His Expression of Life.
Sidney’s prime faults are affectation and conceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest gold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a man’s heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckram and broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible that its pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb by throb is impossible. And if this be true of that Astrophel and Stella series in which the poet outpours the melodious heyday of his youth—in which he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirred man’s blood—what shall be said of the Arcadia? In that ‘cold pastoral’ he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigid a fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a great deal of himself into the result, still every one has not the true critical insight, and to most
of us, I think, those glimpses of the lofty nature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in the eyes of the few are merely invisible.