T3^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM PR 836.J96"T890"'""""'"-"'™^^ Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013276161 THE ENGLISH NOVEL IN THE TIME OF SHAKESPEARE. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. ENGLISH WAYFARING LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES (XlVth CENTURY). Translated from the French by Lucy Toulmin Smith. Third Edition. Illustrated. Small Demy 8vo. (T. Fisher Unwin). Imp Wutmann Pans QUEEN ELIZABETH from du: cnj^iavmff ty WILLIAM ROGERS THE ENGLISH NOVEL IN THE TIME OF SHAKESPEARE J5 J./JUSSERAND CONSEILLER d'AMBASSADE, DR. fes LETTRES TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY ELIZABETH LEE REVISED AND ENLARGED BY THE AUTHOR ILLUSTRATED S.. — A shepherd of Arcady, as seen on the title-page of various editions of Sidney's " Arcadia," ^.^., the third, 1598 ... ... 242 ;. — A Princess of Arcady, 2 /^i/,^. ... 243 L. — Argalus and Parthenia reading a book in their garden ; from Quarles' poem of "Argalus and Parthenia," London, 1656, 4to, p. 135 265 ;. — "The renowned Argalus and Parthenia": " See the fond youth ! he burns, he loves, he dies ; He wishes as he pines and feeds his famish'd eyes." From " The unfortunate Lovers, the History of Argalus and Parthenia, in four books," London, i2mo, a chap-book of the eighteenth century. Frontispiece 273 ILL VSTRA TIONS. 1 7 PAGE 46. — " How the two princesses, Pamela and her sister Philoclea, went to bath themselves in the river Ladon, accompanied with Zelmane and Niso : And how Zelmane combated with Amphialus for the paper and glove of the princess Philoclea, and what after hapned." From " The famous history of heroick acts . . . being an abstract of Pem- broke's Arcadia," London, 1701, i2mo, p. 3 1 . Not without truth does the publisher state that the book is illustrated with " curious cuts, the like as yet not extant " ... 275 47. — " How the two illustrious princesses, Philo- clea and Pamela, being Basilius's only daughters, were married to the two in- vincible princes, Pyrocles of Macedon and Musidorus of Thessalia : and of the glorious entertainments that graced the happy nup- tials," from the same chap-book, p. 139 ... 277 48. — An interior view of the Swan Theatre in the time of Shakespeare, from a drawing by John de Witt, 1596, recently discovered in the Utrecht library by M. K. T. Gaedertz, of Berlin. Reproduced as illustrative of Dek- ker's "Horne-booke," 1609 {infra, ch. vi. § 3). Spectators have not been represented. They must be supposed to fill the pit, " planities sive arena," where they remained standing in the open air, and the covered galleries. The more important people were seated on the stage. Actors, to perform their parts, came 1 8 THE ENGLISH NO VEL. PAGE out of the two doors inscribed " mimorum asdes." The boxes above these doors, con- cerning which some doubts have been expressed, seem to be what was called " the Lords' room." " Let our gallant," says Dekker, " advance himself up to the throne of the stage. I meane not the Lords roome (which is now but stages suburbs) : no, those boxes, by the iniquity of custome, conspiracy of waiting women and gentlemen ushers, that there sweat together, and the covetousness of sharers are contemptibly thrust into the reare, and much new satten is there dambd by being smothrd to death in darknesse. But on the very rushes, where the comedy is to daunce, yea and under the state of Cambises him- selfe must our fethered Estridge be planted valiantly, because impudently, beating downe the mewes and hisses of opposed rascality" ("Works," ed. Grosart, vol. ii. p. 247) ... 286 49. — Elizabethan gaieties. The actor Kemp's dance to Norwich, from the frontispiece of " Kemps nine daies wonder performed in a daunce from London to Norwich, containing the pleasure, paines and kind entertainment of William Kemp betweene London and that city . . . written by himselfe to satisfie his friends," London, 1600, reprinted by Dyce, Camden Society, 1 840, 4to .. . ... ... 287 50.— Portrait of Nash, from "Tom Nash his ghost . . . written by Thomas Nash his ghost" (no date). A copy in the British Museum ILLUSTRATIONS. ig PAGE 51. — Portrait of Dekker, from " Dekker his dreame," a poem by the same, London, 1620, frontispiece ... ... ... ... 333 52. — Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda, a heliogravure by Dujardin, after the mezzo- tint by Beckett To face ■p. 347 ^'}f. — Heroical deeds in an heroical novel. " Pan- dion slayes Clausus," from " Pandion and Amphigenia," by J. Crowne, London, 1665, 8vo 347 54. — Sir Guy of Warwick addressing a skull, in a churchyard, from " The history of Guy, earl of Warwick," 1750.? (a chap-book), P-i8 350 c,^. — Burial of Sir Guy of Warwick, from the same chap-book ... ... ... ... 351 c^d. — A map of the "tendre" country. The original map was inserted by Mdlle. de Scudery in her novel of " Clelie," Paris, 1654, et seq., 10 vols., 8vo, vol. i. p. 399. It was a map drawn by Clelia and sent by her to Herminius, and which " showed how to go from New Friendship to Tender." It was reproduced in the English translations of " Clelie " ; the plate we give is taken from the edition of 1678... ... ... ... 359 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. PAGB 57. — Endymion plunged into the river in the presence of Diana, after an engraving by C. de Pas, in " L' Endimion de Gombauld," Paris, 1624, 8vo, p. 223. The French plates were sent to England and used for the English version of this novel : " Endimion, an excellent fancy . . . interpreted by Richard Hurst," London, 1639, 8vo 367 58. — Frontispiece to Part IV. of the translation of La Calprenede's " Cleopatre," by Robert Loveday : " Hymen's prasludia or Loves master-piece," London, 1652, et seq., i2mo. This frontispiece was drawn according to the instructions of Loveday himself, " Loveday's Letters," Letter Ixxxiii. ... ... ... 371 59. — A fashionable conversation, from the frontis- piece of "La fausse Clelie," by P. de Subligny, Amsterdam, 1671, i2mo. An enlarged plate was made after this one, to serve as frontispiece to the English version of the same work : " The mock Clelia, being a comical history of French gallantries ... in imitation of Don Quixote," London, 1678, 8vo 375 60. — Conversations and telling of stories at the house of the Duchess of Newcastle, from a drawing by Abr. a Diepenbeck, engraved for her book : " Natures pictures drawn by Fancies pencil to the life," London, 1656, fol 379 ILLUSTRATIONS. 21 PAGB 61. — Moorish heroes, from an engraving in Settle's drama : " The Empress of Morocco," London, 1673, 4*° ••• ••• ••• ••• 393 62. — A poet's dream realized, from the English version of Sorel's " Berger Extravagant," "The extravagant Shepherd," London, 1653, fol., translated by John Davies. The usual description of the heroine of a novel has been taken to the letter by the engraver, who represents Love sitting on her forehead, and lilies and roses on her cheeks. Two suns have taken the place of her eyes, her teeth are actual pearls, &c. ... ... ... 401 My heartiest thanks are due to the well- known Elizabethan scholar, Mr. A. H. Bullen, who, putting aside for a while much more important work, has shown me the great kindness of reading for the press the proofs of this volume. J. AN KLIZABETHAN SHEPHERDESS. ^be lEnGlisb flovel in tbe Zimc of Sbakespeare* INTRODUCTION. THE London publishers annually issue statistics of the works that have appeared 'in England during the year. Sometimes sermons and books on theology reach the highest figures ; England is still the England of the Bible, the country that at the time of the Reformation produced three hundred and twenty-six editions of the Scriptures in less than a century, and whose religious literature is so abundant that to-day twenty-eight volumes of the British Museum catalogue treat of the single* word Bible. y 24 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. When theology does not obtain the first rank, it holds the second. The only writings that can compete with it, in the country of Shakespeare, of Bacon _ and ot Newton, are neither dramas, nor books of philosophy nor scientific treatises ; they are novels. Theology had the supremacy in 1885 ; novels obtained it in 1887, 1888, and 1889. Omitting stories written for children, nine hundred and twenty- nine novels were published in England in 1888, and one thousand and forty in 1889. Thus the conscientious critic who wished to acquaint himself with all of them would have to read more than two novels and a half, often in three volumes, every day all the year round, without stopping even on Sundays. This passion for the novel which does not exist in the same degree in any other nation, only ac- quired its full strength in England in the eighteenth century. At that time English novels produced in Europe the effect of a revelation ; they were praised extravagantly, they were copied, they were imitated, and the popularity hitherto enjoyed by the " Prin- cesse de Cleves," " Marianne," and " Gil Bias," was obscured for a while. " I say that Anglicism is gain- y ing on us," wrote d' Argenson ; " after ' Gulliver ' and ' Pamela,' here comes ' Tom Jones,' and they are mad for him ; who could have imagined eighty years ago that the English would write novels and better ones than ours .? This nation pushes ahead by force of unrestricted freedom." i Modern society had at length found the kind of ' " Memoires et Journal inedit du Marquis d' Argenson," Paris, 1857, 5 vols. ; vol. v., " Remarques en lisant." INTRODUCTION. 25 literature which could be most suitably employed to depict it. Society had been presented on the English stage by the authors of domestic comedies ; Steele and Addison had painted it in their essays. But in both forms the portrait was incomplete. The exigencies of the stage, the necessary brevity of the essay, made it impossible to give adequate expression to the infinite complexity of the subject. The novel created anew by Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson, made it an easy thing to introduce into the arena of literature those men and women of intelligence and feeling who, for long ages, had been pleased to see other people the chief subjects of books and inwardly desired that authors should at last deal more especially with themselves. The age of chivalry was gone ; the time of the Arthurs and the Tristans had passed away; such a society as the new one could not so well be sung in verse ; but it could extremely well be described in prose. As Fielding remarked, the novel takes the place of the old epic. We think of the Harlowes when in the olden time we should have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "I'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling for the dead, for the dim past, for a race without posterity, for childhood's cherished and fast- fading dreams. Thus in the same age when Clarissa 26 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Harlowe and Tom Jones came to their kingdom, the poets Chatterton, Percy, Beattie, and others, turned back lovingly to the Middle Ages ; and thus too the new taste for history, archeology, and the pamtmg of real life, all put together and combined, ended by producing a particular school of novel, the romantic school, at whose head stands Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps, however, something besides poetry is to be sought for in these bygone epochs. Movements of human thought have seldom that suddenness with which they are sometimes credited ; if those literary innovations, apparently so spasmodic, are carefully and closely studied, it will -be nearly always found that the way had been imperceptibly prepared for them through the ages. We are in the habit of beginning the history of the English novel with Defoe or Richardson ; but was there no work of the kind in England before ! their time.? had they to invent it all, matter and method } It is not enough to say that the gift of I observation and analysis was inborn in the race, as shown already, long before the eighteenth century, in the work of the dramatists, moralists and philosophers. Had not the same gift already manifested itself in the novel .? The truth is that the novel shed its first splendour during the age of Elizabeth ; but the glory of Shakespeare has overshadowed the multitude of the lesser authors of his time, a multitude which included the early novelists. While they lived, however, they played no insignificant part ; now they are so entirely forgotten that it will perhaps be heard with some Y surprise that they were prolific, numerous, and very IJSITROD UCTION. 2 7 popular. So great was the demand for this kind of literature that some succeeded in making an income out of their novels. Their books went through many / editions for that age, many more than the majority of Shakespeare's plays. They were translated into French at a time when even the name of the great dramatist was entirely unknown to the French people. Lyly's V " Euphues," for example, went through five editions in five years ; in the same period " Hamlet " passed through only three, and " Romeo and Juliet " through two editions. Not a line of Shakespeare was put into French before the eighteenth century, while prose fictions by Nash, Greene, and Sidney were translated more than a century earlier. As in our own day, some of these novelists busied themselves chiefly with the analysis of passion and refined emotion ; others chiefly concerned themselves with minute observation of real life, and strove to place before the reader the outward features of their characters in a fashion impressive enough to enable him to realize what lay below the surface. Many of these pictures of manners and of society were considered by contemporaries good likenesses, not the less so because embellished. Thus, having served as models to the novelists, the men and women of the day in their turn took as example the copies that had been made from them. They had had their portraits painted and then tried hard to resemble their counterfeit presentments. Lyly and Sidney embellished, according to the taste of the age, the people around them, whom they chose as patterns for the heroes of their novels ; and as soon as their books were spread over the country, fashionable 28 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. ladies distiriguished themselves from the common sort by being " Arcadian " or " Euphuizd." ' Thus through these very efForts, a literature, chiefly intended for women, was arising in England, and this is one characteristic more that links these authors to our modern novelists. So that, perhaps, bonds, closer than we imagine, unite those old writers lost in a far- ofF past with the novelists whose books reprinted a hundred times are to be found to-day on every reading- table and in everybody's hands. We make no pretence of covering in the present volume this vast and little trodden field. To keep within reasonable bounds we shall have to leave altogether, or barely mention, the collections of tales translated by Paynter, Whetstone and others from the Italian or French, although they were well known to Shakespeare, and provided him with several of his plots. In spite of their charm, we shall in like manner pass by the simple popular prose tales, which were also very numerous, the stories of Robin Hood, of Tom-a-Lincoln, of Friar Bacon, however ' ' merry and pleasant," they may be, " not altogether unprofitable, nor any way hurtfuU, very fitte to passe away the tediousness of the long winters evenings." ^ We intend to deal here chiefly ' Dekker, "The Guls Horne-booke," 1609. = "The Gentle Craft," 1598. "Early English Prose Romances," ed. W. J. Thorns, London, 2nd edition, 1858, 3 vols., 8vo, contents : " Robert the Davy 11," " Thomas of Reading," by Thomas Deloney, "Fryer Bacon," "Frier Rush," "George a Green," "Tom- a-LincoIn," by Richard Johnson, " Doctor Faustus," &c. Nearly all the stories in this collection bear the date of Shakespeare's time. INTRODUCTION. 29 with those writers from whom our modern novelists are legitimately descended. These descendants, im- proving upon the early examples of their art left by the Elizabethan novelists, have won for themselves a lasting place in literature, and their works are among the undisputed pleasures of our lives. Our gratitude may rightly be extended from them to their pro- genitors. We must be permitted, therefore, to go far back in history, nearly as far as the Flood. The journey is long, but we shall travel rapidly. It was, moreover, the customary method of many novelists of long ago to begin with the beginning of created things. Let their example serve as our excuse. BEGINNING OF THE UNIQUE MS. OF " BEOWULF." CHAPTER I. BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. I. MINUTE research has been made, in every country, into the origin of the drama. Th^ origin of the novel has rarely tempted the literary archaeologist. For a long time the novel was regarded as literature of a lower order ; down almost to our time, critics scrupled to speak of it. When M. Villemain in his course of lectures on the eighteenth century came to Richardson, he experienced some embarrassment, and it was not without oratorical qualifications and certain bashful doubts that he dared to announce lectures on " Clarissa Harlowe " and " Sir Charles Grandison." He sought to justify himself on the ground that it was necessary to track out a special influence derived from England, " the influence of imagination united to moral sentiment in eloquent prose." But this neglect can be explained still better. 32 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. We can at need fix the exact -period of the origin of the drama. It is not the same with the novel. We may go as far back as we please, yet we find the thin ramifications of the novel, and we may say literally that it is as old as the world itself Like man himself, was not the world rocked in the cradle of its childhood to the accompaniment of stories and tales .? Some were boldly marvellous ; others have been called his- torical ; but very often, in spite of the dignity of the name, the " histories " were nothing but collections of traditions, of legends, of fictions : a kind of novel. This noble antiquity might doubtless have been invoked as a further justification by M. Villemain and have confirmed the reasons drawn from the " moral sentiment and elo- quence " of novels, reasons which were such as to rather curtail the scope of his lectures. In England as much and even more than with any other modern nation, novelists can pride themselves upon a long line of ancestors. They can, without abusing the license permitted to genealogists, go back to the time when the English did not inhabit England, when London, like Paris, was peopled by latinised Celts, and when the ancestors of the puritans sacrificed to the god Thor. The novelists indeed can show that the beginning of their history is lost in the abysm of time. They can recall the fact that the Anglo-Saxons, when they came to dwell in the island of Britain, brought with them songs and lege;ids, whence was evolved the strange poem of " Beowulf," i the first epic, ^ "Beowulf, a heroic poem," ed. T. Arnold, London, 1876, 8vo. The unique MS. of this poem, discovered in the last century, is BEFORE SflAKESFEARE. 33 the most ancient history, and the oldest English romance. In it, truth is mingled with fiq:ion ; besides the wonders performed by the hero, a destroyer of monsters, we find a great battle mentioned by Gregory of Tours, where the Frenchmen, that were to be, cut to pieces the Englishmen that were to be ; the first act of that bloody tragedy continued afterwards at Hastings, Crecy, Agincourt, Fontenoy, and Waterloo. The battle of Hastings which made England subject to men from France resulted in a complete transfor- mation of the literature of the Teutonic inhabitants of the island. Anglo-Saxon literature had had moments of brilliance at the time of Alfred, and afterwards at that of Saint Dunstan ; then it had fallen into decay. By careful search, accents of joy, though of strange character, may be discovered in the texts which now represent that ancient literature. Taking it as a whole, however, this literature was sad ; a cloud of melancholy enveloped it, like those penetrating mists, observed by Pytheas and the oldest travellers, which rose from the marshes of the island and concealed the outlines of its impenetrable forests. But the conquerors who came from Normandy, from Brittany, from Anjou, from all the provinces of France, were of a cheerful tempera- ment ; they were happy : everything went well with them. They brought with them the gaiety, the wit, the sunshine of the south, uniting the spirit of the Gascon with the tenacity of the Norman. Noisy and great talkers, when once they became masters of the preserved at the British Museum ; it has been reproduced in fac- simile by the Early English Text Society (Ed. J. Zupitza, 1882, 8vo), We give in fac-simile the first few lines of the MS. 3 34 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. country, they straightway put an end to the already dying literature of the conquered race and substituted their own. God forbid that they should listen to the lamentations of the Anglo-Saxon mariner or traveller ! They had no concern with their miserable dirges. *' Long live Christ who loves the French ! " i Even in the laws and religion of the French there now and then appeared marks of their irrepressible entrain. Shall we not, then, find it in their stories .? The new-comers liked tales of two kinds. First, they delighted in stories of chivalry, where they found marvellous exploits differing little from their own. They had seen the son of Herleva, a tanner's daughter ■of Falaise, win a kingdom in a battle, in course of which the cares of a conqueror had not prevented him from making jokes. When, therefore, they wrote a romance, they might well attribute extraordinary adventures and rare courage to Roland, Arthur and Lancelot : in face ■of the behaviour of the bastard of Normandy, it would be difficult to tax the exploits attributed to those heroes with improbability. The numberless epic romances in which they delighted had no resem- blance with the "Beowulf" of old. These stories were no longer filled with mere deeds of valour, but also with acts of courtesy ; they were full of love and tenderness.] Even in the more Germanic of their poems, in " Roland," the hero is shaken by his emotions, and is to be seen ■shedding tears. Far greater is the part allotted to the gentler feelings in the epics of a subsequent date, in those written for the English Queen Eleanor, by Benoit ' " Vivat qui Francos diligh Christus ! " ("Prologue of the Salic Xaw," Pardessus, 1843, p. 345.) BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 35 •de Sainte More in the twelfth century, which tell for the first time of the loves of Troilus and Cressida ; in those dedicated to Arthur and his knights, where the favour of the mortal deities of whom the heroes are enamoured, is responsible for more feats of chivalry than is the search after the mysterious Grail; They can take Constantinople, or destroy the Roman armies ; they can fight green giants and strange mon- sters, besiege castles of steel, put traitors to death, and escape even the evil practices of enchanters ; but they cannot conquer their passions. All the enemies they have in common with Beowulf, be they men or armies, monsters or sorcerers, they can fight and subdue ; but ■enemies unknown to the Gothic warrior oppose them now more effectually than giants, stormy seas, or armed battalions ; enemies that are always present, that are not to be destroyed in battle nor left behind in flight : their own indomitable loves and desires. What would the conqueror of Grendel have thought of such descendants ? One word in his story answers the ques- tion : "Better it is," says he, "for every man, that he avenge his friend than that he mourn much." This is the nearest approach to tenderness discoverable in the -whole epic of " Beowulf" In this contest between heroes differing so greatly in their notion of the duties and possibilities of life with whom do we side, we of to-day.'' With Beo- wulf or with Lancelot ? Which of the two has ■survived ? Which of them is nearest of kin to us .'' Under various names and under very different con- ditions, Lancelot still continues to live in our thoughts and to play his part in our stories. We shall find him ^ 36 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. in the pages of Walter Scott ; he is present in the- novels of George Eliot. For better or for worse, the literature begun in England by the conquerors at the battle of Hastings still reigns paramount. Moreover, the new possessors of the English country- were fond of tales and short stories, either moving or amusing, in which a word would make the reader laugh or make him thoughtful; but where there was no tirade, no declamation, no loud emphasis, no vague speculation, a style of writing quite unknown to the islanders and contrary to their genius. When the^ returned of an evening to their huge and impregnable castles, in perfect security and in good humour, they liked to hear recited stories in prose, some of which are still extant and will never be read without pleasure : the story of Floire and Blanchefleur, for instance, or perhaps, also that of Aucassin, who preferred " his gentle love " to paradise -even more unconcernedly than the lover in the old song rejected the gift of " Paris la grand ville ; " of Aucassin, in whose adven- tures the Almighty interposes, not in the manner of the Jehovah of the Bible, but as " God who loveth lovers ;" ^ and where Nicolete is so very beautiful that the touch of her fair hands is enough to heal sick people. Accor- ding to the author the same wonder is performed by the tale itself ; it heals sorrow ; ^ " Nouvelles Fran^aises en prose," ed. Moland and d'Heri- cault, Paris, 1856. Four English versions of the story of Floire and Blanchefleur are extant. The story of Amis and Amile was also very popular. "Amis and Amiloun," ed. Kolbing (Heilbronn,, 1884). The cantefable of Aucassin is of the twelfth century- (G. Paris, "Litterature fran9aise au moyen age," 1888, § 51). BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 37 " Sweet the song, the story sweet, There is no man hearkens it, No man living 'neath the sun, So outwearied, so foredone, Sick and woful, worn and sad. But is healed, but is glad 'Tis so sweet." ' So speaks the author, and since his time the per- formance of the same miracle has been the aim of the many tale-writers of all countries ; they have not all of them failed. The fusion of these two sorts of stories, the epic- romance and the tale, produced long afterwards in every country of Europe the novel as we know it now. To the former, the novel owes more especially its width of subject, its wealth of incident, its occasionally ■dignified gait ; to the second, its delicacy of observation, its skill in expression of detail, its naturalness, its real- ism. If we care to examine them closely, we shall find in the greater number of those familiar tragi- comedies, which are the novels of our own day, discernible traces of their twofold and far-ofi^ origin. II. The first result of the diffusion in England, after the Conquest, of a new literature full of southern inventions and gaieties, and loves, and follies, was the silencing of the native singers. This silence lasted for a hundred ' Mr. Andrew Lang's translation, " Aucassin and Nicolete " i(London, 1887, i6mo.). 38 THE ENGLISH NOVEL^ years ; the very language seemed doomed to disappear. What was the good of writing in English, when there was hardly any one who cared to read it, and even those few were learning French, and coming by degrees to enjoy the new literature ? But it turned out that the native English writers had not been swept away for ever. Their race, though silenced, was not extinct ; they were not dead, but only asleep. The first to awake were the scholars, the men who had studied in Paris. It was quite natural that they should be less deeplv impressed with nationalism than the rest of their compatriots ; learning had made them cosmopolitan ; they belonged less to England than to the Latin country, and the Latin country had not suffered from the Conquest. Numerous scholars of English origin shone forth as authors from the twelfth century onwards ; among them Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame, Joseph of Exeter, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Nigel Wireker, and many others of European reputation. In the thirteenth century another awakening takes- place in the palace which the Norman enchanter had doomed to a temporary sleep. Translators and imi- tators set to work ; the English language is again employed ; the storm has abated, and it has become evident that there still remain people of English blood and language for whom it is worth while to write.,. Innumerable books are composed for them, that they may learn, ignorant as they are of French or Latin,., what is the thought of the day. Robert Manning de.- Brunne states, in the beginning of the fourteenth century,, that he writes : BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 39 " Not for the lerid bot for the lewed, Ffor tho that in this land wone. That the Latyn no Frankys cone, Ffor to haf solace and gamen In felawschip when thay sitt samen. " They are to enjoy this new literature in common, Be- it rehgious, be it imaginative or historical ; they will discuss it and it will improve their minds ; it will teach them to pass judgments even on kings : " And gude it is for many thynges For to here the dedis of kynges Whilk were foles and whilk were wyse, )> , In their turn the English poets sang of Arthur ; in all good faith they adopted his glory as that of an ancestor of their own. Among them a man like Laya- mon accepted the French poet Wace for his model, and in the beginning of the thirteenth centurv, devoted thirty-two thousand lines to the Celtic hero ; nor was he ever disturbed by the thought that Arthur's British victories might have possibly been English defeats.^ Then came innumerable poems, translated or imitated from French romances, on Charlemagne and Roland, Gawain and the Green Knight, Bovon of Hanstone, Percival, Havelock the Dane, King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Alexander, Octavian, and the Trojan War.3 ^ "The Story of England," a.d. 1338, ed. F. J. Furnivall, London, 1887, two vols. 8vo, vol. i. p. i. = " Layamon's Brut," ed. Madden, London, 1847, three vols. 8vo. 3 See, among others, the publications of the Early English Text Society, the Camden Society, the Percy Society, the Roxburghe Club, the Bannatyne Club, the Altenglische Bibliothek of E. 40 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Hundreds of manuscripts, some of them splendidly illuminated, testify at the present day to the immense popularity of these imitations of French originals, and provide endless labour for the many learned societies that in our century have undertaken to print them. Layamon's indifference to the price paid by his com- patriots for Arthur's glory was not peculiar to himself It is characteristic of a policy of amalgamation delibe- rately followed from the beginning by the Normans. As soon as they were settled in the country they desired to unify the traditions of the various races inhabiting the great island, in the belief that this was a first and necessary step towards uniting the races themselves. Rarely was literature used for political purposes with more cleverness and with more important results. The conquerors set the example themselves, and from the first adopted and treated all the heroic beings who had won glory in or for England, and whose fame lingered in ballads and popular songs, as if they had been per- sonal ancestors of their own. At the same time they Kolbing (Heilbronn) ; the " Metrical Romances of the Xlllth, XlVth, and XVth Centuries," of H. W. Weber (Edinburgh, 1 8 10, three vols. 8vo) ; the "Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum," by H. L. D. Ward (London, 1887); "Bishop Percy's Folio MS. ; Ballads and Romances,'' ed. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, London, Ballad Society, 1867, &c. The publications of the Early English Text Society include, among others, the romances of " Ferumbras," " Otuel," " Huon of Burdeux," " Charles the Crete," " Four Sons of Aymon," " Sir Bevis of Hanston," "King Horn," with fragments of "Floriz and Blauncheflur," " Havelok the Dane," "Guy of Warwick," "William of Palerne," " Generides," " Morte Arthure," Lone- lich's "History of the Holy Grail," "Joseph of Arimathie," "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight," &c. Others are in preparation. BEFORE SHAKESPEARE, 41 induced the conquered race to adopt the theory that mythic Trojans were their progenitors, a theory already discovered and applied by the French to their own early history, and about which fables were already current among the Welsh people : both races were thus connected together as lineal descendants, the one of Brutus, the other of Francus ; and an indissoluble link united them to the classic nations of antiquity, i So it ' The adoption by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the twelfth cen- tury, of Brutus the Trojan as father of the British race, as Nen- Jiius had done two centuries earlier, did much for the spreading of this belief; the popularity and authority of Geoffrey's fabulous diistory was so great that for several centuries the gravest English historians accepted his statements concerning Brutus without hesi- tation. Matthew Paris, the most accurate and trustworthy his- torian of the thirteenth century, gives an account of his coming to the island of Albion, " that was then inhabited by nobody but a few giants": " Erat tunc nomen insulae Albion, quae a nemine, €xceptis paucis gigantibus habitabatur." Brutus proceeds to the banks of the Thames, and there founds his capital, which he calls the New Troy, Trojam novam, " qua postea, per corruptionem •vocabuli Trinovantum dicta fuerit " (" Chronica Majora,'' Rolls Series, I. pp. 21—22). In the fourteenth century Ralph, in his famous ■" Polychronicon," gives exactly the same account of the deeds of the Trojan prince, and they continued in the time of Shakespeare to be history. Here is the learned account Holinshed gives of these events in his " Chronicles ": " Hitherto have we spoken of the inhabitants of this lie before the coming of Brute, although some will needs have it that he was the first which inhabited the same with his people descended of the Troians, some few giants onelie excepted whom he utterlie destroied, and left not one of them alive through the whole ile. But as we shall not doubt of Brutes coming hither ..." &c. "This Brutus or Brytus (for this letter Y hath of ancient times liad the sounds both of V and I) . . . was the sonne of Silvius, the 42 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. happened that in mediaeval England French singer* were to be heard extolHng the glory of Saxon kings, while English singers told the deeds of Arthur, the arch-enemy of their race. Nothing gives a better idea, of this extraordinary amalgamation of races and tradi- tions than a certain poem of the thirteenth century written in French by a Norman monk of Westminster, and dedicated to Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III., in which we read : " In the world, I may confidently say, there never was country, kingdom or empire, where so many good kings, and holy too, were found, as in the English island. . . . Saints they were, martyrs and confessors,, of whom several died for God ; others most strong and hardy, as were Arthur, Edmund, and Knut." ^ Rarely was the like seen in any literature ; here is a poem dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of Eng- land, which begins with the praise of a Briton, a Saxon,, and a Dane. The same phenomenon is to be noticed,, after the Conquest in romances, chronicles and histories. Sonne of Ascanius, the sonne of Aeneas the Trojan, begotten of his wife Creusa, and borne in Troie, before the citie was destroied" (book ii. chap. i.). ' " En mund ne est (ben vus I'os dire) Pais, reaume, ne empire U tant unt este bons rois E seinz, cum en isle d'Englois . . . Seinz, martirs e confessurs Ki pur Deu mururent plursurs ; Li autre forz e hardiz mutz, Cum fu Arthurs, Aedmunz, e Knudz." (" Lives of Edward the Confessor," ed. H. R. Luard, London,, Rolls, 1858, 8vo.) BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 43 Whoever the author may be, whether of French or English blood, the unity of origin of the two races receives almost invariably the fullest acknowledgment ; the inhabitants of the great island cease to look towards Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia, for their ancestors or for the sources of their inspiration ; they look rather, like their new French companions, to Rome, Greece and Troy. This policy produced not only momentous social results, but also very important literary conse- quences ; the intellectual connection with the north being cut off, the Anglo-French allowed themselves to be drilled with the Latin discipline ; the ancient models, ceased to appear to them heterogeneous ; they studied them in all good faith as the works of distant relations,, with such result that they, unlike the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, were ready, when the time of the Renaissance came, to benefit by the great intellectual 'movement set on foot by southern neo-classic nations ; and while Italy produced Ariosto and Tasso, while Spain possessed Cervantes, and France Montaigne, Ronsard and Rabelais, they were ready to give birth to the un- paralleled trio of Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare. From the fourteenth century this conclusion was easy to foresee ; for, even at that period, England took part in a tentative Renaissance that preceded the great one of the sixteenth century. At the time when Italy produced Petrarca and Boccaccio, and France had Froissart, England produced Chaucer, the greatest of the four. Famous as Chaucer was as a story-teller, it is strange that he was to have almost no influence on the develop- ment of the novel in England. When we read of Harry 44 THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Bailly and the Wife of Bath, of the modest Oxford clerk and the good parson ; when we turn the pages of the inimitable story of Troilus and the fickle, tender, charming Cressida, it seems as if nothing was lacking >to the production of perfect novels. All the elements of the art are there complete : the delicate analysis of passions, the stirring plot, the natural play of various characters, the very human mixture of grossness and tenderness, of love songs and rough jokes, the portraits of actual beings belonging to real life and not to dreamland. It was only necessary to break the cadence of the verse and to write such stories in prose. No one did it ; no one tried to do it. ~^ The fact is the stranger if we remember that Chaucer's popularity never flagged. It was at its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; in the following period the kings of literature, Dryden and Pope, did homage to him. His works had been amongst the first to be printed. Caxton's original; edition was quickly followed by a second. ^ The latter was adorned with illustrations, and this rapid publica-: tion of a second and amended text testifies to the great reverence in which the author was held. Nevertheless it is the fact that Chaucer stands alone ; authors of prose novels who wrote nearly two centuries after his time, instead of trying to follow in his footsteps, sought their models either in the old epic literature or in French and Italian story-books. This is exactly what ' Both editions are undated ; the first one seems to have been published in 14.78, the second in 1484 (W. Blades, "Life and Typography of William Caxton," 1861, two vols. 4to). caxton's representation of Chaucer's pilgrims, 1484. [/. 45. BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 47 Chaucer had done himself ; but they did it with very different success, and entirely missed the benefits of the great advance made by him. By another strange caprice of fate it was these sixteenth-century writers, and not Chaucer, who were to be the ancestors of the world-famous novelists of a later age, of the Richard- sons and Fieldings of the eighteenth century. In one thing, then, the French conquerors entirely failed ; they never succeeded in acclimatizing during the Middle Ages those^ ^shorter prose stories which, were so popular j^n their own country, in which they themselves delighted and of which charming and some- times exquisite models have come to us from the twelfth century downwards. When this art so thoroughly French began, as we shall see, to be cultivated in England, it was the outcome of the Renaissance, not of the Conquest. Hundreds of volumes of mediasval English manuscripts preserve plenty of sermons, theological treatises, epic-romances, poems of all sorts ; but the student will not discover one single original prose story to set by the side of the many examples extant in Freiiich literature ; nothing resembling the French stories / of the thirteenth century, so delightful in their frank ; language, their brisk style and simple grace, in whic.'i we find a foretaste of the prose of Le Sage and Voltaire ; nothing to be compared, even at a distance, in the following century, with the narra- tives of Froisscirt, who, it is true, applied to history his genius for puie romance ; nothing like the anecdotes so well told Ipy the Knight of La Tour Landry for the instructiorji of his daughters ; nothing that at all . approaches " "Petit Jehan de Saintre " or the " Cent 48 ^ THE ENGLISH NOVEL. nouvelles " in the fifteenth century. To find English prose tales of the Middle Ages we should be forced to look through the religious manuscripts where they figure under the guise of examples for the reader's edification. A very troublesome search it is, but not always a vain one ; some of these stories deserve to be included among the most memorable legends of the Middle Ages. To give an idea of them I will quote the story of a scholar of Paris, after Caesarius, but y told in far better style by the holy hermit RoUe de Hampole, in the fourteenth century. It is short and little known : "A scolere at Pares had done' many full synnys the whylke he had schame to schryfe hym of At the last gret sorowe of herte ouercome his schame, & when he was redy to schryfe till (to) the priore of the abbay of Saynte Victor, swa mekill contricione was in his herte, syghynge in his breste, sobbynge in his throtte, that he moghte noghte brynge a worde furthe. Thane the prioure said till hym : Gaa & wrytte thy synnes. He dyd swa, & come a-gayne to the prioure and gafe hym that he hade wretyn, fFor yitt he myghte noghte schryfe hym with mouthe. The prioure saghe the synnys swa grette that thurghe leve of the scolere he schewede theyme to the abbotte to hafe conceyle. The abbotte tuke that byll that ware wrettyn in & lukede thare one. He fande na thynge wretyn & sayd to the priour : What may here be redde thare noghte es wretyne .? That saghe the priour & wondyrd gretly & saide : Wyet ye that his synns here warre wretyn & I redde thaym, bot now I see that God has sene hys contrycyone & forgyfes hym BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 49 all his synnes. This the abbot & the prioure tolde the scolere, & he, with gret joy thanked God." ^ But instances of this kind of story lack those features of gaiety and satirical observation of which French stories are full, and which are an important element of the novel. Some are mystical ; others, in which the devil figures on whom the saints play rude tricks, are intended to raise a loud laugh ; in both cases real life is equally distant.^ A keen faculty of observation however existed in the nation ; foibles of human nature did not escape the English writer's eye any more than its higher aspirations. This is illus- trated not only by Chaucer, who chose to write poetry, but by such men as Nigel Wireker 2 and Walter Map who chose to write Latin. 3 But not ' " English Prose Treatises of Richard RoUe de Hampole," ed.