, you should please God, benefit your country, and honest your own name, if you would take the pains to impart to others what you learned of such a master, and how ye taught such a scholar."

Ascham: "Seeing at my death I am not like to leave [my poor children] any great store of living, therefore in my lifetime I thought good to bequeath unto them, in this little book, as in my will and testament, the right way to good learning; which, if they follow, with the fear of God, they shall very well come to sufficiency of living."1

The preface to The Scholemaster of Roger Ascham purports to show the genesis of the work: Sir Richard Sackville heard Ascham expound his views on corporal punishment during dinner at court and later pressed him for detailed opinions, in conversation and then in print, by his support thus becoming onlie begetter of the book. As Ascham recalls the occasion, however, much more than a simple treatise is required. He is to relay all that he has learned from John Cheke and taught to Queen Elizabeth, in short to record his intellectual autobiography. His rejoinder affirms that he regards the work as his personal testament; his "comely furniture of mind" (III, 1 11) is the major property of which he will die possessed. The central achievement of his life is set forth in The Scholemaster, while his earlier works, Toxophilus and A Report of Germany, are equally autobiographical, each in its own way. Ascham's use of the first person and his regular recourse to personal anec- dote-which undercut the transparent fiction of "Toxophilus" as a character-are obvious indications.2 Moreover, the imagery with which he seeks to

1 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols, in 4 parts (London, 1865), HI, 83, 86. All subsequent citations of Ascham, to volume and page of the Giles edition, occur in the text. 2 Toxophilus himself defends the use of personal experience (II, 157). But it is Ascham

who describes his problem with aiming "at Norwich, in the chapel field within the walls" and his ride through the windblown snow on a trodden highway (II, 154-156). Lawrence Ry an, Roger Ascham (Stanford, 1963), pp. 50-53, 78, emphasizes the book's

autobiographical quality by marking it as answer to scholarly objections about Ascham's own devotion to archery, and by judiciously surveying attempts to find a prototype for Philologus. Ryan's thorough book is the source for all biographical details. Texas Studies in Literature and Language XV.l (Spring, 1973)



6 LINDA BRADLEY SALAMON

make his writing vital is more self-revelatory, of mind, of background, and of temperament, than he could have known. We see Roger Ascham in his figurative language, although he barely admits its existence.

Ascham was, at least for part of his life and with part of his mind, a literary scholar. His discussion of "Imitation" in Book II of The Scholemaster includes criticism of several major classical authors through a form of compara- tive literature and reveals a specialist's knowledge and experience in the realms of rhetoric. Diction and syntax-"a true choice and placing of words, a right ordering of sentences"- are his basic concerns, but he quickly moves to expansion and variation, synonyms and antonyms, and before long he reaches decorum. A learned, ripe judgment must distinguish "sublime, et tumidum, grande, et immodicum, . . . humile, et depressum," and so on (III, 185-186); he must recognize the necessary difference in diction and tone between prose and poetry (III, 195); he must employ the elegance of simplicity-the pared and polished, not the overrank and lusty-as the standard by which to measure Latin prose (III, 207, 203). Invention of good matter and confirmation with good reason receive equal support, but far less detail, than stylistic features. A less bellicose Gabriel Harvey, Ascham involves himself in the central literary issues of the sixteenth century, almost invariably on the con- servative side: quantitative vs. rhymed versification, strict Ciceronianism vs. general classical imitation, decorum in genre theory. What Ascham as literary scholar does not do, in The Scholemaster, is theorize about or even mention the use of allusion, metaphor, simile, or any imagery except elaborate allegorical conceit.3

In Toxophilus, however, when the high and hard science of literature is not the subject, a few remarks occur that illuminate the rather pedestrian uses Ascham saw for figurative language, in practice if not in theory. Conversing before Sidney's triumphant Defense, Ascham's two interlocutors agree that the truth of history is much more valuable and trustworthy than the feigning of poets (II, 74, 79), and they repeatedly use Table' as a pejorative term for the imaginative.4 But, they concede, literature can tell the truth covertly: "Oftentimes, under the covering of a fable, [such noble wits as the poets had] do hide and wrap . . . goodly precepts of philosophy, with the true judgment of things" (II, 32). Presenting his theory of history -writing in A 3 Ascham may have regarded metaphor as an aspect of good diction. Last among the six

rhetorical figures with which the young student begins is "notable phrases," and the examples given are "dare verba; abjicere obedientiam" (III, 95). Conscious illustration of an object, concept, or quality by reference to another enters

Ascham's thinking only in his traditional, rather heavy-handed allegorical interpretations of the Odyssey and of Greek gods and Muses. Cyclops, Calypso, and especially Circe are perfect for his depiction of the dangers of Italian travel, while Apollo as patron of both learning and shooting is ideal for his own values (III, 151-155; II, 31-32). 4 II, 74-80, 56. The seriousness of the attack on 'fable' is clear when the fervent Christian Ascham tells of the Turk "having for a fable, God and his high providence" (II, 72).



The Imagery of Roger Ascham 7

Report of Germany, Ascham explains the only reason for such recourse to the fanciful. "The style must be always plain and open, yet sometime higher and lower, as matters do rise and fall: for if proper and natural words ... do lively express the matter ... a man shall think not to be reading, but present in doing of the same" (III, 6). The truth must be told, as vividly and expres- sively as possible; concrete example, allusion, and firsthand experience that create a forcefully lifelike impression are thus allowable. "Comparisons, saith learned men, make plain matters"; "no man can write a thing so earnestly, as when it is spoken with gesture, as learned men do say" (II, 39, 45). Although broader aesthetics concern The Scholemaster only briefly, he too understands the general aim and the best method of achievement. "Imitation is a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example which ye go about to follow. And of itself it is large and wide; for all the works of nature, in a manner, be examples for art to follow" (III, 210)-but it is the proper imitation of pre- vious writers that he proceeds to survey. However, a variety of the works of nature and of man, drawn lively and perfectly, stud the texture of Ascham's own prose in similes; they, not the formal colors of rhetoric, are the hallmark of his characteristic style.

The self-revelatory metaphors that Ascham employs allow classification by number and frequency, by source, by occasion, and by degree of elaboration. Thus, for example, a very frequent simile-so habitual to Ascham's mind that it becomes buried metaphor in phrases like "ripe judgment" and "fruit of that seed"-is the husbandman in field or vineyard. Ascham borrows this horticultural gentleman from Plato and Cicero,5 usually compares him to the teacher of boys or pruner of prose, and dresses him with such detail and variation that he is unique. From this single example several rules of Ascham's metaphorical usage can be deduced. If his figures have a source, it is ancient Athens and Rome in their chaste austerity, not medieval or Tudor London and its courtly conventions. His figures are most frequently employed to express his central concerns: the exercise of mind in reading, teaching, and writing, the exercise of the body in sport, and the exercise of trained mind

5 The development of this metaphor from Plato through Cicero to Ascham is typical. Socrates makes casual mention of manuring tender shoots and pruning vines in the dialogues directly concerned with education: Euthyphro 1, Protagoras 334, Republic 1.333, 352-353; III. 380. He argues vigorously for the value of wise discourse over merely persuasive rhetoric in terms of fruitful husbandry, Phaedrus 276-277 . Cicero uses the image at least a dozen times in the rhetorical pieces, occasionally on a substantial scale: Brutus, iv.16; Orator, xv.48; De Oratore, I.lviii.249. Ascham specifically picks up De Oratore, II.xxi.88 on luxuriant youthful style. But Ascham's uses of the figure are far more frequent and more detailed than Cicero's brief references. He even applies it to Ciceronian doctrine more than does Cicero himself-the schoolmaster says daily writing "breedeth deep root" (III, 175) although Crassus does not {de orat. I. xxxiv. 154-155). That Plato and Cicero are Ascham's major sources is undoubted. Herbert Patterson,

"The Humanism of Roger Ascham," Pedagogical Seminary, 22 (1915), 546-551, has enumerated all the citations of The Scholemaster; Cicero appears 135 times, Plato 59.




and body in civil life. Finally, those figures that he develops farthest beyond their source relate to his own origins in the countryside and in the yeoman/ artisan class. His imagery naturally reflects his vital and intellectual biog- raphy; the clearest window on the man within the discreet Latin secretary is found in the references throughout his work that draw no more upon classical loci than upon the daily things of life and the simple crafts of man.

Ascham's metaphors may be divided into three groups: classical references, Renaissance commonplaces, and personal invention or elaboration. The first two are of course often interchangeable, and the third frequently derives from one of them; the husbandman comes from Cicero, but he occurs in Erasmus and Thomas Elyot, among numerous other humanist writers on education, and Ascham's touch is distinctive.

These young scholars be chosen commonly, as young apples be chosen by children in a fair garden about St. James's tide: a child will choose a sweeting, because it is presently fair and pleasant, and refuse a runnet, because it is then green, hard, and sour; when the one, if it be eaten, doth breed worms and ill humours; the other, if it stand his time, be ordered and kept as it should, is wholesome of itself, and helpeth to the good digestion of other meats. Sweet- ings will receive worms, rot, and die on the tree, and never or seldom come to the gathering for good and lasting store. (Ill, 102)

Ripeness is all. Ascham's most visible metaphors-because frequently attributed or closely

paraphrased- are purely classical. His images for beginning education early, when the child is impressionable, are utterly Socratic.6

"Every man seeth (as I said before) new wax is best for printing, new clay fittest for working, new shorn wool aptest for soon and surest dyeing, new- fresh flesh for good and durable salting." And this similitude is not rude, nor borrowed of the larder-house, but out of his schoolhouse, of whom the wisest of England need not be ashamed to learn. (Ill, 1 16)

Ascham continues by adding young grafts and young whelps from his sources, while salted flesh seems a characteristic embroidery of his own. He admires the result, for a highly similar cluster of images appears earlier in The Scholemaster and in Toxophilus. To express the Platonic notion of seeking perfection he turns again to Socrates: "Such turning of the best into worst, is much like the turning of good wine out of a fair sweet flagon of silver, into a foul musty bottle of leather; or to turn pure gold and silver into foul brass and copper" (HI, 181). The relative value of metals-an important feature of the Republic, IV- also recurs in The Scholemaster (III, 1 15) and duplicates a passage in Toxophilus, applied not to prose exercises but to appropriate

6 Republic 11.377; III.411 ; IV.429 are convenient examples among many. Cicero, more concerned with oratorical training for an adult literate in Latin, is less fulsome.




pastimes (II, 51). But nobody has expressed the cliché of old wine in new bottles more originally. One further image that Ascham borrows and develops from the stable of Plato and Cicero is the tutor as horse-trainer.7 "That colt, which, at the first taking up, needeth little breaking and handling, but is fit and gentle enough for the saddle, seldom or never prove th well. ... A young horse full of courage, with handling and breaking is brought unto a sure pace and going" (II, 110). Material that at first seems intractable often produces the best results. Ascham follows Socrates in applying the horse-breaking conceit to employment of a good master, to corporal punishment, and- through use of 'rein' and 'bridle'- to good discipline. Images in this classical group are always presented as absolute authority, validating the concept they illustrate so securely that they need no greater detail and the concept requires no further exposition. These images are few, but they are full-dress, formal similes, introduced deliberately and rhetorically with careful parallelism and abundant alliteration. When he turns to the auctores who make bonae litte- me, the scholarly Ascham is sure that he has achieved instant conviction.

The second group of Ascham's images includes those that are commonplace in the Renaissance. Their origin is often, if not always, classical, but their appearance in literature has been so continuous and so unacknowledged that the true source is long forgotten.8 To this group, roughly political in reference, belong-in an order of frequency quite predictable from general Renais- sance usage, indeed from Shakespeare- metaphors of the body and its members, of the physician, disease, poison, and medicine, of the painter, the picture, and the mirror, of the ship of state and its captain. All convey notions of self-knowledge and rational self-direction on moral lines, in individual and state, the very essence of any humanist's program.

In Toxophilus, for example, Ascham presents a paradigmatic statement of the relation of human body to state as microcosm to macrocosm.

The tongue, the nose, the hands, and the feet, be no fitter members or instruments for the body of a man, than is shooting for the whole body of the realm. God hath made the parts of men ... to serve, not for the one

7 Used by Cicero primarily to express curbing style or speech, the horse-trainer is especially relevant to education in the Meno 93, the Apology 20 and 25, the Republic 1.335, the charioteer to moral governance in the Phaedrus 246-248 and passim. 8 The example of society as a unified body, cited below, is of course Platonic, and the physician is probably Socrates' favorite instance of the practitioner of a professional function. (Plato's use of the body-member image as analogue to the organic structure of a well-composed argument, Phaedrus 264-266, is particularly germane; moreover, Phaedrus 268-270 specifically compares medicine to oratory- diagnosis must precede prescription, just as knowledge should underlie rhetoric.) The transit through classical and medieval political literature of these and other metaphors is surveyed by Lester K. Born in his useful, lengthy introduction to Erasmus' Education of a Christian Prince (New York, 1936). The most thorough study of the transmutation of these figures, among others, into Renaissance poetry such as Coriolanus may still be Caroline Spur- geon's Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, 1935).



10 LINDA BRADLEY S ALAMON

purpose only, but for many; as the tongue for speaking and tasting; ... the hands for receiving of good things, and for putting of all harmful things from the body. So shooting is an exercise of health, a pastime for honest plea- sure. ... (11,51)

Apart from applying the image to archery, as he does all his best ideas, Ascham's use is unoriginal. Indeed, he adds, "Reason and rulers being like in office (for the one ruleth the body of man, the other ruleth the body of the commonwealth), ought to be like in conditions" (II, 54). The underlying principle, of course, is that the body must be unified, all the parts working together for a common end, just as a sport like archery must at once exercise ,the whole body and relax the mind. Images of the body in The Scholemaster are slightly more interesting. The accompanying letter to Elizabeth opens by praising learning in a prince, for he needs his own and no other man's head, eyes, ears, and tongue; Book I concludes by noting in the young gentleman returned from Italy "a busy head, a factious heart, a talkative tongue" (III, 166). Thus every individual, from highest to lowest, requires a properly functioning body to guarantee the general health. For degree to be main- tained, the reason of aristocrats must be properly instructed; "nobility without virtue and wisdom, is blood indeed, but blood truly without bones and sinews" (III, 123). In Book II, moreover, Ascham looks for physical unity in his own field of grammar and rhetoric. He twice requires not "some one piece and member of eloquence" but the whole body (III, 239, 274).

The class of bodily images is doubled by references to the eyes, vision, and blindness, including Toxophilus's rather confused encomium to the eye as master, father, mother, ruler, tongue, and window (II, 160-161). The Schole- master makes the point more clearly: "For good precepts of learning be the eyes of the mind, to look wisely before a man, which way to go right, and which not"; "for ignorance is nothing else but mere blindness" (III, 136; II, 148). The eye "spies out" the right way and the false, so that only the blind man goes wrong, in shooting and in versification. Blindness, like other physical defects and diseases, requires a physician and medication, and Ascham employs a sizable group of equally ordinary metaphors on that traditional topic as well.9 In fact, for all the commonplace references, such as ship and speculum, that demonstrate the necessity of orderly reason and ordered de-

9 Diet may be included under health, and Ascham liked well enough to use twice the simile that preferring worse to better is "as a man that would feed upon acorns, when he may eat as good cheap the finest white bread" (III, 223; cf. 250). Giles remarks, "The commentators seem very fond of it; Tost fruges inventas vesci glandibus.' " In the Orator, ix.31, Cicero wrote, "Quae est autem in hominibus tanta perversitas, ut in vends frugibus glande vescantur? An victus hominum Atheniensium beneficio excoli potuit, oratio non potuit?" Editor H. M. Hubbell seems sure that "the allusion is to the legend, that the human race lived on acorns until Triptolemus, the favourite of Demeter, sowed grain in Attica," Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 326n.



The Imagery of Roger Ascham 1 1

gree in soul and state, Ascham's use of the body-member metaphor is thoroughly typical. They are not set out formally with authority, they are often repeated unvaried, and illustrative detail is added only rarely. They almost never conjure up actual mental images, but perhaps they need not- Ascham seems to use them as shorthand, for everyone will know what he means.

Virtually the only striking feature in the Renaissance group of Ascham's images is an absence: there can be few Elizabethan writers who think exten- sively about the eye and never mention the ladies. Indeed, common Renais- sance metaphors that Ascham uses not at all, or only briefly, are as noticeable as those to which he habitually turns. The lack of images of light, sun and stars, or fire is made more visible by the four feeble appearances of candle or lantern, usually in a religious context (III, 128; II, 48, 89). The stage can have had little appeal for Ascham, since only three times does he give brief parts to the Davi and Getae, fools and flatterers from the bookish past, or their modern imitators (III, 49, 100, 127). No lions roar and pace in Ascham's pages, no goats and monkeys prance. Some of his animals are borrowed with a pedant's acknowledgment: Cicero's cranes in flight, the bugs of the Psalm, Propertius's goose (II, 128, 50, 125). Some, impressive for their ferocity, are the emblematic beasts that a fervent Protestant sees created by the Circe of Rome: "that fat boar of the wood, or those brawling bulls of Basan, or any lurking dormouse, blind not by nature, but by malice" (III, 205). The only animals that seem fresh and alive in Ascham's pages are those connected with oratory-speaking "like an humble bee" or "roaring like a bull"-or with sport-greyhounds and whelps, geese and cocks (II, 30; III, 103, 138, 225). 10

Similarly, the dozen or more references to wandering upon a path or mount- ing steps without a fall never represent the journey of life or a spiritual journey; rather, Philologus takes the first step on the right pathway to shooting, or the student wanders the wrong way in literature and stumbles into rhymed verse. Even the passage of the seasons as an icon for mutability does not occur to Ascham without a dutiful footnote and careful crafting for his own purposes. And it is notable, that Velleius Paterculus writeth of Tully, "how that the perfection of eloquence did so remain only in him, and in his time . . ." for no perfection is durable. Increase hath a time, and decay likewise; but all perfect ripeness remaineth but a moment; as is plainly seen in fruits, plums, and cherries; but more sensibly in flowers, as roses and such like; and yet as truly in all greater matters (III, 245)

10 Two of Ascham's animal catalogues deserve remark: a tour de force of Homeric interpretation of Circean beasts (III, 153-156), and a splendid list of the nocturnal vermin who infest gambling (II, 41). They are respectively typical of his classical and his original imagery.




-matters like the decadence of post-Ciceronian Latin. If the archetypal Renaissance metaphors cannot be applied to intellectual or physical training, they do not appear.

In Ascham's use of classical simile and Renaissance image, then, no distinct qualities of personality and few of mind are revealed. They show him merely as a man of his time, a scholarly, conventional humanist whose work supplies a locus classicus for contemporary opinions on education and government, expressed in the vein of contemporary learning. To be sure, he was of the type of Cecil, not Sidney; he too was at the court but not of it, as his untroubled passage from Mary's secretaryship to Elizabeth's implies. There are no crowns or cramoisie among his images, no colors and no jewels; the only flower he names is the Tudor rose, the only music the plainsong of the church or the melody of time (II, 29; III, 33). Above all, Ascham will have no

courtly courtesies, no daily dalliers with pleasant words, no smiling and secret countenances, no signs and tokens. However innocent it be, the language of love is blasphemous to Ascham's ears.1 * If his bookish conceits were the total of his imagery, the self-portrait of his works would sketch a dry, lean pedagogue. But they comprise barely half his illustrative references, while those that remain have mirrored for four hundred years the warmth and charm, the

simplicity and sympathy of his personality. When Ascham turns from his classical masters, he demonstrates his descent

not from Wyatt and Surrey but from John Langland. He draws rural England as a fair field of folk from the humbler stations of life, able practitioners of a vast range of household arts and cottage crafts. Cicero's patrician husbandman is replaced by a dirt farmer, wise in the ways of wind and rain. Mer- chants, artisans, and victuallers, along with archers, bowyers, and fletchers, come to stand in Ascham's mind for any job, however lofty, that is well and

decorously done.

For this I am sure, in learning all other matters, nothing is brought to the most profitable use, which is not handled after the most comely fashion. . . . A cook cannot chop his herbs neither quickly nor handsomely, except he keep such a measure with his chopping-knives, as would delight a man both to see him and hear him. Every handcraftman that works best for his own profit, works most seemly to other men's sight. Again, in building a house, in making a ship, every part, the more handsomely they be joined for profit and last, the more comely they be fashioned to every man's sight and eye. (II, 1 37)

No glamorous Cleopatra, but greasy Joan keeling her pot is the imagined lady of Ascham's pages. When he turns to the homely arts, his illustrations appear

1 1 III, 165. The rare appearances of women in his pages prove their vanity with mirrors (II, 152), the blind infatuation of their admirers (II, 25), and their fickleness in marital matters (III, 122). Ascham's acerbity on this subject cannot be unrelated to the fact that his fiancee, scarcely half his age, had been abducted by a younger rival who alleged her compliance. Ryan, pp. 201-202.




in knowledgeable, winning detail; they are individualized rather than repeated unvaried; they represent not abstract emblems but breathing human beings like "the fishermen of Rye, and herring men of Yarmouth, who deserve by common men's opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all"

(III, 260). Above all, they seem spontaneous conjunctions in Ascham's mind that escape his pen almost unbeknown.

In order of ascending frequency, Ascham's metaphorical people include countrymen, sportsmen, and town artisans. When his attention turns from talk of root and fruit, grafting and pruning, his agricultural knowledge is given a local habitation and a name, not vague allusion to Italian arbored slopes. As Toxophilus and Philologus begin discussing the value of exercise, the very ground on which they stand illustrates their theories.

Phi. This I am sure, which thing this fair wheat (God save it) maketh me remember, that those husbandmen which rise earliest and come latest home, and are content to have their dinner and other drinkings brought into the field to them for fear of losing of time, have fatter barns in harvest, than they which will either sleep at noon-time of the day, or else make merry with their neighbours at the ale. And so a scholar that purposeth to be a good husband, and desireth to reap and enjoy much fruit of learning, must till and sow thereafter.

Tox. Contrariwise, ... to omit study some time of the day, and some time of the year, [makes] as much for the increase of learning as to let the land lie some time fallow, maketh for the better increase of corn. This we see, if the land be ploughed every year, the corn cometh thin up: the ear is short, the grain is small, and, when it is brought into the barn and threshed, giveth very evil fall. . . . And thus your husbandry, methinks, is more like the life of a covetous snudge that oft very evil proves, than the labour of a good husband that knoweth well what he doth. (II, 13-14)

They quite evidently know about missed dinners and short-eared harvests, and they connect such matters to learning and recreation with no sense of impropriety. Corn and archery are equally natural in their speech, as they are in England. For as tilling leads to better corn, instruction would improve shooting; as ploughing also roots out thistles, archery lessons will incidentally allure boys from dice and cards; as fruitful and tilled ground must not be left fallow, so natural and well-taught archers must practice or lose their skill.12 The corn field and the archery field are perhaps not an unlikely conjunction, but in The Scholemaster Ascham goes farther afield, applying agriculture to literary scholarship. Gathering commonplaces is "a silly poor kind of study,

1 aII, 84. This particular conceit is based on De Oratore, II.xxx.131 . But Ascham alone explains how wheat sown in fallow ground comes up rye. And on the whole, Cicero's farmers are country gentlemen who speak slightingly of the rustic accent, rustic metaphors, and rustic solecisms (Brut., lxxiv.259; Orator, xxiv. 81 ; de orat., III.xi.4246).




not unlike to the doing of those poor folk, which neither till, nor sow, nor reap themselves, but glean by stealth upon other men's grounds. Such have empty barns for dear years" (III, 200).

What the common farmer is to the land, the simple seaman- no captain of the vessel of state-is on the water, and Ascham finds fit analogy in his special skills as well.

Greater matters than shooting are under the rule and will of the weather, as sailing on the sea. And likewise, as in sailing, the chief point of a good master is to know the tokens of change of weather, the course of the winds, that thereby he may better come to haven: even so the best property of a good shooter. . . . Wise masters, when they cannot win the best haven, they are glad of the next: good shooters also. ... He that will at all adventures use the seas, knowing no more what is to be done in a tempest than in a calm, shall soon become a merchant of eel-skins: so that shooter. . . . (II, 147)

Changing course, pulling down high tops and broad sails, judging a fine sail- cloth-they are clearly more familiar to Ascham than to Cicero, with the Tyrrhenian Sea in view (II, 149, 126). 13 Again, to couple the prudent and weatherwise coastal sailor with the archer may be only logical. But again Ascham finds the riverman appropriate to illustrate the knowledge of The Scholemaster as well.

The cunning of an expert seaman in a fair calm fresh river, doth little differ from the doing of a meaner workman therein; even so, in the short cut of a private letter, . . . small show of difference can appear. But where Tully doth set up his sail of eloquence in some broad deep argument, carried with full tide and wind of his wit and learning; all other may rather stand and look after him, than hope to overtake him, what course soever he hold either in fair or fouL (III, 259)

Ascham can pay no greater compliment to man or vocation than comparison to Cicero and oratory.

What is at issue in all the similes of farmer and sailor is clearly knowledge of natural environs and skilled functioning by means of that knowledge. Whether the environs be book-lined study or well-tilled field seems irrelevant to Ascham; he values Toxophilus's extensive knowledge of wind and water at least as much as his acquaintance with the history of shooting in ancient empires. Ascham patently has seen rivers rise, overflow their banks, and either stand in stagnant pools or abundantly nourish good ground, and he sponta- neously applies his visual memory to the intransigence of Charles V, to present disorder and past papistry in the realm, or to the presence of Nicholas Metcalfe at St. John's (III, 8, 128, 159, 235). Soil and streams and the men

13Cf. De Oratore, I.xxxiii.153; xxxviii.l74-but the prudent captain and the eel-merchant are Ascham's own.




who work upon them-no French forests or Bohemian seacoasts-form the interior landscape of Ascham's mind, and the productive knowledge of any deft Englishman has active worth within it. The record has always shown that Ascham was Yorkshire-born and a loyal Northerner; his figurative language shows that he knew and remembered-more, he felt-country life. He recog- nized as few courtiers could that "the rain it raineth every day."

No evidence of metaphor is needed to show Ascham's interest in sport. In The Scholemaster he admits forthrightly, "It is well known that I both like and love, and have always, and do yet still use all exercises and pastimes that be fit for my nature and ability"- et in saecula saeculorum . . .(Ill, 138). Readers since Camden have been convinced that Ascham loved cockfighting and dicing all too well, that he protests the contrary too much, for "in his attack on gambling in his Toxophilus he shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks of the dice-board."14 Investigation into Ascham's imagery sup- ports such a contention, for his diatribe constitutes the single longest, most detailed figure in all his pages: contrasting personifications of shooting and of gambling, the baseborn monster nursed by idleness and tutored by night and solitude, "which two things be very inn-keepers and receivers of all naughti- ness" (II, 41). But sports and games can safely be used to illustrate other concepts or events, apparently. The pope's political machinations with French king and German emperor include hazarding both the main chance of Parma and the bye chance of Mirandola for "better sport and fresher game"; the father of an undisciplined son is "most like a fond hunter that letteth slip a whelp to the whole herd; twenty to one he shall fall upon a rascal, and let go the fair game" (III, 20-22, 138).

Some sports, moreover, Ascham took very seriously indeed: he not only presented Henry VIII with Toxophilus, but he rather defensively worked on "my book of the Cockpit" (HI, 140). These sports must have been a signifi- cant preoccupation in his life as in his writing, for he consistently applies them metaphorically to scholarship itself, from its simplest to its most exalted aspects. The need to know both Latin and Greek in "the cockpit of learning" is no greater than the need for two wings in the field. "Even the best translation is ... but an evil imped wing to fly withal, or a heavy stump leg of wood to go withal. . . . Such as will needs so fly, may fly at a pie, and catch a daw; and such runners, . . . they come behind others and deserve but the hop-shackles" (III, 225-226). Ascham's use of archery as metaphor is even more formidable. A Platonist in his belief in striving for perfection, he almost reflexively describes the various goals of learning-perfect Latinity, the

14Lewis B. Radford, "Roger Ascham," Quarterly Review, 256 (1931), 102, attributes this remark to Andrew Lang. The notion of Ascham as gambler is entertained by Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, ed. P. Austin Nuttal (London, 1840), III, 430; and by Dr. Johnson, "The Life of Roger Ascham," The English Works of Roger Ascham (London, 1815), p. xxiii. Ryan treats the evidence, pp. 52-53.




example of Cicero, decorum in diction- as marks at which the scholar must aim. Overwhelmingly in The Scholemaster, not alone in Toxophilus, he finds "perfectness of learning; the only mark that good and wise fathers do wish and labour that their children should most busily and carefully shoot at" (III, 120).

Just the opposite of a dry, lean pedagogue, Ascham is profoundly a believer in mens sana in corpore sano. Toxophilus repeatedly sets learning and shooting exactly parallel, forgetting his single qualification that "shooting should be a waiter upon learning, not a mistress over learning" (11,31). Bright students require rest more than the dull, as a "trick and trim" bow needs to be unstrung more than a "lug, slow of cast" (II, 14). A new bow needs trimming like a young man's style, for "very many do write, but after such a fashion as very many do shoof'-there is a whole catalogue of parallel errors (II, 110, 8). Not only the life of the schoolboy but the vocation of a scholar can appropriately be compared to qualities of the archery field. No arrow is fit for every shooter, "no more than you rhetoricians can appoint any one kind of words, of sentences, of figures, fit for every matter" (II, 118). Ascham's fancy soars over university walls to government of the realm. A good bow, like good counsel, is known by the proof, and good counsel dictates-from the opening fable of Toxophilus's preface to the last major digression in the text-that there is a fitness to be followed for every individual nature, every degree, and every nation, just as there is a fit bow for every archer and the English are fit for shooting (II, 106, 4, 149-151). Archery demonstrates the highest principles of order and decorum; "Aristotle himself saith that shooting and virtue be very like" (II, 23). Ascham's fidelity to, as well as his scholarship about, his favorite sport is undoubted. If his metaphorical use of sport to demonstrate his every serious concept seems indecorous on his part, still it set a venerable precedent: the Defense of Poesie opens with an analogy of literature to horse-training.

The largest class of images in Ascham's pages reveals not his loving knowledge of the countryside and its ways, nor the devotion he lavished on sports, but his interested observation, utterly without condescension, of the daily life and work of artisans and merchants. They are his fellow craftsmen, for Ascham seems never to have forgotten that a poet is also a "maker," that Cicero himself named rhetoric a craft (II, 96). His attitude towards diligent, "honest handy-craftsmen" is invariably respectful (Π, 107). "For perfect knowledge bringeth a man to perfect working: this know painters, carvers, tailors, and all other craftsmen, to be true . . ." (II, 94). His allusions to workmen bear less detail than his farming images, and they are much less argumentative than his archery images. The most spontaneous illustrations within the texture of his prose, they may be the least visible.

Ascham's references in this large group include generalized, almost buried




allusions to trade and toil, momentary images of manual laborers such as smith and carter, more numerous conceits about the jeweler or artificer and the workman and his tools, and a very wide spectrum of the trades that serve everyday life- shoemaker, mercer, and their clothes, brewer, cook, and their food.15 The topics to which they refer, however, are virtually constant: learning, and occasionally archery. The Scholemaster presents "the trade of this little lesson," and Cambridge follows "that trade in study" (III, 94, 232). The works on imitation of Macrobius and others may be used "as porters and carriers, deserving like praise, as such men do wages; but only Sturmius is he, out of whom the true survey and whole workmanship is specially to be learned" (III, 230). Toxophilus makes points about shooting by respectful reference to heavy labor, too. Target practice can improve the less able archer, as "a weak smith . . . will, with a lipe and turning of his arm take up a bar of iron, that another man, thrice as strong, cannot stir" (II, 80). Learning, as well as archery, is a difficult endeavor that the scholar must work at, even sweat over.

Since Ascham finds a well-done job of heavy work noteworthy, the value of the more artistic workman is so much the greater. With jewelers and painters for images, he is able to emphasize not the great effort of scholarship but its high order of skill and the beauty of its result. "Even as a fair stone require th to be set in the finest gold, with the best workmanship . . .; even so excellence in learning. . .joined with a comely personage, is a marvelous jewel in the world" (III, 107). Although Ascham thus admires physical beauty, the jeweler does not enter Toxophilus-aicheiy neither requires such delicacy nor produces artifacts of such luster as to deserve the accolade of this important image. In The Scholemaster, too, the allusion is reserved for the truly great: fragments of Menander are "like broken jewels," Erasmus is "the ornament of learning in our time," and "no stone set in gold ... is more worthy the looking on, than this golden sentence . . . wrought by Hesiod" (III, 214, 196). The painter, on the other hand, is not the high artist of Cicero's imagery but a humble copyist in a shop, an artificer "rather to follow another man's pattern than to invent some new shape himself (III, 218). Since he may copy another picture as often as life, Ascham frequently has recourse to this figure in discussing his great topic, imitation.

1 5 To be sure, there is at least one precedent in either Plato or Cicero for almost every vocation that Ascham cites. But Cicero, opposing the stark Attic style and strenuously defending oratory against imputations of sophistry, refers favorably only to high learning and often denigrates simple crafts (e.g., Brut., lxxiii.255; lxxxviii.297). Although Ascham's workmen are highly individualized, the principle behind them is almost cer- tainly Plato's technê, the notion that each man should perform the skill to which he is best suited-from cookery to rule-if the whole state is to function smoothly (e.g., Phaedrus, 268-269 ;Rep., II. 370-374 and passim).




Longolius doth follow Tully; but ... I would not have him the pattern of our Imitation. Indeed, in Longolius's shop be proper and fair showing colours; but as for shape, figure, and natural comeliness, by the judgment of best judging artificers, he is rather allowed as one to be borne withal, than specially commended. (Ill, 224)

The standard for the student who will not be a "mean painter" is absolute fidelity to the model, while for a true master such as Cicero it is subtle variation in color but not in outline (III, 216, 191). But the literary art is always an applied, not a fine art, and skilled workmanship, not original ex- pression, is its métier.

Most makers and shapers have no claim to artistry, just as most students and even scholars do not aspire to the standard of Cicero. A more common and more casual group of figures in Ascham's prose are the images of wood- workers and their tools. Building is the most natural analogy to learning for him, when he refers more than a dozen times to the straight or crooked "framing" of "stuff," to smoothing and planing "not over-thwartly, and against the wood," to breaking or bowing a staff, to trim furnishing (III, 228, 101, 97, 5). A schoolmaster puts his hand to the student, a scholar to para- phrasis, just as "a cunning shipwright shall make a strong ship of a sallow tree" (II, 89). An archer knows that "pieced bows be much like old housen, which be more chargeable to repair than commodious to dwell in" (II, 115). "Fine edge tools" like the awl and the knife, well forged and kept sharp by the whetstone, are required for ambitious scholar and careful teacher (III, 213, 219, 90). Deft precision is essential, lest students' minds be "dulled and made blunt, . . . even as good edges be blunter which men whet upon soft chalk stones" (II, 27). Ascham knows tools and carpentry-not least, he has thorough knowledge of and respect for the bowyer, stringer, and fletcher who serve archery-and he sees their task as essentially comparable to any scholar's. Learning is no inspired, arcane calling but the daily task of a simple man's mind and hands, in active conjunction with stubborn but ultimately tractable materials. Learning is a craft, a labor of love.

Just as the Englishmen whom Ascham chooses for analogies are not courtiers but honest workmen, so the everyday details of food and drink, cloth and clothing that he lets slip include not velvet capes and lark's tongues but buckram and garlic. No lacemaker but the shoemaker at his bench proves that the right youths should be chosen to serve as God's instruments (II, 151). Fashionable frippery does not embroider Ascham's imagery: like a bow, a shoe or coat must fit, not look dazzling; Chaucer is not followed merely by using rhyme, as Thomas More is not imitated "in wearing the gown awry upon the one shoulder," as he did (II, 125; III, 252).16 In dress as in

1 6 The appearance of More is an excellent example of Ascham's application of classical principles to English cases: in the Protagoras, Socrates scoffs at those "who to emulate




prose, the admirable is the suitable and the classically simple; compared to Greek literature, modern learning is "all patched clouts and rags, in comparison of fair woven broad-cloths" (III, 134). A Frenchman named Textor, for example, has written a book that weaves up "riffraff, pelfery, trumpery, baggage, and beggary ware, clamparde up"- without any Greek authorities (II, 73). The cloth that Ascham finds appropriate, the dress in which he is most comfortable, may well be "nothing else but a demi-buckram cassock, plain without plaits, and single without lining," the garb of the clerk (III, 186).

A man who believes in sensible shoes is likely to follow a moderate diet; moreover, simple but nourishing food is an apt simile for the lessons The Scholemaster has to teach. Ascham naturally advocates the full larder-house of a head well stored with knowledge, a style plentiful in eloquence, "for good and choice meats be no more requisite for healthy bodies, than proper and apt words be for good matters" (III, 211). But plenty may not lead to engorgement, in stomach or in style. A rank and full writer should practice epitome, as an overfat and fleshy man should "sojourn abroad ... at the temperate diet of some sober man" (III, 204). Purgation may even be required-take physic, pomp. Honey may please the palate more than milk, but it makes the stomach too "tender and quaisy" for strong meat and wholesome drink, just as soft music spoils mental concentration (II, 27). Shooting is little mentioned in Roman military history, but then bread is not named in feasts, yet "surely, if a feast, being never so great, lacked bread, or had fusty and naughty bread, all the other dainties should be unsavory and little regarded, and then would men talk of the commodity of bread" (II, 66). Diners in Ascham's pages are not so converted to health foods as to abstain from alcohol, but they are careful. They would not drink malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer all at one feast, any more than they sprinkle their prose with outlandish foreign words (II, 7). Drink is definitely suspect: the dregs of society are the papists, the brewer and broacher of strife in Europe is the pope (II, 76; HI, 18-20).

The taste in food and clothes visible in Ascham's imagery is his own, for it is confirmed by his straightforward fervor about Johnny-come-latelies at court who wear every "new disguised garment, or desperate hat, fond in fashion, or garish in colour," and about the Marian reign, when "frugality in diet was privately misliked, town-going to good cheer openly used," and the priest he who "could turn his portresse and pie readily" (III, 127, 236). Perhaps more surprising is his assimilation to his own life of the everyday trades and crafts. But in fact he associates himself, as scholar, with every walk

[Spartans] . . . bind their hands with thongs, take to physical training and wear short cloaks, under the impression that these are the practices which have made the Spartans a ^eat p^wer in Greece" (342bc).




of life he has imagined. He intends in future "to toil in one or other piece of this work of Imitation," in the Latin and Greek that are "easy and fit for my trade in study" (III, 230; II, 2). He promises in A Report "to paint out as truly as I can, by writing, the very image of such persons as have played any notable part," in the cameos that illustrate the text (HI, 36). As he can speak of Terence's stuff, "neatly packed up" in a shop "more finely appointed, and trimlier ordered, than Plautus's is," so he ingenuously admits that he has borrowed from the shop of his friend Sturm, and declares that his schoolmaster teaches as "he doth in London, who, selling silk or cloth unto his friend, doth give him better measure than either his promise or bargain was" (III, 246, 216, 87). Ascham is not only teacher in the school, but its builder: an elaborate conceit in the preface to The Scholemaster mentions the site, the stuff and workmanship, the cost and delays in completing "this my poor schoolhouse" (III, 84). * 7 Nor does he arrogate to himself any special exper- tise. "I ... [have] been many years a prentice to God's true religion, and trust to continue a poor journeyman therein all days of my life, for the duty I owe, and love I bear both to true doctrine and honest living" (III, 158). In the simple and sincere metaphors natural to his mind, Ascham is but a humble worker in the vineyards of Plato, a diffident clerk in Cicero's shop.

The imagery of Roger Ascham, then, illuminates with great singleness of purpose his central concern of learning, occasionally the learning of archery or manners, but usually the learning of good Latin. His characteristic metaphors-as opposed to those that provide classical authentification or Renais- sance shorthand-are drawn with equal single-mindedness from the dailiness of life. When his use of figurative language is placed in the perspective of his time, it is first of all clear that his figures are people, not colors, jewels, or flowers, sun, moon, or planets, nor even animals. They are busy, breathing human beings, moreover, not static portraits; in activity as well as in social origin, Ascham's figures reflect Breughel rather than Holbein. They are, in fact, no idealized outlines but specific Englishmen. Robin Hood and not King Arthur is Toxophilus's hero; "Will Somer the king his fool" and "He we Prophète the king's servant" help illustrate points; the foreign gentlemen of A Report stand forth through their resemblance to "my Lord Marquis of Northampton," "M. Parrie, her grace's cofferer," or Sir Ralph Sadler (II, 31, 39, 139; HI, 32, 40, 54). Ascham's people live largely on the land or in towns, not in city or court, but in any case in English places-Bridewell or Smithfield if appropriate but preferably the country or the North, Newmarket heath, Topcliff-upon-Swale, the land of York and Sutton. The farmer working through the heat of the day in his cornfield, the mercer measuring out broad- cloth over the counter do not make "golden" imagery, but they reveal values

1 7Cf. De Oratore, I.lx.257: ". . . ac stylus ille tuus, quern tu vere dixisti perfectorem dicendi esse ac magistrum, multi sudoris est."




absent in the finer-spun stuff of Spenser and the sonneteers. They are not "drab" but of the earth, earthy; they represent a constant current in English life and in native English literature, from Chaucer at least to Housman. Ascham takes the attitude of Hopkins in "Pied Beauty," praising God for "Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough; / And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim." But his approach is far less mystical than Hopkins's; perhaps he would agree rather with Marianne Moore on "Poetry":

nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and

schoolbooks"; all these phenomena are important.

Ascham demands

on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and that which is on the other hand

genuine.

The smiths and the fletchers with their bread and cheese dinners also reveal to the interested reader the personality of Roger Ascham, who wore his learning so lightly. Together with his typical adjectives-rude and pure, butcherly and beggarly, comely and slippery- and his happy anecdotes about Lady Jane Grey and rides in the snow,1 8 his metaphors show him as a good and curious observer, genial and approachable, a man of simple tastes and of special devotion to the out-of-doors. He displays a quite genuine modesty in his praise for Johannes Sturm and for Sir John Cheke, to whom he was apprenticed, and in his disclaimers about his obviously substantial knowledge of archery equipment. He is incurably bourgeois, not alone in his birth or constant need for patronage; he is actually saving, concerned about spending pennies on bowstrings. "A miserable merchant [he is] that is neither rich nor wise but after some bankrouts. It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience" (III, 136). Ascham is unembarrassed about such admonitions, unself- conscious in describing Moslem-threatened Christendom as a man choosing "to lie in a slumber and scratch himself where it itcheth, even to the hard bone" (II, 72). He must have been endearing- Elizabeth, a woman unlikely to be beguiled, found him so.

If Ascham's figurative language lightly sketches his character, its relation to his central tenets-its status in intellectual autobiography-is less readily apparent. However, not merely the methods of craftsmanship but also its

1 8The morality implicit in Ascham's diction, as well as the self-portrait available in his anecdotes, are mentioned in Thomas M. Greene's graceful appreciative essay, "Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting," ELH, 36 (1969), 609-625.




worth is analogous to that of scholarship; every trade that is well done by the most able man has equal intrinsic value. The task of the teacher and the parent is to determine the most appropriate role for every student, then train him for it.

When [a] sad-natured and hard-witted child is bet from his book, and be- cometh after either student of the common law, or page in the court, or servingman, or bound prentice to a merchant, or to some handicraft, he proveth, in the end, wiser, happier, and many times honester too, than many of these quick wits do by their learning. (Ill, 102)

The easy egalitarianism of Ascham's imagery permeates his thinking. Of course he believes in order and degree in the realm, but his hierarchy verges on meritocracy. The very best minds of whatever origin, and not the dregs of the gentry, should be trained for divinity; experience shows, moreover, that besides the sacraments "other most weighty matters in the commonwealth [are] put oftentimes, and worthily, to learned men's discretion and charge" (II, 151). Conversely, sons of the nobility who laugh at learning, who follow fashion and gambling rather than archery and austerity, who turn themselves into Englishmen Italianate-they are quite rightly relegated to obscurity by meaner men (III, 100, 123, 147).

The Scholemaster constantly refers to Ascham's own experience-from the good effects of praise and the ill effects of memorization to the brilliance of Elizabeth-and the book is addressed not only to noble youths but to any man who will learn Latin at home alone. Toxophilus presents his own experience of bow-frets, of shooters who dance an ticks, of the wayward wind, and he speaks to "all Gentlemen and yomen of Englande." Whoever can profit should learn, and Ascham will teach him; whoever has learned can rise to authority, and Ascham will cheer him. Himself a minor figure in the civil government, Ascham would allow anyone else who labored at the trade of learning a similar eminence. That the educated should govern is the ideal vision of civic humanism, to which Ascham provides a Tudor vade mecum.

And to say all in short, though I lack authority to give counsel, yet I lack not good will to wish, that the youth of England . . . should be by good bringing up so grounded in judgment of learning, so founded in love of honesty, as, when they should be called forth to the execution of great affairs, in service of their prince and country, they might be able to use, and to order all experiences, were they good, were they bad, and that according to the square, rule, and line of wisdom, learning, and virtue. (Ill, 1 38)

The metaphors with which Ascham strives to convince incidentally provide the reader with a window on a Tudor life. "To dwell in ... books of commonplaces, and not ... to read with all diligence principally the hobest Scrip- ture, . . . maketh so many seeming and sun-burnt ministers as we have; whose




learning is gotten in a summer heat, and washed away with a Christmas snow again" (HI, 201). Ascham wore his learning in all seasons.

Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts



Documents

The Imagery of Roger Ascham