It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which devotes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic genius.
Sidney's best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their freshness; but that book of his which was most popular suffers from the changes of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney's book "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," is a novel, written by the author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book was to Sidney what "The Faery Queen" was to Spenser, a wilderness of delights of his own creation, a retreat into a world of fantasy. He wrote it in sheets read, or sent as soon as finished, to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke; the book was meant for her, not for the world. Not long after his death, an unauthorized copy was published (1590), and unauthorized edition followed, and the general delight in the romance is attested by its constant reissues.
The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his fancy to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of the late Greek romances; and in an Arcadia which never existed, and a Laconia most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous ideals of the author, in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and combats; the truth and constancy of his lovers; the beauty of his descriptions, made this mixture of the Spanish heroic romances that infatuated Don Quixote with the Arcadian pastorals, the delight of four generations. Milton blamed the captive Charles I for copying the beautiful and appropriate prayer of the captive Pamela, long after Shakespeare had interwoven with the story of King Lear, Sidney's tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia.
In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what Malory's "Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and historic romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their parts. Indeed the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable heroic French romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old Mortality," and from which Scott did not disdain to borrow a description in "Ivanhoe". It is indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon (Book I, Chap, XII.) with an actual representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked. The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout the romance. The style is less conceited than that of "Euphues," and is always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The profusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable images of virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean verse of the shepherds of Theocritus.
Spenser.
After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We know from his "Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London—
my most kyndly Nurse,
That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame—
that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills.