behaviour and action." The Greeks, he tells us, chose poetry for their
children's first lessons. Surely (he argues) they never did that for the
sake of sweetly influencing the soul, but rather for the correction of
morals! Strabo's mental attitude is absurd, of course, and preposterous:
for this same influencing of the soul--_φυχαγωγία_ (a beautiful
word)--is, as we have seen, Poetry's main business: but the mischief of
the notion did not end with making the schooldays of children unhappy:
it took hold of the poets themselves, and by turning them into prigs
dried up the children's well of consolation. The Fathers of the Church
lent a hand too, and a vigorous one; and for centuries the face of the
Muse was sicklied o'er with a pale determination to combine amusement
with instruction. Even our noble Sidney allowed his modesty to be
overawed by the pedantic tradition, though as a man of the world he
tactfully gave it the slip. "For suppose it be granted," he says, "(that
which I suppose with great reason may be denied) that the Philosopher in
respect of his methodical proceeding doth teach more perfectly than the
Poet: yet do I thinke that no man is so much _Philosophus_ as to compare
the Philosopher, in _mooving_, with the Poet. And that mooving is of a
higher degree than teaching, it may by this appeare: that it is welnigh
the cause and the effect of teaching. For who will be taught, if hee bee
not mooved with desire to be taught?" Then, after a page devoted to
showing "which constant desire whosoever hath in him hath already past
halfe the hardness of the way," Sidney goes on: "Now therein of all
Sciences (I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit) is
our Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not only show the way, but giveth so
sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it.
Nay he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at
the first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of that taste you may
long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which
must blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory with