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Lewis, C.S. English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.
We now come to Lyly (c. 1553-1606) 1 himself, an author once unjustly celebrated for a style which he did not invent, and now inadequately praised for his real, and very remarkable, achievement. If Lyly had never written Euphues I should have placed him in the next chapter among the 'Golden' writers: that fatal success ties him down to the 'transitional' category. The wild goose chase for a
particular
'source' of euphuism, which began roughly with the publication of
Landmann Euphuismus
in 1881, is now, I take it, pretty well at an end. No literary
development, perhaps, can be fully explained but few are less
mysterious than this. In the present chapter we have seen its gradual
emergence as a structural decoration alternative to the ink-horn
decoration of vocabulary and therefore dear to purists. Its
elements--antithesis, alliteration, balance, rhyme, and assonance--were
not new. They can be found even in More and in the Latin of the Imitation.
So far as the elements are concerned we are indeed embarrassed with too
many ancestors rather than too few: those who inquire most learnedly
find themselves driven back and back till they reach Gorgias.
What is added in full blown
euphuism is a
wealth of pseudoscientific
simile--'new stones, new Fowles, new Serpents'. Of course that sort of
simile neither began nor ended with the euphuists. Chaucer's reference
to hyena's gall in his Response de Forhm would have
delighted Lyly: the ostrich still hides her head in the sand for the
convenience of political orators. What constitutes euphuism is neither
the structural devices nor the 'unnatural history' but the unremitting
use of both. The excess is the novelty: the euphuism of any composition
is a matter of degree. We are all greatly indebted to a modern scholar
for drawing our attention to the Latin orations of Joannes Rainoldus,
delivered in the seventies and published as Orationes Duodecim
in 1614 and 1619. Reynolds, a scholar of Corpus and tutor of Hooker,
was a distinguished man in his day and the orations he delivered as
Greek reader at Merton may have been the final and crucial influence
upon Lyly, Lodge, Gosson, and others. Read in quotation, he may well
appear as the original euphuist. It seems hard to demand more than a
sentence like ut videmus herbam Anthmidem quo magis deprimitur eo
latius diffundi.
But if we sit down to Rainoldus for a whole morning we shall be
disappointed. The euphuisms are there but they are not continuous; we
wade through many a page of (moderate) Ciceronianism to reach them. The
credit--or discredit--of having first kept the thing up for whole pages
or decades of pages at a stretch must still, I believe, be given to
Lyly. I speak, of course, of 'euphuism' as we now understand it; in
Lyly's own time the word referred exclusively to the learned similes. Euphues itself is
related
to Lyly's literary career rather as the Preface of the Lyrical
Ballads
is related to Wordsworth's; each marking a temporary aberration, a
diversion of the author from his true path, which by its unfortunate
celebrity confuses our impression of his genius. John Lyly belongs to a
familiar type. He is a wit, a man of letters to his finger tips. He
comes of erudite stock. His grandfather is Lyly of the Eton Grammar;
his aunt marries two schoolmasters of St. Paul's in succession and her
children have names like Polydore and Scholastica. At Magdalen (
Oxford) he is 'a dapper and deft companion' much averse to 'crabbed
studies', behindhand with his battels and (need we add?) very critical
of the dons. In our own age he would have been a leading light of the
O.U.D.S. and when he went down would have become a producer. And that,
in a sense, was what he
actually became. He gets some post in the Revels and also at St. Paul's
choir school; officially to teach the children Latin (judging by his
own verses, he did it very badly), but unofficially to be dramatist,
trainer, and producer to what is, in effect, a theatrical company. To
that world of 'revels', of pretty, pert, highly trained boys who sing
elegant poems to delicious music and enact stories that are 'ten
leagues beyond man's life', in dialogue of exquisite and artificial
polish, Lyly belongs. There he does (though with much financial
discontent) the work that he was born to do. Unfortunately, however,
once in his life, Lyly, then resident at the Savoy, anxious about his
career, and much concerned to please his patron, the precisian
Burleigh, in an evil hour (evil for his lasting fame) had decided to
turn moralist. He would write a palinode against excess of wit and
other youthful follies. He would line up with Ascham and others against
the dangers of Italian travel. Of course such a design was a less
violent departure for him than it would be for the same type of
intellectual in many other periods. Moral severity was modish as well
as prudent. The palinode against wit could be very witty. One did not
need to step out of 'the Movement' in order to be a censor morum. No
moral theology, no experience of life, no knowledge of the human heart
were required. The plan had, from his point of view, everything to
recommend it, and was carried out in Euphues. The
Anatomy of Wit ( 1578).
I cannot agree with critics who
hold
that Euphues
marks any advance in the art of fiction. For Lyly, as for Pettie, the
story is a trellis. The difference is that Pettie's trellis was an
inoffensive thing which you could forget once the roses were in bloom,
while Lyly's is a monstrosity. Euphues betrays his sworn friend in
love, is himself betrayed, undergoes a sudden conversion to philosophy,
is reconciled (apparently without apology) to the injured friend, and
for the rest of the book lectures the friend and the human race on
morals in a style which would be rather too lofty for Cato to use to
Heliogabalus. It is like seeing the School for Scandal re-written with
Joseph Surface as the hero. It is no kindness to Lyly to treat him as a
serious novelist; the more seriously we take its action and characters
the more odious his book will appear. Whether Lyly's moralizing was
sincere or no, we need not inquire: it is, in either case, intolerable.
The book can now only be read, as it was chiefly read by Lyly's
contemporaries, for the style. It is worst where it is least
euphuistic. In
the dialogue between Euphues and Atheos euphuism is almost wholly
abandoned, and it is here that the confident fatuity of Lyly's thought
becomes most exasperating.
Fortunately Lyly's didactic fit
did not
last long. The recovery is already beginning in Euphws and his
England
( 1580). Here Euphues himself remains as detestable as he was before
(the unfortunate Philautus is lectured even while sea sick) but there
are three changes. In the first book Lyly addressed himself only to
gentlemen; he now solicits the attention of ladies. In the first book
we had a remedium amoris based on a condemnation of all women
and therefore unrelated to any possible life in the real world: in the
second, honest loves are distinguished from dishonest and the virtuous,
though loving, Iffida has a little (a very little) vitality. Finally
the narrative element is increased in quantity and improved in quality.
In the Anatomy the story had played a very small part, and the
book had to be filled out with a dialogue on atheism, a tractate on
education (mainly from Plutarch), and numerous letters. In the England
there are still plenty of instructive letters, but rather more happens
and there are inset stories within the main story. The change must not
be exaggerated. Lyly is still more interested in rhetoric than in
character or situation; far further from the true novel than Amadis
or Huon or Chaucer Troilus
had been. In the history of fiction his book is not an advance from
medieval art but a retrogression. It is, however, an advance from its
predecessor. And in becoming less severely didactic Lyly has become, in
every sense that matters, more moral. Values that a man might really
acknowledge hang about Euphues and his England. The chief pleasure now to be had
from
both books is our participation
in the author's obvious enjoyment of his own rhetoric. We despise his
sermons; but seeing him so young and brisk, so delightedly preoccupied
with the set of his bonnet, the folds of his cloak, and the conduct of
his little sword, we feel our hearts softened. But neither Lyly nor
euphuism can be fairly judged from the two Euphues
books. No style can be good in the mouth of a man who has nothing, or
nonsense, to say. It is in the plays that euphuism shows its real
value. The difference may be illustrated
by two
quotations. Endimion soliloquizing in act II, scene i, says I am none of those Wolues, that
barke
most when thou shinest brightest; but that fish
Philautus, at the moment of
discovering
Euphues'treachcry, says I see now that as the fish Scolopidus
in the floud Araris at the waxinge of the Moone There are minor differences, no
doubt.
Deepest darknes is more evocative than burnt coale.
The laboured exposition of the analogy in Philautus' speech leads to a
flat anticlimax--very zealous . . . most faythlesse. But the
fundamental difference is that Philautus (in angry conversation) is
merely talking about the moon, Endimion (in solitary passion) is
adoring her; that the relation between this moon-struck fish and the
behaviour of Euphues is purely intellectual, while Endimion can
identify himself with the fish and his voice breaks at the
identification in the parenthesis thy fish Cynthia. Hence
Philautus' simile is frigid; in Endimion's the crazy exaltation is
really suitable to the tale of a man who loved the moon. In Lyly's
novels the euphuistic style is plastered over scenes and emotions (not
themselves very interesting) which neither demand nor permit it; in his
plays he creates a world where euphuism would be the natural language.
And of course the antithesis--what M. Feuillerat calls le tic-tac
métronomique
of Lyly's style--is far better in dialogue than it could ever be in
narrative. Not infrequently it achieves grandeur: as in 'He cannot
subdue that which is diuine--Thebes was not-Vertue is' ( Campaspe,
1. i) or 'Shee shall haue an ende--so shall the world' ( Endimion,
1. i). Let us note in passing that it is here, not in the wretched work
of Studley and his colleagues, that the Scnecan 'verbal coup de
théâtre' is really Englished. The history of drama is not my
concern,
so I will say nothing of Lyly's
plays as 'theatre' beyond recording that when I saw Endimion
the courtly scenes (not the weak foolery of Sir Thopas) held me
delighted for five acts. But these plays have a literary importance
which cannot be passed over in silence without crippling the whole
story that this book sets out to tell. Lyly as a dramatist is the first
writer since the great medievals whose taste we can trust: the first
who can maintain a work of any length qualis ab
incepto processerit. Having conceived the imaginary world in which
most of his plays are set--whether antique-heroical as in Campaspe
or pastoral-Ovidian as in most of the others--he brings everything into
keeping. He is consistently and exquisitely artificial. If we miss in
him that full-bloodedness which delights a modern in so many
Elizabethans, we must remember that it was a quality of which our
literature had then too much rather than too little. Belly laughter or
graphic abuse could then be supplied by almost everyone; the fault was
that they often intruded where they were ruinous. The lightness of
Lyly's touch, the delicacy, the blessed unreality were real advances in
civilization. His nymphs and shepherdesses are among the first ladies
we have met since the Middle Ages. They have all the character they
need; to demand more is like asking to have a portrait head by Reynolds
clapped on to a goddess out of Tintoretto. His only serious fault is
the weakness of the low comedy scenes between the pages. In Love's
Metanwphosis
he omitted the clowns and compensated for their absence by making the
heroines a little lighter and more playful. The result is something
sweeter and fresher, but hardly less piquant, than Millamant. It is on
these bubblelike comedies, not on Euphues nor on his
anti-Mardnist pamphlet Pappe with a Hakhet,
that Lyly's fame must rest. And they are good, not despite, but by
means of, his style. It is the perfect instrument for his purpose, and
he can make it pert, grave, tragic, or rapturously exalted. If, as most
scholars think, he did not write the admirable songs which appeared in
the 1632 collection of Six Court Comedies, he certainly wrote
plays exactly fitted to contain those songs. For in the larger and
older sense of the word his genius was essentially poetical and his
work 'poesie'. Here is the 'Golden' literature at last.
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