At length with rounsefal, from stock vntruncked yt harssheth.
Hee rested wylful lyk a wayward obstinat oldgrey.
Theese woords owt showting with her howling the house she replennisht."
There is perhaps no greater evidence of the reverence in which the ancients were held than that such frantic balderdash as this did not extinguish it. Yet this was what a man of undoubted talent, of considerable learning, and of no small acuteness (for Stanyhurst"s Preface to this very translation shows something more than glimmerings on the subject of cla.s.sical and English prosody), could produce. It must never be forgotten that the men of this time were at a hopelessly wrong point of view. It never occurred to them that English left to itself could equal Greek or Latin. They simply endeavoured, with the utmost pains and skill, to drag English up to the same level as these unapproachable languages by forcing it into the same moulds which Greek and Latin had endured. Properly speaking we ought not to laugh at them. They were carrying out in literature what the older books of arithmetic call "The Rule of False,"--that is to say, they were trying what the English tongue could _not_ bear. No one was so successful as Stanyhurst in applying this test of the rack: yet it is fair to say that Harvey and Webbe, nay, Spenser and Sidney, had practically, though, except in Spenser"s case, it would appear unconsciously, arrived at the same conclusion before. How much we owe to such adventurers of the impossible few men know except those who have tried to study literature as a whole.
A few words have to be said in pa.s.sing as to the miscellanies which played such an important part in the poetical literature of the day. Tottel and _The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was, considering its constant accretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They were followed by not a few others. The first in date was _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_ (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not of genius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was very popular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a few scattered exceptions it does not yield much to the historian of English poetry. Its popularity shows what was expected; its contents show what, at any rate at the date of its first appearance, was given. It is possible that the doleful contents of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was reprinted six times during our present period, and which busied itself wholly with what magistrates should avoid, and with the sorrowful departing out of this life of the subjects) may have had a strong effect on Edwards, though one at least of his contributors, W. Hunnis, was a man of mould. It was followed in 1578 by _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, supposed to have been edited by Roydon and Proctor, which is a still drier stick. The next miscellany, six years later, _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_, edited by Clement Robinson, is somewhat better though not much.
It is followed by the _Phoenix Nest_, an interesting collection, by no less than three miscellanies in 1600, edited by "A. B." and R. Allot, and named _England"s Helicon_, _England"s Parna.s.sus_, and _Belvedere_ (the two latter being rather anthologies of extracts than miscellanies proper), and by Francis Davison"s famous _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602, all which last belong to a much later date than our present subjects.
To call the general poetical merit of these earlier miscellanies high would be absurd. But what at once strikes the reader, not merely of them but of the collections of individual work which accompany them, as so astonishing, is the level which is occasionally reached. The work is often the work of persons quite unknown or unimportant in literature as persons. But we constantly see in it a flash, a symptom of the presence of the true poetical spirit which it is often impossible to find for years together in other periods of poetry. For instance, if ever there was a "dull dog" in verse it was Richard Edwards. Yet in _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_ Edwards"s poem with the refrain "The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love," is one of the most charming things anywhere to be found. So is, after many years, the poem attributed to John Wooton in _England"s Helicon_ (the best of the whole set), beginning "Her eyes like shining lamps," so is the exquisite "Come, little babe" from _The Arbour of Amorous Devices_, so are dozens and scores more which may be found in their proper places, and many of them in Mr. Arber"s admirable _English Garner_.
The spirit of poetry, rising slowly, was rising surely in the England of these years: no man knew exactly where it would appear, and the greatest poets were--for their praises of themselves and their fellows are quite unconscious and simple--as ignorant as others. The first thirty years of the reign were occupied with simple education--study of models, efforts in this or that kind, translation, and the rest. But the right models had been provided by Wyatt and Surrey"s study of the Italians, and by the study of the cla.s.sics which all men then pursued; and the original inspiration, without which the best models are useless, though itself can do little when the best models are not used, was abundantly present. Few things are more curious than to compare, let us say, Googe and Spenser. Yet few things are more certain than that without the study and experiments which Googe represents Spenser could not have existed. Those who decry the historical method in criticism ignore this; and ignorance like wisdom is justified of all her children.
CHAPTER II
EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE
The history of the earlier Elizabethan prose, if we except the name of Hooker, in whom it culminates, is to a great extent the history of curiosities of literature--of tentative and imperfect efforts, scarcely resulting in any real vernacular style at all. It is, however, emphatically the Period of Origins of modern English prose, and as such cannot but be interesting. We shall therefore rapidly survey its chief developments, noting first what had been done before Elizabeth came to the throne, then taking Ascham (who stands, though part of his work was written earlier, very much as the first Elizabethan prosaist), noticing the schools of historians, translators, controversialists, and especially critics who ill.u.s.trated the middle period of the reign, and singling out the noteworthy personality of Sidney. We shall also say something of Lyly (as far as _Euphues_ is concerned) and his singular attempts in prose style, and shall finish with Hooker, the one really great name of the period. Its voluminous pamphleteering, though much of it, especially the Martin Marprelate controversy, might come chronologically within the limit of this chapter, will be better reserved for a notice in Chapter VI. of the whole pamphlet literature of the reigns of Elizabeth and James--an interesting subject, the relation of which to the modern periodical has been somewhat overlooked, and which indeed was, until a comparatively recent period, not very easy to study. Gabriel Harvey alone, as distinctly belonging to the earlier Elizabethans, may be here included with other critics.
It was an inevitable result of the discovery of printing that the cultivation of the vernacular for purposes of all work--that is to say, for prose--should be largely increased. Yet a different influence arising, or at least eked out, from the same source, rather checked this increase. The study of the cla.s.sical writers had at first a tendency to render inveterate the habit of employing Latin for the journey-work of literature, and in the two countries which were to lead Western Europe for the future (the literary date of Italy was already drawing to a close, and Italy had long possessed vernacular prose masterpieces), it was not till the middle of the sixteenth century that the writing of vernacular prose was warmly advocated and systematically undertaken. The most interesting monuments of this crusade, as it may almost be called, in England are connected with a school of Cambridge scholars who flourished a little before our period, though not a few of them, such as Ascham, Wilson, and others, lived into it. A letter of Sir John Cheke"s in the very year of the accession of Elizabeth is the most noteworthy doc.u.ment on the subject. It was written to another father of English prose, Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione"s _Courtier_. But Ascham had already and some years earlier published his _Toxophilus_, and various not unimportant attempts, detailed notice of which would be an antedating of our proper period, had been made. More"s chief work, _Utopia_, had been written in Latin, and was translated into English by another hand, but his _History of Edward V._ was not a mean contribution to English prose. Tyndale"s _New Testament_ had given a new and powerful impulse to the reading of English; Elyot"s _Governor_ had set the example of treating serious subjects in a style not unworthy of them, and Leland"s quaint _Itinerary_ the example of describing more or less faithfully if somewhat uncouthly. Hall had followed Fabyan as an English historian, and, above all, Latimer"s _Sermons_ had shown how to transform spoken English of the raciest kind into literature. Lord Berners"s translations of Froissart and of divers examples of late Continental romance had provided much prose of no mean quality for light reading, and also by their imitation of the florid and fanciful style of the French-Flemish _rhetoriqueurs_ (with which Berners was familiar both as a student of French and as governor of Calais) had probably contributed not a little to supply and furnish forth the side of Elizabethan expression which found so memorable an exponent in the author of _Euphues_.
For our purpose, however, Roger Ascham may serve as a starting-point. His _Toxophilus_ was written and printed as early as 1545; his _Schoolmaster_ did not appear till after his death, and seems to have been chiefly written in the very last days of his life. There is thus nearly a quarter of a century between them, yet they are not very different in style. Ascham was a Yorkshire man born at Kirbywiske, near Northallerton, in 1515; he went to St. John"s College at Cambridge, then a notable seat of learning, in 1530; was elected scholar, fellow, and lecturer, became public orator the year after the appearance of _Toxophilus_, acted as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, went on diplomatic business to Germany, was Latin secretary to Queen Mary, and after her death to his old pupil, and died on the 30th December 1568. A treatise on c.o.c.k-fighting (of which sport he was very fond) appears to have been written by him, and was perhaps printed, but is unluckily lost. We have also Epistles from him, and his works, both English and Latin, have been in whole or part frequently edited. The great interest of Ascham is expressed as happily as possible by his own words in the dedication of _Toxophilus_ to Henry VIII. "Although," he says, "to have written this book either in Latin or Greek ... had been more easier and fit for my trade in study, yet ... I have written this English matter in the English tongue for Englishmen"--a memorable sentence none the worse for its jingle and repet.i.tion, which are well in place. Until scholars like Ascham, who with the rarest exceptions were the only persons likely or able to write at all, cared to write "English matters in English tongue for Englishmen," the formation of English prose style was impossible; and that it required some courage to do so, Cheke"s letter, written twelve years later, shows.[12]
"I am of this opinion that our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmingled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitures of other tongues to attire herself withal, but useth plainly her own with such shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent doth lead her unto, and if she want at any time (as being imperfect she must) yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease this need we would not boldly venture of unknown words."[13]
[12] The letter is given in full by Mr. Arber in his introduction to Ascham"s _Schoolmaster_, p. 5.
[13] It will be seen that Cheke writes what he argues for, "clean and pure English." "Other excellent" is perhaps the only doubtful phrase in the extract or in the letter.
The _Toxophilus_ and the _Schoolmaster_ are both in their different ways very pleasant reading; and the English is far more correct than that of much greater men than Ascham in the next century. It is, however, merely as style, less interesting, because it is clear that the author is doing little more than translate in his head, instead of on the paper, good current Latin (such as it would have been "more easier" for him to write) into current English. He does not indulge in any undue cla.s.sicism; he takes few of the liberties with English grammar which, a little later, it was the habit to take on the strength of cla.s.sical examples. But, on the other hand, he does not attempt, and it would be rather unreasonable to expect that he should have attempted, experiments in the literary power of English itself. A slight sense of its not being so "easy" to write in English as in Latin, and of the consequent advisableness of keeping to a sober beaten path, to a kind of style which is not much more English (except for being composed of good English words in straightforward order) than it is any literary language framed to a great extent on the cla.s.sics, shows itself in him. One might translate pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage of Ascham, keeping almost the whole order of the words, into very good sound Latin prose; and, indeed, his great secret in the _Schoolmaster_ (the perpetual translation and retranslation of English into the learned languages, and especially Latin) is exactly what would form such a style. It is, as the following examples from both works will show, clear, not inelegant, invaluable as a kind of go-cart to habituate the infant limbs of prose English to orderly movement; but it is not original, or striking, or characteristic, or calculated to show the native powers and capacities of the language.
"I can teach you to shoot fair, even as Socrates taught a man once to know G.o.d. For when he asked him what was G.o.d? "Nay,"
saith he, "I can tell you better what G.o.d is not, as G.o.d is not ill, G.o.d is unspeakable, unsearchable, and so forth. Even likewise can I say of fair shooting, it hath not this discommodity with it nor that discommodity, and at last a man may so shift all the discommodities from shooting that there shall be left nothing behind but fair shooting. And to do this the better you must remember how that I told you when I described generally the whole nature of shooting, that fair shooting came of these things of standing, nocking, drawing, holding and loosing; the which I will go over as shortly as I can, describing the discommodities that men commonly use in all parts of their bodies, that you, if you fault in any such, may know it, and go about to amend it. Faults in archers do exceed the number of archers, which come with use of shooting without teaching. Use and custom separated from knowledge and learning, doth not only hurt shooting, but the most weighty things in the world beside.
And, therefore, I marvel much at those people which be the maintainers of uses without knowledge, having no other word in their mouth but this use, use, custom, custom. Such men, more wilful than wise, beside other discommodities, take all place and occasion from all amendment. And this I speak generally of use and custom."
"Time was when Italy and Rome have been, to the great good of us who now live, the best breeders and bringers up of the worthiest men, not only for wise speaking, but also for well-doing in all civil affairs that ever was in the world. But now that time is gone; and though the place remain, yet the old and present manners do differ as far as black and white, as virtue and vice.
Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world: vice now maketh that country slave to them that before were glad to serve it. All man [_i.e._ mankind] seeth it; they themselves confess it, namely such as be best and wisest amongst them. For sin, by l.u.s.t and vanity, hath and doth breed up everywhere common contempt of G.o.d"s word, private contention in many families, open factions in every city; and so making themselves bond to vanity and vice at home, they are content to bear the yoke of serving strangers abroad. Italy now is not that Italy it was wont to be; and therefore now not so fit a place as some do count it for young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence. For surely they will make others but bad scholars that be so ill masters to themselves."
This same characteristic, or absence of characteristic, which reaches its climax--a climax endowing it with something like substantive life and merit--in Hooker, displays itself, with more and more admixture of raciness and native peculiarity, in almost all the prose of the early Elizabethan period up to the singular escapade of Lyly, who certainly tried to write not a cla.s.sical style but a style of his own. The better men, with Thomas Wilson and Ascham himself at their head, made indeed earnest protests against Latinising the vocabulary (the great fault of the contemporary French _Pleiade_), but they were not quite aware how much they were under the influence of Latin in other matters. The translators, such as North, whose famous version of Plutarch after Amyot had the immortal honour of suggesting not a little of Shakespere"s greatest work, had the chief excuse and temptation in doing this; but all writers did it more or less: the theologians (to whom it would no doubt have been "more easier" to write in Latin), the historians (though the little known Holinshed has broken off into a much more vernacular but also much more disorderly style), the rare geographers (of whom the chief is Richard Eden, the first English writer on America), and the rest. Of this rest the most interesting, perhaps, are the small but curious knot of critics who lead up in various ways to Sidney and Harvey, who seem to have excited considerable interest at the time, and who were not succeeded, after the early years of James, by any considerable body of critics of English till John Dryden began to write in the last third of the following century. Of these (putting out of sight Stephen Gosson, the immediate begetter of Sidney"s _Apology for Poetry_, Campion, the chief champion of cla.s.sical metres in English, and by a quaint contrast the author of some of the most charming of English songs in purely romantic style, with his adversary the poet Daniel, Meres, etc.), the chief is the author of the anonymous _Art of English Poesie_, published the year after the Armada, and just before the appearance of _The Faerie Queene_. This _Art_ has chiefly to be compared with the _Discourse of English Poetrie_, published three years earlier by William Webbe. Webbe, of whom nothing is known save that he was a private tutor at one or two gentlemen"s houses in Ess.e.x, exhibits that dislike and disdain of rhyme which was an offshoot of the pa.s.sion for humanist studies, which was importantly represented all through the sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, and which had Milton for its last and greatest exponent. _The Art of English Poesie_, which is attributed on no grounds of contemporary evidence to George Puttenham, though the book was generally reputed his in the next generation, is a much more considerable treatise, some four times the length of Webbe"s, dealing with a large number of questions subsidiary to _Ars Poetica_, and containing no few selections of ill.u.s.trative verse, many of the author"s own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fall into the rather colourless but not incorrect cla.s.s already described, and are of the tribe of Ascham. Here is a sample of each:--
(Webbe"s _Preface to the n.o.ble Poets of England_.)
"Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished; the greater part, I think, in any one kind, are such as are either mere poetical, or which tend in some respects (as either in matter or form) to poetry. Of such books, therefore, sith I have been one that have had a desire to read not the fewest, and because it is an argument which men of great learning have no leisure to handle, or at least having to do with more serious matters do least regard. If I write something, concerning what I think of our English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgment of English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and vouchsafe my book pa.s.sage, as being for the rudeness thereof no prejudice to their n.o.ble studies, but even (as my intent is) an _instar cotis_ to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow travail in this matter; whereby, I think, we may not only get the means which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude mult.i.tude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry."
(Puttenham _on Style_.)
"Style is a constant and continual phrase or tenour of speaking and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of the poem or history, and not properly to any piece or member of a tale; but is of words, speeches, and sentences together; a certain contrived form and quality, many times natural to the writer, many times his peculiar bye-election and art, and such as either he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. So we say that Cicero"s style and Sall.u.s.t"s were not one, nor Caesar"s and Livy"s, nor Homer"s and Hesiodus",[14] nor Herodotus" and Thucydides", nor Euripides" and Aristophanes", nor Erasmus" and Budeus" styles. And because this continual course and manner of writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the writer"s mind more than one or two instances can show, therefore there be that have called style the image of man (_mentis character_). For man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered and qualified, so are his speeches and language at large; and his inward conceits be the metal of his mind, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woof of his conceits, more plain or busy and intricate or otherwise affected after the rate."[15]
[14] The final _s_ of such names often at the time appears unaltered.
[15] _i.e._ "in proportion."
Contemporary with these, however, there was growing up a quite different school of English prose which showed itself on one side in the _estilo culto_ of Lyly and the university wits of his time; on the other, in the extremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of the pamphleteers, who were very often the same persons. Lyly himself exhibits both styles in _Euphues_; and if _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for a Parrot_ are rightly attributed to him, still more in these. So also does Gabriel Harvey, Spenser"s friend, a curious c.o.xcomb who endeavoured to dissuade Spenser from continuing _The Faerie Queene_, devoted much time himself and strove to devote other people to the thankless task of composing English hexameters and trimeters, engaged (very much to his discomfiture) in a furious pamphlet war with Thomas Nash, and altogether presents one of the most characteristic though least favourable specimens of the Elizabethan man of letters. We may speak of him further when we come to the pamphleteers generally.
John Lyly is a person of much more consequence in English literature than the conceited and pragmatical pedant who wrote _Pierce"s Supererogation_.
He is familiar, almost literally to every schoolboy, as the author of the charming piece, "Cupid with my Campaspe Played," and his dramatic work will come in for notice in a future chapter; but he is chiefly thought of by posterity, whether favourably or the reverse, as the author of _Euphues_.
Exceedingly little is known about his life, and it is necessary to say that the usually accepted dates of his death, his children"s birth, and so forth, depend wholly on the identification of a John Lilly, who is the subject of such entries in the registers of a London church, with the euphuist and dramatist--an identification which requires confirmation. A still more wanton attempt to supplement ignorance with knowledge has been made in the further identification with Lyly of a certain "witty and bold atheist," who annoyed Bishop Hall in his first cure at Hawstead, in Suffolk, and who is called "Mr. Lilly." All supposed facts about him (or some other John Lyly), his membership of Parliament and so forth, have been diligently set forth by Mr. Bond in his Oxford edition of the _Works_, with the doc.u.ments which are supposed to prove them. He is supposed, on uncertain but tolerable inferences, to have been born about 1554, and he certainly entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569, though he was not matriculated till two years later. He is described as _plebeii filius_, was not on the foundation, and took his degree in 1573. He must have had some connection with the Cecils, for a letter of 1574 is extant from him to Burleigh. He cannot have been five and twenty when he wrote _Euphues_, which was licensed at the end of 1578, and was published (the first part) early next year, while the second part followed with a very short interval. In 1582 he wrote an unmistakable letter commendatory to Watson"s _Hecatompathia_, and between 1580 and 1590 he must have written his plays.
He appears to have continued to reside at Magdalen for a considerable time, and then to have haunted the Court. A melancholy pet.i.tion is extant to Queen Elizabeth from him, the second of its kind, in which he writes: "Thirteen years your highness" servant, but yet nothing." This was in 1598: he is supposed to have died in 1606. _Euphues_ is a very singular book, which was constantly reprinted and eagerly read for fifty years, then forgotten for nearly two hundred, then frequently discussed, but very seldom read, even it may be suspected in Mr. Arber"s excellent reprint of it, or in that of Mr. Bond. It gave a word to English, and even yet there is no very distinct idea attaching to the word. It induced one of the most gifted restorers of old times to make a blunder, amusing in itself, but not in the least what its author intended it to be, and of late years especially it has prompted constant discussions as to the origin of the peculiarities which mark it. As usual, we shall try to discuss it with less reference to what has been said about it than to itself.
_Euphues_ (properly divided into two parts, "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit,"
and "Euphues and his England," the scene of the first lying in Naples) is a kind of love story; the action, however, being next to nothing, and subordinated to an infinite amount of moral and courtly discourse. Oddly enough, the unfavourable sentence of Hallam, that it is "a very dull story," and the favourable sentence of Kingsley, that it is "a brave, righteous, and pious book," are both quite true, and, indeed, any one can see that there is nothing incompatible in them. At the present day, however, its substance, which chiefly consists of the moral discourses aforesaid, is infinitely inferior in interest to its manner. Of that manner, any one who imagines it to be reproduced by Sir Piercie Shafton"s extravagances in _The Monastery_ has an entirely false idea. It is much odder than Shaftonese, but also quite different from it. Lyly"s two secrets are in the first place an ant.i.thesis, more laboured, more monotonous, and infinitely more pointless than Macaulay"s--which ant.i.thesis seems to have met with not a little favour, and was indeed an obvious expedient for lightening up and giving character to the correct but featureless prose of Ascham and other "Latiners." The second was a fancy, which amounts to a mania, for similes, strung together in endless lists, and derived as a rule from animals, vegetables, or minerals, especially from the Fauna and Flora of fancy. It is impossible to open a page of _Euphues_ without finding an example of this eccentric and tasteless trick, and in it, as far as in any single thing, must be found the recipe for euphuism, pure and simple. As used in modern language for conceited and precious language in general, the term has only a very partial application to its original, or to that original"s author. Indeed Lyly"s vocabulary, except occasionally in his similes, is decidedly vernacular, and he very commonly mingles extremely homely words with his highest flights. No better specimen of him can be given than from the aforesaid letter commendatory to the _Hecatompathia_.
"My good friend, I have read your new pa.s.sions, and they have renewed mine old pleasures, the which brought to me no less delight than they have done to your self-commendations. And certes had not one of mine eyes about serious affairs been watchful, both by being too busy, had been wanton: such is the nature of persuading pleasure, that it melteth the marrow before it scorch the skin and burneth before it warmeth. Not unlike unto the oil of jet, which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the flesh, or the scarab flies which enter into the root and never touch the fruit.
"And whereas you desire to have my opinion, you may imagine that my stomach is rather cloyed than queasy, and therefore mine appet.i.te of less force than my affection, fearing rather a surfeit of sweetness than desiring a satisfying. The repeating of love wrought in me a semblance of liking; but searching the very veins of my heart I could find nothing but a broad scar where I left a deep wound: and loose strings where I tied hard knots: and a table of steel where I framed a plot of wax.
"Whereby I noted that young swans are grey, and the old white, young trees tender and the old tough, young men amorous, and, growing in years, either wiser or warier. The coral plant in the water is a soft weed, on the land a hard stone: a sword frieth in the fire like a black eel; but laid in earth like white snow: the heart in love is altogether pa.s.sionate; but free from desire altogether careless.
"But it is not my intent to inveigh against love, which women account but a bare word and men reverence as the best G.o.d. Only this I would add without offence to gentlewomen, that were not men more superst.i.tious in their praises than women are constant in their pa.s.sions love would either be worn out of use, or men out of love, or women out of lightness. I can condemn none but by conjecture, nor commend any but by lying, yet suspicion is as free as thought, and as far as I can see as necessary as credulity.
"Touching your mistress I must needs think well, seeing you have written so well, but as false gla.s.ses shew the fairest faces so fine gloses amend the baddest fancies. Appelles painted the phoenix by hearsay not by sight, and Lysippus engraved Vulcan with a straight leg whom nature framed with a poult foot, which proveth men to be of greater affection their [then? = than]
judgment. But in that so aptly you have varied upon women I will not vary from you, so confess I must, and if I should not, yet mought I be compelled, that to love would be the sweetest thing in the earth if women were the faithfulest, and that women would be more constant if men were more wise.
"And seeing you have used me so friendly as to make me acquainted with your pa.s.sions, I will shortly make you privy to mine which I would be loth the printer should see, for that my fancies being never so crooked he would put them into straight lines unfit for my humour, necessary for his art, who setteth down blind in as many letters as seeing.[16]--Farewell."
[16] "Blinde" with the _e_ according to the old spelling having six letters, the same number as seeing. This curious epistle is both in style and matter an epitome of _Euphues_, which had appeared some three years before.
Many efforts have been made to discover some model for Lyly"s oddities.
Spanish and Italian influences have been alleged, and there is a special theory that Lord Berners"s translations have the credit or discredit of the paternity. The curious similes are certainly found very early in Spanish, and may be due to an Eastern origin. The habit of overloading the sentence with elaborate and far-fetched language, especially with similes, may also have come from the French _rhetoriqueurs_ already mentioned--a school of pedantic writers (Chastellain, Robertet, Cretin, and some others being the chief) who flourished during the last half of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth, while the latest examples of them were hardly dead when Lyly was born. The desire, very laudably felt all over Europe, to adorn and exalt the vernacular tongues, so as to make them vehicles of literature worthy of taking rank with Latin and Greek, naturally led to these follies, of which euphuism in its proper sense was only one.
Michael Drayton, in some verse complimentary to Sidney, stigmatises not much too strongly Lyly"s prevailing faults, and attributes to the hero of Zutphen the purification of England from euphuism. This is hardly critical.
That Sidney--a young man, and a man of fashion at the time when Lyly"s oddities were fashionable--should have to a great extent (for his resistance is by no means absolute) resisted the temptation to imitate them, is very creditable. But the influence of _Euphues_ was at least as strong for many years as the influence of the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology_; and the chief thing that can be said for Sidney is that he did not wholly follow Lyly to do evil. Nor is his positive excellence in prose to be compared for a moment with his positive excellence in poetry. His life is so universally known that nothing need be said about it beyond reminding the reader that he was born, as Lyly is supposed to have been, in 1554; that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Viceroy of Ireland, and of Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the luckless Dudley, Duke of Northumberland; that he was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, travelled much, acquiring the repute of one of the most accomplished cavaliers of Europe, loved without success Penelope Devereux ("Stella"), married Frances Walsingham, and died of his wounds at the battle of Zutphen, when he was not yet thirty-two years old. His prose works are the famous pastoral romance of the _Arcadia_, written to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and the short _Apology for Poetry_, a very spirited piece of work, immediately provoked by a rather silly diatribe against the theatre by one Stephen Gosson, once a playwright himself, but turned Puritan clergyman. Both appear to have been written about the same time--that is to say, between 1579 and 1581; Sidney being then in London and in the society of Spenser and other men of letters.
The amiability of Sidney"s character, his romantic history, the exquisite charm of his verse at its best, and last, not least, the fact of his enthusiastic appreciation and patronage of literature at a time when literary men never failed to give aristocratic patrons somewhat more than _quid pro quo_, have perhaps caused his prose work to be traditionally a little overvalued. The _Apology for Poetry_ is full of generous ardour, contains many striking and poetical expressions, and explains more than any other single book the secret of the wonderful literary production of the half-century which followed. The _Arcadia_, especially when contrasted with _Euphues_, has the great merit of abundant and stirring incident and interest, of freedom from any single affectation so pestering and continuous as Lyly"s similes, and of constant purple patches of poetical description and expression, which are indeed not a little out of place in prose, but which are undeniably beautiful in themselves. But when this is said all is said. Enthusiastic as Sidney"s love for poetry and for literature was, it was enthusiasm not at all according to knowledge. In the _Apology_, by his vindication of the Unities, and his denunciation of the mixture of tragedy and comedy, he was (of course without knowing it) laying down exactly the two principles, a fortunate abjuration and scouting whereof gave us the greatest possession in ma.s.s and variety of merit that any literature possesses--the Elizabethan drama from Shakespere and Marlowe to Ford and Shirley. Follow Sidney, and good-bye to _Faustus_, to _Hamlet_, to _Philaster_, to _The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_, to _The Changeling_, to _The Virgin Martyr_, to _The Broken Heart_. We must content ourselves with _Gorboduc_ and _Cornelia_, with _Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_, at the very best with _Seja.n.u.s_ and _The Silent Woman_. Again Sidney commits himself in this same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verse is "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton, whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the _Arcadia_ by calling it a "vain and amatorious poem." It is a poem in prose, which is as much as to say, in other words, that it unites the faults of both kinds.
Nor is Sidney less an enemy (though a "sweet enemy" in his own or Bruno"s words) of the minor and more formal graces of style. If his actual vocabulary is not Latinised, or Italianised, or Lylyfied, he was one of the greatest of sinners in the special Elizabethan sin of convoluting and entangling his phrases (after the fashion best known in the mouths of Shakespere"s fine gentlemen), so as to say the simplest thing in the least simple manner. Not Osric nor Iachimo detests the _mot propre_ more than Sidney. Yet again, he is one of the arch offenders in the matter of spoiling the syntax of the sentence and the paragraph. As has been observed already, the unpretending writers noticed above, if they have little harmony or balance of phrase, are seldom confused or breathless. Sidney was one of the first writers of great popularity and influence (for the _Arcadia_ was very widely read) to introduce what may be called the sentence-and-paragraph-heap, in which clause is linked on to clause till not merely the grammatical but the philosophical integer is hopelessly lost sight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. It is not that he could not do better; but that he seems to have taken no trouble not to do worse.
His youth, his numerous avocations, and the certainty that he never formally prepared any of his work for the press, would of course be ample excuses, even if the singular and seductive beauty of many sc.r.a.ps throughout this work did not redeem it. But neither of the radical difference in nature and purpose between prose and verse, nor of the due discipline and management of prose itself, does Sidney seem to have had the slightest idea. Although he seldom or never reaches the beauties of the _flamboyant_ period of prose, which began soon after his death and filled the middle of the seventeenth century, he contains examples of almost all its defects; and considering that he is nearly the first writer to do this, and that his writings were (and were deservedly) the favourite study of generous literary youth for more than a generation, it is scarcely uncharitable to hold him directly responsible for much mischief. The faults of _Euphues_ were faults which were certain to work their own cure; those of the _Arcadia_ were so engaging in themselves, and linked with so many merits and beauties, that they were sure to set a dangerous example. I believe, indeed, that if Sidney had lived he might have pruned his style not a little without weakening it, and then the richness of his imagination would probably have made him the equal of Bacon and the superior of Raleigh. But as it is, his light in English prose (we shall speak and speak very differently of his verse hereafter) was only too often a will-o"-the-wisp. I am aware that critics whom I respect have thought and spoken in an opposite sense, but the difference comes from a more important and radical difference of opinion as to the nature, functions, and limitations of English prose. Sidney"s style may be perhaps best ill.u.s.trated by part of his Dedication; the narrative parts of the _Arcadia_ not lending themselves well to brief excerpt, while the _Apology_ is less remarkable for style than for matter.