A Christian Gentleman
Sir Philip Sidney. By Mona Wilson. (Duckworth. 21s. ) OF historical might-have-beens one of the most fascinating to dwell upon is : What would have happened if Sidney had worn his thigh-pieces on October 2nd, 1586 ? It was characteristic of him, as characteristic as the more famous incident of the bottle of water and the dying soldier, that seeing his superior officer, the Lord Marshall, was unable to wear his thigh-pieces because of a wound, he felt obliged in honour to discard his own and thus exposed himself to the Spanish bullet outside Zutphen which caused his death. " Honour pricked him off," as Falstaff would have said, and Elizabeth complained that such conduct was inconsiderate since her gentlemen were not expected to throw away their lives like common soldiers ; it shocked her sense of economy, in other words her dominant passion. Sidney was ruled- by a different passion ; he was that very rare thing, rare at any time, but aliaost unexampled at the Court of Elizabeth, a Christian gentleman, and being so his instinctive tendency was to refuse privileges or benefits for himself when others (of whatever rank) stood in greater need. No doubt he allowed this tendency at times—as in the matter of the thigh-pieces- to carry him to quixotic lengths, but such quixotry is a measure of the strength of that which moved him. All this was very baffling to his royal mistress. " We are aware," writes Miss Wilson, " of a secret antagonism between the two," and continues in explanation, " she could not dazzle him, and his grace, fascinating to old men and young alike, lacked the grosser vitality which in Raleigh and Essex helped the woman to forget her years "—part of the truth, no doubt, but- not the whole. Philip - Sidney and his Queen lived in different universes, and the young man'had`-" a dailSr beauty in his life " that made the ugly old woman uneasily conscious of something ugly in her own.
He baffled her, but we can be sure she was understood well enough by him. Entirely loyal, passionately eager to serve his country to the height of his very considerable powers, and with a wide acquaintance of statecraft gained in Continental travel, Sidney, like others with more selfish aims, was obliged to make a study of the character of his Prince his first business. Had he lived he might have succeeded in winning her confi- dence and perhaps even directing her policy. The personal question, however, would have had to be settled first between them ; and with a man like Sidney that could only have been accomplished by awakening her conscience. The notion of Elizabeth Tudor possessing even the possibility- of a conscience will make some smile. But the miracle which Madame de Maint,enon wrought upon Louis XIV was surely not beyond the capacity of Leicester's nephew with every advantage of birth, rank and opportunity to assist him in the process of conversion. And had this taken place, how different would those last fifteen years of the sixteenth century have been for England, and possibly also for Europe. Sidney was the only man who ever appeared at Elizabeth's court who might have combined in his own person the position of leading favourite and leading statesman, the position which the Cecils and the Raleighs or the Essexes parted between them. Miss Wilson does not believe that Elizabeth could " ever have made of him such a minister as she needed." The point is : Could he have made of her the sort of queen he felt capable of serving ?
If he had he would have influenced literature as much as politics. He would have protected his friend Spenser and prolonged his life, while Shakespeare, who, according to the usual supposition, came to London, as it was, only in time to watch his elaborate and sumptuous obsequies, might have found patronage and assistance in a poet ten years his senior instead of in a rather vulgar nobleman nine years his junior. In any case, there can be little doubt that the kinship of spirit of the two men would have brought them together. For Shakespeare would have seen Sidney for what he was, would have penetrated to the very core of the man ; and would assuredly have anticipated Shelley in acclaiming him " Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,"
while Sidney in his turn would have rejoiced in the play- wright's all-embracing humanity, his tenderness, his profound knowledge of the heart, and would have recanted the section on contemporary drama in the Defence of Poesie in his favour. They were made to understand and appreciate each other ; no third man of the period can be named worthy or capable of sharing the friendship which would have sprung up between them ; and yet, by the tragic irony of history, it is likely that they never even met.
Such are the speculations and regrets provoked by this beautiful, scholarly and poignant book. Its author's restraint and self-repression give the whole a severity of outline which only renders its effect the more moving. " I have en- deavoured," she writes, " to give a narrative of Sidney's life without recourse to invention." The documents are allowed to speak for themselves, with never a trace of senti- mentality and almost without comment. The artist's hand, however, is revealed in the planning and the presentment of the facts. Miss Wilson has, of course, her preferences ; she is especially interested in Sidney as a man of letters, and the chapters on the Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella (or Astrophil and Stella, as she rightly insists it should be called) are admirable ; but the political portions of the bock are also excellent. A second-rate biographer again would have been tempted to ring down the curtain upon the tableau of the waterbottle at Zutphen. Miss Wilson devotes an Epilogue to the funeral in London on February 16th, 1587, giving us the names of the chief mourners and sparing us nothing of the pomp. It is like the conclusion of Hamlet ; for Sidney too " had he been put on " was likely " to have proved most royally." And as we watch the seven hundred mourners wending their way through the streets of the city towards St. Paul's, headed by Leicester, Essex, Pembroke, Drake, and all the other famous men of the age, and as we remember that the young man whose corpse they carried had probably when living been the only purely disinterested soul among them, we seem to have a vision of the Elizabethans cele- brating the interment of their conscience.
J. DOVER WILSON.
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