SOURCE: Müller-Schwefe, Gerhard. “Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices: Notes Toward a Revaluation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14, no. 2 (summer 1972): 235-51.

[In this essay, Muller-Schwefe argues that Hall's opus can be viewed as “a document of his sober judgment of man.” The critic then maintains that Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices is not a mere exercise in abstract moralizing, but rather an astute examination of human nature.]

Much has been done during recent years to make the works of even minor seventeenth-century authors available in reliable editions. Most of Joseph Hall's works, however, have still to be studied in the “new edition revised and corrected, with some additions” which Philip Wynter provided in 1863 and which has been made accessible again in a recent facsimilc reprint.¹ Wynter offered what he thought to be “an accurate and faithful text.” His trust in its authenticity was based on the fact that “several editions, almost all indeed, except those of the present century, had been published in the Author's lifetime,” and that “the errors, whatever they may have been, [were] at once probably discovered and corrected.”² The vast majority of Hall's writings, it is true, were seen through the press by the author himself. But since most of them appeared in more than one edition during Hall's lifetime, the problem of the definitive version poses itself.³ Apart from that, after what Charlton Hinman's Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) has taught us, we are no longer as credulous with respect to the quality of seventeenth-century printed texts as Wynter was.

The arrangement of the Works does not follow the chronological order of their composition, but rather tries to bring together Hall's contributions to the genres and kinds, except for the Latin writings which are collected in the last (tenth) volume. For the chronology of Hall's works the reader may consult T. F. Kinloch's “List of Hall's Works” appended to his Life and Works of Joseph Hall, 1574-1656. Kinloch's list, however, is far from complete and must be supplemented by Harold Fisch's addenda and, for the poems, by Davenport's “Bibliographical Notes.”⁴

Wynter's assurance that early editions of the Works have been collated and readings with “the greatest amount of authority”⁵ have been adopted refers to the edition of Josiah Pratt (1808), whose text he closely followed, and that of Peter Hall (1839). But these could not provide a satisfactory basis for a standard edition of an author whose main importance lies in his naturalizing four genres into English—the formal Satire, the prose Epistle, the Character, and the Meditation. A beginning was made, it is true, as far back as 1937 in Huntington Brown's edition of The Discovery of A New World.⁶ More than a decade later Rudolf Kirk and A. Davenport edited carefully prepared texts of Heaven Upon Earth, Characters of Vertues and Vices, and The Collected Poems.⁷ But to my knowledge nobody has taken the trouble as yet to find out how authoritative the texts of Hall's other major contributions are—namely those of his Epistles and his Meditations, for which we are still dependent on Wynter's edition.

There is no great wealth of source material for a vita of Joseph Hall, D.D., but it does permit a fairly many-sided picture. His Observations of Some Specialities of Divine Providence in the Life of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich. Written With His Own Hand (1646) is not a full autobiographical account of his whole life but rather written sub specie aeternitatis: “Not out of a vain affectation of my own glory, which I know how little it can avail me when I am gone hence, but out of a sincere desire to give glory to my God, whose wonderful providence I have noted in all my ways, have I recorded some remarkable passages of my fore-past life.”⁸ Nevertheless not only “what God has done” for him and which “is worthy of everlasting and thankful memory” has been made the object of Hall's Observations but also the experience of “perfect barbarism,” human frailty and meanness and the self-characterization of a young man of “modesty, piety, good disposition, and other virtues,” who “condescended / to the necessity of a married estate.”⁹ In Hard Measures, Hall gives an account of the most trying period of his long life during which he and twelve other bishops with him were treated like criminals by Parliament and the opponents of the episcopal system and sent to the Tower with all their estates forfeited.¹⁰ Finally Hall and his family were violently expelled from the bishop's palace at Norwich by the enemies of liturgies and episcopacy and he was forced to retire to the little village of Higham near Norwich. Here he spent the last nine years of his life in misery.

These two important autobiographical documents have to be supplemented by rather frequent references to biographical facts scattered through his works. Some material from Hall's private correspondence is included in George Lewis' Life of Joseph Hall (1886), but apart from the letters pertaining to the theological and clerical controversies (reprinted in Wynter's edition, vol. X) other letters have not yet been made available.

No full-length biography has been written since George Lewis. Up to the year 1808 when Josiah Pratt published in ten volumes most of what had fallen from Hall's pen, several portions of the bishop's pious works had been published separately by different individuals, mainly for their devotional character. These were well known and eagerly read. Meanwhile, the emphasis of the interest in Hall has considerably shifted. Whereas the Victorian clergyman-editor Philip Wynter strove to bring “together under the eye of the public everything that could be satisfactorily proved to have been written by the bishop, as tending to illustrate his character”¹¹ since he and his contemporaries were impressed by the prolific divine whose religious and moral qualities were considered exemplary, the student of Hall in the second half of the twentieth century is perhaps more attracted by Hall the man and writer, whose career extended “over perhaps the sixty most eventful years of English literary history, from 1597 [when Thomas Creede printed Hall's Three Bookes of Tooth-Lesse Satires] until his death in 1656.”¹² This new attitude is reflected in all recent studies of Hall's life and works, and they reveal that the bishop seems a figure hardly less controversial today than during his lifetime.

Apart from a few articles concerned with details of Hall's theological and ethical controversies, only two brief accounts of Hall's life have been published within the last twenty-five years which testify to the double interest in the literary figure and the churchman. A. Davenport's indispensable edition of the Collected Poems (1949) is preceded by a brief survey of the poet's earlier life, which draws mainly on George Lewis but makes also use of some contemporary sources. It is condensed to a mere dozen pages and written with the aim of “recording the events of Hall's life only in so far as they illuminate his poems” but since by 1603 Hall “had already ceased to regard himself as a practising poet” the latter part of Hall's biography, after 1617, is condensed to scarcely more than one page for being “of interest to the historian and the churchman, rather than the reader of English poetry.”¹³ T. F. Kinloch, in his survey The Life and Works of Joseph Hall, 1574-1656 devotes seven pages in all to Hall's life. This biography is inadequate for three reasons: first it relies almost entirely on the material of nineteenth-century biographers. In consequence, it is mainly concerned with Hall as a churchman and writer on religious subjects. Hall as a literary figure is unduly neglected. Secondly, Kinloch's vita almost overlooks the last phase, after 1642, when Hall as bishop of Norwich was threatened and insulted, imprisoned in the Tower, expelled from his palace, and forced to spend the rest of his life in a small house he had rented at Higham near Norwich. Thirdly, Kinloch's portrait of Hall is unjustifiably and one-sidedly that of an “out-and-out Calvinist.”¹⁴ In addition, Kinloch detects in Hall a Jekyll-and-Hyde complex and finds “he was determined to make the public believe that he was as ingenuous as he was undoubtedly devout.”¹⁵ So, he concludes, Hall's “character like that of most other men was marred by serious flaws”¹⁶ such as egotism (against his wife), arrogance (against adversaries), and flattery (towards his patrons). Obviously this presents a completely different picture of Hall from the image the nineteenth century had of him.

Naturally biographers are not forbidden to reveal their own sympathies and antipathies provided that the selection of the facts they convey is not governed by their inclination or aversion. Apparently the time is not yet ripe for an unbiased and objective portrait of Hall. In our view, a future biographer, in order to draw a true-to-life picture of Hall, should not fail to take into account the following three items:

First, in the personal sphere, Hall's high appreciation and love of his mother are noteworthy. It does not do justice to this relationship simply to state that Hall, in his leaning toward “the ‘Precisionism’ of Dutchmen like Lodenstein, or the ‘Pietism’ of Germans like Spener and Francke,” was “the true son of his puritanical and somewhat morbid mother.”¹⁷ The more personal ties between mother and son are revealed in his Observations, where he calls her

a woman of that rare sanctity, that, were it not for my interest in nature, I durst say that neither Aleth, the mother of that just honour of Clareval, or Monica, nor any other of those pious matrons anciently famous for devotion, need to disdain her admittance to comparison. She was continually exercised with the affliction of a weak body, and oft of a wounded spirit, the agonies whereof, as she would oft recount with much passion, professing that the greatest bodily sicknesses were but flee-bites to those scorpions; so from them all at last she found an happy and comfortable deliverance.¹⁸

After recounting a dream of hers and interpreting it in terms of spiritual guidance, he adds to this portrait the final realistic touch in saying: “Never any lips have read to me such feeling lectures of piety; neither have I known any soul that more accurately practised them than her own. Temptations, desertions, and spiritual comforts, were her usual theme. Shortly, for I can hardly take off my pen from so exemplary a subject, her life and death were saint-like.”¹⁹ A relation of this kind between son and mother is neither rare nor hard to notice. What raises it above the level of trite psychological analyses is the wonderful combination of a realistic portrait of “so exemplary a subject” and the expression of deep personal attachment. This portrait of his mother, Winifride, reveals Hall's full mastership in character-drawing, which exceeds by far his achievement as a writer of Characters.

Second, it looks as if it were worthwhile studying much more carefully than has been done so far the whole complex sphere of patronage of Sir Robert Drury whose “good opinion and favourable respects” Hall gained after his “wicked detractor,” “a witty and bold atheist, one Mr. Lilly,” had been removed from the scene by the plague.²⁰ It is not only the story of Hall being “forced to buy books” because of the insufficiency of his means while under the patronage of Sir Robert and then being “looked after by some great persons” [viz. Lord Denny, who became his patron in 1607, the Earl of Essex, and Prince Henry, who appointed Hall one of his domestic chaplains] which should be reconsidered in the light of Hall's contributions to the different literary genres but also his relation with John Lilly, John Donne, Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto, and John Milton.²¹ Hall as a literary figure would gain in profile under these aspects.

Third, what has been said about Hall “as an ardent patriot”²² relies mainly for evidence on the panegyric of England in The Kings Prophecie: Or Weeping Joy, a poem of sixty-four stanzas written to welcome King James to the English throne in 1603. Of the “wise Creator” we hear:

For here he ment in late succeeding time,
To seat a second Paradise below.

(ll. 133-134)²³

The praise of England has its climax in the lines:

O Iland more then fortunate and blest.
Heauens chiefest care, Earth's second Paradise,
Wonder of Times, chiefe boast of Natures stile,
Enuy of Nations, president of blisse,
Mistresse of Kingdomes, Monarch of all Iles;
World of this world, & heauen of earth; no lesse
Can serue to shadow out thine happinesse.
Thou art the worlds sole glory, …

(ll. 162-169)²⁴

There are many contemporary documents which make it apparent that Hall's expression of national feelings is not an exception but rather the rule. It has also been pointed out that the national vein in combination with the contempt of foreigners and foreign countries is a traditional element of satirists in the wake of Juvenal.²⁵ But taken together with other utterances of Hall on England and foreign countries²⁶ it cannot be overlooked that Hall's attitude as an Englishman can be defined as reflecting both the national pride that is typical of the learned man during the Renaissance and the self-consciousness of a meditative man who tries to see things and people as they really are.

All of these elements and some others that cannot be mentioned here lead to a much more differentiated picture of Hall the man, the literary figure, the ecclesiastic and theologian. The Rector of Higham John Whitefoot, in his funeral sermon, said of Hall: “Those that were most eminent for learning, he excelled in piety; and those that were most famous for piety, he excelled in learning.”²⁷ But he forgot to mention Hall's deep and all-prevading knowledge of human nature, in which he excelled the learned and the pious. As a matter of fact, almost every single line he wrote, whether satire or sermon, epistle or meditation, is a document of his sober judgment of man. This is particularly true of his often praised and seldom read Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608).

The bibliographical history of Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices and its textual problems have been described by Rudolf Kirk.²⁸ The book was licensed under the date of March 7, 1608,²⁹ and printed in the same year in two octavo editions, which were practically identical as far as the text is concerned but show some differences with regard to the arrangement of the title pages, punctuation, capitalization and lower-case letters, and misprints. There is enough evidence that the edition which has the word Bul-head on the title page (0₁) is earlier than the edition with the word shops on the title page (0₂). Kirk concludes convincingly that only the author himself would make the careful and discriminating changes from 0₁ to 0₂, the details of which he points out.³⁰

The Characters were reprinted in all the editions of Hall's works beginning with the folio of 1614, which reprinted the text of 0₁. Later folios underwent many corrections exceeding those in the text of 0₂.³¹ Though the numerous editions of Hall's works (1625, 1628, 1634, 1647, 1808, 1837, 1863) contain the text of the Characters, no single reprint of them seems to have been made during the seventeenth century. Some students take this as evidence for the lack of influence of Hall's Characters.

Although the first English character-book initiated a new literary genre which was to be one of the foster children of the seventeenth century in England, many critics sit in judgment of Hall's achievement, find in his Characters little more than an imitation of Theophrastus, and blame him for his abstract, moralizing way of presenting characters as mere “bloodless rhetorical exercises.”³² These “first genuinely Theophrastan characters”³³ seem to be limited to describing types, whereas his followers had all the merits of developing individuals. Hall is criticized for keeping “the type general even in his background, with a perhaps too colourless effect frequently but with an occasional flavor of classical antiquity.”³⁴ His characters are “fixed, statuesque, separate from all that could lend them human interest.”³⁵ Under the aspect of their effect on the reader the Virtues are classified as “mere moral exhortations” whereas the Vices are “closely … modelled on Theophrastus.”³⁶ When Hall revitalized Theophrastan characters, he “was overwhelmingly influenced by the virtue-vice mode of conceptualization, which manifests itself in the rigidity of his virtue-vice distinctions and in his near-mystical regard for the attractive power of exempla of virtue and the repelling power of exempla of vice.”³⁷ The conclusion seems cogent: Hall's Characters had little influence on the subsequent development of English character-writing.

However true it may be that books, once written, have a life of their own, and usually one which the author never imagined, it seems only fair to ask what Hall's own intentions were when he composed Characters of Virtues and Vices. The answer to this question Hall gives in the proem to the Characters. Here he points out,

Vertue is not loued enough, because shee is not seene; and Vice loseth much detestation, because her vglinesse is secret. Certainly, my Lords, there are so many beauties, and so many graces in the face of Goodnesse, that no eye can possibly see it without affection, without rauishment; and the visage of Euil is so monstrous, through loathsome deformities, that if her louers were not ignorant, they would be mad with disdaine, and astonishment. What need we more than to discouer these two to the world? this work shall saue the labour of exhorting, and dissuasion. … Loe heere then Vertue and Vice stip't naked to the open view, and despoiled, one of her rags, the other of her ornaments, and nothing left them but bare presence to plead for affection: see now whether shall finde more suiters. And if still the vaine mindes of leaud men shall dote vpon their olde mistresse, it will appeare to be, not because she is not foule, but for that they are blind, and bewitched.³⁸

In other words, Hall wants his readers to see Virtue and Vice in their true nature and “bare presence.” He is quite convinced that nothing more is needed “than to discover these two to the world.” For reasons of commendation, he pretends to be following “that ancient Master of Moralitie,” Theophrastus, whose Ethical Characters had reached England not much earlier than 1605³⁹ and who, previous to the early years of the seventeenth century, was reputed almost exclusively as “scientist.” In Hall's view, he was one of the “moral philosophers” of “the olde Heathens,” who received the acts of an inbred law in “the Sinai of Nature.” Hall acknowledges: “As one therefore that in worthy examples hold imitation better than inuention, I haue trod in their paths, but with a higher & wider step; and out of their Tablets have drawen these larger portraitures of both sorts.” This revealing passage is taken from Hall's preface to the Characters under the title “A Premonition of the Title and Use of Characters.” The true nature of the imitation Hall proposes to apply becomes clear from the following sentences also taken from the “Premonition,” in which he comments on the way the moral philosophers taught their people the body of their natural divinity. They did this

not after one manner; while some spent themselves in deepe discourses of humane felicitie and the way to it in common; others thought best to applie the generall precepts of goodnesse or decencie, to particular conditions and persons: A third sort in a mean course betwixt the two other, and compounded of them both, bestowed their time in drawing out the true lineaments of euery vertue and vice, so liuely, that who saw the medals, might know the face: which Art they significantly termed Charactery. Their papers were so many tables, their writings so many speaking pictures, or liuing images, whereby the ruder multitude might euen by their sense learn to know vertue, and discerne what to detest. I am deceiued if any course could be more likely to preuaile; for heerein the grosse conceit is led on with pleasure, and informed while it feeles nothing but delight: And if pictures have beene accounted the books of idiots, beholde heere the benefit of an image without offence.⁴⁰

Hall, steering a middle course between the abstract and the concrete, wants to give “speaking pictures, or living images,” which will fulfill the task of prodesse et delectare. It has been pointed out that character-writing as it is understood here falls among the categories of the art of rhetoric.⁴¹ The epideictic element in this kind of character portrait places it within reach of descriptio, notae, characterisms which, as George Puttenham has it, are drawn “not by imitation artificially but by observation naturally.”⁴² Imitation is better than invention. Those who see the medals or tablets “might know the face.” Observation and verisimilitude are obviously the principles to which Hall adheres. They imply the use of “particular conditions and persons” from which the spectator can “learn to know virtue, and discern what to detest.” Turning from Hall's theory to his practice, the crucial question will be to what extent he substantiated his intention of presenting his characters as living pictures.

There is not space enough here to give a full account of Hall's Characters with respect to the imitative qualities.⁴³ It must suffice for the time being to direct the reader's attention to one or two significant features. Whereas the characters of Theophrastus are made up of thirty-two vices only Hall juxtaposes in his two books nine virtues (to which he added two more in the edition of 1615) and fifteen vices.⁴⁴ The virtuous qualities enumerated here are: wisdom, honesty, faith, humility, valor, patience, friendship, and nobility. These virtues then are the dissected and anatomized characteristics that ideally should be found combined in one ideal human being the portrait of which Hall presents. This is quite different in the case of the fifteen vices. Here we have not the moral qualities, but rather the embodiments of the vices themselves: the hypocrite, the busybody, the superstitious, the profane, the malcontent, the inconstant, the flatterer, the slothful, the covetous, the vainglorious, the presumptuous, the distrustful, the ambitious, the unthrift, the envious. Different from the book of virtues, the vices cannot be thought of as combined and embodied in one “ideally wicked and bad” person. What we have here is rather a kaleidoscope of varied types differing with respect to their behaviour and conduct and their attitude towards their surroundings and themselves. They all display various forms of transgressions of ethical norms. All the vices have two features in common: a disproportion between appearance and reality, which leads to “making evil good, or good evil”;⁴⁵ and a harmful lack of self-knowledge throughout.⁴⁶

At the end of the Virtues Hall placed a character whom he called “the Good Magistrate,” who is “the faithful deputy of his Maker.” This character is not only the personification of justice,⁴⁷ but embodies at the same time unselfishness, readiness to help, and unfaltering guardianship of the innocent and the just. His main quality in judging and discerning is his realistic view of everything: “Truth must strip her selfe and come in naked to his barre, without false bodies, or colors without disguises.” So the good magistrate, “as it were, another God vpon earth,” is the ideal representation—not of Senecan Stoicism⁴⁸ but rather—of Christian realism. And it is with respect to this realism, which sees things as they really are, that Hall calls his good magistrate “another God vpon earth.”

In a sermon preached at the Court March 1, 1634, and afterwards printed under the significant title “The Character of Man” Hall says:

My Text [Psalm 144:3] and so my Sermon too, is the just Character of Man; A common and stale theme, you will say; but a needful one: we are all apt to mis-know or to forget what we are. … And if any man have condescended to see his face in the true looking-glasse of his wretched frailty, so soon as his back is turned he forget his shape straight; Especially at a Court where outward glory would seem to shoulder out the thoughts of poor despicable morality; Give me leave therefore, (Honourable and beloved) to ring my own knell in your ears this day, and to call home your eyes a little, and to show you that which I fear you too seldome see, your selves.⁴⁹

Hall's Characters fulfill the function of a looking-glass in which the readers-spectators can view their own world and themselves in all the details of seventeenth-century everyday life to a far greater extent than has been pointed out so far. The activities described concern very special spheres of life in which every contemporary of Hall was as much involved as Hall himself: war and peace, crime and revenge, fraud, violence, and law—these are displayed in the different scenes at Court and in the law court, in the church and in Parliament, in the public service, and in the more private regions of dinners and on the sick bed. Social criticism is often implied as when the Profane “comes to Church as to the Theatre … for companie, or custome, for recreation, perhaps for sleepe; or to feed his eyes or his eares: as for his soule hee cares no more than if hee had none.”

Gestures as expressing emotions and mental reactions are introduced to vivify the characters: of the Distrustful we hear that “there is nothing that he takes not with his left hand.” With the Unthrift “one hand cozenes the other.” The Valiant “loves rather the silent language of the hand.” The Slothful “is descried amongst a thousand neighbours by a dry and nasty hand that still savours of the sheet.” Other gestures are just as drastic and as telling: “Let him [i.e., his Master] say it is hot, he [i.e., the Flatterer] wipes his forehead; if cold he shivers and calls for a warmer garment.” With the Hypocrite, gestures are expressions of faked emotions: “He can command his tears, when he speaks of his youth.” The Mal-Content “shakes his head and smiles, as if his silence should say, I could and will not.” Hall was aware of the function of gestures in combination with the other means of the hide-and-seek character of the social world. In his sermon “The Hypocrite” (1629) he speaks of “all that glorious Pageant of fashionable profession which we see made in the World, whether in words, gestures, carriage.”⁵⁰ The Good Magistrate's independence becomes manifest in gestures: “A bribe in his closet, or a letter on the bench, or the whispering and winks of a great neighbour are answered with an angry and courageous repulse.” The maximum of concrete elements and details from everyday life based on observation is to be found in the Superstitious. The description of this character is so enriched with superstitious beliefs and customs held and observed by Hall's contemporaries that it is the best proof of how concrete Hall could be if he wanted to.⁵¹ And, as we know from his “Premonition,” he relied on observation and intended imitation.

Allusions to topical events that were understood by all early seventeenth-century readers and the use of proverbial elements, not frequent but nevertheless prominent, contribute also to making the Characters not abstract and bloodless moral exhortations but realistic “portraitures” of virtues and vices as everybody could experience them in his own world.⁵² They strike a good balance with the frequent use of biblical quotations.

A new chapter will have to be written on Hall's influence on the Continent and especially on the impact and fate of his Characters in France and Germany. Rudolf Kirk has taken a first step in this direction but his bibliographical data are necessarily incomplete and some of them incorrect.⁵³ For the following list of translations into French and German completeness cannot be claimed.⁵⁴ It is likely that more German translations come to light as a result of further investigations.

• (1) Translation into French
  • a. CARACTE- / RES DE VERTUS / ET DE VICES. / Tirez de l'Anglois de M. / IOSEF HALL. / A tres-haut & puissant Seigneur, / Monsigneur le Conte de Salisbury, / grand Tresorier, grand Secretaire, & / grand Maitre des Gardenobles d'An- / gleterre, Chevalier de tres-ancien & / rres-noble [sic] Ordre de la Iarretiere. A Paris, M.DC.X. AVEC PRIVILEGE DV ROY. [Translator's dedication subscribed D.T.Δ., i.e. Jean Loiseau de Tourval.] (Paris, 1610; 1612).
  • b. CARACTERES DE VERTUS ET DE VICES. Tirez de l'Anglois de M. Joseph Hall. Dernière édition revüe, corrigée & augmentée. [Same translator as in a.] (Paris, 1619).
  • c. LES / CARACTERES / DE / VERTUS ET DE / VICES, / Tirez de l'Anglois / De / Tres-Reverend & illustre Seigneur / M. Joseph Hall, Evesque d'Exceter, / & c. / Dernière Edition [Same translator as in a. and b.] (Paris, 1634).
  • d. CARACTERES DE VERTUS ET DE VICES … (Genève, 1628).
  • e. CARACTERES DE VERTUS ET DE VICES … Dernière édition revue et augmentée (Genève, 1634).
  • f. L'ESCOLE / DV / SAGE, / OV / LE CARACTERE / DES VERTUS, & des Vices. / Par Mr CHEVREAV. / DERNIERE EDITION augmentée / (Paris, 1659). [According to Kirk, p. 56, first published in 1645, but not listed in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris); several times reprinted in Paris, Lyon, and Rouen. Book I contains a translation of Hall's complete Characters.]

Apart from some few French translations of Latin books by English authors and of several Scottish works,⁵⁵ Hall's Caractères was the first English book made available to French readers in their own language. The fact that two different translators, Tourval and Chevreau, found it rewarding to make this book accessible and that it remained in active circulation among Protestants as well as among Catholics until well after the middle of the seventeenth century is evidence of a reception that is quite unique in Anglo-French literary relations. Many other works by Hall were translated, it is true, and published at Geneva as the center of religious tendencies cognate to Hall's own. But the Characters by far surpass them in literary importance and influence. With them “the stream of English influence on French literature began its course,⁵⁶ which had one of its most remarkable representations in Jean de la Bruyère's Caractères ou Mœurs de ce siècle (1688/1696). As Erich Brauch's paper will show, the processes of adapting the Characters to the French taste and of amalgamating Hall's concepts of virtues and vices with French ideas as well as the transfer of those ideas from the English to the French scene are in themselves revealing enough and deserve detailed analyses which will add to a full appreciation of this little masterpiece.

• (2) Translations into German
  • a. VORBILDUNG DER TUGENDEN UND VNTUGENDEN. Das ist: Kurtze / aber deutliche und anmutige Beschreibung der vornembsten Tugenden / deren sich ein frommer Mensch befleissen soll / vnd auch der meisten Vntugenden oder Laster / dafür man sich hüten solle. Zuvor niemals in unser deutschen Sprach aussgegangen / antizo aus dem Englischen und Frantzösischen verteutscht / durch den W.H.N.N. Emden. Helwig Kallenbach. 1628.
  • b. JOSEPH HALLENS WEILAND ENGELLÄNDISCHEN BISCHOFFS MERCKZEICHEN DER TUGENDEN UND LASTER / INS TEUTSCHE ÜBERSETZET DURCH BALTHASAR GERHARD KOCH HELMST. S. THEOL. ST. HELMSTÄDT. HEINRICH HESSE. 1685.
  • c. H. JOSEPH HALL / KENNZEICHEN DER TU= / GENDEN UND LASTER / gedolmetscht / Durch ein Mitglied der hoch= / löblichen Fruchtbrin / genden Gesell= / schafft. // Gedruckt zu Franckfurt am Mayn // in Verlegung Johann Nau= / manns / 1652.
  • d. JOSEPH HALL / BISCHOFF ZU EXCETER / IN ENGELAND / KENN=ZEICHEN / DER / TUGEND / UND / LASTER / auß dem Englischen übersetzet / Durch G. P. Harsdorffer / BREMEN, / Gedruckt und verlegt bey Joh. Wesseln / E. E. Hochw. Rahts Buchd. / im Jahr 1696.
  • e. CHARACTERES der Menschen: / Oder die / Entlarvete Welt // In ihrer innerlichen Eigenschafft / Handlung und Betrüglichkeit. / Worinnen allen Ständen der Welt / die Varbe [sic] der Falschheit / abgezogen / an dero statt aber ihnen die Tugend / Thor= und Schwachheiten / in ihrer Natürlichen Blösse / als in einem / Helleuchtenden Spiegel / deuttlich vorgestellet / und mittelst eines jeden / CHARACTERIS oder Gestalts-beschreibung / öffentlich zu Tage geleget / auch nach Beschaffenheit gerühmet / oder beschämet werden. / Komm / kauff / und liese mich / es wird dich nicht gereuen! / Wo du getroffen wirst / magstu dich billig freuen / Und bessern deinen Wahn // Wie Ehrenhold gethan! / Sonst stell'ich jedem vor / wie er beschaffen sey // Und straffe ohne Scheu die schnöde Heucheley. // AMSTERDAM: / Gedruckt bey Siebert Siebertsen auff Kattenburg / in dem gekröhnten / Philosopho. Im Jahr 1701. [Chapter 2 is “J. Halls Kenn-Zeichen der Tugend. Erster Theil”—In Harsdoerffer's translation, but without his amplifications. The remaining three chapters contain characters by various other authors.]
  • f. KURTZE DOCH DEUTLICHE ANWEISUNG, WIE EIN JEDWEDER 1.) IN SEINEN LEBEN SICH ZUVERHALTEN, DURCH EINIGE LEBENS- / REGULN. ZUM 2.) WIE MAN EINIGE TU- / GENDEN UND LASTER AN DE- / NEN MENSCHEN ZU ERKENNEN. AUS WOHLMEINENDER ABSICHT, UND AUF BEGEHREN EINIGER FREUNDE ZU- / SAMMEN GETRAGEN VON JOHANN CONRAD KRANOLD. P. T. PAST. ZU DIETERSDORFF. STOLBERG, DRUCKTS UND VERLEGTS JOHANN FRIEDRICH GÖPNER, GRÄFL. HOF BUCHDR. 1724.

During the seventeenth century four German translations of the Characters were published.⁵⁷ This fact confirms the general interest in Hall's works in Germany, though devotional writings seem to have been more in demand than the more rational Characters. The German reading public during the second half of the seventeenth century appreciated highly books of Richard Baxter, William Perkins, and John Barceley, which were all available in translations. In fact, bookshops at that time were apparently filled with translations from English works.⁵⁸

It does not come as a surprise that the most influential translations of the Characters into German used a French version as their model. Vorbildung der Tugenden und Vntugenden (2a above) admits this in the subtitle. The wording “aus dem Englischen und Französischen verdeutscht” (done into German from the English and French) implies, one is inclined to believe, that the translator did not make use of the English original but knew where his French text came from and wanted to attract his readers by this fact. G. P. Harsdoerffer does not mention a French mediator; but a careful comparative study has brought to light that he made generous use of Tourval's French text, whereas Hall's original served him only as a respectable reference.⁵⁹

Here, as in many other cases, French versions of English originals functioned as conveyors to Germany. It will be subject matter of an interesting study in cultural relations between England, France, and Germany to find out what the implication of Harsdoerffer's assertion in his Vorrede is that he “took the liberty to present these art-tablets [“Kunst = Taffeln”] in our German light and to arrange them after the customs which are in use here.” No doubt Tourval, Chevreau, and Harsdoerffer found Hall's Characters rather “English” portraits which had to be repainted for the readers on the Continent.

From all this it seems to be mandatory that Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices must be seen in a new light. They have been misunderstood so far as representing abstract types and moral qualifications which did not appeal to seventeenth-century readers whether they had the capacity of “sensuous apprehension of thought” or not. But, in Hall's own words, “… heerein the grosse conceit is led on with pleasure, and informed while it feeles nothing but delight: And if pictures haue beene accounted the books of idiots, beholde heere the benefit of an image without the offence.”⁶⁰

Notes

1. The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, D.D., Bishop of Exeter and Afterwards of Norwich. A New Edition, rev. and corr., with some additions, by Philip Wynter, D.D. 10 vols. ([London, 1863]; AMS Press Inc., New York, 1969). Another facsimile reprint has been announced by OLMS Reprints (Hildesheim and New York) for 1972. Wynter's edition will be cited in the text as Wynter.

2. Wynter, Preface, I, vi, Wynter modernized the spelling except in some “poetical passages in which, for obvious reasons, it has been left undisturbed” (I, vii). This is a questionable principle.

3. The list of Hall's works in CBEL, dispersed over several sections of vol. I, is incomplete. So is Kinloch's “List of Hall's Works” (T. F. Kinloch, The Life and Works of Joseph Hall, 1574-1656 [London, New York, 1951], pp. 203-206).

4. Kinloch, pp. 203-206; Harold Fisch, RES, 4 (1953), p. 178; The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), pp. lx-lxxxii.

5. Wynter, “Preface,” I, vi.

6. The Discovery of a New World. (Mundus Alter Et Idem). Written originally in Latin by Joseph Hall, ca. 1605; Englished by John Healey, ca. 1609; edited by Huntington Brown; with a foreword by Richard E. Byrd, Rear Admiral, U.S.N., Ret. (Cambridge, Mass., 1937). Hall's Latin text is in Wynter, X, 399-498.

7. Heaven vpon Earth and Characters of Vertves and Vices. By Joseph Hall. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Rudolf Kirk. Rutgers Studies in English, No. 6. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1948).

8. Wynter, I, xix.

9. Ibid., pp. xxxii, xxviii.

10. Observations of Some Specialities, written in 1646, and Hard Measures, apparently composed early in 1647 and printed May, 1647, were published posthumously in one volume under the title The Shaking of the Olive-Tree in 1660.

11. Wynter, “Preface,” I, viii. The italics are mine.

12. Harold Fisch in RES, 4 (1953), 178.

13. Collected Poems, Introduction: I. Biography, pp. xiii, xxii. See Hall's remark in “The Kings Prophecie” (1603), ll. 19-24 (Collected Poems, ed. Davenport).

14. Kinloch, p. 32.

15. Ibid., p. 18.

16. Ibid., p. 36.

17. Kinloch, p. 14. Kinloch's analysis of Hall's attitude toward women (pp. 70-72) is particularly inadequate. He fails entirely to see where Hall is in line with the general views of his age and where he deviates from them.

18. Wynter, I, xx.

19. Ibid., p. xxi.

20. Wynter, I, xxviii, xxvii.

21. It is still doubtful whether “Mr. Lilly” mentioned by Hall (Wynter, I, xxviii) was the “euphuist,” dramatist, and pamphleteer John Lyly (1554-1606). If, as Davenport, p. xix, suggests, the controversy was between Hall the Martinist and Lyly as an Anti-Martinist, it is difficult to see why Hall calls him “a witty bold atheist.” See Florence S. Teager, “The Patronage of Hall and Donne,” PQ, 15 (1936), 408-413; M. H. M. MacKinnon, “Sir John Barington and Bishop Hall,” PQ, 37 (1958), 80-86; Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and Milton,” ELH, 17 (1950), 274-295; Rudolf Kirk, “A Seventeenth-Century Controversy: Extremism vs. Moderation,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 9 (1967/68), 5-35.

22. For example, Kinloch, p. 166.

23. Quoted from Collected Poems, ed. Davenport.

24. Ibid.

25. See Albert-Reiner Glaap, Bischof Halls “Virgidemiarum” als imitatio Juvenals (diss. Cologne, 1960), pp. 60-63.

26. To quote only a few examples: In Contemplations upon the History of the New Testament, Book IV, xi, “The Pool of Bethesda” (1612), Hall speaks of “The Three wonders of England: Ecclesia, Femina, Lana. ‘The Churches, the Women, the Wool’” (Wynter, II, 513). In his Observations (1646) Hall reports how he travelled to Brussels “in the company of two Italien captains, Signior Ascanio Nigro, and another whose name I have forgotten; who, enquiring into our nation and religion, wondered that we had any baptism or churches in England” (Wynter, I, xxxii). “… Cast back your eyes upon those incomparable favours, wherewith God hath provoked and endeared this island; in which I dare boldly say we are, at the least, his second Israel … O, never, never was any people so bound to a God” (Sermon XXIV, Wynter, V, 373f, and 375).

27. Wynter, I, lxxiv.

28. Heaven vpon Earth and Characters of Vertves and Vices, ed. Kirk, pp. 70-81.

29. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers in London—1554-1640, 5 vols., ed. Edward Arber (London, 1875-1877, 1894, reprt. 1950), III, 371.

30. Kirk, p. 76, n. 100. Only two minor errors seem to have crept in his “list of misprints”: Ladies (0₁ and 0₂, p. 137) is not the catchword but occurs in line 20 of the running text. Grace (0₁ and 0₂, p. 134) is not in line 20 but line 19.

31. Kirk's edition reproduces the text of the folio of 1634 “with such emendations as, for one reason or another, seem to the present editor desirable in order to give the reader as nearly as possible the words which Joseph Hall wished him to read” (p. 80). Emendations have been made on the authority of 0₂. This seems a sound principle. But Kirk forgot to include “The Svmme Of the whole. First Booke. Second Booke” with a complete list of all characters.

32. Wendell Clausen, “The Beginnings of English Character—Writing in the Early Seventeenth Century,” PQ, 25 (1946), 43.

33. Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p. 122.

34. Boyce, p. 130.

35. Edward C. Baldwin, “Jonson's Indebtedness to the Greek Character-Sketch,” MLN, 16 (1901), 394.

36. Clausen, p. 41.

37. Paul J. Schumacher, Virtue and Vice: A Study of the Characters of Hall, The Overburians, and Earle (diss., St. Louis, 1968), Dissertation Abstracts, 29 (1968), 1214A.

38. Quoted from 0₁ (copy in the Library of the Seminar fuer Englische Philologie of the University of Tübingen).

39. Clausen, p. 38. Clausen believes it to be “literary fiction” that the Ethical Characters in Casaubonus' translation (2nd ed., Lyon, 1599) reached England before 1600 or circulated widely.

40. Quotation from “A Premonition of the Title and Vse of Characters” (0₁). The term character was defined by Thomas Overbury: “To square out a Character by our English levell, it is a picture (real or personall) quaintly drawne, in various colours, all of them heightened by one shadowing.” Text from G. Murphy, A Cabinet of Characters (London, 1925), p. 120.

41. More recently by Kuno Schumacher, “Charakterdarstellung und Rhetorik,” Spira-Festschrift, ed. H. Viebrock and W. Erzgräber (Heidelberg, 1961), pp. 184-196.

42. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (London, reprt. 1950), II, 148, after Schumacher, p. 192.

43. The present author hopes to do so in a forthcoming critical and annotated edition.

44. It seems sufficiently clear that Theophrastus never intended to add the “opposite number” of virtues (cf. R. G. Ussher in the Introduction to his edition The Characters of Theophrastus [London, 1960], p. 23).

45. Sermon No. IX, “The Great Impostor,” Wynter, V, 162.

46. Self-knowledge is one of the key words in Hall's Characters. The Wise Man: “There is nothing he desires not to know, but most and first himself.” He is “blind in no man's cause, best sighted in his own.” The Humble Man “is a friendly enemy to himself: though he be not out of his own favour, no man sets so low a value of his worth as him selfe. … His eyes are full of his own wants, and others' perfections.” The Patient Man “has so conquered himself, that wrongs cannot conquer him”; “He is a Happy man that hath learn'd to read himselfe more than all books.” The Profane “loves none but himself.” The Mal-Content “is now almost weary of himself.” The Unconstant is characterized as one whose “multitude of his changed purposes brings with it forgetfulnesse; and not of others more than himself. … Each thing pleases him better that is not his owne … in a word, [he is] any thing rather than himself.” The Flatterer's “scope is to make men fooles, in teaching them to over-value themselves.” The Envious “consumes himself.” The Penitent is “so fallen out with himself, that none but God can reconcile him.”

47. As Kirk thinks him to be (Kirk, p. 26).

48. Kirk, pp. 19-51 (“The Neostoicism of Heaven upon Earth and Characters of Vertues and Vices”); Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism,” PMLA, 65 (1950), 1130-1145.

49. Sermon No. XXIX, Wynter, V, 446. Our quotation in the original spelling of the edition of 1634.

50. Sermon No. XXXVIII, Wynter, V, 428.

51. A comparative study of Theophrastus' character no. XVI δειsιδαιμονία (Superstition), which “gives us some fascinating glimpses into Greek religious customs and beliefs” (Ussher, p. 135), Hall's “The Superstitious,” John Earle's “A Superstitious, or Jealous Man,” (Microcosmography, ed. Alfred S. West [Cambridge, 1897, reprt. 1951], p. 37f.), and Samuel Butler's “A Superstitious Man” (Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves [1970], shows that Hall is by far the least abstract and colourless of all.

52. Topical allusions and proverbial elements are fairly frequent. They will be pointed out in the forthcoming edition.

53. Kirk, pp. 52-63.

54. For the bibliography of French translations, I am indebted to Herr Erich Brauch, whose forthcoming thesis on Hall's Characters in France will bring new light into an important chapter of the reception of Hall on the Continent.

55. Thomas More's Utopia, French translation, 1550. Scottish works: mainly those of King James VI; see Sidney Lee, “The Beginnings of French Translation from the English,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, VIII (London, 1907), 85-111.

56. Lee, p. 87.

57. Kirk's data (p. 58, “three times in the seventeenth century and once or twice in the eighteenth”) have to be corrected. Possibly another seventeenth-century translation was made. Gilbert Waterhouse, The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1914), p. 88 n. 1, suggests that Johann Wilhelm von Stubenberg's translation of what is generally believed to be essays by Bacon and has the title Die Farben (oder Kennzeichen) des Guten und Bösen (1654) may be Hall's Characters. Since the book is very rare I have not yet been able to verify this conjecture.

58. See Karl Viëtor, Probleme der deutschen Barockliteratur. Von deutscher Poeterey, 3 (Leipzig, 1928), 48, and L. M. Price, English Literature in Germany, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 37 (1953), p. 15.

59. Marce Blassneck, Frankreich als Vermittler englisch-deutscher Einflüsse im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Kölner Anglist. Arbeiten vol. 20 (Leipzig, 1934) does not mention Harsdoerffer. Meanwhile Jutta Angrées, in a Tübingen state examination paper, has proved beyond doubt, that Harsdoerffer depends to a large extent on Tourval's French version.

60. From “A Premonition,” Kirk's edition, p. 143.