BY
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
WITH THE ADDITIONS OF SIR WILLIAM
ALEXANDER AND RICHARD BELING,
A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR,
AND AN
INTRODUCTION
BY
ERNEST A. BAKER, M.A.
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Ltd.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE AUTHOR
ARCADIA
{vii}
In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fictionthree periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The latercenturies of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poetand proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material,expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the samespirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romancebeing simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age theliterature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, adecisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained allthe essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with theinvention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came arevolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors hadabandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turnedthemselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and thehistory of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia holds animportant place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as thetype and culmination of the middle period, the age of poeticinvention; how important in the long history of the genesis, thesuccessive transformations, and the final development of Englishfiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings,when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the chansons degestes.
In the exordium of his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney himself laysstress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature.Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literaturesof many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. Fromfree imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuousand passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose—this is the naturalline of progression. And the same course of development is repeated inthe evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic{viii} philosophers wro