complicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer,
has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but
noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour
as the last of them.
Prose from 1579 to 1660.—With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550. In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary, sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover, prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long unset; that is, the parts of speech—noun and verb, epithet and adverb—were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.
The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and
is therefore dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The
tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of
Navarre, and others were purveyed, as remarked
above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton
The novel.
Lyly and euphuism.
and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals
filled a shelf in the playwrights’ libraries. The first of famous
English novels, Lyly’s Euphues (1578), and its sequel
Euphues and his England, are documents of form.
They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness
of observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any
real beauty or deep feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was
only the patentee, not the inventor, strikes partly back to the
Spaniard Guevara, and was a model for some years to many
followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not merely provide
Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and vegetable
similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence,
complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind
shows what could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses
and clusters of clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with
the beat of emphatic alliteration on the corresponding parts of
speech in each constituent clause. This was a useful discipline
for prose in its period of groping. Sidney’s incomposite and
unfinished Arcadia, written 1580–1581, despite its painful forced
antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms, with pleasing
formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and
situation, through which the writer’s eager and fretted spirit
shines. Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge,
show by their somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and
their courtly tone that they were meant in chief for the eyes of
ladies, who were excluded alike from the stage and from its
audience. Nashe’s drastic and photographic tale of masculine life,
Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, stands almost alone,
but some of the gap is filled by the contemporary pamphlets,
sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin declamation, of
Nashe himself—by far the most powerful of the group—and of
Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel
was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance
went on in the next century, owing largely to French influence
and example.
In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin countries. Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy (1595, written about 1580), and Jonson, in his Discoveries, offer a well-inspired and lofty restatement of the current answers to the current questions, but could give no account Criticism. of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend the “truth” of poetry—which was identified with all inventive writing and not only with verse—poetry was saddled with the work of science and instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in Shakespeare’s plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the “Areopagus,” an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel’s firm and eloquent Defence of Rhyming (1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in his Advancement of Learning and De Augmentis; and Jonson, besides passing his famed judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like Webbe’s Discourse of Poetry and the Art of English Poesy (1589) ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.
The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great achievements from Berners’ Froissart (1523–1525) to Urquhart’s Rabelais (1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often obscure, their number witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the talent Translators. for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch’s Morals and Camden’s Britannia, and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his translation, made from Amyot’s classic French, of Plutarch’s Lives (1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in Montaigne’s Essays (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental exploration; and Shelton, in Don Quixote (1612), the chief tragi-comic creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius, Heliodorus, Commines, Celestina and many others, is so good and often so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of historical and social but not of artistic
