The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
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