What is it that makes a great man? It is easy enough to tell in the case of Napoleon or Newton or Shakespeare, whose lives made the world an irrevocably different place from what it had been before. But in every age there are people who seem great to their contemporaries not so much for making anything different (although they may do that too) but, as it were, for being the same, for summing up in their own lives what the age sees itself as being about. Sports heroes, explorers and adventurers, film stars and popular heroes like Charles Lindbergh and Neil Armstrong fall into this category. They may or may not retain their greatness in the eyes of subsequent generations.

Such a man, too, is Sir Philip Sidney. Although he produced in his short lifetime (1554-1586) two or three works of literature that are still read, it is his reputation as the ideal Elizabethan gentleman which has done most to keep his memory green for four centuries. He is still a figure of some interest today, even though few people anymore have a very clear idea of what it is they are admiring when they admire him. This is apparently true even of his biographers. From the latest Sidney biography, by Katherine Duncan-Jones, you will learn all that you care to know about the details of his life but very little indeed about what it was that made Sidney great. If he was great. If there is any such thing as greatness.

Miss Duncan-Jones, a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, is in an important sense unequal to her subject. She knows that Sidney wrote some impressive poetry, a romance, the Arcadia, in which, as Virginia Woolf said, “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent,” and a rumbustious Apology for Poetry (which she insists on calling his Defence of Poesy, an alternative title but one which is too easily confused with Shelley’s Defence of Poetry). She knows, too, that Sidney was well-connected in Elizabethan court circles and much admired by his contemporaries, but she cannot convey to us why it is that he still matters enough to be the subject of a new biography.

What she can convey is that Sidney was not nearly so politically incorrect as you might expect from one of those “fools in old-style hats and coats” (in Philip Larkin’s phrase) that lived back in the days of patriarchy and bear-baiting and other crimes against the spirit of equality. Sidney, it seems, didn’t care for hunting and bear-baiting and, if not actually homosexual himself (the evidence is ambiguous), he at least had close friends who pretty clearly were homosexual and to whom he expressed undying affection. Above all, he had relatively enlightened views about women. “It would be going too far to suggest,” writes Miss Duncan-Jones,

that the ‘Old’ Arcadia offered a deliberate challenge to the concept of a patriarchal society. But like many Elizabethan writers, Sidney showed the disasters that ensue in such a society when the figure wielding most authority, the ‘father of the people’, fails to correct his personal limitations by taking good advice.

Talk about damning with faint praise! Sidney may not have been great, but at least he was PC.

Here is our modern academic contribution to history: the great men of the past are to be judged according to the scale of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like. If they pass the test, as Sidney seems to do in Miss Duncan-Jones’s reckoning, they are allowed to retain their claims to greatness. Perhaps, even, this is what greatness is—to stand up for equal rights, or to be able to be read as standing up for equal rights, at a time and under circumstances where the need for them hardly occurred to anyone else. In other words, the more like Katherine Duncan-Jones and other modern-day clerks of Oxford Sir Philip manages to appear, the greater we are to allow him to be.

But what is this to do with history or biography, whose end must be the understanding of the past?

Well, as Sidney himself said at the beginning of the Apology, “self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties.” But what is this to do with history or biography, whose end must be the understanding of the past? Are we really learning anything by sifting through the life stories of our imposing ancestors for the sole purpose of turning up tiny nuggets of similarity to ourselves? Miss Duncan-Jones’s bloodless biography leaves us with the impression that Sidney’s claim upon our attention amounts to the fact that he was at least no worse than his contemporaries when it comes to the things that really matter and that perhaps he was rather better—in some degree adumbrating our own enlightened times in his appreciation for women and homosexuals. Oh, yes: and he also wrote some lovely poetry.

There is something here of what Wyndham Lewis called “The Demon of Progress in the Arts”—the belief that the art of the past cannot be judged by absolute standards but only according to its progressive qualities—which is to say only to the extent that it can be seen as resembling our own. It is true that Miss Duncan-Jones is appreciative of Sidney’s oeuvre in an abstract way. But most of what she has to say about it, when she is not complimenting his progressive social attitudes, is as a gloss upon his life, often in merely speculative form. Thus:

For all we know, Mary Herbert may have recognized traits of her brother both in the languid love-melancholy of Philisides and the explosive sexual passion of Pyrocles. On the other hand, in locating such passion within characters who have manifest connexions with himself, Sidney may simply have used fictionally transformed self-images for literary purposes.

So indeed he may. But why should we care? And why should we care any more about the literature than we do about the man?

The answer is not really far to seek, though it is not one which registers with our biographer—or indeed with anyone taking the progressive view of literary history. Fulke Greville, Sidney’s boyhood friend and first biographer (and, opines Miss Duncan-Jones, a homosexual), wrote of him: “His talk was ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind.”

His end was not writing, even while he wrote; nor his knowledge moulded for tables, or schools; but both his wit, and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great. In which Architectonical art he was such a Master, with so commanding, and yet equall waies amongst men, that whersoever he went, he was beloved and obeyed.

Here, in Greville’s appreciation, is the key to unlock the secret of Sidney’s charisma. Yet Miss Duncan-Jones doesn’t see it—probably because it is so utterly foreign to the critical assumptions of our own time. For us, literature is its own end in the way that Kant prescribed people should be. But this principle of artistic autonomy is foreign to the Elizabethan sensibility. It marks a wide gulf between us and the neo-classical frame of mind. To his contemporaries, Sidney was so much admired precisely because he was thought to have established a bridge between art and real life.

That, at any rate, was the point of the Apology for Poetry, which insisted on the moral purpose of poetry as an element of the master art or architectonike.

That, at any rate, was the point of the Apology for Poetry, which insisted on the moral purpose of poetry as an element of the master art or architectonike. This, says Sidney, consists “in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only.” The beauty of art was to inspire virtue, and Sidney’s life seemed to his contemporaries a testimony to its capacity to do precisely that. Yet there is nothing in Miss Duncan-Jones’s book to persuade us that Sidney even was particularly virtuous, except insofar as he was not guilty of speech or behavior offensive to women and minorities. The terrible suspicion arises: does Miss Duncan-Jones even have an idea of what it would be to be virtuous in any other sense?

Certainly she has little idea of what it is to be honorable. Writing of Sidney’s attempt to defend his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, against an anonymous pamphlet by issuing a challenge against its author, she sniffs: “Did he believe that such a duel would be of the slightest use in clearing his uncle’s name? . . . A sword fight by Sidney in Paris or Rouen was hardly likely to undo the harm done in the minds of those who read the pamphlet on either side of the Channel.” She can only conclude that her subject had an insecure grasp on reality and that this was one of his “psychotic-like attacks of rage” caused by “repressive Tudor methods of child-rearing.”

It would take too long to explain here that honor has nothing to do with “rage,” that the relevant reality here is a social one having to do with hierarchy and patriarchy and other things that she does not understand, and that, in an age when it was still thought that there must be some connection between word and deed, a “sword-fight,” or the offer of one, might indeed be a very sufficient answer to scurrilous libel. The point is that Miss Duncan-Jones, trapped inside a narrow, academic circle inscribed in a neglected corner of the late twentieth century, is unable to think like an Elizabethan and therefore to imagine why Sir Philip Sidney was a great or even a very interesting man. What, then, is the use of her book about him?