The Worst Style in the World

The word “euphuism” is commonly employed: it is also commonly confused with “euphemism.” The thing is very properly condemned, and the book that gave it its name is usually condemned with it. But it is probable that John Lyly’s Euphues has frequently been abused by persons who have never opened it. At any rate, confessions of having read it are few, and have usually proceeded from the small minority who have found merit in the book. It is very interesting, therefore, to see that Messrs. Croll and Clemons have just published, through Routledge, a new edition, fully annotated. A generation unfamiliar with it will have a chance of reassessing it.

The work is in two parts. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit was first published in 1578; Euphues and his England in 1580. How immediately popular it was is shown by the fact that (my authority is Mr. Arundell Esdaile’s Bibliography of English Tales and Romances) four editions of the first part, three of the second, and then at least seventeen editions of both parts together were published in fifty-eight years. (His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title-pages Lylly, Lyly, Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily: a diversity worthy of “Shakspear.”) For a time almost everybody with any pretensions talked and wrote euphuism, very often employing Lyly’s fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and superfluous imagery without the content of sense that Lyly always had. Some writers openly ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with euphuistic characters, and Sidney (who, I think, did not entirely escape the influence) ridiculed this

But the development of English prose was sensibly changed by it, and its effect may be traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. The book itself, however, like all extravagantly mannered books, had its slump in the end. Early in James I’s reign the wider public seems to have turned away from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition of Lyly’s plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet whose grave he was digging up. Blount’s own language is a terrible example of what Euphuism may come to. He calls his author “a Lilly growing in a Grove of Lawrels”:

“These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard; But I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a Charme (gotten from Apollo) made them greene againe, and set up as Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to suffer these Rare Monuments of wit, to lie covered with Dust, and a shame, such conceipted Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes.”

From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor Arber (a man whose memory has not been sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the “English Reprints,” Euphues never appeared again, save in two brief eighteenth-century adaptations. For almost a hundred years his names was never mentioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dismissed him as a man who, in Sir Walter Scott’s words, deformed his works “by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.” One of the few exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in Westward Ho! attacks Lyly’s critics with tremendous enthusiasm:

“I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever read it? For if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it, in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave, righteous, and pious a book as man need look into; and wish for no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan age than the fact that Euphues and the Arcadia were the two popular romances of the day.”

Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my Encyclopædia, to see whether sense is talked about Lyly there, I find that the article on him is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of surprises.

The truth of the matter is that everybody is right, except those who do not trouble to read the book. Kingsley is perfectly correct; it would be difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling or inspired by higher conceptions of conduct. Lyly is as full of common sense as of refinement; and the fact that he drew much of his discourses on education and religion from other writers does not diminish the impression made by his attitude to life. His narrative does not come to much; most of his space is occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and letters; his Neapolitan and English love-stories move at a snail’s pace. But—his first discussion, by the way, is on heredity and environment which, with startling modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture—he usually argues about things of perennial interest, and always with subtlety, delicacy, and an insight into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott really was not exaggerating the monstrosity—though it is not uniformly monstrous—of his style. It takes some patience to put up with the construction of his sentences and his recurrent bunches of similes in order to follow his argument. On the second page you fall plump into this sentence:

“The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest Rasor soonest tourneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with the Moathes, and the Cambricke sooner stayned than the course Canvas: which appeared well in this Euphues, whose wit beeing like waxe, apt to receive any impression, and bearing the head in his own hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre, disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loathing his old acquaintance, thought either by wit to obteyne some conquest, or by shame to abyde some conflict, who preferring fancy before friends, and this present humor, before honour to come, laid reason in water being too salt for his tast, and followed unbridaled affection, most pleasant for his tooth.”

The mania for balance and alliteration is shown here, but not the equally characteristic passion for piling animals and plants, mainly out of Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are most tolerable when the statements made are least verifiable. Here are two specimens:

“The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea-Crab, and is immediately recured: the Torteyse having tasted the Viper, sucketh Origanum and is quickly revived: the Beare ready to pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: the Dog having surfetted to procure his vomitte, eateth grasse and findeth remedy: the Hart beein perced with the dart, runneth out of hand to the hearb Dicbanum, and is healed.”

“Then good Euphues let the falling out of friendes be a renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones of the Lyon, which lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but being stricken one against another break out like fire, and wax greene.”

Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of such abnormalities with a short, humorous, or pathetic sentence which is most effective; and even sentences bearing the evident marks of his style sometimes move one strongly in their context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla’s two complaints: “But I would to God Euphues would repair hither that the sight of him might mitigate some part of my martyrdome,” and the extremely sibilant but musical “O my Euphues, lyttle dost thou knowe the sodeyn sorrowe that I susteine for thy sweete sake.” What a really judicious critic would do would be to ridicule the style and admire the book.