Rosalynde | Page 5

have made the romance appeal to poets as the work
of Watteau has appealed to painters. Shakespeare felt its charm so
much that he made it the basis of the plot of "As You Like It." That it
became one of his "sources" has injured it incalculably in the popular
estimation. It has become a commonplace of criticism to declare that
"Rosalynde's" chief title to be remembered is its having furnished a hint
to Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, however, it had, to use Johnson's
phrase, "enough wit to keep it sweet," even without Shakespeare's play
"to preserve it from putrefaction." Lodge really had a pretty story to tell,
and he tells it, if not with gusto, at least with grace and with some
degree of skill. Exquisitely graceful are some of the narrative passages,
where the very words seem to possess a clear and pellucid quality like
the water of the spring that Rosalynde and Aliena found in Arden, "so
crystalline and clear, that it seemed Diana and her Dryades and
Hamadryades had that spring, as the secret of all their bathings."[1]
Such, for instance, is the account of the night and morning succeeding
the first meeting of Rosalynde and Rosader in the Forest of Arden.[2]
Graceful, too, are the descriptions of the landscapes in Arden, such as
that of the "fair valley" where Rosalynde and Aliena found Montanus
and Corydon "seeing their sheep feed, playing on their pipes many
pleasant tunes, and from music and melody falling into much amorous
chat." So charmingly graceful are these descriptions that, together with
Shakespeare, Lodge has made the Forest of Arden almost as much the
accepted home of the pastoral as Sicily and Arcadia[3] had been
hitherto.

[Footnote 1: P. 31.]
[Footnote 2: Pp. 58 and 60.]
[Footnote 3: Theocritus (283-263 B.C.) localized his "Idyls" in Sicily;
Vergil (70-19 B.C.), his "Eclogues" in Arcadia.]
Lodge's Skill as a Story-teller. To say that Lodge is a skillful as well as
a graceful story-teller is, of course, to make an indefensible assertion.
In the sixteenth century English fiction was still in its infancy, and
English prose was still undeveloped. Yet we do find in Lodge certain
qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of
some of the stories that had preceded. Though the sentence and
paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one
subject to another are almost invariably well made, or at least are
clearly marked. Phrases such as, "But leaving him so desirous of the
journey, to Torismond"[1]; "Leaving her to her new entertained fancies,
again to Rosader"[2]; "where we leave them, and return again to
Torismond"[3]; show clearly a growing regard for the value of clear
arrangement, to which the earlier romancers had been indifferent. In the
avoidance of digressions, too, Lodge's style is an improvement upon
that of his predecessors, and even upon that of most of his
contemporaries.[4] The story moves along, if not rapidly, at least
continuously from start to finish. There is a gratifying lack of such
preposterous complications and tortuous windings as we meet with in
the plot of Greene's "Menaphon," for example, where it sometimes
seems doubtful whether the characters ever will emerge from so mazy a
labyrinth of plot, and where the reader is bewildered by the almost
complete lack of unity in the story.
[Footnote 1: P. 12.]
[Footnote 2: P. 17.]
[Footnote 3: P. 50. See, also, pp. 19, 41, 51, 59, 73, 97, 104.]
[Footnote 4: On page 72 Lodge accuses himself of digressing; but the
four lines in which he here anticipates the conclusion of the story seem

not to warrant the charge.]
The Lyrical Interludes. Lodge's spirit is essentially poetical. One feels
that his way of looking at things is that of a true poet; of one, that is,
who sees beneath the shows of things. Lodge saw as clearly as
Shakespeare did that only love can untie the knot that selfishness has
tied. And not only is Lodge a poet in his outlook on life, but also in the
narrower sense of the word, for he is one of the sweetest singers of all
that band of choristers that filled the spacious times of great Elizabeth
with sounds that echo still. The voices of some were more resonant or
more impassioned; few, if any, were sweeter. Such a song as
Rosalynde's Madrigal, beginning,
Love in my bosom, like a bee
Doth suck his sweet:
is as fluent, as graceful, and as mellifluous as anything that appeared in
that marvelously productive time. Lodge's poetic interludes impress
one not only by their easy grace and sweetness, but by their melody as
well. They possess that truly lyric quality that Burns's songs exhibit to
such a marked degree. They seem to sing themselves. It is almost