Sidney’s story carries no politics and he depends for its interest solely on the wealth of differing episodes and the stories and arguments of love which it contains.  The story would furnish plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but probably those who read it when it was published were attracted by other things than the march of its incidents.  Certainly no one could read it for the plot now.  Its attraction is mainly one of style.  It goes, you feel, one degree beyond Euphues in the direction of freedom and poetry.  And just because of this greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than those of Euphues.  Perhaps its chief quality is best described as that of exhaustiveness.  Sidney will take a word and toss it to and fro in a page till its meaning is sucked dry and more than sucked dry.  On page after page the same trick is employed, often in some new and charming way, but with the inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to do the unwisest of all things with a book of this kind—­to read on.  This trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare.  Other marks of Sidney’s style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose.  Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the “pathetic fallacy”—­the assumption (not common in his day) which connects the appearance of nature with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or demands such a connection.  In its day the Arcadia was hailed as a reformation by men nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly.  A modern reader finds himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would confront the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it charming as a poet’s essay in prose but no more:  not to be ranked with the highest.

CHAPTER III

THE DRAMA

(1)

Biologists tell us that the hybrid—­the product of a variety of ancestral stocks—­is more fertile than an organism with a direct and unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too fanciful as the starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength and vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety of the discordant and contradictory elements of which it was made up.  The drama was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the best spirits of the time.  It was the flower of the age.  To appreciate its many-sided significances and achievements it is necessary to disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the classics, in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air of enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time.