Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/242

 as they were done.’ The work bears traces of this method of composition. It relates in rambling fashion the stirring adventures of two princes, Musidorus of Thessaly and Pyrocles of Macedon, who, in the face of many dangers and difficulties, sue for the hands of the princesses Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of Basilius, king of Arcady, and of his lascivious queen Gynecia. Numerous digressions divert the reader's attention from the chief theme. Battles and tournaments fill a large space of the canvas, and they are portrayed with all the sympathy of a knight-errant. But the chivalric elements are balanced by the complications incident to romance, in which the men often disguise themselves as women and the women as men, and by pastoral eclogues mainly in verse, in which rustic life and feeling are contrasted with those of courts. In the long speeches which are placed in the mouths of all the leading actors, much sagacious philosophic or ethical reflection is set before the reader, and there are some attractive descriptions of natural scenery.

The work, in which the tumult of a mediæval chivalric romance thus alternates with the placid strains of pastoral poetry, is an outcome of much reading of foreign literature. The title of the whole and most of the pastoral episodes were drawn from the ‘Arcadia’ of the Neapolitan, Jacopo Sanazaro, which was first published at Milan in 1504 (French translation, 1544). But Sidney stood more directly indebted to Spanish romance—to the chivalric tales of ‘Amadis’ and ‘Palmerin,’ and above all to the ‘Diana Enamorada,’ by George Montemayor (itself an imitation of Sanazaro's ‘Arcadia’), first published in 1557 or 1560, and first translated into English by Bartholomew Yong in 1598. From ‘Diana’ Sidney avowedly translated two songs that figure in the ‘certain sonnets’ appended to the ‘Arcadia.’ Signs are not wanting, too, that Sidney had studied the ‘Æthiopica’ of Heliodorus, of which Thomas Underdown [q. v.] published a translation in 1587. Sidney, in his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (ed. Shuckburgh, p. 12), made appreciative reference to Heliodorus's ‘sugred invention of that picture of love in his Theagines and Cariclea.’ Possibly, too, a part of Sidney's scheme was due to Lyly's ‘Euphues,’ which was published a year before the ‘Arcadia’ was begun.

Both in his ‘Apologie’ and in his ‘Sonnets’ (No. iii.), Sidney condemned the conceits of the euphuists who ‘rifled up’ stories of beasts, fowls, and fishes on which to nurture conceits, and Drayton (in Of Poets and Poesy) claimed for ‘noble’ Sidney that he made a successful stand against the tyranny of Lyly's ‘Euphues:’ [And] throughly paced our language, as to show The plenteous English hand in hand might go   With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce Our tongue from Lilly's writing then in use. But the prose of the ‘Arcadia’ is diffuse and artificial, and abounds in tricks as indefensible and irritating as any sanctioned by Lyly. Sidney overloads his sentences with long series of weak epithets, while he abounds in far-fetched metaphors. Oases of direct narrative exist, but they are rare. Mr. George Macdonald, in his ‘Cabinet of Gems’ (1892), has, however, shown that, by gentle pruning, short extracts from the ‘Arcadia’ can assume graces of simplicity which are only occasionally recognisable in the work in its original shape. In the verse in the ‘Arcadia’ Sidney not only experimented in English with classical metres, but with the terza rima, sestina, and canzonet of modern Italy.

But defects of theme and style passed unrecognised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book at once established itself in popular esteem, and for more than a hundred years enjoyed an undisputed vogue. In Holinshed's ‘Chronicle,’ while Sidney was still alive, and the work in manuscript, the ‘Arcadia’ was eulogised by his friend Edmund Molyneux for ‘its excellencie of spirit, gallant invention, varietie of matter, orderlie disposition,’ and ‘apt words.’ Greville described the work as, in the opinion of Sidney's friends, much inferior to ‘that unbounded spirit of his,’ but he regarded it as at once an artistic and ethical tour de force. Gabriel Harvey eulogised it as ‘the simple image of his gentle wit and the golden pillar of his noble courage.’ Hakewill called it ‘nothing inferior to the choicest piece among the ancients.’ Almost from the day of its publication court ladies imitated its affected turns of speech (cf., Gull's Hornbook, 1609; , Every Man out of his Humour, act ii. sc. i. 1600). Early in the seventeenth century a gentleman of fashion would compliment a lady ‘in pure Sir Philip Sidney’ (Anecdotes, Camden Soc. p. 64). A prayer spoken by Pamela (Arcadia, bk. iii.) was almost literally reproduced in a few copies of the ‘Eἰκὼν Bασιλική,’ and one of the charges made against the king's memory by Milton was that he stole a prayer ‘word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman, praying to a heathen god, and that in no serious book, but in the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia’ (Eikonoklastes, 1649, 1650).

The influence of the romance on contemporary literature was considerable.