What makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. No man (unless he were a Coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such inordinate length. When the characters can’t talk to one another they retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. They polish their language with the same care, open the classical dictionary, and have at themselves in good set terms. Philautus, inflamed with love of Camilla, goes to his room and pronounces a ten-minute discourse on the pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. They are amazingly patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. Euphues, angry with Philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. If Lyly had set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into it alone ‘what is not life,’ his product would have been what we find it now. One could easily believe the whole affair to have been intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so serious. We are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but look at a serious child,—there is nothing more serious in the world. Lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. Much of the seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years’ experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward carried.
Being, as we take it, an unmarried man, Lyly gives directions for managing a wife. He believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man should select his own wife. ‘Made marriages by friends’ are dangerous. ‘I had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel as appoint what wife I shall have by his mind.’ He prefers in a wife ‘beauty before riches, and virtue before blood.’ He holds to the radical English doctrine of wifely submission; there is no swerving from the position that the man is the woman’s ‘earthly master,’[2] but in taming a wife no violence is to be employed. Wives are to be subdued with kindness. ‘If their husbands with great threatenings, with jars, with brawls, seek to make them tractable, or bend their knees, the more stiff they make them in the joints, the oftener they go about by force to rule them, the more froward they find them; but using mild words, gentle persuasions, familiar counsel, entreaty, submission, they shall not only make them to bow their knees, but to hold up their hands, not only cause them to honor them, but to stand in awe of them.’ By such methods will that supremest good of an English home be brought about, namely, that the wife shall stand in awe of her husband.
The young author admits that some wives have the domineering instinct, and that way danger lies. A man must look out for himself. If he is not to make a slave of his wife, he is also not to be too submissive; ‘that will cause her to disdain thee.’ Moreover, he must have an eye to the expenditure. She may keep the keys, but he will control the pocket-book. The model wife in Ecclesiastes had greater privileges; she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if she liked it. Not so this well-trained wife of Lyly’s novel. ‘Let all the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare.’ But in setting forth his theory for being happy though married, Lyly, methinks, preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the possibility of a man’s wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree, expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says that if a man does let himself loose in this fashion his wife must not know it. ‘Imitate the kings of Persia, who when they were given to riot kept no company with their wives, but when they used good order had their queens even at the table.’ In short, the wife was to duplicate the moods of her husband. ‘Thou must be a glass to thy wife, for in thy face must she see her own; for if when thou laughest she weep, when thou mournest she giggle, the one is a manifest sign she delighteth in others, the other a token she despiseth thee.’ John Lyly was a wise youth. He struck the keynote of the mode in which most incompatible marriages are played when he said that it was a bad sign if one’s wife giggled when one was disposed to be melancholy.
An interesting study is the author’s attitude toward foreign travel. It would appear to have been the fashion of the time to indulge in much invective against foreign travel, but nevertheless—to travel. Many men believed with young Valentine that ‘home keeping youth have ever homely wits,’ while others were rather of Ascham’s mind when he said, ‘I was once in Italy, but I thank God my stay there was only nine days.’ Lyly came of a nation of travelers. Then as now it was true that there was no accessible spot of the globe upon which the Englishman had not set his foot. Nomadic England went abroad; sedentary England stayed at home to rail at him for so doing. Aside from that prejudice which declared that all foreigners were fools, there was a well-founded objection to the sort of traveling usually described as seeing the world. Young men went upon the continent to see questionable forms of pleasure, perhaps to practice them. Whether justly or not, common report named Italy as the higher school of pleasurable vices, and Naples as the city where one’s doctorate was to be obtained. Gluttony and licentiousness are the sins of Naples. Eubulus tells Euphues that in that city are those who ‘sleep with meat in their mouths, with sin in their hearts, and with shame in their houses.’ There is no limit to the inconveniences of traveling. ‘Thou must have the back of an ass to bear all, and the snout of a swine to say nothing…. Travelers must sleep with their eyes open lest they be slain in their beds, and wake with their eyes shut lest they be suspected by their looks.’ Journeys by the fireside are better. ‘If thou covet to travel strange countries, search the maps, there shalt thou see much with great pleasure and small pains, if to be conversant in all courts, read histories, where thou shalt understand both what the men have been and what their manners are, and methinketh there must be much delight where there is no danger.’ Perhaps Lyly intended to condemn traveling with character unformed. A boy returned with more vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself. ‘There was no crime so barbarous, no murder so bloody, no oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that I could readily recite where I learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.’ Here, indeed, is no lack of plain speech.
In the section called ‘Euphues and his Ephœbus’ twenty-nine pages are devoted to the question of the education of youth. It is largely taken from Plutarch. Some of the points are these: that a mother shall herself nurse her child, that the child shall be early framed to manners, ‘for as the steele is imprinted in the soft waxe, so learning is engraven in ye minde of an young Impe.’ He is not to hear ‘fonde fables or filthy tales.’ He is to learn to pronounce distinctly and to be kept from ‘barbarous talk,’ that is, no dialect and no slang. He is to become expert in martial affairs, in shooting and darting, and he must hunt and hawk for his ‘honest recreation.’ If he will not study, he is not to be ‘scourged with stripes, but threatened with words, not dulled with blows, like servants, the which, the more they are beaten the better they bear it, and the less they care for it.’ In taking this position Lyly is said to be only following Ascham. Ascham was not the first in his own time to preach such doctrine. Forty years before the publication of The Schoolmaster, Sir Thomas Elyot, in his book called The Governour, raised his voice against the barbarity of teachers ‘by whom the wits of children be dulled,’—almost the very words of John Lyly.
Euphues, besides being a treatise on love and education, is a sort of Tudor tract upon animated nature. It should be a source of joy unspeakable to the general reader if only for what it teaches him in the way of natural history. How much of what is most gravely stated here did John Lyly actually believe? It is easy to grant so orthodox a statement of physical fact as that ‘the Sunne doth harden the durte, and melte the waxe;’ but ere the sentence be finished, the author calls upon us to believe that ‘Perfumes doth refresh the Dove and kill the Betill.’ The same reckless extravagance of remark is to be noted whenever bird, beast, or reptile is mentioned. The crocodile of Shakespeare’s time must have been a very contortionist among beasts, for, says Lyly, ‘when one approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him, stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.’ Perhaps the fame of this creature’s powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Thames. The ostrich was human in its vanity according to Lyly; men and women sometimes pull out their white hairs, but ‘the Estritch, that taketh the greatest pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth them.’ Nay, more than that, being in ‘great haste she pricketh none but hirselfe which causeth hir to runne when she would rest.’ We shall presently expect to hear that ostriches wear boots by the straps of which they lift themselves over ten-foot woven-wire fences. But Lyly used the conventional natural history that was at hand, and troubled himself in no respect to inquire about its truth or falsity.
There is yet another cause of the popularity of this book in its own time, which has been too little emphasized. It is that trumpet blast of patriotism with which the volume ends. We feel, as we read the thirty pages devoted to the praise of England and the Queen, that this is right, fitting, artistic, and we hope that it is tolerably sincere. Flattery came easily to men in those days, and there was small hope of advancement for one who did not master the art. But there is a glow of earnestness in these paragraphs rather convincing to the skeptic. Nor would the book be complete without this eulogy. We have had everything else; a story for who wanted a story, theories upon the education of children, a body of mythological divinity, a discussion of methods of public speaking, advice for men who are about to marry, a theological sparring match, in which a man of straw is set up to be knocked down, and is knocked down, a thousand illustrations of wit and curious reading, and now, as a thing that all men could understand, the author tells Englishmen of their own good fortune in being Englishmen, and is finely outspoken in praise of what he calls ‘the blessed Island.’
This is an old-fashioned vein, to be sure,—the ad captandum trick of a popular orator bent upon making a success. It is not looked upon in all places with approval. ‘Our unrivaled prosperity’ was a phrase which greatly irritated Matthew Arnold. Here in America, are we not taught by a highly fastidious journal that we may be patriotic if we choose, but we must be careful how we let people know it? We mustn’t make a fuss about it. We mustn’t be blatant. The star-spangled banner on the public schools is at best a cheap and vulgar expression of patriotism. But somehow even this sort of patriotism goes with the people, and perhaps these instincts of the common folk are not entirely to be despised. Many a reader of Euphues, who cared but little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy, who didn’t read books simply because they were fashionable, must have felt his pulse stirred by Lyly’s chant of England’s greatness. For Euphues is John Lyly, and John Lyly’s creed was substantially that of the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, ‘I am an Englishman.’
In the thin disguise of the chief character of his story the author describes the happy island, its brave gentlemen and rich merchants, its fair ladies and its noble Queen. The glories of London, which he calls the storehouse and mart of all Europe, and the excellence of English universities, ‘out of which do daily proceed men of great wisdom,’ are alike celebrated. England’s material wealth in mines and quarries is amply set forth, also the fine qualities of the breed of cattle, and the virtues of English spaniels, hounds, and mastiffs; for these constitute a sort of good that all could appreciate. He is satirical at the expense of his countrymen’s dress,—‘there is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancie of attire,’—but praises their silence and gravity at their meals. They have wise ministers in the court, and devout guardians of the true religion and of the church. ‘O thrice happy England, where such councilors are, where such people live, where such virtue springeth.’
In the paragraphs relating to the queen, Lyly grows positively eloquent. He praises her matchless beauty, her mercy, patience, and moderation, and emphasizes the fact of her virginity to a degree that would have satisfied the imperial votaress herself if but once she had considered her admirer’s words: ‘O fortunate England that hath such a Queen; ungratefull, if thou pray not for her; wicked, if thou do not love her; miserable, if thou lose her.’ He calls down Heaven’s blessings upon her that she may be ‘triumphant in victories like the Palm tree, fruitful in her age like the Vine, in all ages prosperous, to all men gracious, in all places glorious: so that there be no end of her praise, until the end of all flesh.’