The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes emerging to view.

Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain addition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the Amadis school. But the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of interest: and even some of the longer, such as that Tale of Beryn , which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
prose tale:--first Latin, as in the Gesta Romanorum (which of course had older and positively mediæval forerunners), then Italian and French. The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness from the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verse or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially necessary to throw up the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever it was--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the sum and substance of what mediæval fiction could do in prose. For more, the times and the men had to come.


CHAPTER II

FROM LYLY TO SWIFT


During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at this time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was, and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it has ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable, fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and sufficiently business-like. The Italian novella , of course, admits wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is
bourgeois --at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for "furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals, motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well. In other words the novella was actually (though still in miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these novelle became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge Palace of Pleasure (1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single and collected, of the Italian novellieri and the French tale-tellers, contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.

For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the second position as representing the popular literature of the Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in English--the Euphues of Lyly and the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney.

The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge's Rosalynde and Greene's Pandosto ) do not require much notice, with one exception--Nash's Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller , to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the Arcadia or that of
Euphues . This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
Margarite of America , there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter and the personages of Euphues itself. To this famous book, therefore, we had better turn.

Some people, it is believed, have denied that Euphues is a novel at all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being called one. It is certainly, with Rasselas , the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the agrémens to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in Rasselas itself or the Fool of Quality . But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done. Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, unless it be the Lucretia and Euryalus of Æneas Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
Euphues , make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a piece. The quicquid agunt homines is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in Euphues . Men's interest in morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these appear in it.

The Arcadia stands in a different compartment. Euphues is very much
sui generis : failure as it may be from some points of view, it deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things sui generis it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many days. The Arcadia was in intention certainly, and to great extent in actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the Italians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety called pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, but perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and romantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unity of fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to pay at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid, instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the Pastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.

At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediæval variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality. Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it stands, and is certainly known not to have been revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and Spanish romance which supplied, during