SOURCE: "The Humanist as Man of Letters: John Lyly," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1923, 8-35.

We all remember Lyly very much as Mr. Brooke remembered human perfectibility or Adam Smith. We "went in for that at one time", and from some college Survey of English Literature we have preserved a dim reminiscence of the Euphuist and the dramatist—the writer of an impossible style soon displaced in vogue by that other impossible style of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and the writer of plays soon eclipsed by the plays of Shakespeare. But we are not permitted to remain in this peaceful vagueness of mind. From time to time our ears are assailed by wars and the rumors of wars. We hear that Lyly reformed English prose, and anticipated Dryden; that he was Shakespeare's schoolmaster in dramatic and in lyric art; that he took Euphues, both style and matter, from a work of Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Guadix; that he silenced the Puritan pamphleteer "Martin Marprelate"; and then we hear that he did none of these things. One scholar asserts that Euphues is autobiographical; another believes it to be a 'novelized' play; a third offers a new explanation of the court allegory in Lyly's comedy Endimion; a fourth denies that Endimion contains any court allegory whatever. The fact is that to the student of English literature Lyly presents a series of problems quite as interesting and important as they are complex. For when all is said he proves to be not only in the first rank among the minor Elizabethans, but also a notable power in moulding the giants. The layman, therefore, has a right to expect now and then a report from Parnassus, telling him how matters go on the Muses' hill, gauging the present "state of the art", estimating how far the Lylian problems have advanced towards solution, and rising above their complexity to suggest rather their importance and their interest.

For such a report an occasion was furnished by Mr. Bond's critical edition. His notes and essays summed up the results of much previous scholarship, and made many valuable additions, chiefly by way of elucidating Lyly's text. But it was his establishment of the text itself that laid a solid foundation for subsequent scholarship—a foundation upon which scholarship has not been slow to build. The compte rendu duly followed, in the shape of Mr. J. D. Wilson's brilliant essay, winner of the Harness Prize at Cambridge in 1904; and if the present article sometimes echoes Mr. Wilson, it is because, though more recent scholarship (to which he has himself contributed in no mean degree) has made it necessary to modify some of his conclusions, yet his main assertions are still the mere truth.

Then came what at first sight looked like a synthesis of the omne scibile about Lyly—M. Feuillerat's imposing volume, which is certainly, like Mr. Bond's edition, a point of departure for Lylian scholarship. It is M. Feuillerat's theses which the present essay proposes chiefly to examine.

Feuillerat's Lyly is a worthy addition to the series of thorough studies made in recent years by French Anglists like MM. Huchon, Reyher, Charlanne, Verrier, and—to mention the most distinguished last—M. Legouis, who suggested M. Feuillerat's study and to whom it is dedicated. It is based upon a well-nigh exhaustive reading of the materials, and a conscientious documentation of every statement of fact. The author, too, has qualified himself eminently to treat the Elizabethan court-drama by his earlier work in editing the records of the Revels Office, and to treat Elizabethan fiction, criticism, and lyric verse, by his work upon an edition of Sidney.¹ His training, his industry, are above cavil.

Not so his judgment, his sense of proportion, his logical method. For, in making his own most acceptable additions to the body of facts upon which the criticism of Lyly must rest, M. Feuillerat has sometimes lost the judicial attitude toward these facts in their totality. His own contributions would seem to have bulked so large as to obscure other considerations that might tend to oppose them or to scale down their importance. Thus his work loses its title to be regarded as a judicial synthesis of what is now known about Lyly; and thus, too, it becomes, in a second and less favorable sense, a point from which future scholarship will not seldom be compelled to depart.

I

By means of a manuscript genealogy and other evidence hitherto unnoticed, M. Feuillerat has shown that John Lyly's grandfather was William Lyly, the celebrated grammarian, godson of Linacre, friend of Erasmus, Colet, and More. The family, thus founded in humanism, moves from the humanist scholar William Lyly to the humanist man of letters John Lyly, and shortly after disappears. It has its being in the humanistic tradition.

John Lyly was born about 1554 in Kent, probably in Canterbury, where his father Peter afterward became Archbishop Parker's Registrar, and where the family certainly lived in the years following 1562. Reared in the shadow of the Cathedral, the boy in 1569 went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, as his grandfather and uncle had gone before him. Oxford, no longer the home of the new learning, had relapsed into scholasticism; the studies were arid, the teachers lax, the students lax without, perhaps, being too arid. Lyly neglected his studies, was rather a local wit and trifler—"the fiddlestick of Oxford", yet took his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1575, and, perhaps in the same year, went down to London to seek his fortune. This was apparently favored by family interest at court; Lord Burleigh, as a friend of the Archbishop, would seem to have patronized the Registrar's son before 1574; and though in that year the great Cecil declined to recommend his protégé to a fellowship at Magdalen, Lyly may still have entertained hopes of advancement when client and patron should be at close range. At this point he drops out of sight for three years. M. Feuillerat's research has found no document showing where Lyly was from 1575 to 1578, when he was writing Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt, the first part of his most famous work. And when this appeared at Christmas of 1578 it was dedicated not to Lord Burleigh, but to Lord Delaware.

M. Feuillerat presents two pieces of evidence—neither of them, in our opinion, possessed of the slightest probative force—that Lyly was under Burleigh's supposedly Puritanic influence at the time he was producing the first part of Euphues. One is Lyly's having resided for a time, probably before the end of 1578, at the Hospice of the Savoy, over which Burleigh exercised a certain supervision and control, and which was (and is still, mutatis nominibus) but a step from Burleigh's residence, Cecil House in the Strand. The other is the fact that Lyly having entered the service of Lord Oxford, Burleigh's scapegrace son-in-law, and having dedicated to Oxford Euphues and his England (the second part of Euphues, published in 1580), addressed to Burleigh, probably in July, 1582, an undated letter, still extant, requesting his intercession to clear Lyly of certain imputations under which he was suffering in the mind of Oxford. Certainly neither Lyly's residence in the Savoy nor this long subsequent letter proves that he was at any time under the influence of Burleigh's Puritanism. Now upon the assumption that Lyly was decisively affected by the puritanizing circle at Cecil House just when he was writing Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt, M. Feuillerat has rested his interpretation of this first part of Euphues as a Puritan tract with a thin thread of story added by way of "horrible example". This notion must be dismissed in order to clear the way for a true appreciation of Euphues.

II

A Puritanical element, drawn from English Protestant humanism, Euphues undoubtedly contains. The fact is advertised by Lyly's borrowing the name Euphues from Ascham's account of the "well-natured" youth. The error lies in over-emphasizing the importance of this ingredient at the expense of the other ingredients of Lyly's work. For Euphues is a fabric woven of many strands, not one or two, and draws its life from many traditions. It contains a long treatise on Education, borrowed from Plutarch by way of Guarino, Elyot, and Erasmus. It contains a long dialogue wherein Euphues convinces an atheist of his error by means of arguments taken mostly from the Bible. It contains a long misogynistic warning against women's wiles and falling in love, the so-called Cooling Card for all Fond Lovers, which, as M. Feuillerat is the first to observe, is taken from Ovid's De Remedio Amoris. It contains letters on such antique and Renaissance commonplaces as consolation to an exile (Plutarch again), and the corruption and misery of Courts, the subject of many tracts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, before the Courtier had fully superseded the Knight. Some part of the arrangement, and some inappropriate details, of Lyly's mass of didactic and moralizing material probably came from Guevara's wholly didactic and moralizing Libro del Emperador Marco Aurelio, or rather from its translation The Diall of Princes (1557), by Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch's Lives. To this modest statement of indebtedness has Landmann's sweeping theory of the Spanish origin of Euphues been reduced.

It has been thought, too, that Euphues is of the family of Castiglione's Courtier—that large family of courtesy-books or moral court-treatises which were so widely read at the time of the Renaissance. But the difference between The Courtier and Euphues is a difference in kind. Castiglione's work is a dialogue conducted by a party of ladies and gentlemen who deliberately frame their ideal of a courtier. It is primarily intellectual; and its great beauty of style, its frequent anecdotes and stories, and the glow of its celebrated rhapsody upon Platonic love, hardly win for it a place outside the "literature of knowledge". Lyly's work, for all its didacticism, is primarily imaginative, and despite its weaknesses and tedium, still belongs to the "literature of power". Even the long conversations of its ladies and gentlemen, often turning upon dubbii or questions in the casuistry of love after the Italian manner (after the manner of The Courtier itself indeed), cannot disguise the fact that its main interest lies in a story about these ladies and gentlemen. The Courtier remains an ideal in the minds of his framers, who discuss him; while Euphues is a personage in a tale and speaks for himself. The Courtier is a discussion, Euphues a story containing discussions. The difference is decisive. And in fact, the conversations à l'italienne give to Euphues a specious air of realism, representing as they do a contemporary social custom. It was largely these that led M. Jusserand to call Euphues the first novel of the drawing-room.

Euphues, then, above all, contains, or rather is, a story. And this is not merely an exemplification of doctrine, as are the stories in The Courtier; it is not merely a "horrible example" to point a sermon; it is an interesting, living, human tale of love and friendship, folly and disillusion; and although criticism has been slow to recognize the fact, in Euphues the tale's the thing.

Euphues, a handsome, wealthy, and witty young gentleman of Athens, in the course of his travels arrives at Naples. Finding himself able to evade the snares of the parasites that are ready to prey upon him, he rejects the well-meant admonitions of Eubulus, an old gentleman who counsels him against indulging the follies of youth, and proceeds to make friends with Philautus, a young Neapolitan, with whom he shares his pleasures. Philautus is the accepted lover of Lucilla, the beautiful daughter of one of the governors of the city, Don Ferardo. At a supper-party at her house he introduces his friend to his betrothed. The two fall in love at sight. After supper Euphues and Lucilla discourse to the company upon the question whether it is beauty or wit that more conduces to love; until his feelings overcome him and he is obliged to retire. Left alone, Lucilla in a long monologue confesses to herself her love for Euphues, and resolves to have him despite the probable opposition of her father. Euphues in his chamber also soliloquizes at great length, weighing his love against his friendship, and resolves that his love must prevail. Philautus now seeks him out at his lodging, and, finding him sick, asks his confidence and proffers his own good offices. Euphues deceives his friend by feigning that he is lovesick for Livia, one of Lucilla's companions. Having thus disarmed suspicion, he the more readily finds an opportunity to woo Lucilla, who after some hesitation admits that she returns his love. Shortly afterward, when her father urges her to marry Philautus, she declares in Philautus's presence that she prefers Euphues. A breach between the friends is the result. As Ferardo opposes the new match, Euphues must for a time avoid Lucilla. During his absence she falls in love with one Curio, and definitely jilts Euphues when he next appears. Her fickleness forms the basis of a renewal of friendship between Euphues and Philautus. Euphues, now a confirmed misogynist, retires to Athens to resume his studies. Lucilla's marriage to Curio so grieves Ferardo that he dies; and although she is left heir to his wealth, she comes—as we learn later from one of the letters of Euphues—to a miserable end in the streets of Naples. From another letter we gather a hint that Philautus is now courting Livia. So closes Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt….

In Euphues, the prodigality of the prodigal has been both narrowed and purified. There is only the barest mention of would-be parasites; the feasting and dicing are reduced to a supper and a game of cards at Lucilla's house; while the Lais of the Acolastus plays is represented by Lucilla. Euphues's introduction to Lucilla by the traditional Philautus, together with her abnormal fickleness and her disgraceful end, leave no doubt of her descent from Lais; nevertheless Lucilla is upon a very different social level; and Euphues's love for her has become "the love of a gentleman for a lady…. This shifting of scene from the tavern to the drawing-room was a very important one in the history of our literature…. In making love the central theme of his book, in raising the action of the whole from a physical to an intellectual plane, in converting the repentance of the prodigal into the misanthropy of a philosopher, Lily struck out three paths of great importance."²

The Prodigal Son tradition thus accounts in a very satisfactory manner for Euphues's general evolution from wit and folly to misanthropy; for the purely adventitious personage of Eubulus—once organic, now evidently a mere functionless survival; and, largely, for the rôles of Philautus and Lucilla. Largely, but not wholly. For instance, there is nothing in the Acolastus tradition, I believe, that makes Philautus the lover or the betrothed of Lucilla, or that suggests his being "cut out" by Euphues. These important threads in the story of Euphues seem to be drawn from the other strand of tradition.

In Boccaccio's novella, already referred to, a young stranger, Tito, sojourning in Athens, becomes the friend of a young citizen, Gisippo; is by him introduced to his betrothed, Sofronia, a maiden of noble birth; falls in love with her immediately and retires to his chamber; soliloquizes, determining that his love must prevail over his friendship; falls sick of love; is visited by his friend; receives his friend's request for confidence and offer of service; and, at first, deceives his friend. Here the two plots part company; for Boccaccio's is a tale of true friendship, Tito at length confessing to Gisippo his love for Sofronia, and Gisippo yielding her to him, while Lyly's is a tale of friendship betrayed and faithless love. But, as far as it goes, the parallel is exact. The derivation from Boccaccio is rendered a priori plausible by the accessibility and the great celebrity of Boccaccio's tale, and by the fact that Lyly in Euphues twice names Tito and Gisippo, once with "Sempronia". It is corroborated by a number of verbal parallels.³

Two points more may be noted. Lyly gets from Boccaccio not only narrative matter, but narrative art as well; for he evolves and articulates his derived material almost precisely as Boccaccio does. In each we find the meeting of the friends; the visit to the betrothed; the retirement of the new lover to his chamber; in each, his soliloquy weighing his love against his friendship and issuing in the same resolution; in each, the visit of his friend; in each, his attempted deception of his friend. And this last leads further: the subsequent evolution of Euphues, the part where it differs from Tito and Gisippo may perfectly well have been suggested by Tito and Gisippo. Simply let Euphues succeed in that which Tito attempted, let him actually deceive his friend and take Lucilla from him: thenceforth the tale will consist of a series of retributions growing out of this initial offence. Euphues's treachery will be punished by Lucilla's desertion of him; and this, now quite in character with her descent from Lais, will be punished by her ending as Lais indeed; so that there will be left as possible lovers only Philautus and that shadowy Livia whom Lyly had invented as a stale for the deception practised by Euphues upon his friend.

Boccaccio's story belongs to one branch of the mediæval Legend of Two Friends. Obscurely related to the antique stories of friendship and to Amis and Amile, it is plainly connected with the Old French poem Athis et Prophilias, which probably derives from a late Greek romance. And the remarkable point is that the same articulation which Lyly got from Boccaccio, Boccaccio got from Athis et Prophilias, where we likewise find the two friends from different cities, their meeting, the introduction of the stranger to the citizen's betrothed, his falling in love, his soliloquy, the citizen's visit to him at his chamber, etc. So that Lyly followed what may almost be called a convention, and a very ancient convention,⁴ to which at the last moment, he gave a new turn.

The two strands thus woven by Lyly into the plot of Euphues now part once more; and each has its own continuation into the future. That from Boccaccio runs on into The Two Gentlemen of Verona⁵ where it exhibits, quite as usual, the two friends, the arrival of one at a city where the other is settled, the introduction of the one by the other to the latter's betrothed, the falling in love at sight, the soliloquy weighing love against friendship and deciding in favor of love, and the innovation, introduced by Lyly, of the one friend's playing the other false. The other strand—that from the Prodigal Son—almost vanishes in Lyly's innovation, which has developed the prodigal into the wit, the lover, and the misanthrope, for now the Elizabethan "malcontent", as exemplified in Hamlet, in Jaques, in Marston's Malcontent, and elsewhere, exhibits very distinct characteristics of Euphues.

In the hands of genius Euphues became Hamlet, while his bitterness and disillusionment strike for perhaps the first time in modern literature that note of Weltschmerz which was to form so large an element of the romantic spirit….. Euphues, in short, is the Byronic hero of the sixteenth century.⁶

III

Euphues and his England, the second part of Euphues, is virtually an independent work, and, like most sequels, rather a disappointment. What it gains in imaginative freedom—for the didactic element in it is greatly reduced—it loses in unity. It is not one story, but three, loosely strung together by continuing the name of Euphues and Philautus. On their ship bound for England Euphues relates to Philautus the first of the three stories:—

Callimachus, a young traveller and spendthrift, was warned in vain by his dying father, the rich Cassander, and by his father's brother, a hermit of the same name. He sowed his wild oats, learned by experience to deal wisely with his inheritance, and at length received it from his uncle, with whom his father had left it in trust.⁷

The two friends land at Dover, see the sights there and at Canterbury, and are entertained by a retired courtier, Fidus, an "old man as busie as a Bee among his Bees." Fidus tells them the story of his love for Iffida, a love unrequited because of her love for Thirsus; after whose death in battle with the Turks she also died, and left Fidus to an old age of serene grief.

Euphues and Philautus now reach London, where ensues the third and chief story of the book. Philautus falls in love with Camilla, a lady of great beauty though not of high birth, and courts her without success; for she is being sought by the noble Surius, who at length, as we learn from a letter of Philautus to Euphues, wins and marries her. In the same letter Philautus tells how he himself, turning resolutely from his hopeless love, has married the Lady Frauncis, "his Violet", niece of the Lady Flavia, at whose house they met. Euphues scarcely figures in the story; he disappears during Philautus's courtship, to reappear for a moment at the Lady Flavia's before his return to Athens and his final retirement to the "Mountaine Silixsedra". Throughout the stories of Fidus and Iffida and of Philautus and Camilla are scattered the same conversation-pieces or drawing-room scenes that have been observed in the first part of Euphues; dubbii are discussed; Philautus in a garden hands to Camilla a love-letter enclosed in a pomegranate; she returns her answer inserted in a copy of Petrarch; the tone of polite social intercourse is maintained, perhaps more consistently than in The Anatomy of Wyt; and Euphues is still the same pitiless sermonizer. He now sends to Philautus instructions for the conduct of his married life (Plutarch's Conjugalia Prœcepta), and to the ladies of Italy a pattern for their behavior—Euphues Glasse for Europe—an account of England, largely taken from Cæsar. In a word, except for its inferiority in structure, the second part of Euphues is essentially like the first. That radical change from Puritanism to Italianism, from the influence of Lord Burleigh to the influence of Lord Oxford, for which M. Feuillerat has argued, is surely difficult to perceive.

Nor is it easy to see the force of his objections to calling Euphues a novel, and if a novel, then the first English novel. These cannot be reproduced here, but they are completely answered by M. Feuillerat's own remark: "Mais n' admettre dans un genre que les spécimens bien caractérisés et complètement développés, c'est nier les lois de l'évolution en littérature." Even in Boccaccio's version the story has a certain breadth and body which tend to take it out of the pointed, anecdotal novella-form; and Lyly's changes all tend in the same direction. Euphues's successful dissimulation, and the successive infidelities of Lucilla, not only heighten the reader's interest but give to the plot considerable complication and amplitude. In the character of Euphues, and perhaps in that of Lucilla, there are genuine change and development. Now amplitude in plot—a 'long story' as distinguished from a 'short story'; and, above all, development in character; these taken together are characteristic of the novel, and of no other genre whatsoever. Euphues exhibits other characteristics which favor this classification; and these are frankly stated by M. Feuillerat: the scenes of contemporary social life, the use of letters, as in Richardson, and the 'psychological' analysis of the feelings by way of soliloquy. But these, together or severally, are only accidental to the genus novel; so that it detracts nothing from Lyly's credit to find, as M. Feuillerat finds, some or all of them exhibited by previous writers. Pettie's Palace of Pleasure does in fact anticipate Euphues in all these respects; but nobody would assert of Pettie's tales, despite their soliloquies and letters and contemporary scenes, that they are anything but short stories, devoid of the unfolding characterization and the full-bodied plot of the novel.

More considerable are the claims⁸ of George Gascoigne's A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. (1573), entitled in a second edition (1575) The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valasco. This, however, is almost a canzoniere, or at least a cante-fable: to a situation which would elicit a sermon from Euphues, Jeronimi responds with a 'sonnet'; the function of the prose narrative, one feels, is very largely to furnish situations that will link and explain the verses; and the whole ends suddenly and most inartificially, not more because Gascoigne is weary of his creatures than because he has no more verses to work off. Again, despite its drawing-room scenes, dubbii, and letters, Gascoigne's prose tale, taken on its own merits, is much less a novel than a roman d'alcôve—and a good one: it anticipates not so much Richardson as Crébillon fils. Finally, it is quite without character-development. On the whole, this precursor of Euphues wants some of the essential differentia which stamp Euphues as a novel. A well-rounded plot, together with unfolding characterization—these, I believe, first appear in Euphues.

The seed fell upon barren soil. The hold of the romance and of the novella remained too strong. The novella, with its single point, rudimentary characterization, and want of background, lay so easily within the skill of ordinary writers and the appreciation of ordinary readers that it kept its vogue well into the seventeenth century; while the typical form of seventeenth-century fiction, the romance, despite its amplitude and complication of plot, and its elaborate descriptive setting, failed to develop adequate characterization. So that when the novel came, in the next century, Euphues was too far removed in time, and too thoroughly insulated by intervening literary forms, to serve as a model, and cannot be said to have iufluenced the evolution of English fiction. Its importance as a novel has been obscured by this fact, not less than by its volume of didactic and moralizing matter; so that Dr. Landmann, Mr. Bond, and M. Feuillerat have thought its plot scarcely worth noticing.

IV

Interest in the famous style of Euphues, 'Euphuism', has also tended to draw attention from Euphues as a novel. Mr. Croll dismisses in one footnote the claims of Tito and Gisippo to be a source of the plot, in another footnote favors M. Feuillerat's autobiographical theory, and nowhere mentions the Acolastus tradition, but makes his entire introduction a study of "The sources of the Euphuistic Rhetoric."

Euphuism was certainly not originated by Lyly. Dr. Landmann found it in Pettie's Pallace of Pleasure, full blown; Sir Sidney Lee found something like it in Lord Berners; and M. Feuillerat seems to have found it again in Fisher, Elyot, and More. That Dr. Landmann likewise saw Euphuism in Guevara is not surprising, either; for the chief 'note' of Euphuism is the ancient rhetorical device of balance; which naturally appears in almost any piece of Renaissance prose that imitates the ornate prose of post-classical Greek and Latin rhetoricians.

To these post-classical models of Euphuistic rhetoric Mr. Croll adds models distinctly mediæval, which he believes to be its more direct sources. Euphuism, according to his thesis, is not, pace Norden, a Renaissance revival of the figures of Gorgias, Isocrates or Cicero; it is not Ciceronian but anti-Ciceronian; it exhibits the distinctive patterns which the monastic schools of rhetoric set up for mediæval oratorical style, the style of sermons, of courtly chronicles and harangues, and of works of hortatory and contemplative moralizing and devotion. This style does not need to be revived at the Renaissance, for it is continuous, both in Latin and in Middle-English prose, from the late Middle Ages into the sixteenth century; and Euphues does not so much imitate as continue it.⁹

Its characteristic is an excessive elaboration of the figures of balance (schemata), emphasizing the balanced words or groups, usually short coördinate groups, by means of antithesis, repetition, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. Lyly used these devices; but he logically carried out the balance upon a still larger scale; setting not only word against word, phrase against phrase, and clause against clause, but, as Mr. Child has shown, sentence against sentence; so that he organized the whole paragraph upon a basis of symmetry. Once more we find Lyly working in a humanistic tradition to which he adds something of his own.

So of the other 'note' of Euphuism, the one which its contemporaries considered distinctive—the use of "unnatural natural philosophy" to furnish comparisons. From Aristotle, Ælian, Plutarch, Pliny, and the mediæval bestiaries, the Renaissance inherited a vast quantity of misinformation about animals, vegetables, and minerals. To this Lyly contributed many inventions, like "the Syrian mudde, which being made white chalk by the sunne, never ceaseth rolling, til it lie in the shadow", or "the stone that groweth in the river of Caria, the whiche the more it is cutte, the more it encreaseth". Furthermore, Lyly employed these supposed facts of natural history in a way that is humanistic in a very authentic sense, a way coincident with the Renaissance turn from litterae sacrae to litterae humaniores, from theology to "the humanities". The bestiaries, lapidaries, and volucraries of the Middle Ages, systematically assuming a necessary parallelism between the phenomena of nature and the scheme of salvation, used birds and beasts and stones as symbols of things divine—the rising of the Phœnix from his ashes, for example, as an argument of the resurrection. But Lyly assumes a necessary parallelism between the nature of things and the nature of man; so that, with him, natural phenomena, supposed or invented, became arguments not of matters divine, but of matters human, of human nature. Euphues exclaims to Lucilla, in a passage typically Euphuistic:—

Howe might I excell thee in courtesie, whome no mortall creature can exceede in constancie?…. I finde it now for a settled truth…. that the Purple dye will neuer staine, that the pure Cyuet will neuer loose his sauour, that the greene Laurell will neuer change his coulour [and ergo, or rather argal], that beautie can neuer bee blotted with discourtesie.

Of the characteristics of Lyly's style, it is exceedingly doubtful whether a single one exerted any influence upon English prose. The excess of comparison, the preposterous inventions, the absurd argumentative parallelism between natural phenomena and the soul of man, fell out of vogue in Lyly's own time, even in his own later work. They were untrue and unbeautiful, and could not endure. The point is not so easily decided as to those qualities in Lyly's style which, although he and his imitators carried them to excess, are fundamental to all good writing: balance, symmetry, deliberate structure, the clean-cut matching of clauses; as against the rambling, tacking, slovenly patchwork of much Elizabethan prose. In these respects Lyly was not an originator; he only popularized, by means of the interesting story of Euphues, a style already developed in English by a long line of predecessors. Lyly represents thus only a stage in the general movement of English prose towards organization. After the immediate vogue of Euphuism has passed, there is not, I believe, evidence showing that later writers of organized prose, even writers of balanced prose, like Sir Thomas Browne and Dr. Johnson, were at all influenced by Lyly. As for the English paragraph, its organization moved in a direction specifically other than that adopted by him. On the whole, it may be said that Lyly organized his sentences, as did many of his predecessors; that he organized some of his paragraphs, as his predecessors did not; that after him, many writers increasingly organized both sentences and paragraphs; but that it has not been shown specifically that the style of any of them was influenced by Lyly's Euphuism. The structure of subsequent English prose was post, not proper, hoc, and belongs to a tradition of which Euphuism is only a passing phase.

V

It must have been soon after the publication of Euphues and his England (1580) that Lyly turned from the novel to comedy. He was not, however, employed in the Revels Office; nor can we be absolutely certain that he was an Assistant-Master at St. Paul's Choir School and commanded in this way the services of the boy-actors there. As M. Feuillerat observes, the phrase "Vice-master of Poules and Foolemaster of the Theatre" derisively applied to Lyly by Gabriel Harvey, may mean that Lyly was master of that stock personage the "Vice", as enacted by Paul's Boys, i.e., that he wrote the Vice's part for them or coached them in it. Other passages from Harvey seem to imply that Lyly acted some of the parts he wrote, e.g., that of Midas. His milieu was favorable, at all events, to play-writing. His patron Oxford was in high repute as a writer of comedies, and entertained a troupe of boy-actors of his own. The Queen, to whom Lyly was later appointed "Esquire of the Body", was notoriously fond of plays.

Limits of space forbid the detailed discussion here of Lyly's comedies. For the rest, Messrs. Baker, Bond, Wilson, and Feuillerat have together done the subject ample justice. We must be content, therefore, to signalize only one or two matters among the many that deserve attention, and to suggest some general considerations upon Lyly's dramatic method and achievement.

One of Lyly's supposed titles to fame must be given up at the outset. It is probable that most of the songs inserted in his plays were not written by him. Mr. W. W. Greg takes from Lyly all except the mediocre songs that were published in the Quartos during Lyly's lifetime. Cupid and my Campaspe Played goes by the board; and the lark supposed to be Lyly's did not teach the lark in Cymbeline, which was in fact the earlier riser of the two, and sang first at heaven's gate. These songs, and the others with the exceptions noted, were probably seventeenth-century interpolations. They appear in no edition published during Lyly's lifetime, and are printed as his for the first time in Blount's collection, Six Court Comedies, in 1632. Lyly's title of poet, if deserved at all, is deserved on other grounds.

"Car il était vraiment poète", says M. Feuillerat, "celui qui, avec un instinct infaillible, a su choisir dans les trésors de l'antiquité ceux en lesquels était pour ainsi dire concentré le maximum de grâce et de beauté." Certainly, in the selection of charming myths as the basis of most of his comedies, Lyly evinced a poet's taste. It was an Alexandrian taste, choosing in general such myths as would yield an idyll or little picture: Venus in Phao's ferry-boat; Endymion kissed by Cynthia; Pandora passing scene by scene under the influences of the planet-gods; Cupid errant among Diana's nymphs. Upon a background of such Pompeian wallpanels Lyly's comedy unfolds itself in witty dialogue, always exhibiting its personages upon the level of 'society', and hardly stirring the deeper springs of laughter that lie in human incongruities.

Lyly exhibited something like a poet's architectonic power, too, in remodeling this literary material into "Court Comedy". A courtly audience trained in allusion and innuendo; the gossip of the court about the Queen's proposed marriages, about this courtier's favor and that lady's disgrace; the prattle of pages and maids of honor; the need of caution and delicacy in the treatment of contemporary events; such circumstances, acting upon a playwright of Lyly's temper, could scarcely fail to produce something highly artificial. For Lyly himself was dainty and fanciful rather than vigorous, was addicted to a very exceptional symmetry in workmanship, and, like so many halfgeniuses, was allegorical and symbolic rather than directly imaginative. A French critic should find in him a remarkably 'sympathetic' subject. One is almost tempted to think of Lyly as un-English, as compounded of those very elements, of Celtic verve and Latin symmetry, which constitute the French genius. M. Feuillerat is quick to praise that "impression de sobriété et de mesure d'autant plus précieuse que ces qualitiés sont rares à l'époque".

Lyly's work is thus a work of self-conscious art, fanciful, idyllic, allegorical, symbolical, symmetrical. The last quality is a key to his whole accomplishment. The same love of balance which shaped the Euphuistic sentence and paragraph, and which provided Lucilla with a monologue to match the monologue of Euphues (whereas in Boccaccio it was only Tito who soliloquized), produces likewise in Lyly's plays—in the character-grouping, in the arrangement of scenes, in the arrangement of speeches within the scene—a symmetry absolute. Lyly would be lost without it; he clings closest to it in the only play (Mother Bombie) where he abandons myth or antique history for a plot professedly contemporary and quasi-realistic. It is his chief idealizing device.

This sense for artifice and symmetry, this allowing the mind its rights over literary material, one feels that Lyly carried too far. He never deals with life at firsthand, or takes vital human experience and shapes it into forms of wisdom and beauty. "Le monde ou se meuvent les personnages lyliens est un pays á l'air raréfié, où le cœur semble battre moins vite et moins fort." Lyly, despite his architectonic, does not exhibit the great poet's grasp of reality. Hence, often, his work is merely pretty. Hence, too, it fades into drab before the vibrant brilliancy and palpitating excess of color, it feebly surrenders to the unshaken hold upon life, of the drama that came after.

Amid much darkening of counsel about Lyly's place in the history of the drama, two things are clear. Something new came in with him; and he transmitted it to his great successors. This was his conscious mastery of the comedian's art, the evenness and security of his workmanship, with the lightness of effect that is thereby disengaged. His immediate predecessors and early contemporaries in comedy, Damon and Pithias, The Arraignment of Paris, and Promus and Cassandra—not to mention the cruder Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister-Doister—are simply in another world, the world of poulter's measure, doggerel, clownage, and opportunity wasted for want of that sure-handed technique which Lyly was the first to practice….

VI

The remainder of Lyly's life does not require detailed examination. He marries, and has children. He becomes Esquire of the Body to the Queen, and he sits in four Parliaments. The Marprelate controversy elicits late in 1589 his pamphlet Pappe with an Hatchet, which, Mr. Wilson has shown, did not silence the Martinist press, as M. Feuillerat asserts. But not even the interest of M. Feuillerat's or Mr. Wilson's style can galvanize that scurrilous old quarrel back to life. Pappe with an Hatchet seems to mark, too, the beginning of Lyly's own decline both in vitality and in vogue. After 1590 he produced only one new play, The Woman in the Moone. But this concession to the recent demand for blank verse could not, it would seem, save his popularity. He could not meet the much more fundamental demand of the time, the demand of the spacious years that followed the defeat of the Armada, for a 'redblooded' literature. He lingers on at Court, hoping for a place, waiting for dead men's shoes, and is disappointed again and again. From time to time he addresses petitions to the Queen, to Sir Robert Cecil, to Sir Robert Cotton, doubtless to others, too. The accession of James may have revived his hopes, but the petitioner had little time left in which to feed upon them. He died in November, 1606….

Notes

¹ Cambridge: At the University Press. Vol. I, 1921; Vol. II, 1922; Vol. III to appear.

² The last two paragraphs are quoted or paraphrased from Mr. Wilson's Euphues and the Prodigal Son.

³ Abridged from my A Source of "Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt. "

⁴ This matter is more fully handled in my The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, pp. 248-261.

⁵ As Mr. Bond observes in the Introduction to his edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

⁶ Wilson, ubi supra.

⁷ Apparently this is a variant upon the Prodigal Son theme, with embellishments from sources as yet untraced.

⁸ See Long: From "Troilus" to "Euphues", 367-370. Of John Grange's The Golden Aphroditis (ibid., 371-6) I cannot speak, not having seen it.

⁹ Apart from the evidence that Mr. Croll has gathered, his thesis has a strong antecedent probability. The Renaissance does not at a given moment break away from the Middle Ages, but inherits from them—how much, students of literary history are coming more and more to realize. An illustrative parallel to Euphuism is offered by the Character Writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. This, which has sometimes been supposed to be a Renaissance revival due to Casaubon's edition of Theophrastus, is much more probably, like Euphuism, the continuation of a postclassical and mediaeval exercise in rhetoric.