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IN 1591 a volume of sonnets was issued under the editorship of Thomas Nash, containing Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," twenty-eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel, and other poems by "Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen." The publication was most probably surreptitious: Daniel, who published his "Sonnets to Delia" in the following year, complained that "a greedy printer had published some of his sonnets along with those of Sir Philip Sidney"; and a corrected and authentic edition of Sidney's sonnets was issued before the close of 1591.
The main attraction of Nash's volume was the "Astrophel and Stella" series of sonnets; this was the title of the work, the other poems being merely appended. The editor extolled Sidney with characteristic eloquence and extravagance. He apologises for commending a poet "the least syllable of whose name, sounded in the ears of judgment, is able to give the meanest line he writes a dowry of immortality." He deplores the long absence of England's Sun, and ridicules the gross fatty flames that have wandered abroad like hobgoblins with a wisp of paper at their tails in the middest eclipse of his shining perfections. "Put out your rush candles, you poets and rhymers," he cries; "and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers; for lo! here he cometh that hath broken your legs."
The story of the romantic passion between Sidney and Penelope Devereux, Astrophel and Stella, is well known to readers of literary history. Lady Penelope, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, was some nine years younger than her distinguished lover. Her father had formed a high opinion of Sir Philip's promise, and on his deathbed expressed a wish for their union: but her guardians were in favour of a wealthier match, and two or three years after the old Earl's death, she was married at the age of seventeen, much against her own wishes, to an unattractive young nobleman, Lord Rich. This event may have been hastened by Sidney's attitude before the marriage. If his self-reproaches in the sonnets were well founded, he would seem to have been undecided and vacillating in his addresses, his natural impulses being obstructed by a pedantic fancy that love was unworthy of a great thinker like himself--perhaps a temporary result of his correspondence with Languet: but when the lady was married out of his reach, his love became most ardent, and he courted her favours in a long series of passionate sonnets. Seeing that he very soon after married another lady--a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham--it might with some reason be inferred that there was in Sidney's as in other sonnets not a little make-believe passion, and that his delight as an ambitious young poet at finding such an amount of literary capital was quite as strong as the pain of the disappointment. Certainly, however, Lady Rich, whose rare charms of beauty and wit were the theme of many celebrated Elizabethan pens, was likely enough to be the object of a genuine passion. As the wife of a man whom she disliked and kept in thorough fear and subjection, and as the sister of an ambitious nobleman nearly related to the throne, she led as she advanced in years a brilliant and a troubled life, and was in the Court of England the most conspicuous and fascinating woman of her generation. When Sidney wrote his sonnets she was in the prime of her beauty, and he may well have been sincere in deploring the loss of such a prize, and praying in wailful sonnets that he might continue to have a place in her affections.
In the choice of ideas for his sonnets Sidney prided himself on being original.[2] This was a natural reaction from the long line of imitators between Surrey and himself. In Watson's "Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love," published in 1582, about the time when Sidney was composing his sonnets, the imitative and artificial character of the fashionable English love-poetry was specially illustrated by the candid acknowledgments of the accompanying notes. The poet makes no pretence to spontaneous effusion. Prefixed to the many ingenious praises of his lady's beauty, and allegations of her cruelty, and his own varied professions of unalterable love and consuming pangs of despair, are full references to the literary sources of his inspiration. Before depicting the pangs of Cupid's deadly dart and praying for its withdrawal, the commentary informs us that "the author hath wrought this passion out of Stephanus Forcatulus." Before a dire lament that Neptune's waves might be renewed from the poet's weeping eyes, Vulcan's forge from the flames within his breast, and the windbags of AEolus from his sobbing sighs, we are candidly informed that "the invention of this Passion is borrowed for the most part from Seraphine, Son. 125." A praise of his lady is imitated from Petrarch: a sweet fancy about the capture of Love by the Muses, from Ronsard: a vision of his lady in sleep from Hercules Strozza. Another commendation of the most rare excellencies of his mistress is imitated from a famous sonnet by Fiorenzuola the Florentine, which was imitated also by Surrey and by two other writers in Tottel's Miscellany. So with the majority of Watson's "passions," as he called his poems; very few of them professed to be wholly original, and the adaptation was generally very slight. Now Sidney revolted from this habit of adopting the praises, vows, and "deploring dumps" of other amorous singers. He swore "by blackest brook of hell," that he was "no pick-purse of another's wit." His eloquence came from a different source: "his lips were sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss." He had tried the old plan--
But Invention, the child of Nature, fled from the blows of Study. He sat biting his pen, and beating himself for spite, till at last--
His success was such that be could not refrain from boastful tirades against the old imitators--
This and many other passages in Sidney illustrate the almost Homeric complacency of self-estimate among the Elizabethans.
Most of the conceptions and conceits in Sidney's sonnets are really his own; and they display very exquisite subtlety and tenderness of fancy. In these respects they deserve all the admiration they received from his contemporaries. What, for example, could be finer than the ruling conceit of his 38th sonnet?
The first fifty or sixty sonnets exhibit Astrophel's love in what may be called in fashionable mathematical language the statical stage: the subsequent dynamical stage being composed of sonnets descriptive of moods and conceits occasioned by a sequence of incidents between the lovers--supposed encouragement, venturous liberties, discouragement, despair, and so forth. During the statical or brooding stage, the poet-lover's mind is occupied with similitudes and all sorts of fanciful inventions to set forth the incomparable charms of his mistress and the unexampled force of his passion. During that period his love is subject to no fluctuations, no dynamic change; it suffers neither increase nor abatement. It is chiefly in this stage that the soft gracefulness and ethereal reach of Sidney's fancy are displayed. Instead of the sighing lover's commonplace raw assertion that his mistress is fairer than Helen, or Semele, or Ariadne, or Chloris, or any other mythological beauty, or that she would have borne away the apple from Juno, Pallas, and Venus, Astrophel presents Stella with the following ingenious and delicately wrought conceit, enlivened by a sportive breath of tender humour:--
He is brimful of fancies equally delicate. Venus falls out on Cupid because under terror of the threats of Mars he would not wound that god deep enough. The angry mother breaks her son's bow and shafts, and the poor boy is disconsolate--
The commonplace that his mistress's eyes are like stars he builds up into a profession of faith in Astrology. He takes Plato's saying, that if Virtue could come directly in contact with our eyes, it would raise flames of love in our souls, and maintains the truth of the doctrine, for Virtue has taken Stella's shape, and he is conscious of the effect in his own person. He exults over Reason, who at first intermeddled and decried, but when Stella appeared, knelt down and offered to produce good reasons for loving her. He is puzzled to make out why his plaints move her so faintly. He will not admit that she is hard-hearted; but at last he hits upon the true explanation:--
These sweet fancies rise in the head when the heart is comparatively tranquil. When storms began to agitate, the lover's strains became more impassioned. The following is the 48th sonnet:--
Farther on in the series, having so far conquered the lady's indifference, he prays for and receives a kiss, "poor hope's first wealth, hostage of promised weal, breakfast of Love," and expresses his rapture in several most impassioned sonnets. The following is the 81st:--
Sidney observes the Petrarchian form of the sonnet in so far as regards the division of the stanza into two staves, the first of eight lines with two rhymes, the second of six lines with three rhymes. Whether for ease or for variety, he is not particular about the arrangement of the rhymes within these limits. In the first stave he employs sometimes the alternate, sometimes the successive arrangement; and when the rhymes are alternate, he sometimes reverses but oftener repeats in the second quatrain the order of the first. In the second stave, he sometimes interweaves the lines so as to make a stave proper; but oftener he subdivides it into a quatrain followed by a couplet. Sometimes, as in two of the sonnets above quoted, he begins with the couplet and ends with the quatrain; and the arrangement is seemingly dictated not by ease or accident, but by a just sense of metrical effect.
Interspersed with the sonnets are several songs, and in these our poet is happier than in the more confined measures. The last of these songs, which is in the form adopted by Shakespeare for the serenade to Silvia (Two Gent. of Ver., iv. 2), contains some very sweet staves. The two first lines go to the lady; the three following to the lover:--
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Two such songs as this and the one to Silvia make the stave seem the only true form for a lover's lyric: the lines run into music of their own accord, and scatter sweet perfumes with their light motion. There is nothing more ravishing in the language.
[1] I have given some account of Sidney's life and character in my Manual of English Prose Literature, and shall here confine myself to his sonnets.
[2] He carried his disdain of commonplace into other walks of love. The ladies of the Court thought him a dry-as-dust hecause he wore no particular colours "nor nourished special locks of vowèd hair."--Son. 54.
Fool! said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.
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