Chapter VII. Masques and General Influence

I. Pastoral in the masques and slighter dramatic compositions

II. Milton's masques: _Arcades_ and _Comus_

III. General influence. Pastoral theory. Conclusion.

Appendix I. On the origin and development of the Italian pastoral drama

Appendix II. Bibliography

Index

Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama

Chapter I.

Foreign Pastoral Poetry

In approaching a subject of literary inquiry we are often able to fix upon

some essential feature or condition which may serve as an Ariadne's thread

through the maze of historical and aesthetic development, or to

distinguish some cardinal point affording a fixed centre from which to

survey or in reference to which to order and dispose the phenomena that

present themselves to us. It is the disadvantage of such an artificial

form of literature as that which bears the name of pastoral that no such

_a priori_ guidance is available. To lay down at starting that the

essential quality of pastoral is the realistic or at least recognizably

'natural' presentation of actual shepherd life would be to rule out of

court nine tenths of the work that comes traditionally under that head.

Yet the great majority of critics, though they would not, of course,

subscribe to the above definition, have yet constantly betrayed an

inclination to censure individual works for not conforming to some such

arbitrary canon. It is characteristic of the artificiality of pastoral as

a literary form that the impulse which gave the first creative touch at

seeding loses itself later and finds no place among the forces at work at

blossom time; the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are

inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where

these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both

in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live

at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and

incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms,

pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a

decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of

learning, and its insipid convention having become 'a literary plague in

every European capital,' it finally disappeared from view amid the

fopperies of the Roman Arcadia and the puerile conceits of the Petit

Trianon.

Wherein then, it may be wondered, does the pastoral's title to

consideration lie. It does not lie primarily, or chiefly, in the fact that

it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with

Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes

and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and

Milton; nor yet that works such as the _Idyls_, the _Aminta_, the

_Faithful Shepherdess_, and _Lycidas_ contain some of the most graceful

and perfect verse to be found in any language. Rather is its importance to

be sought in the fact that the form is the expression of instincts and

impulses deep-rooted in the nature of humanity, which, while affecting the

whole course of literature, at times evince themselves most clearly and

articulately here; that it plays a distinct and distinctive part in the

history of human thought and the history of artistic expression. Moreover,

it may be argued that, from this point of view, the very contradictions

and inconsistencies to which I have alluded make it all the more important

to discover wherein lay the strange vitality of the form and its power of

influencing the current of European letters.

From what has already been said it will be apparent that little would be

gained by attempting beforehand to give any strict account of what is

meant by 'pastoral' in literature. Any definition sufficiently elastic to

include the protean forms assumed by what we call the 'pastoral ideal'

could hardly have sufficient intension to be of any real value. If after

considering a number of literary phenomena which appear to be related

among themselves in form, spirit, and aim we come at the end of our

inquiry to any clearer appreciation of the term I shall so far have

attained my object. I notice that I have used the expression 'pastoral

ideal,' and the phrase, which comes naturally to the mind in connexion

with this form of literature, may supply us with a useful hint. It

reminds us, namely, that the quality of pastoralism is not determined by

the fortuitous occurrence of certain characters, but by the fact of the

pieces in question being based more or less evidently upon a philosophical

conception, which no doubt underwent modification through the ages, but

yet bears evidence of organic continuity. Thus the shepherds of pastoral

are primarily and distinctively shepherds; they are not mere rustics

engaged in sheepcraft as one out of many of the employments of mankind. As

soon as the natural shepherd-life had found an objective setting in

conscious artistic literature, it was felt that there was after all a

difference between hoeing turnips and pasturing sheep; that the one was

capable of a particular literary treatment which the other was not. The

Maid of Orleans might equally well have dug potatoes as tended a flock,

and her place is not in pastoral song. Thus pastoral literature must not

be confounded with that which has for its subject the lives, the ideas,

and the emotions of simple and unsophisticated mankind, far from the

centres of our complex civilization. The two may be in their origin

related, and they occasionally, as it were, stretch out feelers towards

one another, but the pastoral of tradition lies in its essence as far from

the human document of humble life as from a scientific treatise on

agriculture or a volume of pastoral theology. Thus the tract which lies

before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of

George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple

charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex.

Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the

fold the fanciful animalism of Mr. Hewlett. By far the most remarkable

work of recent years to assume the title is Signor d'Annunzio's play _La

Figlia di Iorio_, a work in which the author's powerful and delicate

imagination and wealth of pure and expressive language appear in matchless

perfection. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that there is nothing

in common between the 'pastoral ideal' and the rugged strength and

suppressed fire of the great modern Italian's portrait of his native land

of the Abruzzi.

I

Some confusion of thought appears to have prevailed among writers as to

the origin of pastoral. We are, for instance, often told that it is the

earliest of all forms of poetry, that it characterizes primitive peoples

and permeates ancient literatures. Song is, indeed, as old as human

language, and in a sense no doubt the poetry of the pastoral age may be

said to have been pastoral. It does not, however, follow that it bears any

essential resemblance to that which subsequent ages have designated by the

name. All that we know concerning the songs of pastoral nations leads us

to suppose that they bear a close resemblance to the type of popular verse

current wherever poetry exists, folk-songs of broad humanity in which

little stress is laid on the peculiar circumstances of shepherd life. An

insistence upon the objective pastoral setting is of prime importance in

understanding the real nature of pastoral poetry; it not only serves to

distinguish the pastoral proper from the more vaguely idyllic forms of

lyric verse, but helps us further to understand how it was that the

outward features of the kind came to be preserved, even after the various

necessities of sophisticated society had metamorphosed the content almost

beyond recognition. No common feature of a kind to form the basis of a

scientific classification can be traced in the spontaneous shepherd-songs

and their literary counterpart. What does appear to be a constant element

in the pastoral as known to literature is the recognition of a contrast,

implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of

civilization. At no stage in its development does literature, or at any

rate poetry, concern itself with the obvious, with the bare scaffolding of

life: whenever we find an author interested in the circle of prime

necessity we may be sure that he himself stands outside it. Thus the

shepherd when he sang did not insist upon the conditions amid which his

uneventful life was passed. It was left to a later, perhaps a wiser and a

sadder, generation to gaze with fruitless and often only half sincere

longing at the shepherd-boy asleep under the shadow of the thorn, lulled

by the low monotonous rustle of the grazing flock. Only when the

shepherd-songs ceased to be the outcome of unalloyed pastoral conditions

did they become distinctively pastoral. It is therefore significant that

the earliest pastoral poetry with which we are acquainted, whatever half

articulate experiments may have preceded it, was itself directly born of

the contrast between the recollections of a childhood spent among the

Sicilian uplands and the crowded social and intellectual city-life of

Alexandria[1].

As the result of this contrast there arises an idea which comes perhaps as

near being universal in pastoral as any--the idea, namely, of the 'golden

age.' This embraces, indeed, a field not wholly coincident with that of

pastoral, but the two are connected alike by a common spring in human

emotion and constant literary association. The fiction of an age of

simplicity and innocence found birth among the Augustan writers in the

midst of the complex and luxurious civilization of Rome, as an

illustration of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that

'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life

around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil,

and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to

Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his

strange allegorical composition the _Quadriregio_, and was thrice handled

by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in _Don Quixote_,

and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and

Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral

life was effected by Vergil, and in this form it was treated with loving

minuteness by Tasso in his _Aminta_ and by Browne in his _Britannia's

Pastorals_[2]. The fiction no doubt answered to some need in human nature,

but in literature it soon came to be no more than a polite convention.

The conception of a golden age of rustic simplicity does not, indeed,

involve the whole of pastoral literature. It does not account either for

the allegorical pastoral, in which actual personages are introduced, in

the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the

so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy

at the rustic freedom of the country. What it does comprehend is that

outburst of pastoral song which sprang from the yearning of the tired soul

to escape, if it were but in imagination and for a moment, to a life of

simplicity and innocence from the bitter luxury of the court and the

menial bread of princes[3].

And this, the reaction against the world that is too much with us, is,

after all, the keynote of what is most intimately associated with the name

of pastoral in literature--the note that is struck with idyllic sweetness

in Theocritus, and, rising to its fullest pitch of lyrical intensity,

lends a poignant charm to the work of Tasso and Guarini. For everywhere

in these soft melodies of luscious beauty, even in the studied sketches of

primitive innocence itself, there is an undercurrent of tender melancholy

and pathos:

Il mondo invecchia

E invecchiando intristisce.

I have said that a sense of the contrast between town and country was

essential to the development of a distinctively pastoral literature. It

would be an interesting task to trace how far this contrast is the source

of the various subsidiary types--of the ideal where it breeds desire for a

return to simplicity, of the realistic where the humour of it touches the

imagination, and of the allegorical where it suggests satire on the

corruption of an artificial civilization.

When the kind first makes its appearance in a world already old, it arises

purely as a solace and relief from the fervid life of actuality, and comes

as a fresh and cooling draught to lips burning with the fever of the city.

In passing from Alexandria to Rome it lost much of its limpid purity; the

clear crystal of the drink was mixed with flavours and perfumes to fit the

palate of a patron or an emperor. The example of adulteration being once

set, the implied contrast of civilization and rusticity was replaced by

direct satire on the former, and later by the discussion under the

pastoral mask of questions of religious and political controversy. Proving

itself but a left-handed weapon in such debate, it became a court

plaything, in which princes and great ladies, poets and wits, loved to see

themselves figured and complimented, and the practice of assuming pastoral

names becoming almost universal in polite circles, the convention, which

had passed from the eclogue on to the stage, passed from the stage into

actual existence, and court life became one continual pageant of pastoral

conceit. From the court it passed into circles of learning, and grave

jurists and administrators, poets and scholars, set about the refining of

language and literature decked out in all the fopperies of the fashionable

craze. One is tempted to wonder whether anything more serious than light

loves and fantastic amours can have flourished amid eighteenth-century

pastoralism. When the ladies of the court began to talk dairy-farming with

the scholars and statesmen of the day, the pretence of pastoral simplicity

could hardly be long kept up. Nor was there any attempt to do so. In the

introduction to his famous romance d'Urfé wrote in answer to objectors:

'Responds leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy,

ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suivent, de ces

Bergeres necessiteuses, qui pour gaigner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux

aux pasturages; mais que vous n'avez toutes pris cette condition que pour

vivre plus doucement et sans contrainte.' No wonder that to Fontenelle

Theocritus' shepherds 'sentent trop la campagne[4].' But the hour of

pastoralism had come, and while the ladies and gallants of the court were

playing the parts of Watteau swains and shepherdesses amid the trim hedges

and smooth lawns of Versailles, the gates were already bursting before the

flood, which was to sweep in devastation over the land, and to purge the

old order of social life.

II

The Alexandria of the Ptolemies was not the nurse of a great literature,

though the age was undoubtedly one of considerable literary activity.

Scholastic learning and poetic imitation were rife; the rehandling of

Greek masterpieces was a fashionable pastime. For serious and original

composition, however, the conditions were not favourable. That the age

produced no great epic was less due to the disparagement of the form

indulged in by Callimachus, chief librarian and literary dictator, than to

the inherent temper of society. The prevailing taste was for an arrogant

display of rare and costly pageantry. At the coronation of Ptolemy

Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp,

decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and

memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of

gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the

fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of

Alexandria lacked the 'high seriousness' of purpose to produce an

_Aeneid_, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a _Faery Queen_. What they

possessed was delicacy, refinement, and wit; what they created, while

perfecting the epigram and stereotyping the hymn, was a form intermediate

between epic and lyric, namely the idyl as we find it in the works of

Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus.

It is interesting to note that the literary _milieu_ in which Theocritus

moved at Alexandria must have abounded in all those temptations which

proved the bane of pastoral poetry at Rome, Florence, and Ferrara. There

were princes and patrons to be flattered, there were panegyrics to be sung

and ancestral feats of arms to be recorded; nor does Theocritus appear to

have stood aloof from the throng of court poetasters. In spite of the

doubtful authenticity of some of the pieces connected with his name, there

appears no sufficient reason to deprive him of the rather conventional

hymns and other poems composed with a view to court-favour. These have

little interest for us to-day: his fame rests on works which probably

gained him little advantage at the time. It was for his own solace,

forgetful for a moment of the intrigues of court life and the uncertain

sunshine of princes, that he wrote his Sicilian idyls. For him, as at a

magic touch, the walls of the heated city melted like a mirage into the

sands of the salt lagoon, and he wandered once more amid the green woods

and pastures of Trinacria, the noonday sun tempered by the shade of the

chestnuts and the babbling of the brook, and by the cool airs that glide

down from the white cliffs of Aetna. There once more he saw the shepherds

tend their flocks, singing or wrangling with one another, dreamily piping

on their wax-stopped reeds or plotting to annex their neighbours' gear; or

else there sounded in his ears the love-song or the dirge, or the

incantation of the forsaken girl rose amid the silence to the silver moon.

Once again he stood upon the shore and watched the fishers cast their

nets, while around him the goats browsed on the close herbage of the

cliff, and the crystal stream leapt down, and the waves broke upon the

rocks below, till he saw the breasts of the nymphs shine in the whiteness

of the foam and their hair spread wide in the weed, and the fair Galatea,

the enticing and the fickle, mocked the clumsy suit of the Cyclops, as she

tossed upward the bitter spray from off her shining limbs. All these

memories he recorded with a loving faithfulness of detail that it is even

now possible to verify from the folk-songs of the south. To this day in

the Isles of Greece ruined girls seek to lure back their lovers with

charms differing but little from that sung by the Syracusan to Lady

Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those

delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so

incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For

though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of

ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality,

and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted

no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical illusion of

primitive simplicity; he elaborated no imaginary cult of mystical worship.

His art, however little it may tempt us to the use of the term realism, is

nevertheless based on an almost passionate sympathy with actual human

nature. This is the fount of his inspiration, the central theme of his

song. The literary genius of Greece showed little aptitude for landscape,

and seldom treated inanimate nature except as a background for human

action and emotion, or it may be in the guise of mythological allegory.

Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Theocritus, so tenderly concerned

with the homely aspects of human life, was not likewise sensitive to the

beauties of nature. At least it is impossible to doubt his attachment to

the land of his childhood, and it is at worst a welcome dream when we

imagine him, as the evening of life drew on, leaving the formal gardens

and painted landscapes of Alexandria and returning to Syracuse and his

beloved Sicily once more.[5]

The verse of Theocritus was echoed by his younger contemporaries, Bion

and Moschus.[6] The former is best known through the oriental passion of

his 'Woe, woe for Adonis,' probably written to be sung at the annual

festival of Syrian origin commemorated by Theocritus in his fifteenth

idyl.[7] The most important extant work of Moschus is the 'Lament for

Bion,' characterized by a certain delicate sentimentality alien to the

spirit of either of his predecessors. It is perhaps significant that

Theocritus appears to have been of Syracusan, Bion of Smyrnian, and

Moschus of Ausonian origin.[8] With the exception of this poem, which is

modelled on Theocritus' 'Lament for Daphnis,' there is little in the work

of either of the younger poets of a pastoral nature. Certain fragments,

however, if genuine, suggest that poems of the kind may have perished.

Among the remains of Moschus occurs the following:

Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep,

For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep,

Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep;[9]

lines in which we already take leave of the genuine love of the pastoral

life, springing from an intimate knowledge of and delight in nature, and

see world-weariness arraying itself in the sentimental garb of the

imaginary swain.

Once again, five centuries later,[10] the spirit of Greece shone for one

brief moment in a work of pastoral elegance that has survived the

changing tastes of succeeding generations. The 'romance of _Daphnis and

Chloe_ is the last word of a world of sensuous enervation toying with the

idea of vernal freshness and virginity. It is a genuine picture of the

purity of awakening love, wrought with every delicacy of sentiment and

expression, and yet in such manner as by its very _naïveté_ and innocence

to serve as a goad to satiated appetite. It has been suggested that the

work should properly be styled the _Lesbiaca_, a name which recalls the

_Aethiopica_ and _Babylonica_, and reminds us that the author, though a

student of Alexandrian literature, belonged to the school of the erotic

romanciers and traditional bishops, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Of his

life we know nothing, and even his name--Longus--has been called in

question. The story, unlike those of most later pastoral romances, is of

the simplest. The author, however, was no longer satisfied with the

natural refinement of popular love poetry; the central characters are

represented as foundlings nurtured by the shepherds of Lesbos, and are

ultimately identified, on much the same conventional evidence as Ion and

others had been before, as the children of certain rich and aristocratie

families.[11] The interest of the story lies in the growth of their

unconscious love, which constitutes the central theme of the work, though

relieved here and there by wholly colourless adventure.

A Latin translation made the book popular after the introduction of

printing, and the renaissance saw the French version by Amyot, a work of

European reputation. This was translated into English under Elizabeth; an

Italian translation followed in the seventeenth century,[12] and a Spanish

is also extant. There is no doubt that it was widely read throughout the

sixteenth and following centuries, but it exercised little influence on

the development of pastoral literature. By the time it became generally

known the main features of renaissance pastoral were already fixed, and in

motive and treatment alike it was alien to the spirit that animated the

fashionable masterpieces. The modern pastoral romance had already evolved

itself from a blending of the eclogue with the mythological tale. The

drama was developing on independent lines. Thus although, like the other

romances of the late Greek school, it supplied many incidents and

descriptions to be found in later works, it played no vital part in the

history of pastoral, and left no mark either on the general form or on the

spirit that animated the kind. Longus' romance finds its true descendant,

as well as its closest imitation, in a work that achieved celebrity on the

eve of the French revolution, that masterpiece of unreal and sentimental

simplicity, Saint-Pierre's _Paul et Virginie_.

III

A faithful reproduction of the main conditions of actual life was the

characteristic of Theocritus' poetry. It was subject to this ever-present

limitation that his graceful fancy exercised its power of idealization. He

took the singing match, the dirge, and the love-song or complaint as he

found them among the shepherd-folk of Sicily, and gave them that objective

setting which is as necessary to pastoral as to every other merely

accidental form of poetry; for the true subjective lyric is independent of

circumstances. The first of his great successors made the bucolic eclogue

what, with trifling variation, it was to remain for eighteen centuries, a

form based upon artificiality and convention. I have already pointed out

that the literary conditions at Alexandria did not differ materially from

those of Rome; it follows that the change must have been due to the

character of Vergil himself. That intense love of beauty for its own sake

which characterized the Greek mind had little hold over the Roman. Nor did

the latter understand the charm of untaught simplicity. It is true that to

the Roman poets of the Augustan period we owe the conception of the golden

age, but it remained with them rather a philosophical mythus than the

dream of an idyllic poet. To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and

Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little

meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have

regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more

pith and moment. Although he followed Theocritus in his use of the several

types of song and stamped them to all future ages in pastoral convention,

though he may have begun with fairly close imitation of his model and only

gradually diverged into a more independant style, he at no time showed

himself content with the earlier poet's simplicity of motive.[13] The

eclogue in which he followed Theocritus most closely, the eighth, is

equally, perhaps, the most pleasing of the series. It combines the motives

of the love-lament and incantation, and the closeness with which it

follows while playing variations on its models is striking. One instance

will suffice. Take the passage in the second Idyl thus rendered by

Symonds:[14]

Hail, Hecatë, dread dame! to the end be thou my assistant,

Making my medicines work no less than the philtre of Circë,

Or Medea's charms, or yellow-haired Perimedë's.

Wheel of the magic spells, draw thou that man to my dwelling.

Corresponding to this we find the following passage in the Latin poem:

Song hath power to draw from heaven the wandering huntress,

Song was the witch's spell transformed the mates of Ulysses....

Home from the city to me, my song, lead home to me Daphnis.

Vergil was the first to begin the dissociation of pastoral from the

conditions of actual life, and just as his shepherds cease to present the

features and characters of the homely keepers of the flock, so his

landscape becomes imaginary and undefined. This peculiarity has been

noticed by Professor Herford in some very suggestive remarks prefixed to

his edition of the _Shepherd's Calender_. 'The profiles of the Sicilian

uplands,' he writes, 'waver uncertainly amid traits drawn from the Mantuan

plain. In this confusion lay, perhaps, the germ of those debates between

highland and lowland shepherds which reverberate through the later

pastoral, and are still loud in Spenser.' The gulf that separated Vergil

from his predecessor, in so far as their treatment of shepherd-life is

concerned, may be measured by the manner in which they respectively deal

with the supernatural. In the Greek Idyls we find the simple faith or

superstition as it lived among the shepherd-folk; no Pan appears to sow

dismay in the breasts of the maidens, nor do we find aught of the mystical

worship that later gathered round him in the imaginary Arcadia. He is

mentioned only as the rugged patron of herds and song, the wild indweller

of the savage woods as he appeared to the minds of the simple swains, who

hushed their midday piping fearful lest they should disturb the sleep of

the god. It is true that Theocritus introduces mythological characters in

the tale of Galatea, but it should be noticed that this merely forms the

theme of a song or the subject of a poetical epistle to a friend.

Moreover, it is open to more than one rationalistic interpretation.

Symonds treats it as an allegory in harmony with the mythopoeic genius of

Greek poetry. It is equally possible to regard the Cyclops as emblematic

merely of the rough neatherd flouted by the more delicate

shepherd-maiden--the contrast is of constant occurrence in later

works--for, alike in one of his own fragments and in Moschus' lament, Bion

is represented as courting this same Galatea after she has rid herself of

the suit of Polyphemus. Vergil was content with no such simple mythology

as this. He must needs shake Silenus from a drunken sleep and bid him tell

of Chaos and old Time, of the infancy of the world and the birth of the

gods. This mixture of obsolescent theology and Epicurean philosophy

probably possessed little reality for Vergil himself, and would have

conveyed no meaning whatever to the Sicilian shepherds. Its introduction

stamps his eclogues with that unreality which has been the reproach of the

pastoral from his day to ours. The didactic homily was one fresh

convention introduced. Far more important was the tendency to make every

form subserve some ulterior purpose of allegory and panegyric.[15] For the

Roman its own beauty was no sufficient end of art. That the _Aeneid_ was

written for the glorification of Rome cannot be made a reproach to the

poet; the greatness of the end lent dignity to the means. That the

pastoral was forced to serve the menial part of a vehicle of sycophantic

praise is less easily pardoned. In Vergil's hands a conversation between

shepherds becomes an expression of gratitude to the emperor for the

restitution of his villa, a lament for Daphnis is interwoven with an

apotheosis of Julius Caesar, and in the complaint of the forsaken

shepherd, whom Apollo and Pan seek in vain to comfort, we may trace the

wounded vanity of his patron deserted by his mistress for the love of a

soldier. The fourth eclogue was written after the peace of Brundisium, and

describes the golden age to which Vergil looked forward as consequent upon

the birth of a marvellous infant, perhaps some offspring of the marriages

of Antonius and Octavianus, celebrated in solemnization of the treaty. The

poem achieved considerable fame, which lasted as late as the time of

Dryden, owing to the belief that it contained a prophecy of the birth of

Christ drawn from the Sibylline books, and won for Vergil throughout the

middle ages the title of prophet and magician. Whether this belief was

well founded or not may be left to those whom it may interest to inquire;

it is sufficient for our purpose to note that in the poem in question

Vergil first introduced the convention of the golden age into pastoral

verse.

The first of the long line of imitators of whom we have any notice was a

certain Calpurnius. His diction is correct and his verse smooth, but the

suggestion that he belonged to the age of Augustus has not met with much

favour among those competent to judge. He followed Vergil closely, chiefly

developing the panegyric. His poems, however, include all the usual

conventions, singing matches, invocations, cosmologies, and the rest, in

the treatment of which originality never appears to have been his aim.

Some of his pieces deal with husbandry, and belong more strictly to the

school of the _Georgics_ and didactic poetry. The most interesting of his

eclogues is one in which he contrasts the life of the town with that of

the country, the direct comparison of which he appears to have been the

first to treat. The poem likewise possesses some antiquarian interest,

owing to a description of a wild-beast show in an amphitheatre in which

the animals were brought up in lifts through the floor of the arena.

Calpurnius is sometimes supposed, on account of a dedication to Nemesianus

found in some manuscripts, to have lived at the end of the third century,

but even supposing the dedication to be genuine, which is more than

doubtful, it does not follow that the person referred to is that

Nemesianus who contested the poetic crown with Prince Numerianus about the

year 283[16]. This Nemesianus was probably the author of some eclogues

which have been frequently ascribed to Calpurnius (numbers 8 to 11 in most

editions), but which must be discarded from the list of his authentic

works on a technical question of the employment of elision[17]. The

_editio princeps_ of these eclogues is not dated, but probably appeared in

1471, so that they were at any rate accessible to writers of the

_cinquecento_. It is not easy to trace any direct influence, unless, as

perhaps we should, we credit to Calpurnius the suggestion of those poems

in which a 'wise' shepherd describes to his less-travelled hearers the

manners of the town.

A few pieces from the _Idyllia_ of Ausonius appear in some of the bucolic

collections, but they cannot strictly be regarded as coming within the

range of pastoral poetry.

IV

Events conspired to make Vergil the model for later writers of eclogues.

The fame of the poet was a potent cause among many. Another reason why

Theocritus found no direct imitators may be sought in the respective

methods of the two poets. Work of the nature of the _Idyls_ has to depend

for its value and interest upon the artistic qualities of the poetry

alone. Such work may spring up spontaneously under almost any conditions;

it is seldom produced through imitation. On the other hand, any scholar

with a gift for easy versification could achieve a certain distinction as

a follower of Vergil. His verse depended for its interest not on its

poetic qualities but upon the importance of the themes it treated.

Accidental conditions, too, told in favour of the Roman poet. During the

middle ages Latin was a universal language among the lettered classes,

while the knowledge of Greek, though at no time so completely lost as is

sometimes supposed, was a far rarer accomplishment, and was restricted for

the most part to a few linguistic scholars. Thus before the revival of

learning had made Greek a possible source of literary inspiration, the

Vergilian tradition, through the instrumentality of Petrarch and

Boccaccio, had already made itself supreme in pastoral[18].

During the middle ages the stream of pastoral production, though it

nowhere actually disappears, is reduced to the merest trickle. Notices of

such isolated poems as survive have been carefully collected by

Macrì-Leone in the introduction to his elaborate but as yet unfinished

work on the Latin eclogue in the Italian literature of the fourteenth

century. As early as the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth

century we find a poem by Severus Sanctus Endelechius, variously entitled

'Carmen bucolicum de virtute signi crucis domini' or 'de mortibus boum.'

It is a hymn to the saint cross, and in it for the first time the pastoral

suffered violence from the tyranny of the religious idea. The 'Ecloga

Theoduli' alluded to by Chaucer in the _House of Fame_[19] appears to be

the work of an Athenian writer, and is ascribed to various dates ranging

from the fifth to the eighth centuries. While preserving as its main

characteristic a close subservience to its Vergilian model, the eclogue

participated in the general rise of allegory which marked the later middle

ages. Pastoral colouring of no very definite order had shown itself in the

elegies of Alcuin in the eighth century, as also in the 'Conflictus veris

et hiemis,' traditionally ascribed to the Venerable Bede, but more

probably the work of one Dodus, a disciple of Alcuin. Of the tenth century

we possess an allegorical religious lament entitled 'Ecloga duarum

sanctimonialium.' About 1160 a Benedictine monk named Metellus composed

twelve poems under the title of _Bucolica Quirinalium_, in honour of St.

Quirinus and in obvious imitation of Vergil. Reminiscences and paraphrases

of the Roman poet are scattered throughout the monk's own barbarous

hexameters, as in the opening verses:

Tityre tu magni recubans in margine stagni

Silvestri tenuique fide pete iura peculi!

It would hardly be worth recording these medieval clerks, the

undistinguished writers, 'de quibus,' Boccaccio said, 'nil curandum est,'

were it not that they show how the memory at least of the classical

pastoral survived amid the ruins of ancient learning, and so serve to lead

up to one last spasmodic manifestation of the kind in certain poems which

else appear to stand in a curiously isolated position.

It was in 1319, during the bitter years of his exile at Ravenna, that

Dante received from one John of Bologna, known, on account of his fame as

a writer of Latin verse, as Giovanni del Virgilio, a poetical epistle

inviting him to visit the author in his native city. His correspondent,

while doing homage to his poetic genius, incidentally censured him for

composing his great work in the base tongue of the vulgar[20]. Dante

replied in a Vergilian eclogue, courteously declining Giovanni's

invitation to Bologna, on the ground that it was a place scarcely safe for

his person. As regarded the strictures of his correspondent, his

triumphant answer in the shape of the _Paradiso_ lay yet unfinished, so

the author of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ trifled with the charge and

purported to compose the present poem in earnest of reform. There is a

tone of not unkindly irony about the whole. Was it an elaborate jest at

the expense of Giovanni, the writer of Vergilian verse? The Bolognese

replied, this time also in bucolic form, repeating his invitation and

holding out the special attraction of a meeting with Mussato, the most

regarded poet of his day in Europe. Dante's second eclogue, if indeed it

is correctly ascribed to his pen, introduces several historical

characters. It is said not to have reached Bologna till after his death.

These poems were not included in any of the early bucolic collections, and

first appeared in print in the eighteenth century. They seem, from their

purely occasional nature, their inconspicuous bulk, and lack of any

striking characteristics, to have attracted little notice in their own

day, and to have been ignored by later writers on pastoral as forming no

link in the chain of historical development. Given, indeed, the Bucolics

of Vergil, they are imitations such as might at any moment have appeared,

irrespective of date and surroundings, and independent of any living

literary tradition[21]. It is therefore impossible to regard them as in

any way belonging to, or foreshadowing, the great body of renaissance

pastoral, a division of literature endowed with remarkable vitality and

evolutionary force, which must in its growth and decay alike be studied in

close connexion with the ideas and temperament of the age, and in

relation to the general development of the history of letters[22].

The grandeur of the Roman Empire, the background against which in

historical retrospect we see the bucolic eclogues of Vergil and his

immediate followers, had vanished when Italian literature once more rose

out of chaos. The political organism had resolved itself into its

constituent elements, and fresh combinations had arisen. Nevertheless,

though the Empire was hardly now the shadow of its pristine greatness, men

still looked to Rome as the centre of the civilized world. As the seat of

the Church, it stood for the one force capable of supplying a permanent

element among the warring interests of European politics. Nothing was more

natural than that the poetic form that had reflected the glories of

imperial Rome should bow to the fascination of Rome, the visible emblem on

earth of the spiritual empire of Christ. To the medieval mind, so far from

there being any antagonism between the two ideas, the one seemed almost to

involve and necessitate the other. It saw in the splendeur of the Empire

the herald of a glory not of this world, a preparation as it were, a

decking of the chamber against the advent of the bride; and thus the

pastoral which sang of the greatness of pagan Rome appeared at the same

time a hymn prophetic of the glory of the Church[23].

Moreover, during the centuries that had elapsed since the days of Vergil

the term 'pastoral' had gained a new meaning and new associations. In the

days of Augustus Pan was a boorish anachronism; it was left to medieval

Christianity to create a god who was in fact a shepherd of men[24] and so

to render possible a pastoral allegory that should embody the dearest

hopes and aspirations of the human heart. That Christian pastoralists

availed themselves successfully of the possibilities of the theme it would

be difficult to maintain. It is a singular fact that, at a time when

allegory was the characteristic literary form, it was yet so impossible

even for the finer spirits to follow a train of thought clearly and

consistently, that it was only when a mind passed beyond the limitations

of its own age, and assumed a position _sub specie aeternitatis_, that it

was able to free itself from the prevalent confusion of the imaginary and

the real, the word and the idea, and to perceive that success in allegory

depends, not on the chaotic intermingling of the attributes of the type

and the thing typified, but on so representing the one as to suggest and

illuminate the other.

In the early days of renascent humanism, the first to renew the pastoral

tradition, broken for some ten centuries, was Francesco Petrarca. It is

not without significance that the first modern eclogues were from the same

pen as the sonnet 'Fontana di dolore, albergo d'ira,' expressive of the

shame with which earnest sons of the Church contemplated the captivity of

the holy father at Avignon; for thus on the very threshold of Arcadia we

are met with those bitter denunciations of ecclesiastical corruption which

strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and

seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton. In one eclogue

the poet mourns over the ruin and desolation of Rome, as a mother deserted

of her children; another is a dialogue between two shepherds, in which St.

Peter, under the pastoral disguise of Pamphilus, upbraids the licentious

Clement VI with the ignoble servitude in which he is content to abide; a

third shows us Clement wantoning with the shameless mistress of a line of

pontifical shepherds, a figure allegorical of the corruption of the

Church[25]; in yet a fourth Petrarch laments his estrangement from his

patron Giovanni Colonna, a cardinal in favour at the papal court, whom it

would appear his outspoken censures had offended. Petrarch's was not the

only voice that was raised urging the Pope to return from the 'Babylonian

captivity,' but the protest had peculiar significance from the mouth of

one who stood forth as the embodiment of the new age still struggling in

the throes of birth. When 'the first Italian' accepted the laurel crown at

the Capitol, he dreamed of Rome as once more the heart of the world, the

city which should embody that early Italian idea of nationality, the ideal

of the humanistic commonwealth. The course urged alike by Petrarch and by

St. Catherine was in the end followed, but the years of exile were yet to

bear their bitterest fruit of mortification and disgrace. In 1377 Gregory

XI transferred the seat of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, with the

resuit that the world was treated to the edifying spectacle of three

prelates each claiming to be the vicar of Christ and sole father of the

Church.

These ecclesiastical eclogues form the most important contribution made by

Italy's greatest lyric poet to pastoral. Others, one in honour of Robert

of Sicily, another recording the defeat of Pan by Articus on the field of

Poitiers, follow already existing pastoral convention. Some few, again, of

less importance in literary history, are of greater personal or poetic

interest. In one we see Francesco and his brother Gherardo wandering in

the realm of shepherds, and there exchanging their views concerning

religious verse. A group of three, standing apart from the rest, connect

themselves with the subject of the _Canzoniere_. The first describes the

ravages of the plague at Avignon; the second mourns over the death of

poetry in the person of Laura, who fell a victim on April 6, 1348; the

third is a dirge sung by the shepherdesses over her grave. One, lastly, a

neo-classic companion to Theocritus' tale of Galatea, recounts the poet's

unrequited homage to Daphne of the Laurels, thus again suggesting the

idealized source of Petrarch's inspiration. This poem is not only the gem

of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination

in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.

The, eclogues, twelve in number, appear to have been mostly composed

about the middle of the fourteenth century. In the days of Petrarch the

art of Latin verse was yet far from the perfection it attained in those of

Poliziano and Vida; it was a clumsy vehicle in comparison with the vulgar

tongue, which he affected to despise while setting therein the standard

for future ages. Nevertheless, Petrarch's Latin poems bear witness to the

natural genius for composition and expression to which we owe the

_Canzoniere_. The _editio princeps_ of the pastorals appeared in the form

of a beautifully printed folio at Cologne in 1473, ninety-nine years after

the poet's death. They were entitled _Eglogae_[26] (i.e. _aeglogae_), by

which, as Dr. Johnson remarked, Petrarch, finding no appropriate meaning

in the form _eclogae_, 'meant to express the talk of goatherds, though it

will only mean the talk of goats.'

No two men ever won for themselves more diverse literary reputations than

Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio. The Latin eclogue is one of their few

points of literary contact. The bucolic collections contain no less than

sixteen such poems from the pen of the younger writer[27], which, though

not devoid of merit as poetical exercises, show that as a metrist

Boccaccio fell almost as far short of his friend in the learned as in the

vulgar tongue. They were composed at various dates, mostly, it would

appear, after 1360, though some are certainly earlier; and it would be

difficult to say whether to him or to Petrarch belonged the honour of

reviving the form, were it not that, both in the poems themselves and in

his correspondance, he explicitly mentions Petrarch as his master in the

kind[28]. In any case the dates of composition must cover a wide period,

for the poems reflect varions phases of his life. 'Le Egloghe del

Boccaccio,' says an Italian critic, 'rappresentano tutta la vita

psicologica del poeta, dalle febbri d'amore alle febbri ascetiche.' The

amorous eclogues, to which in later life Boccaccio attached little

importance, are early; several are historical in subject and are probably

of later date, though one may be as early as 1348; there are others of a

religions nature which belong to the author's later years. The allusions

in these poems are so obscure that it would in most cases be hopeless to

seek to unravel the meaning had not the author left us a key in a letter

to Martino da Signa, prior of the Augustinians. Many of the subjects are

purely conventional, such as those of the early poems on the loves of the

shepherds, the historical panegyrics and laments, and the satire on rich

misers. The same may be said of a dispute on the respective merits of

poetry and commerce, and of a poem in praise of poetry; although the

former has an obvious relation to the author's own circumstances, and the

latter appears to be inspired by genuine enthusiasm and love of art. The

forces of confusion that have dogged the pastoral in all ages show

themselves where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the

antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch's influence

over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was

later embodied by Spenser in his _Hymns_. One poem stands out from the

rest somewhat after the manner of Petrarch's _Daphne_. In it Boccaccio

tells us, under the thinnest veil of pastoral, how his daughter Violante,

dead in childhood many years before, appeared to him bearing tidings of

the land beyond the grave. The theme is the same as that of the almost

contemporary _Pearl_; and in treating it Boccaccio achieves something of

the sweetness and pathos of the English poem. One eclogue, finally, the

_Valle tenebrosa (Vallis Opaca)_, which appears to owe something to

Dante's description of hell, is probably historical in its intention, but

the gloss explains _obscurum per obscurius_, and we can only suppose that

the author intended that the inner sense should remain a mystery.

When Boccaccio wrote, the eclogue had not yet degenerated into the

literary convention it became in the following century; and, though he was

no doubt tempted to the use of the form by Vergilian tradition and the

example of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural

inclination and no mere dictate of fashion. Even in these poems the

humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends

to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest

convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that

behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his

own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love. His

eclogues, however, never attained the same reputation as Petrarch's, and

remained in manuscript till the appearance of Giunta's bucolic collection

of 1504.

* * * * *

As humanism advanced and the golden age of the renaissance approached,

Latin bucolic writers sprang up and multiplied. The fullest

collection--that printed by Oporinus at Basel in March, 1546--contains the

poems of thirty-eight authors, and even this makes no pretence of giving

those of the middle ages. The collection, however, ranges from Calpurnius

to Castalio (i.e. the French theologian Sébastien Châteillon), and

includes the work of Petrarca, Boccaccio, Spagnuoli, Urceo, Pontano,

Sannazzaro, Erasmus, Vida, and others. There is a strong family likeness

in the pastoral verse of these authors, and the majority are devoid of

individual interest. A few, however, merit separate notice.

It was in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the renaissance

eclogue, abandoning its last claims to poetic inspiration, assumed its

definitive form in the works of Battista Spagnuoli, more commonly known

from the place of his birth by the name of Mantuanus. His eclogues, ten in

number, were accepted by the sixteenth century as models of pastoral

composition, inferior to those of Vergil alone, were indeed any

inferiority allowed. Starting with the simple theme of love, the author

proceeds to depict its excess in the love-lunes of the distraught Amyntas.

Thence he passes to one of those satires on women in which the fifteenth

century delighted, so bitter, that when Thomas Harvey came to translate it

in 1656 he felt constrained, for his credit's sake, to add the note,

'What the author meant of all, the translater intends only of ill

women[29].' There follows the old complaint of the niggardliness of rich

patrons towards poor poets, and a satire on the luxury of city life. The

remaining poems are ecclesiastical. One is in praise of the religious

life, another describes the simple faith of the country folk and the joys

of conversion; finally, we have a satire on the abuses of Rome, and a

discussion on points of theological controversy. None of these subjects

possess the least novelty; the author's merit, if merit it can be called,

lies in having stamped them with their definitive form for the use of

subsequent ages. Combined with this lack of originality, however, it is

easy to trace a strong personal element in the bitterness of the satire

that pervades many of the themes, the orthodox eclogue on conversion

standing in curious contrast with that on ecclesiastical abuses.

It is not easy to account for Spagnuoli's popularity, but the curiously

representative quality of his work was no doubt in part the cause. His

poems were what, through the changing fashions of centuries, men had come

to expect of bucolic verse. They crystallized into a standard mould

whatever in pastoral, whether classical or renaissance, was most obviously

and easily reducible to a type, and so attained the position of models

beyond which it was needless to go. They were first printed in 1498, and

went through a number of editions during the author's lifetime. As a young

man--and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be

attributed--Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but

his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his

later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as

his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order,

but retired in 1515, the year before his death.

Three eclogues are extant from the pen of Pontano, a distinguished

humanist at the court of Ferdinand I and his successors at Naples, and a

Latin poet of considerable grace and feeling. His poems were first

published by Aldus in 1505, two years after his death. In one

characteristic composition he laments the loss of his wife, to whom he was

deeply attached; another introduces under a pastoral name his greater

disciple Sannazzaro[30].

Jacopo Sannazzaro, known to humanism as Actius Sincerus, disciple of the

'Accademia Pontana,' and editor of his master's works, the greatest

explorer, if not the greatest exponent, of the mysteries of Arcadia, was

born of parents of Spanish origin at Naples in 1458. His boyhood was spent

at San Cipriano, but he soon returned to Naples, where he fell in love

with Carmosina Bonifacia. His passion does not appear to have been

reciprocated, but the lady has her place in literature as the Phillis of

the eclogues. He attached himself to the court of Frederick of Aragon,

whom he followed into exile in France. Returning to Naples after his

patron's death in 1503, he again fell in love, this time with a certain

Cassandra Marchesa, to whom he continued to pay court, _more Platonico_,

till his death in 1530. He is said to have died at her house.

To his Italian work I shall have to return later; here it is his five

Latin piscatory eclogues that demand notice. There is nothing in the

subject-matter to arrest attention--they consist of a lament for

Carmosina, a lover's complaint, a singing match, a panegyric, and a poem

in honour of Cassandra--but the form is interesting. Of course the claim

sometimes put forward for Sannazzaro, as the inventor of the piscatory

eclogue, ignores various passages in Theocritus, notably the twenty-first

Idyl, whence he presumably borrowed the idea. But it is certainly

refreshing, after wandering in an unreal Sicily and an imaginary Arcadia,

and listening to shepherds discourse of the abuses of the Roman Curia, to

dive into the waters of the bay of Naples, or wanton in fancy along its

sunlit shore from the low rocks of Baiae to the sheer cliffs of Sorrento,

and to feel that, even though Jacopo was no Neapolitan fisher-boy, and

Carmosina no nymph of Posilipo, yet the poet had at least before him the

blue water and the dark rocks, and in his heart the love that formed the

theme of his song[31].

Sannazzaro also wrote a mythological poem entitled _Salices_, in which

certain nymphs pursued by satyrs are changed by Diana into willows. The

tale was evidently suggested by Ovid, and cannot strictly be classed as

pastoral, though it may have helped to fix in pastoral convention the

character of the satyr; who, however, at no time enjoyed a very savoury

reputation. The Latin works were first published at Naples in 1536, and

though far from rivalling the popularity of the _Arcadia_, went through

several editions.

The Latin eclogues of the renaissance are distinguished from all other

forms of allegory by the obscure and recondite allusions that they

affected. There were few among their authors for whom the narration of

simple loves and sorrows or the graces of untutored nature possessed any

attraction; we find them either making their shepherds openly discuss

contemporary affairs, or more often clothing their references to actual

events in a sort of pastoral allegory, fatuous as regards its form and

obscure as regards its content. Tityrus and Mopsus are alternately lovers,

courtiers and spiritual pastors; Pan, when he does not conceal under his

shaggy outside the costly robes of a prince, is a strange abortive

monster, drawing his attributes in part from pagan superstition, in part

from Christian piety; a libel upon both. The seed sown by Petrarch and

Boccaccio bore fruit only too freely. The writers of eclogues, either

debarred from or incapable of originality, sought distinction by ever more

and more elaborate and involved allusions; and their works, in their own

day held the more sublime the more incomprehensible they were, are now the

despair of those who would wring from them any semblance of meaning.

The absurdities of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass

altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century

Teofilo Folengo composed his _Zanitonella_ in macaronic verse. It consists

of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite

pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In

the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular

writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist

might find ample scope for his wit in anatomizing the foible of the day,

fashionable society continued none the less to encourage the exquisite

inanity, and to be flattered by the elegant obscurity, of the allegorical

pastoral.

V

In 1481 appeared an Italian translation of the Bucolics of Vergil from the

pen of Bernardo Pulci. The same volume also contained a collection of

eclogues in the vernacular by various authors, none of which have any

particular interest beyond what attaches to them as practically heading

the list of Italian pastorals[32]. It will be noticed that these poems

correspond in date with the later school of Latin bucolic writers,

represented by Mantuan; and the vernacular compositions developed

approximately parallel to, though usually in imitation of, those in the

learned tongue. But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been

entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included

by Boccaccio in his _Ameto_ is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in

_terza rima_, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for

'pastoral,' as _ottava rima_ for 'rustic,' composition. The poem is a

contention between an upland and a lowland shepherd, and begins in genuine

pastoral fashion:

Come Titan del seno dell' aurora

Esce, così con le mie pecorelle

I monti cerco sema far dimora.

It is chiefly differentiated from many similar compositions in Latin--and

the distinction is of some importance--in that the interest is purely

pastoral; no political or religious allusions being discernible under the

arguments of the somewhat quarrelsome swains[33]. This peculiarity is on

the whole characteristic of the later vernacular pastoral likewise, which,

after the appearance of the collection of 1481, soon became extremely

common, Siena and Urbino, Ferrara, Bologna and Padua, Florence and Naples,

all alike bearing practical witness to the popularity of the kind[34].

In 1506 Castiglione[35] and Cesare Gonzaga, in the disguise of shepherds,

recited an eclogue interspersed with songs before the court of Duke

Guidubaldo at Urbino. The Duchess Elizabeth was among the spectators. The

_Tirsi,_ as it is called, begins with the simple themes of pastoral

complaint, whence by swift transition it passes to a panegyric of the

court and the circle of the _Cortegiano_. It was not the first attempt at

bringing the pastoral upon the boards, since Poliziano's _Orfeo_ with its

purely bucolic opening had been performed as early as 1471; but

Castiglione's _ecloga rappresentativa_ was the first of any note to depend

purely on the pastoral form and to introduce on the stage the convention

of the allegorical pastoral. Some years later a further step was taken in

the dramatization of the eclogue by Luigi Tansillo in his _Due pelegrini_,

performed at Messina in 1538, though composed and probably originally

acted some ten years before. It is through these and similar poems that we

shall have to trace the gradual evolution of the pastoral drama in a later

section of this work. Tansillo was likewise the author, both of a poem

called _Il Vendemmiatore_, one of those obscene debauches of fancy which

throw a lurid light on the luxurious imagination of the age, and of a

didactic work, _Il Podere_, in which, as his editor somewhat naïvely

remarks, 'ci rende amabile la campagna e l'agricoltura[36].'

The practice of eclogue-writing soon became no less general in the

vernacular than in Latin, and the band of pastoral poets included men so

different in temperament as Machiavelli, who left a 'Capitolo pastorale'

among his miscellaneous works, and Ariosto, whose eclogue on the

conspiracy contrived in 1506 against Alfonso d'Este was published from

manuscript in 1835. The fashion of the piscatory eclogue, set by

Sannazzaro in Latin, was followed in Italian by his fellow-citizen

Bernardino Rota, and later by Bernardino Baldi of Urbino, Abbot of

Guastalla, in whose poems we are able at times to detect a ring of simple

and refreshing sincerity.

Though, as will be understood even from the brief summary given above, the

allusive element is not wholly absent from these poems, it is nevertheless

true, as already said, that it appears less persistently than in the Latin

works, the weighty matters of religion and politics being as a rule

avoided. The reason is perhaps not far to seek, since, being in the vulgar

tongue, they appealed to a wider and less learned audience, before whom it

might have been injudicious to utter too strong an opinion on questions of

church and state.

So far the pastoral poetry of Italy had been composed exclusively in the

literary Tuscan of the day. To Florence and to Lorenzo de' Medici in

particular is due the honour of having first introduced the rustic speech

of the people. His two poems written in the language of the peasants about

Florence, _La Nencia da Barberino_ and a canzonet _In morte della Nencia_,

possess a grace to which the quaintness of the diction adds point and

flavour. A short extract must suffice to illustrate the style.

Ben si potrà tener avventurato

Chi sia marito di sì bella moglie;

Ben si potrà tener in buon dì nato

Chi arà quel fioraliso senza foglie;

Ben si potrà tenersi consolato

Che si contenti tutte le sue voglie

D' aver la Nencia, e tenersela in braccio

Morbida e bianca, che pare un sugnaccio.

* * * * *

Nenciozza mia, vuo' tu un poco fare

Meco a la neve per quel salicale?--

Sì, volentier, ma non me la sodare

Troppo, chè tu non mi facessi male.--

Nenciozza mia, deh non ti dubitare,

Chè l' amor ch' io ti porto sì è tale,

Che quando avessi mal, Nenciozza mia,

Con la mia lingua te lo leveria.

This form of composition at once became fashionable. Luigi Pulci[37]

composed his _Beca di Dicomano_, which attained almost equal success and

passed for the work of Lorenzo. It is, however, a far inferior production,

in which the quaintness of the model is replaced by coarse caricature and

its delicate rusticity by a cruder realism. Other imitations followed, but

none bear comparison with Lorenzo's poem[38]. It is in thought and

expression rather than in actual language that these poems distinguish

themselves from the literary pastoral. More noticeably dialectal is an

anonymous _Pescatoria amorosa_ printed about 1550. It is a Venetian

serenade sung in the persons of fishermen, and possesses a certain grace

of language:

Cortese donne, belle innamorae,

Donzelle, vedovette, e maridae,

Ascholte ste parole, che le no se cortelae,

Che intendere la causa del vegnir in ste contrae[39].

Symonds and D'Ancona alike remark, with perfect truth, that Lorenzo's

rustic style, in spite of its sympathetic grace, is not altogether

dissociated from burlesque. While free from the artificiality of court

pastoral, it is equally distinct from the natural simplicity of the

Theocritean idyl. Its flavour depends upon the half cynical, half kindly,

amusement afforded by the contrast between the _naïveté_ of the country

and the familiar and conventional polish of town life. This theme had

already caught the fancy of the song-writers of the fourteenth century,

who produced some of the most delightful examples of native and

unconventional pastoral anywhere to be found[40]. Franco Sacchetti the

novelist, for example, gives us a series of charming vignettes of country

life and scenery, but always from the point of view of the town observer.

One poem of his in particular gained wide popularity, and a modernized and

somewhat altered version was iater printed among the works of Poliziano.

It was originally a _ballata_, but I prefer to quote some stanzas from the

traditional version:

Vaghe le montanine e pastorelle,

Donde venite sì leggiadre e belle?--

Vegnam dall' alpe, presso ad un boschetto;

Picciola capannella è il nostro sito;

Col padre e colla madre in picciol tetto,

Dove natura ci ha sempre nutrito,

Torniam la sera dal prato fiorito

Ch' abbiam pasciute nostre pecorelle.--

Ben si posson doler vostre bellezze,

Poichè tra valli e monti le mostrate,

Chè non è terra di sì grandi altezze

Che voi non foste degne ed onorate.

Ora mi dite, se vi contentate

Di star nell' alpe così poverelle?--

Più si contenta ciascuna di noi

Gire alla mandria, dietro alla pastura,

Più che non fate ciascuna di voi

Gire a danzare dentro a vostre mura;

Ricchezza non cerchiam, nè più ventura,

Se non be' fiori, e facciam ghirlandelle[41].

Other writers besides Sacchetti produced songs of the sort, but in all

alike the strictly pastoral element was accidental, and merged insensibly

into the more delicately romantic of the _novelle_ themes. The following

lines touch on a situation familiar in later pastoral and also found in

English ballad poetry. They are by Alesso Donati, a contemporary of

Sacchetti's. A nun sings:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica

Gittar voglio e lo scapolo

Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica;

Poi teco a guisa d'assetato giovane,

Non già che si sobbarcoli,

Venir me n' voglio ove fortuna piovane:

E son contenta star per serva e cuoca,

Chè men mi cocerò ch' ora mi cuoca[42].

But if pastoralism made its appearance in the lyric, the lyric equally

influenced pastoral, for it is in the songs of the fifteenth century that

we first meet with that spirit of graceful melancholy sighing over the

transitoriness of earthly things, the germ of the _voluttà idillica_ of

the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido._ This vein is strong in Lorenzo's

charming carnival songs, which at once recall Villon's burden, 'Où sont

les neiges d'antan?' and anticipate Tasso's warning:

Cangia, cangia consiglio,

Pazzerella che sei;

Che il pentirsi dassezzo nulla giova.

The 'triumph' of _Bacchus and Ariadne_, introduced with amorous nymphs and

satyrs, has the refrain:

Quant' è bella giovinezza,

Che si fugge tuttavia!

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:

Di doman non c' è certezza.

The flower of lyric melancholy is already full blown. So, too, in another

carnival song of his:

Or che val nostra bellezza?

Se si perde, poco vale.

Viva amore e gentilezza!

_Gentilezza, morbidezza_--the yielding fancy in the disguise of pity, the

nerveless languor that passes for beauty--such is the dominant note of the

song upon men's lips in the troublous times of the renaissance[43].

Another of the outlying realms of pastoral is the mythological tale, more

or less directly imitated from Ovid. The first to introduce it in

vernacular literature was Boccaccio, who in his _Ninfale fiesolano_ uses

a pagan allegory to convey a favourite _novella_ theme. The shepherd

Affrico loves a nymph of Diana, and the tale ends by the goddess changing

her faithless votary into a fountain. It is written in somewhat cumbrous

_ottava rima_, and seldom shows any conspicuous power of narrative.

Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different

order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of _Ambra_.

The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale

when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists. The poem recounts how the

wood-nymph Ambra, beloved of Lauro, is pursued by the river-god Ombrone,

one of Arno's tributary divinities, and praying to Diana in her hour of

need, is by her transformed into a rock[44]. Lorenzo's _Selva d'amore_ and

_Caccia col falcone_ might also be mentioned in the same connexion.

Less pastoral in motive and less connected in narrative, but of even

greater importance in the formation of pastoral taste, is the famous

_Giostra_ written in honour of the young Giuliano de' Medici. I have

already more than once had occasion to mention its author, Angelo

Ambrogini, better known from the place of his birth as Poliziano or

Politian[45], the contemporary, dependent, and fellow-littérateur of

Lorenzo il Magnifico, and the greatest scholar and learned writer of the

Italian renaissance. As the author of the _Orfeo_ he will occupy our

attention when we come to trace the evolution of the pastoral drama.

Though he left no poems belonging to the recognized forms of pastoral

composition, his work constantly borders upon the kind, and evinces a

genuine sympathy with rustic life which makes the ascription to him of the

already quoted modernization of Sacchetti not inappropriate. He left

several other pieces of a similar nature, some of which at least are known

to be adaptations of popular songs[46]. Such, for instance, is the

irregular _canzone_ beginning:

La pastorella si leva per tempo

Menando le caprette a pascer fuora,

Di fuora, fuora: la traditora

Co' suoi begli occhi la m' innamora,

E fa di mezza notte apparir giorno.

The _Giostra_ is composed, like its predecessors, in the octave stanza,

and presents a series of pictures drawn from classical mythology or from

the poet's own imagination, adorned with all the physical beauty the study

of antiquity could supply and a rich and refined taste crystallize into

chastest jewellery of verse[47]. This blending of luxuriance and delicacy

is the characteristic quality of Poliziano's and Lorenzo's poetry. It is

admirably expressed in the phrase of a recent critic, 'the decorum of

things exquisite.' After the lapse of another half-century, during which

the renaissance advanced from its graceful youth to the full bloom of its

maturity, appeared the _Ninfa tiberina_ of Francesco Maria Molza. 'The

_voluttà idillica_[48],' writes Symonds, 'which opened like a rosebud in

the _Giostra_, expands full petals in the _Ninfa tiberina_; we dare not

shake them, lest they fall.' Like the earlier poem it possesses little

narrative unity--the taie of Eurydice introduced by way of illustration

occupies more than a third of the whole--but every point is made the

occasion of minute decoration of the richest beauty. It was written for

Faustina Mancina, a celebrated courtesan, whose empire lay till the day of

her death over the papal city. The wealth of sensuality and wit that made

a fatal seduction of Rome for Molza, scholar and libertine, is reflected

as it were in the rich cadences and overwrought adornment of his verse.

Such compositions as these had a powerful influence over the tone of

idyllic poetry. I have mentioned only a few out of a considerable list.

The _Driadeo d'amore_ earlier--a mythological medley variously ascribed in

different editions to Luca and to Luigi Pulci--and Marino's _Adone_ later,

were likewise among the works that went to form the courtly taste to which

the pastoral drama appealed. The detailed criticism, however, of such

compositions lies beyond the scope of this work.

VI

We must now return to an earlier period in order to follow the development

of the pastoral romance. When dealing with _Daphnis and Chloe_ I pointed

out that the Greek work could claim no part in the formation of the later

prose pastoral. Between it and the work of Boccaccio and Sannazzaro there

exists no such continuity of tradition as between the bucolics of the

classical Mantuan and those of his renaissance follower. The Italian

pastoral romance, in spite of its almost pedantic endeavour after

classical and mythological colouring, was as essentially a product of its

age as the pastoral drama itself. So far as any influence on the evolution

of the subsequent Arcadia was concerned, Longus might as well never have

written of the pastures of Lesbos. Indeed, were we here concerned in

assigning to its historical source each particular trait in individual

works, rather than in tracing the general development of an idea, it would

be casier to distinguish a faint and slightly cynical reminiscence of

_Daphnis and Chloe _ in the _Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_ than in the _Ameto_

or the _Arcadia_.

In his pastoral romance, 'Ameto, ovvero Commedia delie ninfe fiorentine,'

Boccaccio set a fashion in literature, namely the intermingling for

purposes of narration of prose and verse[49], in which he was followed a

century and a half later by Pietro Bembo, the Socrates of Castiglione's

renaissance Symposium, in his dialogue on love entitled _Gli Asolani_, and

by Jacopo Sannazzaro in his still more famous _Arcadia_. The _Ameto_ is

one of Boccaccio's early compositions, written about 1341, after his

return from Naples, but before he had gained his later mastery of

language. It is not unfairly characterized by Symonds as 'a tissue of

pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style

and affected with pedantic erudition.' It is, however, possible to

underrate its merits, and it would be easy to overlook its historical

importance. Ameto is a rude hunter of the neighbourhood of Florence. One

day, while in the woods, he discovers a company of nymphs resting by a

stream, and overhears the song of the beautiful Lia. His rough nature is

touched by the sweetness of the music and he falls in love with the

singer. Their meetings are interrupted by the advent of winter, but he

finds her again at the feast of Venus, when shepherds, fauns, and nymphs

forgather at the temple of the goddess. In this company Lia proposes that

each of the nymphs present, seven in number, shall narrate the story of

her love. This they in turn do, each ending with a song of praise to the

gods; and Ameto feels his love burn for each in turn as he listens to

their tales. When the last has ended a sudden brightness shines around and

'there descended with wondrous noise a column of pure flame, even such as

by night went before the Israelitish people in the desert places,' Out of

the brightness cornes the voice of Venus:

Io son luce del cielo unica e trina,

Principio e fine di ciascuna cosa,

Del quai men fù, nè fia nulla vicina.

Ameto, though half blinded by the heavenly effulgence, sees a new joy and

beauty shine upon the faces of the nymphs, and understands that the

flame-shrouded presence is that, not of the wanton _mater cupidinum_, but

of the goddess of divine fire who comes to reveal to him the mysteries of

love. Cleansed of his grosser nature by a baptismal rite, in which each of

the nymphs performs some symbolic ceremonial, he feels heavenly love

replacing human in his heart, and is able to bear undazzled the radiance

of the divine purity. He salutes the goddess with a song:

O diva luce, quale in tre persone

Ed una essenza il ciel governi e 'l mondo

Con giusto amore ed eterna ragione,

Dando legge alle stelle, ed al ritondo

Moto del sole, principe di quelle,

Siccome discerniamo in questo fondo[50].

Various interpretations have been suggested for this work, with its

preposterous mixture of pagan and Christian motives. This peculiarity,

which we have already met with in Boccaccio's eclogues, and in his

_Ninfale fiesolano_, was indeed one of the most persistent as it was one

of the least admirable characteristics of pastoral composition. Francesco

Sansovino, who edited the _Ameto_ in 1545, discovered real personages

underlying the characters of the romance. Fiammetta is introduced by name,

and her lover Caleone can hardly be other than Boccaccio. More recent

commentators are probably right in detecting an allegorical intention. The

seven nymphs, according to them, represent the four cardinal and three

theological virtues, and their stories are to be interpreted symbolically.

This view derives support from the baptismal ceremony, in which after the

public lustration one of the nymphs removes the scales from Ameto's eyes,

while another, 'breathing between his lips, kindled within him a flame

such as he had never felt before.' In these ministrants it is not

difficult to recognize the virtues respectively of faith and love. Ameto

may be taken as typical of humanity, tamed of its savage nature by love,

and through the service of the virtues led to the knowledge of the divine

essence. The conception of love as a civilizing and humanizing power

already underlay the sensuous stanzas of the _Ninfale fiesolano_, while

the later part of the romance was not uninfluenced by recollections of the

_Divine Comedy_[51]. It is true that a modern mind will with difficulty be

able to reconcile the amorous confessions of the nymphs with the

characteristics of the virtues, but in Boccaccio's day the tradition of

the _Gesta Romanorum_ was still strong, and the age that mysticized

Vergil, and moralized Ovid, was capable of much in the way of allegorical

interpretation[52].

The point to which this allegorical interpretation can legitimately be

carried need not trouble us here. Having set himself to characterize the

virtues, it is moreover likely enough that Boccaccio sought at the same

time to connect his figures more or less definitely with actual persons.

It is sufficient for our present purpose if we recognize in the _Ameto_

something of the same triple intention which, not to put too fine a

metaphysical point upon the parallel, we meet with in Dante and in the

_Faery Queen_. Having fashioned in accordance with these motives the

framework of his book, Boccaccio further concerned himself but little with

this philosophical intention, and the allegorical setting having served

its artistic purpose of linking them together into one connected whole, it

was upon the detail of the narratives themselves that the author's

attention was concentrated. It is, however, just in this artistic purpose

of the setting that one of the chief interests of the _Ameto_ lies; for if

in the mingling of verse and prose it is the forerunner of the _Arcadia_,

in the linking together of a series of isolated stories it anticipates

Boccaccio's own _Decameron_.

While there is little that is distinctly bucolic about the _Ameto_, the

atmosphere is eminently pastoral in the wider sense. Nymphs and shepherds,

foresters and fauns meet at the temple of Venus; the limpid fountains and

shady laurels belong essentially to the conventional landscape, whether of

Sicily, of Arcadia, or of the hills overlooking the valley of the Arno.

The Italian imagination was not careful to differentiate between field and

forest: _favola boschereccia_ was used synonymously with _commedia

pastorale_; _drammi dei boschi_ is a term which covers the whole of the

pastoral drama. But what really gives the _Ameto_ its importance in the

history of pastoral literature is the manner in which, undisturbed by its

religions and allegorical machinery, it introduces us to a purely sensual

and pagan paradise, in which love with all its pains and raptures reigns

supreme.

The narratives of the nymphs, and indeed the whole of the prose portions

of the work, are composed in a style of surcharged and voluptuous beauty,

congested with lengthy periods, and accumulated superlatives and relative

clauses, which, in its endeavour to maintain itself and its subject at the

highest possible pitch, only succeeds in being intensely and almost

uniformly monotonous and dull. It is perfectly true that the work

possesses some at least of the qualities of its defects. There are

passages which argue a feeling for beauty, none the less real for being of

a somewhat conventional order, while we not seldom detect a certain rich

luxuriance about the descriptions; but it must be admitted that on the

whole the style exhibits most of Boccaccio's faults and few of his merits.

The verse interspersed throughout is in _terza rima_, and offers small

attraction to the ordinary reader: 'meschinissima cosa' is a verdict

which, if somewhat severe, will probably find few to contradict it.

In a certain passage, speaking of Poliziano's _Orfeo_, Symonds remarks

that 'while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus

took the place of its hero.' Without inquiring too closely how far the

writers of the renaissance actually connected the hero of music, as a

power of civilization, with their newly discovered country, it is

interesting to note that the earliest work in the Italian language

containing in however amoebean a state the pastoral ideal opens with an

allusion to Orpheus.

Quella vertù, che già l'ardito Orfeo

Mosse a cercar le case di Plutone,

Allor che forse lieta gli rendeo

La cercata Euridice a condizione,

E dal suon vinto dell' arguto legno,

E dalla nota della sua canzone,

Per forza tira il mio debile ingegno

A cantar le tue Iode, o Citerea,

Insieme con le forze del tuo regno[53].

Orpheus, however, does not stand alone. Venus, Phoebus, Mars, Cupid, and

finally Jove, are each in turn invoked, to say nothing of the incidental

mention of Aeneas, Mirra, and Europa. This love of mythology in and out of

season is one of the most prominent features of the work. One of the

nymphs describes her youth in the following words:

il padre mio .... visse eccellentissimo ne' beni pubblici tra' reggenti,

e de' beni degli iddii copioso: me a lui donata da loro, nominò Mopsa, e

vedentemi nella giovanetta età mostrante già bella forma, ai servigi

dispose di Pallade, la quale me benivola ricevente nelle sante grotte

del cavallo Gorgoneo, tra le sapientissime Muse commise, là dov' io

gustai l'acque Castalie, e l'altezza di Cirra tentante, le stelle cercai

con ferma mano; e i pallidi visi, quelli luoghi colenti, sempre con

riverenza seguii; e molte volte sonando Apollo la cetera sua, lui nel

mezzo delle nove Muse ascoltai[54].

She continues for pages in the same strain with illustrative allusions to

Caius Julius, Claudius, and Britannicus.

At the risk of devoting to the _Ameto_ an altogether disproportionate

amount of the space at my disposai I must before passing on attempt to

give some notion of the kind of narrative contained in the romance, all

the more so as it is little known except to students. With this object I

have translated a characteristic passage from the tale of Agape[55].

I came from my home nigh unto the temple, before whose altars, with due

devotion, I began thus to pray: 'O Venus, full of pity, sacred goddess

whose altars I am joyful to approach, lend thou thy merciful ears unto

my prayer; for I come to thee a young girl, though fairly fashioned yet

ill-starred in love, fearful lest my empty years lead comfortless to a

chill old age; therefore, if my beauty merit that I be counted among thy

followers, enter thou into my breast who so desire thee, and grant that

in the love of a youth not unworthy of my beauty, and through whom my

wasted hours may be with delight made good, I may feel those fires of

thine which many times and endlessly I have heard praised.' I know not

whether while I was thus engrossed in prayer I fell on sleep, and

sleeping saw those things whereof I am about to tell, or whether,

indeed, I was rapt thence in bodily form to see them; all I can tell is

that suddenly I found myself borne through the heavens in a gleaming

chariot drawn by white doves, and that inclining my eyes to things below

I beheld the fruitful earth shrunk to a narrow room, and the rivers

thereof after the fashion of serpents; and after that I had left behind

the pleasant lands of Italy and the rugged mountains of Emathia, I

beheld the waters of the Dircean fount and the ancient walls raised by

the sound of Amphion's lyre, and soon there appeared to me the pleasant

Cytherean mount, and on it resting the holy chariots drawn by the

spotless birds. Whereon having alighted I went straying, alike uncertain

of the way and of the fortune that might await me, when, as to Aeneas

upon the Afric shore, so to me there amid the myrtles there appeared the

goddess I had invoked, and I was filled with wonder such as I had never

known before. She was disrobed except for the thinnest purple veil,

which hid but little of her form, falling in double curve with many

artful foldings over her left side; her face shone even as the sun, and

her head was adorned with great length of golden hair rippling down over

white shoulders; her eyes flashed with light never seen till then. Why

should I labour to tell the loveliness of her mouth and of her snowy

neck, of her marble breast and of her every part, since to do so lies so

far beyond my powers, and even where I able, hardly should my words gain

credence? But whereas she was now at hand I bowed my knees before her

godhead, and with such voice as I could command, repeated my petition in

her presence. She listened thereto, and approaching bade me rise,

saying, 'Follow me; thy prayer is heard, thy desire granted,' and

thereupon withdrew me to a somewhat loftier spot. There hidden amidst

the dense foliage she discovered to me her only son, upon whom gazing in

admiration, I found his beauty such that in all things did he appear

fashioned like unto her, except in so far as being he a god and she a

goddess. O how oft, remembering Psyche, I counted her happy and unhappy;

happy in the possession of such a husband, unhappy in his loss, most

happy in receiving him again from Jove. But even as I gazed, he, beating

the air with his sacred wings that gleamed with clearest gold, departed

with his load of newly fashioned arrows from those parts, and at the

bidding of the goddess I turned to the spring wherein he used to temper

his golden darts fresh forged with fiercest fire. Its silver waters,

gushing of themselves from the earth and shaded along the margin by a

growth of myrtle and dogwood, were neither violated in their purity by

the approach of bird or beast, nor suffered aught from the sun's

distemperature, and as I leaned forward to catch the reflection of my

own figure I could discern the clear bottom free from every trace of

mud[56]. The goddess, for that the hour was already hot, had doffed her

transparent veil and plunged her into the cool water, and now commanded

me that having stripped I too should enter the spring. We were yet

disporting ourselves in the lovely fountain, when, raising my head and

gazing with longing eyes around, I saw amid the leaves a youth, pale and

shy of appearance, who with slow steps was advancing towards the sacred

water. As I looked on him he was pleasant in my eyes, but that he should

behold me naked filled me with shame, and I turned away to hide my

unwonted blushes. And in like manner at the sight of me he too changed

colour and was troubled; he stayed his steps and advanced no further.

Then at the pleasure of the goddess leaving the water we resumed our

apparel, and crowned with myrtle sought a neighbouring glade, full of

finest grass and diapered with many flowers, where in the freshness we

stretched our limbs to rest. Thereupon the goddess, having called the

youth to us, began to speak in these words: 'Agape, most dear to me,

this youth, Apyros by name, whom thou seest thus shy amid our glades,

shall satisfy thy longing; but see that with care thou preserve

inviolate our fires, which in thy heart thou shalt bear with thee

hence.' I was about to make answer when my tender breast was of a sudden

pierced by the flying arrow loosed by the strong hand of the son of her

who added these unto her former words: 'We give him thee as thy first

and only servant; he lacks nought but our fires, which, kindled even now

by thee in him, be it thy care to nourish, that the frost that bound him

like to Aglauros being driven from his heart, he may burn with the

divine fire no less than father Jove himself.' She ceased; and I,

trembling yet with fear, no sooner opened my lips to assent to her

command, than I found myself once more in prayer before her altars;

whereat marvelling not a little, and casting my eyes around in search of

Apyros, I became aware of the golden arrow in my breast, and near me the

pale youth, his intent gaze fixed upon me, and like me wounded by the

god; and so seeing him inflamed with a passion no other than that which

burned in me, I laughed, and filled with contentment and desire, made

sign to him to be of hopeful cheer.

The advance in style that marks the transition from the _Ameto_ to the

_Arcadia_ must be largely accredited to Boccaccio himself. The language of

the _Decameron_ became the model of _cinquecento_ prose. Sannazzaro,

however, wrote in evident imitation not of the structural method only, but

of the actual style of the _Ameto_. Something, it is true, he added beyond

the greater mastery of literary form due to training. Even in his most

luxuriant descriptions and most sensuous images we find that grace and

clearness of vision which characterize the early poetry of the

Renaissance proper, and combine in literature the luminous purity of

Botticelli and the gem-like detail of Pinturicchio. The mythological

affectation of the elder work appears in the younger modified, refined,

subordinated; there is the same delight in detailed description, but

relieved by greater variety of imagination; while, even in the most

laboured passages, there is a poetical feeling as well as a more

subjective manner, which, combined with a remarkable power of

visualization, saves them from the danger of the catalogue. Again, there

is everywhere visible the same artificiality of style which characterizes

the _Ameto_, but purged of its more extravagant elements and less affected

and conceited than it became in the works of Lyly and Sidney. Like the

_Ameto_, lastly, but unlike its Spanish and English successors, the

_Arcadia_ is purely pastoral, free from any chivalric admixture.

The narrative interest in the _Arcadia_ is of the slightest. It opens with

a description of the 'dilettevole piano, di ampiezza non molto spazioso,'

lying at the summit of Parthenium, 'non umile monte della pastorale

Arcadia,' which was henceforth to be the abode sacred to the

shepherd-folk. There, as in Vergil's Italy and in Browne's Devon, in

Chaucer's dreamland, and in the realm of the Faery Queen, 'son forse

dodici o quindici alberi di tanto strana ed eccessiva bellezza, che

chiunque li vedesse, giudicherebbe che la maestra natura vi si fosse con

sommo diletto studiata in formarli.'[57] The shepherds, who are assembled

with their flocks, are about to seek their homes at the approach of night,

when they meet Montano playing upon his pipe, and a musical contest ensues

between him and Uranio. Next day is celebrated the feast of Pales, an

account of which is given at length, and is followed by a song in which

Galicio sings the praises of his mistress Amaranta, of whom the narrator

proceeds to give a minute description. After another singing-match between

Logisto and Elpino the company betake themselves to the tomb of Androgeo,

whose praises are set forth in prose and rime. There follows a song by the

old shepherd Opico, on the superiority of the 'former age'; after which

Carino asks the narrator, Sincero--the pseudonym under which Sannazzaro

travelled in the realm of shepherds--to recount his history, which he

does at length, ending with a lament in _sestina_ form. By way of

consoling him in his exile Carino, in return, tells the tale of his own

amorous adventures. Next the reverend Opico is induced to discourse of the

powers of magic as the shepherds proceed to the sacred grove of Pan, who

shares with Pales the honours of Arcadian worship, and to the games held

at the tomb of sibyllic Massilia--a name under which Sannazzaro is said to

have commemorated his own mother. At this point the narrator is troubled

by a dream portending death to the lady of his love. As, tormented by this

thought, he wanders lonely in the chill dawn he meets a nymph, who leads

him through a marvellous cavern into the depths of the earth, where he

beholds the springs of many famous rivers, and finally, following the

course of the Sabeto, arrives at his native city of Naples, where he

learns the truth of his sorrowful forebodings.

The form has been systematized since Boccaccio wrote, the whole being

divided into twelve _Prose_, alternating with as many _Ecloghe_, preceded

by a _Proemio_ and followed by an address _Alla sampogna_, both in prose.

The verse is mediocre, and several of the eclogues are composed in the

unattractive _sestina_ form, while others affect the wearisome _rime

sdrucciole_.[58] The most pleasing is Ergasto's lament at Androgeo's tomb,

beginning:

Alma beata e bella,

Che da' legami sciolta

Nuda salisti ne' superni chiostri,

Ove con la tua stella

Ti godi insieme accolta;

E lieta ivi schernendo i pensier' nostri,

Quasi un bel sol ti mostri

Tra li più chiari spirti;

E coi vestigi santi

Calchi le stelle erranti;

E tra pure fontane e sacri mirti

Pasci celesti greggi;

E i tuoi cari pastori indi correggi. (_Ecloga_ V.)

One would hardly turn to the artificiality of the _Arcadia_ for

representations of nature, and yet there is in the romance a genuine love

of the woods and the fields, and of the rustic sports of the season.

'Sogliono il più delle volte gli alti e spaziosi alberi negli orridi monti

dalla natura prodotti, più che le coltivate piante, da dotte mani

espurgate negli adorni giardini, a' riguardanti aggradare,' remarks

Sannazzaro at the outset. Elsewhere he furnishes us with an entertaining

description of the various ways in which birds may be trapped, introduced

possibly in pursuance of a hint from Longus.[59] Yet, in spite of his

professed love of savage scenery and his knowledge of pastoral sports, it

is after all in a very artificial and straitened form that nature filters

to us through Sannazzaro's pages. Rather do we turn to them for the sake

of the paintings on the temple walls, of Amaranta's lips, 'fresh as the

morning rose,' of her wild lapful of flowers, and of a hundred other

incidental pictures, one of the most charming of which, interesting on

another score also, I make no apology for here transcribing.

Subito ordinò i premi a coloro, che lottare volessero, offrendo di dare

al vincitore un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano

Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo, eran

dipinte molte cose: ma tra l' altre una ninfa ignuda, con tutti i membri

bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli delle capre; la

quale, sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo satirello, e

con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carità tutta

si struggesse: e 'l fanciullo nell' una mammella poppava, nell' altra

tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l' occhio la si guardava, quasi

temendo che tolta non gli fosse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean due

fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti due volti orribili di

maschere cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre

spavento a duo altri, che davanti loro stavano; de' quali l' uno

fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava; l' altro caduto già

in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimenti aitare, stendeva la mano

per graffiarlo. (_Prosa_ XI.)

I shall make no attempt at translation. Some versions, really wonderful

in the success with which they reproduce the style of the original, will

be found in Symonds' _Italian Literature_[60]. It is probably unnecessary

to put in a warning that the _Arcadia_ is a work of which extracts are apt

to give a somewhat too favourable impression. In its long complaints,

speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull,

but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of

editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the

first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There

were several imitations later, such as the _Accademia tusculana_ of

Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third _Prosa_ in his

_Sacrifizio pastorale_; while collections of tales and _facetiae_ such as

the _Arcadia in Brenta_ of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of

the name. A French translation published in 1544 went through three

editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into

Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578. It may have been due to the existence

of Sidney's more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever

appeared in English.

* * * * *

Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most

important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later,

has of necessity been lengthy. It was at Italian breasts that the infant

ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed. The other countries of

continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn

contributed characteristics of its own. It was to Italy that England too

was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements

peculiar to France and Spain. It will therefore be necessary briefly to

review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though

they need detain us but a brief space in comparison with the Italian

fountain-head.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in

order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost

say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work

of Sannazzaro. Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to

Vergil, who had the worship of Pan in mind, but the selection of the

barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral

luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of

the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the

world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the

materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in

religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of

what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief

from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to

its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism

of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian

dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.

When children weave fancies of wonderland they use the resources of the

imagination with economy; uninterrupted sunshine soon cloys. So too with

these other children of the renaissance. Their wonderland is a place

whither they may escape from the pressure of the world that is too much

with them; they seek in it at least the virtue that its evils shall be the

opposite of those from which they fly. They could not, it is true, believe

in an Arcadia in which all the cares of this world should end--the golden

age is always a time to be sung and remembered, or else to be dreamed of,

in the years to come, it is never the present--but if they cannot escape

from the changes and chances of this mortal life, if death and unfaith

are still realities in their dreamland as on earth, they will at least

utter their grief melodiously, and water fair pastures with their tears.

Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the

Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The

decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to

exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus

turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized

recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the

allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm

either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and

vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to

an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late

fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival;

the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of

strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet

to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these

men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able

wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must

have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding

of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered

kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when

Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fashion,

where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the

land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,'

there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make

Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society

of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian

pastoralism, in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido_, we trace a yearning

towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such

incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral

guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not

content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the

sight of Helena, to find in it a place for the earthly affections that

bound them, and at the touch of reality the vision dissolved in mist.

VII

When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early

years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary

but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is

particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the

similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from

Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe

Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new

world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to

exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these

circumstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of

that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper

genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from

servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian

style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in

recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the

richest national literatures of the world.

It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced

under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind,

which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models,

bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier

and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the

pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more

or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his

humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a

rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain

incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is,

namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national

drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important

examples in this place.[63]

An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future

drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_,

the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two

shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish

society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and

political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak

reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his

Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of

Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference

that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and

vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of

literature are certain poems--_Éclogas_ they are for the most part

styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of

the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about

a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular

poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting

link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama.

About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some

romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide,

and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude

herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the

Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto

pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his

master and Lope de Vega.

With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course,

concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence

in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the

influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of

Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as

such titles as the _Pastores de Belén_ might suggest. It is found equally

in the religious or quasi-religious plays--such as the _Vuelta de Egypto_

with its shepherds and gypsies, and the _Pastor lobo_, an allegorical

satire on the church Lope afterwards entered--and in such purely secular,

amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the _Arcadia_--not to be

confused with his romance of the same name--and the _Selva sin amor_, a

regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides

many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have

been recited after the manner of Castiglione's _Tirsi_.

While on the subject of the drama I may mention translations of the

_Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_. Tasso's piece was rendered into Castilian by

Juan de Jauregui, and first printed at Rome in 1607, a revised edition

appearing among the author's poems in 1618. The _Pastor fido_ was

translated by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, the best version being that

printed at Valentia in 1609, from which Ticknor quotes a passage as

typical as it is successful. It was to these two versions of the

masterpieces of Italian pastoral that Cervantes accorded the highest meed

of praise, declaring that 'they haply leave it doubtful which is the

translation or original.'[64] There likewise exists a poor adaptation of

Guarini's play, said to be the work of Solis, Coello, and Calderon[65].

The pastoral appears, however, never to have gained a very firm footing

upon the mature Spanish stage, no doubt for the same reason that led to a

similar result in England, namely, that the vigorous national drama about

it overpowered and choked its delicate and exotic growth[66].

Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the

pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character,

though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of

Francisco de Sâ de Miranda[67]. He appears to have begun writing

independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the

influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity

and genuineness of feeling. He probably had some direct knowledge of the

Italians, for he writes:

Liamos....

.... os pastores italianos

Do bom velho Sanazarro.

He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already

appeared.

The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the

Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about

1526. To him, in conjunction with Boscán and Mendoza, the vogue was due.

At his best, when he really assimilates the foreign elements borrowed from

his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius

of his nation. The first of his three eclogues, which was probably

composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the

shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author,

while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscán. This

poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself

suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he

does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and

Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral

showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that

it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.

Garcilaso's followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of

Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' _Galatea_; Pedro de

Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa,

the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo

episode into Montemayor's _Diana_; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the

continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many

imitators, who incorporated in his _Siglo de Oro_ a number of eclogues

which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from

Theocritus rather than Vergil.

In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among

Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed

in the less important dialect. Sâ de Miranda has been mentioned above.

Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five

autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently

earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sâ de Miranda's,

in the short measures more natural to the language than the _terza rima_

and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote

fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue

between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to

Sannazzaro:

O pescador Sincero, que amansado

Tém o pégo de Prochyta co' o canto

Por as sonoras ondas compassado.

D'este seguindo o som, que póde tanto,

E misturando o antigo Mantuano,

Façamos novo estylo, novo espanto.

Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fashion passed from

Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to

the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first

to imitate the _Arcadia_ was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during

a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as

Ticknor styles it, entitled from the first words of the text _Menina e

moça_. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo

charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must

have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably

from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of

the story anticipating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of

chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have

arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element

occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On

the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of

real characters, which, though their identity was concealed under anagrams

and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye

of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of

Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but

before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish

translation of the _Arcadia_. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was

himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the

land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.

The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula

to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who

composed in Castilian dialect the famous _Diana_. 'Los siete libres de la

Diana de Jorge de Montemayor'--the Spanish form of Montemôr's name and

that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages--appeared at Valencia,

without date, but about 1560.[69] As in the case of its Italian and

Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance

represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in

love with the nymph Diana, of whose identity Lope de Vega claimed to be

cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and

actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fashion. Sireno

is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and

on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival

Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple,

and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance

of his passion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is

interwoven with a multitude of episodes and incidental narratives,

pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second

part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears,

being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.

Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric

tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain

graces of style which it possesses, the _Diana_ held the field until the

picaresque romance developed into a recognized _genre_, and exercised a

very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers

of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney

translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance;

Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. In

the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of

continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible

publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from

less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second

parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Pérez, only got so far

as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the

original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the

pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style

scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and

Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never

appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the

work of Jerónimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a _rifacimento_

of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming

a sequel to Pérez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions

parody by Fra Bartolomé Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six

French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin

one of Gil Polo's portion at least.

Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of

varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the _Galatea_ of Cervantes,

imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to

have suggested the _Arcadia_, written a few years later at the instigation

of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more

or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: 'many of its

shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,' Cervantes confesses

of his romance, while Lope announces that 'the _Arcadia_ is a true

history.' Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese _Primavera_ of Francisco

Rodrígues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and

1614, and is pronounced by Ticknor to be 'among the best full-length

pastoral romances extant.'

All these works resemble one another in their general features. The

characteristics of the _genre_ as found in Spain, in spite of a real

feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the

elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an

adherence to the circumstances of actual existence even closer than was

the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages

from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances

the whole _mise en scène_ consists of the actual surroundings of the

author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal

element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these

works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric

pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fashionable

pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced,

and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of

magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the

tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming

knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the

style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the

writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their

own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious

and enduring works.

VIII

In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is

summed up in the work of one man--Clément Marot. It is he who forms the

central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of

the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later

the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pléiade. While

belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot

appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting

tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation

of Sannazzaro's _Salices_ and her lament on the death of her brother

François I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her _comédie_ of

human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested

in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the

Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject.

In his early work he continued the tradition of the _Romance of the Rose_;

later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance.

By nature an easy-going _bon vivant_, his only real affection appears to

have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very

probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher

ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of

Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days

as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he

no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately

driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the

bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of

the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous

offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of

Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.

But, however fascinating Marot may be as an historical figure, he was in

no sense a great poet. His chief merit in literature, apart from his often

delicate epigrams, his _élégant badinage_ and his graceful if at times

facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and

Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the

charm of naïve simplicity and genuine feeling. In his _Éclogue au Roi_ he

addresses Francis under the name of Pan, while in the _Pastoureau

chrestien_ he applies the same name to the Deity; yet in either case there

is a justness of sentiment underlying the convention which saves the verse

from degenerating into mere sycophancy or blasphemy. His chief claim to

notice as a pastoral writer is his authorship of an eclogue on the death

of Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis; a poem through which, more than

any other, he influenced his greater English disciple, and thereby

acquired the importance he possesses for our present inquiry.

Marot, however, whose inspiration, in so far as it was not born of his own

genius, appears to be chiefly derived from Vergil, whose first eclogue he

translated in his youth, was far from being the only poet who wrote

bucolic verse or bore other witness to pastoral influence. France was not

behind other nations in embracing the Italian models. Margaret, as I have

said, imitated Sannazzaro in her _Histoire des satyres et nymphes de

Diane_. The _Arcadia_ was translated in 1544. Du Bellay was familiar with

the original and honoured its author with imitation, translation, and even

a respectful mention of it in his famous _Défense_. Elsewhere he asks:

Qui fera taire la musette

Du pasteur néapolitain?

The first part of Belleau's _Bergerie_ appeared in 1565, the complete

work, including a piscatory poem, in 1572. On the stage Nicolas Filleul

anticipated the regular Italian drama in a dramatized eclogue entitled

_Les Ombres_ in 1566. Later Nicolas de Montreux, better known under the

name of Ollenix du Mont-Sacré, a writer of a religious cast, and author

of a romantic comedy on the story of Potiphar's wife, composed three

pastoral plays, _Athlette_, _Diane_, and _Arimène_, which appeared in

1585, 1592, and 1597 respectively. They are conventional pastorals on the

Italian model, futile in plot and commonplace in style. He was also the

author of the _Bergerie de Juliette_, a romance published in 1592, which

Robert Tofte is credited with having translated in his _Honour's

Academy_,' or the Famous Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta,' which

appeared at London in 1610. Tofte's work, however, while purporting to be

'done into English,' makes no mention of the original author, and though

indebted for its form and title to Nicholas' romance does not appear to

bear much further resemblance to it. A far more important work in itself,

but one which does not much concern us here, is Honoré d'Urfé's _Astrée_,

an autobiographic compilation in which the fashionable pastoral romance

found its most consummate example. The work was translated into English as

early as 1620, but the history of its influence in this country belongs

almost exclusively to the French vogue, which began about the middle of

the century, and formed such an important element in the literature of the

restoration.

The comparatively small influence exerted by the French pastoral of the

renaissance on that of England must excuse the scanty summary given in the

preceding paragraphs. It remains to be said that there had existed at an

earlier period in France another and very different tradition, which

supplied one of the regular forms of composition in vogue among

_trouvères_ and _troubadours_ alike. The _pastourelle_ has sometimes been

described as a popular form, but it would be difficult to determine

wherein its 'popularity,' in the sense intended, consists, for it is

easily recognized as the offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is

scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue.

Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention

on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The

narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets

a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is

the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the

other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes.

Others--and the fact is at least significant--serve to convey allusions,

political, personal or didactic: a variety found as early as the twelfth

century in Provençal, and about the fourteenth in northern French.

Wandering scholars adopted the form from the knightly singers and produced

a plentiful crop of Latin _pastoralia_, usually of a somewhat burlesque

nature. An idea of the general style of these may be gathered from such

lines as the following, which contain the reply of a country girl

hesitating before the advances of a merry student:

Si senserit meus pater

uel Martinus maior frater,

erit mihi dies ater;

uel si sciret mea mater,

cum sit angue peior quater:

uirgis sum tributa.[70]

Appropriated, lastly, and refashioned by the hand of an original genius,

the _pastourelle_ gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its

_Minnesang_ in Walther's 'Under der linden,' with its irrepressibly

roguish refrain:

Kuster mich? wol tûsentstunt:

tandaradei,

seht wie rôt mir ist der munt!

Connected with the _pastourelles_ of the _langue d'oïl_ is an isolated

dramatic effort, of a primitive and naïve sort, but of singular grace and

charm. _Li jus Robins et Marion_, the work of Adan le Bochu or de le Hale,

is in fact a dramatized _pastourelle_ of some eight hundred lines

beginning with the rejection by a shepherdess of the advances of a knight

and ending with the rustic sports of the shepherds on the green.

Unsophisticated nature and playful cunning unite in no ordinary degree to

lend delicacy and savour to the work, while the literary quality of Adan's

verse is evident in such incidental songs as Marion's often quoted:

Robins m'aime, Robins m'a,

Robins m'a demandee, si m'ara.

In spite, however, of the genuine _naïveté_ and natural realism of the

piece, it is easy to recognize in it something of the same spirit of

gentle raillery that sparkles in the graceful octaves of Lorenzo's

_Nencia_.

A real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealization of the

actual shepherd class, is reflected in a poem written about 1460 by René

of Anjou, ex-king of Naples, describing in pastoral guise the rustic

retreat which he enjoyed in company with his wife, Jeanne de Laval, on the

banks of the Durance. The conventional pastoralism that veils the identity

of the shepherd and shepherdess is scarcely more than a pretence, for at

the end of the manuscript we find blazoned the arms of the royal pair,

with the inscription:

Icy sont les armes, dessoubz ceste couronne,

Du bergier dessus dit et de la bergeronne.