Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (28 page)

The ambition to do great things in the world of affairs is not easily given up and for the next eighteen months Sidney served the nation where he could. He accompanied his father to Ireland and generally approved of his country’s barbarous behaviour in that wretched land. He had a sympathy for the poor ‘who may groan, for their cry cannot be heard’, but in a
Discourse on Ireland
he made the characteristic English claim that lenience was no use in Ireland because the people hated their conquerors and were papists besides. In February 1577 he found more congenial employment when he was sent on a formal embassy to the Emperor Rudolph, and to the Counts Palatine, Lewis and Casimir, condoling all these men on recent family losses. He went with his friends Fulke Greville and Edward Dyer, and he proved once again his high European reputation. He captivated in turn three most dissimilar men. In Louvain he met the Catholic Don Juan of Austria, the victor of Lepanto, and the onlookers were astonished, said Greville, ‘to see what ingenuous tribute that brave and high-minded Prince’ paid Sidney. In Prague he had long talks with another earnest Catholic, the Jesuit Edmund Campion, later captured and executed in England. And on the way back, at the Queen’s command he turned aside to see William the Silent, the most resolute Protestant leader in Europe. William saw in Sidney a champion of the revolt against Spain, and offered his sister in
marriage; but Elizabeth did not intend to make Sidney an instrument of destiny and forbade the match. Leicester and Walsingham, the leaders of the aggressive faction, were pleased with the embassy. ‘The honourable opinion he hath left behind him with all the Princes with whom he had to negotiate’, wrote Walsingham, ‘hath left a most sweet savour and grateful remembrance of his name in those parts.’ This young man had become a sharp tool for their purpose.

And Sidney was theirs to use. His Protestant sympathy was not in doubt. He had travelled up and down Europe and was admired by all who knew him. He was beginning to show powers of persuasion, able to put a blunt argument in elegant forms. He was bound to Leicester by ties of blood, and cut off from peaceful Burghley through dislike for the Earl of Oxford, Burghley’s son-in-law, who had insulted Sidney on the tennis court. He was the upright, outspoken innocent ready to be employed by the wiles of politicians. When Leicester needed a forceful argument against the proposed match between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, he came to Sidney who willingly complied.

The declaration he sent to the Queen was very bold indeed. He spoke of Anjou in most contemptuous terms as the ‘son of that Jezebel of our age’
¹
and a party to the St Bartholomew Massacre. He warned that Englishmen ‘will be galled, if not alienated, when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman and a Papist’. He showed Elizabeth the duty of a Protestant sovereign. To send such a document was hazardous; the sturdy nationalist John Stubbs, who had written against the marriage in a pamphlet, had his right hand chopped off for his temerity. Sidney escaped punishment because of his birth and position, and because the Queen herself had no intention of marrying. But the presumption, even though the advice was good, was too great for any Tudor to bear. Sidney could now expect no advancement to great office.

The act that was the ruin of the politician was the making of the poet. In the ideal courtier all graces and talents were bound up. He was expected to have skill in diplomacy, administration, arms and arts. Earlier Tudor courts had been served by Wyatt, Sackville, Surrey, labouring for the commonwealth of the realm
and the commonwealth of letters with equal distinction. At the court, more than anywhere else, there was the learning, wealth, leisure and interest to make the arts flourish under the encouragement of sympathetic sovereigns. Manuals on arms were written by courtiers, but so too were manuals on poetry; George Puttenham wrote his
Art of English Poesy
(1589) for ‘young gentlemen or idle courtiers’ and his intention was ‘to make a rude rimer, a learned and a courtly poet’. But the noble ideal of service to the two realms no longer applied in Elizabeth’s reign. The gifted amateur was excluded from government, as Sidney discovered. The English courtier, without responsibility, became an affected butterfly; Languet found the life of the English court effeminate and artificial.

Sidney agreed with his moral tutor. The mark of his mind, wrote Greville, was ‘lovely and familiar gravity as carried grace and reverence above greater years’, and such a nature, denied a place in government, could not be content with the parcel of idle, decadent loiterers about the court. He retired from court and gave himself up to the second part of his courtly endowment, the service of English letters.

In 1577 Philip’s sister Mary had married the Earl of Pembroke whose house was at Wilton near Salisbury. The house was comfortable, the countryside lovely, the company congenial; Sidney was happy to be there when he could, and he and his friends were always welcome. When he retired from court at the beginning of 1580 he went to Wilton where the pleasures of enquiry among a company of friends awaited him. He considered, wrote Dr Moffett, the doctor at Wilton, ‘that day most propitious to him upon which he might withdraw for a time from the noisy squabbles at court’ and ‘might read and dispute with a few university men, in some place where he was made welcome’. Chief among the young disputants—Sidney was in his mid-twenties and his friends not much older—were Fulke Greville, his companion from childhood, Sir Edward Dyer, who had travelled with him to the Emperor Rudolph, and Edmund Spenser, an aspiring courtier whom he had met in 1578 at Leicester’s house in London. All these young men were devoted followers of Renaissance learning, all were jealous for the dignity of English writing, and all were budding authors. The meetings of this little group were begun in London and continued at Wilton, and when they were apart their common
ideals and extensive arguments were carried on in many a letter.

Sidney’s first piece of writing was a dramatic trifle called the
Lady of May
, performed for Elizabeth at Wanstead in 1578, and now only remembered because it may have suggested to Shakespeare the character of Holofernes in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. Though this drama was only a small achievement and Sidney was the youngest of the group, he was looked on as the moving spirit; his reputation had gone before him, and older men gladly acknowledged his qualities. When Spenser published his
Shepherd’s Calendar
in 1579 he dedicated it to ‘the noble and virtuous gentleman and worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry, Mr Philip Sidney’. Sidney beat the critical hares out of the tangle of English poetic practice, and led his companions in pursuit; he knew, said Nashe, ‘what belonged to a scholar’, and knew ‘what pains, what toils, what travail conduct to perfection’.

The investigations of Sidney and his friends were carried on with more energy than success. They recognized problems but their theories provided few answers. Noting the uncertainty of English metrics, they tried to discipline English verse to classical measures, and they experimented with hexameters, sapphics and other awkward, un-English shapes. Sidney was no pedantic classicist—he called ‘Ciceronianism’ the ‘chief abuse’ at Oxford—but the Renaissance mind, when it was puzzled, loved to start at classical principles. Whatever his debt to the classics, Sidney was never one to doubt his own language. At a time when many were gloomy about the chances of English as a literary language, unfavourably contrasting its rugged changeability with the chaste permanence of Greek and Latin, he insisted on its eloquence and power. Bacon might write that ‘these modern languages will play the bankrupt with books’ and put his major works of philosophy into Latin; but Sidney agreed with Richard Mulcaster, the old master of his friend Spenser, who boldly stated ‘I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.’ And Mulcaster would not admit that Latin, though a fine and elegant tongue, was in any way superior to English for any kind of writing. ‘But why not all in English,’ he wrote in his
Elementary
, published in 1582, ‘a tongue of itself both deep in conceit, and frank in delivery? I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments,
either with more pith, or greater plainness than our English tongue is.’ The writings of Sidney and his friends, especially Spenser’s
Shepherd’s Calendar
and Sidney’s own
Arcadia
, were in part attempts to vindicate the opinion of Mulcaster and demonstrate the various and eloquent resources of English. And the virtues of the language appeared not only in the careful rhetoric of an elevated style; Sidney also recognized the glory of traditional forms. He wrote on the old ballads: ‘I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet, and yet it is sung by some blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude style.’

In his own tongue Sidney saw a true language of poetry worthy of the best writers; and the purpose of his studies and his practice was always to prove to his countrymen the true dignity of poetry. Only the poet perfects nature: ‘her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.’ The poet’s power to catch, hold and fire the imagination is worth all the wearisome logic of the philosophers. The poet ‘cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’. When the Puritan critic Stephen Gosson wrote an attack on poetry called
The School of Abuse
, and had the gall to dedicate it to Sidney—relying on Sidney’s well-known Protestant sympathies—he found that he had badly misjudged his man; Sidney was quickly in the field with a resounding defence.

The
Defence of Poesie
was possibly written about 1580 though not published until fifteen years later. It is a curious work of criticism in that it is more notable as an affirmation of the poet’s dignity than as an example of critical acuteness. Gosson had particularly attacked the theatre and Sidney had, on the whole, agreed with him. In a lengthy consideration of his contemporary drama Sidney quite failed to see that, even though in many ways preposterous, it still contained vigorous elements which in a few short years would lead to the overwhelming triumph of English letters—the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare and their many followers. But the
Defence of Poesie
deserves its fame, for in the characteristic manner of Sidney its clarity and charm more than make up for the fallibility of the criticism.

It was a strange and fortunate case with Sidney and his friends
that the actual practice of their writing proved what their theories could not. The arguments and theoretical attempts to reform English prosody on classical principles failed; but what did that matter when the actual poems scattered through
Arcadia
successfully demonstrated a wonderful variety of English verse forms?
Arcadia
was written at Wilton for the entertainment of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, ‘at his vacant and spare times of leisure (for he could endure at no time to be idle and void of action)’. It was written on odd sheets which were taken to his sister as they were done, one by one, for her to keep or to show ‘to such friends as will weigh errors in the balance of good will’. The first version was finished by 1580, but a year or two later Sidney began to recast it. It was not published at all until after his death; a small part was published in 1590, and an amplified version in 1593.
Arcadia
was a startling light piercing clear through the general artistic muddle of the time. It reconciled in an English book various Renaissance and medieval influences and devised a golden prose to celebrate the reconciliation.
Arcadia
is often called a romance, but it is a work that does not fall easily into any class. Sidney took the romance of
Amadis de Gaul
, the pastoral of Sannazaro, the prose epic of Heliodorus and combined them in a work where narrative, moral lesson and poetry are nicely blended. It is certainly not a novel in the modern sense (though perhaps a forebear of the novel); it is rather the expression in art of Sidney’s courtly ideal, a picture of virtuous living. The style of
Arcadia
is no longer to the taste of many readers; it is too high-flown, too rhetorical, too mellifluous. But in its day the style was no less remarkable than the matter of the book. It was an appropriate and disciplined prose, clear in syntax and vivid in language; it was a style that for elegance and ease surpassed what had been written before in English, a prose that caused Ben Jonson to name Sidney, together with Richard Hooker, the masters of good writing.

To be an historical master of prose would be enough for any man; but Sidney also became an historical master of English poetry. He had first met Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex, when he was twenty and she a girl of twelve. Sidney had been with Essex in Ireland and the earl formed such a good opinion of the young man that he wished on his death bed to give Sidney his daughter in marriage. Philip was serious and high-minded; Penelope much younger, wayward and something of a
coquette. There is no knowing what was between the two: true friendship, passion, or merely an expectation of marrying? It never came to that, for Penelope’s family did not favour Sidney (possibly on account of his poverty) and hurried Penelope in 1581, at the age of eighteen, into a marriage with a wealthy and well-named Lord Rich. Sidney, however, immortalized her as the ‘Stella’ of his
Astrophel and Stella
, the first English sonnet sequence.

For the purpose of the poems the true relationship between the young people does not matter. The sonnet sequence is not a narrative history of an affair, but a long lyrical reflection, chiefly on the nature of love.
Astrophel and Stella
was written at about the same time as
Arcadia
, and like
Arcadia
was not published till after the poet’s death. The sonnet sequence was imported from Italy and Sidney stayed very close both to the Italian form of the sonnet and to the Italian idea of the sonnet. Some of the poems are carelessly written and the quality is uneven; but the whole was an extraordinary achievement which impressed his contemporaries more than any other poetry of the century. Sidney gave to Stella the same unearthly fame that Petrarch, his Italian master, had given to Laura. The sequence was an inspiration to later Elizabethans and brought forth in time Spenser’s
Amoretti
and Shakespeare’s own sonnet sequence. The form was wonderfully suited to the Elizabethan sensibility—a lyrical outpouring that permitted passion, reflection and criticism of life in a form that tightly curbed the notorious rambling exuberance which Elizabethan writing was prone to. It would be hard to say which aspect of
Astrophel and Stella
was the more valuable for English letters: the regularity of the metrics and the precision of the form which helped to tame the wilderness of English prosody; or the beauty of the expression which encouraged the lyricism that is now, and always has been, the particular excellence of English poetry.