The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare Part 13

Alas! I lie: rage hath this errour bred; Love is not dead; Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind, Where she his counsell keepeth, Till due desert she find.

Therefore from so vile fancie To call such wit a franzie, Who Love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us!"

Love that was not dead but asleep awoke, and Sidney's raptures were again expressed in his verse:

"O joy too high for my low stile to show!...

For Stella hath, with words where faith doth s.h.i.+ne, Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchie: I, I, O I, may say that she is mine."[178]

This lasted some time and when love faded away, at least in Stella's fickle heart, "Astrophel" wrote the real dirge of his pa.s.sion.

Sidney had nevertheless continued his active life all this while, sometimes at court and sometimes on the continent, recognized as a statesman by statesmen, as a poet by poets, as a perfect knight by all experts in knightly accomplishments. Spenser dedicated in 1579 his "Shepheardes Calender" to "the most n.o.ble and vertuous gentleman, most worthy of all t.i.tles, both of learning and chevalrie, M. Philip Sidney"[179]; and William the Silent, Prince of Orange, once said to Fulke Greville that "Her Majesty had one of the ripest and greatest counsellors of estate in Sir Philip Sidney that at this day lived in Europe." The remaining years of his short life were well filled; he had been amba.s.sador to the German Emperor in 1577; he had taken part at home, though unasked, in the negotiations concerning the Queen's marriage, and he lost favour for a while on account of the extraordinary freedom with which he had written to Elizabeth against the French match.

He retired from court at that moment and went to live in the country; while staying with his sister at Wilton in the midst of congenial surroundings, he wrote most of his "Arcadia" (1580). He was a member of Parliament in 1581 and 1584, and married in 1583 the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. He all but accompanied Drake to America, where he had received from the Queen a large grant of lands; he became at last Governor of Flus.h.i.+ng in the Netherlands. He died in that country at thirty-one years of age, in 1586, of a wound received at Zutphen; a premature death that gave the finis.h.i.+ng touch to men's sympathy and love for him; all England wept for him.[180] Even now, it is difficult to think unmoved of his well-filled career ending on the eve of the great triumphs of his country, to call to our memory this brave man who died with his face to the enemy without knowing that victory would be declared for his side, without having known Shakespeare, without having seen the defeat of the Armada.

As for his Stella she survived him only too long. A few years after Sidney's death she deserted her husband by whom she had had seven children, and became the mistress of Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, afterwards Earl of Devons.h.i.+re, to whom she gave three sons and two daughters. Lord Rich, a man full of prudence it seems, waited for the death of the Earl of Ess.e.x, his wife's brother, to divorce her. She then married her lover in 1605. But till her death, which happened in 1608 she was mostly remembered as having been Sidney's friend, and books were dedicated to her because she had been Astrophel's "Stella." Thus Yong's translation of the "Diana" of Montemayor, a pastoral from which Sidney had taken many hints, is dedicated to her.[181] Thus again Florio asks her conjointly with Sidney's daughter[182] to patronize the second book of Montaigne's Essays, addressing Penelope, in the extraordinary style that belonged to him: "I meane you (truely richest Ladie Rich) in riches of fortune not deficient, but of body incomparably richer, of minde most rich: who yet, like Cornelia, were you out-vied, or by rich shewes envited to shew your richest jewelles, would stay till your sweet images (your deere-sweete children) came from schoole." And then, addressing the ladies together, both the daughter and the mistress of the departed hero: "I know not this nor any I have seen, or can conceive, in this or other language, can in aught be compared to that perfect-imperfect Arcadia, which all our world yet weepes with you, that your all praise-exceeding father (his praise-succeeding countesse) your worthy friend (praise-worthiest lady) lived not to mend or end it."[183]

Once Astrophel had sung of Stella, and now Lady Rich was praised by the pedant Rombus.

II.

Sidney's works well accord with his life; in these few years he had time to take in with a clear and kindly glance all those beauties of ancient or modern times, of distant countries or of his own which set the hearts of his contemporaries beating, and he is therefore perhaps, on account of his catholicity, the most worthy of Shakespeare's immediate precursors. The brilliance of the Spaniards enchants him, and he translates fragments of Montemayor[184]; the Kenilworth fetes amuse him and he writes a masque, "The Lady of May,"[185] to be used at like festivities. A true Christian he translates the Psalms of David; a tender and pa.s.sionate heart, he rhymes the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella; enamoured of chivalry and great exploits, he writes, with fluent pen, his "Arcadia," where he imitates the style made fas.h.i.+onable in Europe by Montemayor in his "Diana"; a lover of _belles lettres_, he defends the poet's art in an argument charming from its youthfulness, vibrating with enthusiasm, which holds in English literature the place filled in French by Fenelon's "Lettre a l'Academie."[186] This work is very important with regard to the subject that now occupies us, not only because Sidney gives in it his opinion on works of fiction in general; but because here we have at last a specimen of flexible, spirited, fluent prose, without excessive ornament of style, or learned _impedimenta_, a specimen of that prose which is exactly suited to novels and that no one--Roger Ascham perhaps excepted--had until then used in England.

Perhaps it will be found, he writes at the beginning of his work, with the elegant gracefulness of a man who knows how to do everything that he does well, that I carry my apology to excess; but that is excusable: listen to what Pietro Pugliano, my master of horsemans.h.i.+p, at the Emperor's Court, said: "Hee sayde souldiours were the n.o.blest estate of mankinde, and hors.e.m.e.n, the n.o.blest of souldiours. Hee sayde, they were the maisters of warre, and ornaments of peace: speedy goers and strong abiders, triumphers both in camp and courts." For a prince no accomplishment is comparable to that of being a good horseman; "skill of government was but a Pedanteria in comparison: then would hee adde certaine prayses, by telling what a peerlesse beast a horse was. The onely serviceable courtier without flattery, the beast of most beutie, faithfulnes, courage, and such more, that if I had not beene a peece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have perswaded mee to have wished my selfe a horse. But thus much at least with his no fewe words hee drave into me, that selfe-love is better then any guilding to make that seeme gorgious, wherein our selves are parties. Wherein, if Pugliano his strong affection and weake arguments will not satisfie you, I wil give you a neerer example of my selfe, who (I knowe not by what mischance) in these my not old yeres and idelest times, having slipt into the t.i.tle of a poet, am provoked to say somthing unto you in the defence of that my unelected vocation."

Set at ease by Pugliano's example, who seems to have had the same veneration for the horse as his countryman Vinci, Sidney enters on his defence and does not restrain himself from extolling poetry beyond any product of the human mind. Poetry is superior to history, to philosophy, to all forms of literature. Poets have, by the charm of their works, surpa.s.sed the beauties of nature and they have succeeded in making "the too much loved earth more lovely." He gives to poetry, in effect, an immense domain: everything that is poetic or even merely a work of the imagination is poetry for him: "there have beene many most excellent poets, that never versified, and now swarme many versifiers that neede never aunswere to the name of poets." For him, the romance of "Theagines and Cariclea" is a "poem"; Xenophon's "Cyrus" is "an absolute heroicall poem." To the great joy of their author he would certainly have seen an epic in Chateaubriand's "Martyrs." "It is not riming and versing that maketh a poet, no more then a long gowne maketh an advocate: who though he pleaded in armor should be an advocate and no soldiour." Even historians have sometimes to do the work of poets, that is imagining, inventing, "although theyr lippes sounde of things doone and veritie be written in theyr foreheads."

In spite of his fondness for the ancients, whose unities and messenger he greatly approves, and of his contempt for the modern drama, such as it was understood in those pre-Shakespearean times, he remains, at bottom, entirely English; he adores the old memorials of his native land, and does not know his Virgil better than his Chaucer, or even the popular songs hummed by the wayfarer along the high roads. Irish ballads, English ballads of Robin Hood, Scottish ballads of Douglas, are familiar to him, and some of them make him start as at the sound of a trumpet: "Certainly, I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I never heard the olde song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart mooved more then with a trumpet: and yet it is sung by some blind crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile; which being so evill apparelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that uncivill age, what would it worke, trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?" He would have loved, like Moliere, the song of the "roi Henri," and like La Fontaine, the story of Peau d'Ane. But his closest sympathies were reserved for poetical tales, for the adventures of Roland and King Arthur, which are a soldier's reading, and even for the exploits of Amadis of Gaul. "I dare undertake 'Orlando furioso' or honest King Arthur will never displease a souldier....

Truely, I have knowen men, that even with reading 'Amadis de Gaule,'

which G.o.d knoweth wanteth much of a perfect poesie, have found their hearts mooved to the exercise of courtesie, liberalitie and especially courage." He imagines nothing more enchanting or more powerful than the charm of poetical prose stories, "any of which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." Their attraction has something superior, divine; for, he adds with a depth of emotion that appears quite modern, "so is it in men, most of which are childish in the best things, till they bee cradlid in their graves."[187]

He closes with a witty and delightful ending, a kindly wish for the hardened enemies of poetry: "Yet this much curse I must send you, in the behalfe of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet: and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph."

Neither did Sidney lack epitaphs; all the poets wept for him; nor was he wanting in those favours that a sonnet can win, for he wrote the most pa.s.sionate that appeared in England before those of Shakespeare. Like the "Apologie" they move us by their youth and sincerity; they come from the heart:

"Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That She, dear She! might take some pleasure of my paine:

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine; Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Som fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sun-burn'd brain: But words came halting forth ...

Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite: 'Foole!' said my Muse to me, 'looke in thy heart, and write!'"[188]

Unfortunately, when Sidney took up his pen to write his "Arcadia,"[189]

he no longer looked into his heart; he loosed the rein of his imagination, and, without concerning himself with a critical posterity for whom the book was not destined, he only wished, like Lyly, to write a romance for ladies, or rather for one lady, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, famous as his sister, famous as a patron of letters,[190]

famous also as the mother of William Herbert, the future friend of Shakespeare, the "W. H." for whom in all probability the sonnets of the great poet were written. Sidney sent the sheets to his sister as fast as he penned them, charging her to destroy them, a thing she did not do.

The poet knight only saw in it an amus.e.m.e.nt for himself and for the Countess, and he gave free vent to his fondness for poetical prose: "For severer eyes it is not," says he to his sister, "being but a trifle and that triflingly handled. Your deare selfe can best witnesse the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheetes, sent unto you as fast as they were done. In summe, a young head, not so well staied as I would it were (and shall bee when G.o.d will) having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not beene in some way delivered, would have growne a monster, and more sorry might I bee that they came in than that they gat out." His "Apologie" was perhaps from its style more useful to the development of the novel than the "Arcadia"; but the latter, in spite of its enormous defects of style and composition, was also of use, and it is not unimportant to note that its influence lasted until and even beyond the time of Richardson.

Sidney's romance is not, as might be believed, an enormous pseudo-Greek pastoral, with tunic-wearing shepherds in the foreground, piping their ditties to their flocks, to their nymphs, to Echo. Elizabethan Arcadias were knightly Arcadias. Sidney's heroes are all princes or the daughters of kings. Their adventures take place in Greece, undoubtedly, and among learned shepherds, but the great parts are left to the n.o.blemen, and the distance between the two cla.s.ses is well marked. However intelligent and well bred the shepherds may be, they are only there for decoration and ornament, to amuse the princes with their songs, and to pull them out of the water when they are drowning. There are Amadises and Palmerins in Sidney's work. Amadis has come to live among the shepherds, but he remains Amadis, as valiant and as ready as ever to draw his sword. To please his sister the better, Sidney mingles thus the two kinds of affectations in fas.h.i.+on, the affectation of pastoral and of chivalry, taking in this as his example the famous "Diana" of George de Montemayor, which was then the talk not only of Spain, but of all the reading public in Europe.[191] As for the shepherds, are we to pity them because their domain is invaded by foreign knights, by whom they are dispossessed of the high rank belonging to them, of all places, in Arcady? There is no need for pity; a time will come when they will repay their invaders, and the end of their piping has not come yet. Leaving their country, where their place has been taken by British n.o.blemen, we shall see them some day invade the land of their conquerors, and, sitting in their turn under the elms of Windsor Park, sing their songs at the call of Mr. Pope. They will look a little awry, no doubt, among the mists of an English landscape, with their loose tunics, bare limbs, and "in-folio" wigs; but they will prove none the less fine speakers, and they will for a time concentrate upon themselves the attention of the capital. Better still will be their treatment at the hands of a Frenchman, not a poet, but a painter, Gaspard Poussin, who will gain more permanent attention and sympathy for them than most poets when he will inscribe in his canvas, on the representation of a ruined tomb, his famous "Et in Arcadia ego."[192]

Sidney's heroes, in the meantime, Prince Musidorus and Prince Pyrocles, the latter disguised as a woman under the name of the amazon Zelmane, are in love with the Princesses Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of the King of Arcady. A great many crosses are in the way of the lovers'

happiness. They have to fight helots, lions, bears, enemies from Corinth. They lose each other, find each other again, and relate their adventures. The masculine amazon especially does wonders, for she has to fight not only with the sword, but in argument. She is so pretty in woman's costume that the old king Basilius, until then wise and virtuous, falls distractedly in love with her, as imprudent as Fior-di-Spina in Ariosto; while the queen, whom the disguise does not deceive, feels an intense pa.s.sion spring up in her heart for the false amazon and a terrible jealousy of her own daughter, Philoclea.

Disguises are numerous in this romance; they are also frequent in Shakespeare's plays and in most of the novels of the time. Parthenia gives herself out to her admirer, Argalus, as the Queen of Corinth, whom she resembles, and announces her own death. As pretended queen she offers her hand to Argalus, to prove him; but he refuses with horror; she then discovers herself to this paragon of lovers, and gives him his Parthenia alive and more loving than ever.

When we read now of such disguises, of princes Pyrocles dressed as women, of Rosalinds dressed as pages, we are tempted to smile at the vain fancies of the novelists of the Shakespearean era.[193] But it must not be forgotten that, after all, there was not so much invention in these fancies, and that living examples were not rare from which writers might copy. Disguises were abundantly used in fetes and ceremonies, but they were also utilized in actual life. The manners of the time in this particular are well ill.u.s.trated by the earnest entreaties of a certain amba.s.sador to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, advising her to leave her palace secretly and travel over the country as his page. The Queen was in no way shocked, but rather pleased; she did not order the amba.s.sador to be turned out of her palace, but heard him expound his plan, wis.h.i.+ng she might have followed it. This happened in one of those curious conversations of which Melville, the amba.s.sador of Mary Queen of Scots, has left us an account. Elizabeth was very desirous of seeing her "dear sister" of Scotland and of judging with her own eyes what truth there was in the reports concerning her beauty. "Then again," says Melville, "she wished that she might see the queen at some convenient place of meeting. I offered to convey her secretly to Scotland by post, clothed like a page, that under this disguise she might see the queen, as James the fifth had gone in disguise to France with his own Amba.s.sadour, to see the Duke of Vendom's sister,[194] who should have been his wife.

Telling her that her chamber might be kept in her absence, as though she were sick; that none needed to be privy thereto except my Lady Strafford and one of the grooms of her chamber.

"She appeared to like that kind of language, only answered it with a sigh, saying: Alas, if I might do it thus."[195]

Surely ladies who "appeared to like that kind of language," and men who were wont to use it, would be certain to accept with much pleasure representations in plays and novels of he-Rosalinds and she-Pyrocles.

In the midst of battles, masques and eclogues, interludes are consecrated to fetes of chivalry. As much as in Italy, France or England, the knights of Arcady challenge each other, and in brilliant tournaments break lances in honour of their mistresses. Sidney himself was very skilful at these sports; he proved it about this time in the festivities of May, 1581, by attacking with his companions, the Castle of perfect Beauty, which was reputed to contain the grace and attractions of the Queen, a treasure as may well be believed, most allegorical. His sonnets more than once refer to his prowess in the lists:

"Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize, Both by the judgment of the English eyes, And of some sent from that sweet enemie France.

Hors.e.m.e.n my skill in horsemans.h.i.+p advance; Towne-folks my strength; a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise; Some luckie wits impute it but a chance ...

Stella lookt on...."[196]

In his letters to his brother Robert, he is most particular as to the every-day exercise by which the young man should improve his fencing. He could not help giving his tastes to his Arcadian knights. They would, otherwise, have been considered by his lady-readers, uninteresting barbarians. He therefore allowed them good spurs and a ready lance; this meant civilization. On a certain day every knight appears in the vale of Arcady, with drawn sword, and carrying a portrait of his fair lady; the painting is to become the prey of the conqueror. The order of merit of the various beauties is thus determined by blows of the lance. Pyrocles, who, dressed as a woman, cannot take part in the fighting, has the mortification of seeing the champion of Philoclea bite the dust and give up her portrait. He goes immediately and secretly puts on some wretched armour, lowers his visor, and like a brave hero of romance, runs into the lists, throws every one to the ground, regains the portrait, and all the others as well. He is proclaimed conqueror of the tourney, and the first of knights, while at the same time, Philoclea becomes again the most beautiful of women.

In this Arcadia of chivalry it must not be thought that only cottages and huts are to be found; sometimes the heroes sleep soundly in the open air, but seldom. In this country there are palaces like those of the rich English lords. The dwelling of the n.o.ble Kalander is of this number. The park is magnificent, and quite in the style of the Elizabethans, that style which is so minutely described in Bacon's "Essay on gardens." It did not differ much from the park at Kenilworth, a place well known to Sidney: "whearin, hard all along the castell wall iz reared a pleazaunt terres of a ten foot hy and a twelve brode, even under foot, and fresh of fyne gra.s.s: as iz allso the side thearof toward the gardein, in whiche by sundry equall distauncez, with obelisks, sphearz and white bearz [bears], all of stone, upon theyr curiouz basez, by goodly shew wear set; too theez, too fine arbers redolent by sweete trees and floourz, at ech end one, the garden plot under that, with fayr alleyz green by gra.s.s." There were fountains with marble Tritons, with Neptune on his throne, and "Thetis on her chariot drawn by her Dollphins,"[197] with many other G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses.

Kalander's gardens in Arcady were of the same sort; their adornments were not very sober, and many eccentricities are presented as beauties; thus the fas.h.i.+on of the day would have it; Versailles in comparison is simplicity itself. Kalander and his guest go round the place, and "as soone as the descending of the staires had delivered them downe, they came into a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits: but scarcely they had taken that into consideration, but that they were suddenly stept into a delicate greene; of each side of the greene a thicket, and behind the thickets againe new beds of flowers, which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion, and they to the trees a mosaicall floore....

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SHEPHERD OF ARCADY, FROM THE t.i.tLE-PAGE OF SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA."]

"In the middest of all the place was a faire pond, whose shaking cristall was a perfect mirrour to all the other beauties, so that it bare shew of two gardens, one in deed, the other in shadowes. And in one of the thickets was a fine fountaine made thus: a naked Venus of white marble, wherin the graver had used such cunning that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautifull veines of her body. At her breast she had her babe aeneas, who seemed, having begun to sucke, to leave that, to look upon her faire eyes, which smiled at the babe's folly, meane while the breast running."[198] The effect produced must undoubtedly have been very pleasant, but scarcely more "natural" than the embellishments recommended by Bacon, who declares that hedges and arbours ought to be enlivened by the songs of birds; and that to make such enlivening sure and permanent, the birds should be secured in cages. A good example of a garden in Sidney's time with beds of flowers, arbours, pavilions, and covered galleries is to be seen in his own portrait by Isaac Oliver, of which we give a reproduction. It must be noticed that only the lower part of the long gallery at the back is built; the vault-shaped upper portion is painted green, being supposed to be made of actual leaves and foliage. Except for such books as Sidney's it could not be said of those gardens that "they too were once in Arcady."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PRINCESS OF ARCADY, FROM THE t.i.tLE-PAGE OF SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA."]

Costumes and furniture are of the same style, and accord with such gardens much more than with shepherd life. They are pure Renaissance, half Italian and half English. Musidorus disguised as a shepherd, dresses his hair in such a way as to look much more like one of the Renaissance Roman Emperors at Hampton Court than like a keeper of sheep: we see him while receiving a lesson on the use of the "sheep-hooke,"

wearing "a garland of laurell mixt with cypres leaves on his head."[199]

The glowing descriptions of the private apartments of the heroes suit modern palaces better than Greek cottages; while representations of ladies rec.u.mbent on their couches are obvious reminiscences of Tintoretto or t.i.tian, whose newly painted works Sidney had admired in Italy. Here is a description of the beautiful Philoclea, resting in her bedroom; it shows unmistakable signs of Sidney's acquaintance with the Italian painters: "She at that time lay, as the heate of that country did well suffer, upon the top of her bed, having her beauties eclipsed with nothing, but with her faire smocke, wrought all in flames of ash-colour silk and gold; lying so upon her right side, that the left thigh down to the foot, yielded hir delightfull proportion to the full view, which was seene by the helpe of a rich lampe, which thorow the curtaines a little drawne cast forth a light upon her, as the moone doth when it s.h.i.+nes into a thinne wood."[200]

Sidney, according to his friend Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, had the highest moral and political purposes, in writing his "Arcadia": "In all these creatures of his making, his interest and scope was, to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life; and in them, first on the monarchs part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of princes, changes of government and lawes ... Then again in the subjects case, the state of favour, disfavour, prosperitie, adversity ... and all other moodes of private fortunes or misfortunes, in which traverses, I know, his purpose was to limn out such exact pictures of every posture in the minde, that any man might see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversitie."[201]

When Greville wrote thus, Sidney was dead, and in his retrospect of his friend's life he was with perfect good faith discovering high, not to say holy motives, for all his actions. Sidney's own explanation suits his work better; he was delivering his "young head" of "many, many fancies," and their main object was not politics, but love. He described it as it was known and practised in his time. Most of the heroes in the "Arcadia," talk like Surrey, Wyatt, Watson, and all the "amourists" of the century, like Sidney himself when he addressed another than Stella.

The modesty of their characters is equal to their tenderness; valiant as lions before the enemy, they tremble like the leaf before their mistresses; they feed on smiles and tender glances; when they have to suffer a scarcity of this heavenly food they can only die: "Hee dieth: it is most true, hee dieth; and he in whom you live dieth. Whereof if though hee plaine, hee doth not complaine: for it is a harme but no wrong which hee hath received. He dies, because in wofull language all his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure." Fair Pamela feels deeply moved when reading this, and confesses her harshness; she denied him a look: "Two times I must confess," says she to her sister, not without a pretty touch of humour of a very modern sort, "I was about to take curtesie into mine eyes, but both times the former resolution stopt the entrie of it: so, that hee departed without obtaining any further kindenesse. But he was no sooner out of the doore, but that I looked to the doore kindly!" The poor lover who did not see this change in his lady's countenance went away fainting, "as if he had beene but the coffin that carried himselfe to his sepulchre!"[202]

Happiness produces the same effect on these heroes. Pyrocles-Zelmane when present in his false quality of woman at the bath of his mistress in the Ladon is on the point of swooning with admiration.[203] His friend, Prince Musidorus, in the ecstasies of his pa.s.sion, falls "downe prostrate," uttering this prayer to the awful G.o.d who reigns paramount in Arcady: "O thou, celestiall or infernall spirit of Love, or what other heavenly or h.e.l.lish t.i.tle thou list to have (for effects of both I find in my selfe), have compa.s.sion of me, and let thy glory be as great in pardoning of them that be submitted to thee as in conquering them that were rebellious."[204]

But Sidney painted also amours of another sort, and one of the great attractions of his book is the variety in the descriptions of this pa.s.sion. Never had the like been seen before in any English novel, and as for France, it must be remembered, that d'Urfe's "Astree," which has kept its place in literature for the very same quality, for its inconstant Hylas and its faithful Celadon, for its Astree and its Madonte, was yet to be written. Sidney has, among several others, created one character which, forgotten as it is now, would be enough to give a permanent interest to this too much neglected romance; it is the Queen Gynecia, who is consumed by a guilty love, and who is the worthy contemporary of the strongly pa.s.sionate heroes of Marlowe's plays. With her, and for the first time, the dramatic power of English genius leaves the stage and comes to light in the novel; it was destined to pa.s.s into it entirely.

Gynecia does not allow herself to be blinded by any subterfuge; love has taken possession of her; the rules of the world, the laws of blood, the precepts of virtue that she has observed all her life, are lost sight of; she is conscious of nothing but that she loves, and is ready, like Phaedra of old, to trample everything under foot, to forsake everything, the domestic hearth, child, husband: and it is very interesting to see, about the time of Shakespeare, this purely dramatic character develop itself in a novel.

"O vertue," she cries, in her torment, "where doest thou hide thy selfe?

What hideous thing is this which doth eclipse thee? or is it true that thou wert never but a vaine name, and no essentiall thing; which hast thus left thy professed servant, when she had most neede of thy lovely presence? O imperfect proportion of reason, which can too much foresee, and too little prevent: Alas, alas, said she, if there were but one hope for all my paines, or but one excuse for all my faultinesse! But wretch that I am, my torment is beyond all succour, and my evill deserving doth exceed my evill fortune. For nothing else did my husband take this strange resolution to live so solitarily: for nothing else have the winds delivered this strange guest to my countrey: for nothing else have the destinies reserved my life to this time, but that onely I, most wretched I, should become a plague to my selfe and a shame to woman-kind. Yet if my desire, how unjust soever it be, might take effect, though a thousand deaths followed it, and every death were followed with a thousand shames, yet should not my sepulchre receive me without some contentment. But, alas, so sure I am, that Zelmane is such as can answer my love; yet as sure I am, that this disguising must needs come for some foretaken conceit: and then, wretched Gynecia, where canst thou find any small ground plot for hope to dwell upon? No, no, it is Philoclea his heart is set upon, it is my daughter I have borne to supplant me: but if it be so, the life I have given thee, ungratefull Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of, than my birth shall glory she hath bereaved me of my desires."[205]

We see with how little reason the "Arcadia" is sometimes placed in the category of bedizened pastorals, where the reader is reduced to regret the absence of a "little wolf," and whether Gynecia, in spite of the oblivion which has gathered over her, does not deserve a place by the side of the pa.s.sionate heroines of Marlowe and Webster rather than in a gallery of Lancret-like characters.

Sidney, thus possesses the merit, unique at that time with prose writers, of varying his subjects by marking its _nuances_ and by describing in his romance different kinds of love. Side by side with Gynecia's pa.s.sion, he has set himself to paint the love of an old man in Basilius, of a young man in Pyrocles, of a young girl in Pamela. This last study led him to portray a scene which was to be represented again by one of the great novelists of the eighteenth century. Richardson borrowed from Sidney, with the name of Pamela, the idea of the adventure that shows her a prisoner of her enemies, imploring heaven that her virtue may be preserved. The wicked Cecropia who keeps Sidney's Pamela shut up, laughs heartily at her invocations: "To thinke," she says, "that those powers, if there be any such, above, are moved either by the eloquence of our prayers, or in a chafe at the folly of our actions, carries as much reason, as if flies should thinke that men take great care which of them hums sweetest, and which of them flies nimblest."

Pamela, "whose cheeks were dyed in the beautifullest graine of vertuous anger," replies by speeches which yield in nothing as regards n.o.bility and dignity, and length also, to those of her future sister, and which are followed as in Richardson, by an unexpected deliverance. These speeches are famous for yet another reason; they are said to have been recited in one of the most terrible crises of the history of England and were not this time followed by a deliverance. Charles I., it is reported, had copied out, and recited a short time before his death, the eloquent prayers to G.o.d, of the young heroine of Sidney's novel. It seems that Pamela's prayer figured among the papers that he gave with his own hand, at the last moment, to the prelate who was attending him: and the Puritans, Milton especially, uttered loud cries, and saw in this reminiscence of the artist-prince, an insult to the divine majesty.

"This King," writes the poet, "hath as it were unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of prayer itself, by borrowing to a Christian use prayers offered to a heathen G.o.d. Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost, whose office is to dictate and present our Christian prayers, so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop who attended him, for a special relique of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman, praying to a heathen G.o.d, and that in no serious book, but in the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia."[206] Here is this prayer which is a very grave and eloquent one, and in no way justifies the bitter reproaches addressed to Charles by his enemies: