John Lyly.
I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man,[95] born down in Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and purpose) in the Schoolmaster of Roger Ascham; and thus it happens over and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble into renown.
The book I refer to was called Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, which came into such extraordinary favor that he wrote shortly after another, called Euphues and his England. And the fashion that he set, was a fashion of affectations—of prettinesses of speech—of piling words on words, daintier and daintier—antithesis upon antithesis, with flavors of wide reading thrown in, and spangled with classic terms and far-fetched similes—so that ladies ambitious of literary fame larded their talk with these fine euphuisms of Mr. Lyly. Something of a coxcomb I think we must reckon him; we might almost say an Oscar Wilde of letters—posing as finely and as capable of drawing female shoals in his wake. His strain for verbal felicities, always noticeable, comparing with good, simple, downright English, as a dancing-master’s mincing step, compares with the assured, steady tread of a go-ahead pedestrian, who thinks nothing of attitudes. Scott, you will remember, sought to caricature the Euphuist, in a somewhat exaggerated way, in Sir Piercie Shafton, who figures in his story of the Monastery; he himself, however, in the later annotations of his novel, confesses his failure, and admitted the justice of the criticism which declared Sir Piercie a bore. Shakespeare, also, at a time not far removed from Lyly’s conquest, perhaps intended a slap at the euphuistic craze,[96] in the pedant Schoolmaster’s talk of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”
Yet there was a certain good in this massing of epithets, and in this tesselated cumulation of nice bits of language, from which the more wary and skilful of writers could choose—as from a great vocabulary—what words were cleanest and clearest. Nor do I wish to give the impression that there were no evidences of thoughtfulness or of good purpose, under Lyly’s tintinnabulation of words. Hazlitt thought excellently well of him; and Charles Kingsley, in these later times, has pronounced extravagant eulogy of him. Indeed he had high moral likings, though his inspirations are many of them from Plato or Boëthius; it is questionable also if he did not pilfer from Plutarch; certainly he sugar-coats with his language a great many heathen pills.
In observation he is very acute. That Euphues who gives name to his book, is an Athenian youth of rare parts—“well-constituted” as the Greek implies—who has lived long in Italy, and who talks in this strain of the ladies he saw on a visit to England:—
“The English Damoiselles have their bookes tied to their girdles—not feathers—who are as cunning in the Scriptures as you are in Ariosto or Petrark. It is the most gorgeous court [of England] that ever I have seene or heard of; but yet do they not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who thinke scorne to kneele at service, for fear of wrinckles in your silk, who dare not lift up your head to heaven, for fear of rumpling the ruffs in your neck; yet your handes, I confess, are holden up, rather I thinke, to show your ringes, than to manifest your righteousness.”
Elizabeth would have very probably relished this sort of talk, and have commended the writer in person; nor can there be any doubt that, in such event, Lyly would have mumbled his thanks in kissing the royal hands: there are complaining letters of his on the score of insufficient court patronage, which are not high-toned, and which make us a little doubtful of a goodly manhood in him. Certainly his deservings were great, by reason of the plays which he wrote for her Majesty’s Company of Child-players, and which were acted at the Chapel Royal and in the palaces. In some of these there are turns of expression and of dramatic incident which Shakespeare did not hesitate to convert to his larger purposes; indeed there is, up and down in them, abundance of dainty word-craft—of ingenuity—of more than Elizabethan delicacy too, and from time to time, some sweet little lyrical outburst that holds place still in the anthologies.
One of these, with which I daresay you may be over-familiar, is worth quoting again. It is called Apelles’ Song, and it is from the play of “Alexander and Campaspe:”
“Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses—Cupid paid.
He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows,
His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows:
Loses them too: then down he throws
The coral of his lip—the Rose
Growing on’s cheek (but none knows how);
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin—
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last, he set her both his eyes—
She won; and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love, has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?”
He puts, too, into imitative jingle of words the song of the Nightingale—(as Bryant has done for the Bobolink); and of the strain of the skylark nothing prettier was ever said than Mr. Lyly says:
“How, at Heaven’s gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking—till she sings.”