VII
Approaching the romance, as we do, from the point of view rather of the development of the pastoral ideal than of the history of prose narrative or of the novel, we may spare ourselves any detailed consideration of the famous work of John Lyly. Although in the novel which has made 'Euphuism' a word and a bye-word in the language he supplied the literary medium for the work of subsequent pastoral writers such as Greene and Lodge, his own compositions in this kind are confined entirely to the drama.
The translations in this department are for the most part negligible. There is, however, one notable exception, namely, the rendering by Bartholomew Yong or Young of Montemayor's Diana, together with the continuations of Ferez and Gil Polo. Completed as early as May, 1583, the work remained in manuscript until 1598, when it was published in the form of a handsome folio. Although, as we have already had occasion to notice, the verse portions were not for the most part of a nature to add lustre to an anthology such as England's Helicon, the whole forms a not unworthy Tudor translation. We learn from Yong's preface that portions of the romance had already been Englished by Edward Paston, a descendant of the famous Norfolk letter-writers, who had family relations with Spain and possessed an intimate knowledge of the language. Of this work nothing further is known. Some two years, however, before Yong's version issued from the press, the first book of Montemayor's portion was again translated by Thomas Wilson, and of this a manuscript yet survives[139]. Passing mention may also be made of Angel Day's translation of Daphnis and Chloe containing the original insertion of the Shepherd's Holiday with the praises of Elizabeth in verse, and of Robert Tofte's Honours Academy (1610), distantly following Ollenix du Mont-Sacré's Bergerie de Juliette, but which, as also John Pyper's version of d'Urfé's Astrée (1620), have received sufficient notice in being recorded in connexion with their originals.
Earlier in date of publication and belonging to an elder tradition than the Arcadia, though later in date of composition, and it may be at times betraying a familiarity with Sidney's manuscript, the romances of the Bohemian Robert Greene, and the buccaneer-physician Thomas Lodge, are naturally the first to claim our attention.
With the exception of Menaphon, Greene's romances offer little that is important in pastoral, apart from the more notable works which they inspired. And even Menaphon, in so far as the general conception is concerned, can hardly be said necessarily to involve the existence of any antecedent pastoral tradition. Greene's novel is, indeed, far from being purely pastoral; no more than in Sidney's, to use Professor Herford's happy phrase, are we allowed to forget that Arcadia bordered on Sparta. In this it undoubtedly resembles the Spanish romances, but the resemblance does not appear to go much further; it is on the whole warlike without being chivalric, the tone Greek, or what Greene considered such, rather than medieval--indeed it might be argued that in its martial incidents it rather recalls Daphnis and Chloe than the Diana. There is certainly nothing chivalric about King Democles, who, when some ten score shepherds are besieging a castle, sends to the 'General of his Forces,' and not only has ten thousand men brought secretly and by night at three days' notice--in itself a notable piece of strategy--but when they arrive on the scene places furthermore the whole force in ambush! No wonder that when the soldiers are let loose out of their necessarily cramped quarters, they kill many of the shepherds, and putting the rest to flight remain masters of the situation.
The plot might perhaps be considered improbable as well as intricate for anything but a pastoral or chivalric romance: judged by the standards prevailing in these species it is neither. Democles, king of Arcadia, has a daughter Sephistia, who contrary to his wishes has contracted a secret marriage with Maximus. When the birth of a son leads to discovery, Democles has them placed in an oarless boat and so cast adrift. A storm arising they are not unnaturally wrecked, and ultimately husband and wife are cast upon different points of the Arcadian coast(!), where, either supposing the other to have perished, they adopt the pastoral life, assuming the names respectively of Melicertus and Samela. The young mother has with her child Pleusidippus, but while still in early boyhood he is carried off by pirates and presented as a gift to the King of Thessaly. In the meantime Menaphon, 'the king's shepherd of Arcadia,' has fallen in love with Samela, but while accepting his hospitality she meets her husband in his shepherd's guise, and without recognizing one another husband and wife again fall in love. Years pass on and Pleusidippus, who has risen to fame at court, hears of the beauty of the shepherdess of Arcadia, and must needs go to test the truth of the report himself. He does so, and promptly falls in love with his own mother. Nor is this all, for Democles equally hears of Samela's fame, and disguising himself as a shepherd falls in love with his own daughter. He endeavours to command Samela's affection by revealing to her his own identity, but Pleusidippus is beforehand with more drastic measures, and with the help of a few associates carries Samela off to a neighbouring castle, to which Democles and the shepherds, headed by Melicertus, proceed to lay siege. A duel between father and son is unceremoniously interrupted by the inroad of Democles' soldiery. Upon this the identity of Samela is revealed by a convenient prophetess, and all ends happily.
In the relation of verse and prose Greene's work differs from that of Sannazzaro and Sidney, the former being of considerably greater merit than the latter. The style adopted exhibits a very marked Euphuism, and the whole form of narrative is characterized by that fondness for petty conceit which not seldom gives an air of puerility to the lighter Elizabethan prose. Puerile in a sense it had every right to be, for modern prose narration was then in its very infancy in this country. No artistic form destined to contribute to the main current of literature is born perfect into the world; the early efforts appear not only tentative, uncouth, at times rugged, but often childish and futile, unworthy the consideration of serions men. The substance of the Gesta Romanorum and the style of the Novellino appear so, considered in relation to the Decameron; the mystery plays are an obvious instance, not to be explained by any general immaturity of medieval ideas. Traces of the tendency may even be noticed where revival or acclimatization, rather than original invention, is the aim; we find it in the Shepherd's Calender, nor was it absent in the days of the romantic revival, either from the German Lenores or the English Otrantos. And so it is with the novelists of the Elizabethan age. Renouncing the traditions of the older romance, which was adult and perfect a hundred years before in Malory, but had now fallen into a second childhood, and determined on the creation of a new and genuine form of literary expression, they paid the price of originality in the vein of childishness that runs through their writings.
If, however, Greene was content in the main to adopt the style of the new novel, he, as indeed Lyly too, could at times snatch a straightforward thought or a vigorous phrase from current speech or controversial literature, and invest it with all the greater effectiveness by contrasting it with its surroundings. Here, as an example of euphuistic composition, is Democles' address to the champions about to engage in single combat:
Worthy mirrors of resolved magnanimitie, whose thoughts are above your fortunes, and your valour more than your revenewes, know that Bitches that puppie in hast bring forth blind whelpes; that there is no herbe sooner sprung up than the Spattarmia nor sooner fadeth; the fruits too soone ripe are quickly rotten; that deedes done in hast are repented at leisure: then, brave men in so weightie a cause,... deferre it some three daies, and then in solemn manner end the combat[140].
With this we may contrast the closing sentence of the work:
And lest there should be left any thing imperfect in this pastorall accident, Doron smudged himselfe up, and jumped a marriage with his old friend Carmela.
This is, of course, intentionally cast in a homely style in contrast to the courtliness of the main plot; but Greene, as some of his later works attest, knew the value of strong racy English no less than his friend Nashe, who, in the preface he prefixed to this very work, pushed colloquialism and idiom to the verge of affectation and beyond.
The incidental verse, on the other hand, though very unequal, is of decidedly higher merit. Sephistia's famous song should alone suffice to save any book from oblivion, while there are other verses which are not unworthy of a place beside it. I may instance the opening of the 'roundelay' sung by Menaphon, the only character strictly belonging to pastoral tradition, with its picture of approaching night:
When tender ewes brought home with evening Sunne
Wend to their foldes,
And to their holdes
The shepheards trudge when light of day is done.
Such as it was, Menaphon appealed in no small degree to the taste of the moment. We know how great was Greene's reputation as an author, how publishers were ready to outbid one another for the very dregs of his wit. Thomas Brabine was but voicing the general opinion when, in some verses prefixed to Menaphon, he wrote, condescending to an inevitable pun, but also to a less excusable mixed metaphor:
Be thou still Greene, whiles others glorie waine.
Of his other romances it is sufficient in this place to mention that Pandosto, which contains the pastoral loves of Dorastus and Fawnia, and supplied Shakespeare with the outlines of the Winter's Tale, appeared the year before Menaphon, while the year after saw his Never Too Late, which is likewise of a generally pastoral character, but does not appear to have suggested or influenced any subsequent work.
The remarks that have been made concerning Greene apply in a large measure also to his fellow euphuist Thomas Lodge. His earliest romance, Forbonius and Prisceria, published in 1584, is partly pastoral in plot, a faithful lover being driven by the opposition of his lady's father into assuming the pastoral habit; but it is chiefly the connexion of his Rosalynde of 1590 with Shakespeare's As You Like It that gives him a claim upon our attention. Rosalynde is not only on this account the best-known, but is also intrinsically the most interesting of his romances. The story is too familiar to need detailing. Its origin, as is also well known, is the Tale of Gamelyn, the story which Chaucer intended putting into the mouth either of the cook, or more probably of the yeoman, and the hero of which apparently belongs to the Robin Hood cycle. The interest centres round the three sons of Sir John of Bordeaux, who retains his name with Lodge and is Shakespeare's Sir Roland de Bois, and whose youngest son, Lodge's Rosader and Shakespeare's Orlando, is named Gamelyn, and the outlaw king, Lodge's king of France and Shakespeare's Duke senior[141]. The entire pastoral element, as well as the courtly scenes of the earlier portion of the novel, are Lodge's own invention. His shepherds, whether genuine, as Coridon and Phoebe, or assumed, as Rosalynde and Rosader, are all alike Italian Arcadians, equally polished and poetical. Montanus, a shepherd corresponding to Shakespeare's Silvius, is a dainty rimester, and is not only well posted in the loves of Polyphemus and Galatea, but can rail on blind boy Cupid in good French, and on his mistress too--
Son cuer ne doit estre de glace, Bien que elle ait de Neige le sein.
Thus Lodge added to the original story the figures of the usurper, Rosalynde, Alinda (Celia), and the shepherds Montanus (Silvius), Coridon (Corin) and Phoebe, while to Shakespeare we owe Amiens, Jacques, Touchstone, Audre, and a few minor characters; whence it appears that Lodge's contribution forms the mainstay of the plot as familiar to modern readers. Moreover, in spite of the stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long 'orations,' 'passions,' 'meditations' and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of its silvan and idyllic sweetness.
Before leaving the school of Lyly, which included a number of more or less famous writers, I may take the opportunity of mentioning two authors usually reckoned among them. One, John Dickenson, left two works of a pastoral nature. His short romance entitled Arisbas appeared in 1594, and may have supplied Daniel with a hint for the kidnapping of Silvia in Hymen's Triumph. Another yet shorter work, entitled the Shepherd's Complaint, which is undated, but was probably printed in the same year, is remarkable for being composed more than half in verse, largely hexameters. In it the author falls asleep and is transported in his dreams to Arcady, where he listens to the lament of a shepherd for the love of Amaryllis. The cruel nymph is, however, soon punished, for, challenging Diana in beauty, she falls a victim to the shafts of the angry goddess, and is buried with full bucolic honours, whereupon the author awakes. The other writer is William Warner, well known from his Albion's England, published in 1586, who left a work entitled Pan his Syrinx, which appeared in 1584; but in this pastoralism does not penetrate beyond the title-page.
Of the books which everybody knows and nobody reads, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is perhaps the most famous[142]. Yet though an account of the romance may be found in the pages of every literary textbook, the history of how the work came to be printed has never been fully cleared up[143]. The Arcadia, as it remained at Sidney's death, was fragmentary. Two books and a portion of a third were all that had undergone revision, and possibly represented the portion which Sidney compiled while living with his sister at Wilton, after his retirement from court in 1581--the portion for the most part actually written in his sister's presence. Even of this trustworthy manuscripts were rare, most of those that circulated being copies of the unrevised text. Sidney died on October 17, 1586, and even before the end of the year we find his friend Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, writing to Sidney's father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, to the effect that the bookseller, William Ponsonby, had informed him that some one was about to print the Arcadia, and that if they were acting without authority a notification of the fact should be lodged with the archbishop. Greville proceeds to say that he had sent to Walsingham's daughter, that is, Lady Sidney, the corrected manuscript of the work 'don 4 or 5 years sinse, which he left in trust with me; wherof there is no more copies, and fitter to be reprinted then the first, which is so common[144].' A complaint was evidently lodged, and the publication stayed, and we may assume that Ponsonby was rewarded for his notification by being entrusted with the publication of the revised manuscript mentioned by Greville, for it was from his house that issued the quarto edition of 1590. Evidence that it was Greville who was responsible for the publication of the Arcadia is found in the dedication of Thomas Wilson's manuscript translation from the Diana, where, addressing Greville, the translater speaks of Sir Philip's Arcadia, 'wch by yor noble vertue the world so hapily enjoyes.' In this edition, containing the first two and a half books only, the division into chapters and the arrangement of the incidental verse were the work of the 'over-seer of the print.' The text, however, was not considered satisfactory, and when the romance was reprinted in 1593 the division into chapters was discarded, certain alterations were made in the arrangement of the verse, and there was added another portion of the third book, together with a fourth and fifth, compiled by the Countess of Pembroke from the loose sheets sent her from time to time by her brother. This edition has been commonly regarded as the first published with due authority, and the term 'surreptitious' has been quite unjustly applied to the original quarto. The charge, indeed, receives colour from the preface, signed H. S., to the second edition; but, whoever H. S. may have been, there is nothing to make one suppose that he was speaking with authority. The quarto of 1590 having been duly licensed on August 23, 1588, the rights of the work were in Ponsonby's hands, and to him the publication of the revised edition had to be entrusted. In 1598 a third edition, to which other remains of the author were for the first time added, was also published by Ponsonby. There still remained, however, a lacuna in Book III, which was not remedied till 1621, when a supplement was added from the pen of Sir William Alexander. In the edition of 1627 a sixth book was appended, the work of one Richard Beling, whose initials alone, however, appear. The early editors seem to have assumed that the unfinished state of the work, or rather the unrevised state of the later portions, was due to the author's early death, but most of it must have been written between the years 1581 and 1583, and it may well be questioned whether in any case Sidney would have bestowed any further attention upon it. Jonson, indeed, has preserved the tradition that it had been Sir Philip's intention 'to have transform'd all his Arcadia to the stories of King Arthure[145],' though how the transformation was to be accomplished he forbore to hint; but the more familiar tradition of Sidney's having expressed on his death-bed a desire that the romance should be destroyed assorts better with what else we know of his regard for his 'idle worke.'
For the name of his romance Sidney was no doubt indebted to Sannazzaro, whom he twice mentions as an authority in his Defence of Poesy, but there in all probability his direct obligation ends, since even the rime sdrucciole, which he occasionally affected, may with equal probability be referred to the influence of the Diana. It was, undoubtedly, Montemayor's romance which served as a model for, or rather suggested the character of, Sidney's work[146]. Thus the chivalric element, unknown to Sannazzaro, is with Sidney even more prominent than with Montemayor and his followers. It is, however, true that, like Greene's, his heroes are rather of a classical than a medieval stamp, and he also chose to lay the scene of the action in Greece rather than in his native land, as was the habit of Spanish writers. The source upon which Sidney chiefly drew for incidents was the once famous Amadis of Gaul, but a diligent reading of the other French and Spanish romances of chivalry would probably lengthen the list of recorded creditors. Heliodorus supplies several episodes, and an acquaintance at least can be traced with both Achilles Tatius and Chariton.
The intricate plot, with its innumerable digressions, episodes, and interruptions, need not here be followed in detail, especially as we shall have ample opportunity of becoming familiar with its general features when we come to discuss the plays founded upon it. Here it will be sufficient to note one or two points. In the first place the romance contains no really pastoral characters, the personae being all either shepherds in their disguise only, or else, like Greene's Doron and Carmela, burlesque characters of the rustic tradition. Secondly, it may be observed that the amorous confusion is even greater than in Menaphon, Pyrocles disguising himself as an Amazon in order to enjoy the company of his beloved Philoclea, which leads to her father Basilius falling in love with him in his disguise, and endeavouring to use his daughter to forward his suit, while her mother Gynecia likewise falls in love with him, having detected his disguise, and becomes jealous of her daughter, who on her part innocently accepts her lover as bosom companion[147].
In general the Arcadia is no more than it purports to be, the 'many fancies' of Sidney's fertile imagination poured forth in courtly guise for the entertainment of his sister, though his own more serious thoughts occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise is a mere veil shielding them from the crude uncompromising light of actuality, with its prejudice in favour of the probable; while the few rustic personages merely supply a not very successful comic antimasque.
To the popularity of the Arcadia it is hardly necessary to advert. It has been repeatedly printed, added to, imitated, abbreviated, modernized, popularized; four editions appeared during the last decade of the sixteenth century, nine between the beginning of the seventeenth and the outbreak of the civil wars[149]. It was first published at a moment when the public was beginning to tire of Euphuism, and when the heroic death of the author had recently set a seal upon the brilliance of his fame. Looking back in after years, writers who, like Drayton, had lived through the movement from its very birth, could speak of Sidney as of the author who
did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing then in use,
and could praise his style as a model of pure English. In spite of the generous, if misguided, efforts of occasional critics, posterity has not seen fit to endorse this view. While finding in Sidney's style the same historical importance as in Lyly's, we cannot but recognize that in itself Arcadianism was little if at all better than Euphuism. It is just as formal, just as much a trick, just as stilted and unpliable, just as painful an illustration of the fact that a figure of rhetoric may be an occasional ornament, but cannot by any degree of ingenuity be made to serve as a basis of composition. In the same way as Euphuism is founded upon a balance of the sentence obtained by antithetical clauses, and the use of intricate alliteration, together with the abuse of simile and metaphor drawn from what has been aptly termed Lyly's 'un-natural history'; so Sidney's style in the Arcadia is based on a balance usually obtained by a repetition of the same word or a jingle of similar ones, together with the abuse of periphrasis, and, it may be added, of the pathetic fallacy. These last have been dangers in all periods of stylistic experiment; the former, figures duly noted as ornaments by contemporary rhetoricians, Sidney no doubt borrowed from Spain. There in one famous example they were shortly to excite the enthusiasm of the knight of La Mancha--'The reason of the unreason which is done to my reason in such manner enfeebles my reason that with reason I lament your beauty'--a sentence which one is sometimes tempted to imagine Sidney must have set before him as a model. Thus it would appear that, for their essential elements, Euphuism and Arcadianism, though distinct, alike sought their models, direct or indirect, in the Spanish literature of the day. Almost any passage, chosen at random, will illustrate Sidney's style. Observe the balance of clauses in the following sentence from Kalander's speech, which inclines perhaps towards Euphuism:
I am no herald to enquire of mens pedegrees, it sufficeth me if I know their vertues, which, if this young mans face be not a false witnes, doe better apparrell his minde, then you have done his body. (1590, fol. 8v.)
Or again, as an instance of the jingle of words, take the following from the steward's narration:
I thinke you thinke, that these perfections meeting, could not choose but find one another, and delight in that they found, for likenes of manners is likely in reason to drawe liking with affection; mens actions doo not alwaies crosse with reason: to be short, it did so in deed. (ib. fol. 20.)
Of Sidney's power of description the stock example is his account of the Arcadian landscape (fol. 7), and it is perhaps the best and at the same time the most characteristic that could be found; the author's peculiar tricks are at once obvious. There are 'the humble valleis, whose base estate semed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers,' and the 'thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to by the chereful deposition of many wel-tuned birds'; there are the pastures where 'the prety lambs with bleting oratory craved the dams comfort,' where sat the young shepherdess knitting, whose 'voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voices musick,' a country where the scattered houses made 'a shew, as it were, of an accompanable solitarines, and of a civil wildnes,' where lastly--si sic omnia!--was the 'shepheards boy piping, as though he should never be old.' It must not be supposed that these are occasional embroideries; they are the very cloth of which the whole pastoral habit is made. The above examples all occur within a few pages, and might even have been gathered from a yet smaller plot. It is, however, on the prose, such as it is, that the reputation of the Arcadia rests; a good deal of occasional verse is introduced, but it has often been subject of remark how wholly unworthy of its author most of it is.
Given the widespread popularity of the work, the influence exercised by the story on English letters is hardly a matter for wonder. Of its general influence on the drama it will be my business to speak later; at present we may note that while yet in manuscript it probably supplied Lodge with certain hints for his Rosalynde, and so indirectly influenced As You Like It. One of the best-known episodes, again, that of Argalus and Parthenia, was versified by Quarles in 1632, and, adorned with a series of cuts, went through a large number of editions before the end of the century, besides being dramatized by Glapthorne. The incident of Pyrocles heading the Zelots has been thought to have suggested the scene in the Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine consents to lead the robber band, while to Sidney Shakespeare was likewise indebted, not only for the cowards' fight in Twelfth Night, but in the 'story of the Paphlagonian unkinde king,' for the original of the Gloster episode in King Lear. A certain prayer out of the later portion of the romance was, as is well known, a favourite with Charles I in the days of his misfortune, but the controversial use made of the fact by Milton it is happily possible to pass over in silence.
Finally, it is worth mentioning as illustrating the vogue of Sidney's romance, that it not only had the very singular honour of being translated into French in the first half of the seventeenth century, but that two translations actually appeared, the rivalry between which gave rise to a literary controversy of some asperity[150].
Thus we take leave of the pastoral novel or romance, a kind which never attained to the weighty tradition of the eclogue, or the grace of the lyric, nor was subjected to the rigorous artistic form of the drama[151]. It remained throughout nerveless and diffuse, and, in spite of much incidental beauty, was habitually wanting in interest, except in so far as it renounced its pastoral nature. As Professor Raleigh has put it: 'To devise a set of artificial conditions that shall leave the author to work out the sentimental inter-relations of his characters undisturbed by the intrusion of probability or accident is the problem; love in vacuo is the beginning and end of the pastoral romance proper.' A similar attempt is noticeable in the drama, but the conditions soon came to be recognized as impossible for artistic use. The operation of human affection under utterly imaginary and impossible conditions is not a matter of human interest; the resuit was a purely fictitious amatory code, as absurd as it was unhealthy, and, when sustained by no extrinsic interest of allegory or the like, the kind soon disappeared. As it is, in the pastoral novel, it is only when the enchanted circle is broken by the rough and tumble of vulgar earthly existence that on the featureless surface of the waters something of the light and shade of true romance replaces the steady pitiless glare ot a philosophical or sentimental ideal.