The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S
 ARCADIA

 BY
 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

 WITH THE ADDITIONS OF SIR WILLIAM
 ALEXANDER AND RICHARD BELING,


 A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR,
 AND AN
 INTRODUCTION
 BY
 ERNEST A. BAKER, M.A.


 LONDON
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Ltd.
 New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.




 CONTENTS

 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
 LIFE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
 TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE AUTHOR
 SIDNEY’S DEDICATION
 ARCADIA
  BOOK I
  BOOK II
  BOOK III
  BOOK IV
  BOOK V
  BOOK VI (by R. B.)
 NOTES




 INTRODUCTION

{vii}

In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction
three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later
centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet
and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material,
expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same
spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance
being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the
literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a
decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all
the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the
invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a
revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had
abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned
themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the
history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ holds an
important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the
type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic
invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the
successive transformations, and the final development of English
fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings,
when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the _chansons de
gestes_.

In the exordium of his _Apologie for Poetrie_, Sidney himself lays
stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature.
Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures
of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From
free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous
and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose--this is the natural
line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in
the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic
{viii} philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and
went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in
the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with
Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in
poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and
experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought
the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose
evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its
origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in
metre.

Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be
very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said,
are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement
literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two
different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not
simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination
of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to
imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely
asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince.
Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek
and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature,
did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially
different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the
imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another
kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really
neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the
subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little
later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an
earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly,
Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time,
was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a
final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that
had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and
interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern
the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but
would have been proud to be compared with {ix} Heliodorus and Longus,
and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets,
preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his _Apologie_ the
fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative
literature.

The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the
great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and
Alexander.