It is not surprising that the “Tullie” who presides over these interlingual exchanges bears no resemblance to Elyot’s nurselike Virgil, who entices the child with sweetly familiar morsels. Instead, Ascham imagines Cicero as an “expert Sea man” who “set[s] vp his saile of eloquence, in some broad deep Argument, [and] caried with full tyde and winde, of his witte and learnyng,” outdistances all rivals, who “may rather stand and looke after him, than hope to ouertake him, what course so euer he hold, either in faire or foule” (63r). Ascham’s method allows the inexpert schoolboy to accompany Cicero on those perilous rhetorical journeys, with the full expectation that he will run off course in the attempt: translation, which Ascham initially champions as an alternative to travel abroad because “learning teacheth safelie” while the traveler is “made cunning by manie shippewrakes” (18r–v), in fact mimics the perils of foreign travel, recuperating the shipwreck as the point of the voyage. We might recall here the fable that introduces Toxophilus, in which a barbarian landlubber is persuaded to give up shipbuilding in order to confront his Greek antagonists on (literally) familiar ground. The Scholemaster offers a less stark take on the folly of meeting an ancient civilization (or its most eloquent exponent) at sea: imitation by way of double translation allows rude and hard-witted schoolboys to set themselves up in direct competition with Cicero and recuperates their inevitable losses as gain.
Ultimately, Ascham allows himself to dream of an England so enriched by such exchanges that even Cicero might prefer it to the nurseries of his own eloquence. Recalling that “Master Tully” once declared of England that “[t] here is not one scruple of siluer in that whole Isle, or any one that knoweth either learning or letter,” he imagines making a triumphant rejoinder: “But now master Cicero, … sixteen hundred yeare after you were dead and gone, it may trewly be sayd, that … your excellent eloquence is as well liked and loued, and as trewlie followed in England at this day, as it is now, or euer was, sence your owne tyme, in any place of Italie, either at Arpinum, where ye were borne, or els at Rome where ye were brought vp” (62r–v). Such a fantasy would seem to answer Elyot’s yearning for perfect intimacy with the past, for an erasure of distance and difference; but, in fact, it is precisely Ascham’s consciousness of his remove from that past, and of England’s inglorious place within it, that gives his fantasy its savor. The sixteen hundred years (and thousands of miles) that separate Ascham’s England from Cicero’s Arpinum or his Rome are here not the source of cultural and linguistic shame but rather evidence of a triumph—the triumph of a pedagogy that turns the “infelicitie of … tyme and countray” into time and space for learning.
Sallust the Exile
In Ascham’s fantasy of an England made eloquent, the natives speak and write in Cicero’s Latin, but he insists that a similar transformation may eventually be effected in the mother tongue. Indeed his first allusion to double translation, Toxophilus’s reference to the “other” method followed by Cicero, comes in a discussion of how best to enrich “the englyshe tongue” (xiv). In addition his gleeful rebuke to Cicero in The Scholemaster is prompted not by the improved Latinity of his countrymen but by their growing skill as vernacular writers. This is as he hopes and expects: the rigorous method of double translation, he writes, is intended “not onelie to serue in the Latin or Greke tong, but also in our own English language. But yet, bicause the prouidence of God hath left vnto vs in no other tong, saue onelie in the Greke and Latin tong, the trew preceptes, and perfite examples of eloquence, therefore must we seeke in the Authors onelie of those two tonges, the trewe Paterne of Eloquence, if in any other mother tongue we looke to attaine, either to perfit vtterance of it our selues, or skilfull iudgement of it in others” (56v). But when Ascham describes the results of that patterning in England, he has less to say about what vernacular writers do well than about what they now (rightly) perceive themselves to do badly: like the boys in his imaginary schoolroom, English authors are learning to “know the difference” between themselves and antiquity (60r). He applauds, therefore, the sentiments behind recent efforts to replace “barbarous and rude Ryming” (60r) with verses modeled on classical quantitative measures, but he is cheered less by results of those experiments than by the knowledge that English writers have, at last and at least, become conscious of their own barbarity: “I rejoice that euen poore England preuented Italie, first in spying out, than in seekying to amend this fault” (62r). That those amendments so far have yielded verses that “rather trotte and hobble, than runne smoothly in our English tong” (60v) is, to his way of thinking, further proof of the virtue of the undertaking itself: those who dissent are lazy homebodies who, for “idleness” or for “ignorance,” “neuer went farder than the schole … of Chaucer at home” (61v)—home, as ever, being the very worst place to take one’s schooling.
Helgerson cites Ascham’s misguided faith in English quantitative measures as an instantiation of a larger truth: “at the historic root of national self-articulation,” he writes, “we find … self-alienation.”33 It is this self-alienating investment in the authority of classical example, he argues, that later Elizabethan writers must learn to overcome in order to fashion English as a truly national tongue.34 But alienation and eloquence are more complexly entwined, both in the sixteenth century and in Cicero’s Rome, as Ascham is fully aware. On the one hand, as he insists, the greatest classical writers became great because of their willingness to depart from common practice: he cites approvingly Cicero’s dictum that by studying at Rhodes, he exchanged the speech he received at home for a better one (though Ascham adds, characteristically, that he doubts that study abroad helped Cicero as much as “binding himself to translate” the great Attic orators [44v]). On the other hand, he acknowledges that those who leave home may struggle to find their way back: thus The Scholemaster concludes with an uneasy meditation on the difference between Cicero and Sallust, each living “whan the Latin tong was full ripe” (63r), each blessed with wisdom and learning, and only one capable of eloquence.
As Ascham recalls, his beloved former tutor John Cheke, whom he credits with the invention of double translation, once cautioned him that it “was not verie fitte for yong men, to learne out of [Sallust], the puritie of the Latin tong,” for “he was not the purest in proprietie of wordes, nor choisest in aptnes of phrases, nor the best in framing of sentences,” and his writing was all too often “neyther plaine for the matter, nor sensible for mens vnderstanding” (64v). When Ascham asks how a well-educated Roman of Cicero’s time should have succumbed to such awkwardness and bad taste, Cheke confesses that he does not know but adds that he has developed a private “fansie.” Sallust’s youth was, he observes, marked by “ryot and lechery,” and it was only “by long experience of the hurt and shame that commeth of mischief” that he was brought to “the loue of studie and learning.” His reward for this conversion of mind and habits was a post as “Pretor in Numidia,” a North African outpost of the empire, “where he [was] absent from his contrie, and not inured with the common talke of Rome, but shut vp in his studie, and bent wholy to reading” (65r). This geographic and scholarly isolation was productive insofar as it yielded Sallust’s great Historiae, Cheke observes, but the voice of the work betrays the stress of its author’s alienation: depending on older authors, especially Cato and Thucydides, for his matter, arrangement, and style, Sallust lapses into archaisms and—when he can find no suitable word for his purposes in Cato or Thucydides—invents new terms wholesale. The worst defect of his style, Cheke continues, is “neyther oldnes nor newnesse of wordes” but the “strange