Lyly's Legatees Rise of the Sentimental Novel doors and lavish emoluments upon any who could wield it, and Greene soon caught the trick so cleverly that he even surpassed Lyly himself. Beginning with Mamilla in 1583, he published during the next seven years no less than fifteen" love-pamphlets," as he called his novels, all of them containing the great Euphuist's tricks of style: his languid elegance, his excessive prettiness, and his abnormal botany and zoology. Euphues was forgotten in the popularity of this new and voluminous romancer. The publishers, declared Nash, considered themselves "blest to pay Greene dear for the very dregs of his wit." Following Greene a veritable school of young novelists entered the lists,-Lodge, Riche, Warner, Dickenson, and others, to contend for the spoils of Euphues. Never before was such a plethora of elegance and sentiment showered upon the reading public. "In the countrey of Bohemia there rayned a king called Pandosto," begins the novel, and immediately we lose sight of time and place and wander in a society that never was and never can be, amid a landscape that defies human geography, and meet adventures such as youthful poets dream on midsummer nights. Everything is carried to extremes. Doralicia was so adorned with more than earthlie perfection as she seemed to be framed by nature to blemishe nature, and that beautie had skipt beyond her skil in framing a piece of such curious workmanship." There is no middle ground. 66 The lovers [says Gosse] are devoted beyond belief, the knights are braver, the shepherds wiser, the nymphs more lovely and more flinty-hearted than tongue can tell; the courteous amorous couples file down the long arcades of the enchanted forest, and find the madrigal that Rosander or the hapless Arsinous has fastened to the balsam tree, or else they gather round the Sidney's Arcadia Decline of Euphuism alabaster tomb of one who died for love, and read the sonnet that his own hand has engraved there. With the publication of Sidney's Arcadia in 1590 Euphuism lost its vogue and a new phase of Italianate prose sprang into popularity. SUGGESTED READING. ber's ed. Selections from Menaphon, Ar 3. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) In 1580, while under a cloud at court, Sidney had passed several months at the country residence of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and to while away the time he had amused himself and his gracious hostess with the construction of the Arcadia, a prose romance. There is every evidence that Sidney regarded this work simply as a recreation. "For sterner eyes it is not," he wrote to his sister, "being but a trifle and that triflingly handled." It was never revised; it was never even finished; it was a mere rough draft of a romance, written to divert an idle hour and to be burned as soon as read. But fortunately it was not burned. Four years after Sidney's death it was brought forth and published under the title of the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and its appearance created a sensation in the literary world wellnigh as great as that occasioned by the publication of Euphues ten years before. Its vogue was immediate. Greene wrote no more "love pamphlets"; Euphuism went out of style never again to appear in English literature, and Arcadianism at once became the fashionable form of prose. Under Sidney's definition the Arcadia is a pastoral poem. "Poesy," he says in his Defense," is a speaking The Purpose of the Romance Its Prose Style picture, with this end,-to teach and delight"; and again, it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet. But it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by." Measured by this standard, the Arcadia belongs with The Faerie Queene. Its moral is hazy at times, but it is never lost. The purpose of the romance, according to Fulke Greville, Sidney's early friend, was to limn out such exact pictures of every posture of the mind that any man might see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversity." Otherwise it is a love-story, laid in Arcadia, the paradise of shepherds, and full of diverting episodes and romantic adventures. 66 The style of the romance deserves careful attention. Sidney denounced all of Lyly's tricks of style as barbarous and pedantic. Very seldom does he use the alliterated balance, and never does he encroach upon the realm of natural history. But his style is nevertheless highly embellished, and it could hardly have been otherwise. The Arcadia is the dream of a young Elizabethan courtier in temporary exile, full of the ideals of chivalry, of great exploits, of gorgeous drapery and furnishings, of tournaments and pageants and romantic adventures, and it is the work of one who believed that he was writing a poem. What wonder if it is ruffled like a courtier, if it is daintily perfumed and exquisitely jewelled! But there is no such straining after effect, no such embellishment dragged in by main force as in Lyly and Greene. It is prose that flows like a poem, with liquid cadences and beautiful periods. It is a style which, though it is over-ornamented Its Great Influence on Later Writers Thomas Nash at times, was, nevertheless, a long step in advance of Euphuism towards the perfect product of later days. As a novel, too, the Arcadia was a distinct advance upon anything that had been previously written. Even now it may be read with interest for the story alone, a statement that is certainly not true of Euphues and its followers. Its influence even down to Dryden's day was enormous. The great fame of its author and the real charm of the story combined to give it an influence which few other novels have ever been able to exert. REQUIRED READING. The Arcadia, Book i. The most accessible edition is that published by Sampson, Low & Marston and imported by the Scribners. 4. Thomas Nash (1567-1600) Authorities. The only complete collection of Nash's works is Grosart's edition (London, 1883-84), 6 vols.; see also Jusserand, Ch. vi., and Morley, Vol. ix. 66 The last step in the development of the Elizabethan novel was taken by Thomas Nash, another of that strangely gifted and boisterous group of young men who so completely took possession of the closing decade of the century. With Nash the realistic novel, the novel founded on actual life, first appears in English literature. Greene was in reality the pioneer; his Cony-catching pamphlets," issued during the last two years of his life, had described with minuteness the criminal class of London, but it was not until Nash had issued in 1594 his Unfortunate Traveller, or the Adventures of Jack Wilton, that a novel was attempted based wholly upon real life. The tale is "a picaresque romance-that is to say, a romance describing realistically the shifts and adventures, The First Realistic Novel The Forerunner of Defoe perils and escapes, of a light-hearted, witty, spring-heeled knave, who goes through all worldly vicissitudes, thus lending himself to his creator's purpose to describe or satirize all classes of society." The book is full of adventures, of realistic pictures and character-sketches, strung upon a slight thread of plot. After a vivid description of life in England during the days of Henry VIII., the author conducts his hero through France and Germany to Italy, in which" drain and sink of hell" he finds ample opportunities for observation and adventure. For vividness of description and for skill at characterization Nash may be compared even with Defoe. He was a fastidious chooser of words. Mere generalizations did not satisfy him: he must have the one strong specific word that would best reproduce the character or scene, and it is this constant struggle for originality and force that is his chief excellence as a writer. His metaphors terse and telling," and altogether his style, though here and there it shows traces of Lyly and the artificial school, is graphic and picturesque. are 66 Nash had no immediate followers. He stood for more than a century a solitary figure; a pioneer who had strayed into a rich field where no one wished to follow, a field which he soon abandoned himself. But his influ 66 ence told at last. As Sir Philip Sidney was the precursor of Richardson," says Raleigh, “so Nash is the direct forerunner of Defoe. The Unfortunate Traveller stands alone among the productions of a many-sided, vigorous, and brilliant age, and among the novels of that age must certainly be counted the most vigorous and brilliant." The Elizabethan Novel. Thus was evolved the Eliza |