The greatest of human teachers, Aristotle, whom Sidney here alleges in his support, says :—
The historian and the poet are distinguished by this — that the one relates what has been, the other what might be. On this account Poetry is a more philosophical and more excellent thing than History. Poetry is chiefly conversant with general truth; History with particular.[1]
The typical writer of the mediæval legend might, therefore, claim the support of Aristotle and Sidney when he thought it was more 'excellent and philosophical' to seek the eternal essence and reality of things than to be eager concerning those particular and transient realities which veil rather than reveal eternal truth.
It would detain us too long to consider the many other ways in which these ancient pages bring us back into the heart of the Middle Ages and set us in contact with its thought and religious feeling. They do not, assuredly, show us everything which lay in that heart : Chaucer, to mention but one author, will afford us much more varied psychological studies. Still less do they show us external brilliancy or pomp: for that we may turn to Froissart. But it is a quite authentic revelation as far as it goes. And if the figures may sometimes remind us of the stiffness and remoteness of those which we see aloft in some well-preserved cathedral window, yet, like these, they are often shot through with a variety of colours borrowed from the pulsing and vivid humanity of the time. Nay more, if they seem to us but faintly
- ↑ ^Sidney An Apologie for Poetrie, pp. 17-27. Aristotle: Poetics c. 9.
quite as mythical as Virgil's — or rather more so. For Virgil himself was not a myth, but 'Dares the Phrygian' was.
