8—
Sidney's Defence and the Collective-Farm Chairman:
Puritan Humanism and the Cultural Apparatus

Absolutist Aesthetics

The works of authors devoted to the military theme foster love of country and staunchness in hardship.. . . The heroes of these works are people from different walks of life: a building team leader, a collective-farm chairman, a railway worker, an army officer, a pilot, or an eminent scientist. But in each of them the reader or the viewer sees his own thoughts and feelings, and the embodiment of the finest qualities of the Soviet character.

So Leonid Brezhnev in his Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1981).^[1] He discovers in Soviet writing at once a truthful representation of reality and an incitement to readers who do not match up to an ideal. The proclaiming of ideal images in literature, with the hope that they will move the rest of us to virtue, has characterized not only Soviet realism. Nature has not produced "so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon's Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil's Aeneas": so Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetiy. And again: "If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed."^[2] Both theorists suppose that truth, right, and goodness are organized in an ideal, universal hierarchy, that this is displayed especially in the works currently recognized as good culture, and that the role of that culture is to incite people to aspire to the ideal.

I call this "aesthetic absolutism" because, like an absolutist political ideology, it posits an ultimately static model for societies and their

values. Also, both absolutisms acknowledge a directly propagandist function for culture—for if societies and their values are fixed, people had better adjust themselves to their proper slots. An absolutist aesthetic is attractive, though by no means limited, to regimes that aspire to absolutism. In early modern England (although it was not actually an absolutist state) an ideology of ineluctable, unified hierarchy and value, with a precise, ideal position for each subject, was propagated through what we now call art and literature. Stalin and Zhdanov (his minister of culture) held that a socialist society had already been achieved, or as much of it as could be expected for the foreseeable future, so the ideal images proposed in Soviet realism could be regarded as actualities for the most heroic citizens and feasible goals for the rest. So Stephen Greenblatt's remark that the survival rate of those close to Henry VIII resembles that of the first politburo is pertinent; John N. King shows how Henry's court produced a midTudor genre, the prison biblical paraphrase or meditation, anticipating, almost, writing from Stalin's prisons.^[3]

Queen Elizabeth I spent relatively little money on what C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus, but was adroit at provoking others to do it for her.^[4] Courtiers sponsored progresses, pageants, tournaments, interludes, masques, and plays; portraits and tombs; palaces and houses; music from masses to madrigals; and the whole range of literary forms. Patronage and censorship persuaded artists to incorporate secular and religious symbolism that ratified the prevailing power arrangements and projected them onto a supernatural dimension. The system filtered down through the gentry, the universities, and local patronage, and was disseminated across the country through churches and schools. Modern lovers of literature who value good culture as the product of free individual creativity, and who regard the early modern period as the finest flowering of the English imagination, sometimes find it disconcerting that this culture was subject to political organization such as we associate now with authoritarian regimes. But then it has generally been something of an embarrassment for essentialist humanism that art and literature are so highly prized in authoritarian states; the commonest attempt at explanation, making a virtue of oppression, implies the enlightened wisdom and sensibility of the ruling elite when untrammeled by the distractions of democracy.

Analysis of all absolutisms is complicated by the fact that they must actually be fantasies. Neither the Communist Party nor the Tudor power elite could hold history trapped. Concomitantly, the unity

proposed in absolutist aesthetics is a chimera. Prescriptions for human behavior and for what is currently recognized as good culture are necessarily embedded in the contradictions and conflicts of the historical moments of their initial production and of subsequent reading. That is why, despite the clean-cut line it cultivates, aesthetic absolutism is always disintegrating as a theory. Brezhnev manages to build a contradiction even into his brief acccount: he says the reader finds in the text, at the same time, both the finest conceivable qualities and the reader's own thoughts and feelings. In Sidney's version this is not the problem—he believes people live in a "fallen" world and that the ideal instantiated in poetic images is unlikely to be achieved or even wholly imagined by most people. Even so, its properties may be known through such authoritative discourses as the Bible, theology, philosophy, and poetry, and people are said to discover their "true" natures when they move towards it, so it still constitutes a standing reproach to dissident behaviors and writing. (Of course, locating the ideal beyond the observable world may be more persuasive, since it evades empirical testing such as undermined Brezhnev's state.) Sidney' s program runs into difficulty because he wants to reinforce the authority of his ideal images by locating them in classical texts. To be sure, these were written in very different cultures (that this matters is what an absolutist aesthetic needs to deny). Hence some strenuous reading. "If evil men come to the stage," Sidney says, "they ever go out (as the tragedy writer answered to one that misliked the show of such persons) so manacled as they little animate folks to follow them."^[5] But this is not quite right in respect of the tragedies most remarked by Sidney and his contemporaries: those of Seneca. Atreus at the end holds the stage triumphantly, and so does Medea. Seneca's plays derive from a political situation in which it was important to say that evil might well triumph (Seneca was forced by Nero to commit suicide). Sidney's suppression of this situation is not incidental. It had more in common with early modern England than he quite wanted to admit—perhaps that is why he wanted to rewrite, and did not finish, the Arcadia.

Such snags in the Defence point towards complications in Sidney's relation to the contemporary cultural apparatus. There were factors that tended to strengthen centralized power—the financial and military independence of great magnates was reduced and there was a growth in loyalty to and dependence on the Crown; rebellion became disreputable.^[6] But these very changes facilitated the development of discourses and institutions—centered upon the Court but also in-

volving Parliament, the church, the universities, the legal system, printing, and the theater—in which an elaborate culture of political maneuvering might flourish. At the same time, the simultaneous arrival in England of Renaissance and Reformation influences conferred upon writing and visual display an extraordinary status. For both movements, the word seemed to speak an exhilarating ultimate truth, and printing and the market projected and dispersed exciting ideas into situations where the conditions of reception could not be controlled, or even envisaged. John N. King has shown the extent to which the Edwardian Reformation was a "cultural revolution," accomplished in part by "a tightly knit faction of Protestant lords and prelates."^[7]

Philip Sidney belonged to such a faction, committed to defending and enhancing the reformed religion in England, and to doing this in part through cultural intervention.^[8] The Earls of Leicester, Huntingdon, and Bedford, and Sidney's sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, supported determined protestant writers like Arthur Golding; Sir Walter Mildmay and Frances, Countess of Sussex (Sidney's aunt), founded Cambridge colleges;^[9] the protestant orientation of Sidney's literary patronage has often been detailed. Cultural intervention also included protecting puritan ministers. For Lawrence Humphrey, this task was "peculiar to noblemen, to relieve the cause of the gospel fainting and falling, to strengthen with their aid impoverished religion, to shield it forsaken with their patronage."^[10] In several instances, Sidney favored puritans who had caused difficulties for the authorities. In 1570 he solicited a living on behalf of Christopher Goodman; in 1575 he agreed that John Buste should be involved in tutoring his brother; and in 1582 he appointed as his chaplain the controversial lecturer James Stiles.^[11] Sidney and his circle sponsored and produced writing, preaching, teaching, and printing; they constituted a determined pressure group within the cultural apparatus. The importance Leicester and Sidney attached to such efforts may be gathered from their activity when they arrived in the Netherlands: they immediately set about the same project.^[12]

That some such task devolved upon Sidney as a part of his "calling" was often urged. The French reformer Hubert Languet pressed him to place his powers "in the service of your country, and of all good men; since you are only the steward of this gift, you will wrong him who conferred such a great benefit on you if you prove to have abused it." In the dedication of his History of Wales to Sidney in 1584, the Bishop of St. Asaph reminded him that he must eventually render an

account of the use of his talents and therefore should devote himself to God and his country.^[13] Sidney's Huguenot friends theorized the matter—François Hotman in his Franco-Gallia (1573) and Mornay in his Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1576). The first assumption was that a man of Sidney's class should deploy his skills as a statesman; literary work was his response to the queen's refusal to use him seriously between 1577 and 1585. "To what purpose should our thoughts be directed to various kinds of knowledge unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public advantage may be the result?— which in a corrupt age we cannot hope for," he wrote to Languet in 1578.^[14] Sidney found in writing the best answer he could. In 1578 he wrote The Lady of May to entertain the queen at Leicester's house at Wanstead, but it was also an attempt to urge an activist protestant policy upon Elizabeth. However, although the contemplative and active qualities embodied by the shepherd and forester appear as absolutes, in the manner proposed in the Defence, the queen resisted Sidney's implication and chose, against the grain of the text, the cautious shepherd rather than the lively forester. Thus she repudiated protestant activism.^[15] This failure of an absolutist aesthetic to secure its reading illustrates, in the one instance, the implication of cultural production in a contested political milieu, the scope for negotiation that was available to a man like Sidney, and the kind of intervention to which he was committed. For although Sidney's aesthetic correlated broadly with the absolutist aspirations of the Elizabethan state and with the principal modes of its cultural apparatus, he was trying to turn that apparatus in a particular direction in order to reinforce a sectional stance within that state. An absolutist aesthetic never represents the totality that it claims, but a strategic position within a contested arena.

We should therefore be more cautious than Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine when they write of the new, Italianate humanism as suiting the ruling elites of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, or than Jonathan Goldberg when he says the new pedagogy "represents and reproduces the state in its differentiated and bureaucratized forms, and attempts to secure for itself a sphere of power as the place from which and within which the state is reproduced."^[16] Such accounts make the effects of cultural production more coherent than they ever can be. At the least, we should notice the potential for disturbance between two features in Goldberg's formulation: the attempts of pedagogy to secure its own position may well, at certain points, diverge from the interests of the state. This is the point I was

making in chapters 4 and 7, following Pierre Bourdieu's argument that ideologies owe their characteristics not only to the interests they serve "but also to the specific interests of those who produce them" (see p. 92 above). In fact, Goldberg's whole argument shows that writing can never make safe its absolutist aspirations; it is always sliding towards a confession of its own construction in ideology, and on occasion Goldberg remarks how distinctively situated groups manifested distinctive relations with the dominant formation. For instance, he observes that the hand of the writing master cannot aspire to the scope of the noble hands that he guides, and that "the female hand makes the rifts in the ideology more apparent" (pp. 116, 145). Rupture in dominant discourses is indicated by Grafton and Jardine also when they remark: "The fact that Erasmus returns again and again in his letters to the connection between his publishing activities in the secular sphere and his scriptural and doctrinal studies suggests that the welding of profane learning to lay piety requires a certain amount of intellectual sleight-of-hand."^[17] The present chapter addresses a disturbance in precisely this region, in the relation between the twin Elizabethan orthodoxies of humanism and protestantism.

Puritan Humanism

The Reformation, by problematizing many preexisting stories, hugely stimulated cultural production of all kinds. Literary endeavor burgeoned in the reign of Edward VI, remaining generally close to native English traditions, adapting them to protestant purposes. Often this writing achieved popular appeal through a combination of ecclesiastical and social reform in the tradition of Lollardry and Piers Plowman .^[18] At this time humanistic learning was still establishing itself in England, but often it seemed allied with protestantism, in opposition to scholasticism and the Catholic church. Robert Barnes, an Augustinian friar, studied under Erasmus and returned to Cambridge to teach Terence and Cicero alongside the Pauline epistles; he was martyred in 1540.^[19] Even so, there was a fundamental divergence of interests between pagan and Christian writing, as Luther at once perceived. "It grieves me to the heart that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen"—Aristotle—"has with his false words deluded and made fools of so many of our best Christians. God has sent him as a plague upon us for our sins," Luther wrote, and Erasmus complained: "Wherever Lutheranism is dominant the study of letters is extinguished."^[20] Pagan writing had bothered earlier Christians—Petrarch, for instance— but the co-occurrence of the Reformation with humanistic enthusiasm

for classical letters posed the problem with enhanced intensity. In 1552 Roger Ascham, though recommending diverse Greek and Latin authors to the schoolmaster, complained of the secular slant of "our Englishmen Italianated": "they have in more reverence the Triumphs of Petrarch than the Genesis of Moses; they make more account of Tully's Offices than St Paul's Epistles, of a tale in Boccaccio than a story of the Bible."^[21]

This disturbance is found, in varying degrees of strength, all through protestantism. Hence my term puritan humanist —which might be written more disjunctively as puritan/humanist , were it not that such persons are often discovered trying to manipulate and efface the conflict, rather than admit it. Sidney displays his Italianate frame of reference on the first page of the Defence by invoking "the fertileness of Italian wit" (p. 73); that this is by way of an elegant and rather oblique joke only confirms the orientation. His main pitch in the Defence is towards courtiers, aristocrats, and gentry—as we see from the restricted manuscript distribution, the derogation of the native English tradition as the work of "base men with servile wits" and lacking unity and decorum (pp. 111, 113–15), and the appeals to the experience of rulers, captains, and courtiers.^[22] Thus Sidney signaled a new phase of anxiety and contest over the role of humane—pagan— learning in protestant culture. In 1582 the Privy Council ordered that Christopher Ocland's new Latin textbook be used in schools, "where diverse heathen poets are ordinarily read and taught, from which the youth of the realm doth rather receive infection in manners than advancement in virtue."^[23] I use the term puritan humanist to identify those who experienced with special intensity the disjunction between humane letters and protestantism.

The ultimate question is whether pagans may be saved. The humanist position is offered in Thomas Starkey's Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535). "None there is so rude and beastly, but, with cure and diligence, by that same sparkle of reason given of God, they may subdue their affections and follow the life to which they be institute and ordained of God," Starkey asserts. Even pagans, then, may be saved "so long as they live after the law of nature, observing also their civil ordinance."^[24] Of course, this means that Adam and Eve cannot have "fallen" too far, and that the incarnation of Jesus, though a help, was inessential. Lord Herbert of Cherbury reached just these conclusions. He explicitly repudiated the "fall," declaring that "the Christians and the heathens are in a manner agreed concerning the definitions of virtues. . . they being doctrines im-

printed in the soul in its first original and containing the principal and first notices by which man may attain his happiness here or hereafter."^[25] Protestants generally said the opposite, denying that there can be salvation without the Christian revelation, which pagans could not have anticipated. Tyndale declared: "The spirit of the world understandeth not the speaking of God; neither the spirit of the wise of this world, neither the spirit of philosophers, neither the spirit of Socrates, of Plato, or of Aristotle's ethics."^[26] John Donne warned: "The scriptures will be out of thy reach, and out of thy use, if thou cast and scatter them upon reason, upon philosophy, upon morality, to try how the scriptures will fit all them."^[27]

In an influential essay, D. P. Walker has alleged that Sidney in particular was engaged by "a purely rational 'natural' theology," using the prisca theologia —pre-Christian hermetic writings—"to integrate Platonism and Christianity."^[28] But the argument rests on De la vérité de la religion chrestienne by Sidney's friend Philippe de Mornay, which Sidney began to translate, and which actually maintains the opposite. Mornay's aim is to refute atheists, and to this end he demonstrates that pagans are obliged to recognize certain Christian propositions. But this is only half the argument: the second half of the book states that the sole hope of retrieving the "fall" is through the Christian revelation, which even Jews do not have. Mornay insists that Pythagoras, Thales, and Xenophanes "have spoken nothing of [God] but dreamingly, nor deemed of him, but overthwartly, nor knowen ought of him but that little which they learned of the Aegyptians.. . . And what learned they there but superstition, as I have showed before?"^[29] The whole structure of his book follows the principle Mornay lays down in his preface: human reason "is so far off from being the measurer of faith, which very far exceedeth nature, that it is not so much as the measurer of nature, and of the least creatures which lie far underneath man, because of the ignorance and untowardness which is in us and reigneth in us." The question of whether Sidney's pagan characters in the New Arcadia will be saved sounds like the ultimate numbering of Lady Macbeth's children, but it indicates Sidney's stance. In fact, as Walker is obliged to admit, Sidney does not make his characters draw upon the prisca theologia or allow them any distinctive Christian insight. Pamela's arguments against the atheism of Cecropia bear directly upon the point. They read as if Sidney had open before him a book Mornay often quotes, Cicero's De natura deorum .^[30] Like Cicero's Stoic spokesman Balbus, Pamela asserts that an ordered universe could not have occurred fortuitously and that

design in the stars and the world indicates the presence of a providential nature. Like Balbus, she infers reason in nature from the fact of human intelligence, since the whole must contain that which is in the part and be superior to the part, and she anticipates the peculiar objection made by Cotta, Cicero's Academic, that if the world is rational then it must be able to read a book (De natura deorum 3.9). Yet Pamela does not follow Balbus all the way: she does not claim that the world and mankind are perfect and perfectly adapted to each other, or that human reason is perfect. Those ideas were too humanist. Sidney brings Pamela precisely as close to protestant ideas as he feels he can, while pointedly denying her any specifically Christian revelation.

Though they would condemn pagans to hell, early modern protestants could not easily set aside classical letters—they were ingrained far too deeply in the culture. In the dedication to his Commentaries on Genesis (1563), Calvin asserts that Aristotle "applied whatever skill he possessed to defraud God of his glory," and that Plato "corrupted and mingled with so many figments the slender principles of truth which he received, that this fictitious kind of teaching would be rather injurious than profitable"; we should attend to Genesis instead.^[31] But a mere two pages before, Calvin has enthused about the humanistic attainment of the ten-year-old Henry of Navarre, to whom these Commentaries are dedicated: "liberal instruction has been superadded to chaste discipline. Already imbued with the rudiments of literature, you have not cast away (as nearly all are wont to do) these studies in disgust, but still advance with alacrity in the cultivation of your genius" (1:47). There is no need to decide whether deference towards the classics or towards the court of Navarre motivated Calvin here: the cultural apparatus works to render such considerations inextricable. The heathens could not be repudiated; they were too firmly established—not merely such that they could not be dislodged, but that cultural work could not otherwise envisaged. Only radical sectarians rejected secular learning altogether;^[32] the overwhelming proportion of protestants worked to capture it for their own purposes. An educated ministry was the most persistent demand of protestants, for the preacher had to interpret and explain the scripture; also, the education system was the place to influence young people. "It was this infiltration of the universities which turned Puritanism from the sectional eccentricity of a few great households in the countryside and groups of artisans and small traders in the towns into a nation-wide movement affecting all classes of society," Lawrence Stone observes.^[33]

But such infiltration inevitably involved negotiation, perhaps contamination. "It may be lawful for Christians to use philosophers and books of secular learning, but with this condition, that whatsoever they find in them that is profitable and useful, they convert it to Christian doctrine and do, as it were, shave off, and pare away all superfluous stuff," John Rainolds cautioned.^[34]

The scope of the problem was nothing less than God and Man. The protestant idea of god was affronted by pagan deities, who were not only too numerous, but given to immoral behavior. Thomas Becon specified carefully in his Catechism (1560) that after "the word of God," the schoolmaster will teach

good letters, I mean poets, orators, historiographers, philosophers, &c.. . . But, in reading these kinds of authors in his discipline, the school-master must diligently take heed that he read only those to his scholars that be most profitable and contain in them no matter that may either hinder the religion of God or the innocency of manners. Such writers in many places of their works are wanton and unhonest, as Martialis, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Cornelius Gallus, and such-like; some wicked and ungodly, as Lucianus, &c.^[35]

It was unclear where the line should be drawn. Lawrence Humphrey in The Nobles (1563) recommends many secular authors for the education of the puritan gentleman, but complains that too many read "human things, not divine, love toys, not fruitful lessons, Venus' games, not weighty studies tending to increase of godliness, dignity, or true and sound commodity; as Ovid, Of the Art of Love ." Humphrey excludes Homer, Horace, Lucian, Ovid, and Virgil's Aeneid (but not the workaday Georgics ) because they present un-Christian values too eloquently (sig. x, y). Hugh Kearney compares Humphrey's approach to Sir Thomas Elyot's in The Governor, where the preference is for classical rather than biblical texts and models of conduct.^[36]

So one answer was to select; another was allegorical interpretation. For protestants, this had to be moral allegory—the medieval and Catholic practice of finding theological allegory in pagan texts attributed too much spiritual wisdom to them.^[37] "Undoubtedly there is no one tale among all the poets, but under the same is comprehended some thing that pertaineth either to the amendment of manners, to the knowledge of truth, to the setting forth of Nature's work, or else to the understanding of some notable thing done," Thomas Wilson asserts in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) (fol. 104r). By this strenuous claim ("undoubtedly. . . no one tale but"), Wilson hoped to justify the sexual escapades of the gods—Jupiter's assault on Danaë shows

that women will be won with money; his changing into a bull to abduct Isis, that beauty may overcome the beast (fol. 104v). Wilson asserts these strained interpretations because he is struggling to square religion and literary interests. Arthur Golding was similarly situated—he translated Theodore Beza's tragedy Abraham sacrifiant (in 1577) and at Sidney's request completed the translation of Mornay's De la véritéde la religion chrestienne.^[38] In the preface and epistle to his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567), Golding takes the same line as Wilson, trying to retrieve those stories through ethical allegory:

The snares of Mars and Venus show that time will bring to light
The secret sins that folk commit in corners or by night.
Hermaphrodite and Salmacis declare that idleness
Is chiefest nurse and cherisher of all voluptuousness,
And that voluptuous life breeds sin: which linking all together
Make men to be effeminate, unwieldy, weak and lither.^[39]

On his title page Golding warns: "With skill, heed and judgment, this work must be read, / For else to the reader it stands in small stead." He means it must be read with a protestant slant if the reader is not to be tempted by pagan values.

While the classical idea of deity seemed all too human for protestants, the idea of human potential was often too godlike. Epic was the most highly valued poetic form partly because an exalted conception of what today might be called "Renaissance Man" could be derived from it. Tasso asserts in his Discourses on the Heroic Poem that "epic illustriousness is based on lofty military valour and the magnanimous resolve to die, on piety, religion, and deeds alight with these virtues." Ficino alludes to an epic idea of human potential when he declares, "In certain ages there are great and powerful men, gods in the guise of humans, or humans who are gods, but they are rarer than the Phoenix."^[40] The contrast with Christianity was appreciated by Machiavelli: "Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It has assigned as man's highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things, whereas that other hath identified it with magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to make men bold."^[41] William Perkins agreed, though unlike Machiavelli he did not regret the Christian attitude:

the Philosopher [Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 4.3] calls Magnanimity (whereby a man thinks himself worthy of great honours, and thereupon enterpriseth great things) a virtue; which notwithstanding is to beholden a flat vice. For by the law of God, every man is to range himself within the limits of his calling, and not to dare once to

go out of it. Whereas, on the contrary, the scope and end of this virtue (as they term it) is to make men attempt high and great matters above their reach, and so to go beyond their callings. Besides, it is directly opposite to the virtue of humility, which teacheth that a man ought always to be base, vile and lowly in his own eyes.^[42]

Puritan humanists felt they should adapt epic to meet these reservations. In the New Arcadia, Musidorus and Pyrocles seem to be the perfect heroic princes; indeed, they have been reared in the manner proposed in Sidney's Defence, on "all the stories of worthy princes, both to move them to do nobly and teach them how to do nobly." They set out on their adventures to excel the classical models, "thinking it not so worthy to be brought to heroical effects by fortune or necessity, like Ulysses and Aeneas, as by one's own choice and working."^[43] But their love slides towards lust, and they are unable to defeat Amphialus; they are subjected to suffering, impotence, and failure, and they begin to develop a more inward and spiritual strength, based on a recognition of their limitations; they learn patience from the princesses. It seems that eventually they must be rescued by providence when their own efforts fail. Milton in Paradise Lost faces a similar task. He says his argument is "Not less but more heroic" than the classical epics, and that knights in battle are "tedious"; he prefers "the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom."^[44] The word stand rings through Paradise Lost . It connotes a heroism that does not overrate the potential for human achievement. "They also serve who only stand and wait" ("On his Blindness").

The most radical solution was to admit only literature on divine subjects—which meant, in the main, translating, rewriting, and reworking biblical material in secular forms (lyric verse, tragedy, epic). A great deal of early protestant writing was of this character; for Sidney's generation, the Huguenot poet Du Bartas (who, like Mornay, was at the court of Navarre) became the spokesman for "divine poetry." In Urania (1574), translated by James VI of Scotland in 1584, Bartas nominates Urania the muse of the divine poem; she exhorts him:

If ye be heavenly, how dare ye presume
A verse profane, and mocking for to sing
'Gainst him that leads of starry heavens the ring?
Will ye then so ingrately make your pen
A slave to sin, and serve but fleshly men?^[45]

The white dove of the Holy Spirit should replace Pegasus, the winged horse, as the emblem of poetic inspiration (p. 35). The Scottish con-

nection was strengthened by the writings of George Buchanan, whose tragedies Baptistes and Jepthes were published in London in 1577–78 and 1580. Such insistence on divine poetry constituted a coherent puritan humanist position, and its influence was powerful in English writing. George Herbert asked God: "Why are not sonnets made of thee? and lays / Upon thine altar burnt?" (they already were being, of course), and resolved that his poetic abilities should be "ever consecrated to God's glory";^[46] he held to that line. Spenser wrote divine poetry; several titles showing this are listed in the printer's note to the Complaints . His Fowre Hymnes (1596) are prefaced with a dedication to the puritan countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, in which Spenser attributes the first two hymns, on earthly love and beauty, to his green youth and offers the second two, on heavenly love and beauty, as a corrective. These latter begin with a repudiation:

Many lewd lays (ah woe is me the more)
In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love,
I have in th'heat of youth made heretofore,
That in light wits did loose affection move.
But all those follies now I do reprove,
And turned have the tenor of my string,
The heavenly praises of true love to sing.^[47]

However, Spenser did not settle to divine poetry; indeed, despite this repudiation, he prints all four hymns—the lewd lays as well as the heavenly praises. The humanist is reluctant, here, to submit to the puritan. Such wavering is not uncharacteristic, for the puritan humanist stance was by definition anxious and indeterminate, inviting diverse resolutions, none of which was quite satisfactory. Some writers moved towards divine or severely instructional writing as they grew older; this was the pattern taken by Fulke Greville and Joseph Hall, and perhaps by Sidney as well, for near the end of his life he translated Bartas's long poem La création du monde ou première sepmaine^[48] and began translating the Psalms and Mornay's De la vérité. Milton moves steadily across the spectrum from humanist to puritan. Comus and "Lycidas" use pagan imagery in ways that may be justified by their ethical purport; Paradise Lost is a divine poem, but it is the unstable mixture of Christian theme and pagan imagery that makes it so astounding; Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained cultivate an austere, though not quite complete, repudiation of secular reference.

However, appropriation is never one-way: the pagan genres adapted by puritan humanists inevitably leave in the Christianizing texts traces of their prior implication. Hence, perhaps, readers' unease with Acra-

sia's Bower of Bliss (Faerie Queene 2.12). Milton in Paradise Lost juxtaposes pagan gardens with Eden while denying that there is any comparison (4.268–87; 9.439–43). But the connotations run riot when Spenser evokes the garden round the dwelling of Acrasia, the wicked seductress:

More sweet and wholesome than the pleasant hill
  Of Rhodope,  on which the nymph that bore
  A giant babe herself for grief did kill;
  Or the Thessalian Tempe,  where of yore
  Fair Daphne Phoebus ' heart with love did gore;
  Or Ida,  where the gods loved to repair,
  Whenever they their heavenly bowers forlore;
  Or sweet Parnass,  the haunt of Muses fair;
  Or Eden  self, if ought with Eden  mote compare.
(Faerie Queene 2.12.52)

Douglas Brooks-Davies invites readers to "note the interpretative problem posed here."^[49] Rhodope and Thessaly were the scenes of disasters, and so might point towards the dangerous character of Acrasia's garden; Ida and Parnassus, on the other hand, had mystical, neoplatonic, and poetic associations, and thus might set an ironic frame for Acrasia's activities. But the two strategies undermine each other: contradictory analogues stand together, without formal distinction, in the one list. Critical ingenuity might propose that Acrasia inhabits a place of moral confusion; but then what of the final comparison with Eden? The question is recognized ("if ought with Eden mote compare"), but not resolved. Pagan, neoplatonic, and Christian images jostle together without an apparent hierarchy. Despite his professions at other points—for instance when the Bible is presented to Redcross as "heavenly documents. . . That weaker wit of man could never reach, / Of God, of grace, of justice, of free will" (1.10.19)—Spenser allows pagan poetry to disturb the priority of Christian imagery. Generally, with Greenblatt, I see Spenser now as a far more opportunistic poet than the modern critical tradition, with its commitment to the discovery of structure, has wanted to envisage.^[50]

Anti-puritan traces in Acrasia's setting may derive also from the sixteenth-century Italian reworkings of epic upon which Spenser was drawing. The equivalent to Acrasia in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) is Alcina: she is presented similarly, with a full catalogue of her attractions, but without serious disapproval of her or her island being suggested (7.11–15; 6.20–22). Ariosto encourages the reader to forgive Ruggiero for being ensnared (7.18); he is tolerant of his heroes'

frequent sexual lapses and does not begrudge Alcina her beauty. The humanist Spenser wants to adopt Ariosto's image, but the puritan must build in evaluative phrases:

Upon a bed of roses was she laid,
  As faint through heat, or dight [dressed] to pleasant sin,
  And was arrayed, or rather disarrayed,
  All in a veil of silk and silver thin,
  That hid no whit her alablaster skin,
  But rather showed more white, if more might be.
(2.12.77)

The moral tone here is quite finely balanced: replace sin with a merely ambiguous word such as dalliance and many readers might not worry about the disarray or the hint of excess and falsification in the last two lines. Spenser is following and partly revising Ariosto's practice, but traces of Ariosto's ethic remain embedded in the language. Spenser's other main source here, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1575), is closer to puritan purpose—Tasso disapproved of Ariosto's casual treatment of Alcina's charms, and his parallel account of Armida and her island is qualified by a moral commentary like Spenser's.^[51] But Tasso's Rinaldo is readily persuaded to leave Armida by a mirroring of his debased condition and an appeal to his honor; Tasso and his hero seem quite at ease in the world of epic achievement (16.29–34). Guyon's good behavior, in contrast, seems always precarious–in Acrasia's garden, he

  suffered no delight
To sink into his sense, nor mind affect,
But passed forth, and looked still forward right,
Bridling his will, and maistering his might.
(2.12.53)

Guyon resisted the temptations of the Cave of Mammon without difficulty, but here his bridling and maistering is not secure; his defeat of sensuality is both harder-won and more decisive than Ruggiero's. Indeed, it is positively destructive:

But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave,
  Guyon  broke down, with rigour pitiless;
  Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
  Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,
  But that their bliss he turn'd to balefulness:
  Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,
  Their arbours spoil, their cabinets suppress,

  Their banquet houses burn, their buildings raze,
And of the fairest late, now made the foulest place.
(2.12.83)

The reversed evaluation of "fairest" and "foulest" in the last line (readers are asked to approve the displacement of fair by foul) is the demand of an extremist. This may just be protestantism: in Reformation thought any virtue in "fallen" humanity must be strenuous and controversial. What is nonetheless perverse, however, is that the zealous Guyon is supposed to be the knight of temperance! But then, while Spenser has portrayed Acrasia's environment as in some ways excessive, he has also allowed it to appear temperate: the heavens "suffered storm nor frost on them to fall,"

Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate
  T'afflict the creatures, which therein did dwell,
  But the mild air with season moderate
  Gently attempered, and disposed so well,
That still it breathed forth sweet spirit and wholesome smell.
(2.12.51)

In the first line of the next stanza, wholesome is repeated (introducing the comparison with Rhodope, already quoted). The birdsong around the bower also seems to be a good thing, harmonious and temperate:

The joyous birds shrouded in cheerful shade—

(but look at the disjunctions—shrouds are deathly, and shade is often gloomy—is this comforting or threatening?)—

The joyous birds shrouded in cheerful shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet;
Th'angelical soft trembling voices made
To th'instruments divine respondence meet.
(2.12.71)

This is what Guyon has to overthrow. It is not surprising that he does not do it temperately, for it is itself partly temperate.

Puritan and humanist values cannot be merged, but they refuse, in Spenser's handling, to separate out. After all, temperance is a pagan virtue, most famously defined in Aristotle's Ethics (2.6) as the rational achievement of a mean between extremes of excess and defect in passions and actions, and it is by no means obvious how it should sort with protestant zeal. The violence with which Guyon breaks up the bower may be not only religious fervor, therefore, but an anxiety that the place of pagan letters, together with the palaces, arbors, banqueting

halls, and fine workmanship of courtly culture, is not altogether settled. One of the temptations Guyon has to survive on his way to Acrasia's bower is the Mermaids, and they are related to the Muses: "They were fair ladies, till they fondly striv'd / With th'Heliconian maids for maistery." This presumption caused them to be transformed half to fish,

   But th'upper half their hue retained still,
   And their sweet skill in wonted melody;
   Which ever after they abused to ill,
T'allure weak travellers, whom gotten they did kill.
(2.12.31)

It must be hard to tell, then, when melody is legitimate and when not. The temptation that is repelled when Acrasia's bower is broken up is integral with one half of the puritan humanist poetic. Guyon is both temperate and intemperate; he is destroying a part of himself. The canto and book close with the complaint of the beastly Grill at being transformed into the kind of creature that Guyon approves: Grill "Repined greatly, and did him miscall, / That had from hoggish form him brought to natural" (2.12.86). This recalcitrance affords Guyon, even in his moment of success, pretext for further immoderateness, further strain and agitation. He and the Palmer do not forego the opportunity for intemperate taunts—

   The dunghill kind
Delights in filth and foul incontinence;
Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind.

Such compulsion to discover yet further resistance to vilify, in the last moment of the book, suggests once more an excess, an instability, in the puritan humanist project.

Sidney's Defence for Puritans

Poetry, Sidney wants to show in his Defence of Poetry , "being rightly applied, deserveth not to be scourged out of the Church of God."^[52] His initial move is to propose three kinds of poetry—divine, philosophical, and (the type he mainly discusses) "that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching" (p. 81). This enables him to revere, yet at the same time to bracket off, divine poetry: it is "the chief, both in antiquity and excellency" (p. 80), yet need not interfere with the main argument. This is not casual lip service though, for Sidney maintains with considerable care a major protestant distinction by accepting only Christian poetry as

divine. He adds and prefers biblical instances (David, Solomon, Moses, Deborah, Job) to the pagans listed by Scaliger—the latter were "in a full wrong divinity" (pp. 80, 190); he does not, like Plato, Scaliger, and the Pléiade, claim heavenly inspiration for the poet; nor, like George Puttenham in the opening paragraph of his Arte of English Poesie (1589), does he draw an unqualified analogy between the poet and God. Like Sir Thomas Elyot, he employs to the general credit of poetry the fact that the Romans called any poet a vates , but he insists that the use of Virgil for fortune-telling was "a very vain and godless superstition"; and verse in oracles, he says, only seemed to have some divine force (pp. 76–77). Sidney apparently read Bartas after writing the Defence , but he places Buchanan in a list of distinguished people who have not disdained poetry and writes, punningly: "the tragedies of Buchanan do justly bring forth a divine admiration" (pp. 110, 116).

Sidney's main case, though, is not for divine poetry, but for the ethical validity of secular poets: "For these indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved" (p. 81). He grants the priority of divine poetry, but does not want poetry restricted to biblical subjects; it is a distinctively puritan humanist project. His key move is to claim for secular poetry ethical insight, for this, according to protestants, was entirely within the competence of pagan reason. "Nothing, indeed, is more common," Calvin allowed, "than for man to be sufficiently instructed in a right course of conduct by natural law."^[53] Pagans could not reach spiritual insight—that would be the province of revelation and divine poetry; but "the admirable light of truth displayed" in pagan writings, Calvin writes with unusual enthusiasm, "should remind us that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator" (Institutes 2.2.15). This gives Sidney much of what he needs to defend pagan poetry. He maintains the demarcation between revealed religion and the ethical philosophy naturally available to "fallen" humankind when he remarks that "in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well, and what is evil,. . . for out of natural conceit the philosophers drew it," and adds, "I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit " (p. 91; emphasis added). The same idea is at work when Sidney indicates the respective roles of biblical and secular reading in his letter of May 22, 1580, to Edward Denny: the scriptures "are certainly the incomparable lantern in this

fleshly darkness of ours.. . . To them if you will add as to the help of the second table (I mean that which contains the love of thy neighbour, and dealing betwixt man and man) some parts of moral philosophy, I think you shall do very wisely."^[54] From such a basis, Sidney may claim "wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, valour in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus" (Defence , p. 86).

Yet the Defence remains vulnerable to the argument, which Sidney knew others were making, that divine subjects would better suit the dignity of poetry and avoid the danger of heathen temptations. Psalm-singing, he says, is recommended by Saint James for times of merriment, and "I know is used with the fruit of comfort by some, when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodness" (p. 80). This seems to echo the well-known preface to the metrical version of the Psalms by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins (1562), but notice the corollary that they draw: psalms are "to be used of all sorts of people privately for their solace and comfort: laying apart all ungodly songs and ballads which tend only to the nourishing of vice and corrupting of youth." Patrick Collinson notes this yearning towards an exclusively religious culture—he quotes Miles Coverdale's wish "that our minstrels had none other thing to play upon, neither our carters and ploughmen other thing to whistle upon, save psalms, hymns, and such godly songs as David is occupied withal!"^[55] Sidney, however, does not want to lay apart ungodly songs. Even so, he declares later on that songs and sonnets of love might better be employed "in singing the praises of the immortal beauty; the immortal goodness of that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive" (p. 116). The question has not gone away. If Sidney's argument for ethical poetry is sometimes forced, as I think it is, then it is partly because although few people seriously imagined dispensing with pagan learning, the case for the exclusive validity of divine poetry was lurking just out of sight.

In the medium term, indeed, the separation of spiritual and terrestrial concerns, which was designed to protect the former, helped make space for empirical and other scientific study that eventually produced a more persuasive secular view of the universe. The separation was Francis Bacon's justification in De augmentis scientiarum , but he hardly admits that the quest for natural laws seems to narrow the scope for divine intervention in the world. However, he does say that "we are not to give up the investigation, until the properties and qualities found in such things as may be taken for miracles of nature be reduced and comprehended under some Form or Fixed Law,"^[56]

and this must leave little space for specific operations of God's "special providence" such as protestants envisaged. Even Calvin and Perkins invite admiration for the marvelous design of the universe, not seeing that regularity must undermine the scope for an intrusive deity. Perkins compares the universe to a watch with many wheels, as deists were to do, not noticing that a good watch does not require the continual tinkering of the watchmaker.^[57] The separation of divine and secular learning enabled Calvin to say that God wants us to study his creation and assists us even "by the work and ministry of the ungodly in physics, dialectics, mathematics and other sciences" (Institutes 2.2.16). But he was helping the ungodly to get the better of the argument: gradually the secular slipped free from religious domination and, by promising advances in understanding and control of the natural world, made religious superstition seem less relevant as an explanation. Similarly, Calvin's freeing of ethics from total subjection to religion permitted people to construct, with some help from pagan thought, an autonomous secular morality that repudiates supernatural sanctions as destructive of true moral choice. The Reformation unwittingly made possible the modern situation, which is generally more advanced in the countries that were protestant, wherein many people conduct a moral life with little or no reference to a spiritual dimension.

That the Defence is subject to a structural difficulty, arising from tension in the puritan humanist situation rather than incidental awkwardnesses, is apparent from other strains in Sidney's argument. With respect to misguided ideas about god(s), he is, of course, not obliged to attribute religious wisdom to pagan poets: "The poets did not induce such opinions, but did imitate those opinions already induced. For all the Greek stories can well testify that the very religion of that time stood upon many and many-fashioned gods, not taught so by the poets, but followed according to their nature of imitation" (p. 108). At this point Sidney becomes a historical relativist, and potentially a materialist; it is a position altogether incompatible with the absolute aesthetic he propounds elsewhere. Moreover, it does not address the question of whether reading such opinions—with all the moving power Sidney attributes to poetry—might be harmful. Much of the anxiety about the gods concerned their sexual behavior, as I have remarked, and on love poetry Sidney is distinctly ambivalent. He suppresses it from his definitions of elegy and lyric—the former is taken solely as lament, ignoring Ovid and the Latin elegists; the latter is said to praise, not sexual love, but virtue and sometimes God (pp. 95, 97). However, Sidney knows that this is partial, and not only

in respect of those genres. As he admits later on: "They say, the comedies rather teach than reprehend amorous conceits. They say the lyric is larded with passionate sonnets; the elegiac weeps the want of his mistress; and that even to the heroical, Cupid hath ambitiously climbed" (p. 103). His answer to this is notably indirect. He grants two objections while hinting at parenthetical reservations, but his appeals to "love and beauty" and "philosophers" support Platonic, not sexual love. Finally he grants that lust, vanity, and scurrility possess much love poetry—but yet that we may "not say that poetry abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry" (p. 104). So poetry in principle is vindicated at the expense of most actual love poetry.

That Sidney's caution here is more puritan than the standard currency of Elizabethan critical thought may be observed through comparison with some less zealous writers. Sir Thomas Elyot recommends that the noble youth study the parts of Lucian "which be without ribaldry or too much scorning" and the episodes with Dido in the Aeneid , and Ovid's Metamorphoses ; he says they will appeal to "that affect or desire whereto any child's fantasy is disposed." Elyot denies that in Terence, Ovid, Catullus, and Martial "is nothing contained but incitation to lechery," and holds that no ancient poet should "be excluded from the lesson of such one as desireth to come to the perfection of wisdom." Puttenham is openly liberal. He says poetry provides instruction, but sees it also as "the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitory life." As such, it may "allowably bear matter not always of the gravest, or of any great commodity or profit, but rather in some sort vain, dissolute, or wanton, so be it not very scandalous and of evil example."^[58]

The epic idea of the hero was also, as I have said, problematic. Here Sidney confronts the puritans more directly, perhaps because magnanimity is a more appropriate virtue for his class than for the social groups envisaged by Perkins as his likely readers. Even so, in his account of "the Heroical," Sidney says it "maketh magnanimity and justice shine," supplying a distinctive second quality—justice—to make the epic hero seem less grandly amoral than he often is. Sidney then offers the noticeably vaguer claims that epic instills "virtue" and "inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy," instancing Aeneas's behavior—"how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country; in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies; in obeying God's commandment to leave Dido" (Defence , p. 98). This is surely the best protestant case that could be made for

epic. When Sidney ventures a wider range of heroes, his claim for their virtue is less convincing: he declares that, hearing "the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas," one "must needs hear the right description of wisdom, valour, and justice" (p. 92). Such an appropriation obliges us to concede a point to Stephen Gosson, who in his Schoole of Abuse (1579) complains that defenders of Homer wrest "the rashness of Ajax to valour, the cowardice of Ulysses to policy, the dotage of Nestor to grave counsel."^[59] Sidney's material reveals its intractability.

The boldest gambit in the Defence is the account of the provenance of the poet's vision. The main competitors to poetry are restricted severely by the "fallen" condition of humanity. History, "being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness." Philosophy is subject to a comparable drawback: it does not move us, and "to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est ."^[60] Poetry's competitors, then, are vitiated by the "fall"; so Sidney sets aside the optimistic view of human potential that we associate with "Renaissance humanism." And poetry too, he says at one point, can only "draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of" (p. 82). But the powers of the poet, a few pages earlier, seem to be miraculously unhampered: he alone is found "freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit" (p. 78). This sounds a far larger claim than the ethical and practical insight with which protestants were happy to credit ancient writers. Sidney asserts special scope for the poet, Christian or pagan—that he is "lifted up with the vigour of his own invention" and transcends "fallen" nature, growing "in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature" (p. 78). This is evidently designed to deal with objections by some protestants to the fictive character of much poetry: it does not only copy the world, but imagines ideal conditions—such as might have pertained before the "fall." Hence, in part, Sidney's commitment to the idea that absolute virtues and vices are displayed in poetry: it creates a golden world (of heroes, demigods, furies, and the like) where qualities are unalloyed. But how does such visionary perception fit the protestant categories that Sidney seems elsewhere to be using?— it sounds almost like Ficino's belief that in his inherent drive towards immortality Man "imitates all the works of the divine nature, and perfects, corrects and improves the works of the lower nature. There-

fore the power of man is almost similar to that of the divine nature, for man acts in this way through himself. Through his own wit and art he governs himself, without being bound by any limits of corporeal nature."^[61] Sidney is evidently aware of the danger of appearing to claim improper scope for lapsed humanity, for he moves quickly to "give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker." In fact, he says, so far from contradicting the "fall," the poet's vision affords "no small arguments to the credulous of that first accursed fall of Adam" (p. 79). This seems to mean that the poet's intuition reminds us of what our condition might have been had the "fall" not occurred; it is Calvin's thought when he remarks that "it is impossible to think of our primeval dignity without being immediately reminded of the sad spectacle of our ignominy and corruption, ever since we fell from our original in the person of our first parent" (Institutes 2.1.1). Here I agree with Andrew Weiner: Sidney is "declaring poetry's lack of complicity in that corruption of nature, following man's first disobedience, into her present 'brazen' state."^[62] However, the question is how the pagan poet—and it is he who is the problem—could achieve such a vision. Weiner cites Calvin's principle that the "fall" may be reversed through "the grace of regeneration" (Institutes 2.2.12) and quotes Sidney's statement that the poet sees with "the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith" (Defence, p. 77). But Sidney says this of David in the Psalms—of the divine poet . The pagan poet cannot be following "the promptings of the Holy Spirit."^[63] Protestant admiration for pagan capacity in ethical affairs, on which Sidney's case is generally based, cannot be stretched so far. Perkins insists:

though those virtues of the heathen be graces of God, yet they are but general and common to all: whereas the virtues of Christians are special graces of the spirit, sanctifying and renewing the mind, will and affections. For example, chastity in Joseph was a grace of God's spirit, renewing his heart; but chastity in Xenocrates was a common grace, serving only to curb and restrain the corruption of his heart. And the like may be said of Abraham, a Christian, and of Aristides, a heathen.^[64]

Pagan virtue is by definition different, and elsewhere Sidney allows, indeed depends upon, the distinction. But here, in the passage about the "fall of Adam," he does encourage confusion, for he says that the poet—not just the biblical writer—has "the force of a divine breath" (p. 79). This sounds like the Holy Spirit: although Sidney claims, in the main, only ethical provenance for pagan poetry, he does at this point allow the distinctive inspiration of the divine poet to slide across.

That this is not a position he could defend explicitly is apparent later, when he bluntly repudiates Plato's claim that poetry is "a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man's wit" (p. 109).

So Sidney arrives at his celebrated formula: "our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (p. 79). This has proved of great appeal to Christian humanists as securing somehow both godlike aspirations and post-lapsarian degradation. It has the ring of profound paradox, vague nobility, and inevitably thwarted idealism that appeals to traditional critics, promising imaginative potency at the expense of actual attention to human affairs. Had Sidney indeed reconciled the most exalted humanist conception of poetry and the protestant conviction that people are thoroughly "fallen," it would be an achievement on the order of reconciling science and religion, or Marx and Freud (or even literature and politics). But the same conditions pertain as before: either "erected wit" is a property of pagans, in which case it is still a limited faculty in comparison with the divine revelation available to regenerate Christians; or it is a property of the elect, in which case it cannot afford a defense of pagan poetry.

There was, in fact, a celebrated pagan use of the word erect . In Ovid's Metamorphoses, when Man is first created, his divine origin is celebrated and it is said that the god gave him an uplifted face and bade him see the sky and lift his countenance erect to the stars ("Os homini sublime dedit: coelumque videre / Iussit, & erectos ad sidera tollere vultus": 1.85–86). Calvin quotes this in the Institutes, applying it to "the integrity with which Adam was endued when his intellect was clear, his affections subordinated to reason, all his senses duly regulated, and when he truly ascribed all his excellence to the admirable gifts of his Maker" (1.15.3). That is when Man was erect. (Milton uses Ovid's verse in the same way when he adapts it in writing of the creation of Adam.)^[65] Created man, Calvin continues, exhibited "the entire excellence of human nature," but at the "fall," this was "vitiated and almost destroyed, nothing remaining but a ruin, confused, mutilated, and tainted with impurity"—and hence the limits upon natural intellect. The one qualification is that Man's original condition "is now partly seen in the elect, in so far as they are regenerated by the Spirit" (Institutes 1.15.4). They may have erected wits; but not pagan poets. Even Ovid was speaking of the golden age, not of current human faculties.

There are two ways of reading Sidney's formula, then: it either addresses the condition of pagans (in which case despite the exalted

tone, their work is still inferior to divine poetry); or it addresses the condition of the regenerate (in which case it cannot defend the pagan writing that figured so largely in the Elizabethan cultural apparatus). By allowing a confusion of the two, the formula sounds like a triumphant justification, the best of all worlds; but it does not stand up to analysis.

At this point the skeptical reader might say: Ah yes, but have you not been paying too much attention to Calvin anyway—was not Richard Hooker, after all, the central religious thinker of the period?

Supposing that were so, it still would not make Sidney's formula coherent. For while the erected wit is compatible with Hooker's conception of human capacity, the infected will is not. To Hooker, will is defined as following reason: "the object of Will is that good which Reason doth lead us to seek. . . neither is any other desire termed properly Will, but that where Reason and Understanding, or the show of Reason, prescribeth the thing desired."^[66] It is Calvin who insists, contrary to Aristotle and Aquinas as well as to Hooker, that the will is depraved to the extent that it is likely to resist the reason.^[67] Alternatively we might say that "erected wit" sounds like Erasmus, who holds in his Handbook of the Militant Christian that "the soul, mindful of its celestial nature, struggles strenuously against the weight of the earthly body to press upward." But such a view correlates, again, with a general sense that the will also is not too damaged by the "fall": none of our passions, Erasmus believes, "is so violent that it cannot be restrained by reason or redirected towards virtue."^[68] So Sidney's sentence deposits him between the two stools of contemporary thought. His idea of the scope of the reason approximates that of Hooker or Erasmus; but the recalcitrance of the will is the position of Calvin and Perkins. His poet meets the criteria of neither of the main contemporary ideas of Man; he is more "fallen" than is allowed in the one, less than in the other. "Our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" effects not a resolution, but a clash of rival absolutes. It is a precise epitome of the struggle over God and Man at the center of puritan humanism.

Positive Images

It may now be apparent that, at least in the forms in which they offered themselves to Sidney, puritanism and humanism, for all their rivalry, finally share the same authoritarian deep structure. For each asserts an absolute notion of humanity—either sunk in spiritual degradation

or blessed with godlike vision. And this entire way of thinking is of a piece with Sidney's determination to efface the historical and ideological specificities of pagan writing and discover ideal, ahistorical, exemplifications in poetry: Man is essentially, ultimately, really, thus (or thus)—it is guaranteed by God. Absolutes are ideological: Anthony Giddens proposes that the three principal ideological forms are "the representation of sectional interests as universal ones," "the denial or transmutation of contradictions," and "the naturalisation of the present."^[69] Sidney in the Defence manifests all three. Despite his awareness that pagan gods are what we should expect in pagan society, he naturalizes the present to the extent that no difference in ethical values between protestants and pagans is acknowledged. To do this, he denies or transmutes the contradictions within pagan literature, between that literature and his society, and within his society. And his aim is to construct a relationship between the cultural apparatus and a particular point of view in Elizabethan culture and politics, but this is not admitted: sectional interests are represented as universal ones. Theories of Man are strategies of political power.

Sidney's strategic choices in his attempt to negotiate a relationship between the cultural apparatus and his political project are not without relevance for those who would do the same today. If I have been able to show partiality in his treatment of some classical texts, it is because their role is like that which Terry Eagleton attributes to Richardson's novels: they are "pitched standards around which battle is joined, instruments which help to constitute social interests."^[70] But Sidney cannot altogether efface contradiction. The condition for the propounding of an absolutist aesthetic is a contest that must belie its claims. The Defence, like Spenser's Bower of Bliss, is problematic because it is not, in fact, a unified construction of absolute qualities, but a piecing together of divergent discourses within an unsettled cultural apparatus. This is characteristic of the way cultures develop: "The process of ideological elaboration is thus closer. . . to Lévi-Strauss' process of bricolage than it is to the consistent elaboration of theoretical or philosophical 'world views,' "Stuart Hall has observed. Ideologies "will frequently be extended and amplified to deal with new situations by 'putting together', often in an illogical or incoherent way, what were, previously, the fragments of more ordered or stable meaning-systems."^[71] For, despite his language of high principle, Sidney is ratifying a program of compromise within the prevailing cultural apparatus. In the face of its absolutist statements, the Defence actually both proposes and instantiates mixed modes: its project de-

mands, and itself exhibits, negotiation and appropriation of existing forms, not a sudden, unfettered intuition of ultimate truth. (And that is why Sidney's other writing does not achieve the ideological purity that the Defence seems to demand.) Doubtless all this was, for Sidney, a necessary personal accommodation. Also, I am arguing, we may discern a purposeful intervention. Sidney aimed to make space in the Elizabethan cultural apparatus for writing that might address the spectrum of concerns articulated at the interface between protestantism and pagan writing; to establish a courtly culture that, although less restricted than Bartas would have had it, was nonetheless a vehicle for earnest protestantism.

Upon his death in 1586, Sidney's admirers hastened to exploit his image, representing him as just such an absolute figure as he had sought to celebrate in pagan literature—an ideal hero in the epic struggle for protestantism and an example for his time. Dispute over the precise defensible balance for poetry and religion continued, for it was imperative for that culture to continue talking to itself about such a central and unresolved issue. Diverse emphases were derived from Sidney's work. Spenser is close on his heels in the Letter to Raleigh about the Faerie Queene, where Spenser claims to be following classical tradition wherein Homer "in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man." Here puritans are Spenser's reference point, and are answered in their own terms when he says that those who may prefer "good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large" should consider that the poetic method is suitable for "these days, seeing all things accounted by their shows, and nothing esteemed that is not delightful and pleasing to common sense."^[72] This is very like Sidney's case for delightful teaching.

Sir John Harington in the preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591) uses the argument less straightforwardly. He borrows, with some acknowledgment, various of Sidney's points, but makes the tone teasing and debunking, for instance in respect of the belief of some opponents that all but divine poetry is "vain and superfluous," and in an absurdly elaborate array of allegorical readings of Perseus slaying Gorgon.^[73] On love poetry, which as translator of Orlando Furioso he must address, Harington rehearses Sidney's embarrassment, but jovially sets it aside: "As for the pastoral with the sonnet or epigram, though many times they savour of wantonness and love and toying, and, now and then breaking the rules of poetry, go into plain scurrility, yet even the worst of them may be not ill applied, and are,

I must confess, too delightful." He reckons that even the blushing matron will read them when no observer is by (p. 209). While Sidney justifies the Aeneid by pointing out that Aeneas virtuously deserts Dido, Harington appeals to Aeneas's lapse with Dido to justify sexual license in Orlando Furioso (p. 214). As T. G. A. Nelson says, it amounts to a parody of Sidney's Defence, a repudiation of "the rather serious-minded aspirations" of Sidney and Spenser.^[74] Fulke Greville, at the other extreme, also framed his argument about secular poetry in Sidneyan terms. He declares that in the Arcadia, Sidney's end "was not vanishing pleasure alone, but moral images and examples, as directing threads, to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life." Yet Greville does not present this as a program for more such writing; rather, he wishes that Arcadia "may be the last in this kind, presuming no man that follows can ever reach, much less go beyond, that excellent intended pattern of his."^[75] In this version, Sidney's own image and example produce not a model to follow but a reason why there should be no more such; his instance was so ideal that none can emulate it. These diverse appropriations of the Defence show how a firm and accomplished statement, rather than closing an issue, very often instigates a further phase of cultural negotiation.

The moment of the Sidney circle was relatively brief, for courtly protestantism was overtaken by events. The defeat of the Armada diminished the need for heroic knights to oppose an evil empire; the Earl of Essex, having the queen's favor, fashioned a more exuberant, less thoughtful image of aristocratic virtue; most puritan ministers learnt to live with periodic intrusions from the bishops; a protestant succession was secured. Jacobean court culture became far more elaborate and expensive, and the commercial stage vastly more influential, than Sidney could have envisaged, producing a culture more ambitious and demotic, and more sexy and violent, than the Defence contemplates. Mixed genres became the norm; plays and masques merged pagan and Christian imagery and contexts, often with casual disregard for historical and philosophical consistency. If my thesis is right, Sidney would have been disconcerted to find the Defence inspiring Theseus's evocation of how "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven" at the start of act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream . And however much he might have admired the scope and poetry of King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi, which draw specifically upon the Arcadia, he would have been

uneasy about the attitudes to Christianity that may be inferred from those plays.

It seems obvious now that Sidney's largest influence occurred because his texts were printed, initially in pirated editions. But the rapid growth in the demand for printed books marked a limit to the significance of the court in the cultural apparatus. Joseph Hall in his Virgidemiarum (1597–98) satirizes every kind of poetry in the name of unmasking the ugly face of vice, but says in a postscript that "poetry itself' scarcely needs defending "after the so effectual and absolute endeavours of her honoured patrons," Sidney and Spenser.^[76] So the erected wit was recycled for the infighting of city wits (Hall later became a bishop and more solemn). The nodes of cultural power were becoming more dispersed—not necessarily very far down the political hierarchy, but into diverse networks and milieux that gained the intellectual and educational confidence to put together their own particular bricolage . As the Caroline court embraced Laudian Anglo-Catholicism, the kind of principled stance adopted by Sidney in the Defence became important again, but now in a gentry culture that cultivated godly earnestness against court excess. Perhaps in a purposeful appropriation, it is Astrophil and Stella that may be heard through George Herbert's religious verse:

There is in love a sweetness ready penned:
Copy out only that, and save expense.
("Jordan [II]")

Compare Astrophil and Stella , sonnet 3:

               in  Stella's  face I read
  What Love and Beauty be, then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.^[77]

Milton is close to the Defence in his Reason of Church Government (1641), where he asserts that poetry teaches "over the whole book of sanctity and virtue through all the instances of example, with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon truth herself unless they see her elegantly dressed." For himself though, picking up what I have said is an indeterminacy in the Defence, Milton finds the logic of divine poetry more compelling: he contemplates a work not "to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit."^[78] In Paradise Regained (1671), Milton

adds a fourth temptation to the biblical account of Jesus in the wilderness: the temptation to study pagan letters. Satan says tragedians instruct and delight in the manner proposed by Sidney (4.261–66), but Jesus will have none of it:

                 He who receives
Light from above, from the Fountain of Light,
No other doctrine needs, though granted true;
But these are false, or little else but dreams,
Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm.
(4.288–92)

Jesus allows just one reservation, two lines out of 78: there may be pagan writing "where moral virtue is expressed / By light of nature not in all quite lost" (4.351–52). In these extensive references to Sidney's ideas we see not the triumph of absolutism but appropriations that precisely undermine its pretensions.

Sidney himself became a powerful cultural token, a figure through whom subsequent generations might propagate and contest significant values. The Defence brings into focus two strategies: the appropriation of prestigious cultural tokens (in Sidney's text, pagan letters), and the representing of supposedly absolute human qualities (the move also of Soviet realism). The history of the idea of Sir Philip in English culture shows, very often, these two strategies working together: he is appropriated as a statusful instantiation of supposedly absolute qualities. (I adopt Sidney's knightly title at this point, for although it was not his at the time of much of his writing, and its conferral was rather a formality,^[79] those who deploy his image have evidently believed that adding social status to literary status helps their case.) Protestant activists initiated such appropriation. Arthur Golding, dedicating the Trewness of the Christian Religion to Leicester, declares that Sidney died "the honourablest death that could be desired, and best beseeming a Christian knight, whereby he hath worthily won to himself immortal fame among the godly, and left example worthy of imitation to others of his calling." That such deployments of the idea of Sidney are very like the theory of poetry that he himself proposed was noticed by Fulke Greville, who writes that Sidney's life "did (by way of example) far exceed the pictures of it in any moral precepts."^[80] But, of course, although the theory suggests that Sidney's life will do this spontaneously, of itself, actually it must be scripted to produce the desired effect—as Greville was scripting it. Description creates the effect it pretends to reveal. In Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst,"

Sidney appears rather obliquely as a guarantor of the quality of the woodlands—

That taller tree, which of a nut was set,
At his great birth, where all the Muses met.^[81]

It is perhaps surprising that he has no larger role; perhaps he has to remain significantly on the margin (in the woods outside the house) because as a writer who was also a nobleman he threatens to disrupt the poem's ethos of mutual deference between professional authorship and social power.

And so through the centuries, for other perspectives. Shelley coopted Sidney as one of the "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" who welcome Adonais to his "winged throne":

                  Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot.

Some Shelleyan self-justification—the mild, spotless lover—seems to have crept into this romantically ardent, yet ethereal, Sidney. For the twentieth century, the combination of poet and action-man has seemed to typify the complete English gentleman; Yeats thought of Major Robert Gregory as "Our Sidney and our perfect man."^[82] With such a pedigree one might justifiably inherit large estates and fly around in airplanes trying to kill people. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (knighted for his services to literature, the Cornwall education committee, and the Liberal Party) offered Sir Philip to his students at Cambridge as an image of the gentleman his university aspired to produce. He describes him as a "perfect young knight," accomplished in both literary sensibility and "bodily games"—"perhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life, made a better end." Sir Arthur chose to print the version of his lecture delivered in February 1913, which related Sir Philip to Captain Robert Scott's Antarctic expedition: "But you have seen this morning's newspaper: you have read of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death of Captain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct. Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble: for we still have heroes to commemorate!"^[83] (The appeal to "gentlemen" was Quiller-Couch's customary way of refusing to recognize that most of his students were women.)

John Buxton, too good a scholar to ignore Sidney's earnest protestant commitment, finds it not quite what one expects of a modern English gentleman and sets it discreetly to one side:

For himself, the hard clarity of Calvin's logic suited him, as did a similar quality in the mind of Ramus; but in poetry he never made the mistake that so many Puritans make, of emphasising the utile, the propaganda, at the expense of the dulce, the delight.. . . Sidney was much too civilised a man to fall into the ancient heresy of demanding that poetry should be "socially engaged," of insisting that the poet should accept his readers' dogmas and prejudices.^[84]

Buxton's own "dogmas and prejudices" lead him to recruit Sidney to his own viewpoint—which is then naturalized (these engaged fellows push their prejudices, whereas civilized chaps just see the world as it is). Even Sidney's religion is aestheticized: "Calvin's logic suited him." More recent criticism disguises its politics more thoroughly as aesthetics, typically constructing "a totality without struggle and historical movement."^[85] In such a perspective, Sidney's texts become ideal, harmonious icons that both represent and move the reader towards a reflective, disengaged stasis that aspires to leave the world as it finds it. D. H. Craig sees that Sidney in the Defence "has drawn on traditions that are at odds with each other," but finds them nevertheless resolved in "the humanist spirit of flexibility and clear-sighted purposefulness"; Martin N. Raitiere finds the Defence "transcending these antinomies and gathering the entire oration into the brilliantly focussed work of art we always knew it was."^[86] We still have heroes to commemorate.

My account of the ideological maneuvering of Sidney and his admirers is not meant as a complacent attack on our benighted, beknighted, forebears; but it aims to see the Defence as, not an accomplished selection from current commonplaces (for who would bother to write that?), but a purposeful intervention at a particular cultural and political conjuncture—like Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads or Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Defence is still an intriguing text, and if it discloses with particular sharpness the irreconcilability of certain serious questions, that is because Sidney has assayed a uniquely ambitious, high-risk thesis. And it still has resonances today. "Whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done," Sidney says, the poet "giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done" (Defence, p. 85). "A building team leader, a collective-farm chairman, a railway worker, an army officer, a pilot, or an eminent scientist. . . in each of them the reader

or the viewer sees his own thoughts and feelings, and the embodiment of the finest qualities of the Soviet character." Although it is rarely admitted, mainstream Anglo-U.S. literary criticism has followed a variant of this strategy. Authors and texts have been interpreted so as to construct pictures that bespeak approved-of values (though of course not so straightforwardly as is envisaged by Sidney and Brezhnev). And the authority of art and literature (partly freed from religion) has allowed critics to imply that they are producing, not a historically located preference, but a universal perception of the human.

It is not a good way to get a critical culture. Spenser's Grill, dubbed bestial for not welcoming the intense authoritarian regime of commissar Guyon, was right to resist being magicked into the approved ideal image—"from hoggish form. . . to natural." For what is more coercive, more ideological, than the demand to conform to an absolute idea of the natural? We would do better with the procedure Sidney himself adopts briefly with the pagan gods—acknowledging and exploring historical and political difference and remaining alert to the danger of cooption. Let Grill be Grill.