PART I

ORIGINS

ORIGINS

[Story-telling outside books.]

STORY-TELLING has nowadays only a shamefaced existence outside books.

We leave the art to the artist, perhaps because he has brought it to

such perfection that we do not care to expose our amateur bunglings. If

a man has a story to tell after dinner he carefully puts it into slang,

or tells it with jerk and gesture in as few words as possible; it is as

if he were to hold up a little placard deprecating the idea that he is

telling a story at all. The only tales in which we allow ourselves much

detail of colouring and background are those in which public opinion

has prohibited professional competition. We tell improper stories

as competently as ever. But, for the other tales, we set them out

concisely, almost curtly, refusing any attempt to imitate the fuller,

richer treatment of literature. Our tales are mere plots. We allow

ourselves scarcely two sentences of dialogue to clinch them at the

finish. We give them no framework. We are shy, except perhaps before a

single intimate friend, of trying in a spoken story to reproduce the

effect of moonlight in the trees, the flickering firelight on the faces

in a tavern, or whatever else of delicacy and embroidery we should be

glad to use in writing.

But in the beginning story-telling was not an affair of pen and ink.

It began with the Warning Examples naturally told by a mother to her

children, and with the Embroidered Exploits told by a boaster to his

wife or friends. The early woman would persuade her child from the

fire with a tale of how just such another as he had touched the yellow

dancer, and had had his hair burned and his eyelashes singed so that

he could not look in the face of the sun. Enjoying the narrative, she

would give it realistic and credible touches, and so make something

more of it than the dull lie of utility. The early man, fresh from an

encounter with some beast of the woods, would not be so little of an

artist as to tell the actual facts; how he heard a noise, the creaking

of boughs and crackling in the undergrowth, and ran. No; he would

describe the monster, sketch his panic moments, the short, fierce

struggle, his stratagem, and his escape. In these two primitive tales,

and their combination in varying proportions, are the germs of all

the others. There is no story written to-day which cannot trace its

pedigree to those two primitive types of narrative, generated by the

vanity of man and the exigencies of his life.

[The professional story-teller.]

At first there would be no professional story-tellers. But it would

not be long before, by the camp fire, in the desert tents, and in

the huts at night, wherever simple men were together relating the

experiences of vigorous days, there would be found some one whose

adventures were always the pleasantest to hear, whose deeds were the

most marvellous, whose realistic details the most varied. Probably it

would also be found that this same man could also give the neatest

point to the tales of wisdom that were the children of the Warning

Example. Men would begin to quote his stories, and gradually the

discrepancy between his life and the life that he lived as he recounted

it to his nightly audiences would grow too great to be ignored. His

adventures would become too tremendous for himself, and, to save his

modesty and preserve his credit, he would father them upon some dead

chief, a strong man who had done things that others had not, and, being

dead, was unable to contradict with his stone axe his too enthusiastic

biographer. Such a man, like many a modern story-teller, would likely

use his hold over the imagination of his fellows to become the medicine

man of his tribe, the depositary of their traditions, their sage as

well as their entertainer. He would create gods besides rebuilding men,

and while his people were sheltering in the huts and listening atremble

to the dying rolls of the thunder, would describe how his hero, the

dead chief of long ago, was even now wrestling with the Thunder God and

getting his knee upon that mighty throat. In the beginning man was a

very little thing in the face of a stupendous Universe. Story-telling

raised him higher and higher until at last heaven and earth were hidden

by the gigantic figure of a man. In the Arthur legend, in the legend of

Charlemagne, in the Sagas, we can watch men becoming heroes, and heroes

supernatural. Then story-telling, having done so much, was to set to

work in the opposite direction, and we shall see the figures of men

gradually shrinking into their true proportions through each successive

phase of the art, until, now that we have examples of all stages

permanently before us, we manufacture gods, heroes, men, and creatures

less than men, with almost equal profusion.

[In early story-telling heroes are more than life size.]

But in the beginning of written story-telling, when life was a huge

battle in which it was the proper thing to die, when the heroes of

stories were not finished off with marriage but by the more definite

means of a battle-axe, when life was a thing of such swiftness,

fierceness, and force, it was clear to his biographer that the creature

who conquered it was surely more than man. His were the attributes of

the gods, with whom he was not frightened to struggle or to be allied.

Sigurd's pedigree is carried back to Odin. Pippin struck a sword

through the devil who met him as he went to bath, and found that 'the

shape was so far material that it defiled all those waters with blood

and gore and horrid slime. Even this did not upset the unconquerable

Pippin. He said to his chamberlain: "Do not mind this little affair.

Let the defiled water run for a while; and then, when it flows clear

again, I will take my bath without delay."' Beowulf fought with dragons

and died boasting gloriously. Theirs are the figures of men a thousand

times man's height, very man-like, but gigantic, like the watchers

shadowed on the mountain mist.

[Silk and homespun stories.]

Each nation showed its peculiar spirit in huge cycles of narrative.

The solid force of the Vikings and their sword-bright imagery survives

in the Sagas; the French chivalry in the legends of Charlemagne and

Arthur; the Celtic feeling for the veiled things in the spells and

dreams of the _Mabinogion_. These were the great stories of their

peoples. But side by side with them were others. The thralls of the

Vikings heard of Brunhild and Gudrun, the serfs of France heard of

Roland and Bertha with the Large Feet; but they had also tales of their

own. The tales of silk have been preserved for us in writing, but what

of the tales of homespun yarn that no old clerk thought worthy of a

manuscript with gold leaves, and sweet faces, and blue and scarlet

flowers entwined around its borders?

Very few of these homespun stories were written down. _Reynard the

Fox_ had few brethren except in spoken story-telling. Perhaps just

because they never were written down, we can guess from the folk-lore

that has survived among us to our own day, and from the tales we hear

from savages, what were those tales of Jean and Jaques, that were

perhaps nearer modern story-telling than the great books that were

known by their masters. In folk-tale, as in _Reynard the Fox_, we find

very different virtues from those of the knights, heroes, kings, and

gods. In the silken tales the virtues are those of Don Quixote; in the

homespun stories they are those of Sancho Panza. Chivalry would seem an

old conceit; bravery, foolhardiness. Sagacity, cunning, and mischief

are their motives. In the silken tales there is no scorn shown save of

cowards, in the folk-tales none save of fools. Perhaps the proverbs

illustrate them best. 'Do not close the stable door after the horse has

gone.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'A bird in the hand is worth two

in the bush.' These are all short stories summed in a sentence, and any

one of them might serve as the motive of a modern novel.

[The swineherd and the king's daughter.]

From the time that stories began to be written down, we can watch them

coming nearer and nearer to this level, nearer and nearer the ordinary

man. The history of story-telling henceforth is that of the abasement

of the grand and the uplifting of the lowly, and of the mingling of the

two. The folk-tale of the swineherd who married the king's daughter is

the history alike of the progress of humanity and of the materials of

story-telling.

[Reduction in the size of the heroes.]

But before the heroes of written story-telling could begin to be

humble, they had to leave off being gods. It is possible to observe

the transformation by comparing a set of early stories composed at

practically the same time, but in different countries, in different

stages of civilisation, and so, for the purpose of our argument,

in sequence. The _Volsunga Saga_, the _Mabinogion_ and _Aucassin

and Nicolete_ were all composed about the same time, but there are

centuries of development between them. The heroes of the sagas are 'too

largely thewed for life'; Aucassin is a boy. Love in the sagas is a

fierce passion, the mainspring of terrific deeds; Aucassin's love is

a tender obsession that keeps him from his arms, and lets him ride,

careless and dreaming, into the midst of his enemies. In the _Morte

Darthur_, as we have it in Malory's version of the much older tales,

we can see the two spirits pulling at cross purposes in the same book.

Beneath there is the rugged brutality of the old fighting tales,

overlaid now with the softer texture of chivalry and gentleness. The

one shows through the other like the grey rock through the green turf

of our north country fields.

[Technique of the Sagas.]

The technique of the old tales varies most precisely with the humanity

and loss of super-humanity of their heroes. In the sagas it is very

simple. The effect is got by sheer weight and mass of magnificent

human material. The details are those of personal appearance and

armour; there are no settings. The men ride out gorgeous and bright

in battle array, with gold about their helms, and painted shields, on

great white horses against a sombre sky. There is no other background

to the tales than heaven and the watchful gods. It was not until a

later stage in their development that story-tellers painted their full

canvas, and put in woodland and castle and all those other accessories

that force their human figures to a human height. At first, like the

early painters, they were content with the outlines of men doing

things; their audiences, with unspoilt imaginations, filled in the rest

themselves. Then, too, they told their tales in a short sing-song form

of verse that served well to keep them in mind, but prevented any great

variation in emphasis. A lament for the dead warrior, a pæan for his

victory, and an account of his wife's beauty, a genealogical tree, were

all forced to jog to the same tune, and the atmosphere and scent of

their telling could only be altered by the intonations of the singer.

They still depended for their effect on the men who recited them, and

had not achieved the completeness of expression that would give them

independence.

[Of the _Mabinogion_.]

The _Mabinogion_, that took literary form at about the same time, were

made by a Celtic nation, far further advanced as artists than the

Scandinavians. The men are not so great in their biographers' eyes as

to hide all else. Picture after picture is made and left as the tale

goes on. For example:--

'And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that

man ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went

into the castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which

the roof seemed to be all gold; the walls of the hall seemed to be

entirely of glittering precious gems; the doors all seemed to be of

gold. Golden seats he saw in the hall, and silver tables. And on

a seat opposite to him he beheld two auburn-haired youths playing

at chess. He saw a silver board for the chess, and golden pieces

thereon. The garments of the youths were of jet black satin, and

chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon were sparkling

jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with imperial

stones. Buskins of new Cordovan leather on their feet, fastened by

slides of red gold.

'And beside a pillar in the hall he saw a hoary-headed man, in

a chair of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold

thereon. Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were

on his hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was

bound with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chessboard

of gold was before him and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his

hand. And he was carving out chessmen.'[1]

These two paragraphs are almost perfect in their kind. See only how

the details are presented in a perfectly natural order, each one

as it would strike a man advancing into the hall, who would see

everything before discovering exactly what the old man was about with

his chessboard, his gold, and his steel file. The Welsh bards were

trained more rigorously than the skalds, and were more delicate in

their craftsmanship. And yet it is interesting to see how these two

paragraphs are the work of a man writing for people in whose eyes gold

and ivory and precious stones have still the glory of the new. The

feeling of that little piece of story is the same we know ourselves

when we have a little child before us, and are telling it wonderful

things to make it open its eyes. The opening of eyes was one of the

effects at which the early artists aimed.

[Of _Aucassin and Nicolete_.]

And then when we come to _Aucassin and Nicolete_, also written at

the same time, but in a country still less barbaric, we find an even

more delicate artistry, and a material far nearer that of later

story-telling. Not only have the heroes become men, but the wondrous

background has become that of real life. There are no castles in

_Aucassin and Nicolete_ whose walls are built 'of precious gems, whose

doors are all of gold.' Nicolete 'went through the streets of Beaucaire

keeping to the shadow, for the moon shone very bright; and she went on

till she came to the tower where her friend was. The tower had cracks

in it here and there, and she crouched against one of the piers, and

wrapped herself in her mantle, and thrust her head into a chink in the

tower, which was old and ancient, and heard Aucassin within weeping,

and making very great sorrow, and lamenting for his sweet friend whom

he loved so much.' Now that is a real tower, as we see again when

presently Nicolete has to go along its wall, and let herself down into

the ditch, hurting her feet sorely before climbing out on the other

side. And is not that an admirable sense for reality that suggested

the keeping to the shadow as she crept through the town? As for the

humanity of the tale; we have been smitten to awe and worship by the

heroes of the sagas, interested in the heroes of the magic-laden

Mabinogion, and now we are made to be sorry for Aucassin. Like the

swing of a pendulum, the character of heroes has swung from that of

God-like ruffians, through that of men, almost to womanhood. We have

had terrible tales, and wondrous tales, and now

'There is none in such ill case,

Sad with sorrow, waste with care,

Sick with sadness, if he hear,

But shall in the hearing be

Whole again and glad with glee,

So _sweet_ the story.'

Loveliness and delicacy are here for their own sakes. We have already

passed the early stages of narrative. We are in the time of sweetly

patterned art; in the monastery over in England a monk is writing

the air of 'Summer is icumen in,' the first known piece of finished,

ordered music; everywhere clerks and holy men, aloof a little from the

turmoil of life, are making gardens in the margins of missals, and on

the roads throughout the world the vagabond students, as separate from

the turmoil as the monks, are singing the Latin songs that promised the

Renaissance.

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

[The thirteenth century.]

THINKING of the Renaissance now, we are apt to see only the flowers

of its spring, the work of men like Boccaccio and Chaucer, who were

strong enough and aloof enough to lift their heads above the flood of

classical learning that refreshed them, and to write as blithely as if

there had been never a book in the world before them. It is easy to

forget those dull years after Chaucer that showed how exceptional he

had been in being at once a student and an artist. It is still easier

to forget the winter years of ploughing and sowing and premature birth

that were before him, the years when no one thought that poetry could

be more esteemed than knowledge, those greedy years of rough and ready

erudition between the making of the students' songs and the building of

the _Decameron_. Many versions of old legends come to us from that time

like the _Life of Robert the Devil_, whose son fought with Charlemagne.

Many of the legends of the kind that the son of Mr. Bickerstaff's

friend was such a proficient in, and many collections of miracles and

small romances of chivalry less beautiful than that of Aucassin, were

at least written down in these years. The monasteries held most of

the learned men, and became more important than the minstrels in the

history of story-telling. They produced the books of miracles, and also

several armouries of warning examples, many of them taken from the

classics, for the vanquishing of scrupulous sinners and the edification

of all. Books like the _Gesta Romanorum_, volumes of tales more or less

irrelevantly tagged with morals, were the forerunners of collections

of less instructive stories, like those of Boccaccio's country-house

party, or those of Chaucer's pilgrims riding to Canterbury. These

books, with their frequent reference to antiquity, showed signs of the

new spirit that was spreading over Europe; the miracle-tales and the

exaggerated wondering biographies held the essence of the old. Rome in

the former was the city built by Romulus and Remus; Rome in the latter

was the place that had been rescued by Charlemagne, the place that was

ruled by the Pope.

But in that thirteenth century, when so many new things were struggling

to birth, one book stands out above all others as the most perfect

illustration of its spirit. The very fact that it is so much less of a

story than the anecdotes of the _Gesta Romanorum_ had almost made me

pass it over in a more detailed criticism of them, but this same fact

perfects it as an example of an artist's attitude in the time of the

revival of classical learning. It was almost an accident that let me

see these years of novel study and eager wisdom so clearly expressed in

the long rhyming narrative of the _Romance of the Rose_, that was known

above all other books for a hundred years, that was read by Ronsard,

modernised by Marot, and partly translated by Chaucer. The accident was

such that I think there is no irrelevance in describing it.

[Meung-sur-Loire.]

Walking through France with the manuscript of my history on my back,

I came at evening of an April day into the little grey French town of

Meung, set on the side of a hill above the Loire. Small cobbled streets

twisted this way and that, up and down, between the old houses, and

walking under the gateway, the Porte d'Amont, with its low arch and

narrow windows overhead, I felt I was stepping suddenly from the broad,

practical France, whose roadside crucifixes are made of iron a hundred

at a time, into a forgotten corner of that older France whose spirit

clings about the new, like the breath of lavender in a room where it

has once been kept. In the inn where I left my knapsack there was a

miller who drank a bottle of wine with me, and talked of old Jean

Clopinel, who was born here in Meung those centuries ago. 'And it was

a big book he had the writing of too, and a wise book, so they tell

me, and good poetry; but it's written in the old French that's not our

language any longer; I could not read it if I tried, and why should I?

They know all about it in the town.'

Indeed the town seemed a piece of the old French itself, with its

partly ruined church, and the little château crowned with conical

cap-like towers, the broad Loire flowing below. I thought of _The

Romance of the Rose_, Jean Clopinel's book, the book that meant so

much to the Middle Ages, the book that, unwieldy as it is, is still

deliciously alive. I thought of Jean Clopinel and his description of

himself, put as a prophecy into the mouth of the God of Love:--

'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel,

Joyous of heart, of body well

And fairly built: at Meun shall he

Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]

I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have

left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own

manuscript and a single volume of Defoe.

[Jean de Meung.]

Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval

revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased

with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by

his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations

upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their shrewdness and

applicability. His share of _The Romance of the Rose_ is a strange and

suggestive contrast with the beginning that was written by Guillaume

de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the second, and

about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with

the sweetness and purity of _Aucassin and Nicolete_; the second opens

solidly with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two

thousand lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with

ancient instances according to the new fashion of the time.

Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it

is difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won

knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of

character, as when you read:--

'Let one demand of some wise clerk

Well versed in that most noble work

"Of Consolation" foretime writ

By great Boethius, for in it

Are stored and hidden most profound

And learned lessons: 'twould redound

Greatly to that man's praise who should

Translate that book with masterhood,'

and know that he made the translation himself.

[The world at school.]

The very popularity of the book proves that the whole world was at

school then, and eager to be taught. Lorris, poet though he is, reminds

his readers that his embroidered tale hides something really valuable,

that it is 'fair wit with wisdom closely wed,' knowing well that he

could find no better bait to keep them with him to the end. And Jean,

when it comes to his turn, admirably expresses the contemporary point

of view. He has no doubts at all between the comparative worths of

manner and matter. He justifies the classics by saying:--

'For oft their quip and crank and fable

Is wondrous good and profitable.'

[One of the schoolmasters.]

The permanent value of knowledge is always before him, and having

learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that he should empty it all

out, only now and again giving the tale a perfunctory prod forward

before continuing his discourse? Knowledge comes always before culture,

and knowledge taken with such abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot

be bored by a scholar who in the thirteenth century is so independent

and so frank. Eager quarry work such as his had to precede the refined

statuary of the Renaissance, and in _The Romance of the Rose_ the

pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a dealer in books alone.

Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him, and there are in that

rambling, various repository of learning promises enough of realistic

story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently valuable

to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by

the classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It

gives me pleasure to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and,

protesting against calling spades anything but spades, prepare the

way for Rabelais. What matter if the romance suffer a little, and the

Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of scholarship? Jean himself moves

on unhampered. He talked of women's table-manners so well that Chaucer

himself could do no better than borrow from him. He attacked womenkind

in general so mercilessly (with the authority of the classics behind

him) that he won a stern rebuke from Christine de Pisan, that popular

authoress of a century later, just as Schopenhauer might be censured by

Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and, turning away, remarks that it is

best, if a man wishes to feel respectful towards them, that he should

not see them too close. Nor does he forget to let us know his views

on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of nature over art in

sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an illustration

of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work. All

these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the

continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring

morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth

and Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture

by Botticelli.

[In Meung six hundred years ago.]

I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the river in the

dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and looking over the dim

reflections to the far-distant bank, with its grove of huge trees, and

the tower of the church with the outline of the gateway on the hill

behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I was back in the

old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar, and that

up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor of

Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes,

that beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his

must have been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of

himself and the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town.

For even now, though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all

about it, and talk of him with that reverence in speaking that children

use when they talk of a master whom they do not often see. I could not

help feeling that their attitude was traditional. It has been the same

for all these years, and perhaps long ago the townsfolk, passing in

the narrow streets, hushed themselves before one door, and whispered,

'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are not many who can do

that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame leg and dipped

from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead tongue and

put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on the

parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that

all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be

wise.

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

[The Romancers before Chaucer.]

THE Franklin of Chaucer's pilgrims introduces his own story by

remarking that,

'Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes

Of diverse aventures maden layes,

Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;

Which layes with hir instruments they songe,

Or elles redden hem for hir pleasaunce;

And oon of hem have I in remembraunce

Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.'

Chaucer had many of them 'in remembraunce,' and though he shared the

knowledge of Jean de Meung, and was not, like the Franklin, a man who

'sleep never on the mount of Parnaso,

Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero,'

these tales, whether made by the 'olde gentil Britons' or the French,

must not be forgotten in considering him.

The romancers who preceded him, and, clad in bright colours, chanted

their stories before the ladies and knights in the rush-carpeted halls,

turning somersaults between their chapters, as many a modern novelist

might for the enlivenment of his narrative, were not scholars, but

had great store of legendary matter from which they made their tales.

Their material continued to be used, more and more elaborately, until

the time of Cervantes, and in such books as the _Morte Darthur_ we can

see what manner of material it was. They were not in the least afraid

of the supernatural, and they knew the undying attraction of hard

blows. Their tales were compiled without reference to the classics,

and contain all the characteristics of primitive story-telling noted

in the chapter on Origins. They represented, fairly accurately, the

Embroidered Exploit. They were tales of heroes, knights, and kings,

half elfin stuff, half history, elaborate genealogical narratives in

which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and the

grandsons' misfortunes are connected with their parents' revenge on

the previous generation. There were great dragon-slayers before the

Lord, and many who, like Charlemagne, were mighty killers of Saracens

in the cause of Christendom. And then there were such tales as that of

Melusine, whose father, King Helymas, married a fairy, and out of love

for her broke his promise not to inquire how she was when she lay in

childbed. Melusine suffers accordingly, spending every Saturday bathing

herself, with her delicate white limbs hidden beneath a serpent's scaly

skin. There comes to her a young knight called Raymondin whom she

saves by her wisdom, enriches by her magic, weds with great pomp, and

presents in successive years with ten sons, each curiously deformed by

reason of the fairy blood. Raymondin, in espousing her, promises to

make no inquiries about her doings on Saturdays. He breaks his promise,

like his father-in-law before him, and when, in anger at the ill-deeds

of one of his sons, he reproaches her with what she is, she sadly takes

leave of him, and flies off through the window, 'transfigured lyke a

serpent grete and long in fifteen foote of lengthe.' There were tales

too of more charming fancy, like that of the queen who bore seven

children at a birth, six boys and a girl, with silver chains about

their necks. The midwife, in her devilish way, showed her seven puppies

with silver collars instead of her litter of babes, privately sending

the children to be killed. The children, however, left in the forest,

were nurtured by a nanny-goat and cared for by a hermit, until the

midwife discovered that they were not dead, when she sent men to see

that they were properly scotched. But the men were so softened by the

accident of meeting a crowd busied with the burning of a woman who had

killed her child, that they had only heart to take the chains from off

the babies' necks, whereupon they flew away as white swans. That is the

beginning of the tale.

[The _Gesta Romanorum._]

There were tales like these representing the Embroidered Exploit,

and there were others illustrating in a curious manner the growth of

the Warning Example. These latter were the forerunners of the tales

of Boccaccio, who, like Chaucer, stands as it were with a Janus-head,

looking both ways, modern and primitive at once. The _Gesta Romanorum_

is a perfectly delightful book, whose purpose was, however, not

pleasure but edification. It is a collection of stories containing

amusement and religion, diversion and instruction--a primrose path from

the everlasting bonfire. The anecdotes are from a thousand sources.

Many of them are taken from the classics, but the references are so

inaccurate as to make it pretty certain that the monkish writer had not

read them, but had gleaned them from the conversation of other monks he

knew. And some of them cannot have come to him within the monastery.

I can imagine the old man, with his hood well thrown back, lolling on

a bench, behind a tankard of good wine and a dish of fruit, laughing

gleefully at the tale of the rich patroness or pious knight who wished

to entertain themselves and him. For almost the only things monkish

about the stories are the applications or morals, some of which are so

far fetched as to make it clear that the monk compiler has included a

tale for the pleasure he has himself won from it, and, after writing it

down, been hard put to it to find a moral that should justify its place

in a book intended as an armoury for preachers. Here is an example:--

'OF THE AVARICIOUS PURSUIT OF RICHES, WHICH LEADS TO HELL.'

'A certain carpenter, residing in a city near the sea, very

covetous and very wicked, collected a large sum of money, and

placed it in the trunk of a tree, which he stationed by his

fireside, and which he never lost sight of. A place like this, he

thought, no one could suspect; but it happened, that while all his

household slept, the sea overflowed its boundaries, broke down

that side of the building where the log was situated, and carried

it away. It floated many miles from its original destination, and

reached at length a city in which there lived a person who kept

open house. Arising early in the morning, he perceived the trunk

of a tree in the water, and thinking it would be of service to

him, he brought it to his own home. He was a liberal, kind-hearted

man, and a great benefactor to the poor. It one day chanced that

he entertained some pilgrims in his house; and the weather being

extremely cold, he cut up the log for firewood. When he had struck

two or three blows with the axe, he heard a rattling sound;

and cleaving it in twain, the gold pieces rolled out in every

direction. Greatly rejoiced at the discovery, he reposited them in

a secure place, until he should ascertain who was the owner.

'Now the carpenter, bitterly lamenting the loss of his money,

travelled from place to place in pursuit of it. He came, by

accident, to the house of the hospitable man who had found the

trunk. He failed not to mention the object of his search; and the

host, understanding that the money was his, reflected whether his

title to it were good. "I will prove," said he to himself, "if God

will that the money should be returned to him." Accordingly he made

three cakes, the first of which he filled with earth, the second

with the bones of dead men, and in the third he put a quantity of

the gold which he had discovered in the trunk. "Friend," said he,

addressing the carpenter, "we will eat three cakes, composed of the

best meat in my house. Chuse which you will have." The carpenter

did as he was directed, he took the cakes and weighed them in

his hand, one after another, and finding that the earth weighed

heaviest, he chose it. "And if I want more, my worthy host," added

he, "I will have that"--laying his hand upon the cake containing

the bones. "You may keep the third cake yourself." "I see clearly,"

murmured the host, "I see very clearly that God does not will the

money to be returned to this wretched man." Calling, therefore,

the poor and infirm, the blind and the lame, and opening the cake

of gold in the presence of the carpenter, to whom he spoke, "Thou

miserable varlet, this is thine own gold. But thou preferredst the

cake of earth and dead men's bones. I am persuaded, therefore, that

God wills not that I return thee thy money." Without delay, he

distributed the whole among the paupers, and drove the carpenter

away in great tribulation.'

So much for the story, which is indeed rather long to be quoted in so

small a book. But listen now to the application:--

'My beloved, the carpenter is any worldly-minded man; the trunk of

the tree denotes the human heart, filled with the riches of this

life. The host is a wise confessor. The cake of earth is the world;

that of the bones of dead men is the flesh; and that of gold is the

kingdom of heaven.'

[Chaucer and Boccaccio.]

The modern novel could have no beginning in a literature so far removed

from ordinary life as the romances, so brief in narration, so pious

in ideal as the Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something

of coarser grain than dreams, on the one hand, and on the other

something fuller fleshed than the skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy

its bones) was needed to produce it. It needed men and women, and it

needed a more delicate narrative form, portraiture, and the fine art of

story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Chaucer, for all that he wrote

in verse, was not a _trouveur_ when he was at his best. Boccaccio was

not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical learning had given them

humaner outlooks. The attitude of the _Canterbury Tales_ is not that

of the _Song of Roland_, or the _Morte Darthur_; the attitude of the

_Decameron_ is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes

at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity,

telling stories to amuse their friends.

Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class

Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than

themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They

were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and

their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal

characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective

literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of

story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of

them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work

their own. The names of the _trouveurs_ are lost, or, at least, not

connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and

counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men

who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre

Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were

men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality.

They were artists in their own right and not artisans.

[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER]

[Chaucer.]

Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to

Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without

in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He

married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with

an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He

had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go

litel my tragedie,' he says in '_Troilus and Criseyd_,

'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace

Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'

And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well

have liked 'at his beddes heed

'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed,

Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'

but he was a man of the true 'Merry England,' when oxen were roasted

whole on feast-days, and pigs ran in the London streets. He followed

the Court, but he knew the populace. His father was a vintner in Thames

Street, and in the Cheapside taverns Chaucer found some of the material

that his travels and learning taught him how to use. On St. George's

day 1374 he was granted a pitcher of wine daily for life by his Majesty

Edward the Third. It is probable that he met Petrarch at Padua. These

two facts seem to me to present no very hollow portrait of the man.

[Portraiture.]

He brought into the art of story-telling a new clearness of sight in

looking at other people and at the manners of the time. The romances

had not represented contemporary life, but rather contemporary ideals.

No one can pretend to find in Lancelot, in Roland, in Isoud of the

White Hands, character-sketch or portrait. Lancelot is the perfect

knight, Roland the perfect warrior, Isoud the beautiful woman. They

were not a knight, a warrior, a woman. Those who heard the tales used

the names as servant-girls use names in modern novels of plot, as pegs

on which to hang their own emotions and their own ambitions. The lady

who listened with her chin upon her hands as the _trouveurs_ chanted

before her, took herself the part of Isoud, and gave her lover or the

lover for whom she hoped the attributes of Tristram. The jack-squire

listening near the foot of the table himself felt Roland's steed

between his legs. These names of romance were qualities not people. The

Wife of Bath is a very different matter.

'In al the parisshe wyf ne was ther noon

That to th' offering bifore hir sholde goon;

And if ther dide, certeyn, so wrooth was she,

That she was out of alle charitee.

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground;

I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound

That on a Sonday were upon hir heed.

Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,

Ful streite y-teyd, and shoos ful moiste and newe.

Bold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.

She was a worthy womman al hir lyve,

Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve,

Withouten other companye in youthe;

But therof nedeth nat to speke as nouthe.

And thryes hadde she been at Jerusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge streem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,

In Galice at seint Jame, and at Coloigne.

She coude much of wandring by the weye;

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Y-wimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe.

Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,

For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'

She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands

because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical

woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her

part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she

is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as

we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and

costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands

whom she has badgered into getting it.

Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men

were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you

loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to

observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the

Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which

is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and

women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became

suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in

story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art

in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the

dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one

another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new

power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was

dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his

Wife,' is the observant spirit of the _Canterbury Tales_. That woman

standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon

her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his

pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see

him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man,

the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier,

are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the

amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of

the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their

little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple

with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on

a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval,

and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides.

[Prose and verse.]

After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott,

indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse,

but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of

the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking

the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his

round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in

this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the

portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art.

But while his verse in the _Canterbury Tales_ has the effect of good

prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his

governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he

was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales

that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the

short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the

_Decameron_.

[Boccaccio.]

Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more

elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a

Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly

seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his

youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was

sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him

devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even

in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something

of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of

a poet. Sentence after sentence in the _Decameron_ glides by like a

splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote

one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:--

'By a clear well, within a little field

Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,

Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)

Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield

Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield

The golden hair their shadow; while the two

Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through

With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd.

After a little while one of them said

(I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck,

Each of our lovers should come here to-day,

Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?'

To whom the others answered, 'From such luck

A girl would be a fool to run away.'

He could write a poem like that; he could write the _Decameron_; he

could write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life

could beg his friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to

the compilation of ponderous works of classical learning. There is

a legend of a deathbed vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured,

which, being reported to him, nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the

gallant the additional mask of the Carthusian religious.

[Illustration: GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO]

But the Boccaccio of the _Decameron_ was the mature young man, of

personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way

with the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a

professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the

rich colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court

of Naples. Here he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps

learnt from them a little of the art of narrative. He knew the _Gesta

Romanorum_, and began to collect tales himself with the idea of making

some similar collection. Noting story after story that he heard told

(for it would be ridiculous to reason from the widespread origin of

his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the world's books),

he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and proportion. In

him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales the

longwindedness of the _trouveurs_ was gone, gone also the nakedness

of the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of

the Gesta. These new forms were not things of utility that needed

justification; they were things of independent beauty.

[His story-telling.]

Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales. He knew enough

of classical literature to feel the possible dignity and permanence of

prose, and he told his stories as they were told to him in a supple,

pleasant vernacular that obeyed him absolutely and never led him off by

its own strangeness into byways foreign to the tales and to himself.

He found his material in anecdotes of current gossip, like Cecco

Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey, and his clothes,

and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He took

it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the

short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and

the little novel, the French _nouvelle_, a tale whose incidents are

many and whose plot may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two

forms have scarcely altered, and in the use of both of them he showed

that invaluable art, so strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of

compelling us to read with him to the end, even if we know it, for the

mere joy of narrative, the delight of his narrating presence. We are

so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous improvisations that we never

ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the general theme. But in

Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can be given to few

story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious construction of men

like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée and Flaubert.

[Importance of framework in books of short tales.]

Even without their setting his tales would have been something

memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less

loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do

not make good books. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are very short and

make a collection of anecdotes. The _Exemplary Novels_ of Cervantes

are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the _Canterbury

Tales_ are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when

Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked

Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have

the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems--the

morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless.

Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can

satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it

professionally expressed:--'Help me,' as Chaucer says:--

'Help me that am the sorwful instrument

That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'

As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the

song:--

'Maults gone down, maults gone down

From an old angel to a French crown.

And every drunkard in this town

Is very glad that maults gone down.'

When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:--'With worse

hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene

that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at

law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates

with simple piety:--'God grant us the like.' The _Decameron_ owes

much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court

of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony

that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of

pestilence and death.

THE ROGUE NOVEL

THE ROGUE NOVEL

[Democracy in literature.]

FEW characters in literature have had so large or so honourable a

progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings' daughters of High Romance,

charming, delicate creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as

delicately fashioned as themselves, we should never have known the

sterling dynasty of the Tom Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with

their honest hearts and coarse hides warranted to wear. All those Kings

of men, whose thrones were beer-barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels,

whose perennial counsellor was Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection,

would never have come to their own, and indeed would never have been

born, if it had not been for the sixteenth century entry of the rascal

into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such shaggy-headed,

smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.

To such rogues as he must be attributed much of our present humanity;

for until we could laugh at those of low estate, we held them of

little account. There is small mention made of serving-men in the

_Morte Darthur_ or the _Mabinogion_, and when, in the _Heptameron_ of

Margaret of Navarre, we hear of the drowning of a number of them in

trying to render easy the passage of their masters through the floods,

the comment is extremely short: 'One must not despair for the loss of

servants, for they are easy to replace.' On a similar occasion 'all

the company were filled with a joy inestimable, praising the Creator,

who, contenting himself with serving-men, had saved the masters and

mistresses,' an index alike to the ferocity they still attributed to

God and the rather exclusive humanity of themselves. Do you not think

with sudden awe of the revolution to come? Do you not hear a long way

off the trampling of a million serving-men, prepared to satisfy God

with other lives? It is a fine contrast to turn from these queenly

sentences to this little book, the autobiography of a beggar, who

thinks himself sufficiently important to set down the whole truth about

his birth, lest people should make any mistake. 'My father, God be

kind to him, had for fifteen years a mill on the river of Tormes....

I was scarcely eight when he was accused of having, with evil intent,

made leakage in his check sacks.... Letting himself be surprised, he

confessed all, and suffered patiently the chastisement of justice,

which makes me hope that he is, according to the Gospel, of the number

of those happy in the Glory of God.' No very reputable parentage this,

in a day when it was the fashion to derive heroes from Charlemagne or

Amadis.

[_Lazarillo de Tormes._]

It is a short step from the ironic to the sincere. The author of the

book is laughing at his hero, and makes a huge joke of his pretensions.

But to recognise, even in jest, that a vagabond rogue could have

pretensions, or indeed any personal character at all beyond that of a

tool in the hand of whoever was kind enough to use him, was to look

upon him with a humaner eye and, presently, to recognise him in earnest

as a fellow creature. It seems to me significant that the first rogues

in our literature should come from Spain, a country that has never

quite forgotten its Moorish occupation. In the Spanish student, who, so

tradition says, wrote _Lazarillo_ while in the University of Salamanca,

there must have been something of the spirit of the race that lets the

hunchback tell his story to the Caliph, and is glad when the son of the

barber marries the daughter of the Grand Vizier. For, joke as it is,

the book is the story of a beggar, told as a peculiarly fearless and

brazen beggar would tell it, without suggesting or demanding either

condescension or pity.

[The morality of the underworld.]

There is genius in the little book. Its author perhaps did better than

he meant, for he brings on every page the moral atmosphere of the

underworld, the old folk-morality, the same in sixteenth-century Spain

as in the oldest tales of sagacity and cunning. Lazarillo's shameless

mother apprentices him to a blind beggar who promises to treat him like

a son and begins his education at once. He takes the boy to a big

stone on the outskirts of the town, and bids him listen to the noise

within it. The boy puts his head close to the stone to hear the better,

and the old rascal gives him a thundering blow, which, the stone being

an admirable anvil, nearly cracks his skull. That is his first lesson

... never to be unsuspicious ... and it is as characteristic of the

others as of _Reynard the Fox_.

There never was so excellent a beggar as Lazarillo's master; no trick

of the trade was unknown to him. As a fortune-teller, he could prophesy

what his victims wished to hear. As a doctor he had his remedies for

toothache, and for fainting-fits; not an illness could be mentioned

but he had a physic ready to his hands. Then too, 'he knew by heart

more prayers than all the blind men of Spain. He recited them very

distinctly, in a low tone, grave and clear, calling the attention of

the whole church; he accompanied them with a posture humble and devout,

without gesticulations or grimaces of mouth, after the manner of those

blind men who have not been properly brought up.' Indeed his only fault

was avarice. 'He was not content with making me die of hunger,' says

his pupil; 'he was doing the same himself.'

Under such a master Lazarillo's wits sharpen quickly. 'A fool would

have been dead a hundred times; but by my subtlety and my good

tricks, I always, or mostly (in spite of all his care), succeeded

in getting hold of the biggest and best portion.' Lazarillo becomes

as astute a rascal as his teacher, and, living fairly and squarely

in the conditions of the underworld, his villainy does not damp his

spirits, or disturb his peace of nights. I was reminded of him by a

young tramp with whom I walked in the north country, a rogue with as

merry a heart as he, and a similar well-fitting morality. With me, from

whom he knew there was nothing to gain but good fellowship, he was a

good fellow, walked with a merry stride, whistled as he went, sang me

songs in the Gaelic of his childhood, and told me of the jolly tricks

he had played with a monkey he had brought from over sea. We walked

like men in the sunshine. But when, beyond a turn in the road, he saw

some person coming a little better dressed, why then his face flashed

into a winking melancholy, his stride degenerated as if by magic into

a slouch, and it was odd if his mean figure and despairing hand did

not attract a copper, for which he would call down a blessing. Then,

as soon as we were out of sight of his benefactor, he would resume his

natural walk and burst again into whistling and merriment. Lazarillo

is as frank as he. He recognises his needs (Hunger is not an easy

fellow to ignore), and would be much surprised if you denied his right

to satisfy them. Nor is he disappointed in you. Every honest man must

love a rogue, and you are as consciencelessly glad as himself when

Lazarillo, by kneeling before him and sucking the liquor through a

straw, diddles the blind man who greedily guards the wine bowl between

his ragged knees. You feel that he has but his due when he happens

upon a wife and a living and (if you read the continuation of his

history[4]) find nothing blameworthy in the fact that he spends his

last years in the clothes and reputation of a dead hermit, subsisting

on the charity of the religious.

[The form of the rogue novel.]

I have talked at some length about the contents of this little book in

order to illustrate the new material then brought into story-telling.

Let me now consider the new form that came with it. _Lazarillo de

Tormes_ was a very simple development from the plain anecdote or merry

quip of folklore or gossip, which was, as we have seen in the last

chapter, one of the popular early forms of narrative. Boccaccio raised

the anecdote to a higher level of art by giving it a fuller technique

and expanding it into the short story. The inventors of the rogue

novels achieved a similar result by stringing a number of anecdotes

together about a particular hero, making as it were cycles of anecdotes

comparable in their humbler way with the grand cycles of romance.

Lazarillo himself is not an elaborate conception, but simply a fit

rogue to play the main part in a score or so of roguish exploits, idly

following one another as they occurred to the mind of the narrator. His

life is a jest-book turned into a biography, a collection of anecdotes

metamorphosed into a novel.

[Its satirical material.]

The new form gave story-telling a wider scope. In writing a collection

of anecdotes it was difficult to realise the hero who was no more than

a name that happened to be common to them all. It was impossible to

make much of the minor characters who walk on or off the tiny stage of

each adventure. But in stringing them along a biography, in producing

instead of a number of embroidered exploits a single embroidered life,

there need be no limit to the choice and elaboration of the embroidery.

Though the hero was no more than a quality, a puppet guaranteed to

jump on the pull of a string, the setting of his life turned easily

into a satirical picture of contemporary existence, and satire became

eventually one of the principal aims with which such novels were

written.

The low estate of the rogue novel's hero made satire from his lips

not only easy but palatable. In writing the opinions of a rogue you

can politely assume that his standpoint is not that of his readers.

For that reason they can applaud the rascal's wit playing over other

people, or, if it touches them too closely, regard it with compassion

as lions might listen to the criticism of jackals. _Lazarillo_

contains plenty of good-humoured, bantering portraits: the seller

of forged indulgences, the miserly priest, and particularly the

out-at-elbows gentleman who walks abroad each day to lunch with a

rich friend, and is unable on his return from his hungry promenade to

keep from eyeing, and at last from sharing, the rough bread that his

servant has begged or stolen for himself. Lazarillo's merit is that he

writes of himself _à propos_ of other people, and never barrenly of

himself for his own sake. Smollett in writing _Roderick Random_ is true

to his traditions in getting his own back from schoolmasters and the

Navy Office. And the arms of Dickens, who reformed the workhouses in

telling the story of Oliver Twist, must have had quartered upon them

the rampant begging bowl of the little Spanish rogue.

Now the characteristic language of satire is as pointed as the blade

of a rapier, and for this we owe some gratitude to these rascally

autobiographies whose plainness of style was nearer talk than that

of any earlier form of narrative. The prose of the picaresque novel

has been in every age remarkably free from the literary tricks most

fashionable at the time. When your hero dresses in rags you cannot

do better than clothe his opinions in simplicity. The writing of

_Lazarillo_, of _Tom Jones_, of _Captain Singleton_, of _Lavengro_,

is clear, virile, not at all ornate, the exact opposite to that of

the Pastorals. Such heroes deliver their sentences, like Long Melford,

straight from the shoulder, and would consider fine writing as so much

aimless trifling in the air.

[Picaresque autobiographies.]

Mention of _Lavengro_ suggests a paragraph on one of the most curious

developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have

examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement

from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become

romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched

it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An

imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero,

makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend

to be imaginary. _Lavengro_ and the _Romany Rye_ are two parts of a

rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a

hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society,

and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they

say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose

attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a

chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the

exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.'

[The development of the rogue novel.]

But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct

line, in spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about

them as they rest upon our shelves. _Lazarillo_ had many sincerer and

more immediate flatterers--Thomas Nash, for example, whose _Jacke

Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller_, holds in itself, as one of the

earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough

of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home,

and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of

the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not

through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its

form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining

the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the

first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow

Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up

their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and

were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel

retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred

writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures

for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained

constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more

fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door

excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingenious

plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that

for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most

popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage,

in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals,

should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali

Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs

chanted the tales of the _Morte Darthur_, before Malory made from their

songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated

itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the

vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book.

[Illustration: ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE]

[Its culmination in Le Sage.]

Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was

not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age

from that which produced his models. The

'Stately Spanish galleons

Sailing from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,

With cargoes of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona,

but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The

Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred

years. Molière had brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was

painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of

letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le

Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a

light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes,

and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his

own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his

peaceable _Galatea_ is no greater than that between the adventurous Gil

Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience

left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just

the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate

them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them

out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious

pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in

colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.

Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined

himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him

doubly licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of

low estate, so that he could see things from below, upside down, and

comment upon them. His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could

observe French things, call them by Spanish names, and laugh at them

without being inexcusably impertinent. He had also a very excellent

technique. Le Sage had read La Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of

Theophrastus, and was the better able to allow his hero to take the

hint from Lazarillo, and use his autobiography as an outlet for his

social satire. Everything that Lazarillo had done, Gil Blas did in a

larger and more skilful fashion. The book summed up the rogue novels in

itself, and in its own right brought their influence to bear on English

narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares with _Don Quixote_ the

parentage of the masculine novel.

THE ELIZABETHANS

THE ELIZABETHANS

[The new conditions of professional story-telling.]

PROFESSIONAL story-tellers before the sixteenth century seem very far

removed from the novelists of our circulating libraries. Theirs was

a simpler patronage; they had but to please one rich man, and they

could live. The invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the

conditions of modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall

into the audience of the world, and patrons into the public. A man told

his stories in his own room. He was not sure of a single listener; he

might have ten thousand without raising his voice or pressing harder

with his pen. Poets might write for their friends or the Court; but

Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist by writing for

the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and themselves.

They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by charm

of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm

on paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly

appearing; already, as in the case of _Euphues_, a single book might

set the fashion for a thousand; already the novelist felt his audience

through his sales. Men like Greene, swift 'yarkers up' of pamphlets,

had to write what the Elizabethan public wanted--with the result that

there is very little purely English story-telling of the period. The

Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas. They fell in love

with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all countries but

their own, and for all times but those in which they lived. There never

were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from Italy, from

Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied crudely and

continually from a newly discovered antiquity.

[Elizabethan borrowings.]

There was _Paynter's Pallace_, peopled with characters from the

love-tales of France and Italy, in whose adventures Elizabethan

playwrights found a score of plots. And then there was _Pettie's

Pallace_, with its delightful title, _A petite Pallace of Pettie his

pleasure_, that shows how late our language lost its French. Pettie

steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of right

of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high

and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion

a Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All

the world was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical

allusion was used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against

her husband, explains his iniquity as follows:--

'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to

proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the

confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is

evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook

Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of

the stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced

Phyllis to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who

left Ariadne in the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he

subdued the monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate

labyrinth! He cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused

his own mother Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and

ripped open, that he might see the place wherein he lay being an

infant in her belly! So that what but filthiness is to be gathered

of such grafts? What boughs but beastliness grow out of such stems?'

And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was

he with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters

as though he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in

the dock before him.

'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more

offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the

one and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness--such

unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief

and murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in

him such falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish

desire, in her such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat,

in her such haggish hate, that I think them both worthy to be

condemned to the most bottomless pit in hell.'

[Lyly writes for women.]

There is something in the style of this, as well as in the address to

a female reader, that suggests the _Euphues_ of John Lyly, published

two years later. Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English

euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan romance, and brought

into it many elements still characteristic of English story-telling,

wrote as well as his letter to 'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie

good friends, the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory

to women--'To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth

what they would.' They were grateful to him, and since he said that he

would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's Casket, then open in a Scholler's

studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in London but knew much of him

by heart, addressed her husband or lover in terms his Lucia might have

used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as in her looking-glass.

His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of all his tales

was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like most

English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than of

the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England' that

he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may

offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And

yet he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century,

and throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards,

the chaste mind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was

to pour forth what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and

Fielding and Smollett were to write, before the chaste mind was to

exert any very lasting influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett

wrote for men, while, like an earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take

the measure of a woman's minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he

would go as neere to fit them for a fancie as the other doth for a

fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less squeamish than their

descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this book planned to

fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:--'Take from

them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles,

their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the

least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in

which so much of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a

'Cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections

were misplaced or unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride

responsibility for the disease, must have found it easy to forgive him

and to smile at so impotent a cure.

[Euphuism.]

The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than his matter. Like

Pettie's, it is precious, but with a preciousness at the same time

so elaborate and infectious that I am finding it difficult even now,

in thinking about it, to keep from imitating it. Its principle is a

battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which the sense, sometimes a

little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or words that are

not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed in a

single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts,

or longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in

the intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There

was something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three

paragraphs ago; and here is an example from Lyly:--'Alas, Euphues, by

how much the more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much

the more I feare thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its

embroidery.) 'The fine Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble;

the greenest Beech burneth faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest

silke is soonest soyled; and the sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest

Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most infect the clearest complection, and

the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest fruite: the most delycate

witte is allured with small enticement unto vice, and most subject to

yeelde unto vanitie.'

['Cruditie and indigestion.']

Such a style could not but attract a newly educated people, still able

to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of information is comparable

to that generosity of gold and precious gems that has been noticed as

characteristic of the writers of the _Mabinogion_. The Briton wondered

at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It is not surprising that in

this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be brought to

perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says Montaigne,

'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the same: the

stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have changed

forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and

concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so

delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine

John Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and

a classical dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig

out metaphors learned and ingenious, and present them immediately to

his readers without putting any undue strain on his own intellectual

digestion.

[Lyly's followers.]

His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If they could

not write they talked his peculiar language. If they were novelists

they wrote in something like his manner, and with cheerful consciences

used his name as a trade-mark to attract his popularity to themselves.

Lodge's _Rosalynde_ is introduced as _Euphues' Golden Legacie_, and

many other stories were connected by some ingenious silken thread to

Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to laugh at euphuism.

It was the first prophecy of the ordered poetic prose in which such

delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of Lodge and

Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at once its

possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A

golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to

England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors,

and when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to

tell all his journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be,

Philautus),' we perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind

his sentences. The stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and

Cassander, or the pretty history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as

pleasant as the tales of Lodge and Greene.

How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of

these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene

wrote in a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing

on the high seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford

gentleman, holding an appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having

nothing else to do. Euphuism fell away from both journalist and sailor,

leaving a pleasant glow over their style. They were more intent than

Lyly on the plain forwarding of the narrative. For the long rhetorical

harangues they substituted shorter, simpler speeches to express the

feelings of their characters. The harangue was a step from the bald

statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter speeches

were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the

subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer

copy of the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself.

Dialogue was yet to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant

argument, but in the best of his imitators it had become already a tool

imperfectly understood but sometimes used for the actual progress of

the tale.

Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of

Elizabethan story-telling. _Pandosto_, _Rosalynde_, and some of

Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the

public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a

jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single

night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for

the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a

pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their

audiences, exceedingly alive.

[Romance and confession.]

In Greene's _Pandosto_ we find reminiscences of old romance, classical

nomenclature, the influence of the Italian _novelle_, and plenty of the

wild improbability that still had power over his audience. _Pandosto_

is a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little

preface on jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this

ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the

country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia

is an island--no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to

close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the

finish--no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans,

fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability

and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was

credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of

an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene

met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like

Nash's _Jacke Wilton_, the rogue novel in England, and give his name

a double importance. These other books were more personal to their

writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene

was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company

of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But

his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with

a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his

purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions

of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom

he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his riotous

career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his

romances had delighted their imaginations.

Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the

latter.

'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his

labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a

surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If

you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine

in favour. But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty

eares to conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if

he come abord our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee

knowes not the shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a

rustie pollax, that sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either

well bebast him, or heave the cockescombe over boord to feed cods.

But curteous gentlemen, that favour most, backbite none, and pardon

what is overslipt, let such come and welcome; Ile into the stewards

roome, and fetch them a kanne of our best bevradge.'

[_As You Like It._]

That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned to England from

piracies on the western seas, introduces his _Rosalynde_. With such a

preface, you would expect a ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and

coarse words, certainly not the dainty little pastoral, romantic fairy

story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding lessons of much profit for

the guidance of his friend's children. The very contrast between its

buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as that between

the pastoral writers and their books, between, for example, Cervantes

of Lepanto and the author of the _Galatea_, between the Sidney who died

at Zutphen and the author of _Arcadia_. It is the tale of _As You Like

It_, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title

for it, since it contains every one of the surest baits with which to

hook an Elizabethan audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that

time when ships were sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found

riches of the world, the hint of travel was a sufficient promise of

delight. It begins with a dying knight who leaves a legacy between his

sons, and its audience had not yet tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras.

It has the fairy-tale notion of the youngest born, and was not England

youngest son of all the world? There are beautiful women in it, and one

of them dresses like a man--a delicious, romantic thing to dream upon.

And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself, and therefore full of

profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written in something

not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the Elizabethans

as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.

THE PASTORAL

THE PASTORAL

[The discovery and exploitation of Arcadia.]

THE Pastoral, whose influence touches even the Elizabethan novels not

professedly Arcadian, had been fished up from sunken antiquity by the

early scholars of the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene

country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and

were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning,

to be able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they

did their best to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a

classical country. They used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun

names of their own times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by

them in the Golden Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The

best time of all the world had a date for them, and they did their best

to live up to its particular antiquity. But in using conventions so

different from real life, in a time of hurry and stress, it was natural

that they should be led into daydreams of a greater simplicity than

their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too, that by refining

character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its sweetest

season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond all

measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes

these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements

of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until,

when the curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece

and calls them 'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,'

the niece hurriedly replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I

beseech you; for should my uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy,

and betake himself to the reading of these books, we should have him

turn shepherd, and so wander through the woods and fields; nay, and

what would be worse yet, turn poet, which they say is a catching and

incurable disease.'

[Shepherds' plaints.]

The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet shepherdesses, it

seems that for the benefit of a Renaissance public they must pour their

sorrows out in verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner

does one shepherd begin his song than another joins him and another,

until there is a chorus of complaining lovers; the infection is so

virulent that it leaps from man to man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a

poem to his lass, it is great odds that she will cap it with another,

and then they will keep it up between them like a shuttlecock. The

disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no one to cross

Muses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:--

'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease?

Ease.

And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain?

Vain.

Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove?

Prove.

Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone?

One.

Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love?

Love.

What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy?

Joy.

What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains?

Pains.

Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end?

End.'

These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, which, of course,

was not in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are

hexameters. How delightfully they scan:--

- ˘ ˘ | - - | - - | - - | - ˘ ˘ | -

'What do lov | ers seek | for long | seeking | for to en | joy?

-

Joy.'

On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind

in Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully

ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods

they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they

themselves had used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of

'Phaleuciaks,' and then Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from

saying something which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all

glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those

verses called Asclepiadiks.' And they thought the night had passed

quickly.

[Illustration: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY]

[An apology to Sidney.]

This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather

exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate

him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not

like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the

woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see

his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly

I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song

of _Percy_ and _Duglas_ that I found not my heart mooued more then

with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with

no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that

he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the

dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed

in the gorgeous eloquence of _Pindar_?' but that it rings with the

sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his

'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the

sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his

predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression

that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines

of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor

English to 'the language of the Gods.'

[The slow progress of Arcadian narrative.]

The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian substitute for rain,

was not the only drag on the narrative of the pastoral story-tellers.

Serenity was considered essential, and so, while the story was being

everlastingly shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it

had also for every step it took forward to take another back in order

to catch again the chosen atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result

was 'a note of linked sweetness long drawn out,' a series of agitated

standstills, and a narrative impossible to end. Cervantes' _Galatea_

was never finished; the last books of _Arcadia_ were written by another

hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end to _l'Astrée_; and Montemor

abandoned his _Diana_.

In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that

is important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to

understand the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to

hide real people under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put

ribboned crooks and silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends.

At first it was the genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his

Fiammetta; at the end it degenerated into mere privy gossip and books

uninteresting without their keys; but in general it was simply a

desire of flattering elaborate people into thinking themselves of

simple heart. [The motive of the Pastoral.] The pastorals were like the

paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find the ladies of a lively

court playing innocent games under the trees, while, if we searched in

the brushwood, we should find in the soft earth under the brambles the

hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings of author and subjects

were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when they sat before the

portrait painter:--'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a

bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with gold, and

a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep

as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to

think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only

by the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since

the writer was able to put them in so very inexpensively.

[Poussin's _Les Bergers d'Arcadie_.]

There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and Sidney were

dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and sweeter than Watteau, an idea

of the pastoral spirit. You can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses

using paint. It would be impossible to suspect the same of one of

Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man

who was shocked as if by sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment

of Virgil. There is in the Louvre (how many times have I been to see

it) a picture called 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most

inaccurately as to facts, but most precisely as to feeling, in his

essay on the painter:[6]--'But above all, who shall celebrate in terms

of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going

out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb with this

inscription: _Et Ego in Arcadia vixi!_ The eager curiosity of some, the

expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear

breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys

low where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny

prospects speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet

to come!'

In those sentences Hazlitt, who found the written pastoral dull, shows

us the very secret of its life. In trying to copy the classic country

writing, it came to be an attempt to reconstruct the time that has

always been past since the beginning of the world. Real shepherds

never do and never did show fear and surprise and eager curiosity on

their weather-beaten faces; but then in Arcadia is no rain. Sweet,

sunny days, soft, peaceful nights, green grass, white sheep, and

smooth-cheeked shepherds Grecian limbed; the whole is the convention of

a dream. It was the dream of busy men in close touch with a life whose

end was apt to come short and sharp between the lifting of a flagon

and putting the lips to it. And in Sidney's dream especially, there is

something of the true Renaissance worship of the ancient gods. Sidney's

dream was of a pastoral life; yes, but to him other things in it were

more important than its rusticity. For him, at least, it must be a life

where the goatfoot god still moved in the green undergrowth, where

Diana hunted the white fawns, while Silenus tippled in the valley, and

Apollo looked serenely from the wooded hill.

[Conventional and realistic art.]