Greene's story of "Menaphon"[141] is hardly more probable, but it takes place in the country of Arcadia, a fact that predisposes us to treat with indulgence any lack of reality; moreover, it contains touches of true poetry, and is perhaps, all considered, the best of Greene's romantic novels. In common with most of this author's tales it abounds in monologues and dialogues; heroes think aloud and let us into their secret thoughts, a device adapted from the classic drama and very common in all the English novels of the period. There is also, according to Greene's custom, a great abundance of songs and verses, the best piece being the lullaby quoted above. Propriety and the truth of characters are not much better observed here than in Greene's other stories. Everybody in this romance speaks with infinite grace and politeness. The shepherd Menaphon, introducing himself to the Princess Sephestia and her child, who have been cast ashore through a shipwreck, says to them: "Strangers, your degree I know not, therefore pardon if I give lesse title than your estates merit." And, falling desperately in love with the beautiful young woman, who gives as her name Samela of the island of Cyprus, he describes to her with ardour and not without grace the pastoral life that he would like to lead with her: "I tell thee, faire nymph, these plaines that thou seest stretching southward, are pastures belonging to Menaphon: ther growes the cintfoyle, and the hyacinth, the cowsloppe, the primrose and the violet, which my flockes shall spare for flowers to make thee garlands, the milke of my ewes shall be meate for thy pretie wanton, the wool of the fat weathers that seemes as fine as the fleece that Jason fet from Colchos, shall serve to make Samela webbes withall; the mountaine tops shall be thy mornings walke, and the shadie valleies thy evenings arbour: as much as Menaphon owes shall be at Samelas command if she like to live with Menaphon."
The romance goes on its way, strewn with songs whose refrains of varied and tuneful metres afford charming melody. In the end two knights, Melicertus and Pleusidippus, both enamoured of Sephestia, fight a duel; they are separated. The king of the country interferes, and comprehending nothing of these intricate love affairs, he is on the point of cutting off all their heads, when it is discovered that Melicertus is the long lost husband of Sephestia; the other duellist is the child of the shipwrecked woman, who, in the course of the tale, has been stolen from her on the shore and has grown up in hiding. They embrace one another; and, as for Menaphon, whose sweetheart finds herself thus provided with a sufficiently fond husband and son, he returns to his old love, Pesana, who had had patience to wait for him, doubtless without growing old: for, in these romances, people do not grow old. Pleusidippus has become a man, without the least change in his mother's face; she has remained as beautiful as in the first page of the book, and is, according to appearances, still "sweet-and-twenty."
In his tales of this sort Greene was mostly describing delights with which he was not personally acquainted, lands of which he had no practical knowledge, princely adventures for which no historian could vouch. He was perfectly free and unimpeded. The taste of the public was similar to his; no Boileau was there to stop him, and he wrote accordingly, following his fancy, not caring in the least for nature and possibility, letting his pen go as fast as it would, and turning out "in a night and a day" a tale like his "Menaphon." But if he did not choose to paint from life and to describe realities in his "love pamphlets," he did so on purpose, not because he was unable to do it. In several of his other writings his subject was such that the work would have been nothing if not true; and there we find a clear view of human passions, foibles and peculiarities, which show that if the taste of the romance readers of the time had been such as to encourage him in this line, he would have proved no mean realistic novelist. His Repentances abound in portraits and scenes, showing the keen eye he had for realities. His conny-catching literature is full of exact descriptions of the sordid life of the sharpers and low courtesans of Elizabethan London. In more than one of these pamphlets he foreshadows, though I need not say with a much lesser genius, the "Moll Flanders" and the "Colonel Jack" of a later period. The resemblance is especially great in the "Life and death of Ned Browne,"[142] in which the hero, according to the custom in picaresque novels, of which more hereafter, himself tells his own story in the first person. Greene is particularly bitter in his denunciations of the professional courtesans of London, about whom he knew probably more than any of his contemporaries. But with all the hatred he felt towards them so long as he had pen in hand, he cannot help repeating that, however objectionable they are in many ways, they have for themselves this advantage, that they are extremely beautiful, so that if their morals are exactly the same as in other countries they excel at least in something which in itself is not contemptible. They are "a kinde of women bearing the faces of Angels, but the hearts of devils, able to intrap the elect if it were possible."[143] Greene had no pretension to be one of the elect, and was only too often "intraped"; but for all his miseries his words show a scarcely less intense admiration for his diabolical angels than Des Grieux's famous rapturous phrase when he meets Manon on her way to the ship that is to convey her to America: "Son linge était sale et dérangé; ses mains délicates exposées à l'injure de l'air; enfin tout ce composé charmant, cette figure capable de ramener l'univers à l'idolatrie, paraissait dans un désordre et un abattement inexprimables." "Again," writes Greene: "let me say this much, that our curtizans ... are far superiour in artificiall allurement to them of all the world, for, although they have not the painting of Italie, nor the charms of France, nor the jewelles of Spaine, yet they have in their eyes adamants that wil drawe youth as the jet the strawe.... Their lookes ... containe modesty, mirth, chastity, wantonness and what not."[144]
Besides the personal reminiscences with which he made up his repentance tales and stories, Greene as an observer of human nature is seen at his best in his curious, and at the time famous, dialogue "between velvet breeches and cloth breeches."[145] It is in fact a disputation between old England and new England; the England that built the strong houses praised by Harrison, and the England that adorned itself with the Burghley House paper work; traditional England and italianate England. Velvet breeches is "richly daubde with gold, and poudred with pearle," and is "sprung from the auncient Romans, borne in Italy, the mistresse of the worlde for chivalry." Cloth breeches is of English manufacture and descent, and deplores the vices that have crept into "this glorious Iland" in the wake of Italian fashions. Both plead before Greene, each giving very graphic accounts of the behaviour of the other. Here, for example, is a scene, assuredly from the life, at a barber's shop:
"Velvet breeches he sittes downe in the chaire wrapt in fine cloathes ... then comes [the barber] out with his fustian eloquence, and making a low conge, saith:
velvet breeches and cloth breeches, 1592.
"Sir, will you have your wor[ship's] haire cut after the Italian maner, shorte and round, and then frounst with the curling yrons, to make it looke like a halfe moone in a miste? or like a Spanyard, long at the eares and curled like the two endes of an old cast periwig? or will you be Frenchified, with a love locke downe to your shoulders, wherein you may weare your mistresse favour? The English cut is base and gentlemen scorne it, novelty is daintye; speake the woord sir, and my sissars are ready to execute your worships wil.
"His head being once drest, which requires in combing and rubbing some two howers, hee comes to the bason: then being curiously washt with no woorse then a camphire bal, he descends as low as his berd, and asketh whether he please to be shaven or no, whether he will have his peak cut short and sharpe, amiable like an inamorato, or broad pendant like a spade, to be terrible like a warrior and a Soldado ... if it be his pleasure to have his appendices primed or his mustachios fostered to turn about his eares like ye branches of a vine...."
The question pending between cloth and velvet is submitted to a jury; men of the various professions are called and accepted, or rejected, according to their merit; each is described, often in a very lively manner. Here is, for example, the portrait of a poet or rather of the poet of the Elizabethan period; for the specimen here represented stands as a type for all his class; and it is worth notice, for if Shakespeare himself was different, many of his associates at the "Mermaid," we may be sure, well answered the description. "I espied far off a certain kind of an overworne gentleman, attired in velvet and satin; but it was somewhat dropped and greasie, and bootes on his legges, whose soles wexed thin and seemed to complaine of their maister, which treading thrift under his feet, had brought them unto that consumption. He walked not as other men in the common beaten way, but came compassing circumcirca, as if we had beene divells and he would draw a circle about us, and at every third step he looked back as if he were afraid of a baily or a sarjant." Cloth Breeches, who seems to be describing here Greene himself, is not too severe in his appreciation of the character of the poor troubled fellow: "If he have forty pound in his purse together, he puts it not to usury, neither buies land nor merchandise with it, but a moneths commodity of wenches and capons. Ten pound a supper, why tis nothing if his plough goes and his ink horne be cleere ... But to speak plainely I think him an honest man if he would but live within his compasse, and generally no mans foe but his own. Therefore I hold him a man fit to be of my jury."