yield to the pertinacity of Du Bartas, while the more pliable English, mindful of an earlier power which had been spellbound into enacting the part of the Sleeping Beauty, responded quickly to the efforts made by Chapman and others to imitate in their own tongue the magnificent rhythmical combinations which constitute so material a part of the Homeric and Pindaric charm. The reward of Du Bartas was a doubtful and ephemeral success; the fashion he set soon went the way of all attempts to set aside natural law. French poetry promptly discarded these compounds, and it may be said that French prose never accepted them. Not so in England. Here they were soon rendered popular in consequence of their adoption by the dramatists, and even earlier began to appear in prose fiction. These compounds form one feature of Arcadianism, and one which Sidney never wholly outgrew. Accordingly we find them. scattered throughout the Defense, just as they occur in the more florid prose of our own day (cf. note on 55 25). Whatever may be urged against their employment, they are certainly an indication of formative energy, and the statement of a literary historian about Lucretius may be applied, with an obvious difference, to Sidney (Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 382): "His abundant use of compound words, most of which fell into disuse in the Augustan age, [was a product] of the same creative force which enabled Plautus and Ennius to add largely to the resources of the Latin tongue. In him, more than in any Latin poet before or after him, we meet with phrases too full of imaginative life to be in perfect keeping with the more sober tones and tamer spirit of the national literature." . It would be tedious to enumerate the specific marks of Sidney's prose as exhibited in his essay. This task may well be reserved for those who undertake a systematic study of his tractate with reference to the illustration of rhetorical principles or historical tendencies. The key to many of its peculiarities will, however, be found in one or two general considerations. First of all, Sidney's may be called an emotional prose. There is a prose of light only, and there is another of light and heat conjoined. That of Sidney belongs to the latter class. It seeks to persuade, and is in that sense oratorical; Hallam even calls it declamatory. Yet while in its argumentative sequences it falls under the head of oratory, in its procession from the emotions and frequent appeal to them, in its imagery and melodious rhythm, it has something in common with poetry. In this union of qualities will be found alike its merits and its defects. There is a somewhat different point of view from which the whole may be regarded. Though the author of the Defense had before him the finished prose of other nations and languages, he stood at the formative period of an artistic prose in English, and the conditions under which all men work at such epochs are less materially affected by their acquaintance with existing models in other tongues than may at first thought be supposed. They know and perhaps approve the better, but instinctively or deliberately follow the worse; or, in the absence of approved precedent, they attempt to fashion an organ for the more purely intellectual faculties, and find themselves slipping back into the balanced constructions and regular cadences of verse. The era of the English Renaissance has in this respect many points of resemblance with the intellectual awakening of Greece after the Persian wars. The evolution of Greek prose finds its counterpart in the struggle to shape a literary medium in English for thought too purely rational and utilitarian in its character to be fitly couched in the ornate diction and measured rhythms of poetry. The description of the former by an accomplished living scholar will fairly characterize the stage through which the more ambitious English prose was at this time passing (Jebb, Attic Orators 1. 18-21): "The outburst of intellectual life in Hellas ... during the fifth century before Christ had for one of its results the creation of Greek prose. Before that age no Greek had conceived artistic composition except in the form of poetry.... As the mental horizon of Greece was widened, as subtler ideas and more various combinations began to ask for closer and more flexible expression, the desire grew for something more precise than poetry, firmer and more compact than the idiom of conversation. Two special causes aided this general tendency. The development of democratic life, making the faculty of speech before popular assemblies and popular law-courts a necessity, hastened the formation of an oratorical prose. The Persian wars, by changing Hellenic unity from a sentiment into a fact, and reminding men that there was a corporate life, higher and grander than that of the individual city, of which the story might be told, supplied a new motive to historical prose... But the process of maturing the new kind of composition was necessarily slow; for it required, as its first condition, little less than the creation of a new language, of an idiom neither poetical nor mean. Herodotos, at the middle point of the fifth century, shows the poetical element still preponderant.... The prose-writer of this epoch instinctively compares himself with the poet. . . . He does not care to be simply right and clear: rather he desires to have the whole advantage which his skill gives him over ordinary men; he is eager to bring his thoughts down upon them with a splendid and irresistible force.... At the moment when prose was striving to disengage itself from the diction of poetry, Gorgias gave currency to the notion that poetical ornament of the most florid type was its true charm. When, indeed, he went further, and sought to imitate the rhythm as well as the phrase of poetry, this very extravagance had a useful result. Prose has a rhythm, though not of the kind at which Gorgias aimed; and the mere fact of the Greek ear becoming accustomed to look for a certain proportion between the parts of a sentence hastened the transition from the old running style to the periodic." Jebb still further characterizes the Gorgian manner in his Introduction, pp. cxxvi-cxxvii: "That which was to the Athenians... the element of distinction in the Sicilian's speaking was its poetical character; and this depended on two things the use of poetical words, and the use of symmetry or assonance between clauses in such a way as to give a strongly marked prose-rhythm and to reproduce, as far as possible, the metres of verse.... Gorgias was the first man who definitely conceived how literary prose might be artistic. That he should instinctively compare it with the only other form of literature which was already artistic, namely poetry, was inevitable. Early prose necessarily begins by comparing itself with poetry." If the Euphuistic and Arcadian prose of the sixteenth century be read in the light of this account of the Gorgian writing, it will be impossible to overlook certain points of similarity, and equally impossible to ignore certain resemblances in the conditions under which the Greek and the English prose were respectively developed. But in instituting such a comparison, there are important differences which must not be disregarded, though there is no space to touch upon them here. And whatever conclusions are reached respecting Euphuism and Arcadianism must certainly undergo modification before proving applicable to the style of the Defense. 5. THEORY OF POETRY. The theory of poetry advanced by Sidney is, in its essentials, the oldest of which we have any knowledge, so old, indeed, that by Sidney's time the world had well-nigh forgotten it, or had deliberately chosen to ignore it. This theory may be expressed in words borrowed from Shelley's Defense of Poetry, a work many of whose chief positions ... are almost precise counterparts of those assumed by Sidney: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. . . . Poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man." Is it indeed true that these words represent Sidney's conception, and, if so, how is this conception related to the chief rival theories which have been, or were then, current? This is the question we have briefly to examine. Sidney assumes that there is an architectonic science, in this following the lead of Aristotle, who in his Ethics (see the note on 12 32 of the Defense) demands this rank for what he calls Political Science, but what we are accustomed to term Moral Philosophy. Speaking as an ethnic, Aristotle had virtually said: "Above all other learnings stands moral philosophy, for it points out the goal of all wisely directed human effort." Speaking as a Christian, Sidney in effect exclaims: "Above all secular learnings stands poetry, for it appropriates the purest ethical teaching, and presents it in a form universally attractive and intensely stimulating." Even in making this statement Sidney is following the lead of Aristotle, who had thus exalted poetry: "Poetry is of a more philosophical and serious character than history" (see note on 18 25). Had Aristotle been asked to determine the relative values of ethics, poetry, and history in a descending scale, he would perhaps have hesitated before giving a categorical answer; had he been urged, he would hardly have done otherwise than arrange them in the order named. Sidney's reply is different. He practically divides the whole of ethics into religion and natural ethics, the latter being understood as moral philosophy unattended with any diviner sanction than such as is derived from the evident nature of things and the purest intuitions of the human spirit. To the former he assigns an indisputable |