"
Once more we feel that Sidney is treading upon dangerous ground. But
once more he saves himself by giving a wider definition both to thought
and action, both to "well knowing and to well doing", than is common
with moralists. By the former most moralists are apt to understand the
bare "precept", thought as crystallized in its immediate bearing upon
action. By the latter they commonly mean the passive rather than the
active virtues, temperance and self-restraint rather than energy and
resolve. From both these limitations Sidney, on the whole, is nobly
free.
To him the "delight which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to
promise", "the words set in delightful proportion and prepared for the
well enchanting skill of music", "the tale which holdeth children from
play and old men from the chimney corner"--all these, its indefinable
and purely artistic elements, are an inseparable part of the "wisdom"
which poetry has to offer. In other words, it is the frame of mind
produced by poetry, the "thought hardly to be packed into the narrow
act", no less than the prompting to this action or to that, which
Sidney values in the work of the poet.
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