Chapter XIX: Euphues Redivivus

I have recently been fortunate in securing a copy of that very rare and precious novel _Delina Delaney_, by Amanda M. Ros, authoress of _Irene Iddesleigh_ and _Poems of Puncture_. Mrs. Ros’s name is only known to a small and select band of readers. But by these few she is highly prized; one of her readers, it is said, actually was at the pains to make a complete manuscript copy of _Delina Delaney_, so great was his admiration and so hopelessly out of print the book. Let me recommend the volume, Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece, to the attention of enterprising publishers.

_Delina Delaney_ opens with a tremendous, an almost, in its richness of vituperative eloquence, Rabelaisian denunciation of Mr. Barry Pain, who had, it seems, treated _Irene Iddesleigh_ with scant respect in his review of the novel in _Black and White_. “This so-called Barry Pain, by name, has taken upon himself to criticize a work, the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” But “I care not for the opinion of half-starved upstarts, who don the garb of a shabby-genteel, and fain would feed the mind of the people with the worthless scraps of stolen fancies.” So perish all reviewers! And now for Delina herself.

The story is a simple one. Delina Delaney, daughter of a fisherman, loves and is loved by Lord Gifford. The baleful influence of a dark-haired Frenchwoman, Madame de Maine, daughter of the Count-av-Nevo, comes between the lovers and their happiness, and Delina undergoes fearful torments, including three years’ penal servitude, before their union can take place. It is the manner, rather than the matter, of the book which is remarkable. Here, for instance, is a fine conversation between Lord Gifford and his mother, an aristocratic dame who strenuously objects to his connection with Delina. Returning one day to Columba Castle she hears an unpleasant piece of news: her son has been seen kissing Delina in the conservatory.

“Home again, mother?” he boldly uttered, as he gazed reverently in her
face.

“Home to Hades!” returned the raging high-bred daughter of
distinguished effeminacy.

“Ah me! what is the matter?” meekly inquired his lordship.

“Everything is the matter with a broken-hearted mother of low-minded
offspring,” she answered hotly.... “Henry Edward Ludlow Gifford, son
of my strength, idolized remnant of my inert husband, who at this
moment invisibly offers the scourging whip of fatherly authority to
your backbone of resentment (though for years you think him dead to
your movements) and pillar of maternal trust.”

Poor Lady Gifford! her son’s behaviour was her undoing. The shock caused her to lose first her reason and then her life. Her son was heart-broken at the thought that he was responsible for her downfall:

“Is it true, O Death,” I cried in my agony, “that you have wrested
from me my mother, Lady Gifford of Columba Castle, and left me here, a
unit figuring on the great blackboard of the past, the shaky surface
of the present and fickle field of the future to track my life-steps,
with gross indifference to her wished-for wish?”... Blind she lay to
the presence of her son, who charged her death-gun with the powder of
accelerated wrath.

It is impossible to suppose that Mrs. Ros can ever have read _Euphues_ or the earlier romances of Robert Greene. How then shall we account for the extraordinary resemblance to Euphuism of her style? how explain those rich alliterations, those elaborate “kennings” and circumlocutions of which the fabric of her book is woven? Take away from Lyly his erudition and his passion for antithesis, and you have Mrs. Ros. Delina is own sister to Euphues and Pandosto. The fact is that Mrs. Ros happens, though separated from Euphuism by three hundred years and more, to have arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples. It is possible to see in a growing child a picture in miniature of all the phases through which humanity has passed in its development. And, in the same way, the mind of an individual (especially when that individual has been isolated from the main current of contemporary thought) may climb, alone, to a point at which, in the past, a whole generation has rested. In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality. Poetry is always written before prose and always in a language as remote as possible from the language of ordinary life. The language and versification of “Beowulf” are far more artificial and remote from life than those of, say, _The Rape of the Lock_. The Euphuists were not barbarians making their first discovery of literature; they were, on the contrary, highly educated. But in one thing they were unsophisticated: they were discovering prose. They were realizing that prose could be written with art, and they wrote it as artificially as they possibly could, just as their Saxon ancestors wrote poetry. They became intoxicated with their discovery of artifice. It was some time before the intoxication wore off and men saw that art was possible without artifice. Mrs. Ros, an Elizabethan born out of her time, is still under the spell of that magical and delicious intoxication.

Mrs. Ros’s artifices are often more remarkable and elaborate even than Lyly’s. This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework:

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s
slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose
blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its
sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

And Lord Gifford parts from Delina in these words:

I am just in time to hear the toll of a parting bell strike its heavy
weight of appalling softness against the weakest fibres of a heart of
love, arousing and tickling its dormant action, thrusting the dart of
evident separation deeper into its tubes of tenderness, and fanning
the flame, already unextinguishable, into volumes of burning blaze.

But more often Mrs. Ros does not exceed the bounds which Lyly set for himself. Here, for instance, is a sentence that might have come direct out of _Euphues_:

Two days after, she quit Columba Castle and resolved to enter the holy
cloisters of a convent, where, she believed she’d be dead to the built
hopes of wealthy worth, the crooked steps to worldly distinction, and
the designing creaks [_sic_] in the muddy stream of love.

Or again, this description of the artful charmers who flaunt along the streets of London is written in the very spirit and language of _Euphues_:

Their hair was a light-golden colour, thickly fringed in front, hiding
in many cases the furrows of a life of vice; behind, reared coils,
some of which differed in hue, exhibiting the fact that they were on
patrol for the price of another supply of dye.... The elegance of
their attire had the glow of robbery—the rustle of many a lady’s
silent curse. These tools of brazen effrontery were strangers to the
blush of innocence that tinged many a cheek, as they would gather
round some of God’s ordained, praying in flowery words of decoying
Cockney, that they should break their holy vows by accompanying them
to the halls of adultery. Nothing daunted at the staunch refusal of
different divines, whose modest walk was interrupted by their bold
assertion of loathsome rights, they moved on, while laughs of hidden
rage and defeat flitted across their doll-decked faces, to die as they
next accosted some rustic-looking critics, who, tempted with their
polished twang, their earnest advances, their pitiful entreaties,
yielded, in their ignorance of the ways of a large city, to their
glossy offers, and accompanied, with slight hesitation, these
artificial shells of immorality to their homes of ruin, degradation
and shame.