Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/99

Rh perversion of fancy in the later "metaphysical" poets down till the Restoration, and even after that. The development throughout is perfectly intelligible. In its beginnings, Euphuism is evidently for England the tumultuous awakening of a modern nation to the sense of the possession of a living and growing modern speech, such as had taken place in Italy some generations before, and in France but recently. In all three nations successively we see the same comparison of the new language with the dead tongues, the same claim to compete with the Greeks and Romans, even while imitating them. And Lyly represents once more the exuberance of youth and strength playing one-sidedly on a newly-gained world of words and books, unsobered by experience and hard thinking. It is a world with more words than knowledge, with a vocabulary constantly widening itself from the stores of other tongues, and an imagination constantly kept on the stretch by the impact of other literatures. Artistic judgment could not quite keep pace with the accumulation of literature, even in the greatest brain of the time. For Shakspere is not only euphuistic in his youth, even when bantering Euphuism; he retains to the last some of the daring exorbitance of speech which is the essential quality of Euphuism; only with the difference that the later style is strengthened by a background of past passion and vital experience, as well as chastened by intellectual discipline. Here beyond question preciosity can be seen to be a creative and liberating force, and far from a mere riot of incompetence. Even where the Elizabethan drama escapes the direct charge of preciosity, it is visibly warmed and tinted by that tropic neighbourhood; its very freedom of poetic phrase is made wider by the modish licence of the surrounding aristocratic world, in which Euphuism is as it were a many-coloured fashion of speech on a par with the parade of splendid Rh