“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.”