This is the style of a writer who does not know when a sentence has come to an end, and who, when he writes one which is properly constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies at least partly in this, that Raleigh had the easier task to perform. He had only to state facts, not to expound doctrine.
While making allowance for the inward and spiritual cause of the invasion of English by the long, confused, overladen sentence, it must also be confessed that the evil was largely due to the prevalence of affected styles of writing, which lent themselves to over-elaboration. Two bad models were set before Englishmen about the middle of the queen’s reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long, exceedingly popular—Lyly’s euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style of Sidney’s Arcadia, to which no name has ever been given. The lives of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their style, as shown in their stories, and its effect on English literature, are the matters in hand. Euphuism and the manner of the Arcadia appear to have been elaborated by their authors about the same time, though Lyly takes precedence in the order of publication. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, was printed in 1579, Euphues and his England in the following year.[79]
Euphuism.
Euphuism has become a name for literary affectation, and is in that sense often used with very little precision. It is a very peculiar form of affectation. The two main features of the style—the mechanical antitheses and the abuse of similes—have been described already. Euphues, in so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught. The hero from whom it takes its name is the grandfather of all virtuous, solemn, and didactic prigs. He makes two excursions into the world from his native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at Naples to jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her most justly jilted in turn. He floods southern Italy with antithetical platitude, and retires to Athens. Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where the second, after philandering with one lady, marries another. Euphues remains didactic and superior. At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra. There is a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her time as high as Shakespeare’s plays and the Ecclesiastical Polity. There are also pages of such matter as this: “But as the cypress-tree the more it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile.” Unbridled youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which was unbridled enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that a time which loved Tamburlaine and produced the great lyric, should also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps, again, it is not so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan time a liking for what looked superior to the common herd. About the Court there was much foppery, and there were many who wished to resemble the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviving morality of the age, compatible as it was with much individual profligacy, made men respectful of virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward VI. and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII. close behind them, it was as yet hardly the case that “the cardinal virtues were to be taken for granted among English gentlemen.” Surrey may have been jesting when he told his sister to make herself the king’s mistress, but what a society that must have been in which a brother, and he “a mirror of chivalry,” thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly was very moral, a fop to his fingers’ ends, and with all his oddity and his pedantry, there is a real, though very artificial, distinction about him. Finally, there were as yet few and insignificant rivals. It is not then at all surprising that his style was taken up at Court as “the thing,” and accepted by the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snobbery, of the outer world.
Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence (for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula, “As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,” can make it. |The Arcadia.| With Sidney’s Arcadia[80] we come to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a précieuse, and who was all her life the centre of some literary coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen. The Arcadia, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a fragment, though a large one. The Arcadia is much longer than the “tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it is much more a Libro de Caballerías. There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly Deeds”—challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the Amadis or the Palmerin. It is a very entangled book, and is not made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them.
Sidney’s style.
The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for Góngora without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form of affectation by the Libros de Caballerías, published from thirty to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s Don Quixote, and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]
We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later authors of Libros de Caballerías. Yet the juggle on the two forces of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate success of Don Quixote in England may be explained not only by the permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences, while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which Sidney abounds.
Short Stories.