“Well was I while under shade
Oaten reeds me music made,
Striving with my mates in song;
Mixing mirth our songs among.
Greater was the shepherd’s treasure
Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.”
How strenuous in his nature was the heroic energy that gave the chivalric strain to his romance, was shown pre-eminently in the closing scenes of his life, when he roused his uncle Leicester out of his sloth, and sacrificed himself on the field to a sense of knightly punctilio. It has been said of him that his whole life was “a true poem, a composition, and pattern of the best and honourablest things”; and not only in his shepherd Philisides, but in all the idealisms of courage, knightly faith and honour, and self-denying affection, that illumine the pages of his Arcadia, and in their splendid deeds of valour and endurance, he poured out the riches of his own nature, as the poet puts all that is best in himself into his verse. His purpose in writing the Arcadia, according to the testimony of his old schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, was moral and didactic; but “in all these creatures of his making his interest and scope was to turn the barren philosophic precepts into pregnant images of life,” that is, to energize them with poetry.
The prose naturally begotten of such a poetical conception of the novel is well illustrated in the following passage, one of those most charged with humanity and most free from extravagance.
“But the headpiece was no sooner off but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which, with the face, soon known by the badge of excellency, witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in despite of the past sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her roundly, sweetly-smelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed her neighbour death; in her cheeks, the whiteness striving, by little and little, to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck—a neck indeed of alabaster—displaying the wound which with most dainty blood laboured to crown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of an unaffected languishing; though these things, to a grossly conceiving sense, might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looking upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.”
In the Apologie for Poetry, Sidney condemned Euphuism, Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated circles immediately upon the publication of Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry, and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his contemporaries:—
“Mirus prorsus homo, immo semideus, vel certe Deus, qui magnae artis subtilitate tantum efferavit argentum … ut diem suum sibi domus faciat, licet sole nolente: sic cubicula, sic porticus, sic ipsae valvae fulgurant.”
“Namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum, et inaccessa salebritate lubricum, mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat: qui statim proni foraminis lacunis editi, perque proclive delapsi, et angusti canalis exerto contecti tramite, proximam convallem latenter incidebant.”
Apuleius might very well have written such a sentence as this:—
“Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object that at first it did but hit flatlong. But little availed that, since the lady falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword with another blow to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.”
And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such extravagances as this:—
“Exceedingly sorry for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that exceedingness in fear for Philoclea.”