His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have, in his mimesis, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[[243]]
It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the Apology, though the indirect references are fairly clear. Abstract of it. Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of his office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet vates, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[[244]] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a maker. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.
The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. These classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic, comic, &c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, “for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And again, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet.” Xenophon and Heliodorus were both poets in prose.
Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then by parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or mistress-knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against poetry at some length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is philosophoteron and spoudaioteron than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though not in fact. Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended; and it is in the eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about Chevy Chase[[245]] occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,” he argues that if they were inseparable,[[246]] verse is the most excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.
Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The Mirror for Magistrates is good; so is Surrey; and The Shepherd’s Calendar “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except Gorboduc, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in Gorboduc, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious how cool the reductio ad absurdum will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits two styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer.”
The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically, can hardly be exaggerated. Its minor shortcomings It exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the Calendar, few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus did use dialect: it would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.
It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.
There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy. and major heresies. In both the authority of the ancients must again bear good part of the blame, but in both he has additional excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis that verse were necessary to poetry, though he does not think it is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As for the plays, there is still more excuse for him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point; and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side—at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared, and there is great difference between the two theatres. In English itself not one single great or even good play certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from what we have of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed upon classical and Italian literature. The excuses of both, And it is noteworthy that even Gorboduc, with all its regularity and “Senecation,” does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is here, as elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in the position of a man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and observations, confronted with a stage of creative production but just improving from a very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as against new ones which had as yet had no success.
And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. and their ample compensation. That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the Faerie Queene, that was to give us Hamlet and As You Like It. What though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body is art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the afflatus, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French.
In the decade which followed,[[247]] three notable books of English criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s afflatus, but all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for more than a century. King James’s Reulis and Cautelis. These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”) Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie, 1585; William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poesie, next year; and the anonymous Arte of English Poesie, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George Puttenham.[[248]]