A History of English Literature by George Saintsbury (best novels in english TXT) 📖

extent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large class of curious tracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners, of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous mass of these works by single unimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any account here, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's English Garner. But the works of the six most important individual writers of them—Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whom might be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)—are luckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published, or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club of Glasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. The reprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly and others, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice of these collections will not only give a fair idea of the entire miscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill a distinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enter into much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have been noticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very little indeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in this respect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more like literature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparently perverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in the estimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote in this way has gone out of fashion, and its purely literary graces are barely sufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitter personalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire to contemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lasting interest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe have the advantage (which they little anticipated, and would perhaps less have relished) of surviving as illustrations of Shakespere, of the Shakescene who, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued Pandosto and Euphues' Golden Legacy from oblivion by associating them with the immortality of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale.

Owing to the different forms in which this fleeting and unequal work has been reprinted, it is not very easy to decide off-hand on the relative bulk of the authors' works. But the palm in this respect must be divided between Robert Greene and Nicholas Breton, the former of whom fills eleven volumes of loosely-printed crown octavo, and the latter (in prose only) a thick quarto of very small and closely-printed double columns. Greene, who began his work early under the immediate inspiration first of his travels and then of Lyly's Euphues, started, as early as 1583, with Mamillia, a Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England, which, both in general character and in peculiarities of style, is an obvious copy of Euphues. The Mirror of Modesty is more of a lay sermon, based on the story of Susanna. The Tritameron of Love is a dialogue without action, but Arbasto, or the Anatomie of Fortune returns to the novel form, as does The Card of Fancy. Planetomachia is a collection of stories, illustrating the popular astrological notions, with an introduction on astrology generally. Penelope's Web is another collection of stories, but The Spanish Masquerado is one of the most interesting of the series. Written just at the time of the Armada, it is pure journalism—a livre de circonstance composed to catch the popular temper with aid of a certain actual knowledge, and a fair amount of reading. Then Greene returned to euphuism in Menaphon, and in Euphues, his Censure to Philautus; nor are Perimedes the Blacksmith and Tully's Love much out of the same line. The Royal Exchange again deviates, being a very quaint collection, quaintly arranged, of moral maxims, apophthegms, short stories, etc., for the use of the citizens. Next, the author began the curious series, at first perhaps not very sincere, but certainly becoming so at last, of half-personal reminiscences and regrets, less pointed and well arranged than Villon's, but remarkably similar. The first and longest of these was Greene's Never too Late, with its second part Francesco's Fortunes. Greene's Metamorphosis is Euphuist once more, and Greene's Mourning Garment and Greene's Farewell to Folly are the same, with a touch of personality. Then he diverged into the still more curious series on "conny-catching"—rooking, gulling, cheating, as we should call it. There are five or six of these tracts, and though there is not a little bookmaking in them, they are unquestionably full of instruction as to the ways of the time. Philomela returns once more to euphuism, but Greene is soon back again with A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, a piece of social satire, flying rather higher than his previous attempts. The zigzag is kept up in Orpharion, the last printed (at least in the only edition now known) of the author's works during his lifetime. Not till after his death did the best known and most personal of all his works appear, the famous Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, in which the "Shakescene" passage and the exhortation to his friends to repentance occur. Two more tracts in something the same style—Greene's Repentance and Greene's Vision—followed. Their genuineness has been questioned, but seems to be fairly certain.

This full list—to which must be added the already mentioned Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia, and the translated Debate between Folly and Love—of a certainly not scanty life-work (Greene died when he was quite a young man, and wrote plays besides) has been given, because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic of the whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that the writer is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. But fashion and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its main features are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vivid and direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in the delightful snatches of verse which intersperse and relieve the heterogeneous erudition, the clumsy dialogue, and the rococo style. The two following extracts give, the first a specimen of Greene's ornate and Euphuist style from Orpharion, the second a passage from his autobiographical or semi-autobiographical confessions in the Groat's Worth:—