ELIZABETHAN PROSE—TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS—ROGER ASCHAM—HIS BOOKS AND STYLE—WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM—THE SENTENCE—EUPHUISM—THE ‘ARCADIA’—SIDNEY’S STYLE—SHORT STORIES—NASH’S ‘UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER’—NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS—MARTIN MARPRELATE—ORIGIN OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS—THE ‘DIOTREPHES’—COURSE OF THE CONTROVERSY—ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY—HOOKER—‘THE ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.’
Elizabethan prose.

The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very[260] great name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or curious—anything, in fact, but great—and of not a few of them it has to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable.

The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, or Have with you to Saffron Walden, or The Unfortunate Traveller. We shall be better able to make a survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style, and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate.
Two schools of writers.

If this classification, then, is permitted, we may divide the Elizabethan prose-writers into those whose aim it was to give “English matter in the English tongue for Englishmen,” and those who strove for something better, more ornate, lofty, peculiar, and, as they held, more literary, than was to be reached by the pursuit of this modest purpose. The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham,[261] who, however, belonged to an earlier generation, though he died in the queen’s reign, and part of his work was published after his death. The great exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which is not in Ascham. The enredados razones—the roundabout affectations of the authors of the Spanish Libros de Caballerías—may have had some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino were much read and imitated by some who also “parled Euphues.” But the distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who, having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the other were those who, whether they had something to say or whether they were simply determined to be talking, were careful to give their utterances some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable to become pedestrian, the second were threatened by an obvious danger. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the writer who has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk the bull, to escape sheer affectation—which affectation, again, is in the great majority of cases a trick, a juggle with words repeated over and over again.

The prose which was first written for literary purposes in Elizabeth’s time was an inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain downright style of Ascham—the style of a man who thought in Latin, and turned it into good current English.

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Webbe and Puttenham.

Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie, printed in 1586, or the Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614, are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The Arte of English Poesie is indeed a very sane and thorough critical treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form. The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous, no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade, but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is Brant?me’s excuse for the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian. The sentence. Their general inability to confine themselves to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the[263] light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marprelate’s Epistle may have been—Penry, Udall, Barrow, or another—he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s Defence of the Government of the Church of England. “And learned brother Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page 69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time, you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c., and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists, and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying, and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those gifts or[264] graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the grace of God’s election to be of necessity to salvation.’”

The Dean’s meaning reveals itself at the third or fourth reading, but this is the style of Mrs Nickleby. Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and noted on the margin, “Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it again,” as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges is no authority in English literature, but he was a learned man, and must have had some practice in preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion which at any time after the seventeenth century would have been a proof either of extreme ignorance, or of some such defect of power to express himself as accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean Bridges shows only the disastrous consequences of that disregard of the proper limit of the sentence which was common with some of the greatest writers of his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins admirably: “All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt.” Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] “Sir Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make resistance having endured in this fifteen hours’[265] fight, the assault of fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge not able to move one way or other but as she was moved with the waves and billow of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many hours’ fight, and with so great a navy they were not able to take her, having had fifteen hours’ time, fifteen thousand men, and fifty and three sail of men of war to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or as many as he could induce to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy of none else, but as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation, by prolonging their own lives for a few hours or a few days.”

This is the style of a writer who does not know when a sentence has come to an end, and who, when he writes one which is properly constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies at least partly in this, that Raleigh had the easier task to perform. He had only to state facts, not to expound doctrine.

While making allowance for the inward and spiritual cause of the invasion of English by the[266] long, confused, overladen sentence, it must also be confessed that the evil was largely due to the prevalence of affected styles of writing, which lent themselves to over-elaboration. Two bad models were set before Englishmen about the middle of the queen’s reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long, exceedingly popular—Lyly’s euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style of Sidney’s Arcadia, to which no name has ever been given. The lives of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their style, as shown in their stories, and its effect on English literature, are the matters in hand. Euphuism and the manner of the Arcadia appear to have been elaborated by their authors about the same time, though Lyly takes precedence in the order of publication. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, was printed in 1579, Euphues and his England in the following year.[79]
Euphuism.

Euphuism has become a name for literary affectation, and is in that sense often used with very little precision. It is a very peculiar form of affectation. The two main features of the style—the mechanical antitheses and the abuse of similes—have been described already. Euphues, in so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught. The hero from whom it takes its name is the grandfather of all virtuous, solemn, and didactic prigs. He makes two excursions into the world from his native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at[267] Naples to jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her most justly jilted in turn. He floods southern Italy with antithetical platitude, and retires to Athens. Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where the second, after philandering with one lady, marries another. Euphues remains didactic and superior. At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra. There is a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her time as high as Shakespeare’s plays and the Ecclesiastical Polity. There are also pages of such matter as this: “But as the cypress-tree the more it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile.” Unbridled youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which was unbridled enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that a[268] time which loved Tamburlaine and produced the great lyric, should also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps, again, it is not so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan time a liking for what looked superior to the common herd. About the Court there was much foppery, and there were many who wished to resemble the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviving morality of the age, compatible as it was with much individual profligacy, made men respectful of virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward VI. and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII. close behind them, it was as yet hardly the case that “the cardinal virtues were to be taken for granted among English gentlemen.” Surrey may have been jesting when he told his sister to make herself the king’s mistress, but what a society that must have been in which a brother, and he “a mirror of chivalry,” thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly was very moral, a fop to his fingers’ ends, and with all his oddity and his pedantry, there is a real, though very artificial, distinction about him. Finally, there were as yet few and insignificant rivals. It is not then at all surprising that his style was taken up at Court as “the thing,” and accepted by the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snobbery, of the outer world.

Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence (for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula, “As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,”[269] can make it. The Arcadia. With Sidney’s Arcadia[80] we come to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a précieuse, and who was all her life the centre of some literary coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen. The Arcadia, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a fragment, though a large one. The Arcadia is much longer than the “tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it is much more a Libro de Caballerías. There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly Deeds”—challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There[270] are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the Amadis or the Palmerin. It is a very entangled book, and is not made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them.
Sidney’s style.

The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for Góngora without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form of affectation[271] by the Libros de Caballerías, published from thirty to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s Don Quixote, and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]

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We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later authors of Libros de Caballerías. Yet the juggle on the two forces of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate success of Don Quixote in England may be explained not only by the permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences, while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which Sidney abounds.
Short Stories.

Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations of the Italians, and notably Bandello, with imitations of Euphues and the Pastorals, were common in Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps because it suffered from the overpowering rivalry of poetry and the stage, the prose tale is rarely among the good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and Breton[82] are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said, with any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time, but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash’s Unfortunate Traveller, to[273] which attention has again been attracted of late. It is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic force should have put the model of the Novela de Pícaros before English readers five years earlier than the publication of Guzman de Alfarache in Spain, and that it should have been so completely forgotten that when this model was again introduced among us by Defoe, his inspiration came from Le Sage.[83]
Nash’s Unfortunate Traveller.

Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known as a pamphleteer, published The Unfortunate Traveller in 1594. It is difficult to read, at any rate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt that the author had seen, if not the original of the Lazarillo de Tormes, then at any rate the French version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If his work is quite independent, then we have a very remarkable instance of exact similarity in the method and spirit of two writers separated from one another in race and by an interval of nearly half a century, during which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity. This is difficult to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo’s doings than the tricks which Nash’s hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and[274] the Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero’s love-affairs with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his “courtezan,” and gives himself out to be the Earl of Surrey. From the time the hero and Diamante reach Rome the picaresque tone disappears, and Nash drops into familiar Elizabethan “blood and thunder.” With the inconsequence of his time he gives at the end a defiant last dying speech and confession of an Italian malefactor, who bears the English name of Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an air there is about it of being hasty work done to make a little mo............