John Lyly | Page 9

Phoenix as of the Pheasant: and
that she that hath become faithlesse to one, will never be faithfull to
any[24]." What proof could be more exact, what better example could
be given of the methods of concomitant variations? It is precisely the
same logical process which induces the savage to wreak his vengeance
by melting a waxen image of his enemy, and the farmer to predict a
change of weather at the new moon.
[22] Jusserand, p. 107.
[23] Euphues, p. 402.
[24] id., p. 58.
Lyly, however, was not concerned with making philosophical
generalizations, or scientific laws, about the world in general. His
natural, or unnatural, phenomena were simply saturated with moral
significance: not that he saw any connexion between the ethical process
and the cosmic process, but, like every one of his contemporaries, he
employed the facts of animal and vegetable life to point a moral or to

help out a sermon. The arguments he used appear to us puerile in their
old-world dress, and yet similar ones are to be heard to-day in every
pulpit where a smattering of science is used to eke out a poverty of
theology. And, to be fair, such reasoning is not confined to pulpits.
Even so eminent a writer as Mr Edward Carpenter has been known to
moralize on the habits of the wild mustard, irresistibly reminding us of
the "Camomill which the more it is trodden and pressed down the more
it speedeth[25]." Moreover the soi-disant founder of the inductive
method, the great Bacon himself, is, as Liebig[26] shows in his
amusing and interesting study of the renowned "scientist's" scientific
methods, tarred with the same mediaeval brush, and should be ranked
with Lyly and the other Elizabethan "scholastics" rather than with men
like Harvey and Newton.
[25] Euphues, p. 46.
[26] Lord Bacon et les sciences d'observation en moyen âge, par Liebig,
traduit par de Tchihatchef.
Lyly's natural history was at any rate the result of learning; many of his
"facts" were drawn from Pliny, while others were to be found in the
plentiful crop of mediaeval bestiaries, which, as Professor Raleigh
remarks, "preceded the biological hand-books." Perhaps also we must
again allow something for Lyly's invention; for lists of authorities, and
footnotes indicative of sources, were not demanded of the scientist of
those days, and one can thoroughly sympathise with an author who
found an added zest in inventing the facts upon which his theories
rested. Have not ethical philosophers of all ages been guilty of it?
Certainly Gabriel Harvey seems to be hinting at Lyly when he slyly
remarks: "I could name a party, that in comparison of his own
inventions, termed Pliny a barren wombe[27]."
[27] Bond, I. p. 131 note.
The affectations we have just enumerated are much less conspicuous in
the second part of Euphues than in the first, and, though they find a
place in his earlier plays, Lyly gradually frees himself from their
influence, owing perhaps to the decline of the euphuistic fashion, but

more probably to the growth of his dramatic instinct, which saw that
such forms were a drag upon the action of a play. And yet at times Lyly
could use his clumsy weapon with great precision and effect. How
admirably, for example, does he express in his antithetical fashion the
essence of coquetry. Iffida, speaking to Fidus of one she loved but
wished to test, is made to say, "I seem straight-laced as one neither
accustomed to such suites, nor willing to entertain such a servant, yet
so warily, as putting him from me with my little finger, I drewe him to
me with my whole hand[28]." Other little delicate turns of phrase may
be found in the mine of Euphues--for the digging. Our author was no
genius, but he had a full measure of that indefinable quality known as
wit; and, though the stylist's mask he wears is uncouth and rigid, it
cannot always conceal the twinkle of his eyes. Moreover a certain
weariness of this sermonizing on the stilts of antithesis is often visible;
and we may suspect that he half sympathises with the petulant
exclamation of the sea-sick Philautus to his interminable friend:
"In fayth, Euphues, thou hast told a long tale, the beginning I have
forgotten, ye middle I understand not, and the end hangeth not well
together[29]"; and with this piece of self-criticism we may leave Lyly
for the present and turn to his predecessors.
[28] Euphues, p. 299.
[29] Euphues, p. 248.
SECTION II. The Origins of Euphuism.
When we pass from an analytical to an historical consideration of the
style which Lyly made his own and stamped for ever with the name of
his hero, we come upon a problem which is at once the most difficult
and the most fascinating with which we