THE ELIZABETHANS

Picaresque autobiographies.

Mention ofLavengrosuggests a paragraph on one of the most curious developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend to be imaginary.Lavengroand theRomany Ryeare two parts of a rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.'

The development of the rogue novel.

But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in spite of the roguishand adventurous air that clings about them as they rest upon our shelves.Lazarillohad many sincerer and more immediate flatterers—Thomas Nash, for example, whoseJacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, holds in itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingeniousplots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals, should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales of theMorte Darthur, before Malory made from their songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book.

sage

ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE

Its culmination in Le Sage.

Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age from that which produced his models. The

'Stately Spanish galleonsSailing from the Isthmus,Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,With cargoes of diamonds,Emeralds, amethysts,Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

'Stately Spanish galleons

Sailing from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,

With cargoes of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had broughtcomedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his peaceableGalateais no greater than that between the adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.

Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him doubly licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of low estate, so that he could see things from below, upside down, and comment upon them. His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could observe French things, call them bySpanish names, and laugh at them without being inexcusably impertinent. He had also a very excellent technique. Le Sage had read La Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of Theophrastus, and was the better able to allow his hero to take the hint from Lazarillo, and use his autobiography as an outlet for his social satire. Everything that Lazarillo had done, Gil Blas did in a larger and more skilful fashion. The book summed up the rogue novels in itself, and in its own right brought their influence to bear on English narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares withDon Quixotethe parentage of the masculine novel.

The new conditions of professional story-telling.

Professionalstory-tellers before the sixteenth century seem very far removed from the novelists of our circulating libraries. Theirs was a simpler patronage; they had but to please one rich man, and they could live. The invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the conditions of modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall into the audience of the world, and patrons into the public. A man told his stories in his own room. He was not sure of a single listener; he might have ten thousand without raising his voice or pressing harder with his pen. Poets might write for their friends or the Court; but Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist by writing for the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and themselves. They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by charm of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm on paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly appearing; already, as in the case ofEuphues, a single book might set the fashion for a thousand; already the novelist felt his audience through his sales. Men like Greene, swift'yarkers up' of pamphlets, had to write what the Elizabethan public wanted—with the result that there is very little purely English story-telling of the period. The Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas. They fell in love with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all countries but their own, and for all times but those in which they lived. There never were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from Italy, from Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied crudely and continually from a newly discovered antiquity.

Elizabethan borrowings.

There wasPaynter's Pallace, peopled with characters from the love-tales of France and Italy, in whose adventures Elizabethan playwrights found a score of plots. And then there wasPettie's Pallace, with its delightful title,A petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure, that shows how late our language lost its French. Pettie steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of right of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion a Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All the world was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical allusion was used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against her husband, explains his iniquity as follows:—

'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of the stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced Phyllis to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who left Ariadne in the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he subdued the monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate labyrinth! He cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused his own mother Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and ripped open, that he might see the place wherein he lay being an infant in her belly! So that what but filthiness is to be gathered of such grafts? What boughs but beastliness grow out of such stems?'

And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was he with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters as though he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in the dock before him.

'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the one and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness—such unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief and murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in him such falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish desire, in her such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat, in her such haggish hate, that I think them both worthy to be condemned to the most bottomless pit in hell.'

Lyly writes for women.

There is something in the style of this, as wellas in the address to a female reader, that suggests theEuphuesof John Lyly, published two years later. Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan romance, and brought into it many elements still characteristic of English story-telling, wrote as well as his letter to 'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie good friends, the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory to women—'To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth what they would.' They were grateful to him, and since he said that he would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's Casket, then open in a Scholler's studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in London but knew much of him by heart, addressed her husband or lover in terms his Lucia might have used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as in her looking-glass. His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of all his tales was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like most English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than of the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England' that he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And yet he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century, and throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards, the chastemind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was to pour forth what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and Fielding and Smollett were to write, before the chaste mind was to exert any very lasting influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett wrote for men, while, like an earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take the measure of a woman's minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he would go as neere to fit them for a fancie as the other doth for a fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less squeamish than their descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this book planned to fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:—'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in which so much of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a 'Cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections were misplaced or unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride responsibility for the disease, must have found it easy to forgive him and to smile at so impotent a cure.

Euphuism.

The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than his matter. Like Pettie's, it is precious, but with a preciousness at the same time so elaborate and infectious that I am finding it difficult even now, in thinking about it, to keepfrom imitating it. Its principle is a battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which the sense, sometimes a little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or words that are not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed in a single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts, or longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in the intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There was something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three paragraphs ago; and here is an example from Lyly:—'Alas, Euphues, by how much the more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much the more I feare thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its embroidery.) 'The fine Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble; the greenest Beech burneth faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest silke is soonest soyled; and the sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most infect the clearest complection, and the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest fruite: the most delycate witte is allured with small enticement unto vice, and most subject to yeelde unto vanitie.'

'Cruditie and indigestion.'

Such a style could not but attract a newly educated people, still able to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of information is comparable to that generosity of gold and precious gems that has been noticed as characteristic of thewriters of theMabinogion. The Briton wondered at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It is not surprising that in this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be brought to perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says Montaigne, 'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the same: the stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have changed forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine John Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and a classical dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig out metaphors learned and ingenious, and present them immediately to his readers without putting any undue strain on his own intellectual digestion.

Lyly's followers.

His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If they could not write they talked his peculiar language. If they were novelists they wrote in something like his manner, and with cheerful consciences used his name as a trade-mark to attract his popularity to themselves. Lodge'sRosalyndeis introduced asEuphues' Golden Legacie, and many other stories were connected by some ingenious silken thread to Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to laugh at euphuism. It was the first prophecy of theordered poetic prose in which such delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of Lodge and Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at once its possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors, and when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to tell all his journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be, Philautus),' we perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind his sentences. The stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and Cassander, or the pretty history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as pleasant as the tales of Lodge and Greene.

How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene wrote in a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing on the high seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford gentleman, holding an appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having nothing else to do. Euphuism fell away from both journalist and sailor, leaving a pleasant glow over their style. They were more intent than Lyly on the plain forwarding of the narrative. For the long rhetorical harangues they substituted shorter, simpler speeches to express the feelings oftheir characters. The harangue was a step from the bald statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter speeches were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer copy of the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself. Dialogue was yet to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant argument, but in the best of his imitators it had become already a tool imperfectly understood but sometimes used for the actual progress of the tale.

Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan story-telling.Pandosto,Rosalynde, and some of Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their audiences, exceedingly alive.

Romance and confession.

In Greene'sPandostowe find reminiscences of old romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the Italiannovelle, and plenty of the wild improbability that still had power over his audience.Pandostois a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little prefaceon jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island—no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the finish—no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans, fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash'sJacke Wilton, the rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom he consorted, that broughthim the money to continue on his riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his romances had delighted their imaginations.

Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.

'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine in favour. But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty eares to conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if he come abord our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee knowes not the shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a rustie pollax, that sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either well bebast him, or heave the cockescombe over boord to feed cods. But curteous gentlemen, that favour most, backbite none, and pardon what is overslipt, let such come and welcome; Ile into the stewards roome, and fetch them a kanne of our best bevradge.'

As You Like It.

That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned to England from piracies on the western seas, introduces hisRosalynde. With such a preface, you would expect a ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and coarse words, certainly not the dainty little pastoral, romantic fairy story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding lessons of much profit for the guidance of his friend's children. The very contrast between its buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as that between the pastoral writers andtheir books, between, for example, Cervantes of Lepanto and the author of theGalatea, between the Sidney who died at Zutphen and the author ofArcadia. It is the tale ofAs You Like It, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title for it, since it contains every one of the surest baits with which to hook an Elizabethan audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that time when ships were sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found riches of the world, the hint of travel was a sufficient promise of delight. It begins with a dying knight who leaves a legacy between his sons, and its audience had not yet tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras. It has the fairy-tale notion of the youngest born, and was not England youngest son of all the world? There are beautiful women in it, and one of them dresses like a man—a delicious, romantic thing to dream upon. And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself, and therefore full of profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written in something not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the Elizabethans as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.

The discovery and exploitation of Arcadia.

ThePastoral, whose influence touches even the Elizabethan novels not professedly Arcadian, had been fished up from sunken antiquity by the early scholars of the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning, to be able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they did their best to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a classical country. They used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun names of their own times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by them in the Golden Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The best time of all the world had a date for them, and they did their best to live up to its particular antiquity. But in using conventions so different from real life, in a time of hurry and stress, it was natural that they should be led into daydreams of a greater simplicity than their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too, that byrefining character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its sweetest season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond all measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until, when the curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece and calls them 'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,' the niece hurriedly replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I beseech you; for should my uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy, and betake himself to the reading of these books, we should have him turn shepherd, and so wander through the woods and fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn poet, which they say is a catching and incurable disease.'

Shepherds' plaints.

The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet shepherdesses, it seems that for the benefit of a Renaissance public they must pour their sorrows out in verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner does one shepherd begin his song than another joins him and another, until there is a chorus of complaining lovers; the infection is so virulent that it leaps from man to man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a poem to his lass, it is great odds that she will cap it with another, and then they will keep it up between them like a shuttlecock. The disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no one to crossMuses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:—

'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease?Ease.And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain?Vain.Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove?Prove.Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone?One.Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love?Love.What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy?Joy.What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains?Pains.Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end?End.'

'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease?

Ease.

And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain?

Vain.

Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove?

Prove.

Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone?

One.

Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love?

Love.

What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy?

Joy.

What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains?

Pains.

Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end?

End.'

These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney'sArcadia, which, of course, was not in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are hexameters. How delightfully they scan:—

J¯oy.'

hexameter

On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind in Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselveshad used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of 'Phaleuciaks,' and then Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from saying something which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.' And they thought the night had passed quickly.

sidney

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

An apology to Sidney.

This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song ofPercyandDuglasthat I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence ofPindar?' but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his predilection for the classics, shows how genuinewas the expression that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the language of the Gods.'

The slow progress of Arcadian narrative.

The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian substitute for rain, was not the only drag on the narrative of the pastoral story-tellers. Serenity was considered essential, and so, while the story was being everlastingly shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it had also for every step it took forward to take another back in order to catch again the chosen atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result was 'a note of linked sweetness long drawn out,' a series of agitated standstills, and a narrative impossible to end. Cervantes'Galateawas never finished; the last books ofArcadiawere written by another hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end tol'Astrée; and Montemor abandoned hisDiana.

In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that is important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to understand the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to hide real people under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put ribboned crooks and silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends. At first it was the genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his Fiammetta; at the end it degenerated into mere privy gossip and books uninteresting without their keys; but ingeneral it was simply a desire of flattering elaborate people into thinking themselves of simple heart.|The motive of the Pastoral.|The pastorals were like the paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find the ladies of a lively court playing innocent games under the trees, while, if we searched in the brushwood, we should find in the soft earth under the brambles the hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings of author and subjects were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when they sat before the portrait painter:—'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only by the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since the writer was able to put them in so very inexpensively.

Poussin'sLes Bergers d'Arcadie.

There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and Sidney were dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and sweeter than Watteau, an idea of the pastoral spirit. You can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses using paint. It would be impossible to suspect the same of one of Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man who was shocked as if by sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment of Virgil. There is in the Louvre (how many times have I been tosee it) a picture called 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most inaccurately as to facts, but most precisely as to feeling, in his essay on the painter:[6]—'But above all, who shall celebrate in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription:Et Ego in Arcadia vixi!The eager curiosity of some, the expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys low where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospects speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!'

In those sentences Hazlitt, who found the written pastoral dull, shows us the very secret of its life. In trying to copy the classic country writing, it came to be an attempt to reconstruct the time that has always been past since the beginning of the world. Real shepherds never do and never did show fear and surprise and eager curiosity on their weather-beaten faces; but then in Arcadia is no rain. Sweet, sunny days, soft, peaceful nights, green grass, white sheep, and smooth-cheeked shepherds Grecian limbed; the whole is the convention of a dream. It was the dream of busy men in close touch with a life whose end wasapt to come short and sharp between the lifting of a flagon and putting the lips to it. And in Sidney's dream especially, there is something of the true Renaissance worship of the ancient gods. Sidney's dream was of a pastoral life; yes, but to him other things in it were more important than its rusticity. For him, at least, it must be a life where the goatfoot god still moved in the green undergrowth, where Diana hunted the white fawns, while Silenus tippled in the valley, and Apollo looked serenely from the wooded hill.

Conventional and realistic art.

This was the same art as that of Malory, though not that of the chansons or the sagas. It is the art in which life is simplified into a convention, and human figures worked into a tapestry. The pastoral romances are duller than those of chivalry, partly, no doubt, because their conventions are not home-made but taken as strictly as possible from another civilisation, and partly because they are too long for their motives—the pattern is repeated too often. But they do not represent a dead or a dying art, but rather a stage in the infancy of an art that has blossomed in our own day, in some of the work of Théophile Gautier, for example; in Mr. Nevinson'sPlea of Pan, in some of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Sidney'sArcadiais terribly unwieldy, but passage after passage in it breathes a fragrance different from anything in the literature of realism.

Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these two arts, the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other that shows us life, that one that, using symbols disentangled from ordinary existence, can legitimately fill books with things beautiful in themselves, and the other that reconciles us to ugliness by showing us some vital interest, some hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty in things as they generally are. The spirit of the one set statues of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the Grecian women, the spirit of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers. Both spirits have shown their right to be by the works of art whose inspiration they have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art of the one by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds, the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying 'Open Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we should be legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and enter the robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the Arcadian shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet about the hills, any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut called Cinderella for riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal is all we may ask of dreams. And the pastorals, in spite of their borrowed conventions,do hold an ideal, suffocated though it sometimes is under an impossible technique, and the weight of ornament which is so tempting to those who have but newly learned the secrets of its manufacture.

Poetic prose.

Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves. They have made short stories instead of labyrinthine narratives, and they have been able, as Sidney tried to do, to disclaim any competition with utilitarian homespun literature by the use of a poetic prose. In the prose of Sidney'sArcadia, imitated from that of Lyly, but a little less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between poetry and prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament perfected by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by the recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the prose of use.

Prologue.

Itis curious how many odds and ends may be heaped together and woven into a patchwork of thought, by a mind concentrating itself upon one idea, and, as if in spite of itself, making excursions after each chance butterfly and puff of wind, each half promise of real or phantom value it perceives. The mind returns continually to where it stood, bringing with it always something new, like a starling adding to its nest, until at last the original idea is so covered over with half visualised images, half clarified obscurities, dimly comprehended notions, that it is itself no longer to be seen but by a reverse process of picking away and throwing aside, one by one, the accretions that have been brought to it by the adventuring mind. For the last hour I have been sitting in my easy-chair, a cup of tea at my elbow, a pipe in my mouth, a good fire at my feet, trying not to let myself stray too far from the consideration of Cervantes and his place in the history of story-telling. All that hour, without effort, almost against my will, my mind has been playing about the subject, and bringing straw and scraps of coloured cloth, until now the plain notion ofCervantes is dotted over and burdened with a dozen other things—a comparison between an active life and a bookish one, the relation between parody and progress, the mingling of rogue novel and romance, Sir Walter Scott, and the remembrance of a band of Spanish village musicians. Perhaps if I disentangle this superstructure piece by piece Cervantes himself will become as visible as he intends to allow me to present him.

An active life and a bookish one.

Cervantes was one of the men who write books in two languages; in literature and in life. Indeed, his contribution to his country's history is scarcely less vivid than his share in the history of story-telling. Cervantes the soldier, losing the use of his hand in the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he took so glorious a part that the grandiloquent Spanish tradition attributed to him, a mere private soldier, more than half the merit of the victory, is quite as attractive as Cervantes the impecunious author, writing plays for the theatre and poems for the nobility, collecting taxes for the king, pleasing himself with hisGalatea, and laying literature under an international debt to him for hisExemplary Novelsand hisDon Quixote. Like Sir Philip Sidney, he won admiration from his contemporaries as much for his personal worth as for his intellect. The maimed hand meant to them and him as much as any printed books. His own life was as romantic as his romance.Wherever he had found himself, boarding a Turkish galley, plotting for freedom in the prisons of Algiers, he had played the game as stirringly as d'Artagnan. Don Quixote's patriotism was no more obstinate and glamorous than his, and Sancho Panza's wisdom was gained in no school of harder knocks.

It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen of pastoral romance. TheGalateabears no closer relation to workaday life than Sir Philip Sidney'sArcadia. This old soldier began his career as a man of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in Arcady, the very country whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to ridicule, and the last book he wrote, in spite of the humaner work that had preceded it, was a romance not dissimilar from his first. Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the time; but it is not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful manner in which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson, caged in sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real adventurers set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on a smooth grassy slope.

Don Quixoteno parody.

Cervantes'Galateais not a great work. Its shepherds weep more than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing considerably worse. But it had its success, and Cervantes was never anything but proud of it, a fact that should not be forgotten inremembering hisDon Quixote.Don Quixotehas often been described as a parody of the heroic and pastoral romances, which indeed had become a little foolish. But Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved. Instead, he fills the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new wine of experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them in a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that allows all manner of developments.

saavadera

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

The picaresque form.

Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments.Don Quixoteowed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows. The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back. His deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the front ofhis stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the entertainment than his habit of punctuating his conversation with a well-directed log of wood. Let him continue his villainous career, let his squeaking inhuman voice continue to exult, and we are perfectly contented. It was so with the rogues, and it is so withDon Quixote. As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that love mirth better than melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but Don Quixote lay on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.'

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