ARTHUR HALLS
IT is not necessary to be a hero to be a good subject for biography, and Arthur Hall was very far from heroic in his character. But he has at least two titles to remembrance. He was the first translator of Homer into English, and his expulsion from Parliament is the first recorded instance of the exercise of this power, which has ever since remained in the possession of the Lower House without its being contested. We know a great deal more about him personally than is known about Shake- speare, but the knowledge does not tend to admiration ; at best it inspires a certain compassion for misfortunes which were largely of his own making. He started life under prosperous auguries, coming of a good Lincolnshire stock, not ill provided with means, the son of a country gentleman who served the Crown faithfully as King's agent on the Continent in many difficult and dangerous missions, and in particular as Surveyor and Comptroller of Calais, where he spent a good part of his life, and where Arthur Hall was born about 1540. On the death of his father he became the ward of Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, entered his household, and was brought up with his son Thomas, to whom he afterwards dedicated his Translation of Homer. He was probably for a while at St. John's College, Cambridge, was a fair Latin scholar, and well versed in French, as a result of a childhood spent in France. As a young man he made the grand tour, travelling through France, Germany, and Italy, and pushing on to Constantinople. Returning to England in 1569, he was elected Member for Grantham in 1571, and re-elected in 1572. But in the same year he was severely reprimanded by the Speaker for his contu- macious and unorthodox utterances, in and outside the House, in regard to the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots. A feud with a gentleman named Mallory, whom he accused of cheating at cards in 1573, involved him in troubles which clouded the remainder of his life. Hall undoubtedly had a certain rugged independence ; his notions of the responsibilities of a Member to his constituents appeal to modern ears. But he was prepared to claim the privileges of his order to the full ; he had a perfect genius for brawling and quarrelling, and in this Mallory business he cut a sorry figure. Defeated in his attempt to evade the payment of a fine inflicted on one of his servants for wounding his enemy, he avenged himself by writing a pamphlet reflecting on the House and the Speaker which led to his expulsion and imprisonment. Thenceforth his life, as his biographer happily observes, illustrates the remark of his fellow- courtier Bacon : " Vindicative persons live the life of witches, who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate." He had powerful friends—notably his old patron Burghley—but they were unable to restore his position at Court. A widower in 1582, he aspired to the hand of Lady Sussex, only to be met with a crushing rebuff, rushed into print with an account of the whole affair, was arrested at the instance of the Lord Chamberlain, and imprisoned in the Marshalsea for seven months in the company of pirates, traitors and beggars." Released in the spring of 1589, he next contrived to embroil himself with his protector and benefactor Lord Burghley, and from about 1595 onwards was continually harassed by his creditors. In 1601 he was imprisoned for debt, he was still in the Fleet in July:1604, and for all we know was there at his death a year and a half later. In one of his saner moments he described his own character with curious accuracy as " overweening of himself, which brings many infirmities to the person which is infected with that canker, furious when he is contraried, without patience to take time to judge or doubt the danger of the sequel." His great-uncle Sir Robert Wingfield was noted for his pedantry, pride, and contentiousness, and Hall had his full share of all those qualities. Yet as a country gentle- man he appears to have had an eye to the welfare of the poor; and though improvident and extravagant in the management of his own finances, he proved himself in advance of his times by advocating the abolition of the privileges of all merchant companies, the removal of restrictions on commerce, and the setting up of free trade for all citizens on condition of paying the usual Customs. Of his minor works, the libel on • The Life and Works of Arthnr Hall of armdhaur, Member of Parliament, Owner, and First Tranerator of Homer ins linglieh. By R. 0. Wright, KA., Avistant Lecturer In English Literature and Langnage in the University of lbsnehrer. Manchester: at the tal•Creity rms. tondos: Loassums. llos. Sc. arta Lady Sussex, A Hungaryous Mystery, has disappeared ; of the account of his grievances against Mallory, published under the title of A Letter Sent by F. A., only two copies have come down to us. It is not only a very rare and valuable book, but a human document of considerable importance as the self- revelation of "sixteenth-century human nature." The literary merit of his epistles in verse to his guardian is not high ; those in prose are largely complaints to, or requests for aid from, Lord Burghley; but they justify Mr. Wright's praise of their freshness and naturalness.
There remains the translation of Bonier, on which he was engaged as early as 1562 or 1563, when Roger Ascham encour- aged him to continue his version. In the turbulent years that followed he neglected or laid the work aside, but resumed it in 1578 or 1579. Before its completion he was imprisoned in the Tower, where it may well have proved a consolation to him in his misfortune, and it was published in 1581, some eight months after his release. As Mr. Wright reminds us, the knowledge of Greek and the acquaintance with Hellenic literature were comparatively rare in the generation of Ascharn. " The influ- ence of Homer himself was small, and only Plutarch with his Lives became an important factor for the Elizabethan stage." Here again a French intermediary had to be relied upon, and "it was in keeping with the general tendency of the age to find Hall, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth, connected with France as he was by early residence, turning to the French version of the Abbot Hugues Salel to make Homer known to English readers." Moreover, the Cecil household had already encour- aged other translators—Golding, who published a version of Caesar's commentaries in 1565, and Drant, who dedicated his rendering of two books of Horace's satires to Lady Bacon and Lady Cecil in 1566, and began a translation of the Iliad never published. But if Hugues Salel was not an Amyot, still less was Hall a North. His version, written in long seven-foot rhymed lines, has little to recommend it beyond its priority. It only ran to one edition, it was passed over in silence or disparagingly hinted at by contemporary critics, and superseded in 1598 by Chapman's incomparably more poetic version. In his admirable chapter on the style and technique of Hall's version Mr. Wright brings out clearly its merits and defects. Where anger, defiance, passion were needed Hall found fitting words ; he knew what adversity was from bitter experience. But he was incapable of restraint, dignity, or serenity. "He introduces the rough tone of the camp among the gods of high heaven." He had force, homely vigour, and at times could be pithy and concise ; but was too often rambling and obscure, interlarded the vernacu• lar with a jargon of French and Latin words, had little command of metrical variety, and often declined into stretches of sheer doggerel. Yet when criticism has done its worst, and the chief interest of Hall's work—" the shade of a shade "—is admitted to be historical, we must not forget that until Chapman's version appeared Hall's was the only rendering of Homer accessible to the Elizabethan public in English ; that it may have been made use of by Shakespeare in the early part of his career ; and that, however Chapman may sneer at Hall's " lame and defective work," this imperfect version may have "quickened in the greatest Elizabethan translator his own more comely offspring." Mr. Wright sums it all up in the last sentences of his scholarly and interesting study when he says :- " We feel sure that Keats, on reading Hall, would never have felt as though some new planet had swum into his ken. indeed, Hall is a fitter subject for the biting satire of Pope than for the ecstatic praise of Keats. But it is possible that without Hall, poor and at times grotesque as he may be, we should have had no Chapman. For this reason, and for its connection with the life of such a robust and striking personality, Hall's rendering of Homer's Iliad is worthy to be remembered in the great body of Eliyabethan translations."
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