Sidney commits himself in
this same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verse
is "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton,
whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the _Arcadia_ by
calling it a "vain and amatorious poem." It is a poem in prose, which is as
much as to say, in other words, that it unites the faults of both kinds.
Nor is Sidney less an enemy (though a "sweet enemy" in his own or Bruno's
words) of the minor and more formal graces of style. If his actual
vocabulary is not Latinised, or Italianised, or Lylyfied, he was one of the
greatest of sinners in the special Elizabethan sin of convoluting and
entangling his phrases (after the fashion best known in the mouths of
Shakespere's fine gentlemen), so as to say the simplest thing in the least
simple manner. Not Osric nor Iachimo detests the _mot propre_ more than
Sidney. Yet again, he is one of the arch offenders in the matter of
spoiling the syntax of the sentence and the paragraph. As has been observed
already, the unpretending writers noticed above, if they have little
harmony or balance of phrase, are seldom confused or breathless. Sidney was
one of the first writers of great popularity and influence (for the
_Arcadia_ was very widely read) to introduce what may be called the
sentence-and-paragraph-heap, in which clause is linked on to clause till
not merely the grammatical but the philosophical integer is hopelessly lost
sight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. It is not that he could
not do better; but that he seems to have taken no trouble not to do worse.
His youth, his numerous avocations, and the certainty that he never
formally prepared any of his work for the press, would of course be ample
excuses, even if the singular and seductive beauty of many scraps
throughout this work did not redeem it. But neither of the radical
difference in nature and purpose between prose and verse, nor of the due
discipline and management of prose itself, does Sidney seem to have had the
slightest idea. Although he seldom or never reaches the beauties of the
_flamboyant_ period of prose, which began soon after his death and filled
the middle of the seventeenth century, he contains examples of almost all
its defects; and considering that he is nearly the first writer to do this,
and that his writings were (and were deservedly) the favourite study of
generous literary youth for more than a generation, it i