The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
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
part in the development of the action. There is the ideal maiden,