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