The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare Part 1

The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare.

by J. J. Jusserand.

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. 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 of 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 pa.s.sion for the novel which does not exist in the same degree in any other nation, only acquired 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 "Princesse de Cleves," "Marianne," and "Gil Blas," was obscured for a while. "I say that Anglicism is gaining 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."[1]

Modern society had at length found the kind of 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 pa.s.sed 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 "l'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 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, archaeology, and the painting 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 observation and a.n.a.lysis 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 mult.i.tude of the lesser authors of his time, a mult.i.tude 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 surprise that they were prolific, numerous, and very 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 "Euphues," for example, went through five editions in five years; in the same period "Hamlet" pa.s.sed 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 a.n.a.lysis of pa.s.sion 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, fas.h.i.+onable ladies distinguished themselves from the common sort by being "Arcadian" or "Euphuizd."[2]

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 pa.s.s 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 hurtfull, very fitte to pa.s.se away the tediousness of the long winters evenings."[3] We intend to deal here chiefly with those writers from whom our modern novelists are legitimately descended. These descendants, improving 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 grat.i.tude may rightly be extended from them to their progenitors. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CANCER.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Memoires et Journal inedit du Marquis d'Argenson," Paris, 1857, 5 vols.; vol. v., "Remarques en lisant."

[2] Dekker, "The Guls Horne-booke," 1609.

[3] "The Gentle Craft," 1598. "Early English Prose Romances," ed. W. J.

Thoms, London, 2nd edition, 1858, 3 vols., 8vo, contents: "Robert the Devyll," "Thomas of Reading," by Thomas Deloney, "Fryer Bacon," "Frier Rush," "George a Green," "Tom-a-Lincoln," by Richard Johnson, "Doctor Faustus," &c. Nearly all the stories in this collection bear the date of Shakespeare's time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. The 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 embarra.s.sment, 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. 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 historical; 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 n.o.ble antiquity might doubtless have been invoked as a further justification by M. Villemain and have confirmed the reasons drawn from the "moral sentiment and eloquence" 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 G.o.d 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 legends, whence was evolved the strange poem of "Beowulf,"[4] the first epic, the most ancient history, and the oldest English romance. In it, truth is mingled with fiction; 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 transformation 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 temperament; they were happy: everything went well with them.

They brought with them the gaiety, the wit, the suns.h.i.+ne 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 country, they straightway put an end to the already dying literature of the conquered race and subst.i.tuted their own. G.o.d 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!"[5] 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 resemblance 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 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 monsters, besiege castles of steel, put traitors to death, and escape even the evil practices of enchanters; but they cannot conquer their pa.s.sions. 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 question: "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 Beowulf 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 conditions, Lancelot still continues to live in our thoughts and to play his part in our stories. We shall find him 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 they 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 Auca.s.sin, 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 Auca.s.sin, in whose adventures the Almighty interposes, not in the manner of the Jehovah of the Bible, but as "G.o.d who loveth lovers;"[6] and where Nicolete is so very beautiful that the touch of her fair hands is enough to heal sick people.

According to the author the same wonder is performed by the tale itself; it heals sorrow:

"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."[7]

So speaks the author, and since his time the performance 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 realism. 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-off 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 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 deeply 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 imitators 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:

"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 religious, be it imaginative or historical; they will discuss it and it will improve their minds; it will teach them to pa.s.s 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."[8]

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 Layamon accepted the French poet Wace for his model, and in the beginning of the thirteenth century, 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.[9]

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.[10] Hundreds of ma.n.u.scripts, 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 compatriots for Arthur's glory was not peculiar to himself. It is characteristic of a policy of amalgamation deliberately 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 personal ancestors of their own. At the same time they 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 cla.s.sic nations of antiquity.[11] So it happened that in mediaeval England French singers were to be heard extolling 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 traditions 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: