Moralizing, deviating to rhetoric, Sidney is nevertheless suggestive and sometimes penetrative.
He cites Plato’s dialogues (3) as poetical. His lively account of poetry as imaginative realization (4-6) and as insight into human life makes clear Aristotle’s saying that poetry “is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history” (18). He satirizes Elizabethan ignoring of the dramatic unities (48), and sees through Ciceronianism (53). His section (55-56) on the character and capacity of English verse, all too brief, has real importance.
But he is so far from grasping Aristotle’s idea of imitation that he renders it thus:
Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word μίμησις, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight (9).
We leap away from Aristotle to Horace’s ut pictura poesis, and so to rhetoric. This is not merely misinterpretation; it indicates Sidney’s lack of any controlling poetic principle. Though he tidily provides summaries at the ends of his sections, he has little advance of thought. His work is what it is called, a defense[59] of poetry, not a reasoned theory.
There is occasional significance in the usual Renaissance array of names. Paying his respects to the Cardinals Bembo and Bibbiena (44), Sidney immediately offsets them with the Protestants Beza and Melancthon. He calls Fracastoro and Scaliger “learned philosophers”; Pontano and Muret, “great orators”; and refers twice to the Latin tragedies of George Buchanan. His praise of l’Hospital (45) is probably reminiscent of Ronsard’s ode; for Sidney is acquainted with the Pléiade. Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Ariosto he merely mentions; but he knows the greatness of Dante and of course the charm of Sannazaro. Of the ancients, Plato is cited oftenest, then Aristotle, Plutarch, Horace of course, and Pindar. He speaks of “the height of Seneca’s style” (47), mentions Apuleius (50), and cites the “Greek Romances” in an extraordinary miscellany: “so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas” (8). His review of English poetry (45-47) scorns the intrusion of “base men with servile wits,” finds that Chaucer “did excellently”—for his time, and gives vague praise to Surrey and Spenser. The reading of the English gentleman poet has been wide, creditably classical, undiscriminating.
12. ENGLISH DISCUSSION OF VERSE
George Gascoigne’s Certaine notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or rime in English, written at the request of Master Edouardo Donati (1575; reprinted in G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 46-57) is a brief primer of English verse usage. Though it bungles in detail, it is fairly true to the English tradition of rhythm determined by stress.
The last years of the century prolonged in England a proposal to classicize English metric. William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie (1586; Gregory Smith, I, 226-302. References are to these pages.) harps uncertainly on classical prosody.