LYLY AND HIS "EUPHUES."
I.
The romance which, at this period, received a new life, and was to come
nearer to our novels than anything that had gone before, has many traits
in common with the fanciful style of the architecture, costume, and
conversation described above. What have we to do, thought men, with
things practical, convenient, or of ordinary use? We wish for nothing
but what is brilliant, unexpected, extraordinary. What is the good of
setting down in writing the incidents of commonplace lives? Are they not
sufficiently known to us? does not their triviality sadden us enough
every day? If we are told stories of imaginary lives, let them at least
be dissimilar from our own; let them offer unforeseen incidents; let the
author be free to turn aside from reality provided that he leaves the
trivial and the ordinary. Let him lead us to Verona, Athens, into
Arcadia, where he will, but as far as possible from Fleet Street! And if
by ill-luck he sets foot in Fleet Street, let him at least speak the
language of Arcadia!
Authors found this advice excellent, and took good care to relieve
themselves of difficult search after the mere truth. The public who
imposed these laws, this exacting public of women who read Plutarch and
Plato, who judged the merits of great men as learnedly as the cut of a
ruff, found at the very moment they most wanted him the author who could
please them in the person of a novel writer, the famous Lyly. At
twenty-five years of age, John Lyly, a _protege_ of Lord Burghley, who
was at this same time busy with his own architectural poem, if one may
say so, of Burghley House, wrote "Euphues,"[67] a new kind too of
"paper-work" with which people were enraptured.
It was written expressly for women, and not only did the author not
conceal the circumstance, but he proclaimed it aloud. Their opinion
alone interested him, to that of the critics he was indifferent. "It
resteth Ladies," he said, "that you take the paines to read it, but at
such times, as you spend in playing with your little dogges, and yet
will I not pinch you of that pastime, for I am content that your dogges
lie in your laps: so 'Euphues' may be in your hands, that when you shall
be wearie in reading of the one, you may be ready to sport with the
other.... 'Euphues' had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open
in a Schollers studie." Yet after dinner, "Euphues" will still be
agreeable to the ladies, adds Lyly, always smiling; if they desire to
slumber, it will bring them to sleep which will be far better than
beginning to sew and pricking their fingers when they begin to nod.[68]
There is no possibility of error; with Lyly commences in England the
literature of the drawing-room, that of which we speak at morning calls,
productions which, in spite of vast and many changes, still occupy a
favourite place on the little boudoir tables. We must also notice what
pains Lyly gives himself to make his innovation a success, and so please
his patronesses, and how he ornaments his thoughts and engarlands his
speeches, how cunningly he imbues himself with the knowledge of the
ancients and of foreigners, and what trouble he gives himself to improve
upon the most learned and the most florid of them. His care was not
thrown away. He was spoiled, petted, and caressed by the ladies; with an
impartial heart they extended to the author the same favour they granted
to the book, and to their little dogs. He was proclaimed king of letters
by his admirers, and became, in fact, king of the _precieux_. He created
a school, and the name of his hero served to baptize a whole literature.
This particular form of bad style was called _euphuism_.
II.
Euphuism owes to him its name and its diffusion in England; but not,
although it is usually so stated, its birth. This strange language, as
Dr. Landmann[69] has well demonstrated, was imported from Spain into
England, and Lyly was not the first to use it in this country. The works
of Guevara, turned into English by five or six different translators,
had a considerable vogue and acclimatized this extraordinary style in
Great Britain. One of his writings especially, "The golden boke of
Marcus Aurelius, emperour," enjoyed a very great popularity; it was
translated by Lord Berners in 1532, and by Sir Thomas North in 1557,[70]
and went through many editions. The moral dissertations of which it is
full enchanted serious minds; the unusual language of Spain delighted
frivolous souls. Before Lyly, English authors had already imitated it;
but when Lyly appeared and embellished it even more, enthusiasm ran so
high that its foreign progenitor was forgotten, and this exotic style
was rebaptized as proof of adoption and naturalization in England.
Since it is not a natural product, but the mere result of ingenious
artifices, nothing is easier than to reduce it to its component parts,
to take it to pieces so to speak. It consists in an immoderate,
prodigious, monstrous use of similes, so arranged as to set up
antitheses in every limb of the sentence. What is peculiar to the
English imitators, is the employment of alliteration, in order to better
mark the balance of the sentences written for effect. Finally, the kind
of similes even has something peculiar: they are for the most part
borrowed from an imaginary ancient history and a fantastical natural
history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones to which the most
extraordinary virtues are attributed.
In the important parts, when he means to use a noble style, Lyly cannot
relate the most trivial incident without setting up parallels between
the sentiments of his characters and the virtues of toads, serpents,
unicorns, scorpions, and all the fantastical animals mentioned in Pliny
or described in the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. His knowledge of
zoology resembles that of Richard de Fournival, who, in the thirteenth
century, lamented in his "Bestiaire d'Amour,"[71] that he was like the
wolf, who, when instead of first noticing the man, allowed the man to
see him first, lost all his courage; or like the cricket who loves
chirping so much that he forgets to eat and allows himself to be caught.
Richard was overcome in like manner by the glances of his mistress, and
all his songs only served to accomplish his ruin. The woman he loves
resembles the bird called "Kalander," or again, the animal called
"cockatrice" or "cocodrille," which is often mentioned by Lyly. "Its
nature is such that when it finds a man, then it devours him, and when
it has devoured him, then it laments him all the days of its life."[72]
Such is the conduct, says Richard, of women too beautiful and too much
beloved.
[Illustration: THE "AEGYPTIAN OR LAND CROCODILE," 1608.]
Bestiaries had enjoyed an immense popularity from the earliest times.
They were not all, far from it, like Richard de Fournival's,
love-bestiaries; most of them had a religious tendency. Such were, for
example, in England, the well-known Anglo-Saxon bestiary,[73] or the
English bestiary of the thirteenth century, in which we read of the
world-famous wickedness of the whale who allows sailors to rest on her
back, and even to light a fire thereon, in order to warm themselves;
but as soon as she feels the heat she dives and drowns them all: an
example of what may be expected from the devil. There is, too, the
elephant that leans against a tree to take his rest. People cunningly
cut the tree, and replace it; when the elephant comes the tree falls and
so does he, and is caught, an emblem of our father Adam, who also owed
his fall to a tree.[74] Again the "Contes Moralises" of Nicole Bozon,
written in French by a friar who lived in England in the first half of
the fourteenth century, are also full of the most curious comparisons
between the properties of animals, plants, and minerals, and the sinful
tendencies and frailties of mankind.[75]
These are old, far-off examples, and it might be supposed that people of
education in Elizabethan England would have possessed a sounder
knowledge of natural history. This was, however, not the case. And if we
wish to know what were the current beliefs among well-informed men of
the time about animals, we have only to open the two folio volumes
penned with greatest care by painstaking Topsell, concerning
"Foure-footed beastes" and "Serpents."[76] We shall then willingly set
Lyly and his followers free from all blame of exaggeration and
improbable inventions. Most often indeed they did not invent; they
knew. Topsell's books are nothing but a careful summary of the then
generally accepted reports concerning animated creation.
His histories are the more curious as his scruples and earnestness are
obvious. His purpose is high, and he means to write only for the
Creator's glory, considering his subject to be a "part of Divinity that
was never known in English. I take my owne conscience to witness, which
is manifest to my Judge and Saviour, I have intended nothing but his
glory, that is the creator of all." Secondly, his serious attention to
his subject is shown by what he says of accessible animals; the
engravings he gives of them, of dogs, for instance, of bulls, asses, and
many others being really excellent. Even rare animals, when by any
chance he had secured a glimpse of them, are represented with the utmost
care; such, for instance, is his chameleon, of which he gives a very
good engraving, not long after careless Robert Greene had been writing
of "this byrd, a camelion."[77]
But, then, nature is full of surprises, and so is Topsell's book. His
antelopes are very dangerous things: "They have hornes ... which are
very long and sharpe; so that Alexander affirmed they pierced through
the sheeldes of his souldiers, and fought with them very irefully: at
which time his companions slew as he travelled to India, 8,550; which
great slaughter may be the occasion why they are so rare and sildome
seene to this day." Undoubtedly.
[Illustration: A HIPPOPOTAMUS TAKING ITS FOOD, 1607.]
The blood of the elephant has a very strange property: "Also it is
reported that the blood of an elephant is the coldest blood in the world
and that Dragons in the scorching heate of summer cannot get anything to
coole them except this blood." The sea-horse, or hippopotamus, "is a
most ugly and filthy beast, so called because in his voice and mane he
resembleth a horsse, but in his head an oxe or a calfe; in the residue
of his body a swine.... It liveth for the most part in rivers; yet it is
of a doubtful life, for it brings forth and breedeth on the land."
According to the accompanying engraving he apparently feeds on
crocodiles. The rhinoceros is remarkable for his breathing: he "hath a
necke like unto a horsse and also the other parts of his body, but it is
said to breath out aire which killeth men."
But in this world of animals, which includes the Mantichora, the
Sphinga, the Papio, and a monster alive "in the territory of the bishop
of Salceburgh," the most interesting is the Lamia. It is of such great
interest because its very existence has been disputed, but quite
wrongly. Some untrue reports were circulated concerning this animal, and
as these accounts were fabulous, people have been found who disbelieved,
not only the stories, but even the possibility that Lamiae existed.
Topsell wisely takes a middle course: "These and such like stories and
opinions there are of Phairies, which in my judgment arise from the
praestigious apparitions of Devils, whose delight is to deceive and
beguile the minds of men with errour, contrary to the truths of holye
scripture which doeth no where make mention of such inchaunting
creatures; and therefore if any such be, we will holde them the workes
of the Devill and not of God." But, then, there are true Lamiae, and "we
shall take for granted by the testimony of holy scripture that there is
such a beast as this." The particulars Topsell was able to gather about
them are to the following effect: "The hinde parts of this beast are
like unto a goate, his fore legs like a beares, his upper parts to a
woman, the body scaled all over like a Dragon, as some have observed, by
the observation of their bodies." Their wickedness is so great that it
scarcely bears description: "They are the swiftest of foot of all
earthly beasts, so as none can escape them by running, for by their
celerity, they compasse their prey of beastes, and by their fraud, they
overthrow men. For when as they see a man, they lay open their breastes,
and by the beauty thereof entice them to come neare to conference, and
so having them within their compasse, they devoure and kill them." So
much for four-footed beasts.[78]
[Illustration: THE LAMIA, ACCORDING TO TOPSELL, 1607.]
The "Historie of serpents" is not less instructive, for it contains,
"with their lively figures: names, conditions, kindes and natures of all
venomous beasts: with their severall poisons and antidotes; their deepe
hatred to mankind and the wonderfull worke of God in their creation and
destruction." Among serpents are included: bees, drones, wasps, hornets,
frogs, toads, tortoises, spiders, earthworms, and many other unexpected
"venomous beasts." There is in this book information concerning the
boas: "The Latines call it _Boa_ and _Bossa_ of _Bos_ because by sucking
cowes milke it so encreaseth that in the end it destroyeth all manner of
herdes and cattels." The cockatrice, above named, "seemeth to be the
king of serpents ... because of his stately face and magnanimous mind."
The crocodile is to be carefully avoided, "even the Egyptians themselves
account a crocodile a savage and cruell murthering beast, as may appeare
by their Hieroglyphicks, for when they will decypher a mad man, they
picture a crocodile." And Topsell goes on to relate the particular
hatred which existed between crocodiles and the inhabitants of Tentyris,
that exquisitely charming Denderah which overlooks the valley of the
Nile, and still deserves its old fame as the chief temple of the Goddess
Athor, the Egyptian Aphrodite.
The dipsas, the hydra, the dragon, are also endowed with the most
remarkable qualities; but they seem to have disappeared since Topsell's
day. Not so another very wonderful animal of whom we continue to hear
from time to time, I mean the great sea-serpent; this marvellous beast
is not only described, but depicted in our naturalist's book. Topsell
gives a faithful portrait of it, and we do the same. These animals are
so big that "many a time, they overthrow in the waters a laden vessell
of great quantitie, with all the wares therein contained." The engraving
shows one of them upsetting a three-masted Jacobean ship and swallowing
sailors, apparently with great relish and voracity.[79]
Such being the current belief among students of the natural sciences, we
may be the better prepared to excuse some eccentricities in a novelist.
Lyly, who was well versed in the legendary lore of plants and animals,
is never tired of making a display of his knowledge, but the wonder is
that his readers had never too much of that. A single erudite or
scientific simile never satisfies Lyly; he has always in his hands a
long bead-roll of them, which he complacently pays out: "The foul toade
hath a faire stone in his head, the fine golde is found in the filthy
earth: the sweet kernell lyeth in the hard shell: vertue is harboured in
the heart of him that most men esteeme mishapen ... Doe we not commonly
see that in painted pottes is hidden the deadlyest poyson? that in the
greenest grasse is ye greatest serpent? in the cleerest water the
uglyest toade?" and four or five similes still follow. Tormented by
examples, overwhelmed with similitudes, the adventurous reader, who
to-day risks a reading of "Euphues," feels it impossible to keep his
composure. He would like to protest, to defend himself, to say that he
has lied, this imperturbable naturalist, that bitter kernels are found
indeed in the hardest shells, that painted pots often contain something
other than poison, and that if toads appear less ugly in foul water, it
is perhaps because they are the less seen. But what does it matter to
Lyly? He writes for a select coterie, and when a man writes for a
coterie, the protestations of the discontented, of the envious, alas! of
those of good sense, too, are scarcely of any consequence. Let the
common herd then shriek themselves hoarse at Lyly's door: it is shut
fast, he will hear nothing, and is indifferent even if among this common
herd Shakespeare figures. He is happy; "Euphues," in company with the
little dogs, rumples the silken laps of ladies with the lace-plaited
ruffs.
[Illustration: THE BOA, AS IT WAS UNDERSTOOD, A.D. 1608.]
III.
But however important style may be, it is not everything in a literary
work. It must be acknowledged that Lyly's success, if it is no
commendation of the taste of his contemporaries, is greatly to the
credit of their morality and earnestness. By the form of his sentences
Lyly is a Spaniard; he surpasses the most bombastic, and could give
points to that author mentioned by Louis Racine, who, discovering his
mistress lying under a tree, cried: "Come and see the sun reclining in
the shade!" But the basis of his character is purely English; he is
truly of the same country as Richardson, and belongs at heart to that
race which Tacitus said did not know how "to laugh at vices," a very
high praise that Rousseau rendered later almost in the same terms.[80]
From the time of Lyly until our own day, the English novel, generally
speaking, has remained not only moral, but a moralizing agent; the
author has recourse to a thousand skilful and fascinating devices, and
leads us by the hand through all sorts of flowery paths; but whatever
the manner may be, he almost invariably, without saying so, leads us to
the sermon. There are sermons in Defoe, who strongly protested against
some abbreviations of his "Robinson Crusoe": "They strip it of all
those reflections as well religious as moral, which are not only the
greatest beauties of the work, but are calculated for the infinite
advantage of the reader."[81] There are sermons in Richardson, so much
so that it might rather be said that novels are to be noticed in
Richardson's magnificent series of sermons. This is the way he himself
would have spoken. Did he not write to Lady Bradsaigh, while forwarding
her the last volumes of "Clarissa": "Be pleased ... to honour these
volumes with a place with your Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, with your
Practice of piety, and Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, not as being worthy
of such company, but that they may have a chance of being dipt into
thirty years hence. For I persuade myself, they will not be found
utterly unworthy of such a chance, since they appear in the humble guise
of novel, only by the way of accommodation to the manners and taste of
an age overwhelmed with luxury, and abandoned to sound and
senselessness."[82] There are some sermons in Fielding, many in Dickens,
not a few in George Eliot, and even in Thackeray. Splendid they are,
most eloquent, most admirable in their kind, most beneficial in their
way; but there is no denying that sermons they are. Unfortunately for
Lyly, what formerly constituted the attraction of "Euphues," and hid the
sermon's bitterness, makes it to-day ridiculous and even odious: it is
the style. Let us forget for a moment his unicorns and his scorpions;
taken in himself, his hero deserves attention, because he is the
ancestor in direct line of Grandison, of Lord Orville, of Lord Colambre,
and of all the sermonizing lords, and lords of good example, that
England owed to the success of Richardson.
[Illustration: THE GREAT SEA SERPENT, ACCORDING TO TOPSELL, 1608.]
Euphues is a young Athenian, a contemporary not of Pericles, but of
Lyly, who goes to Naples, thence to England, to study men and
governments. Grave with that gravity peculiar to lay preachers,
well-informed on every subject, even on his own merits, assured by his
conscience that in making mankind sharer in his illumination, he will
assure their salvation, he addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to
guide them through life. Omniscient like the inheritors of his vein whom
we have heard since, he instructs the world in the truth about marriage,
travel, religion. He anticipates, in his discourses concerning
aristocracy, the philosophical ideas of "Milord Edouard," of "Nouvelle
Heloise" fame; he treats of love with the wisdom of Grandison, and of
the bringing up of children with the experience of Pamela.[83]
When women are his subject he is especially earnest and eloquent, and
having, as it seems, suffered much at their hands he concludes: "Come to
me al ye lovers that have bene deceived by fancy, the glasse of
pestilence, or deluded by woemen, the gate to perdition; be as earnest
to seeke a medicine, as you were eager to runne into a mischiefe."
Having thus secured, as it seems, a fairly large audience, he begins his
sermon, which he is pleased to call, "a cooling carde for Philautus, and
all fond lovers."[84] His intention is to give men remedies, which shall
cure them of loving. Some of his precepts resemble the wise advice of
Rondibilis to Panurge; some do not. Philautus is to avoid solitude, and
idleness; he must study. In the same way Panurge is recommended _labeur
assidu_ and _fervente estude_.[85] Philautus is advised to try law,
"whereby thou mayest have understanding of olde and auntient customes;"
if law proves of no avail, there is "Physicke," and if this again fails,
then there is "the atteining of ye sacred and sincere knowledge of
divinitie." Study then may be supplemented by contemptuous meditations
about women;[86] a remedy which Rabelais, who probably knew more of life
than twenty-five-years-old Lyly, refrains from recommending.
This part of the anathema, including as it does a description of the
superfluities of Elizabethan dress, is especially worth noticing: "Take
from them," cries Euphues, in a burst of eloquence, "their perywigges,
their paintings, their jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and
thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.
When they be once robbed of their robes, then wil they appeare so
odious, so ugly, so monstrous, that thou wilt rather think them serpents
then saints, and so like hags, that thou wilt feare rather to be
enchaunted than enamoured. Looke in their closettes, and there shalt
thou finde an appoticaryes shop of sweete confections, a surgions boxe
of sundry salves, a pedlers packe of newe fangles. Besides all this
their shadows, their spots, their lawnes, their leefekyes, their ruffes,
their rings, shew them rather cardinalls curtisans then modest
matrons.... If every one of these things severally be not of force to
move thee, yet all of them joyntly should mortifie thee." This was,
however, by no means the case, and Philautus not so much "cooled" by
this "carde" as his friend expected, behaved himself in such a way as to
demonstrate that, according to his experience, here was gross
exaggeration indeed.
Euphues shows better knowledge of the heart of woman when, continuing
his analysis of women's foibles, he comes to give his friend information
that teaches him in fact rather how to be loved than how to cease
loving: "Yet if thou be so weake being bewitched with their wiles that
thou hast neither will to eschue nor wit to avoyd their company ... yet
at the hearte dissemble thy griefe ... cary two faces in one hood, cover
thy flaming fancie with fained ashes ... let thy hewe be merry when thy
heart is melancholy, beare a pleasaunt countenaunce with a pined
conscience.... Love creepeth in by stealth, and by stealth slideth away.
If she breake promise with thee in the night, or absent hir selfe in the
day, seeme thou carelesse, and and then will she be carefull; if thou
languish [_i.e._, becomest slack in thy suit], then wil she be lavish of
hir honour, yea and of the other strange beast her honestie."
He continues in this bitter vein, avenging, as it seems, his private
wrongs, and vowing never, as far as he is himself concerned to have
anything more to do with women. From them, he is naturally led to think
of children who form an equally good theme on which to moralise. He does
not fail in this duty, and writes for the good of his friend, and of the
public at large, a little treatise very much in the style of some of
Pamela's letters,[87] where we are taught how "Ephoebus," the child that
is to be, should be brought up. Ephoebus is the Emile of this
sixteenth-century Rousseau. Always thorough and exact, Lyly is careful
to begin at the beginning, informing us at first "that the childe
shoulde be true borne and no bastarde."[88]
Then he comes to the bringing up of the boy, and with as much
earnestness as Jean-Jacques, and with true and moving eloquence, he
beseeches the mother to be the nurse of her own progeny. "It is most
necessary and most naturall in mine opinion, that the mother of the
childe be also the nurse, both for the entire love she beareth to the
babe, and the great desire she hath to have it well nourished: for is
there any one more meete to bring up the infant than she that bore it?
or will any be carefull for it, as she that bredde it?... Is the earth
called the mother of all things onely bicause it bringeth forth? No,
but bicause it nourisheth those things that springe out of it.
Whatsoever is bred in ye sea is fed in the sea; no plant, no tree, no
hearbe commeth out of the ground that is not moystened, and as it were
noursed of the moysture and mylke of the earth; the lyonesse nurseth hir
whelps, the raven cherisheth hir byrdes, the viper her broode, and shal
a woman cast away her babe?
"I accompt it cast away which in the swath clouts is cast aside, and
lyttle care can the mother have which can suffer such crueltie: and can
it be tearmed with any other title then cruelty, the infant yet looking
redde of the mother, the mother yet breathing through the torments of
hir travaile, the child crying for helpe which is said to move wilde
beastes, even in the selfe said moment it is borne, or the nexte minute,
to deliver to a straunge nurse, which perhappes is neither wholesome in
body, neither honest in manners, whiche esteemeth more thy argent though
a trifle, then thy tender infant, thy greatest treasure?" Here Lyly is
at his best, and neither Richardson nor Rousseau spoke better on this
point, which is one of their favourite subjects.
He goes on to show how his child should be brought up, with what
principles he should be imbued; many of these principles again very much
resembling those Rousseau was to accept and propagate two hundred years
later: "It is good nurture that leadeth to virtue, and discreete
demeanour that playneth the path to felicitie.... To be a noble man it
is most excellent, but that is our ancestors ... as for our nobilytie,
our stocke, our kindred, and whatsoever we ourselves have not done I
scarcely accompt ours.... It is vertue, yea vertue, gentlemen, that
maketh gentlemen.... These things [_i.e._, knowledge, reason, good
sense], neither the whirling wheele of Fortune can chaunge neither the
deceitful cavilling of worldlings separate, neither sickenesse abate,
neither age abolish." Then follows a dialogue between Euphues and an
atheist,[89] in which I need not say the latter is utterly routed; and
the book ends with a collection of letters[90] between Euphues and
various people who ask and get his advice on their difficulties,
oracle-wise, Pamela-wise too.
In the second part of his romance, which appeared in 1580,[91] Lyly
gives a kind of _Lettres persanes_, but _Lettres persanes_ reversed,
Montesquieu making use of his foreigner to satirize France, and Lyly of
his to eulogize his native land. Euphues comes to England with his
friend Philautus, and, since he knows everything, instructs the latter
as they go along. He warns him against wine, gambling, and debauchery,
teaches him geography, and points out to him what is worth seeing.
Philautus does not retort that Euphues is a pedant, which proves him to
be very good tempered and a perfect travelling companion. The two
friends are enchanted with the country: its natural products, its
commerce, its agriculture, its inhabitants and their manners, its
bishops and their flocks, the civil government, the religious
government, everything is perfect. English gentlewomen are prodigies of
wisdom and beauty; and indeed that is the least Lyly can say of them,
since it is for them that he is writing. When he spoke, as we have seen,
disparagingly of women, he meant Italian women (none of whom, as a
matter of fact, he had ever known or even seen), not Englishwomen. These
spend their mornings "in devout prayer," and not in bed like the ladies
of Italy; they read the Scriptures instead of Ariosto and Petrarch; they
are so beautiful that the traveller is enraptured and cannot help crying
out: "There is no beauty but in England." To sum up, "they are in prayer
devoute, in bravery humble, in beautie chast, in feasting temperate, in
affection wise, in mirth modest, in all their actions though courtlye,
bicause woemen, yet Aungels, bicause virtuous." As for the women of
other countries, they all have lovers and spend their time in painting
their faces.[92]
Having verified such important differences, Philautus cannot do less
than find a wife in England, and Euphues, whose unsociable humour
prevents his doing likewise, carries away with him into his native land
the remembrance of "a place, in my opinion (if any such may be on the
earth) not inferiour to a paradise," and of a Queen "of singuler beautie
and chastitie, excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta."
It is, however, appropriate to recollect that at the time of the
Renaissance, before the blossoming in England of this literature for
ladies, Caxton too had enumerated the chief qualities of the women of
his country. They are the same as in Lyly, only, as we shall see, the
honest printer closes his remarks with a slight reservation. In the
preface placed at the beginning of a work translated from the French by
Lord Rivers, he states that in the translation, several passages
reflecting on the female sex were suppressed; that is easily understood;
they would have no application in England; "for I wote wel," says he,
"of whatsomever condicion women ben in Grece, the women of this contre
ben right good, wyse, playsant, humble, discrete, sobre, chast, obedient
to their husbandis, trewe, secrete, stedfast, ever besy and never ydle,
attemperat in speking and vertuous in all their werkis"--"or," he is
fain to add, "atte leste sholde be soo."[93] And thereupon, Caxton, on
his own authority, restores the suppressed passages.
From the particular point of view of the historian of the English novel,
Lyly with all his absurdities had yet one merit which must be taken into
account. With him we leave epic and chivalrous stories and approach the
novel of manners. There is no longer question of Arthur and his
marvellous knights, but rather of contemporary men, who, in spite of
excessive oratorical gew-gaws, possess some resemblance to reality.
Conversations are reported in which we find the tone of well-born
persons of the period. Lyly takes care also to be very exact in his
dates. Having announced at the end of his first volume that Euphues was
about to set out for England, he informs us in the beginning of the
second, which appeared in 1580, that the embarkation took place on
December 1, 1579. He would, for anything, have gone so far as to give an
engraved portrait of his hero, just as we were to see later, at the
beginning of a book destined to make some noise in the world, the
portrait of "Captain Lemuel Gulliver of Redriff." Undoubtedly his
opinions on men and life, his analysis of sentiment, are rather clumsily
blended with the story and savour of the awkwardness of a first attempt;
but there was however merit in making the attempt, and it is not
impossible at distant intervals to discover under the crust of pedantry
some well-turned passage, possessing eloquence, as we have seen, or,
more rarely, a sort of humour. It is thus that a tolerably good lesson
may be drawn from the adventures of Philautus in London, who, deeply
smitten with the charms of a young English lady, consults a sorcerer in
order to obtain a philtre that will inspire love. Here was an excellent
opportunity, which the magician does not fail to seize, of talking about
serpents and toads. But, after a long enumeration of the bones, stones,
and livers of animals that cause love, the alchemist, urged by
Philautus, ends by confessing that the best sorcery of all to gain the
loving regard of a woman, is to be handsome, witty, and charming.
IV.
By his defects and his merits, his wisdom, his gracefulness and also his
bad style, Lyly could not fail to please. His public was ready when he
began writing, a public with many frivolous tastes and many serious
instincts. The lightness of tone and of behaviour which struck a
foreigner coming for the first time to the English court or a
professional censor who by trade is meant to see nothing else, was
misleading as showing only the surface of the sort of mankind that was
flourishing there at that time. This lightness of tone, however, did
exist nevertheless, and those who assumed it were not slow to embellish
their speeches with flowers from Lyly's paper garden. The austere French
Huguenot, Hubert Languet, the friend and adviser of Sir Philip Sidney,
who visited England in the very year "Euphues" was published, was very
much astonished to see how English courtiers behaved themselves;
accustomed as he was to the grave talk he enjoyed with his young friend,
he had imagined, it seems, that no other was relished by him or by
anybody in Queen Elizabeth's palaces. When he left the country he wrote
to Sidney his opinion of the manners he had observed. It is simply a
confirmation of what Ascham had stated sometime before, when he wrote of
his travelled compatriots: neither of them did justice to the more
serious qualities hidden under all this courtly trifling: "It was a
delight to me last winter," says Languet, "to see you high in favour and
enjoying the esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the
habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have
wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a
reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those virtues
which are wholesome to the State, and which are most becoming to
generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so
were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life
on such things, and I feared lest that noble nature of yours should be
brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only enervate the mind."[94]
Lyly's book proved well suited to this public; it went through numerous
editions; it was printed five times during the first six years of its
publication, and new editions were issued from time to time till 1636.
It gave birth, as we shall see, to many imitations; the name of Euphues
on the title-page of a novel was for years considered a safe conduct to
the public, if not to posterity; books purporting to be Euphues'
legacies or copies of Euphues' papers, or bearing in some way or other
the stamp of his supposed approbation, multiplied accordingly. The
movement increased rapidly, but it was not to last long; in fact, it did
not continue beyond ten or twelve years; after this time the monuments
of the euphuistic literature were still reprinted, but no addition was
made to their number.
This period, however, was filled in a measure with the product of Lyly's
brains or that of his imitators. All who prided themselves on elegance
spoke his affected language, and studied in his book the mythology of
plants. Edward Blount, a bookseller who reprinted Lyly's comedies in the
following century, at a time when these courtly dramas were beginning to
be forgotten, has well expressed the kindly and sympathetic favour
accorded to Lyly by the ladies of Elizabethan days: "These papers of
his," says he, "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 them up as epitaphes to his memory. A
sinne it were to suffer these rare monuments of wit to lye covered in
dust and a shame such conceipted comedies should be acted by none but
wormes. Oblivion shall not so trample on a sonne of the Muses; and such
a sonne as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for a
new English which he taught them. 'Euphues and his England' began first
that language; all our ladyes were then his schollers; and that beautie
in court, which could not parley eupheueisme was as little regarded, as
shee which now there speakes not French."[95] It may be appropriately
recalled here that this same Blount who thus eulogizes Lyly had
published already another set of Elizabethan dramas, and a much more
important one, viz., the first folio of Shakespeare in 1623.
Those comedies which Blount thought fit to reprint, considering that in
so doing he was presenting to his readers "a Lilly growing in a grove of
lawrels," are another proof of the success Lyly had, through his novel,
secured for himself at court. His plays are mythological or
pseudo-historical dramas, interspersed with some pretty songs and
dialogues, and were performed by children before the Queen on holy-days.
Among others were his "Campaspe," "played before the Queenes Majestie,
on new yeares day at night, by Her Majesties children and the children
of Paules," 1584; his "Sapho and Phao," performed also before the Queen
by the same children, on Shrove Tuesday, 1584; his "Endimion, the man in
the moone," played before the Queen "at Greenwich on Candlemass day at
night, by the chyldren of Paules"; "Gallathea," played on New Year's
Day; "Midas," performed on Twelfth Night, also before the Queen, &c.[96]
On love matters and women's affairs, he was considered an authority; the
analysis of the passions and the knowledge of the deeper moods of the
soul, which many consider to be, among novelists, a new-born science,
were regarded by his contemporaries as a thing wholly his, a discovery
made by himself; not foreseeing his successors, they proclaimed him a
master of his newly invented art. Beginners would come to him for advice
or for a preface, as they go now to the heirs of his art, especially
when love is their theme. In this way Thomas Watson published in 1582
his "Passionate Centurie of Love," and prefaced it, as with a
certificate of its worth, by a letter from Lyly: "My good friend, I have
read your new passions, and they have renewed mine old pleasures, the
which brought to me no lesse delight, then they have done to yourself
commendations.... Such is the nature of persuading pleasure, that it
melteth the marrow before it scorch the skin ... not unlike unto the
oyle of jeat which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the flesh."[97]
It was useless for wise minds to grumble; Lyly always found women to
applaud him. In vain did Nash, twelve years after the appearance of
"Euphues," scoff at the enthusiasm with which he had read the book when
he was "a little ape in Cambridge";[98] vainly was Euphuism derided on
the stage before a Cambridge audience: "There is a beaste in India
call'd a polecatt ... and the further she is from you the less you smell
her," a piece of information that contains more probability than perhaps
any given by Lyly.[99] Vainly, too, Shakespeare showed his opinion of
the style in lending it to Falstaff when the worthy knight wishes to
admonish Prince Henry in the manner of courts. Grown old in his tavern,
Falstaff has no idea that these refinements, fashionable at the time
when he was as slender as his page, may be now the jest of the young
generation: "There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of,
and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as
ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou
keepest: for, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears;
not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes
also."[100]
Many persons to whom the book doubtless recalled the memory of their
spring-time, shared Falstaff's ingenuousness, and remained faithful to
Lyly; if men or letters, after some years of enthusiasm, ceased to
imitate him, his book was for a long time continuously read, and it was
reprinted again and again even in the reign of Charles I. It was
translated into Dutch in the same century,[101] and was modernized in
the following, under the title: "The false friend and the inconstant
mistress: an instructive novel ... displaying the artifices of the
female sex in their amours."[102] High praise is rendered by the editor
to Lyly, who "was a great refiner of the English tongue in those days."
The book appeared not very long before Richardson's "Pamela," a fact
worthy of notice, the more so as in this abbreviation of Euphues, the
letters contained in the original have been reproduced and look the more
conspicuous in the little pamphlet. Quite Richardsonian, too, is the
table of contents which is rather a table of good precepts and useful
information, a very different table from the one appended by Harington
to his "Ariosto." Here we find enumerated the many wise recommendations
by which Lyly so long anticipated Richardson and Rousseau:
"The mother ought to be her own nurse p. 83.
"The wild beasts more tender of their young
than those who nurse not their own children p. 83.
"Children not to be frightened with stories
of spirits and bugbears (&c.) p. 86."
So much for the continuation of Lyly's fame. As for the period of
imitation proper, the era of euphuism's full glory, it lasted, as we
have said, hardly more than twelve or at most fifteen years. But it saw
the birth of works that are not without importance in the history of the
origin of the novel in this country.
[Illustration: LIBRA.]
[Illustration: KNIGHTLY PASTIMES. HAWKING, 1575.
_Illustrative of Gerismond's life in Lodge's "Rosalynd."_]
FOOTNOTES:
[67] "'Euphues' the anatomy of wyt ... wherin are contained the delights
that wyt followeth in his youth by the pleasauntnesse of Love, and the
happynesse he reapeth in age by the perfectnesse of wisedome"; London
[1579], 4to; reprinted by Arber, London, 1869. Lyly was born in 1553 or
1554; he died in 1606.
[68] Dedication of the second part: "To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of
England." There is afterwards a sort of second preface addressed to the
"Gentlemen readers," but Lyly puts into it much less animation, and
appears to have written it only for conscience' sake in order not to
forget any one.
[69] In his excellent work, "Shakspere and Euphuism," _Transactions of
the New Shakspere Society_, 1884, Dr. Landmann was the first to break up
Lyly's style into its different parts, and point out the true sources
where he found not only the elements of his language, but even many of
his ideas. The same essay contains very useful information on Gongorism
and other kinds of affected styles of the sixteenth century. See also
Dr. Landmann's "Der Euphuismus," Giessen, 1881; his edition of part of
"Euphues," Heilbronn, 1887; and an article by Mr. S. L. Lee, _Athenaeum_,
July 14, 1883.
[70] The "Libro aureo" appeared in 1529; it was translated into French
in 1531, and went through a great many editions, entitled sometimes "Le
Livre dore de Marc-Aurele"; sometimes "L'Horloge des princes." North's
translation, which followed the French editions, is entitled, "The Diall
of Princes, by Guevara, englyshed out of the Frenche," London, 1557,
fol.; it had several editions. It is to the Marcus Aurelius of Guevara
that La Fontaine alludes in his "Paysan du Danube"; the story of the
peasant was one of the most popular of the "Golden Boke." Guevara's
style, with all the supplementary embellishments that Lyly has added,
was already to be seen in the collection of short stories by Pettie,
1576 (_supra_, p. 81) of which one of the early editions begins like
"Euphues," with an epistle to the "gentlewomen readers."
[71] "Le Bestiaire d'Amour," ed. Hippeau, Paris, 1840, 8vo. Richard de
Fournival died about 1260. The MS. followed in this edition is dated
1285.
[72] "Sa nature si est que quand il trouve un homme, si le devore, et
quand il l'a devore, si le pleure tous les jours de sa vie."
[73] Fragments of which remain in the "Codex Exoniensis," ed. Thorpe,
London, 1842, 8vo. The Panther, p. 355; the Whale, p. 360, &c.
[74] "An old English Miscellany, containing a bestiary," ed. R. Morris,
London, Early English Text Society, 1872.
[75] Recently published by Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith and M. Paul Meyer,
Paris, Societe des anciens textes Francais, 1889, 8vo.
[76] "The historie of Foure-footed beastes, describing the true and
lively figure of every beast," London, 1607, fol. "The historie of
Serpents or the second book of living creatures," London, 1608, fol.
[77] "Alcida. Greenes metamorphosis," licensed 1588; earliest known
edition, 1617.
[78] "Foure-footed beastes," _ut supra_, pp. 1, 199, 328, 453.
[79] "Historie of serpents," _ut supra_, pp. 111, 140, 236, &c.
[80] It should not, however, be thence concluded that Lyly is original
in all his moral dissertations; as Dr. Landmann has pointed out (see
_supra_, p. 106) he often borrows large passages from Plutarch and
Guevara; but what is remarkable is the intense and persistent
conviction, and also the success, at least success in so far that it was
read, with which this young man of twenty-five, who was of the world and
not of the church, preaches good morals to all classes of society.
[81] Preface to Part II.
[82] "Correspondence of Samuel Richardson," ed. Barbauld, London, 1804,
6 vols. 12mo.
[83] The meaning of his name is thus given by Ascham in his
"Scholemaster" (1570): "[Greek: Euphues] is he that is apte by goodnes
of witte and appliable by readines of will, to learning, having all
other qualities of the minde and partes of the bodie that must an other
day serve learning, not troubled, mangled or halfed, but sounde, whole,
full, and hable to do their office." So was Grandison.
[84] Arber's reprint, pp. 106 _et seq._
[85] "Pantagruel," bk. iii. ch. xxxi.
[86] Compare the meditations of the same sort of the Pedant in the
"Pedant joue," of Cyrano de Bergerac.
[87] For instance, the letter on the nursing of children by their
mothers (vol. iii. of the original edition, letter 56), and the long
letter where Pamela takes to pieces Locke's "Treatise on Education," and
remodels it according to her own ideas (vol. iv. letters 48 _et seq._).
[88] Arber's reprint, _ut supra_, "Euphues and his Ephoebus," pp. 123
_et seq._
[89] "Euphues and Atheos," Arber's reprint, _ut supra_, pp. 160, _et
seq._
[90] "Certeine Letters writ by Euphues to his friends," _ibid._, pp. 178
_et seq._
[91] "Euphues and his England. Containing his voyage and adventures,
myxed with sundry pretie discourses of honest love, the description of
the countrey, the court and the manner of that Isle.... by John Lyly,
Maister of Arte, London 1580," reprinted by Arber, _ut supra_.
[92] "Euphues and his England," _ut supra_, p. 442.
[93] Preface to the "Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophres," 1477.
[94] Antwerp, Nov. 14, 1579, "Correspondence of Sir Ph. Sidney and
Hubert Languet," ed. Pears, London, 1845, 8vo, p. 167.
[95] Preface "to the Reader" in "Six Court Comedies ... by the onely
rare poet of that time, the wittie, comicall, facetiously-quicke and
unparalelld John Lilly," London, 1632, 12mo.
[96] "Dramatic Works," ed. Fairholt, London, 1858, two vols. 8vo.
[97] Watson was then about twenty-five years old. "Poems," reprinted by
Arber, London, 1870, 4to.
[98] "'Euphues' I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge, and I then
thought it was _ipse ille_; it may be excellent still for ought I know,
but I lookt not on it this ten yeare" ("Strange Newes," 1592).
[99] "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," ed. Macray, Oxford, 1886, 8vo. "The
Returne," part i. act v. sc. 2. This part was performed in 1600.
[100] "1 Henry IV.," act ii. sc. 4 (A.D. 1597-8, Furnivall).
[101] "De vermakelijke historie Zee-een Landreize van Euphues,"
Rotterdam, 1671, 12mo. Another edition of the same, 1682.
[102] London, 1718, 16mo. "Price 2s." (on title-page). Defoe's "Robinson
Crusoe" appeared the next year; Richardson's "Pamela" was published in
1740.
[Illustration: ANOTHER DRAGON, 1608.]