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Baker,
Ernest A. The History
of the English Novel.
H. F. & G. Witherby, 1929. 57-66. CHAPTER IV LYLY'S EUPHUES
IN December 1578 Gabriel Cawood, dwelling in Paul's Churchyard, published Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. It was the first literary work of John Lyly, then aged twenty-five or twenty-six, who had left Oxford three years before under a cloud, and was trying by the avenue of aristocratic patronage to step into some such office as the mastership of the revels. One road to success in this endeavour was to win distinction as an author. Lyly came of a scholarly family, his grandfather being William Lyly the grammarian, friend of Erasmus, More and Colet; an uncle was a canon of Canterbury and the author of several erudite works; his father was registrar of the city and diocese of Canterbury. The book secured him public attention without delay. There had already been four editions when he followed it up, in the spring of 1580, with a second part, Euphues and his England. He had meantime added the degree of Master of Arts at Cambridge to that awarded by his own university. He became a favoured dependent and probably the secretary of the Earl of Oxford, son-in-law to his old patron, Burleigh, and, helped perhaps by this influential backing, he brought out his first two plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phaon, which were acted before the court. After this success he devoted his talents to the stage, where we need not follow him. He wrote no more fiction, and died in 1606. 1 Euphues, to speak collectively of the two books which are now usually found in one pair of covers, is a work of considerable importance in literary history; but the degree of its importance requires very careful evaluation. It is often described as the first English novel, or the first novel of manners. If this be taken as meaning that it is the first work that can be regarded as falling within a loose definition of the novel, or as the first to combine a thread of ____________________
-57-
narrative with a view of
life and manners, the description may be accepted for what it is worth.
But if it implies that Euphues was the pattern and
starting-point from which the English novel proceeded to develop, it is
far from true. Euphues
made a great hit, and was widely imitated, both style and story, for
ten or a dozen years. Then it went into gradual oblivion, from which it
has been resurrected, like a museum specimen, for the edification of
modern students. In certain ways it was a forerunner of the novel of
manners which came into being a century and a half later; but the
novelists of manners hardly knew of its existence, and probably learned
nothing from it either directly or indirectly. Outline of "Euphues."
Part I.-"The Anatomy of Wit" There are two stories in Euphues,
besides incidental anecdotes, and besides other contents which are by
no means tributary to the narrative: there is that of The Anatomy
of Wit, 1 and there is the sequel, Euphues and
his England.
Let us review them in outline. In the first an educated young Athenian,
wishing to see the world, visits Naples, a frivolous and dissolute
place, well exemplifying the demoralized state of Italian society, of
which it is one main object of the book to give young men a warning.
Here, after being greeted with a protracted lecture on the follies of
youth from an old man, Eubulus--who might stand for Conscience in a
morality play--and replying impatiently at similar length, Euphues
falls in with a gallant of his own age, Philautus. With much prolix
declamation on the theme of friendship the two enter into bonds of
closest amity, and Philautus takes his new acquaintance with him to the
house of the lady whom he is courting. Euphues has the ill grace to
fall in love, and when his friend's back is turned to woo the lady
himself. He cuts out Philautus; but Lucilla speedily jilts him too, and
both the swains are left lamenting. There is nothing more in the shape
of story. 2 Euphues, disillusioned and penitent, indites a
"Cooling Card for
Philautus and all Fond Lovers" ; this is put into an appendix, with a
dissertation " Euphues and his Ephebus," derived through -58- Erasmus from Plutarch De
Educatione; and so, with further letters and addresses, the
first book is brought to a conclusion. In all this there is
manifestly very little of the stuff that now goes
to the composition of a novel. The thread of story is of the slightest,
exciting hardly any interest in itself; the characters are not persons,
but merely copy-book headings, and their doings or mishaps appeal
neither to our sympathy nor to our sense of humour--except in ways not
calculated upon by the author. The story, such as it is, forms a mere
pretext for the moralization, which Lyly dispenses in a lecturing style
in dialogue and soliloquy, like those in Pettie's tales, or in epistles
bearing the signature of the hero. He was evidently doing his best to
exploit the widespread taste for moralistic debate; and the story not
only fails to hold the modern reader, but is also a very faint
reflection of life, either then or in any other age. Lyly found,
however, that the public who bought his book preferred even this
attenuated measure of fiction to the lectures, and accordingly he
constructed the sequel on somewhat better lines. Part II.-"Euphues
and his
England" In Euphues and his
England
the reunited friends leave Italy for these shores. Euphues, by sad
experience, has learned wisdom and seriousness, and at an early point
relates the edifying story of the hermit Cassander and his headstrong
nephew, Callimachus. A much better tale is the one put in the mouth of
the venerable Kentishman, Fidus, which follows after some pleasing
dialogue. Its moral is the folly of love. But that is not the doctrine
enunciated at large in Euphues and his England, which is in the
main a recantation of the diatribes against women and love between the
sexes contained in the Anatomy.
This second book has a preface addressed to the ladies as well as the
gentlemen of England, in which respect it follows Pettie's lead.
Philautus is now the central figure. He falls in love with the arrogant
Camilla, and the reader's interest is solicited in his sentimental
experiences. Philautus is not successful here, but he finds happiness
with a lady who has remained heart-whole. After his friend's marriage
Euphues returns philosophically to Athens, whence he sends to the
Neapolitan ladies his Glass for Europe-a panegyric of Elizabeth
and the ladies of England. Finally, he retires to a life of meditation
at Silexedra. Though little is made of
them, there are dramatic opportunities in the
story. Bare as it seems, it is not half so bare of incident as -59-
some modern stories which
hold us spellbound. But, whilst Lyly gravely
anatomizes the thoughts and emotions of men and women in love, he fails
to persuade that his men and women are alive or ever were alive.
Deloney reveals more knowledge in one little episode-the comedy of Long
Meg and Gilian waiting in Tuttle Fields for the same young man, who
never comes 1 --than Lyly in any of his expositions of the
deceits and pangs of love.
But Deloney does not analyse and discuss the moral and sentimental
bearings of the case. Still more glaring is the inferiority of Lyly's
diagnosis of the love malady to Chaucer's in Troilus and Cressida,
or even to Lefevre's broader treatment in the History of Jason.
2 Of character in the sense of
individuality there is more in an average play-bill than in both parts
of Euphues.
Fond editors have discerned character in these abstract figures,
forgetting that it was character only in the ethical sense that Lyly
was aiming at, and that he devised his story only as a framework for
the abstract discussion. "Euphues" a treatise on
education and manners rather than a novel For the proper way to regard
Euphues
is not as a rudimentary novel, even though some of the stories that
resulted from copying his performance did approximate slightly to the
species. Looking back we are naturally obsessed by the idea of the
novel as a goal towards which earlier forms of literature were tending.
3 But Lyly had his mind on the present, not the
future. He essayed to
produce a more taking kind of book than those already accessible on the
ideals and discipline required for the making of a finished gentleman. There were a number of grave
treatises at the bookshops handling the problem in different ways,
among them Sir John Elyot Governour ( 1531), Hoby's translation
of Castiglione ( 1561), and Ascham Scholemaster ( 1570)--from
which he took the word "De
cette vaste enquête allant des vagissements qu'interroge M. Baker
aux
tout derniers cris enregistrés par MM. Gould et Starr, quels
enseignements tirer? D'abord, qu'il faut abandonner l'attitude
messianique. L'histoire du roman n'est pas du tout une Marche à
l'Étoile orientée vers Richardson et Fielding et, de
là, sur les
constellations du dernier siècle. Elle n'aboutit pas plus a
notre
époque que l'Histoire de France à la Troisième
République. Bannissonsen
l'idée de progrès qui jalonne de faux indicateurs rant
d'histoires de
la littérature. C'est une série de recommencements. Si,
comme on a
droit de le croire, la fiction romanesque eat un besoin éternel
et
universel de l'âme humaine, toutes les variétés du
roman co-existent,
et dans tons les temps y compris le nôtre. Toutes sont
également
légitimes, et nécessaires." -60-
"euphues " and made it the
name of his hero. He proposed to put the
aspirant to good manners, sound morals, and a cultivated mind in a
setting of real life, and thus to show the trials and conflicts in
which he must triumph if he would attain the perfection which he
coveted. Thus we have to judge Euphues as a book of theory and
precept, set forth in an entertaining way, the fiction being only a
device for illustrating the teaching and not an object in itself. 1
Euphuism --Lyly's style: was it
assimilated from Guevarra? Euphues
has, further, received disproportionate attention from literary
historians on account of its remarkable style. That style has been
christened euphuism after Lyly's book, 2 although it was
not invented by him and
had indeed been in use for some time already. The author of Euphues
practised it more systematically than his predecessors, and gave it the
finishing touches; that was his sole claim to the patent. He was the
last, rather than the first, of the euphuists. For many years Dr
Landmann's theory 3 met with general acceptance, that
euphuism was a novel species of
rhetoric acquired by Lyly and others from Antonio de Guevara,
Archbishop of Mondoñedo and Cadiz, whose most celebrated work 4
was the Libro del Emperador Marco
Aurelio con relox de principes ( 1529), a work translated by
Lord Berners as The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius ( 1534), and
by Sir Thomas North as The Diall of Princes ( 1557). 5
Unhappily for this theory, both Berners and North made their
translations, not straight from Guevara's Spanish, but from a French
rendering in which the distinctive features of Guevara's prose were
completely altered. 6 They were both of them apparently
unable
to -61-
read their author in the
original, nor is there the slightest reason to
suppose that Lyly was acquainted with Castilian or had made any study
of Guevara's peculiar variety of estilo culto, the artificial,
highly ornate diction which was being cultivated at this period by
Spanish, Italian, French, and also English men of letters. Sir Sidney
Leeremarked, in editing Berners' translation of Huon of Bordeaux
( 1887), that this great translator, in his preface to Froissart, was
writing in a style singularly like euphuism in 1524, five years before
Guevara's book had appeared in Spain. There was no need for Lyly to
read Spanish literature in order to learn euphuism. In the previous
chapter it was noted that Fenton and Pettie indulged freely in
euphuistic prose before the advent of Lyly's book 1 ; and
among others whose style had
similar characteristics may be named Latimer, Cheke, Gosson, author of The
Schoole of Abuse ( 1579), 2 and even Ascham, when he
was not expressly maintaining classical
dignity and restraint. Between Lyly and Guevara the main analogy was
that both wrote to edify and were never tired of moral disquisition,
and both cultivated style for its own sake; both, in particular, made
inordinate use of alliteration, a favourite ornament of artistic prose
at that era. 3 For the rest, Spanish censoriousness and
English Puritanism were sufficiently alike to make the parallel seem a
close one. The Main charActeristics of
euphiusm The bibliography of euphuism
is immense, criticism of the style
beginning with Lyly's contemporaries, who thought it strange and rather
absurd. The question of its derivation is now growing clearer. Euphuism
did not originate in Spain and was not immediately derived from any
foreign source; it was the latest form of a fashion of writing which
had long been established in this country, and to which the artifices
of Guevara's elaborate diction contributed next to nothing. It would
have had a notable place in Tudor literature even had Lyly never
written. The special marks of euphuism have now been traced a long way
back in the literary use of English. 4 -62-
What are these special marks?
Euphuism is a method of prose composition
distinguished by the systematic use of certain rhetorical figures,
which are figures of sound rather than of sense, principally the three
called, in technical language, isocolon, parison, and paromoion.
Isocolon means equality of limbs, and applies to that balancing of
phrases or clauses by their close correspondence in length and weight
on which the monotonous symmetry of euphuism is based. Parison,
equality of sound, applies to the answering of word to word in the
internal ordering of phrases. Thus, "suspect me of idleness" and
"convince me of lightness" are phrases of about the same length, and
the contrasted words occur at the same points in the order of the
phrases. Paromoion, similarity of sound, includes alliteration, use of
the same initial consonant in different words, and assonance,
similarity of the terminal sounds; it also covers the repetition of
syllables in the internal parts of words. Lyly employs the various
forms of paromoion to accentuate the other correspondences.
Alliteration is the most obvious device for this purpose, and there is
continual use of transverse alliteration. 1 But such kinds
of syllabic antithesis as the echoing of "thrift" and
theft," "lightness" and "lewdness," "loving" and "having," "hopeless"
and "hapless," and the rhyming of unstressed syllables, as in
"dissolute" and "resolute," "nature" and "nurture," or "most
contemptible" and "most notable," serve the same end. 2 By
this balancing of members having a similar sound scheme the sentence
has a symmetrical structure imposed on it analogous to that of verse.
The clauses may fall into antithetic pairs like couplets, and by more
intricate correspondences a sentence may assume an almost stanzaic
form. Sentence may further be articulated into sentence, until a
complete paragraph falls into a complicated pattern of interlacing
cadences. Antithesis is certainly the most prominent characteristic of
euphuism; but the antithesis, let it be repeated, is not so much for
the sake of defining and emphasizing meaning as for the pleasure of
like but contrasted sounds; and the object that dominates -63- everything is to make
language conform to a symmetrical design, and
thus attain effects equivalent to those of rhyme and metre. But, as already
observed, it was not these mechanical devices of Lyly's
style that struck his contemporaries as something unusual, for they
were practising various kinds of estilo culto themselves and
had no rooted objection to artifices and preciosities. What excited the
ridicule of Harvey, Sidney, Nashe, and others, was Lyly's addiction to
similes drawn from mythology and ancient learning and all manner of
later sources, more particularly the fictitious natural science current
in mediæval bestiaries and long-established encyclopædias
of knowledge
which had not been discarded at the invention of printing. 1
Preachers and orators had from of old delighted in such illustrations,
as writers trained in the schools delighted in the schemata. Of these
far-fetched similes there is little need to quote examples; they have
been reproduced in every account of the style until the very word
euphuism bores rather than amuses. Messrs Croll and
Clemons have, perhaps finally, traced the genealogy of the schemata
or word-schemes which are classified under the heads of isocolon,
parison and paromoion. The ultimate source was the Greek orator
Gorgias. He and his followers made continual use of the schemata
as a means of securing rhythmic effect. Not that they made them the
mainstay of their rhetoric; they employed them with varying degrees of
taste and moderation, Isocrates, in particular, to whom M. Feuillerat
would ascribe the chief influence on English imitators, 2
preferring a nobler and more varied rhythm to the monotonous
parallelism and repetition of cadence which resulted from the excessive
use of the schemes. Through the later sophists the rhetoric of the
Gorgianic schools found its way into the schools of imperial Rome, and
was adopted by teachers of oratory training men for the Christian
Church. Mediæval professors of rhetoric were hardly capable of
appreciating the fineness of the Greek oratorical style; but they were
readily attracted by such definite and easily imitated devices as
isocolon, parison and paromoion, and made these the principal means of
attaining stateliness and fervour. The ancients used the wordschemes
sparingly; mediæval teachers made them the very basis -64- of an effective style.
Bede in his sermons, Thomas à Kempis, and other
writers have been shown to have used these ornaments with the same
monotonous persistency and to have woven them into the same intricate
patterns as those of the euphuists. 1 From writers in Latin
they passed
into early English prose. They have been traced in the Ayenbite of
Inwyt,
in Richard Rolle of Hampole and the mystic Walter Hilton, and so on to
Fisher and Latimer's sermons, and to the other exponents of a
euphuistic style who preceded Lyly. 2 And these peculiar
figures are commonly found associated with the
peculiar similes which were fastened upon by contemporary critics as
the hall-mark of euphuism; the mediæval rhetorician was as fond
of the
one as of the other. Estilo culto, and its sub-variety
euphuism, owed next to nothing to the revival of learning; it was
something, on the contrary, antipathetic to such humanists as More and
Elyot, who inculcated classical standards in prose composition. 3
Influence of euphuism The euphuistic fashion
of writing, and also of speaking, was cultivated
enthusiastically for a few years after Lyly had carried it to the last
stage of elaboration; then it was contemptuously abandoned. But the
cult was not without its lesson to writers of prose, especially prose
fiction. The kind of prose urgently required, even if nobody yet
realized the want, was one adapted to the description of everyday
reality and the natural expression of thoughts and feelings--a style
that would attract little attention to itself, but would form, as it
were, a transparent medium between the reader and the life presented.
Any disturbance of the stiff and cumbrous prose that was accepted as
the regular literary equipage could not fail to -65- be useful. Euphuism
certainly did tend to break up the involved,
would-be Ciceronian periods of the erudite, and the rhapsodizing,
semi-poetic diction inherited from the romancers. In making
prosewriting an art, obedient to as many conventions and structural
obligations as were imposed on verse, Lyly made an experiment which was
instructive to writers who aimed at nothing so artificial. His
sentences were true sentences, and not paragraphs clumsily knit into
lengths of meandering discourse that came to a halt when nothing more
could be hitched on. Such structural punctilio, though so much
overdone, was a wholesome reaction against the prevailing formlessness.
Affected and unnatural as it was, euphuism came nearer than much of the
current literary prose to the direct, pithy and nervous language of
spirited conversation. Euphues
was, in sum, the first English work not composed in verse in which
characters, actions and sentiments--sentiments above all-were set forth
with the internal unity of a definite attitude of mind and tone of
feeling, and with the external unity of a consistent and well-wrought
style. Lyly aimed at the coherence of a work of art; and such a
style--whether the particular one adopted were the right or the wrong
one is another question--was essential to that aim. He was not
successful in presenting character; his actions and incidents are not
of absorbing interest; the analysis of sentiments--a novelty at the
time--does not go very deep. Nevertheless, the effort was in itself an
event in literary history, and could not be entirely without
consequences. This is Lyly's claim to importance in the annals of
fiction; not that Euphues was the first novel addressed to
women, nor that it inaugurated the literature of the drawing-room.
Women had long been the chief readers of romances. This particular form
of drawing-room literature was speedily superseded by one of a
different stamp, which in turn was ousted by a newer fashion. Its
importance, in short, is much the same as that of Sidney Arcadia,
which falls next for consideration. Here, again, is a book aiming at
artistic coherence of matter and style, and achieving its aim in equal
measure; and a book as influential as Lyly's, if not more so, on books
to follow. -66-
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