published in 1578; _Euphues and his England_ in 1580. How immediately
popular it was is shown by the fact that (my authority is Mr. Arundell
Esdaile’s _Bibliography of English Tales and Romances_) four editions
of the first part, three of the second, and then at least seventeen
editions of both parts together were published in fifty-eight years.
(His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title-pages Lylly, Lyly,
Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily: a diversity worthy of “Shakspear.”) For
a time almost everybody with any pretensions talked and wrote euphuism,
very often employing Lyly’s fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and
superfluous imagery without the content of sense that Lyly always had.
Some writers openly ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with
euphuistic characters, and Sidney (who, I think, did not entirely escape
the influence) ridiculed this
_Talking of beasts, birds, fishes, flies,_
_Playing with words and idle similes._
But the development of English prose was sensibly changed by it, and its
effect may be traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. The book
itself, however, like all extravagantly mannered books, had its slump in
the end. Early in James I’s reign the wider public seems to have turned
away from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition
of Lyly’s plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet whose grave he was
digging up. Blount’s own language is a terrible example of what Euphuism
may come to. He calls his author “a Lilly growing in a Grove of Lawrels”:
“These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard;
But I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a Charme
(gotten from _Apollo_) made them greene againe, and set up as
Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to suffer these Rare
Monuments of wit, to lie covered with Dust, and a shame, such
conceipted Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes.”
From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor Arber (a man whose memory
has not been sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the
“English Reprints,” _Euphues_ never appeared again, save in two brief
eighteenth-century adaptations. For almost a hundred years his names
was never mentioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. Most
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dismissed him as a man who,
in Sir Walter Scott’s words, deformed his works “by the most unnatural
affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.” One of the few
exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in _Westward Ho!_ attacks Lyly’s
critics with tremendous enthusiasm:
“I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever read it? For
if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it,
in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave,
righteous, and pious a book as man need look into; and wish for
no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan
age than the fact that _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_ were the two
popular romances of the day.”
Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my Encyclopædia, to see
whether sense is talked about Lyly there, I find that the article on him
is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of surprises.
The truth of the matter is that everybody is right, except those who do
not trouble to read the book. Kingsley is perfectly correct; it would
be difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling or inspired by
higher conceptions of conduct. Lyly is as full of common sense as of
refinement; and the fact that he drew much of his discourses on education
and religion from other writers does not diminish the impression made
by his attitude to life. His narrative does not come to much; most of
his space is occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and letters;
his Neapolitan and English love-stories move at a snail’s pace. But—his
first discussion, by the way, is on heredity and environment which, with
startling modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture—he usually argues about
things of perennial interest, and always with subtlety, delicacy, and
an insight into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott really was not
exaggerating the monstrosity—though it is not uniformly monstrous—of his
style. It takes some patience to put up with the construction of his
sentences and his recurrent bunches of similes in order to follow his
argument. On the second page you fall plump into this sentence:
“The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest Rasor soonest
tourneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with
the Moathes, and the Cambricke sooner stayned than the course
Canvas: which appeared well in this Euphues, whose wit beeing
like waxe, apt to receive any impression, and bearing the
head in his own hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre,
disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loathing his old
acquaintance, thought either by wit to obteyne some conquest,
or by shame to abyde some conflict, who preferring fancy before
friends, and this present humor, before honour to come, laid
reason in water being too salt for his tast, and followed
unbridaled affection, most pleasant for his tooth.”
The mania for balance and alliteration is shown here, but not the equally
characteristic passion for piling animals and plants, mainly out of
Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are most tolerable when the
statements made are least verifiable. Here are two specimens:
“The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea-Crab, and
is immediately recured: the Torteyse having tasted the Viper,
sucketh Origanum and is quickly revived: the Beare ready to
pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: the Dog having
surfetted to procure his vomitte, eateth grasse and findeth
remedy: the Hart beein perced with the dart, runneth out of
hand to the hearb _Dicbanum_, and is healed.”
“Then good Euphues let the falling out of friendes be a
renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones
of the Lyon, which lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but
being stricken one against another break out like fire, and wax
greene.”
Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of such abnormalities with
a short, humorous, or pathetic sentence which is most effective; and
even sentences bearing the evident marks of his style sometimes move
one strongly in their context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla’s
two complaints: “But I would to God Euphues would repair hither that
the sight of him might mitigate some part of my martyrdome,” and the
extremely sibilant but musical “O my Euphues, lyttle dost thou knowe
the sodeyn sorrowe that I susteine for thy sweete sake.” What a really
judicious critic would do would be to ridicule the style and admire the
book.
The Reconstruction of Orthography
Reconstruction is a blessed word, and very comprehensive: but I doubt
whether the Government, when it established the Reconstruction Committee,
anticipated that it would be asked to consider the problem of Spelling
Reform. The Simplified Spelling Society, however, has sent it a memorial
urging that “the reform of English spelling is eminently one that merits
the practical consideration of the Committee.” The signatories include a
number of scientific and other professors, scores of teachers, and a tail
composed of “men of business, men of letters, editors, etc.” The editors
do not include any man who edits a London daily or a literary weekly,
though the directive minds of the _Lady’s Realm_ and the _Ardrossan and
Saltcoats Herald_ are in the movement; and the only “men of letters”
are Messrs. William Archer, H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, T. Seccombe
(at whom I am surprised), and a few persons who combine authorship with
business or with “etc.” One did not want this piece of negative evidence
to convince one that authors, as a body, will fight Simplifyd Speling
to the last mute k. The memorial makes the usual points about saving
children’s time, facilitating the acquisition of foreign languages,
lightening the work of teaching defective children, and assisting aliens
who are acquiring our tongue. We are also told that “the demand for a
rational spelling may be compared to that for decimalizing our coinage
and our weights and measures.”
This comparison seems to me very misleading, if by decimalization is
meant the introduction of the Continental metric system. For this
latter is uniform in various countries, whereas the reform suggested
by the Simplified Spelling Society would do nothing to approximate the
sound-values of our letters to those of letters in foreign tongues.
Cosmopolitan systems have been proposed, very complex and full of odd
new letters; but this Society’s suggestions, whilst eliminating some
difficulties for the foreigner, would leave English just as difficult for
a Frenchman to pronounce as French is for an Englishman. Take the phrase
(I find it here) “A Ferst Reeder in Simplifyd Speling.” A Frenchman
would still mispronounce it. If he wished to indicate those sounds in
the French way he would write (I am not a phonetician) something like “E
Fœust,” etc. So the Society had better not pitch its promises too high.
This, nevertheless, remains a minor point. The chief considerations
undoubtedly are the domestic effects of this piece of Reconstruction.
It sounds all very simple and convincing when people say: “Our spoken
language has diverged from our written language: let our written language
be made the same as our spoken language.” But directly you go into the
matter you find that the difficulties are enormous. That we have no one
spoken language is a commonplace. Our speech varies from fashion to
fashion and from locality to locality. “Educated” English at present has
an increasing Cockney element in it. The common “cultured” pronunciation
of “No,” for instance, embodies an “o” sound which is anything but pure.
Many rustics, however, still pronounce it with a good broad vowel. Even
the spelling reformers do not agree about words. A. J. Ellis thought
the “r” at the end of “proper” was still there; Sweet thought it had
disappeared. As a matter of fact, it is both there and not there: in some
classes and parts it is pronounced, in some it is not. And it is quite
possible that it will become universal again.
This gets us on to the question of change in time. The Reformers
can be met both ways. If it be argued that phonetic spelling fixes
pronunciation, why have we abandoned the old pronunciation of words
once phonetically spelt? Shakespeare pronounced the initial “k” in
“know” and “knee.” We have dropped it out. And we have no guarantee that
spelling these words according to our present slack pronunciation would
not be followed by another divergence. The history of the word “sea”
is odd. In the Middle Ages it was spelt “see” and pronounced “say.”
In Tudor times the spelling was altered to “sea” in order to make the
spelling correspond to the sound (the same as that in “great”). We have
reached a pronunciation which the original spelling would have correctly
represented! If it be argued that spelling does not fix pronunciation,
the case for the reform is seriously weakened. The truth of the matter
is that nothing can fix a pronunciation, but that the written word,
especially in an age of universal literacy, does exercise a pull. And
that pull can as well be exercised by our present spellings as by new
ones. I think it was Titus Oates who went to the scaffold, or somewhere,
crying “Lard! Lard!” Had he been a spelling reformer he would have quite
unnecessarily assimilated the spelling of “lord” with that of the name of
the white stuff they keep in bladders: a distinct loss to the language.
Mr. Murison, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_, points out that
the word “kiln” was originally pronounced as spelt; then for some time
the “n” was dropped; then the old pronunciation returned. The same thing
happened to words containing the diphthong “oi.” “Join” and “oil” were,
in Middle English, pronounced as they are now. But for centuries men
called them “jine” and “ile,” a habit that still persists amongst many
of the most eager supporters of Spelling Reform. “H’s” were dropped
wholesale and then picked up again. We never know, in fact, whether we
shall not return to an old way of speech; and we might as well do that as
diverge from an old way of writing.
The great consolation of conservatives in this matter is the length of
time during which the enthusiasts have continuously failed to bring about
a change. This is the oldest of the Campaigns. It was already old when in
1585 a book was published with this title-page (differently accented):
“AEsopz Fable’z in true Orto’graphy with Grammar-nótz.
Heryuntoo ar al’so jooined the short sentencez of the wyz Cato
imprinted with lyk form and order: both of which Autorz ar
transláted out of Latin intoo English. By William Bullokar.”
I don’t suppose that the Reconstruction Committee will find time to
consider this matter. But if they do think of handling it they should
realize that they are going to put their hands into a nestful of the
largest hornets.
Mr. James Joyce
Mr. James Joyce is a curious phenomenon. He first appeared in literary
Dublin about (I suppose) a dozen years ago: a strangely solitary and
self-sufficient and obviously gifted man. He published a small book
of verse with one or two good lyrics in it; and those who foresaw a
future for him became certain they were right. He published nothing;
but his reputation spread even amongst those who had never read a
line he had written. He disappeared from Ireland and went to Austria,
where he settled. The war came, and soon afterwards his second
book—_Dubliners_—was issued and reviewed with a general deference, after
wandering about for years among publishers who had been fighting shy of
it because of its undoubted unpleasantness and a reference to Edward VII.
Another interval and _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ began to
run serially in the _Egoist_. “The Egoist, Ltd.,” has now published this
book, and nobody is surprised to find all writing London talking about
it. Mr. Joyce has only done what was expected.
Whether this book is supposed to be a novel or an autobiography I do not
know or care. Presumably some characters and episodes are fictitious,
or the author would not even have bothered to employ fictitious names.
But one is left with the impression that almost all the way one has been
listening to sheer undecorated, unintensified truth. Mr. Joyce’s title
suggests, well enough, his plan. There is no “plot.” The subsidiary
characters appear and recede, and not one of them is involved throughout
in the career of the hero. Stephen Dedalus is born; he goes to school;
he goes to college. His struggles are mainly inward: there is nothing
unusual in that. He has religious crises: heroes of fiction frequently
do. He fights against, succumbs to, and again fights against sexual
temptation: we have stories on those lines in hundreds. All the same, we
have never had a novel in the least degree resembling this one; whether
it is mainly success or mainly failure, it stands by itself.
You recognize its individuality in the very first paragraph. Mr. Joyce
tries to put down the vivid and incoherent memories of childhood in
a vivid and incoherent way: to show one Stephen Dedalus’s memories
precisely as one’s own memories might appear if one ransacked one’s mind.
He opens:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a
moocow coming down along the road and the moocow that was down
along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...”
“His mother had a nicer smell than his father,” he proceeds. There is
verisimilitude in this; but a critic on the look-out for Mr. Joyce’s
idiosyncrasies would certainly fasten upon his preoccupation with
the olfactory—which sometimes leads him to write things he might as
well have left to be guessed at—as one of them. Still, it is a minor
characteristic. His major characteristics are his intellectual integrity,
his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely what he wants to
set down. He is a realist of the first order. You feel that he means to
allow no personal prejudice or predilection to distort the record of what
he sees. His perceptions may be naturally limited; but his honesty in
registering their results is complete. It is even a little too complete.
There are some things that we are all familiar with and that ordinary
civilized manners (not pharisaism) prevent us from importing into general
conversation. Mr. Joyce can never resist a dunghill. He is not, in fact,
quite above the pleasure of being shocking. Generally speaking, however,
he carries conviction. He is telling the truth about a type and about
life as it presents itself to that type.
He is a genuine realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as
well as the depressions, the inner life as well as the outer. He is
not morosely determined to paint everything drab. Spiritual passions
are as powerful to him as physical passions; and as far as his own
bias goes it may as well be in favour of Catholic asceticism as of
sensual materialism. For his detachment as author is almost inhuman. If
Stephen is himself, then he is a self who is expelled and impartially
scrutinized, without pity or “allowances,” directly Mr. Joyce the artist
gets to work. And of the other characters one may say that they are
always given their due, always drawn so as to evoke the sympathy they
deserve, yet are never openly granted the sympathy of the author. He is
the outsider, the observer, the faithful selector of significant traits,
moral and physical; his judgments, if he forms them, are concealed. He
never even shows by a quiver of the pen that anything distresses him.
His prose instrument is a remarkable one. Few contemporary writers are
effective in such diverse ways; his method varies with the subject-matter
and never fails him. His dialogue (as in the remarkable discussions at
home about Parnell and Stephen’s education) is as close to the dialogue
of life as anything I have ever come across; though he does not make
the gramophonic mistake of spinning it out as it is usually spun out
in life and in novels that aim at a faithful reproduction of life and
only succeed in sending one to sleep. And his descriptive and narrative
passages include at one pole sounding periods of classical prose and
at the other disjointed and almost futuristic sentences. The finest
sustained pages in the book contain the sermon in which a dear, simple
old priest expounds the unimaginable horrors of hell: the immeasurable
solid stench as of a “huge and rolling human fungus,” the helplessness
of the damned, “not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws
it,” the fierceness of the fire in which “the blood seethes and boils in
the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast
glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the
tender eyes flaming like molten balls.” Stephen, after listening to this,
“came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the
scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched
by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the
corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs
hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and
shapeless.”
No wonder. For myself, I had had an idea that this kind of exposition had
died with Drexelius; but after I had read it I suddenly and involuntarily
thought, “Good Lord, suppose it is all true!” That is a sufficient
testimony to the power of Mr. Joyce’s writing.
This is not everybody’s book. The later portion, consisting largely of
rather dull student discussions, is dull; nobody could be inspired by
the story, and it had better be neglected by any one who is easily
disgusted. Its interest is mainly technical, using the word in its
broadest sense; and its greatest appeal, consequently, is made to the
practising artist in literature. What Mr. Joyce will do with his powers
in the future it is impossible to conjecture. I conceive that he does
not know himself: that, indeed, the discovery of a form is the greatest
problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist.
Tennessee
Letters from strangers can usually be accounted for. But why on earth I,
more than any one else, should have received a letter from America asking
me to contribute towards the re-establishment of a backwoods library I
don’t know. This, however, has been my experience, and I trust that I am
not endangering the new Anglo-Saxon Entente by relieving my feelings in
the following:
LINES
_Written on receiving from the Librarian of a College which
educates “the mountain youth of Tennessee” a request for “a
book” to assist in the re-formation of the Library, which was
recently destroyed by fire._
_Mine ears have heard your distant moan,_
_O mountain youth of Tennessee;_
_Even the bowels of a stone_
_Would melt to your librarian’s plea._
_Although we’re parted by the ocean,_
_I’m most distressed about your fire:_
_Only I haven’t any notion_
_What sort of volume you require._
_I have a Greene, a Browne, a Gray,_
_A Gilbert White, a William Black,_
_Trollope and Lovelace, Swift and Gay,_
_And Hunt and Synge: nor do I lack_
_More sober folk for whom out there_
_There may be rather better scope,_
_Three worthy men of reverend air,_
_A Donne, a Prior, and a Pope._
_Peacock or Lamb, discreetly taken,_
_Might fill the hungry mountain belly,_
_Or Hogg or Suckling, Crabbe or Bacon_
_(Bacon’s not Shakespeare, Crabbe ~is~ Shelley)_
_And if—for this is on the cards—_
_You do not like this mental food,_
_I might remit less inward bards:_
_My well-worn Spenser or my Hood._
_Longfellows may be in your line_
_(Littles we know are second-raters),_
_Or one might speed across the brine_
_A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters._
_Or, then again, you may devote_
_Yourselves to less æsthetic lore,_
_Yet if I send you out a Grote[3]_
_For all I know you’ll ask for More._
_O thus proceeds my vacillation:_
_For now the obvious thought returns_
_That after such a conflagration_
_A fitting sequel might be Burns._
_And now again I change my mind_
_And, almost confidently, feel_
_That since to Beg you are inclined_
_You might like Borrow, say, or Steele...._
Envoi
_Yes, Prince, this song ~shall~ have an end._
_A sudden thought has come to me—_
_The thing is settled: I shall send_
_A Tennyson to Tennessee!_
But, as a matter of fact, unless I get a special permit for the export of
second-hand books, I shan’t be able to send them even that.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might return them
the Pound they sent us some years since.
Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George
“Representatives of literature and art” usually appear in the Honours
Lists, and they are usually queer representatives. The knighted
_littérateur_, as a rule, is either a second-rate man or a man long past
his prime. Possibly more men than we know of refuse these knighthoods.
For myself I do not see what on earth a really distinguished artist wants
with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and thinks that a title would add
a guinea or two per thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel
Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, Sir Robert Browning,
Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood
beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel,
and Sir Hedley le Bas (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not
conceive that those eminent writers would be held in greater honour than
they are, or that literature would cut a more important figure in our
social life. The one man to whom a knighthood may _usefully_ be given is
the deserving person who has worked conscientiously for years without
adequate recognition and of whose existence the public might—to his and
its advantage—be officially reminded. As the crown of a famous career a
knighthood is absurd.
Sir William Watson has presumably got his knighthood for being one of
the most industrious of the war-poets—and a war-poet congenial to the
Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he had a greater reputation than he
now has, and wrote several good and many respectable poems. He is still
skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Wordsworth and Milton;
but he is certainly not a man of whom one thinks when one is estimating
the vital forces in contemporary poetry. A new volume, _The Man who Saw_,
has just appeared. The title-poem is about the Prime Minister: