SOURCE: Edelen, Georges. “Hooker's Style.” In Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, edited by W. Speed Hill, pp. 241-77. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972.

[In the following essay, Edelen examines the length and complexity of Hooker's sentences, concluding that his writing style places “a deliberate emphasis on the whole rather than the part.”]

I

The most significant elements of Hooker's style in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity are the length of his sentences and the complexity of their structure. Even for his contemporaries it was these aspects of Hooker's prose that drew immediate attention. George Cranmer, in his notes on a preliminary manuscript of Book vi, urges Hooker at a number of points to abbreviate his sentences. A Puritan attack complains of his “cunningly framed sentences, to blind and entangle the simple.” Thomas Fuller describes his style as “long and pithy, drawing on a whole flock of several clauses before he came to the close of a sentence.”¹

In an analysis of sentence length, summary statistics are of limited value, since they fail to take into account the range of an author's effects.² Far more revealing than any average figures (which, after all, are an addition and a division away from the text) is the extraordinary freedom with which Hooker varies his sentence length. Taking only the extremes from Book i, the range is from 2 to 267 words. Of the 723 sentences in that book, 83 fall into the rather arbitrary category of short (15 words and under), 302 may be considered long (40 words and over), and 71 are very long (80 words and over). The sensitive reader is likely to share the view of Hooker's contemporaries that the longer sentences are more representative. They call attention to themselves, partly for the obvious reason that they take more space and require a greater span of attention, partly because they are rarer in English prose, especially when organized as true grammatical units. Shorter sentences are less likely to impress a reader as a distinguishing note in an author's style, no matter what average statistics may indicate.

Hooker is thus distinctively a writer of copious sentences, but far from exclusively so; he remains aware of the usefulness of occasional brief, even aphoristic, statement. Cicero had recommended diversifying one's style with these “little daggers,” although he seems to have had only the rhetorical virtue of variety in mind. Typically, Hooker uses the technique with a firm sense of the expressive values inherent in syntactical form. Often his short sentences will come in clusters for specific effects. In the following passage, for example, the epigrams help to preserve the tone of kindly, ironic wisdom with which Hooker analyzes the career of John Calvin:

But wise men are men, and the truth is truth. That which Calvin did for establishment of his discipline, seemeth more commendable then that which he taught for the countenancing of it established. Nature worketh in us all a love to our owne Counsels. The contradiction of others is a fanne to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintaine that which once we have done, sharpneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all meanes to reason for it. Wherefore a marvaile it were if a man of so great capacitie, having such incitements to make him desirous of all kind of furtherances unto his cause, could espie in the whole Scripture of God nothing which might breed at the least a probable opinion of likelihood, that divine authoritie it selfe was the same way somewhat inclinable.

[Pref.ii.7]³

I quote the passage at length, not only to indicate the context from which the aphorisms derive their avuncular force, but also to suggest a side of Hooker little known to the general reader. The last sentence of the passage is a fine sample of ironic diction. “At the least a probable opinion of likelihood” deftly iterates to dilute the concession Hooker seems to be making, and verbs like “espie” and “breed” are particularly wicked. Nor is the rather awkward, lumpy movement of this sentence without pejorative effect in suggesting the strain with which Calvin, in Hooker's view, inclined Scripture to his purpose.

In more sober moods Hooker sometimes uses his clusters of short sentences with what might be called axiomatic force. The following passage begins his discussion of the nature of law: “All things that are have some operation not violent or casuall. Neither doth any thing ever begin to exercise the same without some foreconceaved ende for which it worketh. And the ende which it worketh for is not obteined, unlesse the worke be also fit to obteine it by. For unto every ende every operation will not serve” (i.ii.1). Here the relative brevity of the sentences reflects Hooker's realization that he is enunciating the axioms of his philosophic system. As with any first principles, these teleological assumptions are not susceptible of formal proof. As starting points they are accorded the careful enunciation and syntactical simplicity of Euclidian definitions. A similar use of short sentences occurs in Hooker's Thomistic analysis of human will: “To choose is to will one thing before another. And to will is to bend our soules to the having or doing of that which they see to be good. Goodnesse is seene with the eye of the understanding. And the light of that eye, is reason” (vii.2). Sometimes the short sentences are used to emphasize the logical force of the reasoning: “Now if men had not naturally this desire to be happie, how were it possible that all men shoulde have it? All men have. Therefore this desire in man is naturall” (xi.4). The extreme brevity of the sentences, as well as the repetition of terms and the use of “therefore,” call attention to the syllogism. The major premise is somewhat extended as a rhetorical question, but the minor and the conclusion are cast into the abrupt simplicity of the scholastic mode, conveying a tone of logical finality.

Hooker's brief sentences have far greater effect in context, of course, since the contrast with his elaborate constructions is more emphatic. Any clear deviation from an author's normal syntactical patterns can be used to focus attention at key points, and the technique is too common an aspect of all good prose to warrant special comment. What does distinguish Hooker from lesser stylists is the superb sense of decorum with which he uses these contrasts of syntactical form, not simply for emphasis, but with acute sensitivity to the expressive values implicit in the form itself. As these examples suggest, the forms of Hooker's sentences grow organically out of the thought processes they embody. Whatever typical patterns can be discerned are the result not of preconceived or inherited syntactical molds into which thought is poured, but rather of the recurrent patterns of Hooker's own cognitive processes.

Of far greater importance in Hooker's prose style than mere sentence length is sentence structure, although the two elements are related. Structure, after all, is a question of word order, of the arrangement of phrases and clauses, and of syntactical ligatures, all of which, in English at least, admit of diverse shaping in direct proportion to the copiousness of the sentence. Indeed, it may be questioned whether one can speak meaningfully of sentence structure in analyzing English plain styles, since the organization of the individual sentence often seems more a question of grammatical inevitability than of individual pattern. Generally speaking, in English, the longer the sentence, the greater the possibilities of expressive structure.

II

The normal principle of structural organization in Hooker's longer sentences is logical subordination. Around an independent clause the remaining elements are carefully ordered, customarily by the use of subordinating conjunctions, to indicate their logical relationships within the thought of the sentence. Cause and effect, condition and concession, definition and distinction—all find their explicit functions within the structure of his grammatical units. For Hooker the complex sentence is the reflection of rational process.

Often the main clause will come toward the middle of the sentence, the first members grammatically suspended in preparation, the later members walking backward. As a relatively simple example, here is one of the many passages in which Hooker analyzes the psychology behind Puritan obstinacy in error:

1 But so easie it is for every man living to erre,
2 and so hard to wrest from any mans mouth the playne acknowledgement of error,
3 that what hath beene once inconsiderately defended,
4 the same is commonly persisted in,
5                    as long as wit by whetting it selfe is able to finde out any shift,
6                                        be it never so sleight,
7                              whereby to escape out of the handes of present contradiction.

[iii.v.1]⁴

The sentence is not grammatically complete until the end of the main clause, the first three members being subordinated and held in suspension by the conjunction “so … so … that,” the third member operating as the antecedent for the pronoun “the same” and hence as the subject of the main verb. The last three members are grammatically complex, but the use of the introductory conjunction “as long as” restrains them from grammatical independence. Since, taken together, they function as an adverb modifying the “is … persisted in” of the main clause, they look back to the core of the sentence as pointedly as the earlier members had looked ahead. The passage is, in fact, a prime example of the centripetal tendency characteristic of much Ciceronian prose.

Hooker's structure here is completely organic. The syntactical organization of the sentence exactly reflects the movement of the thought. The heart of the idea, given in the main and only independent clause, is the fact of Puritan obduracy, even in the face of proven error. But no fact is a self-sustaining entity for Hooker, with his strong orientation to Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. A fact, insofar as it represents an empirical observation, can only be understood within the context of the rational patterns of an ordered cosmos. In the coherent procession of events, a fact is a point defined by the intersection of lines of cause and effect. Thus the first two members of the sentence investigate the reasons for Puritan obstinacy; the last three define the results, as Hooker's adversaries whet their wits, seeking any shift in their attempt to escape “present contradiction.” The grammatical suspension of the earlier part of the sentence stresses this movement from cause to central fact, just as the subordination of the latter part emphasizes the derivation of the effects from that same fact. The syntactical cohesiveness of the sentence thus embodies the integrity of a logical analysis.

A striking example of Hooker's sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of syntactical form occurs in the first two members of this sentence. An antithetical figure is created and emphasized by a slightly unidiomatic inversion (“so easie it is … so hard”); we might expect in the second member little more than an elaboration, in parallel syntax, of the thought in the first. Such static devices of aural elegance appear rarely in Hooker's prose. The two members are notably asymmetrical since, as a matter of fact, the idea is not simply elaborated. A sequence of causality occurs even within the early members of the sentence. The ease with which the Puritans, like all men, fall into error is the subject of the first clause, and the idea is embodied in easy, flowing syntax. The second member calls attention to what is psychologically and temporally a succeeding step. After an implicit stage in which the Puritans become at least semiconscious of error, they fall guilty of the intellectual pride that prevents their acknowledging their mistakes and makes them difficult antagonists. The initial symmetry is justified by the close relationship between the thought in these members (a relationship that is further echoed in the “inconsiderately defended” of the third member), but since the thought is progressive, Hooker deliberately rejects the invitation to extended symmetry. Furthermore, just as the emphasis has changed from a common flaw to the more culpable and less docile vice of intellectual hypocrisy, the syntax of the second member becomes thicker and less fluent. The effect is achieved most obviously by the greater length of the second member and by suppressing the active verb, but also important is the use of an inflected genitive, a form surprisingly rare in the Laws. A comparison in context of “any mans mouth” with Hooker's usual phrasal form, “the mouth of any man,” is instructive in suggesting the accuracy of his ear for syntactical effects.

Hooker's strong tendency to avoid obvious formal symmetries has been misunderstood. One critic, noting this phenomenon, has even called Hooker a “baroque” stylist.⁵ But this is to apply arbitrary criteria mechanically. The asymmetrical quality of the sentence structure in the Laws is better understood as Hooker's implicit realization that the figures of parallelism and antithesis are essentially static. His is rather a style of rational thrust, constantly pushing along the chains of logical relationships. “I have endevoured,” Hooker writes, “throughout the bodie of this whole discourse, that every former part might give strength unto all that followe, and every later bring some light unto all before” (i.i.2). He is writing of the plan of the Laws, but the words apply equally to the structure of his individual sentences.

The mere presence of hypotactic constructions is hardly likely to impress a contemporary reader as a distinguishing note in a prose style. The proper use of syntactical ligatures and the correct subordination of sentence elements to indicate their relative importance is a constant theme in modern handbooks of rhetoric. What makes Hooker's prose distinctive is partly the elaborateness of his sentence structure, partly the order in which he places his syntactical elements. The following passage is a useful example of both points:

1          Now whether it be that through an earnest longing desire
2                              to see things brought to a peaceable end,
3                    I do but imagin the matters, whereof we contend,
4                              to be fewer then indeed they are,
5          or els for that in truth they are fewer
6                                        when they come to be discust by reason,
7                    then otherwise they seeme, when by heat of contention
8                                        they are devided into many slipps,
9                                        and of every branch an heape is made:
10          surely, as now we have drawne them together,
11                    choosing out those thinges which are requisite
12                                        to be severally all discust,
13                    and omitting such meane specialties as are likely
14                                                                                (without any great labour)
15                                                            to fall afterwardes of themselves;
16 I knowe no cause why either the number or the length of these controversies should diminish our hope
17                    of seeing them end with concord and love on all sides;
18                                        which of his infinite love and goodnes the father of all peace and unitie graunt.

[ii.i.1]

As in the previous example, there is but one independent clause, conveying the heart of the thought, and the other members are arranged to point either ahead or back to the core of the sentence. In this case, however, the main clause comes so late that far more attention is directed to the grammatical suspension of the first fifteen members, which carefully explain why Hooker eventually asserts his conviction that a reconciliation with the Puritans is possible, always assuming that they are willing to discuss their differences “by reason.” He begins with the disarming admission that his own rational perceptions may be colored by his “earnest longing desire” for a peaceable settlement. Although, for persuasive purposes, he gives only co-ordinate grammatical value to the alternative—that the number of questions at issue has been unduly magnified “by heat of contention”—he clearly subscribes to this latter view. Accordingly, he lays down in members 10-15 the conditions that will permit fruitful discussion. Only after this chain of argument, considering the reasons, both subjective and objective, on which his conclusion is based and the necessary procedure which is a consequent, does Hooker announce his message of hope.

The expressive value of such an extended grammatical suspension is to be found in Hooker's insistence on an exploration of all the relevant arguments before adopting a controversial position. The syntactical order reflects the temporal and logical priority given to premise, evidence, condition, and cause over conclusion. By first exploring the reasons for his position, even to the extent of admitting a subjective bias, Hooker suggests that his conclusion comes only as the result of a rational process of investigation; by treating each element in the argument with syntactic discursiveness, he implies that he has scrupulously examined each link in the chain; by casting the entire chain as a single sentence, he emphasizes the logical coherence of his thought. The structure of Hooker's sentences has much to do with his reputation for judiciousness.

Any attempt to recast this sentence into syntactical patterns that sound more familiar quickly defines the quality of Hooker's effects. In such a reworking, the concession of bias might still open the sentence, but the main clause would be strongly attracted to the second position. The remainder of the thought would, in all likelihood, be appended as an explanation of the grounds for the stand taken. In such an ordering, the syntax inevitably connotes rationalization for a conviction that has been previously adopted, perhaps for reasons of dubious objectivity. A stylist like Bacon will write, typically:

But farther, it is an assured truth and a conclusion of experience that a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion, for in the entrance of philosophy, when the second causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there, it may induce some oblivion of the highest cause, but when a man passeth on farther, and seeth the dependence of causes and the works of Providence, then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair.⁶

The syntax here is as expressive as Hooker's, but the gulf between is wide indeed. Bacon opens his sentence with his conviction; no attempt is made to soften the dogmatic tone by admitting an element of opinion (compare Hooker's “I knowe no cause …”). To the contrary, Bacon's position is “an assured truth and a conclusion of experience.” Doubtless it is an assured truth precisely because it is a conclusion of experience, possibly only Bacon's own; later ages might question whether experience assures anything of the sort. The remainder of the sentence investigates the reasons for the observed phenomenon. As the syntactical ordering implies, Bacon's explanation is offered less as the logical grounds for his assertion than as a way of accounting for an empirical observation. The investigative process comes after, not before the fact. The failure of his explanation to carry logical force in supporting the original proposition is further echoed in the comparatively loose ligatures of Bacon's sentence. Where Hooker integrates the major elements of his thought by correlative and subordinating conjunctions (“whether … or else,” “as now”), Bacon prefers the weaker coordinating links (“but” twice; although “for” is probably subordinating as used here, it is a weak hinge on which to swing two thirds of the sentence). Hooker thus invites us, syntactically, to think along with him and, hopefully, to reach the same conclusion. Bacon's assertion, although subject to control by our own experience, stands at the head of his sentence as a summary pronouncement. Judicious Hooker; judicial Bacon.

The use of these extended grammatical suspensions, or periodicity, is often cited as one of the most important characteristics of Hooker's prose. Critics, by and large, have been content to label such suspensions Latinisms, common in those English styles under heavy Ciceronian influence but essentially unidiomatic and foreign to the genius of the English language. The attempt to recreate in English this syntactical pattern borrowed from the Romans was—so the argument goes—almost as much of a dead end as the Elizabethan experiments with quantitative meter. Brief grammatical suspensions are common, almost inevitable, even in relatively plain styles, but true periodicity, the withholding of grammatical completion until the end of a complex hypotactic sentence, was never successfully acclimated in English.

The analysis, so far as it goes, is sound. Hooker's grammatical suspensions have a distinctly archaic or unidiomatic ring to most modern ears; at the least they seem overelaborate. Like any unusual feature in a prose style, they are apt to be taken as a defining feature, independent of frequency. But the explanation of grammatical suspension in terms of a classical tradition has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring whatever expressive values the syntactical pattern may have. Whether Hooker felt freer to retard his main clauses because of his intimate familiarity with classical and patristic Latin is a question irrelevant to his meaningful use of such sentence structure. An author's slavery to a tradition may explain his stylistic vices but not his triumphs.

In fact, Hooker's classical training doubtless had a crucial effect upon his English prose style. He belonged to that transitional generation of educated men whose English and Latin were virtually in balance, and, as Dr Johnson self-consciously put it, “he that has long cultivated another language, will find its words and combinations croud upon his memory.”⁷ The Latin influence on Hooker is better understood, however, as a liberation than as a restraint. It freed him from both the rambling formlessness of a native tradition and the overly obvious, semi-mechanical formalism of the Euphuistic school, and it freed him to adapt the Ciceronian patterns as they suited his expressive purposes. No doubt his grammatical suspensions and inversions of normal English word order seemed less unusual to that part of his audience as well versed in their classics as he. The tyranny of a native idiom had yet to be strongly felt.

Tyranny is exactly what English idiom has become, and later structural habits in the language stand as a barrier between us and Hooker. The periodic sentence is an excellent case in point. The language is perfectly capable of handling even protracted suspensions with clarity, as Hooker demonstrates. The failure of such suspensions to achieve an idiomatic foothold in English (except, perhaps, for special uses) can hardly be accounted for on purely linguistic grounds. Only in the expressive connotations can an adequate reason be sought. Perhaps, as the passage from the Advancement of Learning suggests, one explanation for the unidiomatic ring of the period may lie in the incurably empirical thought patterns of the English-speaking peoples.

In turning our backs on the suspended sentence, however, we have lost a valuable construction, as Hooker proves in almost every chapter of the Laws. The period has certain obvious structural advantages, for example, as a means of unifying a long sentence when the thought involves a number of elements of coordinate value, all in approximately the same relationship to the central idea. In the following example Hooker organizes a series of distinctions on this principle. He is defending here his position that “the scripture of God leaveth unto the Churches discretion” some aspects of ecclesiastical polity, against the Puritan charge that such a stand can only “impaire the honour which the Church of God yeeldeth to the sacred scriptures perfection”:

1 Wherein seeing that no more is by us mainteyned,
2          then onely that scripture must needes teach the Church
3          whatsoever is in such sort necessarie, as hath beene set downe,
4          and that it is no more disgrace for scripture
5          to have left a number of other thinges free
6                    to be ordered at the discretion of the Church,
7          then for nature to have left it unto the wit of man
8          to devise his owne attyre,
9          and not to looke for it
10                    as the beastes of the field have theirs:
11 if neyther this can import,
12 nor any other proofe sufficient bee brought foorth
13          that wee eyther will at any time or ever did affirme
14                    the sacred Scripture to comprehende no more then onely those bare necessaries;
15 if we acknowledge that
16                    as well for particular application to speciall occasions,
17                    as also in other manifolde respectes
18          infinite treasures of wisedome are over and besides aboundantly to be found in the holy scripture;
19 yea that scarcely there is anye noble parte of knowledge,
20                    woorthy the minde of man,
21          but from thence it may have some direction and light;
22 yea, that although there be no necessitie
23          it should of purpose prescribe any one particular
                                                                                forme of Church-governement,
24                    yet touching the manner of governing in generall
25          the precepts that scripture setteth downe are not fewe.
26          and the examples manie which it proposeth
27                    for all Church-governors, even in particularities to followe;
28 yea, that those thinges finally which are of principall waight
29                    in the verie particular forme of Church-politie
30                              (although not that forme which they imagine,
31                              but that which we against them upholde)
32          are in the selfe same scriptures conteyned:
33 if all this be willingly graunted by us
34          which are accused to pinne the worde of God in so narrowe roome,
35                    as that it should be able to direct us but in principall poyntes of our religion,
36                    or as though the substance of religion
37          or some rude and unfashioned matter of building the Church were uttered in them,
38          and those thinges left out,
39                    that should pertaine to the forme and fashion of it;
40 let the cause of the accused bee referred to the accusors owne conscience,
41 and let that judge whether this accusation be deserved
42          where it hath beene layd.

[iii.iv.1]

The structure of the sentence is worth close examination as an example of Hooker's genius in ordering heavy masses of thought. The passage opens with an absolute participal construction; “seeing” governs and suspends the first ten members, which in turn are broken into two groupings, both integrated around the same correlative conjunction, “no more … then.” Typically, Hooker avoids any more obvious or extended symmetries. He uses his first grouping (members 1-3) to restate and delimit his position on the all-sufficiency of Scripture. The second element (4-10) summarizes the parallel between Nature and Scripture which he has developed at greater length in the preceding sentence. This initial suspension is not resolved but leads into the major one, which begins at member 11 and continues to 39. These 29 members are further subdivided into 6 sections, each introduced by the subordinating conjunction “if” or its equivalent. The first grouping (11-14) cautions against drawing unfounded inferences from the premise announced in the earlier part of the sentence. The next four sections (15-18, 19-21, 22-27, 28-32) explain, in a series of admissions, why such inferences are invalid. The series opens with the concessive clause, “if we acknowledge that …”, which is implicitly repeated in the opening “yea, that …” of the next three sections to indicate the parallelisms of thought through this part of the sentence. Since the substitution also has intensive force, implying “if we even acknowledge that …”, the series of yeas directs attention to the progressive movement of the thought as Hooker spirals down from the most general concession closer and closer to the Puritans' specific stand on this question. The section beginning at member 33 is summary, setting in juxtaposition the concessions made (“if all this be willingly graunted by us …”) with the Puritan charges (“which are accused …”). The discrepancy is too obvious to need belaboring, and Hooker finally resolves his suspension with legal metaphor of members 40-42. Interestingly, he ends with a rather unusual doubling of the independent clause, where the idea is statically elaborated, probably on purely formal grounds: the tremendous weight of the sentence pressing on the final members requires two legs for stability.

The expressive value of Hooker's suspension in this sentence is less obvious than in the previous example. The syntactical pattern still follows the movement of Hooker's mind along a chain of argument, each section of the sentence developing logically out of what has preceded, but the final clauses are less a rational consequent than a rhetorical elaboration. While the validity of the metaphor in the last three members depends upon the argument that has been unfolded, the suspension is not resolved by a final thrust of the thought into a logical conclusion. Rather, Hooker ends with a more explicit and emotive restatement of the position that has already been reached in members 33-39. In other words, the suspension seems at the end more a deliberate artifice than an organic reflection of rational process, and it would, in fact, be easier to reconstruct a large part of this sentence into non-periodic syntax without destroying the logical patterns on which it is built.

The grammatical suspension here has, nonetheless, strong expressive values. Hooker's purpose in this sentence is basically one of definition. His contention that Scripture contains what is necessary to salvation and leaves many unessential details of ecclesiastical government to the judgment of men has been misinterpreted by the Puritans to mean that Scripture contains only what is necessary to salvation. Distinctions are clearly necessary. Hooker begins, appropriately, with the restatement of his position that has caused the confusion, but, unlike Bacon, he does not allow it to assume the finality of grammatical independence. The suspension forces the reader ahead into the distinctions and concessions that are necessary to an understanding of the proposition. The structure of the sentence demands, as in the previous case, that all relevant information be absorbed before a grammatical or logical stopping-place is reached.

III

These sentences provide sufficient evidence to attempt some generalizations on the expressive value of the period. Insofar as the true period is an extended sentence, it emphasizes the cohesiveness of the complex thought that it embodies, since no intermediate segment is allowed to detach itself as grammatically and logically independent. Insofar as all but the final parts of the sentence are explicitly sub-ordinated to the principal thought, the period also emphasizes the articulation of the various segments, the logical relationships existing among the elements of the sentence. Yet neither of these qualities sufficiently defines the value of grammatical suspension. Even though cohesiveness and logical articulation find an appropriate home in the period, it still cannot be denied that these virtues are common in prose styles dominated by short and thoroughly unsuspended sentences. And, after all, neither length nor explicit subordination is the exclusive property of the suspended construction. The essential expressive value of the periodic sentence must be sought in the distinguishing characteristic of that pattern—that is, in the suspension itself.

In a sense, virtually every literate sentence is suspended. The opening word excites an expectation of that eventual grammatical completion which will reflect a coherent thought. Each new element in the sentence is related by the reader to what has gone before, and the segment thus produced is held in suspension to await further modifications until the grammatical completion reveals the entire pattern. Even the so-called “loose” construction, where the sentence is grammatically complete early but trails on in a series of further elements, has the same pattern of suspension, the reader's expectation being reopened with each new relative pronoun or conjunction. This pattern of a grammatical expectation, which invites mental suspension and is eventually satisfied or resolved, is as true of simple declarative syntax as it is of Hooker's most involved periods, although in curt sentences the process may seem instantaneous. The difference is one of degree. The extended period makes more prolonged and emphatic use of what might be called the natural rhythm of grammar, substituting larger blocks of thought for the simpler meanings represented by single words or brief phrases.

The expressive value of extended periods can thus be viewed as a tapping of a psychological process inherent in the very structure of language, that process of holding subsidiary elements in mental suspension until the developing form of the thought absorbs them into a larger pattern. In philosophical or apologetic writing, the period is a natural vehicle for the mind that insists that no conclusions can be validly reached prior to a discursive and open-minded examination of all the relevant premises, causes, evidence, arguments, distinctions, or effects. The sudden intuition, the imaginative lunge, the emotional stance, the dogmatic pronouncement—all are alien to the genius of the period. Extended suspensions reflect the methodological tentativeness of a rational process whose conclusions are finally validated by their position in a logical pattern.

Periodicity is, therefore, not simply a favorite grammatical construction for Hooker, but a cast of mind which is reflected everywhere in the Laws. Not only the syntax of individual sentences but the plan of the entire work is periodic. Hooker “suspends” to the last four books the specific questions of ecclesiastical polity at issue with the Puritans, insisting that it is first necessary to examine in detail the more general principles on which valid particular judgments must be based.

But when they who withdraw their obedience pretend that the lawes which they should obey are corrupt and vitious; for better examination of their qualitie, it behooveth the very foundation and root, the highest welspring and fountaine of them to be discovered. … So that if the judgements of men doe but holde themselves in suspence as touching these first more generall meditations, till in order they have perused the rest that ensue: what may seeme darke at the first will afterwardes be founde more plaine, even as the later particular decisions will appeare, I doubt not more strong, when the other have beene read before.

[1.i.2]

In two suspended sentences Hooker gives the rationale underlying the structure of both his entire work and his individual periods.

Suspension is thus to be understood not simply as a syntactical or organizational principle in the Laws but as an expressive embodiment of Hooker's understanding of the rational processes by which men must seek truth. The entire force of his attack upon the Puritans lies in his conviction that they have failed to suspend their judgments, that they have leapt to conclusions that are not rationally tenable, precisely because they have failed to take into previous account all of the relevant considerations. The long historical account in the Preface of the Puritan triumph in Geneva, for example, is expressly designed to prove that Calvin's theories of ecclesiastical discipline were an ex post facto attempt to justify and elevate to the dignity of principles the church laws he had been forced to adopt by the exigencies of a single, particular situation: “that which once they had done, they became for ever after resolute to maintaine” (Pref.ii.2). In other words, the Puritan position was reached not by suspended judgment and rational process but by historical accident; what is offered as rational foundation is, in fact, rationalization. In like manner Hooker twits Calvin for a reversal of logical priority: “We should be injurious unto vertue it selfe, if wee did derogate from them whome their industrie hath made great. Two thinges of principall moment there are which have deservedly procured him honour throughout the worlde: the one his exceeding paynes in composing the Institutions of Christian religion; the other his no lesse industrious travailes for exposition of holy Scripture according unto the same institutions” (ii.8). For Hooker, Calvin's thought processes were anything but periodic.

One final, famous, and somewhat atypical period of Hooker's should be examined:

1          Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether,
2                    though it were but for a while,
3          the observation of her own lawes:
4          if those principall and mother elements of the world,
5                              wherof all things in this lower world are made,
6                    should loose the qualities which now they have,
7          if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads
8                    should loosen and dissolve it selfe:
9          if celestiall spheres should forget their wonted motions
10                    and by irregular volubilitie, turne themselves any way
11                              as it might happen:
12 if the prince of the lightes of heaven
13                              which now as a Giant doth runne his unwearied course,
14                    should as it were through a languishing faintnes
15                    begin to stand and to rest himselfe:
16          if the Moone should wander from her beaten way,
17          the times and seasons of the yeare blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture,
18          the winds breath out their last gaspe,
19          the cloudes yeeld no rayne,
20          the earth be defeated of heavenly influence,
21          the fruites of the earth pine away
22                    as children at the withered breasts of their mother
23                              no longer able to yeeld them reliefe,
24 what would become of man himselfe,
25                              whom these things now do all serve?

[1.iii.2]

This elaborate period is probably the best-known passage in the Laws, since it has become, together with Ulysses' speech in Troilus and Cressida, a classic citation to illustrate the Elizabethan sense of an ordered cosmos. Frequent excerpting of the sentence has done some disservice to Hooker and the popular conception of his style. He is at his best in the exposition of logical relationships or in moments of quiet eloquence rather than in such dazzling rhetorical amplification.

The sentence is organized around a series of hypothetical conditions, grammatically suspended until the consequent is finally enunciated in member 24 as a rhetorical question. Each succeeding “if” heightens expectation, impelling the reader toward the resolution, an effect reinforced by the increasing brevity and swiftness of the parallel elements and the omission of the conjunction (18-20), until the rubato of members 21-23 prepares for the conclusion. The tension in this case is accompanied by no corresponding logical thrust: the thought of the period is complete if members 4-23 are omitted. True, there is an orderly progression of the coordinate hypotheticals. After the most general statement of the condition (1-3), Hooker defines the total scope of natural order, from the “mother elements” of this “lower world” (4-6) to the “heavenly arch” (7-8). The remaining sections of the suspension trace the hierarchy between these poles, beginning with the highest “celestiall spheres” and moving progressively down a chain of physical being to the “fruites of the earth,” until the whole is related to man in the final clauses. Yet this orderly development of the amplifications, reflecting the natural order which is their subject, does not conceal their essentially static quality as elaboration by example of what was explicit from the opening of the sentence.

Doubtless the rhetorical quality⁸ of this period derives from Hooker's implicit realization that he is dealing with a subject not susceptible of logical demonstration. Alfred North Whitehead speaks of the “instinctive faith that there is an Order of Nature.” The formation of such a general idea, he suggests, and “the grasp of its importance, and the observation of its exemplification in a variety of occasions are by no means the necessary consequences of the truth of the idea in question.” Nonetheless, in the long tradition of Western thought, “we all share in this faith, and we therefore believe that the reason for the faith is our apprehension of its truth.”⁹ It is precisely to this faith, this consensus, this traditional assumption, that Hooker appeals by his rhetorical amplification, as well as by the interrogative mood of the resolving clause. He does not attempt the impossible task of logical proof. Even he is forced to admit the existence of “swarvings” in the course of nature, and the biblically learned of his day could protest that if nature should intermit her course, nothing more calamitous might happen to man than the winning of a battle. Furthermore, Hooker can recognize that the physical order “hath in it more then men have as yet attained to know, or perhaps ever shall attaine” (1.iii.2). All such difficulties vanish for Hooker, however, before the general and perpetual voice of men: “so constantly the lawes of nature are by naturall agents observed, that no man denieth but those things which nature worketh, are wrought either alwaies or for the most part after one and the same manner” (iii.3). The rhetorical force of his static amplification is essentially an appeal to what “no man denieth.”

In this connection, one rhetorical value of the period should be noted, a value that derives from the grammatical tensions of that construction. Since a kind of syntactic spring is stretched tauter with each succeeding element of the suspension, the swift release of the tension in the terminal clauses has the effect of snapping the spring back to a position of rest. Here, I think, the psychic effect of the extended suspension differs so much in degree from that of simpler constructions that it might almost seem a difference in kind. The whip-crack of the resolution in the periodic sentence produces a radically stronger impression of release than the gradual relaxation of tension in the more common forms of English sentence structure. Because the resolution has been postponed so long, the grammatical expectations have become correspondingly more intense; the climactic fulfillment of those expectations at the end of the sentence seems quintessentially right. This emotion is translatable into persuasive force. The strong feeling of syntactical inevitability in the resolution impels the reader into a state of rest, both grammatical and conceptual.

A discussion of Hooker's use of the period in the Laws cannot end without an even more general consideration of the expressive nature of the construction, abstracted from any particular example. Syntax can be analyzed as expressive in representative sentences, as I have done above, where the question becomes the extent to which the grammatical structure reflects the author's premises and the movement of his mind within the area of thought he is specifically treating. Such an analysis deals with what might be called immediate or contextual expressiveness. Insofar as the sentences chosen for dissection are representative, such a discussion leads naturally to broader considerations of the author's habitual modes of thought. Yet there remains another aspect of structural expressiveness, more abstract and more tenuous. In default of a less clumsy term, it might be called ontological expressiveness. A favorite syntactical construction may embody not only the forms emanating from the immediate movement of the author's mind but also from those ultimate patterns that he assumes to lie at the heart of a meaningful cosmos. In other words, syntax may be understood as reflecting cosmological as well as psychic order.

In Hooker's case, the ontological expressiveness of the period can be seen as an embodiment of his profoundly teleological assumptions. The concept of final cause dominates the Laws: “the nature of everie lawe must be judged of by the ende for which it was made, and by the aptnes of thinges therein prescribed unto the same end” (iii.x.1). For Hooker the world is the creation of a rational God, and reason is defined as the purposive choice of the best means for a preconceived end. Standing firmly in the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition, Hooker rejects the Puritan insistence on an inscrutable God of will. On the other hand, he carefully avoids the opposite extreme into which eighteenth-century rationalism happily leaped. God's reason is analogous, not identical, to man's. No less than Browne (and, for that matter, Bacon) Hooker has his “O, altitudo!” (i.ii.5) and he concedes, “Dangerous it were for the feeble braine of man to wade farre into the doings of the most High” (ii.2). Nonetheless, whatever the limitations on man's actual ability to understand the ways of God, those ways are rationally meaningful because they are purposive. The flux of the world is, in reality, an orderly pattern of movement toward divinely known and appointed ends, a pattern hierarchically arranged in a chain of causality reaching ultimately to the Final Cause, God Himself. Thus, for example, the unintermitting order of nature is to be understood not in Newtonian terms as an embodiment of physical laws that are expressible mathematically, but rather as a purposive order, the final cause being man, “whom these things now do all serve.”

The periodic sentence is itself a syntactical embodiment of this same teleological pattern. The “final cause” of the grammatical structure is the terminal resolution which exerts an attractive force on the preceding elements, rationally ordering and justifying them as means to a preconceived end. There is surely significance in the fact that the stylistic revolt in the seventeenth century against the periodic construction as overly formal and inexpressive almost exactly coincided with the supplanting of teleological premises by a new scientific interest in proximate, material, and efficient causes.

IV

Although the centripetal and periodic sentences are favorite and significant constructions with Hooker, examples of which can be culled from almost every page of the Laws, they by no means represent his only syntactical forms. Indeed, it is precisely because he uses them occasionally, often reserving them for crucial moments of argumentation or eloquence, that they retain their expressive force unsmudged.

Variety of syntactical form can be understood as expressive of a writer's flexibility of mind. Yet it may be doubted if sufficient diversity can be achieved on purely expressive principles. The very uniqueness and force of an author's vision is apt to lead him into monotonous patterns unless he has a simultaneous respect for the rhetorical virtue of variety as a means of holding the sympathetic attention of his reader. Even when diversity of form is pursued on such rhetorical grounds, however, it has an important function in maintaining expressive values. The expressive edge of any form can be blunted by insistent repetition. Patterns that are meaningful will come by overuse to seem ornamental and mannered. The classic case of such syntactical wolf-crying is provided by Lyly's Euphuism. Professor Jonas Barish has suggested that Lyly's steady stream of antithetical constructions is his “way of expressing the perpetual ambiguities of human sentiment, and above all, the most ambiguous of all human sentiments, love.”¹⁰ Without denying the validity of Professor Barish's argument, a reader of Euphues might protest that Lyly's bag of tricks is too limited and too obvious. The structure of his prose may be meaningful, but the reader's sensitivities in that direction are quickly dulled, and the antitheses come to seem no more expressive than a facial tic. The real trouble with Lyly's prose style, leaving to one side his second-rate mind, is that he is too little, rather than too much, concerned with rhetoric.

The rhetorical virtue of syntactical variety is thus a condition for sharpness of expressive force at the moments that count. Few prose stylists in the language have grasped that principle more clearly than Hooker. The true value of his more carefully formed sentences can only be appreciated in the context of his normal flow. Here, for example, is a longer passage representing Hooker in an expository mood:

1 Now besides that lawe which simplie concerneth men as men, and that which belongeth unto them as they are men linked with others in some forme of politique societie; there is a third kinde of lawe which toucheth all such severall bodies politique, so far forth as one of them hath publique commerce with another.

2 And this third is the Lawe of nations.

3 Betweene men and beastes there is no possibilitie of sociable communion, because the welspring of that communion is a naturall delight which man hath to transfuse from him selfe into others, and to receyve from others into himselfe especially those thinges wherein the excellencie of his kind doth most consist.

4 The chiefest instrument of humaine communion therefore is speech, because thereby we impart mutuallie one to another the conceiptes of our reasonable understanding.

5 And for that cause seing beastes are not hereof capable, for as much as with them we can use no such conference, they being in degree, although above other creatures on earth to whome nature hath denied sense, yet lower then to be sociable companions of man to whome nature hath given reason; it is of Adam said that amongst the beastes He found not for him selfe any meete companion.

6 Civill society doth more content the nature of man then any private kind of solitarie living, because in societie this good of mutuall participation is so much larger then otherwise.

7 Here with notwithstanding we are not satisfied, but we covet (if it might be) to have a kind of societie and fellowship even with al mankind.

8 Which thing Socrates intending to signifie professed him self a Citizen, not of this or that common-welth, but of the world.

9 And an effect of that very natural desire in us, (a manifest token that we wish after a sort an universall fellowship with all men) appeareth by the wounderful delight men have, some to visit forrein countries, some to discover nations not heard of in former ages, we all to know the affaires and dealings of other people, yea to be in league of amitie with them: and this not onely for trafiques sake, or to the end that when many are confederated each may make other the more strong, but for such cause also as moved the Queene of Saba to visit Salomon; and in a word because nature doth presume that how many men ther are in the world, so many Gods as it were ther are, or at least wise such they should be towards men.

[i.x.12]

The first, fifth, and ninth sentences of this passage, with the main clauses medial, terminal, and initial, provide good examples of expressive syntactical patterns. The opening centripetal sentence is used for transition, the initial suspension glancing back at the subjects of the previous chapters; the central clause turns to the new topic of international law, whose scope is defined in the concluding members. The fifth sentence gathers the arguments that have been expounded in the third and fourth sentences into a typical periodic construction. Since the ninth sentence explicitly deals with effects of man's natural desire for international amity, the principal clause is placed first. The expressive force of these three sentences is dependent, however, on the context of more casually patterned transitional sentences, whose structure is determined by the logical continuum within which they occur.

To this point I have concentrated upon Hooker's tendency to subordinate the less important elements of a sentence to a single main clause. Coordinate elements within the subordinations are common, of course, but in most of the longer sentences only the principal thought is allowed grammatical independence. Nonetheless, in a stylist as conscious of the value of syntactical variation as Hooker, it is hardly surprising to find occasional sentences with multiple independent clauses. Even such infrequent constructions are used with expressive force. For example, in a passage where Hooker attempts to refute the Puritan contention that “no way is good in any kind of action, unlesse wisedom do by scripture leade unto it,” he insists that “wisdom hath diversly imparted her treasures unto the world”:

1 Some things she openeth by the sacred bookes of Scripture;
2 some things by the glorious works of nature:
3 with some things she inspireth them from above by spirituall influence,
4 in some thinges she leadeth and trayneth them onely by worldly experience and practise.

[ii.i.4]

Here the coordinate syntax clearly reflects Hooker's position that the Book of Nature has, within its proper sphere, the same dignity and validity as Scripture. The Puritan insistence on a total subordination of natural reason to divine revelation is tacitly resisted even by Hooker's syntactical structure; it is entirely significant that of the ten sentences in the section from which the quotation is taken, six have more than one independent clause. The parallelism in the two pairs of clauses quoted above also has expressive value, reflecting Hooker's view that Nature and Scripture are congruent modes of attaining wisdom, since both emanate from the same rational God.

V

The distinctive structure of any prose style is defined not only by the placement and relationship of sentence elements but also by the internal character of those elements. The individual members of Hooker's sentences are notable for their syntactical discursiveness. Nouns and verbs tend to double, adjectives and adverbs to expand into phrases, phrases into clauses. The typical copiousness of the Ciceronian is achieved largely by this expansive tendency in which every aspect of the thought is made explicit by full grammatical development. The historical movement of the English sentence toward greater conciseness has been achieved in part by contraction of the sentence elements into a kind of syntactical shorthand; Hooker belonged to an earlier, more discursive tradition.

Here, for example, is a typical expansive period from the Laws:

1          Albeit therefore every cause admit not such infallible evidence of profe,
2                    as leaveth no possibilitie of doubt or scruple behind it;
3          yet they who claime the generall assent of the whole world
4                    unto that which they teach,
5                    and doe not feare to give very hard and heavy sentence
6                    upon as many as refuse to embrace the same,
7 must have speciall regard
8          that their first foundations and grounds be more then sclender probabilities.

[ii.1.3]

It will be noted that the periodic form is characteristically used to give logical precedence to the opening concession and, in members 3-6, the aspects of the Puritan position that justify the conclusion.

The expansive tendencies at work in the sentence can be shown by compressing the thought to essentials, preserving Hooker's order and diction (with one exception): Albeit therefore every cause admit not infallible evidence, yet they who demand general assent unto that which they teach must have special regard that their foundations be more than slender probabilities. The substitution of the stronger verb “demand” for the original “claim” absorbs the relative clauses in members 5 and 6. A further change of diction, replacing the pronominal subject of member 3 with “Puritans” or, to preserve the abstractive tone, with “dogmatists,” would remove any strict necessity for the clause “unto that which they teach.” The entire central part of the sentence could be reduced to half a dozen words without radically affecting the conceptual content.

Such recastings are useful in revealing structural traits. The original sentence displays, in fact, the principal syntactical techniques used by Hooker for expansion. Occasionally he will adopt nearly tautological constructions: the doublings of “hard and heavy sentence” or of “first foundations and grounds” seem to fall within this category. More often the tautology will be used for clearly emphatic purposes. In the opening members, “such infallible evidence of profe, as leaveth no possibilitie of doubt or scruple behind it” seems, on strictly logical grounds, redundant. The repetition helps, however, to emphasize the limits of Hooker's concession. If he is willing to admit that the Anglicans cannot claim strict or absolute infallibility, so that no possibility of doubt remains; nonetheless, his entire argument is designed to show that for practical purposes his position attains as much certainty as can reasonably be expected in the disputed areas of ecclesiastical polity. A somewhat similar use of redundancy occurs in “the generall assent of the whole world,” which serves to emphasize the sweeping claims of the Puritans.

The most common expansive device in the Laws appears through the central part of the sentence. In such key grammatical positions as the subject of the main clause, Hooker will often use a weak abstraction, most frequently a pronoun, which he can later expand with relative or appositional clauses. The Laws begins, in fact, with such a construction: “He that goeth about to perswade a multitude …” In a similar manner, Hooker may prefer a weaker or less precise verb, which he can define more precisely in later expansions: in the sentence above, the exact form of the Puritan “claime” to general assent is explained in the clauses “and doe not feare to give very hard and heavy sentence upon as many as refuse to embrace the same.” Indeed, the second half of this expansion itself illustrates the pattern of pronoun and defining clause.

As an expressive technique this form of elaboration is probably to be interpreted as a quest for precision of meaning, the explanatory clauses determining the connotational overtones with greater accuracy than a single word is likely to achieve. For instance, can any substitution of “demand,” or “insist upon,” or “enforce” for the original “claime” reproduce exactly the effect of “doe not feare to give very hard and heavy sentence,” with its connotations of temerity and ruthlessness? More generally, the syntactical discursiveness of the individual member can express, particularly in passages of controversy, a meticulous attention to detail, a sense that every aspect of the opponents' position and every step in the author's own argument has received his full and deliberate consideration. Nor can any consideration of the expressive value of this copiousness of development avoid noticing the manner in which it reinforces other forms of structural expressiveness. A suspended construction of ten members is twice as periodic as one of five.

VI

One final aspect of Hooker's prose structure remains to be treated: the nature of his syntactical ligatures, the mortar of his style, so to speak. The question is closely related to Hooker's expansive inclinations, since the heavier the weight of individual segments of the sentence, or of the sentences themselves, the stronger must be the bonds that join them if the stylistic edifice is to cohere.

Hooker uses many means to bind his logical chains, most obviously his heavy sprinkling of conjunctions, but his most revealing technique is his characteristic dependence on pronouns for linkage. I have mentioned his fondness for a pronoun followed by a relative clause as a typical expansive movement, but the extraordinary frequency of pronominal forms in the Laws cannot be explained only as a method of inducing natural elaborations.

The pronoun is a widespread linguistic device, of course, whose primary function is to render unnecessary the clumsy repetition of nouns or a harried search for synonyms. Generally speaking, the more sensitive a prose stylist to the connotational aura of words, the more unhappy he will be in the quest for exact synonyms, and the stronger will be his attraction to pronominal constructions, particularly in passages of careful argument. Or a fondness for pronouns may reflect a strong bias in favor of formal logic, since the syllogism is based on an identity of terms which renders suspect the use of synonyms. The syllogism is stylistically awkward in itself, but it may be absorbed into the flow of prose without loss of force by substituting pronouns for the repeated terms. Both explanations can be used to account for the frequency of pronouns in the Laws. Yet when all these justifications are taken into account, Hooker's pronominal supply remains far in excess of need.

The most basic explanation for the ubiquity of pronouns in the Laws lies in their function as a method of linkage. The cohesion of Hooker's style is, to a great extent, dependent upon this technique. In the following illustration he is disclaiming those flaws in the Anglican position which are attributable to human failings rather than to the system itself:

1          Wherefore all these abuses being severed and set apart,
2                    which rise from the corruption of men
3                    and not from the lawes themselves:
4          come we to those things
5                    which in the very whole intier forme of our Church-politie have beene
6                              (as we perswade our selves)
7                    injuriously blamed by them,
8                    who endevour to overthrow the same,
9                    and in stead therof to establish a much worse;
10                    onely through a strong misconceipt they have,
11                              that the same is grounded on divine authoritie.

[ii.i.1]

The sentence has the typical centripetal structure Hooker often employs for transition; the opening suspension summarizes the previous argument, the main clause indicates a change of direction, and the trailing elements define the new area of investigation. Characteristic expansive devices are present: the doublings of “severed and set apart” (which is neither tautological nor conceptually necessary) or “whole intier,” the explicit development of an antithesis in two members (2 and 3), and the patterns of pronoun and relative clause (“those things which …”, “blamed by them, who …”). Typical, also, is the linkage of this sentence to the previous one by an initial conjunction.

The sentence supplies a rather striking example of the use of pronominal forms for linkage in the two occurrences of “the same” (8 and 11). It will be noted that both appear in that part of the sentence which is grammatically “loose” or unsuspended and thus has the greater tendency to fragment. The interlocking strength provided by the pronouns comes, of course, from the necessity of recalling the antecedent and substituting the more specific noun for the vaguer pronoun, a process that involves the reader in a simultaneous consideration of two parts of the sentence. When the pronoun immediately follows the antecedent, as it does in most relative constructions, the act of substitution is so instantaneous that it could scarcely be called a process, and the linking force is limited to the point of contact, in the manner of a hinge. The greater the syntactical distance between a pronoun and its antecedent, the larger is the area the reader must scan before making the necessary substitution. The mental processes involved in this determination of meaning, no matter how low the level of consciousness at which they operate, will thus require the interrelating of two quite separate syntactical points. If the linkage is less strong than that provided by conjunctions or immediately relative pronouns, it embraces a larger portion of the sentence. In the passage quoted above, both occurrences of “the same” are separated from their antecedents by at least two clauses. In more extreme cases, the antecedents for Hooker's pronouns are found three or four sentences earlier.

The use of pronouns for linkage is not without attendant dangers. One far from uncommon aspect of Hooker's pronominal forms is an ambiguity of reference. In the sentence under discussion, identical pronouns are used for different antecedents. In member 8 “the same” refers to “our Church-politie” in 5, whereas in 11 it substitutes for “a much worse” in 9. The possibility for confusion is strong, and only the general context of Hooker's argument provides an adequate clue to the correct antecedent. In fact, such an overly casual approach to the pronoun represents Hooker's major stylistic vice. Often the problem is one of diction rather than syntax; the simple substitution of “theirs” for “the same” in member 11 would remove the confusion. But Hooker is not careful in his choice of pronouns, and the reader is sometimes brought to a halt in a conscious search for the correct referent. Yet devotion to pronominal forms for linkage, whatever the occasional difficulties that may be entailed, is a key element in his style. When a reader enters upon a search for the correct referent, he does not, except in cases of confusion, actually reread the previous part of the sentence. Instead, he scans his memory for a substitution that will be meaningful in the context of the new clause. Thus a heavy use of linking pronouns trains the reader to hold in immediately available suspension the sentence members, or even whole sentences, he has already absorbed, even when they have been grammatically completed. No previous element must be allowed to escape the immediate consciousness lest it be required for pronominal reference. Such an analysis reduces, of course, to mechanical terms a swift and perhaps partly intuitive mental process, but it is nonetheless useful in describing the cohesive effect Hooker thus achieves. As an expressive tendency, therefore, pronominal linkage is similar to grammatical suspension. Both embody a refusal to pigeonhole, an insistence upon examining all the evidence in a rationally tentative manner without precipitate judgments.

My own experience in reading Hooker with students has been revealing. Influenced as most of them have been by modern prose styles, their absorption of written meaning seems analogous to the manner in which they would count the cars of a train entering a tunnel. Each element of the thought passes before them on its own syntactical gondola. Coherence depends on an unobtrusive head-to-tail linkage and a general unity of direction as all the cars move along the same track. Each car is inexorably displaced by the succeeding one, each disappears in turn into the darker recesses of the memory. Reading Hooker for the first time, these students seem to find that, because of his complicated and expansive sentence structure, particularly the periodic construction, and his heavy use of pronominal linkage, they are constantly losing count. The train has to be backed up, the passages reread. After a period of vocal suffering they learn to adapt to this unaccustomed mode of prose. To pursue the analogy a little further, they learn not to count cars just before they enter a tunnel. In a sense, they learn not to count at all, but to remove themselves to a nearby hilltop from which they can simultaneously see the whole train and estimate its length, the nature of its freight, and its true direction, even when some cars are still rounding a curve. Some losses are entailed in the more distant perspective. The individual cars, the syntactical elements, are less immediately exciting. From afar the colors are weaker, the details of individual pieces of freight less precise, the noise of passage less internally vibrating. The corresponding gain is in a more comprehensive outlook, which is never distracted from embracing the whole by the immediacy of the present part.

The analogy has obvious limitations, but I think it instructive in revealing some essential qualities of Hooker's prose structure. Distinctions are often made between prose styles on the basis of coherency. As Coleridge put it, in stylists like Hooker, the unity “is produced by the unity of the subject, and the perpetual growth and evolution of the thoughts, one generating, and explaining, and justifying, the place of another, not, as it is in Seneca, where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely strung together like beads, without any causation or progression.”¹¹

Throughout the previous discussion I have emphasized the syntactical forms by which Hooker expresses this logically coherent movement. Yet such a proximate analysis as Coleridge's is far from satisfying. What, exactly, is meant by logical coherence? What is incoherent about Senecan beads on a string? Does not a necklace have unity, cohesiveness, progression, even a kind of structural causality? In short, how does the progression of a Ciceronian passage really differ from that of a Senecan? I am inclined to think that too much emphasis can be placed on this distinction between a causally unified, logically progressive style and one that proceeds more atomistically by a series of striking thoughts. The distinction is valid for descriptive purposes, but it deals only in effects and leaves untouched more essential questions.

No readable style can be incoherent or lack all progressive movement. A glance at a Bacon essay in the Senecan “curt” mode will invariably reveal an underlying development. “Of Riches,” for example, opens with Coleridge's beads on a string: “I cannot call Riches better than the baggage of virtue. The Roman word is better, impedimenta. For as baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue. It cannot be spared nor left behind, but it hindreth the march; yea and the care of it sometimes loseth or disturbeth the victory. Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.” Structurally, Bacon's prose is almost at the opposite extreme from Hooker's here. Typically, he begins the passage with the conclusion, and the explanation follows. Notable is his use of the pronoun in the fourth sentence. Some linking force is present, but Bacon is less interested in structural coherence than in the value of the indefinite pronoun for reinforcement of his metaphor: “it” has a double antecedent, both baggage and riches. Elsewhere Bacon prefers to repeat such key nouns.

Although the passage moves in the staccato bursts of the stile coupé, it hardly seems accurate to say that it is “without causation or progression.” The introduction of the metaphor, the development of its relevance, the explicit application in a moral epigram surely represents a “growth and evolution of the thoughts, one generating, and explaining, and justifying, the place of another.” The difference between the Ciceronian and Senecan modes, of course, lies in structural emphasis. Were Hooker to rework Bacon's passage into one of his characteristic periods, we would be made much more conscious of rational progression, much more aware, for example, of the change of subject from “riches” to “great riches.” Doubtless there are degrees of logical coherence in all good English prose styles, but the poles are not widely separated. A train remains a train, regardless of our perspective. The crucial difference is the extent to which an author impresses his coherence upon our attention.

In short, one gets closer to an essential definition of Hooker's prose structure by thinking less of logical coherence as an absolute quality in itself. What matters is rather an author's syntactical emphasis on coherence, which in turn is symptomatic of a more basic perspective, which I can only call syntactical distance. The writer views his train from the hilltop. Less metaphorically, syntactical distance can be defined as an emphasizing of larger structural patterns in place of individual elements. The syntactical whole is more important than the parts, or, more accurately, the parts are significant only as they contribute to the whole. Coleridge explains this aspect of style as “that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole.”¹² Thus the reader is required to perceive simultaneously much greater quantities of prose embracing a larger area of thought. Reading remains, of course, a process. The reader cannot, in practice, grasp a long sentence or a chapter immediately; he must proceed element by element. But by such devices as involved subordinating constructions, a heavy incidence of conjunctions, and pronominal linkage, Hooker requires his reader to exercise more fully the suspending powers of memory until the whole argument has taken form.

The negative side of this integrating perspective has already been mentioned. No syntactical part may be allowed to become so immediately vivid that it usurps the attention. A striking metaphor, a self-sufficient epigram, the magical rhythm of a happy phrase, in fact all the partial virtues of a Senecan style are deliberately avoided by Hooker, not because he is incapable of managing them, but because they have the effect of lessening syntactical distance, of involving the reader too deeply with the present segment. Like his contemporary, Spenser, with whom he has great stylistic affinities, Hooker is continually dissolving his imagery, his wit, his epigrams in his discursive syntax and in the expansive movement of his style. The generally low density of his prose results from a deliberate emphasis on the whole rather than the part. Like Spenser, Hooker seeks his effects by the page, not the line.

Notes

1. Cranmer's notes are included in The Works of … Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. Keble, 7th ed., rev., 1888, 3:108-30. The Puritan pamphlet, A Christian Letter of certain English Protestants … (1599), is included in Bayne's edition of The Fifth Book (1902), pp. 589-635; for the attack on Hooker's style and his replies see pp. 630-33. Fuller's comment is reprinted in Works 1:79.

2. The average length of Hooker's sentences is high, but not extreme: a little over 41 words in Book 1 of the Laws. Edwin Herbert Lewis, The History of the English Paragraph (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1894), pp. 40-41, gives a tabulation of average sentence length for 69 writers from Tyndale to Herbert Spencer, in which Hooker ranks 22nd. But the count in this instance is purely mechanical, from period to period, taking no cognizance of the distinction between indicated sentences and grammatically complete units. Since Hooker's sentences normally contain but one independent clause, he would stand appreciably higher in a tabulation that called the authors to a stricter grammatical accounting.

3. All citations to the Laws in my text are identified by the book, chapter, and section numbers in the Keble editions, but I follow the text of the 1593 edition.

4. In analyzing the structure of Hooker's more complicated sentences I reproduce them schematically, using indentations to suggest degrees of subordination and italics for the main independent clause. I am uncomfortably aware that such orderings are often moot.

5. Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought, pp. 173-74.

6. Of the Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1860-64), 6:96-97.

7. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: J. and P. Knapton, etc., 1755; reprinted New York: A.M.S. Press, 1967), “Preface,” Vol. 1, sig. C2^v.

8. I should make clear my implicit distinction between expressive and rhetorical (or impressive) values in stylistic analysis. The critic, standing so to speak on the written word, can look back to the writer and describe how precisely the next expresses the author's meaning, or he can look forward toward the reader and analyze how effectively the author's meaning is communicated. The theoretical implications of this distinction are too complex to be investigated here, but I think the critic unwilling to admit the discreteness of these perspectives and the validity of each is in trouble.

9. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 6.

10. Jonas Barish, “The Prose Style of John Lyly,” ELH 23 (1956): 24.

11. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), p. 217.

12. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), 2:44.