orthodox treatise on the Christian religion by a distinguished French Protestant friend, De Mornay. When De Mornay visited London, Sidney was no less profuse in hospitality to him than to Bruno. Every man of intellectual tastes attracted him, but he was steadfast to his own conviction, and was not hastily led away by novel speculation, even if he were fascinated by the charm of exposition which hovered on its inventor's lips.

VIII

the Drama.

To another form of literary endeavour Sidney's attention was diverted somewhat against his will. English Drama was still in its infancy. Comedy had not yet emerged Sidney and from the shell of horseplay and burlesque and rusticity; genuine humour or genuine romance was to develop later. Tragedy was still a bombastic presentment of blood and battle, of barbarous and sordid crime. But the embryonic Drama was encouraged by men of enlightenment, and by none so warmly as by the cultured leaders of the aristocracy. To the leisured classes any new form of recreation is welcome, and the drama could adapt itself to all gradations of literary taste among its patrons. The acting profession in England was first organised under the protection of the nobility. Like other great noblemen, Sidney's uncle Leicester took under his patronage a band of men who went about the country engaged in rudimentary dramatic performances. The company of actors called itself the Earl of Leicester's men or his servants. It ultimately developed into that best of all organised bands of Elizabethan actors, which was glorified by Shakespeare's membership. Sidney interested himself in the company of players which was under the patronage of his uncle. He stood godfather to the son of

one of its leaders, a very famous comic actor, Richard Tarleton-one of the earliest English actors whose name has escaped oblivion. But there was nothing individual in Sidney's attitude to actors. His attitude was the conventional one of his class.

Puritan attacks.

Despite the favour of the great, the prospects of the Drama in England in those days of infancy were critical and uncertain. It was a new development in England and had little but its novelty to recommend it. Its artistic future was unforeseen. Its earliest manifestation, too, excited the fears and animosity of the growing Puritan sentiment of the country. To the delight in Art which the Renaissance encouraged, the Puritan feeling, when once roused, was mortally opposed. Puritanism was in fact a reactionary movement against the delights in things of the sense which the study of ancient literature fostered. Puritanism was impatient of the current culture. It viewed all recreation with distrust, and detected in most forms of amusement signs of sin. Especially did the Drama, the most recent outcome of the Renaissance of paganism, rouse ugly suspicions in the Puritan minds. Its lawfulness in a Christian commonwealth was doubted. Controversy arose as to whether or no the Drama was an emanation of the devil: whether or no the theatre was to be tolerated by members of Christ's Church.

Stephen

The Puritan attack was bitter and persistent. The Puritan champions sought recruits from all ranks of society and were anxious to divert from the new-born theatre the Gosson favour of the nobility. Their fanaticism lent them strength. Their methods were none too scrupulous. Sidney was known to be of serious temper; he was held in esteem in fashionable society. His countenance was worth the winning for any cause. Accord

seeks Sidney's support.

ingly one of the most outspoken of the Puritan controversialists—one of the warmest foes of the budding Drama -endeavoured, by a device that had nothing but boldness to excuse it, to press Sidney's influence into his service. Without asking Sidney's leave, Stephen Gosson, who had once been himself a writer of plays and now wrote with the fury of an apostate, dedicated to Sidney a virulent invective, or libel, on plays, players, and dramatists, which he called The School of Abuse. He affected to take for granted Sidney's sympathy. To him he dedicated his diatribe, and paraded his name in the preface of the book as an illiberal foe of dramatic literature.

Sidney's resent

ment.

The misrepresentation of Sidney's sentiment was unblushing. Sidney's soul rebelled against the obscurantist views to which the pamphleteer committed him. One might have as justly dedicated to Sir Thomas More a Lutheran tract and credited him with enthusiasm for the doctrines of Luther. No truce was possible between Sidney and on who failed to see in the Drama which Greeks and Romans, had especially dignified an honoured branch of literature. Sidney retaliated with spirit. Turning the tables on the offending author, he set to work on an enlightened defence of the Drama. The essay which he called an Apologie for Poetrie, embodied his firmest convictions on the value to life of literature and works of imagination.

Sidney's retort to Gosson went far beyond its immediate purpose. He did much more than expound the worth of the Drama. The Drama was for him one of many The manifestations of poetry. It was to the defence Apologie for Poetrie. of the whole poetic art that he bent his energies. In an opening paragraph he calls himself a piece of a logician,' and it is a logical mode of argument that he pursues. Nowhere is the fine quality of Sidney's intellect seen

to better advantage. Nowhere else does he illustrate with equal liberality the breadth of his literary sympathies or his instinct for scholarship. He had studied not only the critical philosophy of Aristotle, together with Plato's general discussions of the merits and defects of poetry, but had steeped himself in the elaborate criticism of the Renaissance scholars, Minturno and Julius Caesar Scaliger, who had in their treatises, named respectively 'De Poeta' and 'Poetice,' attempted, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to codify anew the principles and practices of poetry.

Freedom from pedantry.

Despite the extent and variety of his sources of learning, Sidney retained full mastery of his authorities, and welds them together with convincing effect. The catholicity of his literary taste preserved him from pedantry. A popular ballad sung with heartiness roused him as with a trumpet, while the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar could do no more. Sidney wrote with lucidity. His style is coloured by his enthusiasm for all that elevates the mind of man. Nearly two centuries and a half later, Shelley, in emulation of Sidney, wrote another Defence of Poetry, where the poet's creed was again defined in language of singular beauty. No higher testimony to Sidney's suggestive force or influence can be offered than the fact that his tract should have engendered in Shelley's brain offspring of so rare a charm.

The worth

works of man.

Sidney's central proposition, to which all sections of the treatise converge, is that poetry is the noblest of all the Philosophy and history are for of poetry. the most part mere handmaidens of poetry, which is the supreme teacher, and ranks as a creative agent beside Nature herself. To the ordinary matter-of-fact intellect of every age such a claim on behalf of poetry is barely intelli

gible. That poetry is a deep thing, a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human things,' is an assertion that sounds whimsical in the ears of the multitude of all epochs. It represents a faith whose adherents in every era have been few. Sidney gave reasons for it with exceptional sincerity and logical force. In Elizabethan England the tendency to accept the belief was perhaps more widely disseminated than at any other period of English history. Certainly Sidney's words seem to have fallen on willing ears, and widened the ranks of the faithful.

Confusion

between poetry and

prose.

In details Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie lies open to criticism. He underrated the value of poetic expression and poetic form. Poetry embraced for him every exercise of the imagination. Matter was for him more valuable than manner. 'Verse,' he wrote, 'is but an ornament, and no cause to poetry;' prose might consequently be as effective a vehicle of poetry as metrical composition. Though his main contention that poetry is the supreme teacher is not materially affected by the misconception, Sidney here falls a victim to a confusion of terms. The place of expression in poetry is overestimated when it is argued that it counts alone. But expression is the main factor. The functions of poetry and prose lie, too, for the most part, aloof from one another. Neither theory nor practice justifies a statement of their identity, even though on occasion they may traverse the same ground. Things of the mind are the fittest topic of prose which seeks to supply knowledge. Things of the emotions are the fittest topic of poetry which seeks to stimulate feeling. Prose is under no obligation to appeal to aught beside the intellect; poetry is under a primary obligation to appeal to the emotions and to the sense of sound.