[In the following essay, Turner discusses the “rooted moisture” mentioned in elegy 75 in the Old Arcadia, and says the concept, which is derived from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, describes the “natural humidity” that is the basis of natural life.]

In the “Fourth Eclogues” of the Old Arcadia, the shepherd Agelastus leads his companions “in bewailing” the “general loss” of Basilius to the Arcadians.¹ Ringler points out that this elegy (OA 75) and Spenser's November ecloque “are the earliest examples of formal pastoral elegy in English.”² Unlike Spenser's Colin, however, Agelastus maintains the naturalistic decorum of the classical form and is brought, finally, to bewail the helplessness of mankind before the natural processes which end in death:

O Phisicke's power, which (some say) hath refrayned
          Approach of death, alas thou helpest meagerly,
          When once one is for Atropos distrained.
Great be Physitions' brags, but aid is beggerly,
          When rooted moisture failes, or groweth drie,
          They leave off al, and say, death comes too eagerlie.
They are but words therefore which men do buy,
          Of any since God æsculapius ceased.

(109–116)

Both Ringler and Robertson gloss the “rooted moisture” of “When rooted moisture failes” as “vital spirits.”³ Rooted moisture is something quite different from vital spirits, however, and the process by which it fails and dries up is more fundamental to the despairing naturalism of Agelastus's invention.

In a small treatise on self-knowledge, Sidney's friend du Plessis Mornay defines what he calls “natural humidity”:

Euen as wee behold the flame of a lampe, to be nourished & maintained by some clammie drines which is in it: in like manner the bodie of any creature, hauing life and vnderstanding, hath som especial good humiditie, fat and ayrie, which commeth of the seede and essentiall beginning of the body, & disperseth it self throgh all the parts, wherein is carried this viuifying & celestiall heate, holding together & still nourishing this heate, which humiditie once consumed, immediately that heate is quenched.

Citing Aristotle as his authority, Mornay further explains that death occurs “when the heat natural is extinct: that is to say, when the primitiue & original humiditie (pure and intire) is consumed.”⁴ La Primaudaye, in his French Academie, calls this airy moisture by its more common name, radical humour, “because it is as it were the roote of life.” He makes the same basic points as Mornay but explains, in addition, that “although this radical humidity be nourished by the ordinary food which the body daily receiueth,” such nourishment “is not so pure nor so fit, nor so natural as the radicall humour it selfe neither can [it] wholy restore that which diminisheth and consumeth thereof, it must needes be that life would faile in processe of time.” “By this meanes,” therefore, “it commeth to passe, that the radicall humiditie and natural heat faile and perish both together. Whereby we may easily understand why mens bodies abide not alwaies in their strength, but faile & waxe olde.”⁵ Thus, the failure of “rooted moisture” explains the process of aging and natural death. Agelastus, unaware that Basilius has apparently been poisoned, bewails his loss in terms of an accepted medical concept first named and fully defined by Avicenna but having its origins in ancient Greece and most especially with Aristotle.⁶ Aristotle, for instance, is the source for Mornay's assertion that radical humidity is “fat and ayrie.” Aristotle argues that longevity depends upon the power of the body's innate moisture to remain moist; hence it must be “fatty,” because “fatty things are not liable to decay” as they “contain air” which “does not become corrupt.”⁷

To grasp the wider relationship of “rooted moisture” to Agelastus's imagery, one must be aware that the sixteenth century inherited from the ancient world what one writer calls “the constant confusion of air and water vapor” which fostered the Stoic concept of pneuma, or spiritus, as a hot breath.⁸ This gives an added dimension to the notion that the radical humidity possesses the nature of air. In Aristotle, the vaporous heat of the pneuma is the generative principle of the male seed; this heat, he says, is “analogous to the element which belongs to the stars.”⁹ Here is the most obvious source for that “celestiall heate” which Mornay calls “viuifying” and La Primaudaye “quickening,” the heat which comes with the radical humour from the seed. Discussions of radical humidity inevitably advert to the seed, the origin of life, which is moist and airy and warm. If, in the Galenic medical tradition, the three-fold spiritus—natural, vital, and animal—are nourished by respiration, one must also remember that pneuma, the warm vapor of breath and spirit, is in the seed itself.

With these few points in mind, let us briefly look at Agelastus's images. From the very first the art of Agelastus is an art of “doleful tunes” that breathes out spirit and depletes the moisture of life with exhausting “sorrowe.” He looks to the trees to “receave” into their “porous barkes”

          The straunge resounde of these my causefull
cries:
And let my breath upon your braunches cleave,
          My breath distinguish'd into wordes of woe.

(ll. 7–10)

Agelastus holds up before his imagination an image in which he pours the moist breath of life back into the vegetable nature with which it shares a common root: for “rooted moisture” is not merely metaphor but, rather, points to the belief that radical humidity is a moisture man shares with the plants and which is the basis of vegetative life.¹⁰ If on the one hand he desires to pour himself back into nature, on the other he would have all of nature, like himself, breathe out its life and weep itself dry: this he seeks in the “weeping Myrrhe” (l. 13), in the hyacinthine “Ai” (l. 29), in the diurnal rain of “wofull teares” from “dimmy clowedes” (ll. 67–70), and in having “all the Sea” Earth's “teares accounted be” (l. 20). He would have all of nature participate in “death's detested crime” (l. 90), which is, of course, a crime only against human consciousness, the mind which can enhance nature yet has not even the powers of self-renewal of the “filthy snake” (ll. 82–87).

In the third stanza, “breath distinguish'd into wordes of woe” becomes the Echo, breath reaching out towards celestial answers, seeking to find the iteration of itself not on earth but somewhere in the farthest reaches of its progressive self-attenuation, as it rises, “One Echo to another cast” (l. 34). The unanswered Echo, the doleful tune that mounts aloft but finds no sound to repeat its being becomes, beyond the final attenuation of breath, not even air, but what is no longer air, the annihilation of naturalistic reality: “Death is our home, life is but a delusion” (l. 123). The poem leaves us with the failure of breath to have risen above the fatty moisture at the source of life, the failure of breath to have become Spirit. “Upon thy face let coaly Ravens swarme” (l. 19), says Agelastus to Earth. The Echo that mounts aloft can look forward only to becoming the earthbound wings of extinguished heat, the dead coals of an innate flame that has been consumed.

Notes

1. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. jean Robertson (Oxford, 1973), p. 344. Ringler—The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Ringler, Jr. (Oxford, 1962)—attributes this elegy to Dicus (p. 419). In the present essay, I use Ringler's text of the poems and his notation and numbering; I use Robertson for prose passages.

2. Ringler, p. 419.

3. ———, p. 421; Robertson, p. 477.

4. Philip du Plessis Mornay, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. Anthony Munday (London, 1602), pp. 40–43.

5. The French Academie (London, 1618), pp. 537–538 (i.e. sig.Zz4^r-Zz4^v, misnumbered in this edition as 547–548).

6. The concept of radical moisture has been treated by Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1969), passim and in “Life, Death and the Radical Moisture: A Study of Thematic Pattern in Medieval Medical Theory,” Clio Medica, 6 (1971), 3–23. I am indebted to Professor Hall for his having sent me a copy of his own essay, which was not otherwise immediately available to me, and for having at the same time sent me a copy of Michael McVaugh's study, “The ‘Humidum Radicale’ in Thirteenth-Century Medicine,” Traditio, XXX (1974), 259–283.

7. Parv. Nat. 466a 23–25; my translation is that of W.S. Hett, Aristotle: On the Soul, Parva naturalia, On Breath, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1964).

8. S. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London, 1959), p. 3.

9. Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1964), 736b 35–39.

10. The Middle English Dictionary, for instance, defines “radical moisture” as a “moisture of the root.” One finds that the radical humour is the organic basis of growth, reproduction, and nutrition, commonly referred to as the “three powers” of the vegetative soul.