The Common Reader
catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich
draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how
exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing
a passage from Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_ with one from Montaigne’s
Essays.
He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent
with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music,
and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending
no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue;
even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by
hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which if one should
begin to tell them the nature of the _Aloës_ or _Rhubarbarum_ they
should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at
their mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the best
things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear
the tales of Hercules. . . .
And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney’s prose is an
uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid
phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long
accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial,
unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself
flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with
this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers
and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and
crevices which poetry can never reach; of cadences different but no less
beautiful; capable of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose
entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the
ancients met death:
. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs
occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul
propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation
ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais
entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires,
et la musique, et des vers amoureux.
An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared
with the French are as boys compared with men.
But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of
youth have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney
shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and
naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to
perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the
discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of
self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic
passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found.
The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on
the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer
interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.
_Cler_. A box of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man
can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has painted, and
perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes
her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear
it) on the subject. [Page sings]
Still to be neat, still to be drest &c.
_True_. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good dressing
before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate
garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often
counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show
them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand,
discover it often: practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth,
repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.
So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s _Silent Woman_, knocked into shape by
interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into
stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and
the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing
consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the
mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression
and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His
immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists,
autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades
of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men
with men to their lonely life within. “The world that I regard is
myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for
the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my
recreation.” All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked
the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel sometimes a hell within
myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.”
In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. “I am in the
dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.”
The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes
about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the
greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted
all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life
are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot
that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of
them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens
before his imagination. “We carry with us the wonders we seek without
us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo of wonder
encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the
flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in
the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed
with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own
qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from
nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself.
“For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a
friendly aspect to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws, the
customs and policies of several states, the names of all the
constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so
sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this
little figure walking that “methinks I do not know so many as when I did
but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than
Cheapside”.
He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the
highest altitudes he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the
details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes
large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes.
He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept
maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the
spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of
the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most
things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when
we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was
a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime
speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man,
whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we
smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile
broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the
astonishing conjectures of the _Religio Medici_. Whatever he writes is
stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of
impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish
colours that, however hard we try, make it difficult to be certain
whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the
presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest
lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with
ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses
full of emerald lights and blue mystery.
[Footnote 2: _Hakluyf’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels,
and Discoveries of the English Nation_, five volumes, 4 to, 1810.]
_Notes on an Elizabethan
Play_
There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in English
literature, and chief among them that jungle, forest, and wilderness
which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to be
examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare who has had the light on
him from his day to ours, Shakespeare who towers highest when looked at
from the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays of the lesser
Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,—to
adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an
upsetting experience which plies him with questions, harries him with
doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For
we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces
of a bygone age how great a power the body of a literature possesses to
impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but
takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles
which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact,
splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield
our ground or stick to our guns.
At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by the
extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and
our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed, is, speaking
roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called Smith, who
succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood importers, timber
merchants and coal exporters, was well known in political, temperance,
and church circles, did much for the poor of Liverpool, and died last
Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell Hill. That
is the world we know. That is the reality which our poets and novelists
have to expound and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan play
that comes to hand and read how
I once did see
In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.
Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool? And the groves of
Elizabethan drama echo “Where?” Exquisite is the delight, sublime the
relief of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the
jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend
their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women,
as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest
profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they fall
imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. But
soon the low, the relentless voice, which if we wish to identify it we
must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English literature, and
French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to stimulate and
enchant these old plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably
dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on the alert