THE ELIZABETHANS
The new conditions of professional story-telling.
Professional story-tellers before the sixteenth century seem very far removed from the novelists of our circulating libraries. Theirs was a simpler patronage; they had but to please one rich man, and they could live. The invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the conditions of modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall into the audience of the world, and patrons into the public. A man told his stories in his own room. He was not sure of a single listener; he might have ten thousand without raising his voice or pressing harder with his pen. Poets might write for their friends or the Court; but Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist by writing for the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and themselves. They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by charm of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm on paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly appearing; already, as in the case of Euphues, a single book might set the fashion for a thousand; already the novelist felt his audience through his sales. Men like Greene, swift 'yarkers up' of pamphlets, had to write what the Elizabethan public wanted—with the result that there is very little purely English story-telling of the period. The Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas. They fell in love with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all countries but their own, and for all times but those in which they lived. There never were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from Italy, from Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied crudely and continually from a newly discovered antiquity.
Elizabethan borrowings.
There was Paynter's Pallace, peopled with characters from the love-tales of France and Italy, in whose adventures Elizabethan playwrights found a score of plots. And then there was Pettie's Pallace, with its delightful title, A petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure, that shows how late our language lost its French. Pettie steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of right of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion a Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All the world was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical allusion was used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against her husband, explains his iniquity as follows:—
'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of the stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced Phyllis to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who left Ariadne in the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he subdued the monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate labyrinth! He cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused his own mother Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and ripped open, that he might see the place wherein he lay being an infant in her belly! So that what but filthiness is to be gathered of such grafts? What boughs but beastliness grow out of such stems?'
And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was he with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters as though he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in the dock before him.
'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the one and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness—such unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief and murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in him such falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish desire, in her such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat, in her such haggish hate, that I think them both worthy to be condemned to the most bottomless pit in hell.'
Lyly writes for women.
There is something in the style of this, as well as in the address to a female reader, that suggests the Euphues of John Lyly, published two years later. Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan romance, and brought into it many elements still characteristic of English story-telling, wrote as well as his letter to 'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie good friends, the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory to women—'To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth what they would.' They were grateful to him, and since he said that he would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's Casket, then open in a Scholler's studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in London but knew much of him by heart, addressed her husband or lover in terms his Lucia might have used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as in her looking-glass. His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of all his tales was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like most English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than of the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England' that he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And yet he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century, and throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards, the chaste mind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was to pour forth what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and Fielding and Smollett were to write, before the chaste mind was to exert any very lasting influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett wrote for men, while, like an earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take the measure of a woman's minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he would go as neere to fit them for a fancie as the other doth for a fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less squeamish than their descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this book planned to fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:—'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in which so much of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a 'Cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections were misplaced or unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride responsibility for the disease, must have found it easy to forgive him and to smile at so impotent a cure.
Euphuism.
The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than his matter. Like Pettie's, it is precious, but with a preciousness at the same time so elaborate and infectious that I am finding it difficult even now, in thinking about it, to keep from imitating it. Its principle is a battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which the sense, sometimes a little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or words that are not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed in a single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts, or longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in the intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There was something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three paragraphs ago; and here is an example from Lyly:—'Alas, Euphues, by how much the more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much the more I feare thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its embroidery.) 'The fine Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble; the greenest Beech burneth faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest silke is soonest soyled; and the sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most infect the clearest complection, and the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest fruite: the most delycate witte is allured with small enticement unto vice, and most subject to yeelde unto vanitie.'
'Cruditie and indigestion.'
Such a style could not but attract a newly educated people, still able to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of information is comparable to that generosity of gold and precious gems that has been noticed as characteristic of the writers of the Mabinogion. The Briton wondered at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It is not surprising that in this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be brought to perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says Montaigne, 'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the same: the stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have changed forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine John Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and a classical dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig out metaphors learned and ingenious, and present them immediately to his readers without putting any undue strain on his own intellectual digestion.
Lyly's followers.
His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If they could not write they talked his peculiar language. If they were novelists they wrote in something like his manner, and with cheerful consciences used his name as a trade-mark to attract his popularity to themselves. Lodge's Rosalynde is introduced as Euphues' Golden Legacie, and many other stories were connected by some ingenious silken thread to Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to laugh at euphuism. It was the first prophecy of the ordered poetic prose in which such delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of Lodge and Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at once its possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors, and when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to tell all his journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be, Philautus),' we perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind his sentences. The stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and Cassander, or the pretty history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as pleasant as the tales of Lodge and Greene.
How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene wrote in a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing on the high seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford gentleman, holding an appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having nothing else to do. Euphuism fell away from both journalist and sailor, leaving a pleasant glow over their style. They were more intent than Lyly on the plain forwarding of the narrative. For the long rhetorical harangues they substituted shorter, simpler speeches to express the feelings of their characters. The harangue was a step from the bald statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter speeches were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer copy of the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself. Dialogue was yet to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant argument, but in the best of his imitators it had become already a tool imperfectly understood but sometimes used for the actual progress of the tale.
Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan story-telling. Pandosto, Rosalynde, and some of Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their audiences, exceedingly alive.
Romance and confession.
In Greene's Pandosto we find reminiscences of old romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the Italian novelle, and plenty of the wild improbability that still had power over his audience. Pandosto is a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little preface on jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island—no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the finish—no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans, fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash's Jacke Wilton, the rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his romances had delighted their imaginations.
Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.
'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine in favour. But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty eares to conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if he come abord our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee knowes not the shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a rustie pollax, that sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either well bebast him, or heave the cockescombe over boord to feed cods. But curteous gentlemen, that favour most, backbite none, and pardon what is overslipt, let such come and welcome; Ile into the stewards roome, and fetch them a kanne of our best bevradge.'
As You Like It.
That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned to England from piracies on the western seas, introduces his Rosalynde. With such a preface, you would expect a ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and coarse words, certainly not the dainty little pastoral, romantic fairy story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding lessons of much profit for the guidance of his friend's children. The very contrast between its buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as that between the pastoral writers and their books, between, for example, Cervantes of Lepanto and the author of the Galatea, between the Sidney who died at Zutphen and the author of Arcadia. It is the tale of As You Like It, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title for it, since it contains every one of the surest baits with which to hook an Elizabethan audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that time when ships were sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found riches of the world, the hint of travel was a sufficient promise of delight. It begins with a dying knight who leaves a legacy between his sons, and its audience had not yet tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras. It has the fairy-tale notion of the youngest born, and was not England youngest son of all the world? There are beautiful women in it, and one of them dresses like a man—a delicious, romantic thing to dream upon. And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself, and therefore full of profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written in something not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the Elizabethans as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.