Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/100

88 costume. M. Taine has well seen, in the case of the Elizabethan Euphuism, what Molière has prevented us from seeing in the case of the later French preciosity, that it is the foppery of power and pride, not of folly.

"A new, strange, and overcharged style has been formed, and is to prevail until the Revolution, not only in poetry but also in prose, even in sermons and ceremonial addresses ; a style so conformable to the spirit of the time that we meet it at the same period throughout Europe, in Ronsard and D'Aubigné, in Calderon, Gongora, and Marini. In 1580 appeared Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, by Lyly, which was the manual, the masterpiece, and the caricature of the new style, and which was received with a universal admiration The ladies knew by heart all the phrases of Euphues, singular phrases, far-fetched and sophisticated, which are as enigmas for which the author seems determinedly to seek the least natural and the most remote expressions, full of exaggerations and antitheses, where mythological allusions, reminiscences of alchemy, metaphors from botany and astronomy, all the medley, all the pell-mell of erudition, travel, mannerism, rolls in a deluge of comparisons and conceits. Do not judge it from the grostesque painting made of it by Sir Walter Scott. His Sir Piercy Shafton is but a pedant, a cold and dry imitator; and it is warmth and originality that give to this language an accent and a living movement: it must be conceived not dead and inert, as we have it to-day in the old books, but springing from the lips of ladies and young lords in doublets broidered with pearls, vivified by their vibrating voices, their laughter, the light of their eyes, and the gesture of the hands that play with the hilt of the sword or twist the mantle of satin They amuse themselves as do to-day nervous and ardent artists in a studio. They do not speak to convince or comprehend, but to content their high-strung imagination They play with words, they twist and deform them, they cast up sudden perspectives, sharp contrasts, which leap out, stroke upon stroke, one after the Rh