Great Scot
Christopher Hill
The Admirable Urquhart: Selected Writings edited by Richard Boston (Gordon Fraser £5.50)
For most English-speaking readers, Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel is Rabelais, and Rabelais is Urquhart. This may not have been altogether to Rabelais's advantage. Sir Thomas is even more Rabelaisian than Rabelais himself, and even !Ino re explosively voluble. He rarely translates ItaY words into fifty when he can find a hundred. Nevertheless, Urquhart's Gargantua and Pantagruel is universally accepted as one of the great translations. Mr Boston gives us sixty pages from it — nearly a third of this slim, _elegant and expensive volume. His sixty-page .Introduction contains the salient facts about 1.1.Jrquhart's career, and urges us to reconsider lrn as a "very remarkable prose-writer . . . who has for too long been unjustly neglected." It is difficult to give the flavour of Urquhart's Style by short quotation its effects are cumulative as the sentences roam on over the Pages. His Rabelais appeared in 1653, at a time When Sir Thomas was desperately trying to
'flake Imoney
his estates, to relieve his debts or to redeem confiscated in consequence of his Participation in the unsuccessful Scottish royalist invasion of the English republic in 1651. But Urquhart has many other, less well-known, Works to his credit. His first publication, in L, 5, was a treatise on trigonometry, fortunately not reprinted here, which was described by
a nineteenth century inathematician as "not absolute nonsense, but . . . written in a most unintelligible way"; even a more favourable modern critic agrees that it is "unreadable." His other works include a genealogy which traces the unbroken descent of the Urquhart family from Adam and Eve, via the daughter of Pharaoh who found Moses among the bullrushes, the Queen of Sheba, a Greek prince from whom the family name originated, and a daughter of King Arthur. After that the claim to have owned land in Scotland for 2,039 years seems positively modest. It is not always easy to take Urquhart wholly seriously. But Mr Boston's title reminds us that his translation of Rabelais is not his only memorable work. "The Admirable Crichton" has become a proverbial phrase, used by many who have no idea where it comes from. Mr Boston reprints forty pages -on Crichton from The Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, which appeared in 1652. This must be one of the earliest examples of Scottish nationalist propaganda: Crichton was only one of many "exceedingly renowned" Scots whose praise Urquhart sings. Crichton had a "seraphic wit" which routed all academic competitors. He was "dearly beloved of all the ladies" for his social graces; "for his liberality and munificence he was blessed by the poor." He killed all who dared to challenge him to a duel, until he died by a tragic mishap at the age of twenty-two. Urquhart was something of a fire-eater himself. On his continental travels as a young man he fought three duels to vindicate the honour of Scotland against those who ventured to question it. In 1658, when he was nearly fifty, he issued a challenge to his Presbyterian cousin — which does not seem to have been accepted.
The Jewel also gives — among many other things — an account of a universal language which Urquhart had invented, and of which he gave another prospectus in Logopandecteision (1653), though it never actually saw the light of day. Sir Thomas appears to have hoped either to make money out of it, or to obtain some concessions from the government of the English republic to which his estates were forfeit. Mr Boston quotes forty pages on the advantages of this language from Logo pandec
teision. There is a serious study to be written one day on seventeenth century English interest in a universal language or "real character." This interest extends from Comenius and Samuel Hartlib to Isaac Newton, involving on the way Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law John Wilkins, Sir William Petty, Robert Boyle and other early members of the Royal Society. (Sir Thomas, it may be observed, was much more sensible in his scepticism about witchcraft than many of the scientists of the Royal Society.) One may wonder how far London's significance as a multi-lingual centre in the sixteen-forties fostered interest in a universal language, when not only Scots, Irishmen and Welshmen congregated there but also refugees from France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland.
Revolutionary London must also have contributed to Urquhart's prose style. He spent most of his life in Scotland. But he had lived in London in the early sixteen-forties, and he was there again as a prisoner in the fifties. For all his Scottish nationalism his cultural allegiances were English. Once the old regime of the Stuarts had collapsed, liberty of the press made possible a fantastic outpouring of books in the forties and fifties; the attempts of rival political groupings to sway public opinion led to all sorts of experiments in writing. Sir Thomas's style is an exaggerated version of the old-fashioned ityle favoured by Sir Thomas Browne and the Milton of Areopagitica, rather than the modern colloquial prose of Walwyn, Winstanley, Berkenhead and the Milton of A Treatise of Civil Power. But the Scottish royalist Urquhart should certainly appear with the English Ranter Abiezer Coppe and the Welsh borderer Thomas Traherne in any anthology of seventeenth century experimental prose.
Christopher Hill is Master of Balliol College, Oxford. He has most recently written Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England
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