Earlier even than Thomas of Exeter’s day, the hardy barons of England had discovered that when they were “fested and fed,” they were ready to be amused, and that there was nothing so amusing as a story. In the twelfth century, before St. Thomas à Becket gave up his life in Canterbury cloisters, English knights and ladies had grown familiar with the tragic history of King Lear, the exploits of Jack the Giant Killer, the story of King Arthur and of the enchanter Merlin. The earliest of these tales came from Brittany, and were translated from Armorican into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, and a benefactor to the world; but, by the following century, Robin Hood, Tom-a-Lincoln, and a host of sturdy English-born heroes shared in the popular attention. It must have been inexpressibly helpful to the writers and compilers of early fiction that the uncritical age in which they lived had not yet been vitiated by the principles of realistic art. The modern maxims about sinning against the probabilities, and the novelist’s bondage to truth, had not then been invented; and the man who told a story was free to tell it as he pleased. His readers or his hearers were seldom disposed to question his assertions. A knight did not go to the great and unnecessary trouble of learning his letters in order to doubt what he read. Merlin was as real to him as Robin Hood. He believed Sir John Mandeville, when that accomplished traveler told him of a race of men who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads. It was a curious fact, but the unknown world was full of greater mysteries than this. He believed in Prester John, with his red and white lions, his giants and pigmies, his salamanders that built cocoons like silk-worms, his river of stones that rolled perpetually with a mighty reverberation into a sandy sea. Why, indeed, should these wonders be doubted; for in that thrice famous letter sent by Prester John to Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, did he not distinctly say, “No vice is tolerated in our land, and, with us, no one lies.”
This broad-minded, liberal credulity made smooth the novelist’s path. He always located his romances in far and unknown countries, where anything or everything might reasonably be expected to happen. Scythia, Parthia, Abyssinia, were favorite latitudes; Bohemia could always serve at a pinch; and Arcadia, that blessed haven of romance, remained for centuries his happy hunting-ground, where shepherds piped, and nymphs danced sweetly in the shade, and brave knights met in glorious combat, and lovers dallied all day long under the whispering boughs. In Elizabeth’s day, Arcadia had reached the zenith of its popularity. Robert Green had peopled its dewy fields with amorous swains, and Sir Philip Sidney had described its hills and dales in the four hundred and eighty folio pages of his imperishable romance. A golden land, it lies before us still, brilliant with sunshine that shall never fade. Knights and noble ladies ride through it on prancing steeds. Well-bred shepherds, deeply versed in love, sing charming songs, and extend open-hearted hospitality. Shepherdesses, chaste and fair, lead their snowy flocks by meadows and rippling streams. There is always plenty of fighting for the knights when they weary of plighting their vows, and noble palaces spring up for their entertainment when they have had enough of pastoral pleasures and sylvan fare. Ah, me! We who have passed by Arcadia, and dwell in the sad haunts of men, know well what we have lost. Yet was there not a day when the inhabitants of the strange new world, a world not yet familiar with commercial depression and the stock exchange, were thus touchingly described in English verse?
“Guiltless men who danced away their time,
Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime.”
And what gayer irresponsibility could be found even in the fields of Arcadia?
“In Elizabeth’s day,” says M. Jusserand, “adventurous narratives were loved for adventure’s sake. Probability was only a secondary consideration.” Geographical knowledge being in its innocent infancy, people were curious about foreign countries, and decently grateful for information, true or false. When a wandering knight of romance “sailed to Bohemia,” nobody saw any reason why he should not, and readers were merely anxious to know what happened to him when he got there. So great, indeed, was the demand for fiction in the reign of the virgin queen that writers actually succeeded in supporting themselves by this species of composition, a test equally applicable to-day; and it is worth while to remember that the prose tales of Nash, Green, and Sidney were translated into French more than a century before that distinction was conferred on any play of Shakespeare’s.
It need not be supposed, however, that Romance, in her triumphant progress through the land, met with no bitter and sustained hostility. From the very beginning she took the world by storm, and from the very beginning the godly denounced and reviled her. The jesters and gleemen and minstrels who relieved the insufferable ennui of our rude forefathers in those odd moments when they were neither fighting nor eating, were all branded as “Satan’s children” by that relentless accuser, “Piers Plowman.” In vain the simple story-spinners who narrated the exploits of Robin Hood and Tom-a-Lincoln claimed that their merry legends were “not altogether unprofitable, nor in any way hurtful, but very fitte to passe away the tediousness of the long winter evenings.” It was not in this cheerful fashion that the “unco gude”—a race as old as humanity itself—considered the long winter evenings should be passed. Roger Ascham can find no word strong enough in which to condemn “certaine bookes of Chivalrie, the whole pleasure of whiche standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open man-slaughter and bolde bawdrye.” The beautiful old stories, so simply and reverently handled by Sir Thomas Malory in the “Morte d’Arthur,” were regarded with horror and aversion by this gentle ascetic; yet the lessons that they taught were mainly “curtosye, humanyte, friendlynesse, hardynesse and love.” The valorous deeds of Guy of Warwick and Thomas of Reading lent cheer to many a hearth, and sent many a man with brave and joyous heart to battle; yet the saintly Stubbes, who loved not joyousness, lamented loudly that the unregenerate persisted in reading such “toys, fantasies and babbleries,” in place of that more dolorous fiction, Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.” Even Sir Philip Sidney’s innocent “Arcadia” was pronounced by Milton a “vain, amatorious” book; and the great poet who wrote “Comus” and “L’Allegro” harshly and bitterly censured King Charles because that unhappy monarch beguiled the sad hours of prison with its charming pages, and even, oh! crowning offense against Puritanism! copied for spiritual comfort, when condemned to die, the beautiful and reverent invocation of its young heroine, Pamela. “The king hath, as it were, unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of prayer itself,” wrote Milton mercilessly. “Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little care of truth in his last words, or honor to himself or to his friends, as, immediately before his death, to pop into the hand of that grave bishop who attended him, for a special relique of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word by word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god.”
But not even the mighty voice of Milton could check the resistless progress of romantic fiction. Not even dominant Puritanism could stamp it ruthlessly down. When “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the great pioneer of religious novels, was given to the world, England read it with devout delight; but she read too, with admirable inconsistency, those endless tales, those “romances de longue haleine,” which crossed the channel from France, and replaced the less decorous Italian stories so popular in the preceding century. Some of these prolix and ponderous volumes, as relentless in dullness as in length, held their own stoutly for centuries, and won allegiance where it seemed least due. There is an incredible story narrated of Racine, that, when a student at Port Royal, his favorite reading was an ancient prose epic entitled “Ethiopica; the history of Theagenes and Chariclea.” This guileless work, being too bulky for concealment, was discovered by his director and promptly burned, notwithstanding its having been written by a bishop, which ought to have saved it from the flames. Racine, undaunted, procured another copy, and fearing it would meet with the same cruel fate, he actually committed large portions of it to memory, so that nothing should deprive him of his enjoyment. Yet “Ethiopica” would seem as absolutely unreadable a book as even a bishop ever wrote. The heroine, though chaste as she is beautiful, has so many lovers, all with equally unpronounceable names, and so many battles are fought in her behalf, that no other memory than Racine’s could have made any sort of headway with them; while, just in the middle of the story, an old gentleman is suddenly introduced, who, without provocation, starts to work and tells all his life’s adventures, two hundred pages long.
The real promoters and encouragers of romance, however,—the real promoters and encouragers of fiction in every age—were women, and this is more than enough to account for its continued triumphs. There was little use in the stubborn old Puritan, Powell, protesting against the idle folly of females who wasted their time over Sidney’s “Arcadia,” when they ought to have been studying the household recipe books. Long before Cromwell the mighty revolutionized England, women had wearied of recipes as steady reading, and had turned their wanton minds to matters more seductive. Wise and wary was the writer who kept these fair patronesses well in view. When John Lyly gave to the world his amazing “Euphues,” he dexterously announced that it was written for the amusement and the edification of women, and that he asked for it no better fate than to be read by them in idle moments, when they were weary of playing with their lap-dogs. For a young man of twenty-five, Lyly showed an admirable knowledge of feminine inconsistency. By alternately flattering and upbraiding the subtle creatures he hoped to please, now sweetly praising their incomparable perfections, now fiercely reviling their follies and their sins, he succeeded in making “Euphues” the best-read book in England, and he chained with affectations and foolish conceits the free and noble current of English speech.
It was the abundance of leisure enjoyed by women that gave the ten-volumed French romance its marvelous popularity; and one sympathizes a little with Mr. Pepys, though he was such a chronic grumbler, when he laments in his diary that Mrs. Pepys would not only read “Le Grand Cyrus” all night, but would talk about it all day, “though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner,” remarks this censorious husband and critic. More melancholy still to contemplate is the early appearance on the scene of female novelists who wrote vicious twaddle for other women to read. We may fancy that this particular plague is a development of the nineteenth century; but twenty years before the virtuous Pamela saw the light, Eliza Heywood was doing her little best to demoralize the minds and manners of her countrywomen. Eliza Heywood was, in Mr. Gosse’s opinion,—and he is one of the few critics who has expressed any opinion on the subject,—the Ouida of her period. The very names of her heroines, Lassellia, Idalia, and Douxmoure, are Ouidesque, and their behavior would warrant their immediate presentation to that society which the authoress of “Strathmore” has so sympathetically portrayed. These “lovely Inconsiderates,” though bad enough for a reformatory, are all as sensitive as nuns. They “sink fainting on a Bank” if they so much as receive letters from their lovers. Their “Limbs forget their Functions” on the most trifling provocation. “Stormy Passions” and “deadly Melancholy” succeed each other with monotonous vehemence in their “tortured Bosoms,” and when they fly repentant to some remote Italian convent, whole cities mourn their loss.