Philip Sidney.
Meantime what has become of that Philip Sidney[93] who flashed upon us under the eyes of Elizabeth at the age of twenty-four? You know him as the chivalric soldier and the model gentleman. Students and young people all, who are under the glamour of youthful enthusiasms, are apt to have a great fondness for Philip Sidney: But if any of my young readers chance to be projecting an essay about that courteous gentleman—and I know they will, if they have not already—I would counsel them to forego any mention of the story about the dying soldier and the cup of water. It has been cruelly overworked already. Indeed it might have been matched in scores of cases upon the battle-fields of our own war: When the last shattering blow comes to our poor humanity, the better nature in us does somehow lean kindly out, in glance and in purpose. Yet Philip Sidney was certainly a man of great kindness and full of amiabilities and courtesies.
Why, pray, should he not have been? Consider that in all his young life he was wrapped in purple. It is no bad thing in any day to be born eldest son of an old and wealthy and titled family of England; but it is something more to be born eldest son of a Sidney—nephew to Leicester, prime favorite of the Queen, cousin to the Northumberlands, the Sutherlands, the Warwicks—heir to that old baronial pile of Penshurst, toward which summer loiterers go now, every year, from far-away countries—to admire its red roofs—its gray walls curtained with ivy—its tall chimneys, that have smoked with the goodly hospitalities of centuries—its charming wood-walks, that Ben Jonson and Spenser and Massinger have known—its courts and parterres and terraces, where “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” gathered posies—its far-reaching lovely landscape, with Penshurst church cropping out near by—blue, hazy heights off by Tunbridge—lanes bowered with hedge-rows—wide-lying wavy, grain-fields, and sheep feeding in the hollows of the hills. He was born heir to all this, I say, and had the best masters, the tenderest and the worthiest of mothers—who writes to him in this style,
“Your noble Father hath taken pains, with his own hand, to give you in this—His Letter—so wise precepts for you to follow with a diligent mind, as I will not withdraw your eyes from beholding, and reverent honoring the same—no, not so long a time as to read any letter from me: Wherefor—I only bless you—with my desire to God to plant in you his grace, and have always before your mind the excellent councils of my Lord, your dear Father: Farewell, my little Philip; and, once again, the Lord bless you!
“Your loving mother,
“Marie Sidney.”
Ought not a boy, with such a mother, and Penshurst in prospect, and cousinly relations with the Talbots and Howards and Stanleys to be gentlemanly and amiable? Then—his great-uncle—Leicester (who is Chancellor of the University) writes up to Oxford, where young Sidney is reading for his degree—“Pray have my boy, Philip Sidney, who is delicate, excused from fasting during Lent.” And there is a plot afoot to marry this young Oxford man to Anne, daughter of that Lord Burleigh I told you of, and there are letters about the negotiation still extant. Would you like to hear how Lord Burleigh discusses his daughter’s affairs?
“I have been pressed,” he says, “with kind offers of my lord of Leicester, and have accorded with him, upon articles (by a manner of A. B. C.) without naming persons—that—if P. S. and A. C. hereafter shall like to marry, then shall H. S. (father of P. S.) make assurances, etc., and W. C. [that’s Lord Burleigh] father of A. C. shall pay, etc.: What may follow, I know not: but meanwhile P. S. and A. C. shall have full liberty.”
What did follow was, that old Burleigh thought better of it, and married his daughter to a bigger title—that is Lord Oxford, a learned and elegant, but brutal man, who broke poor Anne Cecil’s heart.
Sidney, after his Oxford course, and another at Cambridge (as some authorities say) went—as was the further mode—upon his travels: and goes, with the same golden luck upon him, to the great house of Walsingham, ambassador of England, in Paris. Why not be gentle? What is to provoke? It is quite a different thing—as many another Cambridge man knew (Spenser among them), to be gentle and bland and forbearing, when illness seizes, when poverty pinches, when friends backslide, when Heaven’s gates seem shut;—then, amiability and gentleness and forbearance are indeed crowning graces, and will unlock, I think, a good many of the doors upon the courts, where the weary shall be at rest.
Sidney is at Paris when that virago Catharine de’ Medici was lording it over her sons, and over France;—there, too, as it chanced, through the slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s day, from which bloody holocaust he presently recoils, and continues his travel over the Continent, writing very charming, practical letters to his younger brother Robert:
“You think my experience,” he says, “has grown from the good things I have learned: but I know the only experience which I have gotten is, to find how much I might have learned and how much indeed I have missed—for want of directing my course to the right end and by the right means.” And again he tells him, “not to go travel—as many people do—merely out of a tickling humor to do as other men have done, or to talk of having been.”
He goes leisurely into Italy—is for some time at the famous University of Padua; he is in Venice too during the great revels which were had there in 1574, in honor of Henry III. (of France). The Piazza of San Marco was for days and nights together a blaze of light and of splendor: what a city to visit for this young Briton, who came accredited by Elizabeth and by Leicester! The palaces of the Foscari and of the Contarini would be open to him; the younger Aldus Manutius was making imprints of the classics that would delight his eye; the temple fronts of Palladio were in their first freshness: Did he love finer forms of art—the great houses were rich in its trophies: the elder Palma and Tintoretto were still at work: even the veteran Titian was carrying his ninety-eight years with a stately stride along the Rivi of the canal: if he loved adventure, the Venetian ladies were very beautiful, and the masks of the Ridotto gave him the freedom of their smiles; the escapade of Bianca Capello was a story of only yesterday; and for other romance—the air was full of it; snatches from Tasso’s Rinaldo[94] were on the lips of the gondoliers, and poetic legends lurked in every ripple of the sea that broke upon the palace steps. It is said that Sidney was painted in Venice by Paul Veronese; and if one is cunning in those matters he may be able to trace the likeness of the heir of Penshurst in some one of those who belong to the great groups of noble men and women which the Veronese has left upon the walls of the Ducal Palace.
In 1575 he came home, with all the polish that European courts and European culture could give him. We may be sure that he paid dainty compliments to the Queen—then in the full bloom of womanhood: we may be sure that she devoured them all with a relish that her queenliness could not wholly conceal. He won his sobriquet of “The Gentleman” in these times; elegantly courteous; saying the right thing just when he should say it:—perhaps too elegantly courteous—too insistent that even a “Good-morning” should be spoken at precisely the right time, and in the right key—too observant of the starched laws of a deportment that chills by its own consciousness of unvarying propriety, as if—well, I had almost said—as if he had been born in Boston. His favorite sister meantime has married one of the Pembrokes, and has a princely place down at Wilton, near Salisbury (now another haunt of pleasure-seekers). Sidney was often there; and he wrote for this cherished sister his book, or poem—(call it how we will) of Arcadia; writing it, as he says, off-hand—and without re-reading—sheet by sheet, for her pleasure: I am sorry he ever said this; it provokes hot-heads to a carelessness that never wins results worth winning. Indeed I think Sidney put more care to his Arcadia than he confessed; though it is true, he expressed the wish on his deathbed, that it should never be printed.
Shall I tell you anything of it—that it is an Allegory—shaped in fact after a famous Italian poem of the same name—that few people now read it continuously; that it requires great pluck to do so; and yet that no one can dip into it—high or low—without finding rich euphuisms, poetic symphonies, noble characters, dexterous experimentation in verse—iambics, sapphics, hexameters, all interlaced with a sonorous grandiloquence of prose—a curious medley, very fine, and very dull? When published after his death it ran through edition after edition, and young wives were gravely cautioned not to spend too much time over that cherished volume. His little book of the Defence of Poesie, which he also wrote down at Wilton, appeals more nearly to our sympathies, and may be counted still a good and noble argument for the Art of Poetry. And Sidney gave proof of his skill in that art, far beyond anything in the Arcadia—in some of those amatory poems under title of Astrophel and Stella, which were supposed to have grown out of his fruitless love for Penelope Devereux, to which I made early reference. I cite a single sonnet that you may see his manner:—
“Stella, think not, that I by verse seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live—but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history.
If thou praise not, all other praise is shame,
Nor so ambitious am I as to frame
A nest for my young praise in laurel tree;
In truth I vow I wish not there should be
Graved in my epitaph, a Poet’s name.
Nor, if I would, could I just title make
That any laud thereof, to me should grow
Without—my plumes from other wings I take—
For nothing from my wit or will doth flow
Since all my words thy beauty doth indite,
And Love doth hold my hand, and make me write.”
But it is, after all, more his personality than his books that draws our attention toward him, amid that galaxy of bright spirits which is gathering around the court of Elizabeth. In all the revels, and the pageants of the day the eyes of thousands fasten upon his fine figure and his noble presence. Though Scott—singularly enough—passes him by without mention, he is down at Kenilworth, when the ambitious Leicester turns his castle-gardens into a Paradise to welcome his sovereign. When he goes as ambassador to Rudolph of Germany, he hangs golden blazonry upon the walls of his house: Englishmen, everywhere, are proud of this fine gentleman, Sidney, who can talk in so many languages, who can turn a sonnet to a lady’s eyebrow, who can fence with the best swordsmen of any court, who can play upon six instruments of music, who can outdance even his Grace of Anjou. His death was in keeping with his life; it happened in the war of the Low Countries, and was due to a brilliant piece of bravado; he and his companions fighting (as at Balaclava in the Charge of the Light Brigade) where there was little hope of conquest. All round them—in front—in rear—in flank—the arquebuses and the cannon twanged and roared. They beat down the gunners; they sabred the men-at-arms; thrice and four times they cut red ways through the beleaguering enemy; but at last, a cruel musket-ball came crashing through the thigh of this brave, polished gentleman—Philip Sidney—and gave him his death-wound. Twenty-five days he lingered, saying brave and memorable things—sending courteous messages, as if the sheen of royalty were still upon him—doing tender acts for those nearest him, and dying, with a great and a most worthy calm.
We may well believe that the Queen found somewhat to wipe from her cheek when the tale came of the death of “my Philip,” the pride of her court. Leicester, too, must have minded it sorely: and of a surety Spenser in his far home of Kilcolman; writing there, maybe—by the Mulla shore—his apostrophe to Sidney’s soul, so full of his sweetness and of his wonderful word-craft:—
“Ah me, can so Divine a thing be dead?
Ah no: it is not dead, nor can it die
But lives for aye in Blissful Paradise:
Where, like a new-born Babe, it soft doth lie
In bed of Lilies, wrapped in tender wise
And compassed all about with Roses sweet
And dainty violets, from head to feet.
There—thousand birds, all of celestial brood
To him do sweetly carol, day and night
And with strange notes—of him well understood
Lull him asleep in angelic Delight
Whilst in sweet dreams, to him presented be
Immortal beauties, which no eye may see.”
Two black palls fling their shadows on the court of Elizabeth in 1587: Sidney died in October of 1586; and in the following February Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded. The next year the Spanish Armada is swept from the seas, and all England is given up to rejoicings. And as we look back upon this period and catch its alternating light and shade on the pages of the historians and in the lives of English poets and statesmen, the great Queen, in her ruff and laces, and with her coronet of jewels, seems somehow, throughout all, the central figure. We see Raleigh the Captain of her Guard—the valiant knight, the scholar, the ready poet—but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately gallantries to her court: We see Sir Francis Drake, with his full beard and bullet-head—all browned with his long voyages, from which he has come laden with ingots of Spanish gold—swinging with his sailor-gait into her august presence: We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his—Francis Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen’s hand and do service for favors which shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash, headstrong Oxford may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the affianced of Sidney: And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville, had contributed the best parts to the Mirror for Magistrates: Richard Hooker, too, may be there—come up from the “peace and privacy” of his country parsonage—in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but in the prime of his age and power, with the calm face and the severe philosophy with which he has confronted a termagant of a wife and the beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in London might have been found, in that day, a young man, not much past twenty—just up from Stratford-upon-Avon—to take his part in playing at the Globe Theatre; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Stratford man may be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul’s—with his chin upon his hand—looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers of his—only creatures of his day-dreams; yet they are to carry his messages of wisdom into all lands and languages.
But I must shut the books where I see these figures come and go.