BOOK VI (by R. B.)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

{vii}

In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction

three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later

centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet

and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material,

expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same

spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance

being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the

literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a

decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all

the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the

invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a

revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had

abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned

themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the

history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ holds an

important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the

type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic

invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the

successive transformations, and the final development of English

fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings,

when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the _chansons de

gestes_.

In the exordium of his _Apologie for Poetrie_, Sidney himself lays

stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature.

Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures

of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From

free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous

and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose--this is the natural

line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in

the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic

{viii} philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and

went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in

the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with

Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in

poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and

experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought

the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose

evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its

origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in

metre.

Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be

very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said,

are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement

literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two

different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not

simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination

of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to

imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely

asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince.

Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek

and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature,

did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially

different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the

imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another

kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really

neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the

subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little

later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an

earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly,

Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time,

was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a

final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that

had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and

interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern

the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but

would have been proud to be compared with {ix} Heliodorus and Longus,

and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets,

preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his _Apologie_ the

fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative

literature.

The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the

great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and

Alexander. Some of these were written in prose originally, but the

majority were translations, paraphrases, or recensions of metrical

narratives. Some were turned into verse again, and again in that form

were the material for further prose recensions. And throughout these

transformations the matter, the style, and the spirit of the stories

underwent hardly any change. It was only now and then that the

versifier gave a rein to imagination in his battles and pageants; or

was hurried by the swing of the metre into bursts of lyricism, or a

more dramatic curtness in the dialogue; or cut short the explication

of motive and plot, which the prose-writer was inclined to elaborate.

How well the prose sufficed to the minstrel converting it into his own

idiom may be seen by comparing such a metrical romance as the Scots

poem, _Lancelot of the Laik_, with the samples of the French prose

story from which it was translated, in the edition by the Early

English Text Society. There is very little poetical heightening except

where the minstrel tacks on a prologue of his own composing; the rest

is but the effect of the paraphraser’s occasional impulse to change

and invent.[i01] Certainly these {x} writers were not embarrassed by

any preconceptions of a strict boundary line between prose and the

language of poetry, and the uses for which either was especially

ordained. The traditional themes were handled, in both verse and

prose, in the same traditional manner, and were animated by the same

spirit of romantic adventure.

A change of style is almost invariably the result of a change of

thought and feeling; but no profound mental and moral revolution like

that which underlay the romantic movement of the nineteenth century,

was the occasion for turning the mediaeval romances into prose. When

all literary compositions were intended for singing and recitation,

they naturally took a metrical form; but when books were meant to be

read in bower and cloister, it was left to the writer to choose his

vehicle. Thus, while there were true poets like Chrestien de Troyes

and Wolfram von Eschenbach among those working upon the material of

legend, many arrayed themselves in the poetic vesture without having a

spark of divine fire; and the style of many of these metrical

narratives strikes one as too prosaic for the subject, especially if

we base our expectations on Malory, to us the chief exemplar of

mediaeval romance, whose prose, though not in the least resembling in

structure that bastard thing, prose poetry, is thoroughly epical in

its stark simplicity, its sensuous colour, and the haunting suggestion

of beauty and ideality. It was not an age of poetry in the way this

can be said of the early period of Greek literature, when

philosophers, historians, and lawgivers spoke in metre because the

muse was in them. Romance is the decadence of poetry; and while the

traditional forms survived, the poetic impulse grew weaker and weaker.

{xi}

By Caxton and his successors the prose romances of the age of chivalry

were multiplied and circulated among wider audiences than even those

who listened to the mediaeval jongleur: these were the first popular

novels of the Tudor age, yet they were already getting out of date,

inasmuch as they reflected the manners and the ideals of a bygone

period. But there had arisen on the continent two forms of romance

that represent another stage in the development of fiction; the

Spanish chivalric romance typified in _Amadis of Gaul_, and the

pastoral novel of Sanazzaro and Montemayor. The three great legendary

cycles, no matter how wild and fabulous their later excursions, always

claimed to be a reading of history; each writer was careful to state

his authorities, real or fictitious; and though he added life and

circumstance to his narrative, the substance was put forward and

accepted as history. In Spain romance had begun exactly as in Britain

with poetic chronicles of heroic periods, such as the story of the

Cid, round which gathered in the process of time a vast accretion of

anonymous legend. But in the _Amadis_, printed in 1508, but current in

oral or manuscript versions for two centuries at least, Spain gave

birth to a kind of romance in which such history even as that in the

legendary chronicles had no place. Amadis himself, it is true, was

connected with the Arthuriad by his lineage; but with this exception,

the author or authors let both history and historical tradition go,

and in the various knight-errantries of Amadis gave to their

imaginative powers their full fling. In the beauty of its ladies, the

size of its giants, the valour, constancy, and self-denial of its

heroes, the _Amadis_ eclipses all its rivals; and in the _Palmerins_

and _Esplandians_ that were the sequel, these exaggerations are

carried to even more ridiculous lengths. The older romances had

usually been localised in actual places and countries, though these

were often idealised out of all likeness to reality; but Amadis and

his successors met with their adventures and performed their feats of

arms in a region created by the fancy of their authors. Spenser’s

Fairy Land, and Sidney’s Arcadia were no doubt suggested by this

romantic geography.

Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the _Eclogues_ of

Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the

social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy {xii} were

avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil.

Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his

_Daphnis and Chloe_ depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if

Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new

movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this

respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel

began its course with the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan

whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of

a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple

existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and

the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are

intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style

accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the

_Galatea_ of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his

Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of _Diana_, who

added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a

deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a

popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by

Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances

were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s _Arcadia_, in which the

spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental

Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.

The pastoral, however, was only a digression in the slow advance of

the English novel towards its goal; and though it furnished perhaps

half the inspiration of Sidney’s romance, it does not bear upon the

present theme, the significance of the Elizabethan novel as

represented by the _Arcadia_ in the evolution of English fiction. The

pastoral romance, it should nevertheless be noted, is more closely

allied to poetry than to prose fiction proper, not merely because it

mingles verse with a flowery and emotional prose, but chiefly because

it is an offspring of the free imagination and not of the study of

real life. The pastoral impulse has always been something factitious

and retrograde in the history of literature and art, something exactly

contrary to the return to nature to which Wordsworth gave the

strongest impetus, and which exercised such an enormous effect on the

advance of realism.

{xiii}

The Elizabethan novel, the general characteristics of which are

roughly summed up in the words “poetic invention,” came next to

mediaeval romance in a natural order of succession. It did not bring

fiction any nearer the type conditioned by the laws of expression in

strict prose, of the eighteenth century pattern. In an age of poetry

the novel had become more poetic in style and in attitude to life than

it had ever been. The _Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ have less than the

_Morte d’Arthur_ of the real world of men and women. A superficial

view, accordingly, might suggest that with a hybrid and unfruitful

type of art like the poetic novel one line of development came to an

end, especially as we see that Defoe, in the next age, makes an

entirely new beginning, abjuring romance and free imagination, turning

directly to actual experience for his material, and using a homespun

style, as close as he could make it to the speech of everyday life.

Yet the semi-poetic novel represents a definite stage of transition,

and it does contain elements that were to be developed later. The

masterpieces of Italian story-tellers had made their mark upon the

Elizabethans, who acquired the art of constructing a plot, and giving

their narratives a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They showed

also a more conscious effort to portray individual character; and by

Lyly the analysis of motive and feeling was carried to a point that

seems to anticipate Richardson. More than this, they came a good step

nearer to reality, although they failed so flagrantly to reproduce the

atmosphere of the real. They chose their subjects from the sphere of

human experience; and they rejected giants, fairies, and witchcraft,

together with the

“Forests and enchantments drear,

Where more is meant than meets the ear,”

which were stock features of the romantic literature; although, on the

other hand, they put wild improbabilities in the place of supernatural

marvels, and revelled in coincidences and disguises almost as

incredible as the Celtic magic of the _trouvère_.

Sidney the critic expounds in his _Apologie for Poetry_ his view that

the novel of his time and of all anterior times, together {xiv} indeed

with all literature having an imaginative and idealistic tendency, was

comprehended under his definition of poetry.

“For Xenophon,” says he, “who did imitate so excellently as to give us

the portraiture of a just Empire under the name of Cyrus, made therein

an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention

of that picture of love in _Theagines and Cariclea_. And yet both writ

in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not riming and versing

that maketh a poet, no more than a long gowne maketh an Advocate.”

What his theory of poetry was may be gathered from his description of

the poet, who,

“disdayning to be tied to any such subjection (as the natural rules of

things), lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, dooth growe

in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature

bringeth forth, or, quite anewe, formes such as never were in Nature,

as the _Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies_, and such like;

so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the

narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging onely within the

Zodiack of his owne wit. Nature never set the earth in so rich

tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers,

fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make

the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets

only deliver a golden.”

This corresponds to Bacon’s famous account of the nature of poetry, in

the _Advancement of Learning_:--

“Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part

restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly

refer to the imagination; which, not being tied to the laws of matter,

may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that

which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of

things; _Pictoribus atque poetis, etc._ It is taken in two senses in

respect of words and matter. In the first sense it is but a character

of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for

the present. In the latter it is (as hath been said) one of the

principal parts of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history,

which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.

“The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of

satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of

things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the

soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a

more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute

variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, {xv}

because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude

which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events

greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the

successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of

virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution,

and more according to revealed providence. Because true history

representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged,

therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected

and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and

conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore

it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because

it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to

the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind

unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and

congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the

agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and

estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning

stood excluded.”

These definitions are too broad for poetry, and too narrow for

imaginative literature in general, though that is what they aimed to

define. It was as difficult for Sidney and Bacon as for Aristotle to

propound a theory embracing literary forms that were not yet invented;

and furthermore it is probable that had they witnessed the birth of

naturalism in Defoe, or its ultimate developments in our own age, they

would have denied to it the name of literature or art. But there is no

place in such a definition for many works that neither Sidney nor

Bacon would have hesitated to admit, the novels of George Eliot, for

instance, or those of Fielding. Yet a modern explanation of poetry,

that of Newman, would not exclude even such prose works as these. He

says,

“Moreover, by confining the attention to one series of events and

scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the confused luxuriance of

real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of circumstances, it

brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect, completes the

dependance of the parts one on another, and harmonises the proportions

of the whole.”

A stricter analysis, however, demands of poetry not only a distinctive

mode of conceiving its subject, but a distinctive mode of utterance.

If poetry is the fine art of words, and {xvi} its aim to give all the

sensuous, emotional, and intellectual delight of which words are

capable, it is clear that Sidney and Bacon gave full weight to only

one side of the truth, and that they included far too much. The poetic

novel, to which their definition applied so aptly, is a case in point,

since it was a hybrid and transitional form, a thing that was just

ceasing to be poetry, but had not yet become the new form of art to

which it was the harbinger.

The _Arcadia_, and the same may be said of the Elizabethan novel

generally, shows its near relationship to poetry in both ways, in its

style and in the purely imaginative nature of the story, the

characters, and the life depicted. In the introduction to Defoe’s

_Roxana_ and _Moll Flanders_, published in this series, I compared the

opening of Defoe’s stories, _Robinson Crusoe_, for instance, so

definite as to time and place, so particular in the mention of names

and the exact circumstances in which the events occur, with the

beginning of the _Arcadia_, which carries us at once away in

imagination to a flowery meadow in a land of Arcady that has no

existence save in the fancy of the poets and those under their spell.

There is no effort to make the story credible, or the characters real,

by attaching them with the bands of verisimilitude to the world of

familiar things. Musidorus and Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea, Zelmane

and Amphialus, are in no way studies from life, but embodiments of

Sidney’s chivalrous energy and thirst for action, and of the craving

for a life of pastoral simplicity and ideal love, strengthened by his

enforced existence amidst the pomps and unrealities of a court. While

he was living in retirement at Wilton, where the _Arcadia_ was begun,

he gave vent to this feeling in the following lines:--

“Well was I while under shade

Oaten reeds me music made,

Striving with my mates in song;

Mixing mirth our songs among.

Greater was the shepherd’s treasure

Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.”

How strenuous in his nature was the heroic energy that gave the

chivalric strain to his romance, was shown pre-eminently in the

closing scenes of his life, when he roused his uncle {xvii} Leicester

out of his sloth, and sacrificed himself on the field to a sense of

knightly punctilio. It has been said of him that his whole life was “a

true poem, a composition, and pattern of the best and honourablest

things”; and not only in his shepherd Philisides, but in all the

idealisms of courage, knightly faith and honour, and self-denying

affection, that illumine the pages of his _Arcadia_, and in their

splendid deeds of valour and endurance, he poured out the riches of

his own nature, as the poet puts all that is best in himself into his

verse. His purpose in writing the _Arcadia_, according to the

testimony of his old schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke Greville, Lord

Brooke, was moral and didactic; but “in all these creatures of his

making his interest and scope was to turn the barren philosophic

precepts into pregnant images of life,” that is, to energize them with

poetry.

The prose naturally begotten of such a poetical conception of the

novel is well illustrated in the following passage, one of those most

charged with humanity and most free from extravagance.

“But the headpiece was no sooner off but that there fell about the

shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair,

which, with the face, soon known by the badge of excellency, witnessed

that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her

beauty then, even in despite of the past sorrow, or coming death,

assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For

her exceeding fair eyes having with continual weeping gotten a little

redness about them; her roundly, sweetly-smelling lips a little

trembling, as though they kissed her neighbour death; in her cheeks,

the whiteness striving, by little and little, to get upon the rosiness

of them; her neck--a neck indeed of alabaster--displaying the wound

which with most dainty blood laboured to crown his own beauties; so as

here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white,

each giving lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God

knows, full of an unaffected languishing; though these things, to a

grossly conceiving sense, might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they

but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looking upon

through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her

natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief,

compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate

in victory.”

In the _Apologie for Poetry_, Sidney condemned Euphuism, {xviii}

Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated

circles immediately upon the publication of _Euphues, or the Anatomie

of Wit_, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from

purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a

style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some

equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In

this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and

Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of

Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the

artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio

pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the

_Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech

affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose

of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied

similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical

periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common

to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius

showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry,

and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his

contemporaries:--

“Mirus prorsus homo, immo semideus, vel certe Deus, qui magnae artis

subtilitate tantum efferavit argentum … ut diem suum sibi domus

faciat, licet sole nolente: sic cubicula, sic porticus, sic ipsae

valvae fulgurant.”

“Namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum, et inaccessa salebritate

lubricum, mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat: qui

statim proni foraminis lacunis editi, perque proclive delapsi, et

angusti canalis exerto contecti tramite, proximam convallem latenter

incidebant.”

Apuleius might very well have written such a sentence as this:--

“Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object that at

first it did but hit flatlong. But little availed that, since the lady

falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword

with another blow to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.”

And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of {xix}

Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such

extravagances as this:--

“Exceedingly sorry for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that

exceedingness in fear for Philoclea.”

The fact is, there are bound to be these freaks and extravagances

whilst a style is still in such an inchoate and experimental state as

English prose was in from the time of Malory and Berners, and the

other early architects of a style unfettered by metre, with whom, as

Mr John Dover Wilson has shown in his work on John Lyly, the germs of

Euphuism found their way into English long before Guevara was known in

this country, although the tendency is nearly always attributed to his

influence. The writers of this period could not evolve even a poetic

prose without falling into these pitfalls, for the simple reason that

they wrote a century before the principles of what may be called a

normal prose style had been determined. Mr Watts-Dunton has pointed

out that in the present age there is another kind of poetic prose in

process of evolution, a prose “which above all other kinds holds in

suspense the essential qualities of poetry.” Prose to be truly

poetical, he argues, must move far away from the “tremendous

perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured

descriptions of Ruskin,” and must no doubt be something very different

from what Sidney and other writers made of Elizabethan prose, noble as

their achievement was.

“It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically

call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the

poet’s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric

effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the

very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and

impassioned diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time

to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars.”

Such a prose as this must be the very latest product of literary

effort. Its difference from the poetic prose actually evolved in the

transitional age with which we are dealing, is the difference between

an art founded on long experience and many attempts and failures, and

above all on a sound philosophy of aesthetic causes and effects, and

the essays of {xx} men who were not yet clear as to the objects they

ought to aim at. So uncertain was Sidney even as to the true genius of

English poetry that he was one of the most ardent members of the

“Areopagus,” who endeavoured to reform English poetry on Italian and

classical principles, the results of which attempt may be appraised in

the verses inserted in the _Arcadia_. The indispensable basis for a

sound poetic prose, if such a thing is feasible, must be a

satisfactory norm of unpoetic prose.

Sidney’s romance did not escape ridicule in his own time; Ben Johnson

parodied Arcadianism in _Every Man out of his Humour_; Dekker poked

fun at Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen in the _Gul’s Horne-book_;

and the involved and careless construction of the story came in for

mild satire in one of the earliest burlesques of chivalrous and

pastoral romances, Sorel’s _Berger Extravagant_, which was translated

by John Davies of Kidwelly in a book that may be remembered by its

sub-title, the _Anti-Romance_. The criticism in the passage following

is not particularly acute, but is cited because few readers of Sidney

are likely to come across such a very rare work as this translation

(1648).

“Nor hath England wanted its _Arcadia_, whereof it is not long since

we have had the translation. I find no more order in that than in the

rest, and there are many things whereof I am not at all satisfied. At

the very beginning you have the complaints of the shepherds Strephon

and Claius upon the departure of Urania, without telling us who she

was, nor whither she went. Now an author ought never to begin his book

but he should mention the persons principally concerned in the history

whose actions he is to raise up beyond any of the rest; yet this man

makes afterward no more mention of these two shepherds than if he had

never named them; and though he bring them in again at some sports

before Basilius, yet that signifies nothing, since a man finds no

period of their adventures, and that those verses wherein they speak

of their loves are so obscure that they may be taken for the oracles

of a Sybill. It is true that Sir Philip dying young might have left

his work imperfect; but there’s no reason why we should suffer by that

misfortune, and be obliged to take a thing for perfect because it

might have been made so.”

… Thus Clarimond in his “Oration against Poetry, Fables, and

Romances”; Philiris in his “Vindication” replies:--

{xxi}

“As for Sidney’s _Arcadia_, since it hath crossed the sea to come and

see us, I am sorry Clarimond receives it with such poor compliments.

If he hears nothing of the loves of Strephon and Claius, he must not

quarrel with the author who hath made his book one of the most

excellent in the world. There are discourses of love and discourses of

state so generous and pleasant that I should never be weary to read

them. I should say much in his commendation were I not in haste to

speak of Astraea, which Clarimond brings in next, and I am very glad

to find that book generally esteemed, which should oblige him to

esteem it also.”

Sorel’s _Berger Extravagant_ appeared in 1628. Two French translations

of the _Arcadia_ had already been made, one by Baudoin in 1624, and a

second by D. Geneviefve, Chappelain, the year following. The book was

translated into German in 1629, by Valentinus Theocritus, whose

translation was revised by Martin Opitz, and appeared again in 1643

and 1646.

It would be rash to assert that the _Arcadia_, not published until

1590, though circulated widely in manuscript during the preceding

decade, had any influence on the pastorals of Greene and Lodge, who

boasted their adherence to the linguistic fashions set in 1579 by

Lyly’s _Euphues_. It is enough to observe that these and the _Arcadia_

have many close resemblances which are proofs of a common ancestry.

Robert Greene’s _Pandosto_ (1588), the original of Shakespeare’s

_Winter’s Tale_, his _Menaphon_ (1589), and _Philomela_ (1592); and

Lodge’s _Rosalynde: Euphues’ golden legacie_ (1590), whence _As you

like it_ was derived, have the Arcadian scenes and the atmosphere of

fairy-land, combined with the same strain of chivalrous adventure, and

the same complicated love-plots as Sidney’s romance. I venture to

quote from Professor Courthope’s History of English Poetry a passage

emphasising the strong feminine interest which was such a prominent

feature in Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, as well as in Sidney.

“But after all, the element in the _Arcadia_ which produced the

greatest effect upon contemporary taste, on account of the dramatic

tendencies of the age, was the one which Sidney derived from his study

of Montemayor. Perhaps the most noticeable feature in the story is the

complete elimination of the magical and supernatural machinery which

formed so important a part of the older romances. {xxii} In imitation

of Montemayor, Sidney now concentrated the main interest of his

narrative in the complications of the love-plots. The consequence of

this device was to bring the exhibition of female character into

greater prominence. In the old chivalric poetry and fiction no more

than three types of women are represented, the insipid idol of male

worship who shows ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ to her lover, according to the

regulation pattern of the Cours d’Amour; the fickle mistress, like

Cressida, who is inconstant to one lover, and so violates the code of

chivalry; and the unfaithful wife of the class of Guinevere and

Iseult. The _Arcadia_, on the other hand, is full of feminine

heroines, martyrs, and monsters, each of whom plays her own distinct