Misunderstandings about English

In one other respect Sidney disappoints us. After he has enumerated and defined with real insight the various known classes of poetic effort, he offers an estimate of the past, present, and future posipoetry. tion of English poetry. His commendations of Chaucer, Surrey, and his friend Spenser, satisfy a reasonable standard of criticism. But his insight fails him in his comments on the literary prospects of the English Drama. Reverence for Aristotle's laws, as they were developed by the classicists of the Renaissance, shackles his judgment. He ridicules the failure to observe the primeval unity of action or the later classical unities of place and time. He warmly denounces endeavours to echo in a single play the voices of comedy and tragedy. Tragi-comedy he anathematises. An obstinate conservatism mingled with his liberal sympathies and led him at times to confuse progress with anarchy. Sidney wrote before Elizabethan effort had proved the capacity of forms dramatic art of which classical writers had not dream.

But if Sidney's views of the Drama were halting and reactionary, he regained his clearness of vision in the conEnlightened cluding pages of his great Apologie. His final conclusions. condemnation of strained conceits in lyrical poetry -although a fault from which his own verse is not always free-is wise and lightened. He perceived that the English tongue was, if efficiently handled, comparable with Greek, and was far more pliant than Latin, in the power of giving harmonious life to poetic ideas. If he underrated the poetic promise of his age, his eloquent appeal to his fellow-countrymen at the end of his Apologie, to disown the earth-creeping mind' that 'cannot lift itself up to look into the sky of poetry,' proved for many a stirring call to arms. He took leave of his readers like a herald summoning to

the poetic lists all the mighty combatants with whom the Elizabethan era was yet to be identified.

IX

But Sidney was soon summoned from these altitudes. Controversies in public and Court life were competing with literary debates for Sidney's attention. The Queen's favour was always difficult to keep. Her favourite, Leicester, Sidney's uncle, forfeited it for a time when the news Difficulties reached her of his secret marriage with that at Court. Countess of Essex who was mother of Sidney's Penelope, his poetic idol, 'Stella.' The Queen's wrath, when roused, always expended itself over a wide area, and it now involved all Leicester's family, including his nephew.

There was much in Court life to alienate Sidney's genuine sympathies. Many of his fellow-courtiers were difficult companions. The ill-mannered Earl of Oxford always regarded Sidney with dislike and ridiculed his aspirations.

Quarrels

courtiers.

The Earl's wife was that daughter of the Prime with Minister Burghley whose hand in girlhood had been at first offered by her father to Sidney himself. Childish quarrels between Sidney and the Earl were frequent. Once, at the Queen's palace at Whitehall, while Sidney was playing tennis, the Earl insolently insisted on joining uninvited in the game. Sidney raised objections. The Earl bade all the players leave the court. Sidney protested. The Earl called him a puppy.' Sidney retorted, truthfully if not very felicitously, 'Puppies are got by dogs, and children by men,' and then with greater point challenged the unmannerly nobleman to a duel. The dispute reached the Queen's ears. She forbade the encounter, and with great injustice ordered Sidney to apologise for an insult which he had directed at a man of higher rank than himself. Sid

ney declined, and the Queen's wrath against him increased. He was in no yielding mood, and sought no reconciliation.

In the Queen's personal and political conduct there was at the moment much to offend his innermost convictions. He was resolved to forfeit altogether his position at Court rather than acquiesce in silence. The Queen was contemplating marriage with the King of France's brother. On grounds of patriotism and of Protestantism he begged her to throw over a Frenchman and a Catholic. There was no lack of plainness or of boldness in this address to his prince. The result was inevitable. He was promptly excluded from the royal presence.

In

Sidney's intellectual friends had long regretted the waste of his abilities which idle lounging about the Court entailed, and they viewed his taste of the royal anger withretirement. out dejection. He, too, left the Court with a sense of relief. Preferment that should be commensurate with his character and abilities had long seemed a hopeless quest; vanity now appeared the only goal of a courtier's life. He could escape from it, with the knowledge that solace for his disappointments awaited him in the society of a beloved comrade, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, whose tastes were singularly like his own. At her husband's country house in Wiltshire he was always a welcome guest, and there could cut himself off with a light heart from the mean and paltry pursuit of the royal countenance. In this period of enforced retirement he engaged with the Countess in literary recreation of an exacting kind. For her and his own amusement he wrote a romance. He called it the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. It was the latest and most ambitious of all his literary endeavours, and gave him a world-wide repute.

Sidney affected to set no value on the work, which exile

from the central scene of the country's activities had given him the opportunity of essaying. He undertook it, he said, merely to fill up an idle hour and to amuse his The sister. Now, it is done only for you, only to

Arcadia.

you:' he modestly told her if you keep it to yourself, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled.'

models.

The work is far more serious than the deprecatory preface suggests. Sidney's pen must have travelled with lightning speed. Whatever views may be entertained of Foreign the literary merits of his book, it amazes one by its varied learning, its wealth of episode and its exceptional length. It was eulogised in its own day by Sidney's friend, Gabriel Harvey, as a 'gallant legendary, full of pleasurable accidents and profitable discourses; for three things especially very notably for amorous courting (he was young in years), for sage counselling (he was ripe in judgment), and for valorous fighting (his sovereign profession was arms)— and delightful pastime by way of pastoral exercises may pass for the fourth.' 1 The commendation is pitched in too amiable a key. The Arcadia is a jumble of discordant elements; but, despite its manifold defects, it proves its author to have caught a distant glimpse of the true art of fiction.

The romance was acknowledged on its production to be a laborious act of homage to a long series of foreign literary influences. In his description of character and often in his style of narration he was thought to have assimilated the tone of the Latin historians Livy, Tacitus and the rest, and the modern chroniclers, Philippe de Comines and Guicciar1 Pierces Supererogation, etc.

G

dini. The Arcadia is a compound of an endless number of simples, all of which are of foreign importation. Sidney proves in it more than in his sonnets or his critical tract his loyalty to foreign models and the catholicity of taste which he brought to the study of them.

The corner stone of the edifice must be sought in a pastoral romance of Italy. A Neapolitan, Sanazzaro, seems to have been the first in modern Europe, very early in the sixteenth century, to apply the geographical Greek name of Arcadia to an imaginary realm of pastoral simplicity, where love alone held sway. Sanazzaro was only in part a creator. He was an enthusiastic disciple of Virgil, and he had read Theocritus. His leading aim was to develop in Italian prose the pastoral temper of these classical poets. But he brought to his work the new humanism of the Renaissance and broadened the interests and outlook of pastoral literature. His Italian Arcadia set an example which was eagerly followed by all sons of the Renaissance of whatever nationality. In Spain one George de Montemayor developed forty years later Sanazzaro's pastoral idealism in his fiction of Diana Inamorada, and the Spanish story gained a vogue only second to its Italian original. Sidney was proud to reckon himself a disciple of Montemayor the Spaniard, as well as of Sanazzaro the Neapolitan.

The Greek novel of Heliodorus.

But it was not exclusively on the foundations laid by Italian or Spaniard that Sidney's ample romantic fiction was based. Two other currents merged in its main stream. Sidney knew much of late Greek literary effort which produced, in the third century of the Christian era, the earliest specimen of prose fiction. It was the Græco-Syrian Heliodorus, in his 'Aethiopian Tales,' who first wrote a prose novel of amorous intrigue. Heliodorus's novels became popular in translation in every