SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA.” "No man," writes Horace Walpole in his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors,"*"seems to me so astonishing an object of temporary admiration as the celebrated friend of the Lord Brooke, the famous Sir Philip Sidney. The learned of Europe dedicated their works to him; the republic of Poland thought him at least worthy to be in the nomination for their crown. All the Muses of England wept his death. When we, at this distance of time, inquire what prodigious merits excited such admiration, what do we find ? Great valour. But it was an age of heroes. In full of other talents, we have a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through; and some absurd attempts to fetter English verse in Roman chains ta proof that this applauded author understood little of the genius of his own language. The few of his letters extant are poor matters; one, to a steward of his *Page 128, ed. 1796, under "Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke." Walpole did not deign to accord a separate chapter to so undistinguished a personage as Sir Philip Sidney! Thus Pope:— "And Sidney's verse halts ill on Roman feet." father, an instance of unwarrantable violence. By far the best presumption of his abilities (to us who can judge only by what we see) is a pamphlet published amongst the Sidney Papers,' being an answer to the famous libel called Leicester's Commonwealth.' It defends his uncle with great spirit. What had been said in derogation to their blood seems to have touched Sir Philip most. He died with the rashness of a volun teer, after having lived to write with the sans froid [sic] and prolixity of Mademoiselle Scuderi." No passage more damaging to Walpole's reputation as a man and a critic could possibly have been written. The clever dilettante of the eighteenth century was quite unable to understand the noble hero of the sixteenth century, and the result is painful even to those who are willing to recognise in the author of the "Castle of Otranto" a man of considerable literary tact and aptitude. It is true enough that we have few means of judging of the reality of Sidney's fame; we have nothing but the testimony of his contemporaries to assure us of his popularity as a friend, his brilliancy as a courtier, and his bravery as a soldier; but surely it is sufficient to say of Sidney that he was born laudari a viris laudatis, that he was considered a great man among the great, and that his death was the signal for universal lamentation among his afflicted countrymen. The finical little censor of Strawberry Hill is good enough to sneer at the manner in which Sidney met his fate; but the story of Sidney on the field of Zutphen is one which still lingers in the memory of Englishmen, and is one, moreover, which the world will not "Such was this young man,' says willingly let die. Mr. Friswell, "that even his Spanish enemies bewailed him; the peasant at Penshurst, the courtier with his Queen, the great Queen herself, the meanest soldier in the camp lamented him, and above two hundred authors wrote sad elegies on his death. Brought home to London, the streets were thronged; the lord mayor and aldermen, robed in purple, and on stately horses; the deputies from foreign states, came forth to follow his ashes; English men and women wept and sobbed aloud, and lamented for him as a brother, and as the most beloved and first true gentleman of Europe." There must have been some reason for all this enthusiasm; and the voice of Elizabethan England may be taken as more valuable, perhaps, than even the ipse dixit of a Horace Walpole or a William Hazlitt. For Walpole is not the only one of the detractors of Sir Philip Sidney. The "Arcadia" was unable to satisfy the acute but acrid author of the "New Pygmalion," and Hazlitt devotes a portion of his "Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth" to a statement of his reasons for his dissatisfaction. "Sir Philip Sidney," he says, "is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said he could not love the French republic, so I may say that I cannot love 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia' with all my good-will to it . . . It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power on record. It puts one in mind of the court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time, which are grown obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic; not poetry, but casuistry; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author's mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and maliciously, in order to aggrandise our idea of himself. Out of five hundred folio pages, there are hardly, I conceive, half-a-dozen sentences expressed simply and directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise the object, instead of displaying it in its true colours and real proportions Imagine a writer to have great natural talents, great powers of memory and invention, an eye for nature, a knowledge of the passions, much learning and equal industry; but that he is so full of a consciousness of all this, and so determined to make the reader conscious of it at every step, that he becomes a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so ;-that he never lets a casual observation pass without perplexing it with an endless running commentary, that he never states a feeling without so many circumambages, without so many interlineations and parenthetical remarks on all that can be said for it, and anticipations of all that can be said against it, and that he never mentions a fact without giving so many circumstances and conjuring up so many things that it is like or not like, that you lose the main clue of the story in its infinite ramifications and intersections;—and we may form some faint idea of the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia,' which is spun with great labour out of the author's brains, and hangs like a huge cobweb over the face of nature ! In a word," says Hazlitt, " (and not to speak ト it profanely) the 'Arcadia' is a riddle, a rebus, an age All this, of course, is very clever and well-written, and portions of it, doubtless, have a substratum of substantial fact. But it would be unfair to judge of the "Arcadia" as a whole from the peculiar point of view of William Hazlitt.* I am unable to believe that Sidney set to work "purposely and maliciously to spoil all his fine things, "in order to aggrandise our idea of himself." I cannot see any trace of the "intellectual coxcomb," or observe that there is anything in Sidney's style so terribly tortuous and affected as Hazlitt describes it. He admits that there are some "The decisions of the author of Table Talk,'" says Lamb, "are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against.' And that he had conceived such a prejudice against Sir Philip Sidney is sufficiently obvious throughout his criticism. |