[597] Biogr. Univ. Mademoiselle de Scuderi was not gifted by nature with beauty, or, as this biographer more bluntly says, étoit d’un extrême laideur. She would, probably, have wished this to have been otherwise, but carried off the matter very well, as appears by her epigram on her own picture by Nanteuil:
Nanteuil, en faisant mon image,
A de son art divin signalé le pouvoir;
Je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir,
Je les aime dans son ouvrage.
Argenis of Barclay. 56. The Argenis of Barclay, a son of the defender of royal authority against republican theories, is a Latin romance, superior to those which the Spanish or French language could boast. It has indeed always been reckoned among political allegories. That the state of France, in the last years of Henry III., is partially shadowed in it, can admit of no doubt; several characters are faintly veiled, either by anagram or Greek translation of their names; but whether to avoid the insipidity of servile allegory, or to excite the reader by perplexity, Barclay has mingled so much of mere fiction with his story, that no attempts at a regular key to the whole work can be successful, nor in fact does the fable of this romance run in any parallel stream with real events. His object seems in great measure to have been the discussion of political questions in feigned dialogue. But though in these we find no want of acuteness or good sense, they have not at present much novelty in our eyes; and though the style is really pleasing, or, as some have judged, excellent,[598] and the incidents not ill contrived, it might be hard to go entirely through a Latin romance of 700 pages, unless, indeed, we had no alternative given but the perusal of the similar works in Spanish or French. The Argenis was published at Rome in 1622; some of the personages introduced by Barclay are his own contemporaries; a proof that he did not intend a strictly historical allegory of the events of the last age. |His Euphormio.| The Euphormio of the same author resembles in some degree the Argenis but, with less of story and character, has a more direct reference to European politics. It contains much political disquisition, and one whole book is employed in a description of the manners and laws of different countries with no disguise of names.
[598] Coleridge has pronounced an ardent, and rather excessive, eulogy on the language of the Argenis, preferring it to that of Livy or Tacitus. Coleridge’s Remains, vol. i., p. 257. I cannot by any means go this length; it has struck me that the Latinity is more that of Petronius Arbiter, but I am not well enough acquainted with this writer to speak confidently. The same observation seems applicable to the Euphormio.
Campanella’s City of the Sun. 57. Campanella gave a loose to his fanciful humour in a fiction, entitled the City of the Sun, published at Frankfort in 1623, in imitation perhaps of the Utopia. The City of the Sun is supposed to stand upon a mountain situated in Ceylon, under the equator. A community of goods and women is established in this republic; the principal magistrate of which is styled Sun, and is elected after a strict examination in all kinds of science. Campanella has brought in so much of his own philosophical system, that we may presume that to have been the object of this romance. The Solars, he tells us, abstained at first from flesh, because they thought it cruel to kill animals. “But afterwards considering that it would be equally cruel to kill plants, which are not less endowed with sensation, so that they must perish by famine, they understood that ignoble things were created for the use of nobler things, and now eat all things without scruple.” Another Latin romance had some celebrity in its day, the Monarchia Solipsorum, a satire on the Jesuits in the fictitious name of Lucius Cornelius Europeus. It has been ascribed to more than one person; the probable author is one Scotti, who had himself belonged to the order.[599] This book did not seem to me in the least interesting; if it is so in any degree, it must be not as mere fiction, but as a revelation of secrets.
[599] Biogr. Univ. arts. Scotti and Inchoffer. Niceron, vols. xxxv. and xxxix.
Few books of fiction in England. 58. It is not so much an extraordinary as an unfortunate deficiency in our own literary annals, that England should have been destitute of the comic romance, or that derived from real life, to a late period; since in fact we may say the same, as has been seen, of France. The picaresque novels of Spain were thought well worthy of translation; but it occurred to no one, or no one had the gift of genius, to shift the scene, and imitate their delineation of native manners. Of how much value would have been a genuine English novel, the mirror of actual life in the various ranks of society, written under Elizabeth or under the Stuarts! We should have seen, if the execution had not been very coarse, and the delineation absolutely confined to low characters, the social habits of our forefathers better than by all our other sources of that knowledge, the plays, the letters, the traditions and anecdotes, the pictures or buildings of the time. Notwithstanding the interest all profess to take in the history of manners, our notions of them are generally meagre and imperfect; and hence, modern works of fiction are but crude and inaccurate designs when they endeavour to represent the living England of two centuries since. Even Scott, who had a fine instinctive perception of truth and nature, and who had read much, does not appear to have seized the genuine tone of conversation, and to have been a little misled by the style of Shakspeare. This is rather elaborate and removed from vulgar use by a sort of archaism in phrase and a pointed turn in the dialogue, adapted to theatrical utterance, but wanting the ease of ordinary speech.
Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall. 59. I can only produce two books by English authors in this first part of the seventeenth century which fall properly under the class of novels or romances; and of these one is written in Latin. This is the Mundus Alter et Idem of Bishop Hall, an imitation of the later and weaker volumes of Rabelais. A country in Terra Australis is divided into four regions, Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronea, and Lavernia. Maps of the whole land and of particular regions are given; and the nature of the satire, not much of which has any especial reference to England, may easily be collected. It is not a very successful effort.
Godwin’s Journey to the Moon. 60. Another prelate, or one who became such, Francis Godwin, was the author of a much more curious story. It is called the Man in the Moon, and relates the journey of one Domingo Gonzalez to that planet. This was written by Godwin, according to Antony Wood, while he was a student at Oxford.[600] By some internal proofs, it must have been later than 1599, and before the death of Elizabeth in 1603. But it was not published till 1638. It was translated into French, and became the model of Cyrano de Bergerac, as he was of Swift. Godwin himself had no prototype, as far as I know, but Lucian. He resembles those writers in the natural and veracious tone of his lays. The fiction is rather ingenious and amusing throughout; but the most remarkable part is the happy conjectures, if we must say no more, of his philosophy. Not only does the writer declare positively for the Copernican system, which was uncommon at that time, but he has surprisingly understood the principle of gravitation, it being distinctly supposed that the earth’s attraction diminishes with the distance. Nor is the following passage less curious. “I must let you understand that the globe of the moon is not altogether destitute of an attractive power; but it is far weaker than that of the earth; as, if a man do but spring upwards with all his force, as dancers do when they show their activity by capering, he shall be able to mount fifty or sixty feet high, and then he is quite beyond all attraction of the moon.” By this device Gonzalez returns from his sojourn in the latter, though it required a more complex device to bring him thither. “The moon,” he observes, “is covered with a sea, except the parts which seem somewhat darker to us, and are dry land.” A contrary hypothesis came afterwards to prevail; but we must not expect everything from our ingenious young student.
[600] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. ii., col. 558. It is remarkable that Mr. Dunlop has been ignorant of Godwin’s claim to this work, and takes Dominic Gonzalez for the real author. Hist. of Fiction, iii. 394.
Howell’s Dodona’s Grove. 61. Though I can mention nothing else in English which comes exactly within our notions of a romance, we may advert to the Dodona’s Grove of James Howell. This is a strange allegory, without any ingenuity in maintaining the analogy between the outer and inner story, which alone can give a reader any pleasure in allegorical writing. The subject is the state of Europe, especially of England, about 1640, under the guise of animated trees in a forest. The style is like the following:—“The next morning the royal olive sent some prime elms to attend prince Rocolino in quality of officers of state; and a little after he was brought to the royal palace in the same state Elaiana’s kings used to be attended the day of their coronation.” The contrivance is all along so clumsy and unintelligible, the invention so poor and absurd, the story, if story there be, so dull an echo of well-known events, that it is impossible to reckon Dodona’s Grove anything but an entire failure. Howell has no wit, but he has abundance of conceits, flat and common-place enough. With all this he was a man of some sense and observation. His letters are entertaining, but they scarcely deserve consideration in this volume.