Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man's weaknesses--if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that was quite universally sung to this actor's virtues, acquiesced by saying amiably, 'Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile follower of the 'monster Conventionality' even in his spelling, while in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he would spell Romeo with a small _r_, Irishman with a small _i_, and G.o.d with a small _g_.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-cla.s.s bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which he proposes to have bound 'in Gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.'

One reads with sympathetic amus.e.m.e.nt of Keats's genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' The necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh Hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolishing receipts.'

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous pa.s.sages than that in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention: 'Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out--then all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.' The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general _adonizing_ could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to pa.s.s are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's ma.n.u.script.

By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one must have successfully pa.s.sed twenty-six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the first a clear and n.o.ble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it.

Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. 'I read and write about eight hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats's Oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon.

He was then writing _Endymion_. His stint was about 'fifty lines a day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.' Bailey quotes, in connection with this, Keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' Whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved Tom Nash's sneer at those writers who can only produce by 'sleeping betwixt every sentence.' Keats had in no small degree the 'fine extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.'

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a pa.s.sion. Keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. 'Whenever you write, say a word or two on some pa.s.sage in Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular pa.s.sages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'I find I cannot exist without Poetry,--without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do,--the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.' He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare's sonnets. He rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' We are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment.

Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses.

He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats's ambition trembled in the presence of Keats's conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.' Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he p.r.o.nounces his own work good,--better even than that of a certain other great name in English literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when _Endymion_ was spoken of as 'slipshod' Keats could reply, 'That it is so is no fault of mine.... The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.... That which is creative must create itself. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green sh.o.r.e, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.'

Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don't win the prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. Keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another.

Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. 'There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one's self into an idea of being a great Poet.'

Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in February, 1818, had little expectation that his _Endymion_ was going to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as 'Johnny,' or of getting recommendations to return to his 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.' In fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that in _Endymion_ he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. 'If _Endymion_ serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content, for thank G.o.d I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride,--to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that I am not appreciated.' And for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad, can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his _Pot of Basil_ as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, 'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death!'

Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint.

But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats's att.i.tude towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the fact that he applauded Reynolds's _Peter Bell_, and inquired almost petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth's 'Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand.' But it is also impossible that his sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, 'Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peac.o.c.k over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use of simple means in his art, he says, 'I think that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.'

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... Poetry should be great and un.o.btrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' Or as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'Entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it.'

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables.

Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed his humble origin; nevertheless, the const.i.tution of English society would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing mental att.i.tude.

Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own s.e.x; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women.

This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant circ.u.mstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest of what is n.o.blest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his att.i.tude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats's sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'The Idea of your sending it to Wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what Reverence I would send my well wishes to him.'

But interesting as a chapter on Keats's friendships with men would be, we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale when laid beside that fiery love pa.s.sage of his life, his acquaintance with f.a.n.n.y Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume of Buxton Forman's edition of _Keats's Works_ tell the story of this affair of a poet's heart. These are the letters which Mr. William Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of 'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just ill.u.s.tration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public, the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open.

Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to f.a.n.n.y Brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great pa.s.sion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of att.i.tude with respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'Nothing,' he says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.

A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.'

Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters described in the _Spectator_, and says that it would please him more 'to sc.r.a.pe together a party of lovers.' If this letter be genuine and the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he had succ.u.mbed to the attractions of f.a.n.n.y Brawne. Perhaps he was trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarra.s.sment.

In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes and fine manners and a 'rich Eastern look.' He discovers that he can talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. 'I am too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble.... She kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do.... I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me.' But he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two pages on the subject of this dark beauty. She was a friend of the Reynolds family. She crosses the stage of the Keats drama in a very impressive manner, and then disappears.

The most extraordinary pa.s.sage to be met with in relation to the poet's att.i.tude towards women is in a letter written to Benjamin Bailey in July, 1818. As a partial hint towards its full meaning I would take two phrases in _Daniel Deronda_. George Eliot says of Gwendolen Harleth that there was 'a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her,' which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl's feeling towards men as described a little later, when Rex Gascoigne attempted to tell her his love. Gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of fury that was surprising to herself. The author's interpretative comment is, '_The life of pa.s.sion had begun negatively in her._'

So one might say of Keats that the life of pa.s.sion began negatively in him. He was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. 'I am certain I have not a right feeling toward women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot.' He certainly started with a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he thought a fair woman a pure G.o.ddess. And now he is disappointed at finding women only the equals of men. This disappointment helps to give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as George Eliot's phrase throws light upon it. He thinks that he insults women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. 'Is it not extraordinary,' he exclaims, 'when among men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; ... I am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone.' He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of it as a prejudice produced from 'a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel.' And then, with a good-humored, characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, 'After all, I do think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.'

Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or November, 1818. Keats's description of f.a.n.n.y is hardly flattering, and not even vivid. What is one to make of the colorless expression 'a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort'? But she was fair to him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. We look at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which ensnared Keats. But if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day pa.s.sed for dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the artistic capabilities of a silhouette. Not infrequently is it true that the style of dress seems to disfigure. But we have learned, in course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them.

It is easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover.

Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. f.a.n.n.y Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called 'the world,' and so did he when he was well; but looking through the discolored gla.s.s of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. For these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to being doc.u.ments in love-madness. Many a line in them gives sharp pain, as a record of heart-suffering must always do. You may read Richard Steele's love letters for pleasure, and have it. The love letters of Keats scorch and sting; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid reflecting upon the transitory character of such a pa.s.sion. Withering young love like this does not last. It may burn itself out, or, what is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. But in its earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last; a man would die under it. Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly extinct.

These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and it is wonderful to see how Keats's elastic nature would rebound the instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times almost gay. The singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural epistolary voice: 'There's the Thrush again--I can't afford it--he'll run me up a pretty Bill for Music--besides he ought to know I deal at Clementi's.' And in the letter which he wrote to Mrs. Brawne from Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that 'it's misery to have an intellect in splints.' He was never strong enough to write again to f.a.n.n.y, or even to read her letters.

I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter written to Reynolds in February, 1818. Keats says: 'I had an idea that a man might pa.s.s a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, ... and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale--but when will it do so?

Never! When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual pa.s.sage serves him as a starting post towards all the "two-and-thirty Palaces." How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!... Nor will this sparing touch of n.o.ble Books be any irreverence to their Writers--for perhaps the honors paid by Man to Man are trifles in comparison to the Benefit done by great Works to the Spirit and pulse of good by their mere pa.s.sive existence.'

May we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be able to be read in the manner here indicated? As Keats read, so did he write. His own work was

'accomplished in repose Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.'

AN ELIZABETHAN NOVELIST

The fathers in English literature were not a little given to writing books which they called 'anatomies.' Thomas Nash, for example, wrote an _Anatomy of Absurdities_, and Stubbes an _Anatomy of Abuses_.

Greene, the novelist, ent.i.tled one of his romances _Arbasto, the Anatomy of Fortune_. The most famous book which bears a t.i.tle of this kind is the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, by Robert Burton. It is notable, first, for its inordinate length; second, for its readableness, considering the length and the depth of it; third, for its prodigal and barbaric display of learning; and last, because it is said to have had the effect of making the most indolent man of letters of the eighteenth century get up betimes in the morning. Why Dr. Johnson needed to get up in order to read the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ will always be an enigma to some. Perhaps he did not get up. Perhaps he merely sat up and reached for the book, which would have been placed conveniently near the bed. For the virtue of the act resided in the circ.u.mstance of his being awake and reading a good book two hours ahead of his wonted time for beginning his day. If he colored his remark so as to make us think he got up and dressed before reading, he may be forgiven. It was innocently spoken. Just as a man who lives in one room will somehow involuntarily fall into the habit of speaking of that one room in the plural, so the doctor added a touch which would render him heroic in the eyes of those who knew him. I should like a pictorial book-plate representing Dr. Johnson, in gown and nightcap, sitting up in bed reading the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, with Hodge, the cat, curled up contentedly at his feet.

It would be interesting to know whether Johnson ever read, in bed or out, a book called _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_. It was published in the spring of 1579 by Gabriel Cawood, 'dwelling in Paules Churchyard,'

and was followed one year later by a second part, _Euphues and his England_. These books were the work of John Lyly, a young Oxford Master of Arts. According to the easy orthography of that time (if the word orthography may be applied to a practice by virtue of which every man spelled as seemed right in his own eyes), Lyly's name is found in at least six forms: Lilye, Lylie, Lilly, Lyllie, Lyly, and Lylly.

Remembering the willingness of _i_ and _y_ to bear one another's burdens, we may still exclaim, with Dr. Ingleby, 'Great is the mystery of archaic spelling!' Great indeed when a man sometimes had more suits of letters to his name than suits of clothes to his back. That the name of this young author was p.r.o.nounced as was the name of the flower, lily, seems the obvious inference from Henry Upchear's verses, which contain punning allusions to Lyly and Robert Greene:--

'Of all the flowers a Lillie once I lov'd Whose laboring beautie brancht itself abroad,' etc.

Original editions of the _Anatomy of Wit_ and its fellow are very rare. Probably there is not a copy of either book in the United States. This statement is ventured in good faith, and may have the effect of bringing to light a hitherto neglected copy.[1] Strange it is that princely collectors of yore appear not to have cared for _Euphues_. Surely one would not venture to affirm that John, Duke of Roxburghe, might not have had it if he had wanted it. The book is not to be found in his sale catalogue; he had Lyly's plays in quarto, seven of them each marked 'rare,' and he had two copies of a well-known book called _Euphues Golden Legacie_, written by Thomas Nash. The Perkins Sale catalogue shows neither of Lyly's novels. List after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where the _Anatomy of Wit_ ought to be. From this we may argue great scarcity, or great indifference, or both. In the compact little reprint made by Professor Arber one may read this moral tale, which was fashionable when Shakespeare was a youth of sixteen. For convenience it will be advisable to speak of it as a single work in two parts, for such it practically is.

[1] The writer of this paper once sent to that fine scholar and gracious gentleman, Professor Edward Arber, to inquire whether in his opinion one might hope to buy at a modest price a copy of either the first or the second part of _Euphues_. Professor Arber's reply was amusingly emphatic: 'You might as well try to purchase one of Mahomet's old slippers.' But in July of 1896 there were four copies of this old novel on sale at one New York bookstore. One of the copies was of great beauty, consisting of the two parts of the story bound up together in a really sumptuous fashion. The price was not large as prices of such books go, but on the other hand ''a was not small.'

To p.r.o.nounce upon this romance is not easy. We read a dozen or two of pages, and say, 'This is very fantastical humours.' We read further, and are tempted to follow Sir Hugh to the extent of declaring, 'This is lunatics.' One may venture the not profound remark that it takes all sorts of books to make a literature. _Euphues_ is one of the books that would prompt to that very remark. For he who first said that it takes all sorts of people to make a world was markedly impressed with the differences between those people and himself. He had in mind eccentric folk, types which deviate from the normal and the sane. So _Euphues_ is a very Malvolio among books, cross-gartered and wreathed as to its countenance with set smiles. The curious in literary history will always enjoy such a production. The verdict of that part of the reading world which keeps a book alive by calling for fresh copies of it after the old copies are worn out is against _Euphues_. It had a vivacious existence between 1579 and 1636, and then went into a literary retirement lasting two hundred and thirty-six years. When it again came before the public it was introduced as 'a great bibliographical rarity.' Its fatal old-fashionedness hangs like a millstone about its neck. In the poems of Chaucer and the dramas of Shakespeare are a thousand touches which make the reader feel that Chaucer and Shakespeare are his contemporaries, that they have written in his own time, and published but yesterday. Read _Euphues_, and you will say to yourself, 'That book must have been written three hundred years ago, and it looks its age.' Yet it has its virtues. One may not say of it, as Johnson said of the _Rehearsal_, that it 'has not wit enough to keep it sweet.' Neither may he, upon second thought, conclude that 'it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' It has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had Malvolio. It is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what pa.s.sed for wit among many readers of that day. Often the wit is of a tawdry and spectacular sort,--mere verbal wit, the use of a given word not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because the author wants a word beginning with the letter G, or the letter M, or the letter F, as the case may be. On the second page of Greene's _Arbasto_ is this sentence: 'He did not so much as vouchsafe to give an _eare_ to my _parle_, or an _eye_ to my _person_.' Greene learned this trick from Lyly, who was a master of the art. The sentence represents one of the common forms in _Euphues_, such as this: 'To the stomach _quatted_ with _dainties_ all _delicates_ seem _queasie_.'

Sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side. For example, the companions whom Euphues found in Naples practiced arts 'whereby they might either _soake_ his _purse_ to reape _commodotie_, or _sooth_ his _person_ to winne _credite_.' Other ill.u.s.trations are these: I can neither '_remember_ our _miseries_ without _griefe_, nor _redresse_ our _mishaps_ without _grones_.' 'If the _wasting_ of our _money_ might not _dehort_ us, yet the _wounding_ of our _mindes_ should _deterre_ us.' This next sentence, with its combination of K sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: 'Though Curio bee as hot as a toast, yet Euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a c.o.c.ke of the game, yet Euphues is content to bee craven and crye creake.'

Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly's style.

That style has been carefully a.n.a.lyzed by those who are learned in such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, ant.i.thesis, climax, and a.s.sonance. In truth, one does not know which to admire the more, the ingenuity of the man who constructed the book, or the ingenuity of the scholars who have explained how he did it. Between Lyly on the one hand, and the grammarians on the other, the reader is almost tempted to ask if this be literature or mathematics. Whether Lyly got his style from Pettie or Guevara is an important question, but he made it emphatically his own, and it will never be called by any other name than Euphuism. The making of a book on this plan is largely the result of astonishing mental gymnastics. It commands respect in no small degree, because Lyly was able to keep it up so long. To walk from New York to Albany, as did the venerable Weston not so very long since, is a great test of human endurance. But walking is the employment of one's legs and body in G.o.d's appointed way of getting over the ground. Suppose a man were to undertake to hop on one leg from New York to Albany, the utility or the aesthetic value of the performance would be less obvious. The most successful artist in hopping could hardly expect applause from the right-minded. He would excite attention because he was able to hop so far, and not because he was the exponent of a praiseworthy method of locomotion. Lyly gained eminence by doing to a greater extent than any man a thing that was not worth doing at all. One is more astonished at Lyly's power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance as reader. For the volume is actually readable even at this day. Did Lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative trick-ponies? Apparently not. The book is 'executed' with a vivacity, a dash, a 'go,' that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet the author halfway. _Euphues_ became the rage, and its literary style the fashion. How or why must be left to him to explain who can tell why sleeves grow small and then grow big, why skirts are at one time only two and a half yards around and at another time five and a half or eight yards around. An Elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff starched. Lyly's style bristles with extravagances of the starched ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual deficiencies in the matter of doublet and hose.

Of plot or story there is but little. The hero, Euphues, who gives the t.i.tle to the romance, is a young, clever, and rich Athenian. He visits Naples, where his money and wit attract many to his side. By his careless, pleasure-seeking mode of life he wakens the fatherly interest of a wise old gentleman, Eubulus, who calls upon him to warn him of his danger. The conversation between the two is the first and not the least amusing ill.u.s.tration of the courtly verbal fencing with which the book is filled. The advice of the old man only provokes Euphues into making the sophistical plea that his style of living is right because nature prompts him to it; and he leaves Eubulus 'in a great quandary' and in tears. Nevertheless, the old gentleman has the righteous energy which prompts him to say to the departing Euphues, already out of hearing, 'Seeing thou wilt not buy counsel at the first hand good cheap, thou shalt buy repentance at the second hand, at such unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy hard heart.' Euphues takes to himself a new sworn brother, one Philautus, who carries him to visit his lady-love, Lucilla. Lucilla is rude at first, but becomes enamored of Euphues's conversational power, and finally of himself. In fact, she unceremoniously throws over her former lover, and tells her father that she will either marry Euphues or else lead apes in h.e.l.l. This causes a break in the friendship between Euphues and Philautus, and there is an exchange of formidably worded letters, in which Philautus reminds Euphues that all Greeks are liars, and Euphues quotes Euripides to the effect that all is lawful in love. Lucilla, who is fickle, suddenly dismisses her new cavalier for yet a third, while Euphues and Philautus, in the light of their common misfortune, fall upon each other's necks and are reconciled.

Both profess themselves to have been fools, while Euphues, as the greater and more recent fool, composes a pamphlet against love. This he calls a 'cooling-card.' It is addressed primarily to Philautus, but contains general advice for 'all fond lovers.' Euphues's own cure was radical, for he says, 'Now do I give a farewell to the world, meaning rather to macerate myself with melancholy, than pine in folly, rather choosing to die in my study amidst my books than to court it in Italy in the company of ladies.' He returns to Athens, applies himself to the study of philosophy, becomes public reader in the University, and, as crowning evidence that he has finished sowing his wild oats, produces three volumes of lectures. Realizing how much of his own youth has been wasted, he writes a pamphlet on the education of the young, a dialogue with an atheist, and these, with a bundle of letters, make up the first part of the _Anatomy of Wit_. From one of the letters we learn that Lucilla was as frail as she was beautiful, and that she died in evil report. The story, including the diatribe against love, is about as long as _The Vicar of Wakefield_. It begins as a romance and ends as a sermon.

The continuation of the novel, _Euphues and his England_, is a little over a third longer than Part One. The two friends carry out their project of visiting England. After a wearisome voyage they reach Dover, view the cliffs and the castle, and then proceed to Canterbury.

Between Canterbury and London they stop for a while with a 'comely olde gentleman,' Fidus, who keeps bees and tells good stories. He also gives sound advice as to the way in which strangers should conduct themselves. A lively bit of writing is the account which Fidus gives of his commonwealth of bees. It is not according to Lubbock, but is none the less amusing. In London the two travelers become favorites at the court. Philautus falls in love, to the great annoyance of Euphues, who argues mightily with him against such folly. The two gentlemen expend vast resources of stationery and language upon the subject.

They quarrel violently, and Euphues becomes so irritated that he must needs go and rent new lodgings, 'which by good friends he quickly got, and there fell to his _Pater noster_, where awhile,' says Lyly innocently, 'I will not trouble him in his prayers.' They are reconciled later, and Philautus obtains permission to love; but he has discovered in the mean time that the lady will not have him. The account of his pa.s.sion, how it 'boiled and bubbled,' of his visit to the soothsayer to purchase love charms, his stately declamations to Camilla and her elaborate replies to him, of his love letter concealed in a pomegranate, and her answer st.i.tched into a copy of Petrarch,--is all very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making between Pyrocles and Philoclea, or between any other pair of the many exceedingly tiresome folk in Sidney's _Arcadia_. Grant that it is deliciously absurd. It is not to be supposed that a clever eighteen-year-old girl, replying to a declaration of love, will talk in the language of a trained nurse, and say: 'Green sores are to be dressed roughly lest they fester, tettars are to be drawn in the beginning lest they spread, Ringworms to be anointed when they first appear lest they compa.s.s the whole body, and the a.s.saults of love to be beaten back at the first siege lest they undermine at the second.'