is so impossible to reach unto that I almost begin to submit myself unto the tyranny of despair, not knowing any way of persuasion. . . .

 --surely an acute and subtle observation made by a man who had felt what he describes. For a moment the pale and legendary figures, Gynecia, Philoclea, and Zelmane, become alive; their featureless faces work with passion; Gynecia, realizing that she loves her daughter's lover, foams into grandeur, "crying vehemently Zelmane help me, O Zelmane have pity on me"; and the old King, in whom the beautiful strange Amazon has awakened a senile amorosity, shows himself old and foolish, looking "very curiously upon himself, sometimes fetching a little skip, as if he had said his strength had not yet forsaken him".

But that moment of illumination, as it dies down and the princes once more resume their postures and the shepherds apply themselves to their lutes, throws a curious light upon the book as a whole. We realize more clearly the boundaries within which Sidney was working. For a moment he could note and observe and record as keenly and exactly as any modern novelist. And then, after this one glimpse in our direction, he turns aside, as if he heard other voices calling him and must obey their commands. In prose, he bethinks himself, one must not use the common words of daily speech. In a romance one must not make princes and princesses feel like ordinary men and women. Humour is the attribute of peasants. They can behave ridiculously; they can talk naturally; like Dametas they can come "whistling, and counting upon his fingers, how many load of hay seventeen fat oxen eat up on a year"; but the language of great people must always be long-winded and abstract and full of metaphors. Further, they must either be heroes of stainless virtue, or villains untouched by humanity. Of human oddities and littleness they must show no trace. Prose also must be careful to turn away from what is actually before it. Sometimes for a moment in looking at Nature one may fit the word to the sight; note the heron "wagling" as it rises from the marsh, or observe the water-spaniel hunting the duck "with a snuffling grace". But this realism is only to be applied to Nature and animals and peasants. Prose, it seems, is made for slow, noble, and generalized emotions; for the description of wide landscapes; for the conveyance of long, equable discourses uninterrupted for pages together by any other speaker. Verse, on the other hand, had quite a different office. It is curious to observe how, when Sidney wished to sum up, to strike hard, to register a single and definite impression, he turns to verse. Verse in the Arcadia performs something of the function of dialogue in the modern novel. It breaks up the monotony and strikes a high-light. In those snatches of song that are scattered about the interminable adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus our interest is once more fanned into flame. Often the realism and vigour of the verse comes with a shock after the drowsy langour of the prose:

 

    What needed so high spirits such mansions blind?

    Or wrapt in flesh what do they here obtain,

    But glorious name of wretched human kind?

    Balls to the stars, and thralls to fortune's reign;

    Turn'd from themselves, infected with their cage,

    Where death is fear'd, and life is held with pain.

    Like players plac't to fill a filthy stage. . . .

 

--one wonders what the indolent princes and princesses will make of that vehement speaking? Or of this:

 

    A shop of shame, a Book where blots be rife,

    This body is . . .

    This man, this talking beast, this walking tree.

 

--thus the poet turns upon his languid company as if he loathed their self-complacent foppery; and yet must indulge them. For though it is clear that the poet Sidney had shrewd eyes--he talks of "hives of wisely painful bees", and knew like any other country-bred Englishman "how shepherds spend their days.