good works alone than is offered by the utterly neglected heroic
novels of the seventeenth century. At the opening of the reign of
Louis XIV. in France, several writers, in the general dearth of prose
fiction, began to supply the public in Paris with a series of long
romances, which for at least a generation absorbed the attention of
the ladies and reigned unopposed in every boudoir. I wonder whether my
lady readers have ever attempted to realise how their sisters of two
hundred years ago spent their time? In an English country-house of
1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no lawn tennis or
croquet, no afternoon-teas or glee-concerts, no mothers' meetings or
zenana missions, no free social intercourse with neighbours, none of
the thousand and one agreeable diversions with which the life of a
modern girl is diversified. On the other hand, the ladies of the house
had their needlework to attend to, they had to "stitch in a clout," as
it was called; they had to attend to the duties of a housekeeper,
and, when the sun shone, they tended the garden. Perhaps they rode
or drove, in a stately fashion. But through long hours they sat over
their embroidery frames or mended the solemn old tapestries which
lined their walls, and during these sedate performances they required
a long-winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might be read
aloud by turns. The heroic novel, as provided by Gombreville,
Calprenède, and Mlle. de Scudéry supplied this want to perfection.
The sentiments in these novels were of the most elevated class, and
tedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almost
more than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. Madame
de Sévigné herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessed
herself to be a fly in the spider's web of their attractions. "The
beauty of the sentiments," she writes, "the violence of the passions,
the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of their
redoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a little
girl." In these modern days of success, we may still start to learn
that the Parisian publisher of _Le Grand Cyrus_ made 100,000 crowns
by that work, from the appearance of its first volume in 1649 to its
close in 1653. The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame de
Sévigné were those which appealed most directly to public feeling in
France. There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalric
passions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of
all kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience. When La
Rochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines which
may be thus translated:
_To win that wonder of the world,
A smile from her bright eyes,
I fought my King, and would have hurled
The gods out of their skies_,
he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic novels. Their
extraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit of
the age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone
of Greek romance. No book had been read in France with greater avidity
than the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel _Heliodorus_;
and in the _Polexandres_ and _Clélies_ we see what this Greek spirit
of romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of Louis
XIV.
The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, for
the whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historians
of literature. It has been asserted that they were not read in England
until after the Restoration. Nothing is further from the truth.
Charles I. read _Cassandra_ in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne,
in her exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously studying
one heroic novel after another through the central years of Cromwell's
rule. She reads _Le Grand Cyrus_ while she has the ague; she desires
Temple to tell her "which _amant_ you have most compassion for, when
you have read what each one says for himself." She and the King read
them in the original, but soon there arrived English translations
and imitations. These began to appear a good deal sooner than
bibliographers have been prepared to admit. Of the _Astrée_ of
D'Urfé--which, however, is properly a link between the _Arcadia_ of
Sidney and the genuine heroic novel--there was an English version
as early as 1620. But, of the real thing, the first importation was
_Polexandre_, in 1647, followed by _Cassandra_ and _Ibrahim_ in 1652,
_Artamenes_ in 1653, _Cleopatra_ in 1654-8, and _Clélie_ in 1655, all,
it will be observed, published in England before the close of the
Commonwealth.
Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French originals, turned up her
nose at these translations. She says that they were "so disguised
that I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them." They had,
moreover, changed their form. In France they had come out in an
infinite number of small, manageable tomes. For instance, Calprenède
published his _Cléopatre_ in twenty-three volumes; but the English
_Cleopatra_ is all contained in one monstrous elephant folio.
_Artamenes_, the English translation of _Le Grand Cyrus_, is worse
still, for it is comprised in five such folios. Many of the originals
were translated over and over again, so popular were they; and as the
heroic novels of any eminence in France were limited in number,
it would be easy, by patiently hunting the translations up in old
libraries, to make a pretty complete list of them. The principal
heroic novels were eight in all; of these there is but one, the
_Almahide_ of Mile, de Scudéry, which we have not already mentioned,
and the original publication of the whole school is confined within
less than thirty years.
The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fiction
was the author of the book which is the text of this chapter. La
Calprenède, whose full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes de
la Calprenède, was a Gascon gentleman of the Guards, of whose personal
history the most notorious fact is that he had the temerity to marry
a woman who had already buried five husbands. Some historians relate
that she proceeded to poison number six, but this does not appear to
be certain, while it does appear that Calprenède lived in the married
state for fifteen years, a longer respite than the antecedents of
madame gave him any right to anticipate. He made a great fame with his
two huge Roman novels, _Cassandra_ and _Cleopatra_, and then, some
years later, he produced a third, _Pharamond_ which was taken out of
early French history. The translator, in the version before us, says
of this book that it "is not a romance, but a history adorned with
some excellent flourishes of language and loves, in which you may
delightfully trace the author's learned pen through all those
historians who wrote of the times he treats of." In other words, while
Gombreville--with his King of the Canaries, and his Vanishing Islands,
and his necromancers, and his dragons--canters through pure fairyland,
and while Mlle. de Scudéry elaborately builds up a romantic picture of
her own times (in _Clélie_, for instance, where the three hundred and
seventy several characters introduced are said to be all acquaintances
of the author), Calprenède attempted to produce something like a
proper historical novel, introducing invention, but embroidering it
upon some sort of genuine framework of fact.
To describe the plot of _Pharamond_, or of any other heroic novel,
would be a desperate task. The great number of personages introduced
in pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate thread
wound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make any
following of the story a great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copy
of _Cleopatra_ which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenth
century has very conscientiously written out "a list of the Pairs of
Lovers," and there are thirteen pairs. _Pharamond_ begins almost in
the same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G.P.R. James might. When
the book opens we discover the amorous Marcomine and the valiant
Genebaud sallying forth along the bank of a river on two beautiful
horses of the best jennet-race. Throughout the book all the men are
valiant, all the ladies are passionate and chaste. The heroes enter
the lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over surcoats
of gold and silk tissue; their heads "shine with gold, enamel and
precious stones, with the hinder part covered with an hundred plumes
of different colours." They are mounted upon horses "whose whiteness
might outvie the purest snow upon the frozen Alps." They pierce into
woodland dells, where they by chance discover renowned princesses,
nonpareils of beauty, in imminent danger, and release them. They
attack hordes of deadly pirates, and scatter their bodies along the
shore; and yet, for all their warlike fire and force, they are as
gentle as marmozets in a lady's boudoir. They are especially admirable
in the putting forth of sentiments, in glozing over a subtle
difficulty in love, in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock of
hair to their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so softly that a
lady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; they
are so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketched
a couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence the
poetical miracle has come. In valour, in courtesy, in magnificence
they have no rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique in
beauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. Sometimes they
correspond at immense length; in _Pharamond_ the letters which pass
between the Princess Hunnimonde and Prince Balamir would form a small
volume by themselves, an easy introduction to the art of polite
letter-writing. Mlle. de Scudéry actually perceived this, and
published a collection of model correspondence which was culled bodily
from the huge store-house of her own romances, from _Le Grand Cyrus_
and _Clélie_. These interchanges of letters were kept up by the
severity of the heroines. It was not thought proper that the lady
should yield her hand until the gentleman had exhausted the resources
of language, and had spent years of amorous labour on her conquest.
When Roger Boyle, in 1654, published his novel of _Parthenissa_, in
four volumes, Dorothy Osborne objected to the ease with which the hero
succeeded; she complains "the ladies are all so kind they make no
sport."
This particular 1662 translation of _Pharamond_ appears to be
very rare, if not unique. At all events I find it in none of the
bibliographies, nor has the British Museum Library a copy of it. The
preface is signed J.D., and the version is probably therefore from
the pen of John Davies, who helped Loveday to finish his enormous
translation of _Cleopatra_ in 1665. In 1677 there came out another
version of _Pharamond_, by John Phillips, and this is common enough.
Some day, perhaps, these elephantine old romances may come into
fashion again, and we may obtain a precise list of them. At present no
corner of our literary history is more thoroughly neglected.[1]
[Footnote 1: Since this was written, a French critic of eminence,
M. Jusserand, has made (in _The English Novel in the Time of
Shakespeare_, 1890) a delightful contribution to this portion of our
literary history. The earlier part of the last chapter of that volume
may be recommended to all readers curious about the vogue of the
heroic novel. But M. Jusserand does not happen to mention _Pharamond_,
nor to cover the exact ground of my little study.]
A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS
In his _Ballad of the Book-Hunter_, Andrew Lang describes how, in
breeches baggy at the knees, the bibliophile hunts in all weathers:
_No dismal stall escapes his eye;
He turns o'er tomes of low degrees;
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies_.
That speaks straight to my heart; for of all my weaknesses the weakest
is that weakness of mine for Restoration plays. From 1660 down to 1710
nothing in dramatic form comes amiss, and I have great schemes, like
the boards on which people play the game of solitaire, in which space
is left for every drama needed to make this portion of my library
complete. It is scarcely literature, I confess; it is a sport, a long
game which I shall probably be still playing at, with three mouldy old
tragedies and one opera yet needed to complete my set, when the Reaper
comes to carry me where there is no amassing nor collecting. It would
hardly be credited how much pleasure I have drained out of these
dramas since I began to collect them judiciously in my still callow
youth. I admit only first editions; but that is not so rigorous as it
sounds, since at least half of the poor old things never went into a
second.
As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, of course it is
literature, and of a very high order; even Shadwell and Mrs. Behn
and Southerne are literature; Settle and Ravenscroft may pass as
legitimate literary curiosity. But there are depths below this where
there is no excuse but sheer collectaneomania. Plays by people who
never got into any schedule of English letters that ever was planned,
dramatic nonentities, stage innocents massacred in their cradles, if
only they were published in quarto I find room for them. I am not
quite so pleased to get these anonymities, I must confess, as I am to
get a clean, tall _editio princeps_ of _The Orphan_ or of _Love for
Love_. But I neither reject nor despise them; each of them counts one;
each serves to fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurries
on that dreadful possible time coming when my collection shall be
complete, and I shall have nothing to do but break my collecting rod
and bury it fathoms deep.
A volume has just come in which happens to have nothing in it but
those forgotten plays, whose very names are unknown to the historians
of literature. First comes _The Roman Empress_, by William Joyner,
printed in 1671. Joyner was an Oxford man, a fellow of Magdalen
College. The little that has been recorded about him makes one wish to
know more. He became persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith, and
made a voluntary resignation of his Oxford fellowship. He had to do
something, and so he wrote this tragedy, which he dedicated to Sir
Charles Sedley, the poet, and got acted at the Theatre Royal. The cast
contains two good actors' names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it seems that
it enjoyed a considerable success. But doubtless the stage was too
rough a field for the gentle Oxford scholar. He retired into a
sequestered country village, where he lingered on till 1706, when he
was nearly ninety. But Joyner was none of the worst of poets. Here is
a fragment of _The Royal Empress_, which is by no means despicably
versed:
_O thou bright, glorious morning,
Thou Oriental spring-time of the day,
Who with thy mixed vermilion colours paintest
The sky, these hills and plains! thou dost return
In thy accustom'd manner, but with thee
Shall ne'er return my wonted happiness_.
Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive vein of sadness, as
though the poet were thinking less of his Aurelia and his Valentius
than of the lost common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no more
revisited.
Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious. It is the
_Usurper_, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon.
Edward Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in-law. Edward
Howard is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poem
of _The British Princes_:
_A vest as admired Vortiger had on,
Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won_.
Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing
Vortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already.
But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden
himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events,
the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of _The British Princes_ is
before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly
runs:
_Which from this island's foes his grandsire won_.
Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep,
follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries.
The _Usurper_ is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, "a most perfidious
villain," plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last,
much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L.
Stevenson, "There's an end of that."
But though the _Usurper_ is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier
lees of wit in the _Carnival_, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of
1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be
more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little
thing interesting to a modern student. The _Carnival_ has one such
peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the
stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's _Churchyard
Elegy_. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly
occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and
counter-marches of the Civil War.
But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in
our volume really repays us for pushing on so far. Here is a piece of
wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of
Newcastle's _Humorous Lovers_:
_At curfew-time, and at the dead of night,
I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright,
Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow
To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo
To darker caves and solitary woods,
To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods;
I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe,
Blasted with cursèd droppings of mildew;
Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans
Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans;
The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty,
And how thy want of love did murder me;
And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near,
Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear_.
But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of Newcastle wrote those
lines himself. Published in 1677, they were as much of a portent as a
man in trunk hose and a slashed doublet. The Duke had died a month or
two before the play was published; he had grown to be, in extreme old
age, the most venerable figure of the Restoration, and it is possible
that the _Humorous Lovers_ may have been a relic of his Jacobean
youth. He might very well have written it, so old was he, in
Shakespeare's lifetime. But the Duke of Newcastle was never a very
skilful poet, and it is known that he paid James Shirley to help him
with his plays. I feel convinced that if all men had their own,
the invocation I have just quoted would fly back into the works of
Shirley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit of
conceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast which Boldman
promises to the Widow of his heart:
_The twinkling stars shall to our wish
Make a grand salad in a dish;
Snow for our sugar shall not fail,
Fine candied ice, comfits of hail;
For oranges, gilt clouds will squeeze;
The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese;
Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place
Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace;
Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet,
And violet skies strewed for our feet;
The spheres shall for our music play,
While spirits dance the time away_.
This is extravagant enough, but surely very picturesque. I seem to see
the supper-room of some Elizabethan castle after an elaborate
royal masque. The Duchess, who has been dancing, richly attired in
sky-coloured silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, is attended to
the refreshments by the florid Duke, personating the river Thamesis,
with a robe of cloth of silver around him. It seems the sort of thing
a poet so habited might be expected to say between a galliard and a
coranto.
At first sight we seem to have reached a really good rhetorical play
when we arrive at Bancroft's tragedy of _Sertorius_, published in
1679, and so it would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. But its
seeming excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that _All for
Love_ and _Mithridates_, two great poems which are almost good
plays, appeared in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft.
_Sertorius_ is written in smooth and well-sustained blank verse, which
is, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect that
John Bancroft was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and his
practice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world. He
acquired, it is said, from his patients "a passion for the Muses,"
and an inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he cured or
killed. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epilogue to _Sertorius_, in
which he says that--
_Our Poet to learnèd critics does submit,
But scorns those little vermin of the pit,
Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit_,
and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than those of the
professional playwrights themselves. He wrote three plays, and lived
until 1696. One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, laden
with his secrets and his confidences. Why did he not write memoirs,
and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway really
died, and what Dryden's habits were? Why did he not purvey magnificent
indiscretions whispered under the great periwig of Wycherley, or
repeat that splendid story about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave? Alas!
we would have given a wilderness of _Sertoriuses_ for such a series of
memoirs.
The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is Weston's _Amazon Queen_,
of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is _The Fortune
Hunters_, a comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, James
Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred "to _be_ rather
than to _personate_ a hero," and died in gallant fight for William
of Orange, at the battle of Aughrim; here is _Mr. Anthony_, a comedy
written by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in
1690, a piece never republished among the Earl's works, and therefore
of some special interest. But I am sure my reader is exhausted, even
if the volume is not, and I spare him any further examination of
these obscure dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr.
Johnson, that I
_Set wheels on wheels in motion--such a clatter!
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore_.
I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special student
of comparative literature--namely, that it is sometimes in the minor
writings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly
felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearly
observed. _The Amazon Queen_ is in rhymed verse, because in 1667
this was the fashionable form for dramatic poetry; _Sertorius_ is
in regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 the
fashion had once more chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might be
the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the age
in these imitative and floating nonentities.
A CENSOR OF POETS
The Lives of The Most Famous English Poets, _or the Honour of
Parnassus; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above Two
Hundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to the
Reign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by William
Winstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, for
Samuel Manship at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil,_ 1687.
A maxim which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on
the walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, but
be very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struck
on the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in his
proud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Who
recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned,
sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore old bear, who was too stupid
to perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavished
by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather beside
one sentence about Wordsworth's _Excursion_, and one tasteless sneer
at Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the
whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser
to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. And
the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book
occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the
rule. His literary existence has been sacrificed by a single outburst
of petulant criticism, which was not even literary, but purely
political.
The only passage of Winstanley's _Lives of the English Poets_ which
is ever quoted is the paragraph which refers to Milton, who, when it
appeared, had been dead thirteen years. It runs thus: