Arcadian
Katherine Duncan-Jones
The general reader, I suspect, knows only three things about Sir Philip Sidney, all of them false: that he was a perfect Elizabethan courtier and aristocrat; that, dying in battle, he gave up a glass of water to a dying soldier, saying, 'Thy necessity is yet greater than mine'; and that he wrote an idealised and unreadable romance. Actu- ally, the Queen never took to Sidney, who was the too-vigorous nephew and heir of her favourite, Leicester, nor he to her. His private letters suggest impatience for her to name a successor and die, and in the Arcadia he makes such sharp observations as that 'she was a queen, and therefore beautiful', or that another, elderly, queen's beauty was marred by 'an exceeding red haire with small eyes', Though dangerously well-connected on his mother's side, Sidney was plain Master Philip until the last three years of his life — the knighthood, awarded to him solely for reasons of protocol, may have done as much harm to his image in
after years as the honorary doctorate bes- towed on Johnson late in life.
The anecdote of the drink (not glass) of water comes only in the life of Sidney writ- ten by his friend Fulke Greville twenty-five years after his death, and suspiciously resembles a story told of Alexander the Great. The readability of Sidney's romance is less speedily demonstrated. The Arcadia, dismissed by Walpole in 1759 as 'a tedious, lamentable, pedantic pastoral romance which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through', has never really been given a fair viewing since then as there has been no easily obtainable text. Jean Robertson's superb modernised critical edi- tion of the Old Arcadia (Oxford 1973) is, alas, beyond the pocket of most students or casual readers. This year looks like seeing the revival for which Sidney's romance has waited so long. Penguins have at last got round to mounting an edition of the Arcadia, to appear in August. Meanwhile Professor Hamilton's pleasantly lucid and careful survey of Sidney's life and works should help to pave the way for a sym- pathetic and informed reading of the romance.
What will perhaps most strike a reader of this book, and of Sidney's Arcadia, who expects to find a lofty, remote and idealised vision of life, is Sidney's extreme matter- of-factness. As a literary theorist, for instance, he does not believe (as almost all his contemporaries did) in divine inspi- ration, but in the poet's own powers of invention — God-given, no doubt, but also self-sufficient. And Hamilton brings out very well the way in which even the most virtuous of Sidney's characters (in the revised Arcadia) are fully human: Argalus anti rartnema, the only perfectly noble and unselfish figures in Sidney's variegated gal- lery of human types, are good naturally and humanly. Sidney does not describe superhuman and incredible feats of self- control, as Milton does in his Lady, or Sam- son, or Christ, but people who are vul- nerable on every level. If, like Argulus and Parthenia (who may be idealised portraits of Sidney's unhappy parents) they differ from most of humanity in being naturally loving, constant and courageous, they are the more open to physical assaults rather than temptations: these lovers are killed with particular unpleasant violence, and do not survive to preside over the later phases of the unfinished romance. The central fig- ures are engagingly faulty. Sidney's heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, are resourceful and badly-behaved young men who mask lustful and anarchic intents beneath ornate and ingenious disguises.
I think Hamilton takes Musidorus too much at his own estimation when he quotes his justification of the disguise by which he gains access to the princess Pamela: 'though the ways be foul, yet is the journey's end most fair and honourable'. Hamilton suggests that the 'end' of Musidorus's jour- ney is Christian marriage; but I think Sidney makes it abundantly clear that at this stage the prince's end is nothing more than seduc- tion or rape.
Sidney's world is a richly-realised and highly detailed one which has a great deal to offer to a reader more familiar with modern fiction. He analyses the springs of human behaviour and the quirks of the psyche with an intensity unknown since Chaucer, and within this period, excelled only by Shakes- peare. For instance Pyrocles, on his way to lie for the first time with the enchantingly guileless Philoclea, at what should have been a moment of pure joy: 'Well he found that extremity of joy is not without a certain joyful pain, by extending the heart beyond its wonted limits' — an almost Keatsian per- ception of melancholy within the temple of delight. Sidney's is a colourful, solid and always wittily alive world, in which charac- ters can bruise their shins in the dark, dis- locate shoulders in a coach crash, and find with embarrassment that a transvestite dis- guise produces problems when naked bath- ing is proposed.
Professor Hamilton's study is of Sidney's life in conjunction with his works, and he deftly incorporates into a fairly slim book • most of the main points of his career. His approach to the material is at times a little uncritical: he assumes the reality of Sidney's love for Lady Rich, the evidence for which is extremely elusive. And he is so concerned to exalt his subject as a 'seminal' figure in English literature that he omits some of his less attractive characteristics. For instance, the arrogance and hot temper which led Sidney to threaten (in a letter) to thrust a dagger into his father's secretary are nowhere suggested. Without necessarily incorporating the obscene gossip picked up by Aubrey in Wiltshire alehouses (of Sid- ney's incest with his sister, along with more innocuous failings such as a high colour and pimples) Hamilton could with advantage have allowed his subject a few more warts. Since, the authoritative life by M. W. Wal- lace in 1915, Sidney has never found a biog- rapher who could steer a steady course bet- ween hagiography and iconoclasm; but this may be inevitable. Had Sidney not been built up after his death as a national hero and the matinee idol of Protestant Europe, perhaps we would be able to look more steadily at his image. As it is, he evokes the same kind of distortions and irritations which come into play with such figures as Byron or Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen, without leaving the detailed personal records which might enable us to get the picture straight, What is left is the Arcadia, and Professor Hamilton's study should open the eyes of many more readers to the enjoyment of Sidney's masterpiece.
Previous page
