poems produced under its rules. Time sobered down the momentary extravagance, and the familiar ways of English verse reclaimed their master. Spenser's hexameters are mere literary curiosities, buried in the shadow of The Fairy Queen. Sidney's 'Roman feet' are one of the most prominent features of his bestknown work, and were regarded as characteristic of him in days when the poems to Stella were forgotten. The freaks of the 'Areopagus' had no more real relation to his genius than they had to Spenser's; but life left him no time to undo mistakes. Into what final mould his powers might have run is matter for speculation. The important point to notice is that death stepped in between him and that slow-coming maturity which belongs to all such rich and complex natures. His youth asserts itself in all he wrote. His best work is liable to youth's unripeness and inequality. But the greatness of his gift is not to be doubted. As a series of sonnets the Astrophel and Stella poems are second only to Shakespeare's; as a series of love-poems they are perhaps unsurpassed. Other writers are sweeter, more sonorous; no other lovepoet of the time is so real. The poems to Stella are steeped throughout in a certain keen and pungent individuality which leaves a haunting impression behind it. They represent, not a mere isolated mood, whether half-real like Daniel's passion for Delia, or wholly artificial like the mood of Thomas Watson's Passions, but a whole passage in a genuine life. Here is no question of the pastoral landscape with its conventional pair of figures. Sidney's every-day life as a courtier and politician, mingling with the pageantries and touching the great interests of his time, his personal character with its serious and Puritan bias, his hopes and fears for his own prospects and career,—these are the facts of solid and human reality which deepen and vary the music of his passion for Stella, like rocks in the current of a stream. Not that Astrophel and Stella is without its makebelieves. It has its 'conceits,' its pieces of pure word-play, in the common Elizabethan manner. No writer in the full tide of literary fashion like Sidney could afford to neglect these. But it would be scarcely fanciful to say that even in the most clearly marked of what one may call his conceited sonnets, the true Sidneian note to a reader who has learnt to catch it is almost always discernible, a note of youth and eagerness easily felt but hard to be described. As is well known, Astrophel and Stella contains the records of Sidney's love for Penelope Devereux, daughter of the first Earl of Essex and sister to Elizabeth's favourite. They first met at Chartley in 1575, during the Kenilworth progress, when Sidney was twenty-one and Penelope a child of twelve, and in the years between 1576 and 1580 were commonly supposed to be destined for one another. Sidney however does not appear to have prosecuted his suit with much ardour-there are several allusions to this early blindness of his in Astrophel and Stella—and in 1580 his prospects had suddenly become so clouded by his own and Leicester's temporary disgrace, that it seems to have been thought prudent that Stella should look elsewhere. At any rate, when Sidney returned to court in the autumn of 1580, he found Penelope Devereux either married (there is a doubt about the date of the marriage) or pledged to Lord Rich. Disappointment and a sharp sense of injury, expressed with plain bitterness in one of his miscellaneous poems (see p. 362), shook his former liking into love, and during the following year, as far as dates can now be recovered, after Stella's marriage at any rate, as well as possibly before it, the Astrophel and Stella sonnets were written. The chronology of these sonnets is now scarcely to be determined. They were not published till after Sidney's death, when they were either printed from completed MSS., in which the order had been slightly disarranged by Sidney himself, for the purpose of masking to some extent their autobiographical character, or were put together by his friends in carelessness or ignorance of the dates of many among them. The main thread however is still discernible, and a close sifting of the allusions to contemporary history in them, as well as a comparison of them with the correspondence between Languet and Sidney of 1580-81, might enable a more clear-headed editor than has yet arisen to handle Sidney, to explain much that is now obscure. There are three distinct stages in the series: the first representing a period of impetuous passion, when Sidney is wooing in hot eagerness, bending all the power of his genius to the glorification of Stella and the scorning of his supplanter Lord Rich, and yet dogged perpetually by returns upon himself, by outbursts of moral sensitiveness eminently characteristic; the second a period of partial relenting on Stella's part and of joy on Sidney's :— Gone is the winter of my misery! My spring appears: O see what here doth grow, For Stella hath, with words where faith doth shine, And the third, a period of widening separation, when the lover, 'forced by Stella's laws of duty to depart,' sinks deeper and deeper into depression and discouragement. Joy, hope, delight, even tears, have forgotten him : 'Only true sighs you do not go away: Thank may you have for such a thankful part; -Thankworthiest yet when you shall break my heart!' Last of all, we may imagine, comes a sudden call to action, perhaps connected with the schemes of colonisation which we know to have been occupying his mind in 1582, and Sidney writes the 107th sonnet, the last but one in the series as printed, probably the true conclusion of the whole according to Sidney's plan. 'Sweet for a while give respite to my heart, Which pants as though it still should leap to thee, To this great cause, which needs both use and art. And scorning say, 'See what it is to love!' Scattered up and down these three divisions as the sonnets stand now, are sonnets which have no special fitness to one or other division, and others again that are clearly misplaced. Still, in the main, the story of the poems runs on unbroken, a living continuous whole growing step by step more real and more tragic. With very few exceptions, the Astrophel and Stella sonnets cannot be fairly judged apart from their context. Each sonnet depends upon those before and after it, and it is in the cumulative effect of the whole that Sidney's genius is most clearly felt. Other contemporary series of sonnets will bear unstringing without injury. A stray sonnet taken at random from Delia or Lodge's Phillis or from Drummond's love-sonnets will often compare favourably with one taken at random from Astrophel and Stella. But the weak sonnets in Sidney are like the weak places in some of Wordsworth's finest work, descents to commonplace which taken alone would be intolerable, but which in their proper context rather heighten than detract from the realistic and passionate effect of the whole. In order to preserve this general effect as much as possible, the plan of the present selection has been to take from each period a certain number of representative sonnets, which reproduce the original whole at least in outline, adding to these two specimens from the Astrophel and Stella songs, eleven in number, which were originally printed after the sonnets, but were interspersed among them in the Arcadia of 1598. The two sonnets beginning 'Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare,' and 'Leave me, O Love which reachest but to dust,' which a recent editor has arbitrarily placed for the first time at the end of Astrophel and Stella, have been here carefully distinguished from that series. In some ways, in spite of their grand flow of verse and phrase, they are inferior to the majority of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets in workmanship, and also slightly different from them in plan. Sidney was probably not inclined to assign to them finally so conspicuous a place, and they were first published with other miscellaneous sonnets in the Arcadia of 1598. But that they were written towards the close of the Stella episode, perhaps about the time of the poet's marriage with Frances Walsingham, is certainly very likely, and their consonance with all that we know of that philosophical and high-minded Sidney in whom Elizabeth found an unwelcome counsellor, and Languet saw the hope of the Protestant cause in Europe, makes it justifiable to regard them as fit successors to any selection from Astrophel and Stella, and especially as closely connected with the 107th Sonnet. Of the rest of Sidney's poetry it is not necessary to say very much. The Stella poems brought him his contemporary fame, and upon them and the Apology for Poetry his claim to live in English letters must always rest. His other poems have the youthful faults which mar even Astrophel and Stella, only in far greater abundance. Mere 'thin diet of dainty words,' ingenuity unrelieved by a single touch of true feeling, the stock phrases and themes common to the hundred-and-one second-rate rhymers of the day, this is all that the voluminous verse of the Arcadia, with the exception of a few passages here and there, has to offer. The two songs quoted below from the 'Certain Sonnets-never before printed,' of 1595, belong to the great lyrical growth of the time, and are specimens of Sidney's freest and most spontaneous manner. One of them, the passionate dirge beginning 'Ring out ye bells, let mourning shews be spread,' has a swing and force which ought long ago to have rescued it from oblivion. MARY A. WARD. ASTROPHEL AND STELLA. I. Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; 5. It is most true that eyes are form'd to serve It is most true, what we call Cupid's dart An image is, which for ourselves we carve, And, fools, adore in temple of our heart, Till that good god make church and churchmen starve: |