His Expression of Life.
Sidney's prime faults are affectation and conceit. His verses drip with
fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much
of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit
embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest
gold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere
spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a
man's heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckram
and broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible that
its pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb by
throb is impossible. And if this be true of that _Astrophel and Stella_
series in which the poet outpours the melodious heyday of his youth--in
which he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirred
man's blood--what shall be said of the _Arcadia_? In that 'cold
pastoral' he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigid
a fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a great
deal of himself into the result, still every one has not the true
critical insight, and to most of us, I think, those glimpses of the lofty
nature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in the
eyes of the few are merely invisible.
His Fame.
In thinking of Sidney, Ophelia's lament for Hamlet springs to the lips,
and the heart reverts to that closing scene at Zutphen with a blessed
sadness of admiration and regret. But frankly, is it not a fact that
that fine last speech of his has more availed to secure him immortality
than all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchman
need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read
his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the
pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined,
with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity
of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote
for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his
intellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows and
abstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely nor
listened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than a
brilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluency
and sweetness have not improved with years.