The fact is, there are bound to be these freaks and extravagances whilst a style is still in such an inchoate and experimental state as English prose was in from the time of Malory and Berners, and the other early architects of a style unfettered by metre, with whom, as Mr John Dover Wilson has shown in his work on John Lyly, the germs of Euphuism found their way into English long before Guevara was known in this country, although the tendency is nearly always attributed to his influence. The writers of this period could not evolve even a poetic prose without falling into these pitfalls, for the simple reason that they wrote a century before the principles of what may be called a normal prose style had been determined. Mr Watts-Dunton has pointed out that in the present age there is another kind of poetic prose in process of evolution, a prose “which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry.” Prose to be truly poetical, he argues, must move far away from the “tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin,” and must no doubt be something very different from what Sidney and other writers made of Elizabethan prose, noble as their achievement was.
“It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet’s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars.”
Such a prose as this must be the very latest product of literary effort. Its difference from the poetic prose actually evolved in the transitional age with which we are dealing, is the difference between an art founded on long experience and many attempts and failures, and above all on a sound philosophy of aesthetic causes and effects, and the essays of men who were not yet clear as to the objects they ought to aim at. So uncertain was Sidney even as to the true genius of English poetry that he was one of the most ardent members of the “Areopagus,” who endeavoured to reform English poetry on Italian and classical principles, the results of which attempt may be appraised in the verses inserted in the Arcadia. The indispensable basis for a sound poetic prose, if such a thing is feasible, must be a satisfactory norm of unpoetic prose.
Sidney’s romance did not escape ridicule in his own time; Ben Johnson parodied Arcadianism in Every Man out of his Humour; Dekker poked fun at Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen in the Gul’s Horne-book; and the involved and careless construction of the story came in for mild satire in one of the earliest burlesques of chivalrous and pastoral romances, Sorel’s Berger Extravagant, which was translated by John Davies of Kidwelly in a book that may be remembered by its sub-title, the Anti-Romance. The criticism in the passage following is not particularly acute, but is cited because few readers of Sidney are likely to come across such a very rare work as this translation (1648).
“Nor hath England wanted its Arcadia, whereof it is not long since we have had the translation. I find no more order in that than in the rest, and there are many things whereof I am not at all satisfied. At the very beginning you have the complaints of the shepherds Strephon and Claius upon the departure of Urania, without telling us who she was, nor whither she went. Now an author ought never to begin his book but he should mention the persons principally concerned in the history whose actions he is to raise up beyond any of the rest; yet this man makes afterward no more mention of these two shepherds than if he had never named them; and though he bring them in again at some sports before Basilius, yet that signifies nothing, since a man finds no period of their adventures, and that those verses wherein they speak of their loves are so obscure that they may be taken for the oracles of a Sybill. It is true that Sir Philip dying young might have left his work imperfect; but there’s no reason why we should suffer by that misfortune, and be obliged to take a thing for perfect because it might have been made so.”
… Thus Clarimond in his “Oration against Poetry, Fables, and Romances”; Philiris in his “Vindication” replies:—
“As for Sidney’s Arcadia, since it hath crossed the sea to come and see us, I am sorry Clarimond receives it with such poor compliments. If he hears nothing of the loves of Strephon and Claius, he must not quarrel with the author who hath made his book one of the most excellent in the world. There are discourses of love and discourses of state so generous and pleasant that I should never be weary to read them. I should say much in his commendation were I not in haste to speak of Astraea, which Clarimond brings in next, and I am very glad to find that book generally esteemed, which should oblige him to esteem it also.”
Sorel’s Berger Extravagant appeared in 1628. Two French translations of the Arcadia had already been made, one by Baudoin in 1624, and a second by D. Geneviefve, Chappelain, the year following. The book was translated into German in 1629, by Valentinus Theocritus, whose translation was revised by Martin Opitz, and appeared again in 1643 and 1646.
It would be rash to assert that the Arcadia, not published until 1590, though circulated widely in manuscript during the preceding decade, had any influence on the pastorals of Greene and Lodge, who boasted their adherence to the linguistic fashions set in 1579 by Lyly’s Euphues. It is enough to observe that these and the Arcadia have many close resemblances which are proofs of a common ancestry. Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), the original of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, his Menaphon (1589), and Philomela (1592); and Lodge’s Rosalynde: Euphues’ golden legacie (1590), whence As you like it was derived, have the Arcadian scenes and the atmosphere of fairy-land, combined with the same strain of chivalrous adventure, and the same complicated love-plots as Sidney’s romance. I venture to quote from Professor Courthope’s History of English Poetry a passage emphasising the strong feminine interest which was such a prominent feature in Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, as well as in Sidney.
“But after all, the element in the Arcadia which produced the greatest effect upon contemporary taste, on account of the dramatic tendencies of the age, was the one which Sidney derived from his study of Montemayor. Perhaps the most noticeable feature in the story is the complete elimination of the magical and supernatural machinery which formed so important a part of the older romances. In imitation of Montemayor, Sidney now concentrated the main interest of his narrative in the complications of the love-plots. The consequence of this device was to bring the exhibition of female character into greater prominence. In the old chivalric poetry and fiction no more than three types of women are represented, the insipid idol of male worship who shows ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ to her lover, according to the regulation pattern of the Cours d’Amour; the fickle mistress, like Cressida, who is inconstant to one lover, and so violates the code of chivalry; and the unfaithful wife of the class of Guinevere and Iseult. The Arcadia, on the other hand, is full of feminine heroines, martyrs, and monsters, each of whom plays her own distinct part in the development of the action. There is the ideal maiden, Pamela or Philoclea, type of lofty virtue, forerunner of the Clarissas and Belindas of Richardson; the vicious Queen Cecropia recalling the Phaedras and Sthenobaeas of Greek legend; Gynecia, the passion-stricken wife of a respectable elderly husband, a favourite figure in the modern French novel; the clownish Mopsa, the original, perhaps, of Shakespeare’s Audrey; and, above all, the representative of adventurous, unhappy, self-sacrificing love in its various aspects, Helen, Queen of Corinth, Parthenia, and Zelmane, predecessors of Shakespeare’s Viola, Helena, and Imogen.”