Transcriber's note.

Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Variable spelling has been retained.

A HISTORY OF STORY-TELLING

EDITED BY ARTHUR RANSOME

THE WORLD'S STORY-TELLERS

Each volume contains a selection of complete stories, an Introductory Essay by Arthur Ransome, and a Frontispiece Portrait by J. Gavin.

List of volumes already published:—

• GAUTIER
• HOFFMANN
• POE
• HAWTHORNE
• MÉRIMÉE
• BALZAC
• CHATEAUBRIAND
• THE ESSAYISTS
• CERVANTES
• Others in preparation

In cloth, 1s. net; cloth gilt, gilt top, 1s. 6d. net per vol.

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

T. C. AND E. C. JACK

meung

JEAN DE MEUNG

A HISTORY OF
STORY-TELLING

STUDIES IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE

BY
ARTHUR RANSOME

Editor of 'The World's Story-Tellers'

WITH 27 PORTRAITS BY J. GAVIN

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
1909

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

This is a spring day, and I am writing in a flood of sunlight in front of a brown French inn. Above my head there is the dusty branch of a tree stuck out of a window, the ancient sign that gave point to the proverb, 'Good wine needs no bush.' Good books, I suppose, need no prefaces. But honest authors realise that their books are never as good as they had planned them. A preface, put on last and worn in front, to show what they would have liked their books to be, is the pleasantest of their privileges. And I am not inclined to do without it.

A book that calls itself a history of a subject with as many byeways and blind alleys as exist in the history of story-telling, is precisely the kind of book that one would wish one's enemy to have written. Everybody who reads it grumbles because something or other is left out that, if they had had the writing of it, would have been put in. And yet in the case of this particular book (how many authors have thought the same!) criticism of omissions is like quarrelling with a guinea-pig because it has not got a tail. It is not the guinea-pig's business to have a tail, and it is not the business of this book to be a chronicle, full of facts, and admirable for reference. That place is already filled by Dunlop's History of Fiction, and, in a very delightful manner, by Professor Raleigh's English Novel. The word history can be used in a different sense. The French say that such an one makes a history of a thing when he makes a great deal of talk about it. That is what I set out to do. My business was not to be noting down dates and facts—this book was published in such a year and this in the year preceding. I was to write with a livelier imp astride my pen. The schoolmaster was to be sent to steal apples in the orchard. I was to write of story-telling as a man might write of painting or jewellery or any other art he loved. I was to take here a book and there a book, and notice the development of technique, the conquests of new material, the gradual perfecting of form. I would talk of old masters and modern ones, and string my chapters like beads, a space between each, along the history of the art.

Well, I have fait une histoire, suggested mainly by the masterpieces that I love, and without too much regard for those that happen to be loved by other people. And now that it is done, I think of it sadly enough. It should have been so beautiful. When I see an old church, like the priory church at Cartmel, standing grey and solemn in the mist above the houses, or hear an old song, like 'Summer is icumen in,' or see a browned old picture, like Poussin's 'Bergers d'Arcadie,' I feel that these things have meant more to man than battles. These are his dreams and his ideals, resting from age to age, long after the din of fighting has died and been forgotten, recorded each in its own way, in stone, in melody, in colour, and in the tales also that, changing continually, have 'held children from play and old men from the chimney-corner,' the dreams lie hid. What a tapestry they should have made. For the story of this art, or indeed of any art, is the story of man. Looking back through the years, as I sit here and close my eyes against the sunlight, I see the hard men and fierce women of the Sagas living out their lives in the cold and vigorous north—Pippin, the grandfather of Charlemagne, sticking his sword indifferently through the devil, Beaumains and his scornful lady riding through the green wood. In the dungeon of the tower sits Aucassin sorrowing for Nicolete his so sweet friend. Among the orange-trees on the Italian slope the gold-haired Fiammetta watches for her lover. With battered armour and ascetic face Don Quixote, upright in his saddle, rides on the bare roads of Spain, dreaming of Dulcinea del Toboso. Gil Blas swindles his way through life and comes out top as an honest rascal will. Clarissa sits in her chamber blotting with tears her interminable correspondence. Tom Jones draws blood from many meaner noses. My Uncle Toby looks, not in the white, for the mote in the Widow Wadman's eye. Mrs. Bennet begs her husband, to 'come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins.' Old Goriot pawns his plate and moves to cheaper and yet cheaper rooms to keep his daughters in their luxury. Raphael, nearing death, watches the relentless shrinking of the morsel of shagreen. There falls the House of Usher. There floats the white face of Marie Roget down the waters of the Seine. Quasimodo leers through the rosace; Mateo Falcone feels the earth with the butt of his gun and finds it not too hard for the digging of a child's grave; Clarimonde throws her passionate regard across the cathedral to the young novice about to take his vows; and, with a clatter of hoofs, the musketeers ride off for the reputation of the Queen of France.

A tapestry indeed.

I turn over my chapters, torn rags of colour loosely patched together, and then look back to my dream, that gorgeous thing that for these five years past has glittered and swung before me. I look from one to the other and back again, and am almost ready to tear up the book in order to regain the delightful possession of the dream. It was a task to be taken up reverently and with love; and indeed these are the only qualifications I can honestly claim. But it needed far more. Now that I have done my best, I look at the result and am afraid. I hate, like I hate the tourists in Notre Dame, impertinent little books on splendid subjects. With my heart in my mouth I ask myself if I have made one.

Impertinent or no, my book is very vulnerable, and since it is my own I must defend it, so far as that is possible, by defining my intentions. The chapters are, as I meant them be, threaded like beads along the history of the art, and it is very easy to quarrel not only with the beads, but also with the spaces between them. There is no one who reads the book who will not find somewhere a space where he would have had a gleaming bead, a bead, where he would have had a contemptuous space. I could not put everything in; but have left material for many complementary volumes. It would perhaps be possible, writing only of authors I have not considered, to produce a history of story-telling no more incomplete than this. But it will be found, and the fact is perhaps my justification, that few of my omissions have been made by accident. In order to have the satisfaction of coming to an end at all, I had to seek the closest limits, and those limits, once chosen, barred, to my own surprise, more than one great story-teller from any detailed discussion.

My object not being an expanded bibliography of story-telling, but rather a series of chapters that would trace the development of the art, many admirable writers, who were content with the moulds that were ready made to their hands, fell outside my range, however noble, however human was the material they poured into the ancient matrices. Dickens and Thackeray, for example, pouring their energy and feeling and wit and humour into the moulds designed by the eighteenth century, had, economically, to be passed over, since across the channel and in America men were writing stories, not necessarily greater, nor of wider appeal to mankind, but of more vital interest to their fellow artists. Throughout the book we hunt, my readers and I, with the hare. Always we discuss the art in those examples that seem the most advanced of their time. Just as with the Romantic movement I pass over from England to France, though the book contains no survey of French fiction, so when Cervantes is the leading story-teller, the artist nearest our own time, I shall be in Spain, though Spanish literature does not make a continuous thread in the history. I shall think more of the art than of my own country, or indeed of any country, and shall neglect all literatures in turn when they are producing nothing that is memorable in the progress of the technique of story-telling, however freely they may be contributing great or brilliant tales to the world's resources of amusement.

Then too, it will be noticed that I neglect my opportunities. What a semblance of erudition I might have made by discussing, among the origins of story-telling, the Greek and Latin specimens of narrative. But it seemed desirable, since it was possible, to trace the development of the art entirely in the literatures of our own civilisation. French and English, the two greatest European literatures, contain, grafted on their national stocks, every flower of the art that was cultivated by Greece or Rome. I have used for discussion only the books known and made by our own ancestors, and when, at the Renaissance, they lifted forms out of Antiquity and filled them with imitations of classical matter, I have considered the imitations rather than the originals, if only because any further influence they may have had on the development of the art was exerted not by the classical writers but by the Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians who made their manners and materials their own.

The book represents many years of reading, and two of writing where it should have taken ten. It has travelled about with me piecemeal, and, if I dated my chapters from the places where I wrote them, they would trace a very various itinerary. In France, in England, and in Scotland it has shared my adventures, and indeed it is a wilful, rambling thing, more than a little reminiscent of its infancy. Do not expect it to be too consistent. There is, I fear, no need for me to ask you not to read it all at once.

ARTHUR RANSOME.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I

ORIGINS

ORIGINS

Story-telling outside books.

Story-telling has nowadays only a shamefaced existence outside books. We leave the art to the artist, perhaps because he has brought it to such perfection that we do not care to expose our amateur bunglings. If a man has a story to tell after dinner he carefully puts it into slang, or tells it with jerk and gesture in as few words as possible; it is as if he were to hold up a little placard deprecating the idea that he is telling a story at all. The only tales in which we allow ourselves much detail of colouring and background are those in which public opinion has prohibited professional competition. We tell improper stories as competently as ever. But, for the other tales, we set them out concisely, almost curtly, refusing any attempt to imitate the fuller, richer treatment of literature. Our tales are mere plots. We allow ourselves scarcely two sentences of dialogue to clinch them at the finish. We give them no framework. We are shy, except perhaps before a single intimate friend, of trying in a spoken story to reproduce the effect of moonlight in the trees, the flickering firelight on the faces in a tavern, or whatever else of delicacy and embroidery we should be glad to use in writing.

But in the beginning story-telling was not an affair of pen and ink. It began with the Warning Examples naturally told by a mother to her children, and with the Embroidered Exploits told by a boaster to his wife or friends. The early woman would persuade her child from the fire with a tale of how just such another as he had touched the yellow dancer, and had had his hair burned and his eyelashes singed so that he could not look in the face of the sun. Enjoying the narrative, she would give it realistic and credible touches, and so make something more of it than the dull lie of utility. The early man, fresh from an encounter with some beast of the woods, would not be so little of an artist as to tell the actual facts; how he heard a noise, the creaking of boughs and crackling in the undergrowth, and ran. No; he would describe the monster, sketch his panic moments, the short, fierce struggle, his stratagem, and his escape. In these two primitive tales, and their combination in varying proportions, are the germs of all the others. There is no story written to-day which cannot trace its pedigree to those two primitive types of narrative, generated by the vanity of man and the exigencies of his life.

The professional story-teller.

At first there would be no professional story-tellers. But it would not be long before, by the camp fire, in the desert tents, and in the huts at night, wherever simple men were together relating the experiences of vigorous days, there would be found some one whose adventures were always the pleasantest to hear, whose deeds were the most marvellous, whose realistic details the most varied. Probably it would also be found that this same man could also give the neatest point to the tales of wisdom that were the children of the Warning Example. Men would begin to quote his stories, and gradually the discrepancy between his life and the life that he lived as he recounted it to his nightly audiences would grow too great to be ignored. His adventures would become too tremendous for himself, and, to save his modesty and preserve his credit, he would father them upon some dead chief, a strong man who had done things that others had not, and, being dead, was unable to contradict with his stone axe his too enthusiastic biographer. Such a man, like many a modern story-teller, would likely use his hold over the imagination of his fellows to become the medicine man of his tribe, the depositary of their traditions, their sage as well as their entertainer. He would create gods besides rebuilding men, and while his people were sheltering in the huts and listening atremble to the dying rolls of the thunder, would describe how his hero, the dead chief of long ago, was even now wrestling with the Thunder God and getting his knee upon that mighty throat. In the beginning man was a very little thing in the face of a stupendous Universe. Story-telling raised him higher and higher until at last heaven and earth were hidden by the gigantic figure of a man. In the Arthur legend, in the legend of Charlemagne, in the Sagas, we can watch men becoming heroes, and heroes supernatural. Then story-telling, having done so much, was to set to work in the opposite direction, and we shall see the figures of men gradually shrinking into their true proportions through each successive phase of the art, until, now that we have examples of all stages permanently before us, we manufacture gods, heroes, men, and creatures less than men, with almost equal profusion.

In early story-telling heroes are more than life size.

But in the beginning of written story-telling, when life was a huge battle in which it was the proper thing to die, when the heroes of stories were not finished off with marriage but by the more definite means of a battle-axe, when life was a thing of such swiftness, fierceness, and force, it was clear to his biographer that the creature who conquered it was surely more than man. His were the attributes of the gods, with whom he was not frightened to struggle or to be allied. Sigurd's pedigree is carried back to Odin. Pippin struck a sword through the devil who met him as he went to bath, and found that 'the shape was so far material that it defiled all those waters with blood and gore and horrid slime. Even this did not upset the unconquerable Pippin. He said to his chamberlain: "Do not mind this little affair. Let the defiled water run for a while; and then, when it flows clear again, I will take my bath without delay."' Beowulf fought with dragons and died boasting gloriously. Theirs are the figures of men a thousand times man's height, very man-like, but gigantic, like the watchers shadowed on the mountain mist.

Silk and homespun stories.

Each nation showed its peculiar spirit in huge cycles of narrative. The solid force of the Vikings and their sword-bright imagery survives in the Sagas; the French chivalry in the legends of Charlemagne and Arthur; the Celtic feeling for the veiled things in the spells and dreams of the Mabinogion. These were the great stories of their peoples. But side by side with them were others. The thralls of the Vikings heard of Brunhild and Gudrun, the serfs of France heard of Roland and Bertha with the Large Feet; but they had also tales of their own. The tales of silk have been preserved for us in writing, but what of the tales of homespun yarn that no old clerk thought worthy of a manuscript with gold leaves, and sweet faces, and blue and scarlet flowers entwined around its borders?

Very few of these homespun stories were written down. Reynard the Fox had few brethren except in spoken story-telling. Perhaps just because they never were written down, we can guess from the folk-lore that has survived among us to our own day, and from the tales we hear from savages, what were those tales of Jean and Jaques, that were perhaps nearer modern story-telling than the great books that were known by their masters. In folk-tale, as in Reynard the Fox, we find very different virtues from those of the knights, heroes, kings, and gods. In the silken tales the virtues are those of Don Quixote; in the homespun stories they are those of Sancho Panza. Chivalry would seem an old conceit; bravery, foolhardiness. Sagacity, cunning, and mischief are their motives. In the silken tales there is no scorn shown save of cowards, in the folk-tales none save of fools. Perhaps the proverbs illustrate them best. 'Do not close the stable door after the horse has gone.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' These are all short stories summed in a sentence, and any one of them might serve as the motive of a modern novel.

The swineherd and the king's daughter.

From the time that stories began to be written down, we can watch them coming nearer and nearer to this level, nearer and nearer the ordinary man. The history of story-telling henceforth is that of the abasement of the grand and the uplifting of the lowly, and of the mingling of the two. The folk-tale of the swineherd who married the king's daughter is the history alike of the progress of humanity and of the materials of story-telling.

Reduction in the size of the heroes.

But before the heroes of written story-telling could begin to be humble, they had to leave off being gods. It is possible to observe the transformation by comparing a set of early stories composed at practically the same time, but in different countries, in different stages of civilisation, and so, for the purpose of our argument, in sequence. The Volsunga Saga, the Mabinogion and Aucassin and Nicolete were all composed about the same time, but there are centuries of development between them. The heroes of the sagas are 'too largely thewed for life'; Aucassin is a boy. Love in the sagas is a fierce passion, the mainspring of terrific deeds; Aucassin's love is a tender obsession that keeps him from his arms, and lets him ride, careless and dreaming, into the midst of his enemies. In the Morte Darthur, as we have it in Malory's version of the much older tales, we can see the two spirits pulling at cross purposes in the same book. Beneath there is the rugged brutality of the old fighting tales, overlaid now with the softer texture of chivalry and gentleness. The one shows through the other like the grey rock through the green turf of our north country fields.

Technique of the Sagas.

The technique of the old tales varies most precisely with the humanity and loss of super-humanity of their heroes. In the sagas it is very simple. The effect is got by sheer weight and mass of magnificent human material. The details are those of personal appearance and armour; there are no settings. The men ride out gorgeous and bright in battle array, with gold about their helms, and painted shields, on great white horses against a sombre sky. There is no other background to the tales than heaven and the watchful gods. It was not until a later stage in their development that story-tellers painted their full canvas, and put in woodland and castle and all those other accessories that force their human figures to a human height. At first, like the early painters, they were content with the outlines of men doing things; their audiences, with unspoilt imaginations, filled in the rest themselves. Then, too, they told their tales in a short sing-song form of verse that served well to keep them in mind, but prevented any great variation in emphasis. A lament for the dead warrior, a pæan for his victory, and an account of his wife's beauty, a genealogical tree, were all forced to jog to the same tune, and the atmosphere and scent of their telling could only be altered by the intonations of the singer. They still depended for their effect on the men who recited them, and had not achieved the completeness of expression that would give them independence.

Of the Mabinogion.

The Mabinogion, that took literary form at about the same time, were made by a Celtic nation, far further advanced as artists than the Scandinavians. The men are not so great in their biographers' eyes as to hide all else. Picture after picture is made and left as the tale goes on. For example:—

'And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that man ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went into the castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which the roof seemed to be all gold; the walls of the hall seemed to be entirely of glittering precious gems; the doors all seemed to be of gold. Golden seats he saw in the hall, and silver tables. And on a seat opposite to him he beheld two auburn-haired youths playing at chess. He saw a silver board for the chess, and golden pieces thereon. The garments of the youths were of jet black satin, and chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon were sparkling jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with imperial stones. Buskins of new Cordovan leather on their feet, fastened by slides of red gold.

'And beside a pillar in the hall he saw a hoary-headed man, in a chair of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold thereon. Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were on his hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was bound with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chessboard of gold was before him and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his hand. And he was carving out chessmen.'[1]

These two paragraphs are almost perfect in their kind. See only how the details are presented in a perfectly natural order, each one as it would strike a man advancing into the hall, who would see everything before discovering exactly what the old man was about with his chessboard, his gold, and his steel file. The Welsh bards were trained more rigorously than the skalds, and were more delicate in their craftsmanship. And yet it is interesting to see how these two paragraphs are the work of a man writing for people in whose eyes gold and ivory and precious stones have still the glory of the new. The feeling of that little piece of story is the same we know ourselves when we have a little child before us, and are telling it wonderful things to make it open its eyes. The opening of eyes was one of the effects at which the early artists aimed.

Of Aucassin and Nicolete.

And then when we come to Aucassin and Nicolete, also written at the same time, but in a country still less barbaric, we find an even more delicate artistry, and a material far nearer that of later story-telling. Not only have the heroes become men, but the wondrous background has become that of real life. There are no castles in Aucassin and Nicolete whose walls are built 'of precious gems, whose doors are all of gold.' Nicolete 'went through the streets of Beaucaire keeping to the shadow, for the moon shone very bright; and she went on till she came to the tower where her friend was. The tower had cracks in it here and there, and she crouched against one of the piers, and wrapped herself in her mantle, and thrust her head into a chink in the tower, which was old and ancient, and heard Aucassin within weeping, and making very great sorrow, and lamenting for his sweet friend whom he loved so much.' Now that is a real tower, as we see again when presently Nicolete has to go along its wall, and let herself down into the ditch, hurting her feet sorely before climbing out on the other side. And is not that an admirable sense for reality that suggested the keeping to the shadow as she crept through the town? As for the humanity of the tale; we have been smitten to awe and worship by the heroes of the sagas, interested in the heroes of the magic-laden Mabinogion, and now we are made to be sorry for Aucassin. Like the swing of a pendulum, the character of heroes has swung from that of God-like ruffians, through that of men, almost to womanhood. We have had terrible tales, and wondrous tales, and now

'There is none in such ill case,

Sad with sorrow, waste with care,

Sick with sadness, if he hear,

But shall in the hearing be

Whole again and glad with glee,

So sweet the story.'

Loveliness and delicacy are here for their own sakes. We have already passed the early stages of narrative. We are in the time of sweetly patterned art; in the monastery over in England a monk is writing the air of 'Summer is icumen in,' the first known piece of finished, ordered music; everywhere clerks and holy men, aloof a little from the turmoil of life, are making gardens in the margins of missals, and on the roads throughout the world the vagabond students, as separate from the turmoil as the monks, are singing the Latin songs that promised the Renaissance.

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

The thirteenth century.

Thinking of the Renaissance now, we are apt to see only the flowers of its spring, the work of men like Boccaccio and Chaucer, who were strong enough and aloof enough to lift their heads above the flood of classical learning that refreshed them, and to write as blithely as if there had been never a book in the world before them. It is easy to forget those dull years after Chaucer that showed how exceptional he had been in being at once a student and an artist. It is still easier to forget the winter years of ploughing and sowing and premature birth that were before him, the years when no one thought that poetry could be more esteemed than knowledge, those greedy years of rough and ready erudition between the making of the students' songs and the building of the Decameron. Many versions of old legends come to us from that time like the Life of Robert the Devil, whose son fought with Charlemagne. Many of the legends of the kind that the son of Mr. Bickerstaff's friend was such a proficient in, and many collections of miracles and small romances of chivalry less beautiful than that of Aucassin, were at least written down in these years. The monasteries held most of the learned men, and became more important than the minstrels in the history of story-telling. They produced the books of miracles, and also several armouries of warning examples, many of them taken from the classics, for the vanquishing of scrupulous sinners and the edification of all. Books like the Gesta Romanorum, volumes of tales more or less irrelevantly tagged with morals, were the forerunners of collections of less instructive stories, like those of Boccaccio's country-house party, or those of Chaucer's pilgrims riding to Canterbury. These books, with their frequent reference to antiquity, showed signs of the new spirit that was spreading over Europe; the miracle-tales and the exaggerated wondering biographies held the essence of the old. Rome in the former was the city built by Romulus and Remus; Rome in the latter was the place that had been rescued by Charlemagne, the place that was ruled by the Pope.

But in that thirteenth century, when so many new things were struggling to birth, one book stands out above all others as the most perfect illustration of its spirit. The very fact that it is so much less of a story than the anecdotes of the Gesta Romanorum had almost made me pass it over in a more detailed criticism of them, but this same fact perfects it as an example of an artist's attitude in the time of the revival of classical learning. It was almost an accident that let me see these years of novel study and eager wisdom so clearly expressed in the long rhyming narrative of the Romance of the Rose, that was known above all other books for a hundred years, that was read by Ronsard, modernised by Marot, and partly translated by Chaucer. The accident was such that I think there is no irrelevance in describing it.

Meung-sur-Loire.

Walking through France with the manuscript of my history on my back, I came at evening of an April day into the little grey French town of Meung, set on the side of a hill above the Loire. Small cobbled streets twisted this way and that, up and down, between the old houses, and walking under the gateway, the Porte d'Amont, with its low arch and narrow windows overhead, I felt I was stepping suddenly from the broad, practical France, whose roadside crucifixes are made of iron a hundred at a time, into a forgotten corner of that older France whose spirit clings about the new, like the breath of lavender in a room where it has once been kept. In the inn where I left my knapsack there was a miller who drank a bottle of wine with me, and talked of old Jean Clopinel, who was born here in Meung those centuries ago. 'And it was a big book he had the writing of too, and a wise book, so they tell me, and good poetry; but it's written in the old French that's not our language any longer; I could not read it if I tried, and why should I? They know all about it in the town.'

Indeed the town seemed a piece of the old French itself, with its partly ruined church, and the little château crowned with conical cap-like towers, the broad Loire flowing below. I thought of The Romance of the Rose, Jean Clopinel's book, the book that meant so much to the Middle Ages, the book that, unwieldy as it is, is still deliciously alive. I thought of Jean Clopinel and his description of himself, put as a prophecy into the mouth of the God of Love:—

'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel,

Joyous of heart, of body well

And fairly built: at Meun shall he

Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]

I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript and a single volume of Defoe.

Jean de Meung.

Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their shrewdness and applicability. His share of The Romance of the Rose is a strange and suggestive contrast with the beginning that was written by Guillaume de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the second, and about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with the sweetness and purity of Aucassin and Nicolete; the second opens solidly with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two thousand lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with ancient instances according to the new fashion of the time.

Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it is difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of character, as when you read:—

'Let one demand of some wise clerk

Well versed in that most noble work

"Of Consolation" foretime writ

By great Boethius, for in it

Are stored and hidden most profound

And learned lessons: 'twould redound

Greatly to that man's praise who should

Translate that book with masterhood,'

and know that he made the translation himself.

The world at school.

The very popularity of the book proves that the whole world was at school then, and eager to be taught. Lorris, poet though he is, reminds his readers that his embroidered tale hides something really valuable, that it is 'fair wit with wisdom closely wed,' knowing well that he could find no better bait to keep them with him to the end. And Jean, when it comes to his turn, admirably expresses the contemporary point of view. He has no doubts at all between the comparative worths of manner and matter. He justifies the classics by saying:—

'For oft their quip and crank and fable

Is wondrous good and profitable.'

One of the schoolmasters.

The permanent value of knowledge is always before him, and having learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that he should empty it all out, only now and again giving the tale a perfunctory prod forward before continuing his discourse? Knowledge comes always before culture, and knowledge taken with such abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot be bored by a scholar who in the thirteenth century is so independent and so frank. Eager quarry work such as his had to precede the refined statuary of the Renaissance, and in The Romance of the Rose the pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a dealer in books alone. Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him, and there are in that rambling, various repository of learning promises enough of realistic story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently valuable to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by the classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It gives me pleasure to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and, protesting against calling spades anything but spades, prepare the way for Rabelais. What matter if the romance suffer a little, and the Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of scholarship? Jean himself moves on unhampered. He talked of women's table-manners so well that Chaucer himself could do no better than borrow from him. He attacked womenkind in general so mercilessly (with the authority of the classics behind him) that he won a stern rebuke from Christine de Pisan, that popular authoress of a century later, just as Schopenhauer might be censured by Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and, turning away, remarks that it is best, if a man wishes to feel respectful towards them, that he should not see them too close. Nor does he forget to let us know his views on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of nature over art in sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an illustration of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work. All these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth and Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture by Botticelli.

In Meung six hundred years ago.

I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the river in the dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and looking over the dim reflections to the far-distant bank, with its grove of huge trees, and the tower of the church with the outline of the gateway on the hill behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I was back in the old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar, and that up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor of Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes, that beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his must have been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of himself and the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town. For even now, though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all about it, and talk of him with that reverence in speaking that children use when they talk of a master whom they do not often see. I could not help feeling that their attitude was traditional. It has been the same for all these years, and perhaps long ago the townsfolk, passing in the narrow streets, hushed themselves before one door, and whispered, 'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are not many who can do that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame leg and dipped from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead tongue and put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on the parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be wise.

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

The Romancers before Chaucer.

The Franklin of Chaucer's pilgrims introduces his own story by remarking that,

'Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes

Of diverse aventures maden layes,

Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;

Which layes with hir instruments they songe,

Or elles redden hem for hir pleasaunce;

And oon of hem have I in remembraunce

Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.'

Chaucer had many of them 'in remembraunce,' and though he shared the knowledge of Jean de Meung, and was not, like the Franklin, a man who

'sleep never on the mount of Parnaso,

Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero,'

these tales, whether made by the 'olde gentil Britons' or the French, must not be forgotten in considering him.

The romancers who preceded him, and, clad in bright colours, chanted their stories before the ladies and knights in the rush-carpeted halls, turning somersaults between their chapters, as many a modern novelist might for the enlivenment of his narrative, were not scholars, but had great store of legendary matter from which they made their tales. Their material continued to be used, more and more elaborately, until the time of Cervantes, and in such books as the Morte Darthur we can see what manner of material it was. They were not in the least afraid of the supernatural, and they knew the undying attraction of hard blows. Their tales were compiled without reference to the classics, and contain all the characteristics of primitive story-telling noted in the chapter on Origins. They represented, fairly accurately, the Embroidered Exploit. They were tales of heroes, knights, and kings, half elfin stuff, half history, elaborate genealogical narratives in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and the grandsons' misfortunes are connected with their parents' revenge on the previous generation. There were great dragon-slayers before the Lord, and many who, like Charlemagne, were mighty killers of Saracens in the cause of Christendom. And then there were such tales as that of Melusine, whose father, King Helymas, married a fairy, and out of love for her broke his promise not to inquire how she was when she lay in childbed. Melusine suffers accordingly, spending every Saturday bathing herself, with her delicate white limbs hidden beneath a serpent's scaly skin. There comes to her a young knight called Raymondin whom she saves by her wisdom, enriches by her magic, weds with great pomp, and presents in successive years with ten sons, each curiously deformed by reason of the fairy blood. Raymondin, in espousing her, promises to make no inquiries about her doings on Saturdays. He breaks his promise, like his father-in-law before him, and when, in anger at the ill-deeds of one of his sons, he reproaches her with what she is, she sadly takes leave of him, and flies off through the window, 'transfigured lyke a serpent grete and long in fifteen foote of lengthe.' There were tales too of more charming fancy, like that of the queen who bore seven children at a birth, six boys and a girl, with silver chains about their necks. The midwife, in her devilish way, showed her seven puppies with silver collars instead of her litter of babes, privately sending the children to be killed. The children, however, left in the forest, were nurtured by a nanny-goat and cared for by a hermit, until the midwife discovered that they were not dead, when she sent men to see that they were properly scotched. But the men were so softened by the accident of meeting a crowd busied with the burning of a woman who had killed her child, that they had only heart to take the chains from off the babies' necks, whereupon they flew away as white swans. That is the beginning of the tale.

The Gesta Romanorum.

There were tales like these representing the Embroidered Exploit, and there were others illustrating in a curious manner the growth of the Warning Example. These latter were the forerunners of the tales of Boccaccio, who, like Chaucer, stands as it were with a Janus-head, looking both ways, modern and primitive at once. The Gesta Romanorum is a perfectly delightful book, whose purpose was, however, not pleasure but edification. It is a collection of stories containing amusement and religion, diversion and instruction—a primrose path from the everlasting bonfire. The anecdotes are from a thousand sources. Many of them are taken from the classics, but the references are so inaccurate as to make it pretty certain that the monkish writer had not read them, but had gleaned them from the conversation of other monks he knew. And some of them cannot have come to him within the monastery. I can imagine the old man, with his hood well thrown back, lolling on a bench, behind a tankard of good wine and a dish of fruit, laughing gleefully at the tale of the rich patroness or pious knight who wished to entertain themselves and him. For almost the only things monkish about the stories are the applications or morals, some of which are so far fetched as to make it clear that the monk compiler has included a tale for the pleasure he has himself won from it, and, after writing it down, been hard put to it to find a moral that should justify its place in a book intended as an armoury for preachers. Here is an example:—

'OF THE AVARICIOUS PURSUIT OF RICHES, WHICH LEADS TO HELL.'

'A certain carpenter, residing in a city near the sea, very covetous and very wicked, collected a large sum of money, and placed it in the trunk of a tree, which he stationed by his fireside, and which he never lost sight of. A place like this, he thought, no one could suspect; but it happened, that while all his household slept, the sea overflowed its boundaries, broke down that side of the building where the log was situated, and carried it away. It floated many miles from its original destination, and reached at length a city in which there lived a person who kept open house. Arising early in the morning, he perceived the trunk of a tree in the water, and thinking it would be of service to him, he brought it to his own home. He was a liberal, kind-hearted man, and a great benefactor to the poor. It one day chanced that he entertained some pilgrims in his house; and the weather being extremely cold, he cut up the log for firewood. When he had struck two or three blows with the axe, he heard a rattling sound; and cleaving it in twain, the gold pieces rolled out in every direction. Greatly rejoiced at the discovery, he reposited them in a secure place, until he should ascertain who was the owner.

'Now the carpenter, bitterly lamenting the loss of his money, travelled from place to place in pursuit of it. He came, by accident, to the house of the hospitable man who had found the trunk. He failed not to mention the object of his search; and the host, understanding that the money was his, reflected whether his title to it were good. "I will prove," said he to himself, "if God will that the money should be returned to him." Accordingly he made three cakes, the first of which he filled with earth, the second with the bones of dead men, and in the third he put a quantity of the gold which he had discovered in the trunk. "Friend," said he, addressing the carpenter, "we will eat three cakes, composed of the best meat in my house. Chuse which you will have." The carpenter did as he was directed, he took the cakes and weighed them in his hand, one after another, and finding that the earth weighed heaviest, he chose it. "And if I want more, my worthy host," added he, "I will have that"—laying his hand upon the cake containing the bones. "You may keep the third cake yourself." "I see clearly," murmured the host, "I see very clearly that God does not will the money to be returned to this wretched man." Calling, therefore, the poor and infirm, the blind and the lame, and opening the cake of gold in the presence of the carpenter, to whom he spoke, "Thou miserable varlet, this is thine own gold. But thou preferredst the cake of earth and dead men's bones. I am persuaded, therefore, that God wills not that I return thee thy money." Without delay, he distributed the whole among the paupers, and drove the carpenter away in great tribulation.'

So much for the story, which is indeed rather long to be quoted in so small a book. But listen now to the application:—

'My beloved, the carpenter is any worldly-minded man; the trunk of the tree denotes the human heart, filled with the riches of this life. The host is a wise confessor. The cake of earth is the world; that of the bones of dead men is the flesh; and that of gold is the kingdom of heaven.'

Chaucer and Boccaccio.

The modern novel could have no beginning in a literature so far removed from ordinary life as the romances, so brief in narration, so pious in ideal as the Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something of coarser grain than dreams, on the one hand, and on the other something fuller fleshed than the skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy its bones) was needed to produce it. It needed men and women, and it needed a more delicate narrative form, portraiture, and the fine art of story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Chaucer, for all that he wrote in verse, was not a trouveur when he was at his best. Boccaccio was not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical learning had given them humaner outlooks. The attitude of the Canterbury Tales is not that of the Song of Roland, or the Morte Darthur; the attitude of the Decameron is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity, telling stories to amuse their friends.

Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the trouveurs are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans.

chaucer

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer.

Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in 'Troilus and Criseyd,

'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace

Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'

And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well have liked 'at his beddes heed

'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed,

Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'

but he was a man of the true 'Merry England,' when oxen were roasted whole on feast-days, and pigs ran in the London streets. He followed the Court, but he knew the populace. His father was a vintner in Thames Street, and in the Cheapside taverns Chaucer found some of the material that his travels and learning taught him how to use. On St. George's day 1374 he was granted a pitcher of wine daily for life by his Majesty Edward the Third. It is probable that he met Petrarch at Padua. These two facts seem to me to present no very hollow portrait of the man.

Portraiture.

He brought into the art of story-telling a new clearness of sight in looking at other people and at the manners of the time. The romances had not represented contemporary life, but rather contemporary ideals. No one can pretend to find in Lancelot, in Roland, in Isoud of the White Hands, character-sketch or portrait. Lancelot is the perfect knight, Roland the perfect warrior, Isoud the beautiful woman. They were not a knight, a warrior, a woman. Those who heard the tales used the names as servant-girls use names in modern novels of plot, as pegs on which to hang their own emotions and their own ambitions. The lady who listened with her chin upon her hands as the trouveurs chanted before her, took herself the part of Isoud, and gave her lover or the lover for whom she hoped the attributes of Tristram. The jack-squire listening near the foot of the table himself felt Roland's steed between his legs. These names of romance were qualities not people. The Wife of Bath is a very different matter.

'In al the parisshe wyf ne was ther noon

That to th' offering bifore hir sholde goon;

And if ther dide, certeyn, so wrooth was she,

That she was out of alle charitee.

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground;

I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound

That on a Sonday were upon hir heed.

Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,

Ful streite y-teyd, and shoos ful moiste and newe.

Bold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.

She was a worthy womman al hir lyve,

Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve,

Withouten other companye in youthe;

But therof nedeth nat to speke as nouthe.

And thryes hadde she been at Jerusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge streem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,

In Galice at seint Jame, and at Coloigne.

She coude much of wandring by the weye;

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Y-wimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe.

Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,

For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'

She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered into getting it.

Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant spirit of the Canterbury Tales. That woman standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides.

Prose and verse.

After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art. But while his verse in the Canterbury Tales has the effect of good prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the Decameron.

Boccaccio.

Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in the Decameron glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:—

'By a clear well, within a little field

Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,

Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)

Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield

Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield

The golden hair their shadow; while the two

Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through

With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd.

After a little while one of them said

(I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck,

Each of our lovers should come here to-day,

Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?'

To whom the others answered, 'From such luck

A girl would be a fool to run away.'

He could write a poem like that; he could write the Decameron; he could write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life could beg his friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to the compilation of ponderous works of classical learning. There is a legend of a deathbed vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured, which, being reported to him, nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the gallant the additional mask of the Carthusian religious.

boccaccio

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

But the Boccaccio of the Decameron was the mature young man, of personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way with the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the rich colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court of Naples. Here he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps learnt from them a little of the art of narrative. He knew the Gesta Romanorum, and began to collect tales himself with the idea of making some similar collection. Noting story after story that he heard told (for it would be ridiculous to reason from the widespread origin of his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the world's books), he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and proportion. In him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales the longwindedness of the trouveurs was gone, gone also the nakedness of the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of the Gesta. These new forms were not things of utility that needed justification; they were things of independent beauty.

His story-telling.

Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales. He knew enough of classical literature to feel the possible dignity and permanence of prose, and he told his stories as they were told to him in a supple, pleasant vernacular that obeyed him absolutely and never led him off by its own strangeness into byways foreign to the tales and to himself. He found his material in anecdotes of current gossip, like Cecco Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey, and his clothes, and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He took it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and the little novel, the French nouvelle, a tale whose incidents are many and whose plot may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two forms have scarcely altered, and in the use of both of them he showed that invaluable art, so strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of compelling us to read with him to the end, even if we know it, for the mere joy of narrative, the delight of his narrating presence. We are so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous improvisations that we never ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the general theme. But in Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can be given to few story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious construction of men like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée and Flaubert.

Importance of framework in books of short tales.

Even without their setting his tales would have been something memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do not make good books. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are very short and make a collection of anecdotes. The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the Canterbury Tales are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems—the morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:—'Help me,' as Chaucer says:—

'Help me that am the sorwful instrument

That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'

As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:—

'Maults gone down, maults gone down

From an old angel to a French crown.

And every drunkard in this town

Is very glad that maults gone down.'

When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:—'With worse hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple piety:—'God grant us the like.' The Decameron owes much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death.

THE ROGUE NOVEL

THE ROGUE NOVEL

Democracy in literature.

Few characters in literature have had so large or so honourable a progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings' daughters of High Romance, charming, delicate creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as delicately fashioned as themselves, we should never have known the sterling dynasty of the Tom Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with their honest hearts and coarse hides warranted to wear. All those Kings of men, whose thrones were beer-barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels, whose perennial counsellor was Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection, would never have come to their own, and indeed would never have been born, if it had not been for the sixteenth century entry of the rascal into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such shaggy-headed, smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.

To such rogues as he must be attributed much of our present humanity; for until we could laugh at those of low estate, we held them of little account. There is small mention made of serving-men in the Morte Darthur or the Mabinogion, and when, in the Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre, we hear of the drowning of a number of them in trying to render easy the passage of their masters through the floods, the comment is extremely short: 'One must not despair for the loss of servants, for they are easy to replace.' On a similar occasion 'all the company were filled with a joy inestimable, praising the Creator, who, contenting himself with serving-men, had saved the masters and mistresses,' an index alike to the ferocity they still attributed to God and the rather exclusive humanity of themselves. Do you not think with sudden awe of the revolution to come? Do you not hear a long way off the trampling of a million serving-men, prepared to satisfy God with other lives? It is a fine contrast to turn from these queenly sentences to this little book, the autobiography of a beggar, who thinks himself sufficiently important to set down the whole truth about his birth, lest people should make any mistake. 'My father, God be kind to him, had for fifteen years a mill on the river of Tormes.... I was scarcely eight when he was accused of having, with evil intent, made leakage in his check sacks.... Letting himself be surprised, he confessed all, and suffered patiently the chastisement of justice, which makes me hope that he is, according to the Gospel, of the number of those happy in the Glory of God.' No very reputable parentage this, in a day when it was the fashion to derive heroes from Charlemagne or Amadis.

Lazarillo de Tormes.

It is a short step from the ironic to the sincere. The author of the book is laughing at his hero, and makes a huge joke of his pretensions. But to recognise, even in jest, that a vagabond rogue could have pretensions, or indeed any personal character at all beyond that of a tool in the hand of whoever was kind enough to use him, was to look upon him with a humaner eye and, presently, to recognise him in earnest as a fellow creature. It seems to me significant that the first rogues in our literature should come from Spain, a country that has never quite forgotten its Moorish occupation. In the Spanish student, who, so tradition says, wrote Lazarillo while in the University of Salamanca, there must have been something of the spirit of the race that lets the hunchback tell his story to the Caliph, and is glad when the son of the barber marries the daughter of the Grand Vizier. For, joke as it is, the book is the story of a beggar, told as a peculiarly fearless and brazen beggar would tell it, without suggesting or demanding either condescension or pity.

The morality of the underworld.

There is genius in the little book. Its author perhaps did better than he meant, for he brings on every page the moral atmosphere of the underworld, the old folk-morality, the same in sixteenth-century Spain as in the oldest tales of sagacity and cunning. Lazarillo's shameless mother apprentices him to a blind beggar who promises to treat him like a son and begins his education at once. He takes the boy to a big stone on the outskirts of the town, and bids him listen to the noise within it. The boy puts his head close to the stone to hear the better, and the old rascal gives him a thundering blow, which, the stone being an admirable anvil, nearly cracks his skull. That is his first lesson ... never to be unsuspicious ... and it is as characteristic of the others as of Reynard the Fox.

There never was so excellent a beggar as Lazarillo's master; no trick of the trade was unknown to him. As a fortune-teller, he could prophesy what his victims wished to hear. As a doctor he had his remedies for toothache, and for fainting-fits; not an illness could be mentioned but he had a physic ready to his hands. Then too, 'he knew by heart more prayers than all the blind men of Spain. He recited them very distinctly, in a low tone, grave and clear, calling the attention of the whole church; he accompanied them with a posture humble and devout, without gesticulations or grimaces of mouth, after the manner of those blind men who have not been properly brought up.' Indeed his only fault was avarice. 'He was not content with making me die of hunger,' says his pupil; 'he was doing the same himself.'

Under such a master Lazarillo's wits sharpen quickly. 'A fool would have been dead a hundred times; but by my subtlety and my good tricks, I always, or mostly (in spite of all his care), succeeded in getting hold of the biggest and best portion.' Lazarillo becomes as astute a rascal as his teacher, and, living fairly and squarely in the conditions of the underworld, his villainy does not damp his spirits, or disturb his peace of nights. I was reminded of him by a young tramp with whom I walked in the north country, a rogue with as merry a heart as he, and a similar well-fitting morality. With me, from whom he knew there was nothing to gain but good fellowship, he was a good fellow, walked with a merry stride, whistled as he went, sang me songs in the Gaelic of his childhood, and told me of the jolly tricks he had played with a monkey he had brought from over sea. We walked like men in the sunshine. But when, beyond a turn in the road, he saw some person coming a little better dressed, why then his face flashed into a winking melancholy, his stride degenerated as if by magic into a slouch, and it was odd if his mean figure and despairing hand did not attract a copper, for which he would call down a blessing. Then, as soon as we were out of sight of his benefactor, he would resume his natural walk and burst again into whistling and merriment. Lazarillo is as frank as he. He recognises his needs (Hunger is not an easy fellow to ignore), and would be much surprised if you denied his right to satisfy them. Nor is he disappointed in you. Every honest man must love a rogue, and you are as consciencelessly glad as himself when Lazarillo, by kneeling before him and sucking the liquor through a straw, diddles the blind man who greedily guards the wine bowl between his ragged knees. You feel that he has but his due when he happens upon a wife and a living and (if you read the continuation of his history[4]) find nothing blameworthy in the fact that he spends his last years in the clothes and reputation of a dead hermit, subsisting on the charity of the religious.

The form of the rogue novel.

I have talked at some length about the contents of this little book in order to illustrate the new material then brought into story-telling. Let me now consider the new form that came with it. Lazarillo de Tormes was a very simple development from the plain anecdote or merry quip of folklore or gossip, which was, as we have seen in the last chapter, one of the popular early forms of narrative. Boccaccio raised the anecdote to a higher level of art by giving it a fuller technique and expanding it into the short story. The inventors of the rogue novels achieved a similar result by stringing a number of anecdotes together about a particular hero, making as it were cycles of anecdotes comparable in their humbler way with the grand cycles of romance. Lazarillo himself is not an elaborate conception, but simply a fit rogue to play the main part in a score or so of roguish exploits, idly following one another as they occurred to the mind of the narrator. His life is a jest-book turned into a biography, a collection of anecdotes metamorphosed into a novel.

Its satirical material.

The new form gave story-telling a wider scope. In writing a collection of anecdotes it was difficult to realise the hero who was no more than a name that happened to be common to them all. It was impossible to make much of the minor characters who walk on or off the tiny stage of each adventure. But in stringing them along a biography, in producing instead of a number of embroidered exploits a single embroidered life, there need be no limit to the choice and elaboration of the embroidery. Though the hero was no more than a quality, a puppet guaranteed to jump on the pull of a string, the setting of his life turned easily into a satirical picture of contemporary existence, and satire became eventually one of the principal aims with which such novels were written.

The low estate of the rogue novel's hero made satire from his lips not only easy but palatable. In writing the opinions of a rogue you can politely assume that his standpoint is not that of his readers. For that reason they can applaud the rascal's wit playing over other people, or, if it touches them too closely, regard it with compassion as lions might listen to the criticism of jackals. Lazarillo contains plenty of good-humoured, bantering portraits: the seller of forged indulgences, the miserly priest, and particularly the out-at-elbows gentleman who walks abroad each day to lunch with a rich friend, and is unable on his return from his hungry promenade to keep from eyeing, and at last from sharing, the rough bread that his servant has begged or stolen for himself. Lazarillo's merit is that he writes of himself à propos of other people, and never barrenly of himself for his own sake. Smollett in writing Roderick Random is true to his traditions in getting his own back from schoolmasters and the Navy Office. And the arms of Dickens, who reformed the workhouses in telling the story of Oliver Twist, must have had quartered upon them the rampant begging bowl of the little Spanish rogue.

Now the characteristic language of satire is as pointed as the blade of a rapier, and for this we owe some gratitude to these rascally autobiographies whose plainness of style was nearer talk than that of any earlier form of narrative. The prose of the picaresque novel has been in every age remarkably free from the literary tricks most fashionable at the time. When your hero dresses in rags you cannot do better than clothe his opinions in simplicity. The writing of Lazarillo, of Tom Jones, of Captain Singleton, of Lavengro, is clear, virile, not at all ornate, the exact opposite to that of the Pastorals. Such heroes deliver their sentences, like Long Melford, straight from the shoulder, and would consider fine writing as so much aimless trifling in the air.

Picaresque autobiographies.

Mention of Lavengro suggests a paragraph on one of the most curious developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend to be imaginary. Lavengro and the Romany Rye are two parts of a rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.'

The development of the rogue novel.

But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about them as they rest upon our shelves. Lazarillo had many sincerer and more immediate flatterers—Thomas Nash, for example, whose Jacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, holds in itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingenious plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals, should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales of the Morte Darthur, before Malory made from their songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book.

sage

ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE

Its culmination in Le Sage.

Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age from that which produced his models. The

'Stately Spanish galleons

Sailing from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,

With cargoes of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his peaceable Galatea is no greater than that between the adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.

Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him doubly licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of low estate, so that he could see things from below, upside down, and comment upon them. His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could observe French things, call them by Spanish names, and laugh at them without being inexcusably impertinent. He had also a very excellent technique. Le Sage had read La Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of Theophrastus, and was the better able to allow his hero to take the hint from Lazarillo, and use his autobiography as an outlet for his social satire. Everything that Lazarillo had done, Gil Blas did in a larger and more skilful fashion. The book summed up the rogue novels in itself, and in its own right brought their influence to bear on English narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares with Don Quixote the parentage of the masculine novel.

THE ELIZABETHANS

THE ELIZABETHANS

The new conditions of professional story-telling.

Professional story-tellers before the sixteenth century seem very far removed from the novelists of our circulating libraries. Theirs was a simpler patronage; they had but to please one rich man, and they could live. The invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the conditions of modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall into the audience of the world, and patrons into the public. A man told his stories in his own room. He was not sure of a single listener; he might have ten thousand without raising his voice or pressing harder with his pen. Poets might write for their friends or the Court; but Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist by writing for the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and themselves. They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by charm of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm on paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly appearing; already, as in the case of Euphues, a single book might set the fashion for a thousand; already the novelist felt his audience through his sales. Men like Greene, swift 'yarkers up' of pamphlets, had to write what the Elizabethan public wanted—with the result that there is very little purely English story-telling of the period. The Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas. They fell in love with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all countries but their own, and for all times but those in which they lived. There never were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from Italy, from Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied crudely and continually from a newly discovered antiquity.

Elizabethan borrowings.

There was Paynter's Pallace, peopled with characters from the love-tales of France and Italy, in whose adventures Elizabethan playwrights found a score of plots. And then there was Pettie's Pallace, with its delightful title, A petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure, that shows how late our language lost its French. Pettie steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of right of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion a Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All the world was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical allusion was used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against her husband, explains his iniquity as follows:—

'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of the stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced Phyllis to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who left Ariadne in the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he subdued the monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate labyrinth! He cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused his own mother Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and ripped open, that he might see the place wherein he lay being an infant in her belly! So that what but filthiness is to be gathered of such grafts? What boughs but beastliness grow out of such stems?'

And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was he with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters as though he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in the dock before him.

'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the one and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness—such unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief and murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in him such falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish desire, in her such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat, in her such haggish hate, that I think them both worthy to be condemned to the most bottomless pit in hell.'

Lyly writes for women.

There is something in the style of this, as well as in the address to a female reader, that suggests the Euphues of John Lyly, published two years later. Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan romance, and brought into it many elements still characteristic of English story-telling, wrote as well as his letter to 'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie good friends, the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory to women—'To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth what they would.' They were grateful to him, and since he said that he would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's Casket, then open in a Scholler's studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in London but knew much of him by heart, addressed her husband or lover in terms his Lucia might have used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as in her looking-glass. His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of all his tales was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like most English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than of the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England' that he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And yet he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century, and throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards, the chaste mind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was to pour forth what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and Fielding and Smollett were to write, before the chaste mind was to exert any very lasting influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett wrote for men, while, like an earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take the measure of a woman's minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he would go as neere to fit them for a fancie as the other doth for a fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less squeamish than their descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this book planned to fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:—'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in which so much of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a 'Cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections were misplaced or unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride responsibility for the disease, must have found it easy to forgive him and to smile at so impotent a cure.

Euphuism.

The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than his matter. Like Pettie's, it is precious, but with a preciousness at the same time so elaborate and infectious that I am finding it difficult even now, in thinking about it, to keep from imitating it. Its principle is a battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which the sense, sometimes a little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or words that are not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed in a single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts, or longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in the intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There was something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three paragraphs ago; and here is an example from Lyly:—'Alas, Euphues, by how much the more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much the more I feare thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its embroidery.) 'The fine Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble; the greenest Beech burneth faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest silke is soonest soyled; and the sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most infect the clearest complection, and the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest fruite: the most delycate witte is allured with small enticement unto vice, and most subject to yeelde unto vanitie.'

'Cruditie and indigestion.'

Such a style could not but attract a newly educated people, still able to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of information is comparable to that generosity of gold and precious gems that has been noticed as characteristic of the writers of the Mabinogion. The Briton wondered at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It is not surprising that in this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be brought to perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says Montaigne, 'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the same: the stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have changed forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine John Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and a classical dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig out metaphors learned and ingenious, and present them immediately to his readers without putting any undue strain on his own intellectual digestion.

Lyly's followers.

His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If they could not write they talked his peculiar language. If they were novelists they wrote in something like his manner, and with cheerful consciences used his name as a trade-mark to attract his popularity to themselves. Lodge's Rosalynde is introduced as Euphues' Golden Legacie, and many other stories were connected by some ingenious silken thread to Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to laugh at euphuism. It was the first prophecy of the ordered poetic prose in which such delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of Lodge and Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at once its possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors, and when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to tell all his journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be, Philautus),' we perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind his sentences. The stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and Cassander, or the pretty history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as pleasant as the tales of Lodge and Greene.

How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene wrote in a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing on the high seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford gentleman, holding an appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having nothing else to do. Euphuism fell away from both journalist and sailor, leaving a pleasant glow over their style. They were more intent than Lyly on the plain forwarding of the narrative. For the long rhetorical harangues they substituted shorter, simpler speeches to express the feelings of their characters. The harangue was a step from the bald statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter speeches were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer copy of the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself. Dialogue was yet to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant argument, but in the best of his imitators it had become already a tool imperfectly understood but sometimes used for the actual progress of the tale.

Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan story-telling. Pandosto, Rosalynde, and some of Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their audiences, exceedingly alive.

Romance and confession.

In Greene's Pandosto we find reminiscences of old romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the Italian novelle, and plenty of the wild improbability that still had power over his audience. Pandosto is a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little preface on jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island—no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the finish—no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans, fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash's Jacke Wilton, the rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his romances had delighted their imaginations.

Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.

'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine in favour. But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty eares to conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if he come abord our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee knowes not the shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a rustie pollax, that sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either well bebast him, or heave the cockescombe over boord to feed cods. But curteous gentlemen, that favour most, backbite none, and pardon what is overslipt, let such come and welcome; Ile into the stewards roome, and fetch them a kanne of our best bevradge.'

As You Like It.

That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned to England from piracies on the western seas, introduces his Rosalynde. With such a preface, you would expect a ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and coarse words, certainly not the dainty little pastoral, romantic fairy story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding lessons of much profit for the guidance of his friend's children. The very contrast between its buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as that between the pastoral writers and their books, between, for example, Cervantes of Lepanto and the author of the Galatea, between the Sidney who died at Zutphen and the author of Arcadia. It is the tale of As You Like It, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title for it, since it contains every one of the surest baits with which to hook an Elizabethan audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that time when ships were sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found riches of the world, the hint of travel was a sufficient promise of delight. It begins with a dying knight who leaves a legacy between his sons, and its audience had not yet tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras. It has the fairy-tale notion of the youngest born, and was not England youngest son of all the world? There are beautiful women in it, and one of them dresses like a man—a delicious, romantic thing to dream upon. And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself, and therefore full of profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written in something not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the Elizabethans as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.

THE PASTORAL

THE PASTORAL