Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

1

covered poverty of thought and excused vulgarity of feeling. Writers, who scorned the pedantry of academicians, and sought to take the world by storm-men of Aretino's stamp, Doni, Albicante, Franco, Vergerio-played upon these literary vices. No book, says Doni in his Marmi,' has a chance of success, if it appears in modest style with a plain indication of its subject. You must coin attractive titles, The Pumpkin,' or The Cobbler's Caprices,' or 'The Hospital of Fools,' or The Synagogue of Ignoramuses,' to carry off your ethical discourses. If you want to sell an invective, you must invent for it some bizarre superscription, as, for instance: 'The Earthquake of Doni, the Florentine, with the Ruin of a Great Bestial Colossus, the Antichrist of our Age.' Then folk will read you. Aretino, who thoroughly understood the public, proved his originality by creating a new manner, brassy and meretricious. Antithesis followed antithesis; forced metaphors, outrageous similes, hyperbolical periphrases, monstrous images, made up a style of clap-trap only to be pardoned by the author's ruffianly power. The manner spread like wild-fire. Campanella in his prison punned upon his surname and peculiarly shaped skull, rejoicing in the sobriquet of Settimontano Squilla,' or the 'Seven-hilled Bell.' Bruno uttered his philosophy in a jargon of conceits, strained allegories, and allusive metaphors, which is all but incomprehensible. One of his metaphysical works, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, bears this title: 'Lo Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante.' Another is styled: 'Gli Eroici Furori.' It had become impossible for sage or theologian, satirist or pedant, essayist or versifier, to express himself with classical propriety or natural directness. Marini, an indubitable poet, consecrated this aberration of taste in his 'Adone,' the marvel of the age, the despair of less authentic bards.

[ocr errors]

It was precisely at this point of its development that Italian literature exercised the widest and deepest influence in Europe. The French, the Spaniards, and the English rushed with the enthusiasm of beginners into imitation of Italian vices. An affectation, drawn from many diverse sources, from 'See Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. pp. 95, 96.

VARIED AFFECTATION

407

medieval puerility and humanistic pedantry, from the sentimentalism of the Petrarchisti and the cynical audacities of Aretino, from the languors of Marini and Doni's impudent bids for popularity-an affectation bred in the premature decay of the renascence, invaded every country where Italian culture penetrated. The masterpieces of pure literature, the antique classics, the poems of Petrarch and Ariosto, the histories of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, received due studious attention. But while these were studied, the mannerisms of feebler men, the faults of contemporaries, were copied. It was easier to catch the trick of an Aretino or a Marini than to emulate the style of a Tasso or a Castiglione. Still, what in Italy had been, to some extent a sign of decadence and exhaustion, became, when it was carried to barbarian shores, a petulant parade of youthful vigour. The effete literature of Florence and Venice generated this curious hybrid, which was enthusiastically cultivated on the virgin soils of France and Spain and England. It there produced new rarities and delicacies of divinest flavour; monstrosities also, outdoing in extravagance the strangest of Italian species. Where the national genius displayed a robust natural growth, as in England for example, literature was only superficially affected-in the prose of Lyly, the elegies of Donne, the slender Euphuistic thread that runs in iron through Marlowe, in silver through Shakspere, in bronze through Bacon, in more or less inferior metal through every writer of that age. Teutonic and Celtic qualities absorbed while they assimilated, dominated while they suffered, that intrusive Southern element of style. Yet the emphasis added to spontaneous expression by its foreign accent was so marked that no historian can venture to neglect it. The romantic art of the modern world did not spring, like that of Greece, from an ungarnered field of flowers. Troubled by reminiscences of the past and by reciprocal influences from one another, the literatures of modern Europe came into existence with composite dialects, obeyed confused canons of taste, exhibited their adolescent vigour with affected graces, showed themselves senile in their cradles.

In France the post-Italian affectation ran its course

[ocr errors]

through two marked phases, from Du Bellay and Du Bartas to the Précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet. In Spain it engendered the poetic diction of Calderon, who called the birds in heaven winged harps of gold'; and it expired in that estilo culto of Gongora, which required a new system of punctuation to render its constructions intelligible, and a glossary to explain its metaphors and mythological allusions. Of all parts of Europe, Spain perhaps produced the most extravagant specimens of this preposterous mannerism. England it first appeared as Euphuism, passing on into the metaphysical conceits of Cowley, and the splendid pedantries of Sir Thomas Browne.1

This affectation, which I have attempted to trace to its source in Italy, took somewhat different form in each country and in every writer. But its elementary conditions were the same. From the Middle Ages survived a love of allegory and symbolism, the habit of scholastic hair-splitting, and the romantic sentiment which we associate with chivalry. Humanism introduced the uncritical partiality for classical examples and citations, the abuse of mythology, and the sententious prolixity which characterise this literary phase in all its manifestations. The Petrarchisti gave currency to a peculiar conceited style, definable as the persistent effort to express one thing in terms of another, combined with a patient seeking after finished form. The Venetian school of Aretino

'It has been my object in the foregoing paragraphs to describe in general the origins of that literary affectation, which appears under many forms and species in Italy, Spain, France, and England, upon the close of the Renaissance-species known to us apart, and designated by the names of eminent or fashionable writers; of Petrarch and Marini, Montemayor and Gongora, Ronsard and Du Bartas, Lyly and Cowley. I have dwelt upon the generic rather than the specific characteristics of this lues literaria, because I think Euphuism may fairly claim to be a separate type. But I must also here profess my belief in the very close dependence of Lyly's style and matter upon the work of the Spanish author Guevara, without whom, as Dr. Landmann has abundantly proved, Euphuism would certainly not have crystallised into its wellknown and characteristic form. In some important respects the species Euphuism, strictly so called, is immediately derived from Guevara's purer and weightier mannerism. See Dr. Landmann's Euphuismus, Giessen, 1881, and his article in the New Shakspere Society's Transac tions, 1880-2.

LYLY'S NATURAL HISTORY

409

and his followers set the fashion of bizarrerie in titles, effect by antithesis, verbal glare and glitter. Marini, preceded by the author of the Pastor Fido,' brought the specific note of the new literary style-its effort to be rich and rare, at the expense of taste, by far-fetched imagery, surprises, striking metaphors, and unexpected ingenuity in language-into the domain of poetry. In his work it dropped much of its medieval and pedantic apparatus. It shone before the entranced eyes of Europe as an iridescent marvel, on which the intellect and fancy fed with inexhaustible delight. The unexplored riches of modern literatures, exulting in their luxuriance, and envying the fame of Greece and Rome, tempted writers to extravagant experiments in language. Imagination itself was young, and ran riot in the prodigality of unexhausted forces.

This

Euphuism, after this preamble, may be defined as a literary style used by Lyly in his prose works, and adopted into the language of polite society. It is characterised by a superficial tendency to allegory; by the abuse of easy classical erudition; by a striving after effect in puns, conceits, and plays on words; by antithesis of thought and diction, carried to a wearisome extent, and enforced by alliterative and parisonic use of language; and, finally, by sententious prolixity in the display of commonplace reflections. Lyly's euphuism is further and emphatically distinguished by the reckless employment of an unreal natural history for purposes of illustration. constitutes what may be termed the keynote of his affectation. He seems to have derived it in the first place from Pliny; but also from the Bestiaries and Lapidaries of the Middle Ages, with indiscriminate reference to Herodotus and Mandeville, and an idle exercise of his inventive fancy. To animals, plants, stones, &c. he attributes the most absurd properties and far-fetched virtues, applying these to point his morals and adorn his tales. Let the falling out of friends,' he writes, 'be the renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones of the lion, which lying still and not moved begin to rot, but being stricken one against another, break out like fire and wax green.' Page after page of his prose

runs on after this fashion; empty, vague, prolix, decorated with preposterous examples. It would be a nice task for idle antiquarian research to discover whether there are or are not sources in medieval erudition for such statements as the following:

'As the fire-stone in Liguria, though it be quenched with milk, yet again it is kindled with water, or as the roots of Anchusa, though it be hardened with water, yet it is made soft with oil.'

As the precious stone Sandrasta hath nothing in outward appearance but that which seemeth black, but being broken poureth forth beams like the sun.'

'As by basil the scorpion is engendered, and by the means of the same herb destroyed or as the salamander which being a long space nourished in the fire, at the last quencheth it.'

'I lived, as the elephant doth by air, with the sight of my lady.'

'Like the river in Arabia, which turneth gold to dross, and dirt to silver.'

'As the dogs of Egypt drink water by snatches, and so quench their thirst, and not hinder their running.'

The more sensible readers of Lyly's works seem to have felt the tediousness of this fabulous natural history no less than we do, though certainly the list of Vulgar Errors concerning the fauna and flora of distant lands was then a larger one than it is now. Drayton, publishing his poems in 1627, upon the eve of 'Euphues'' extinction, says of Sir Philip Sidney that he

Did first reduce

Our tongue from Lyly's writing then in use;
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes;

As the English apes and very zanies be

Of everything which they do hear and see,
So imitating his ridiculous tricks,

They spake and writ, all like mere lunatics.

« PreviousContinue »