A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 14

The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use the language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea of their author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking images and pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But the compression of them (which is often so great that they might be printed sentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author from displaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style.

What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the _Henry the Seventh_, in the _Atlantis_, and in various minor works, some originally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent pa.s.sage which Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of the Baconian system. In such pa.s.sages the purely oratorical faculty which he undoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rare exceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that) displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going into the law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and where his mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than it brought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer and calmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to "take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted to engage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, business of politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, Jeremy Taylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberant gorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, and quite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric.

For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was a rhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisen in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and splendid promises of the _Novum Organum_ and its companions has arisen from oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He is stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates; he is inexhaustible in a.n.a.logy and ill.u.s.tration, full of wise saws, and of instances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurate expositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suited to his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here just obscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity, there flas.h.i.+ng with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in the reasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention of the student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather of the great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice in every kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought which constant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its pract.i.tioners to dispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and in many different styles. But of these it will always be found that two were most familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image, which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and the half-hortatory half-descriptive _discours d'ouverture_, where the writer is the unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identified with great ease on any chart.[38]

[38] Of Bacon in prose, as of Spenser, Shakespere, and Milton in verse, it does not seem necessary to give extracts, and for the same reason.

A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would in many ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here,--that both had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they been simple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, shows no poetical bent, Raleigh was _h.o.m.o utriusque linguae_, and his works in verse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits of poetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostly written hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the graces of style; and his masterpiece, the famous _History of the World_, is made up of short pa.s.sages of the most extraordinary beauty, and long stretches of monotonous narration and digression, showing not much grace of style, and absolutely no sense of proportion or skill in arrangement. The contrast is so strange that some have sought to see in the undoubted facts that Raleigh, in his tedious prison labours, had a.s.sistants and helpers (Ben Jonson among others), a reason for the superior excellence of such set pieces as the Preface, the Epilogue, and others, which are scattered about the course of the work. But independently of the other fact that excellence of the most diverse kind meets us at every turn, though it also deserts us at every turn, in Raleigh's varied literary work, and that it would be absurd to attribute all these pa.s.sages to some "affable familiar ghost,"

there is the additional difficulty that in none of his reported helpers'

own work do the peculiar graces of the purple pa.s.sages of the _History_ occur. The immortal descant on mortality with which the book closes, and which is one of the highest achievements of English prose, is not in the least like Jonson, not in the least like Selden, not in the least like any one of whose connection with Raleigh there is record. Donne might have written it; but there is not the smallest reason for supposing that he did, and many for being certain that he did not. Therefore, it is only fair to give Raleigh himself the credit for this and all other pa.s.sages of the kind. Their character and, at the same time, their comparative rarity are both easily explicable. They are all obviously struck off in moments of excitement--moments when the writer's variable and fanciful temperament was heated to flas.h.i.+ng-point and gave off almost spontaneously these lightnings of prose as it gave, on other occasions, such lightnings of poetry as _The Faerie Queene_ sonnet, as "the Lie," and as the other strange jewels (cats'

eyes and opals, rather than pearls or diamonds), which are strung along with very many common pebbles on Raleigh's poetical necklace. In style they antic.i.p.ate Browne (who probably learnt not a little from them) more than any other writer; and they cannot fairly be said to have been antic.i.p.ated by any Englishman. The low and stately music of their cadences is a thing, except in Browne, almost unique, and it is not easy to trace it to any peculiar mannerism of vocabulary or of the arrangement of words. But Raleigh's usual style differs very little from that of other men of his day, who kept clear at once of euphuism and burlesque. Being chiefly narrative, it is rather plainer than Hooker, who has some few points of resemblance with Raleigh, but considerably freer from the vices of desultoriness and awkward syntax, than most writers of the day except Hooker. But its most interesting characteristic to the student of literature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in the least foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. Even Milton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilous invective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trot commonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason that they are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh, like Milton, seems to have had little or no humour.

The opening and closing pa.s.sages of the _History_ are almost universally known; a quainter, less splendid, but equally characteristic one may be given here though Mr. Arber has already extracted it:--

"The four complexions resemble the four elements; and the seven ages of man, the seven planets. Whereof our infancy is compared to the moon; in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants.

"The second age, to Mercury; wherein we are taught and instructed.

"Our third age, to Venus; the days of Love, Desire and Vanity.

"The fourth, to the Sun; the strong, flouris.h.i.+ng and beautiful age of man's life.

"The fifth, to Mars; in which we seek honour and victory; and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends.

"The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter; in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding.

"The last and seventh, to Saturn; wherein our days are sad and overcast; and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that, of all our vain pa.s.sions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities: and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired. Whom, when Time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for our Eternal Habitation, which we pa.s.s on unto with many sighs, groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmans.h.i.+p of Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments: but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons."

But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers of prose, the company of scholarly divines who produced--what is probably the greatest prose work in any language--the Authorised Version of the Bible in English. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiece ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries--the school and training ground of every man and woman of English speech in the n.o.blest uses of English tongue--every one who values that mother tongue is more especially bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company appears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious that such an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thus combined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding spirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers,--an advantage which they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in the nineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best living writers of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, no known translator under James has left anything which at all equals in strictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as long may it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examination than it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to the intrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will be generally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the Old Testament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of the New Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literary value to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literary merit to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier English versions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not very accomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any way advantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner at least, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two cla.s.ses. They were in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in this volume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible.

They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary plat.i.tudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be cla.s.sed together. On the other side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs dest.i.tute of proportion and of grace, dest.i.tute even of ordinary manageableness and shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees, and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English prose--harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespa.s.sing the limits of prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a companion pa.s.sage from a very different original, the Charity pa.s.sage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our subject. One of the blunders which spoils this pa.s.sage in the Revised Version is the pedantic subst.i.tution of "mirror" for "gla.s.s," it having apparently occurred to some wiseacre that gla.s.s was not known to the ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest knowledge of English literature, a single t.i.tle of Gascoigne's, "The Steel Gla.s.s," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation; but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in churches, and subst.i.tuted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original (as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story) will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the a.s.syrian host of Sennacherib; the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the Revelation,--a hundred other pa.s.sages which it is unnecessary to catalogue,--will always be the _ne plus ultra_ of English composition in their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual form of their most impa.s.sioned and elaborate pa.s.sages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarra.s.sed phantoms of ephemeral fas.h.i.+on in scholars.h.i.+p, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circ.u.mstances of a translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circ.u.mstances and with any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work.

The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his _English Grammar_, in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered, and the quaintly named _Explorata_ or _Discoveries_ and _Timber_--a collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay.

In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time--a _style tourmente_, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with cla.s.sical grammar--and the straightforward, vigorous English of these _Discoveries_. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity.

Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies what it preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it is true, are set down in a shorthand fas.h.i.+on as if (which doubtless they were) they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But others and perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin t.i.tles, though only one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attention to literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into loose construction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, and often presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dry form:--

"We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together and performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, p.r.o.nunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once: and if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long."

No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separate or substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there were pract.i.tioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters of style, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and were long authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises of the time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, though the Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles, the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacred poet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden, Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in his way, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his _Defence of Rhyme_. He had companions in the critical task; but it is curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and Englis.h.i.+ng travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whom two, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and the younger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in the language for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. These were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhaps overpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir Thomas Overbury and the prose works, such as the _Counterblast_ and _Demonology_, of James I., are books whose authors have made them more famous than their intrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of the day, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous as those of the cla.s.s of writers now to be noticed. Of all this miscellaneous work it is impossible to give examples, but one critical pa.s.sage from Daniel, and one descriptive from Hakluyt may serve:--

"Methinks we should not so soon yield up our consents captive to the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of discretion s.h.i.+neth upon us; we have our portion of the same virtues, as well as of the same vices, et Catilinam quocunque in populo videas, quocunque sub axe. Time and the turn of things bring about these faculties according to the present estimation; and, res temporibus, non tempore rebus servire opportet. So that we must never rebel against use; quem penes arbitrium est, et vis et norma loquendi. It is not the observing of trochaics nor their iambics, that will make our writings aught the wiser: all their poesy and all their philosophy is nothing, unless we bring the discerning light of conceit with us to apply it to use. It is not books, but only that great book of the world, and the all-overspreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial.

Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other that fits his humour or the times. The Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselves; yet Pyrrhus, when he saw the well ordered marching of the Romans, which made them see their presumptuous error, could say it was no barbarous manner of proceeding. The Goths, Vandals, and Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as they say, all the glory of learning in Europe, have yet left us still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the provincial const.i.tutions of Christendom; which, well considered with their other courses of government, may serve to clear them from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound coverings of malediction appear these monuments of truth, as argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment, though without Greek and Latin."

"To speak somewhat of these islands, being called, in old time, _Insulae fortunae_, by the means of the flouris.h.i.+ng thereof. The fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other that I have heard of. For they make wine better then any in Spain: and they have grapes of such bigness that they may be compared to damsons, and in taste inferior to none. For sugar, suckets, raisons of the sun, and many other fruits, abundance: for rosin, and raw silk, there is great store. They want neither corn, pullets, cattle, nor yet wild fowl.

"They have many camels also: which, being young, are eaten of the people for victuals; and being old, they are used for carriage of necessities. Whose property is, as he is taught, to kneel at the taking of his load, and the unlading again; of understanding very good, but of shape very deformed; with a little belly; long misshapen legs; and feet very broad of flesh, without a hoof, all whole saving the great toe; a back bearing up like a molehill, a large and thin neck, with a little head, with a bunch of hard flesh which Nature hath given him in his breast to lean upon.

This beast liveth hardly, and is contented with straw and stubble; but of strong force, being well able to carry five hundredweight.

"In one of these islands called Ferro, there is, by the reports of the inhabitants, a certain tree which raineth continually; by the dropping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied with water: for other water have they none in all the island. And it raineth in such abundance that it were incredible unto a man to believe such a virtue to be in a tree; but it is known to be a Divine matter, and a thing ordained by G.o.d: at Whose power therein, we ought not to marvel, seeing He did, by His Providence (as we read in the Scriptures) when the Children of Israel were going into the Land of Promise, feed them with manna from heaven, for the s.p.a.ce of forty years. Of these trees aforesaid, we saw in Guinea many; being of great height, dropping continually; but not so abundantly as the other, because the leaves are narrower and are like the leaves of a pear tree. About these islands are certain flitting islands, which have been oftentimes seen; and when men approach near them, they vanished: as the like hath been of these now known (by the report of the inhabitants) which were not found but of a long time, one after the other; and, therefore, it should seem he is not yet born, to whom G.o.d hath appointed the finding of them.

"In this island of Teneriff, there is a hill called the Pike, because it is piked; which is, in height, by their report, twenty leagues: having, both winter and summer, abundance of snow on the top of it. This Pike may be seen, in a clear day, fifty leagues off; but it sheweth as though it were a black cloud a great height in the element. I have heard of none to be compared with this in height; but in the Indies I have seen many, and, in my judgment, not inferior to the Pike: and so the Spaniards write."

One of the most remarkable developments of English prose at the time, and one which has until very recently been almost inaccessible, except in a few examples, to the student who has not the command of large libraries, while even by such students it has seldom been thoroughly examined, is the abundant and very miscellaneous collection of what are called, for want of a better name, Pamphlets. The term is not too happy, but there is no other (except the still less happy Miscellany) which describes the thing. It consists of a vast ma.s.s of purely popular literature, seldom written with any other aim than that of the modern journalist. That is to say, it was written to meet a current demand, to deal with subjects for one reason or other interesting at the moment, and, as a matter of course, to bring in some profit to the writer. These pamphlets are thus as dest.i.tute of any logical community of subject as the articles which compose a modern newspaper--a production the absence of which they no doubt supplied, and of which they were in a way the forerunners. Attempts to cla.s.sify their subjects could only end in a hopeless cross division. They are religious very often; political very seldom (for the fate of the luckless Stubbes in his dealings with the French marriage was not suited to attract); politico-religious in at least the instance of one famous group, the so-called Martin Marprelate Controversy; moral constantly; in very many, especially the earlier instances, narrative, and following to a large extent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large cla.s.s of curious tracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners, of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous ma.s.s of these works by single unimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any account here, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's _English Garner_. But the works of the six most important individual writers of them--Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whom might be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)--are luckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published, or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club of Glasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. The reprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly and others, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice of these collections will not only give a fair idea of the entire miscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill a distinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enter into much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have been noticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very little indeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in this respect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more like literature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparently perverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in the estimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote in this way has gone out of fas.h.i.+on, and its purely literary graces are barely sufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitter personalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire to contemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lasting interest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe have the advantage (which they little antic.i.p.ated, and would perhaps less have relished) of surviving as ill.u.s.trations of Shakespere, of the Shakescene who, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued _Pandosto_ and _Euphues' Golden Legacy_ from oblivion by a.s.sociating them with the immortality of _As You Like It_ and _The Winter's Tale_.

Owing to the different forms in which this fleeting and unequal work has been reprinted, it is not very easy to decide off-hand on the relative bulk of the authors' works. But the palm in this respect must be divided between Robert Greene and Nicholas Breton, the former of whom fills eleven volumes of loosely-printed crown octavo, and the latter (in prose only) a thick quarto of very small and closely-printed double columns. Greene, who began his work early under the immediate inspiration first of his travels and then of Lyly's _Euphues_, started, as early as 1583, with _Mamillia, a Looking-Gla.s.s for the Ladies of England_, which, both in general character and in peculiarities of style, is an obvious copy of _Euphues_. _The Mirror of Modesty_ is more of a lay sermon, based on the story of Susanna. _The Tritameron of Love_ is a dialogue without action, but _Arbasto, or the Anatomie of Fortune_ returns to the novel form, as does _The Card of Fancy_. _Planetomachia_ is a collection of stories, ill.u.s.trating the popular astrological notions, with an introduction on astrology generally.

_Penelope's Web_ is another collection of stories, but _The Spanish Masquerado_ is one of the most interesting of the series. Written just at the time of the Armada, it is pure journalism--a _livre de circonstance_ composed to catch the popular temper with aid of a certain actual knowledge, and a fair amount of reading. Then Greene returned to euphuism in _Menaphon_, and in _Euphues, his Censure to Philautus_; nor are _Perimedes the Blacksmith_ and _Tully's Love_ much out of the same line.

_The Royal Exchange_ again deviates, being a very quaint collection, quaintly arranged, of moral maxims, apophthegms, short stories, etc., for the use of the citizens. Next, the author began the curious series, at first perhaps not very sincere, but certainly becoming so at last, of half-personal reminiscences and regrets, less pointed and well arranged than Villon's, but remarkably similar. The first and longest of these was _Greene's Never too Late_, with its second part _Francesco's Fortunes_.

_Greene's Metamorphosis_ is Euphuist once more, and _Greene's Mourning Garment_ and _Greene's Farewell to Folly_ are the same, with a touch of personality. Then he diverged into the still more curious series on "conny-catching"--rooking, gulling, cheating, as we should call it. There are five or six of these tracts, and though there is not a little bookmaking in them, they are unquestionably full of instruction as to the ways of the time. _Philomela_ returns once more to euphuism, but Greene is soon back again with _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_, a piece of social satire, flying rather higher than his previous attempts. The zigzag is kept up in _Orpharion_, the last printed (at least in the only edition now known) of the author's works during his lifetime. Not till after his death did the best known and most personal of all his works appear, the famous _Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance_, in which the "Shakescene" pa.s.sage and the exhortation to his friends to repentance occur. Two more tracts in something the same style--_Greene's Repentance_ and _Greene's Vision_--followed. Their genuineness has been questioned, but seems to be fairly certain.

This full list--to which must be added the already mentioned _Pandosto, the Triumph of Time_, or _Dorastus and Fawnia_, and the translated _Debate between Folly and Love_--of a certainly not scanty life-work (Greene died when he was quite a young man, and wrote plays besides) has been given, because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic of the whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that the writer is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. But fas.h.i.+on and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its main features are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vivid and direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in the delightful s.n.a.t.c.hes of verse which intersperse and relieve the heterogeneous erudition, the clumsy dialogue, and the rococo style. The two following extracts give, the first a specimen of Greene's ornate and Euphuist style from _Orpharion_, the second a pa.s.sage from his autobiographical or semi-autobiographical confessions in the _Groat's Worth_:--

"I am Lydia that renowned Princess, whose never matched beauty seemed like the gorgeous pomp of Phoebus, too bright for the day: rung so strongly out of the trump of Fame as it filled every ear with wonder: Daughter to Astolpho, the King of Lydia: who thought himself not so fortunate for his diadem, sith other kings could boast of crowns, nor for his great possessions, although endued with large territories, as happy that he had a daughter whose excellency in favour stained Venus, whose austere chast.i.ty set Diana to silence with a blush. Know whatsoever thou art that standest attentive to my tale, that the ruddiest rose in all Damasco, the whitest lilies in the creeks of Danuby, might not if they had united their native colours, but have bashed at the vermilion stain, flourish'd upon the pure crystal of my face: the Marguerites of the western Indies, counted more bright and rich than that which Cleopatra quaffed to Anthony, the coral highest in his pride upon the Afric sh.o.r.es, might well be graced to resemble my teeth and lips, but never honoured to overreach my pureness. Remaining thus the mirror of the world, and nature's strangest miracle, there arrived in our Court a Thracian knight, of personage tall, proportioned in most exquisite form, his face but too fair for his qualities, for he was a brave and a resolute soldier. This cavalier coming amongst divers others to see the royalty of the state of Lydia, no sooner had a glance of my beauty, but he set down his staff, resolving either to perish in so sweet a labyrinth, or in time happily to stumble out with Theseus. He had not stayed long in my father's court, but he shewed such knightly deeds of chivalry amongst the n.o.bility, lightened with the extraordinary sparks of a courageous mind, that not only he was liked and loved of all the chief peers of the realms, but the report of his valour coming to my father's ears, he was highly honoured of him, and placed in short time as General of his warlike forces by land. Resting in this estimation with the king, preferment was no means to quiet his mind, for love had wounded so deep, as honour by no means might remedy, that as the elephants can hardly be haled from the sight of the waste, or the roe buck from gazing at red cloth, so there was no object that could so much allure the wavering eyes of this Thracian called Acestes, as the surpa.s.sing beauty of the Princess Lydia, yea, so deeply he doted, that as the Chameleon gorgeth herself with gazing into the air, so he fed his fancy with staring on the heavenly face of his G.o.ddess, so long dallying in the flame, that he scorched his wings and in time consumed his whole body. Being thus pa.s.sionate, having none so familiar as he durst make his confidant he fell thus to debate with himself."

"On the other side of the hedge sat one that heard his sorrow, who getting over, came towards him, and brake off his pa.s.sion.

When he approached, he saluted Roberto in this sort: Gentleman, quoth he (for so you seem) I have by chance heard you discourse some part of your grief; which appeareth to be more than you will discover, or I can conceit. But if you vouchsafe such simple comfort as my ability will yield, a.s.sure yourself, that I will endeavour to do the best, that either may procure your profit, or bring you pleasure: the rather, for that I suppose you are a scholar, and pity it is men of learning should live in lack.

"Roberto wondering to hear such good words, for that this iron age affords few that esteem of virtue; returned him thankful gratulations and (urged by necessity) uttered his present grief, beseeching his advice how he might be employed. 'Why, easily,'

quoth he, 'and greatly to your benefit: for men of my profession get by scholars their whole living.' 'What is your profession?'

said Roberto. 'Truly, sir,' said he, 'I am a player.' 'A player!'

quoth Roberto. 'I took you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man.' 'So am I, where I dwell' (quoth the player) 'reputed able, at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with me, when I was fain to carry my playing fardel a foot-back; _Tempora mutantur_, I know you know the meaning of it better than I, but I thus construe it; it is otherwise now; for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds.' 'Truly'

(said Roberto) 'it is strange that you should so prosper in that vain practise, for that it seems to me your voice is nothing gracious.' 'Nay, then,' said the player, 'I mislike your judgment: why, I am as famous for Delphrigas, and the King of Fairies, as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and placed three scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven.' 'Have ye so?'

(said Roberto) 'then I pray you, pardon me.' 'Nay more' (quoth the player) 'I can serve to make a pretty speech, for I was a country author, pa.s.sing at a moral, for it was I that penn'd the moral of man's wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years'

s.p.a.ce was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanach is out of date.

The people make no estimation Of morals teaching education.

Was not this pretty for a plain rhyme extempore? if ye will ye shall have more.' 'Nay, it is enough,' said Roberto, 'but how mean you to use me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other, 'for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains.'"

These same characteristics, though without the prevailing and in part obviously sincere melancholy which marks Greene's regrets, also distinguish Lodge's prose work to such an extent that remarks on the two might sometimes be made simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodge than to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had any occasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers and their a.s.sociates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work--an academic if not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_; but in the _Alarum against Usurers_, which resembles and even preceded Greene's similar work, he took to the satirical-story-form. Indeed, the connection between Lodge and Greene was so close, and the difficulty of ascertaining the exact dates of their compositions is so great, that it is impossible to be sure which was the precise forerunner. Certainly if Lodge set Greene an example in the _Alarum against Usurers_, he followed Greene's lead in _Forbonius and Prisceria_ some years afterwards, having written it on s.h.i.+pboard in a venture against the Spaniards. Lodge produced much the most famous book of the euphuist school, next to _Euphues_ itself, as well as the best known of this pamphlet series, in _Rosalynde_ or _Euphues' Golden Legacy_, from which Shakespere took the story of _As You Like It_, and of which an example follows:--

"'Ah Phoebe,' quoth he, 'whereof art thou made, that thou regardest not thy malady? Am I so hateful an object, that thine eyes condemn me for an abject? or so base, that thy desires cannot stoop so low as to lend me a gracious look? My pa.s.sions are many, my loves more, my thoughts loyalty, and my fancy faith: all devoted in humble devoir to the service of Phoebe; and shall I reap no reward for such fealties? The swain's daily labours is quit with the evening's hire, the ploughman's toil is eased with the hope of corn, what the ox sweats out at the plough he fatteneth at the crib: but unfortunate Monta.n.u.s[39] hath no salve for his sorrows, nor any hope of recompense for the hazard of his perplexed pa.s.sions. If Phoebe, time may plead the proof of my truth, twice seven winters have I loved fair Phoebe: if constancy be a cause to further my suit, Monta.n.u.s' thoughts have been sealed in the sweet of Phoebe's excellence, as far from change as she from love: if outward pa.s.sions may discover inward affections, the furrows in my face may discover the sorrows of my heart, and the map of my looks the grief of my mind. Thou seest (Phoebe) the tears of despair have made my cheeks full of wrinkles, and my scalding sighs have made the air echo her pity conceived in my plaints; Philomel hearing my pa.s.sions, hath left her mournful tunes to listen to the discourse of miseries. I have portrayed in every tree the beauty of my mistress, and the despair of my loves. What is it in the woods cannot witness my woes? and who is it would not pity my plaints? only Phoebe. And why? Because I am Monta.n.u.s, and she Phoebe: I a worthless swain, and she the most excellent of all fairies. Beautiful Phoebe! oh might I say pitiful, then happy were I though I tasted but one minute of that good hap. Measure Monta.n.u.s, not by his fortunes, but by his loves, and balance not his wealth but his desires, and lend but one gracious look to cure a heap of disquieted cares: if not, ah if Phoebe cannot love, let a storm of frowns end the discontent of my thoughts, and so let me perish in my desires, because they are above my deserts: only at my death this favour cannot be denied me, that all shall say Monta.n.u.s died for love of hard hearted Phoebe.' At these words she filled her face full of frowns and made him this short and sharp reply.

"'Importunate shepherd, whose loves are lawless because restless: are thy pa.s.sions so extreme, that thou canst not conceal them with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent as none serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market can be made nowhere else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hang so high, that gaze at them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet Monta.n.u.s I speak not this in pride, but in disdain: not that I scorn thee, but that I hate love: for I count it as great honour to triumph over fancy as over fortune. Rest thee content therefore Monta.n.u.s, cease from thy loves, and bridle thy looks, quench the sparkles before they grow to a farther flame; for in loving me, thou shalt but live by loss, and what thou utterest in words are all written in the wind. Wert thou (Monta.n.u.s) as fair as Paris, as hardy as Hector, as constant as Troilus, as loving as Leander, Phoebe could not love, because she cannot love at all: and therefore if thou pursue me with Phoebus, I must flie with Daphne.'"

[39] The Silvius, it may be just necessary to observe, of _As You Like It_.

This book seems to have been very successful, and Lodge began to write pamphlets vigorously, sometimes taking up the social satire, sometimes the moral treatise, sometimes (and then most happily) the euphuist romance, salted with charming poems. His last prose work in this kind (he wrote other things later) was the pretty and prettily-named _Margarite of America_, in 1596.

The names of Nash and Harvey are intertwined even more closely than those of Greene and Lodge; but the conjunction is not a grasp of friends.h.i.+p but a grip of hatred--a wrestle, not an embrace. The fact of the quarrel has attracted rather disproportionate attention from the days of Isaac Disraeli onwards; and its original cause is still extremely obscure and very unimportant. By some it is connected, causally as well as accidentally, with the Martin Marprelate business; by some with the fact that Harvey belonged to the inner Sidneian clique, Nash to the outer ring of professional journalists and Bohemians. It at any rate produced some remarkable varieties of the pamphlet, and demonstrated the keen interest which the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men who choose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar, was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter, _Pierce's Supererogation_, is about as rambling, incoherent, and ineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for.

It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints on literary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with their well-known criticism and recommendation of cla.s.sical forms, and _Foure Letters Touching Robert Greene and Others: with the Tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of Thomas Nash, Gentleman_. A sample of him, not in his abusive-dull, but in his scholarly-dull manner, may be given:--

"Mine own rules and precepts of art, I believe will fall out not greatly repugnant, though peradventure somewhat different: and yet I am not so resolute, but I can be content to reserve the copying out and publis.h.i.+ng thereof, until I have a little better consulted with my pillow, and taken some further advice of Madame Sperienza. In the mean time, take this for a general caveat, and say I have revealed one great mystery unto you: I am of opinion, there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the a.s.sured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art, and to frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof; than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography in all points conformable and proportionate to our common natural prosody: whether Sir Thomas Smithies in that respect be the most perfit, as surely it must needs be very good; or else some other of profounder learning and longer experience, than Sir Thomas was, shewing by necessary demonstration, wherein he is defective, will undertake shortly to supply his wants and make him more absolute. Myself dare not hope to hop after him, till I see something or other, to or fro, publicly and authentically established, as it were by a general council, or Act of Parliament: and then peradventure, standing upon firmer ground, for company sake, I may adventure to do as others do.

_Interim_, credit me, I dare give no precepts, nor set down any certain general art: and yet see my boldness, I am not greatly squeamish of my _Particular Examples_, whereas he that can but reasonably skill of the one, will give easily a shrewd guess at the other: considering that the one fetcheth his original and offspring from the other. In which respect, to say troth, we beginners have the start, and advantage of our followers, who are to frame and conform both their examples and precepts, according to precedent which they have of us: as no doubt Homer or some other in Greek, and Ennius, or I know not who else in Latin, did prejudice, and overrule those that followed them, as well for the quant.i.ties of syllables, as number of feet, and the like: their only examples going for current payment, and standing instead of laws, and rules with the posterity."

In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusive exaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull, which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the same error ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong language which has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and such dead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than their being friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey had all the worst traits of "donnishness," without having apparently any notion of that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphatically of Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus.