IMITATION IN LYRIC AND PASTORAL
1. LYRIC
The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive
revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch
made him an Italian classic and a European model. Thus, in England,
revival from a meager and languid fifteenth century was stimulated in
the sixteenth by Italy. But France shows the history of vernacular lyric
in clearest stages: (1) in the formalizing of medieval modes by the
_rhétoriqueurs_; (2) in the verse forms and diction of Lemaire and Marot,
seeking variety without rejecting tradition; (3) in the Pléiade program
of revolt from tradition to classicism, and especially in Ronsard’s
experiments with the Greek ode; (4) in the final predominance of the
sonnet.
(_a_) _Latin Lyric_
Latin lyric was both changed in mode by the Renaissance and increased in
volume. The fifteenth century turned from the modes of the medieval Latin
lyric to more direct imitation of Vergil and Ovid, Catullus and Horace.
Meantime the tradition of writing Latin verse in school continued to make
every Renaissance author familiar with this metric. The difference was
that he now used it in his own mature composition. For humanism demanded
even of vernacular poets such Latin stanzas as might introduce the works
of their friends, compliment their patrons, or celebrate state weddings,
victories, and solemn entries. Though even published Latin lyrics
were often themes, they at least promoted and confirmed two pervasive
Renaissance literary habits: control of classical metric, and imitation.
Throughout the Renaissance there is to be assumed in the back of a poet’s
mind a fund of classical measures and phrases.
But Renaissance Latin lyrics are by no means all themes. For some poets
Latin was really the lyric medium. Humanistic anxiety and pretense about
classical diction might, indeed, hinder lyric, but could not suppress it.
Pontano (1426-1503), whose Latin poems fill nearly seven hundred modern
pages, wrote not a few as directly and utterly lyrical as his _Naenia_.
Jan Everaerts of Mechlin, known to literature as Secundus (1511-1536),
even started a lyric vogue in Italy and France, and later in England,
with his _Basia_. Obviously inspired by Catullus, they had a quality and
influence of their own.
(_b_) _Italy and England_
The progress of vernacular lyric was steadiest in Italy because there the
vernacular triumph had been recognized earliest and most consistently.
The medieval lyric forms derived generically from Provençal—_canzone_,
_ballata_, _sestina_, and _sonetto_—had all been explored by Dante;
and one of them, the sonnet, had received from Petrarch a stamp that
gave it European currency. Beside the humanist cult of Augustan Latin
rose a cult of Petrarch as a vernacular classic. From Petrarch himself
and through his fifteenth-century imitators the sonnet became the most
widespread lyric mode both for a single, self-sufficient lyric and as a
lyric unit in a narrative chain.
In England, where the range of medieval stanzas had been narrower,
fifteenth-century lyric was meager. “The age of transition,” as it
has been called apologetically, was a period of medieval decadence,
of stalling in medieval patterns. Without much stir of ideas, without
general sureness in verse technic, it is often diffuse and straggling,
as in Lydgate. Skelton’s Latin learning remained quite apart from his
slack and boisterous English verse; and English fifteenth-century lyric
generally is both conventional and feeble. The sixteenth-century revival
that was sought in Petrarch led here, as elsewhere, to the prevalence
of sonnets. Its pioneer was Sir Thomas Wiat (1503-1542). Starting with
that connection of lyric with music which was to be a preoccupation of
Ronsard, appreciating Chaucer, but reading him in imperfect texts, he
turned early from a few _rondeaux_ of the Marot type to the Petrarchan
sonnet. Two thirds of his sonnets are translations or echoes of Petrarch
himself, or are derived from his imitators. Wiat pursued Italian further
in octaves and _terza rima_ and seems to have read, besides Ariosto,
Alamanni, Navagero, and Castiglione, the _Poetica_ of Trissino (1529).
The previous century had brought Italian influences on English learning;
Wiat brought the first clearly literary influence since Boccaccio’s on
Chaucer. His friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), carried
this forward. Similarly following Petrarch and the Petrarchans, and
experimenting with _terza rima_ and other stanzas, he made Italian
metric more familiar, and in particular helped to establish among the
Elizabethans that form of sonnet which is called Shaksperian.
(_c_) _France_
France shows most distinctly the whole Renaissance lyric history. The
beginning of the history in the medieval vernacular art of refrain
stanzas had shown there the most systematic elaboration. In 1501 Antoine
Vérard printed at Paris the huge collection of _balades_, _rondeaux_,
and _virelais_ entitled _Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique_.
_Rhétorique_, or more specifically _seconde rhétorique_, means the art of
verse; the introduction expounds this in an anonymous treatise. Pierre
Fabri incorporated the treatise in his _Grande et vraie art de pleine
rhétorique_ (Rouen, 1521). The _pleine_ signifies merely the inclusion
of both prose (Part I) and verse (Part II). Fullness in any other sense
is hardly to be found in the _rhétoriques_ of the period. They furnish
mainly figures of speech and verse forms. They are style books; for the
so-called school of the _rhétoriqueurs_ was devoted mainly to verbal and
metrical ingenuities.
But as Villon had shown in the early fifteenth century that the _balade_
was not dead, so as the century waned Jean Lemaire (1473 to about 1520)
was poet enough to be more than _rhétoriqueur_. True, he continued the
jingling iteration. A double virelay composed on two rhymes begins as
follows:
Hau_tains_ es_prits_ du grand royal pour_pris_,
Je suis é_pris_ par mouvements cer_tains_
De bien servir la reine de haut _prix_.
Mais trop sur_pris_ est mon coeur malap_pris_ ... (p. 128).[24]
But Lemaire usually handled such recurrences with more delicacy.
Notre âge est bref comme les _fleurs_
Dont les cou_leurs_ reluisent peu d’es_pace_.
Le temps est court et tout rempli de _pleurs_
Et de dou_leurs_, qui tout voit et com_passe_.
Joie se _passe_; on s’ébat, on so_lasse_
Et entre_lace_ un peu de miel bénin
Avec l’amer du monde et le venin ... (p. 17).
Using few of the popular medieval stanzas, he acknowledged Petrarch and
Serafino d’Aquila (p. 238), composed the first part of his _Concorde des
deux langages_ in _terza rima_, and experimented with Alexandrines. The
“enrichment” later proposed by Du Bellay he tried in such Latinisms as
_aurein_, _calefaction_, _collocution_, _oscultation_, _congelative_, and
_glandifère_. Bits of his pastoral decoration might have been written in
the Pléiade.
A son venir Faunes l’ont adoré,
Satyres, Pans, Aegipans, dieux agrestes,
Et Sylvanus, par les bois honoré;
Nymphes aussi, diligentes et prestes,
A la déesse ont offert leur service,
Tout à l’entour faisant danses et festes.
Les Napées, exerçant leur office,
Font bouillonner fontaines argentines,
Créant un bruit à sommeil très propice.
Puis à dresser les tentes célestines
Ont mis leur soin les mignonnes Dryades,
Faisant de bois ombrageuses courtines.
(_Concorde des deux langages_, p. 243).
But the whole allegorical scheme of that poem is as medieval as Chaucer’s
in the _Parlement of Foules_. For Lemaire still uses mythology not for
classical allusion, but medievally as an extension of allegory. Chaos
and the Furies, Hymen, Erebus, Mercury, and Janus are listed (pp.
172-173) with the personifications Honor, Grace, Victory, and Discord.
The medieval adaptation brings from the _Roman de la Rose_ Bel-Accueil
to be a sub-deacon in the temple of Venus (p. 252); for the temple, as
in Chaucer, is a church and has relics. Even Hippolytus is a “_saint
martyr_” (p. 223); and the three goddesses at the judgment of Paris are
domesticated in Flanders by their “_venustes corpulences_.” Jean Lemaire
was not a forerunner of classicism.
Nor was Clement Marot (1495-1544). He learned the sonnet in Lyon and in
Italy without discerning either its distinctive value or its future.
For him it was merely one more form of the epigram type seen also in
the _dizaine_. He continued the _balade_, adapted the _rondeau_, wrote
much encomium without ever proclaiming himself a _vates_. His epistles,
elegies, epigrams, his experiments with Alexandrines, his imitations of
Martial, suggest a more normal development than the Pléiade change of
both emphasis and direction.[25]
For the new day of the sonnet at Lyon we must look to Louise Labé (about
1520-1566). Bourgeoise of the commercial and literary, French and Italian
city of Lyon, composing sometimes in Italian and sometimes in French, she
speaks the choice language of culture without parade. Her sonnets[26]
are directly and utterly lyric. Their literary derivations may, indeed,
be found, but are never put forward. Her few classical allusions are all
familiar. The simple mythology of her prose _Débat de Folie et d’Amour_
is handled in the Burgundian fashion of Jean Lemaire. Her verse is
Petrarchan as it were inevitably, because that was the prevalent mode of
her place and time. To call her a precursor of the Pléiade, then, may be
quite misleading; for she suggests neither school nor date.
French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting
but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be
recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and
might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving
of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus
be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s.
Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be
_docte_. As for readers insufficiently educated, they were not to be
considered. Ronsard repeated Horace’s _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_.
Let the poet seek “fit audience, though few.” This whole theory of
poetic allusion seems to our age exploded. It comes to us through that
standardized eighteenth-century poetic diction which was repudiated by
the romantic revolt. Modern readers, consequently out of tune, must
approach many Renaissance lyrics with a resolution of tolerance. Aurora
leaving the bed of Tithonus, though mere decoration in Vergil and
somewhat faded in the Middle Age, was not yet stale to the increasing
audience of the sixteenth century. But if the allusion, far from being
stale, were unfamiliar, even recondite? Instead of rejecting classical
allusions _a priori_ as hindrances to lyric, we may learn to estimate
their value from actual Renaissance experience. That the language of
poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance
postulate.
Ronsard’s early classicism, revolting from prolonged _rhétorique_, was
reminiscent of Vergil and Ovid of course, of Catullus and his imitator
Secundus, sometimes of Claudian and Pontano, but mainly of the Odes of
Horace. Sometimes he even paraphrases, as when he composes a French _Fons
Bandusiae_; often he adapts phrases; oftenest he follows the Horatian
lyric movement. If he occasionally condescends to a medieval form, he
gives it classical style. Further, his study of Greek under Dorat led him
to imitate Callimachus and then Pindar. The reminiscences of Callimachus
hardly go beyond the usual Renaissance lifting of phrase or allusion,
that verbal classicism which was the habit of the time; but from Pindar
he learned something different.
The extant poetry of Pindar is almost all encomium of victors at the
pan-Hellenic contests. Encomium was a poetic fashion in the Renaissance
too, because it was a means of publication. The Greeks had justified
it by the poet’s mission to confer fame. Though Ronsard adopts the
idea in haughty proclamation of his own high function, he had already
ancient warrant enough in Horace. What he learned further from Pindar
was technical, a wider range of lyric composition. Encomium, reduced to
recipe in late Greek oratory, took definite form earlier in Greek poetry.
The main topics for the Pindaric celebration of an Olympian victor are
his family line and his native city. Each of these is carried into legend
and myth, either by allusions to what the pan-Hellenic audience knew as
common tradition, or in the longer odes by verse narrative. The poem
often ended on exhortation to live worthily of past and present fame.
These conventional motives Pindar carried out metrically in a sequence
of strophes and antistrophes. Without examining how strictly Ronsard
followed the Greek mode, it is enough to say that his French adaptation
proceeds by triads: strophe, antistrophe, epode. Though he usually
followed Pindar’s shorter odes, his Ode to the King on the Peace (1550)
has ten triads; his Ode to Michel de l’Hospital (1550), twenty-four. In
the latter the young Muses sing to Jupiter the battle of the Olympians
with the Titans; and there follows an historical vision of the progress
of poesy. Thus the Greek scheme invited Ronsard to wider adventures in
metric, to more remote recurrences and larger lyric harmonies than were
offered by Horace.
Though the metrical experiment ceased abruptly with Ronsard in 1550,
it had later fruit in Spenser. Longer poems of occasion, thus
introduced from the Greek by so skillful a metrist, were carried by the
Pléiade influence to England. But Spenser’s _Epithalamion_ (1595) and
_Prothalamion_, instead of conforming specifically to Ronsard’s verse
system, follow more generally and more variously the idea of larger
metrical reach by framing a stanza of eighteen lines.[27]
Why did Ronsard drop such measures in 1550 at the age of twenty-seven?
The Pindaric ode recurs sporadically in vernacular poetry, and
occasionally has had a limited vogue. More or less Greek, it is often,
as with Ronsard, learned and often pretentious with airs of inspiration.
One of its rare successes came more than two centuries later in England
with Gray. It has never kept its hold in lyric poetry. Ronsard continued
to print his Pindarics among his collected poems; but he never again
composed in those lyric modes. Had he found them intractable to his
language or to his own bent? Having pushed allusiveness beyond the ken
of any considerable audience, had he learned that lyric is remote at its
peril? We may guess part of the answer from the times.
Renaissance lyric thrived on learning so long as it was addressed to a
special audience and sought reputation with patrons to whom learning
might be useful in their dependents. The poet courtier naturally
flattered princes or their ministers by assuming their familiarity with
the classics as he displayed his own. But the printers had been widening
the audience. Though 1550 was too early for what we now call a reading
public, there was a widening circle, especially in the commercial cities,
of readers who had some culture and desired more. Poets could begin to
address these directly. Forty years later Spenser, still practicing
encomium to win a position in which he could write, felt an English
reading public and harmonized a long stanza without exhibiting Greek
metric. Though Renaissance lyric remained largely aristocratic, even
Ronsard, aristocrat himself, might find the mission of dispensing fame
smaller than the opportunity of wider hearing.
For such wider appeal the readiest mode was the sonnet. Accepting Marot’s
scheme, Ronsard restricted his own practice to a few types especially
suited to music. In thus using the new polyphonic art of voice with
string accompaniment he applied the ancient idea of a sung lyric to the
actual singing of his time. Modulating his many sonnets expertly, he
showed equal control in other stanzas. That these familiar forms became
a fitter pattern for Ronsard than the ode seems to us demonstrated by
literary history. His Pindarics have been relegated to the museum; his
more acclimated Horatian odes have been neglected; but time has not
dimmed:
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, deuidant & filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerueillant,
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que i’estois belle.
Lors vous n’aurez seruante oyant telle nouuelle,
Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille resueillant,
Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.
Ie seray sous la terre & fantôme sans os
Par les ombres myrteux ie prendray mon repos:
Vous serez au fouyer vne vieille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour & vostre fier desdain.
Viuez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:
Cueillez dés auiourdhuy les roses de la vie.[28]
Life is short; “gather ye roses while ye may”; the theme is perennial,
a lyric commonplace. The rendering of it has often been conventional,
but often, as here, individual because intensely realized. The sonnet is
direct, immediate, in renouncing all elaboration and all distraction.
There are no allusions, only images. Candlelight, hearth, loom, song,
spoken words, are the sharper because they are unmodified. There are
few adjectives. The lyric is simplified. But the images of attitude and
gesture are iterated to lead the mood: “assise auprès du feu, dévidant
et filant,” “à demi sommeillant ... réveillant,” “accroupie.” This is
the diction of the lyrics that have no date. For the point is not the
abstract superiority of the sonnet as a verse form; it is the appeal of
form and diction alike to a wider audience, the communication of poetry
rather than its exhibition. Ronsard shows this power of direct appeal
in his equally popular _Mignonne, allons voir si la rose_. Included in
his first book of odes, this has no Greek strangeness. By 1550, having
explored more remote modes to answer the special demand of his circle and
his own bent toward learning, he returned to the lyric forms that had
become familiar.
The sonnet sequence, the use of the sonnet as a lyric unit in a progress
suggesting narrative, was more distinctly developed in England. Though
Ronsard’s sonnets appear in series, as addressed to Cassandre, Marie, or
Hélène, the enchaining is more evident in Sidney’s _Astrophel and Stella_
and in Shakspere. Spenser, fully aware of the Pléiade, gave himself no
such strict schooling as Ronsard’s. He usually stopped short of ancient
stanza and of borrowed phrase. But he relied longer on mythological
allusions. Thus he decorated not only the _Faerie Queene_, but even his
lyric triumph, the _Epithalamion_. Ronsard’s later verse makes slighter
and more considerate use of such ornament; Spenser’s last poem still
turns to the nymphs, to Jupiter and Leda, and to Hesper. The Renaissance
lyric experience may be summed up in these two poets. Devoted to national
revival of vernacular poetry, nourished by Latin and by Greek antiquity,
expert metrists, they show together the limits of imitative classicism.
Responding to the special demands of their time, they used the classics
to certify their learning. Thus their lyric medium was surcharged. Its
forms were sometimes so strange, its diction often so overloaded, as
to sacrifice lyric directness, especially the immediate transmission
of sensations. Lyric allusiveness was pushed beyond its lyric value.
With lesser poets it often sufficed as an end in itself. Renaissance
“enrichment” often became mere decorative dilation. But Ronsard, and then
Spenser, lived to fuse their experience of classicism in their appeal to
coming lovers of poetry.
2. PASTORAL
Pastoral is an old dream. Classified by modern psychology as escape,
it has been in various forms the poetry of the city wistful for the
country. The word, denoting shepherds, at the same time connotes that its
shepherds are not real, but fictitious. Whether allegorized or otherwise
manipulated, they are not the actual men who throughout history have
tended beasts by day and night in the open, not actual Sicilians, not
even the shepherds who in the Nativity plays brought English toys to the
infant Saviour. All these are real; the shepherds of pastoral, wearing
shepherd’s clothes, sing other songs. Artificial, indeed, pastoral has
often been, and is easily, but not always, not necessarily. The city
dream of the country “simple life” is after all a recurrent fact. Though
it may be sentimentalized, conventionalized, rhetoricated, so may the
other dreams. Instead of ruling out this one, we may examine its literary
vitality. Besides, it has a special claim. Pastoral, ranging all the way
from lyric through narrative to dramatic, and from Alexandrian Greek to
Elizabethan English, offered in its Renaissance vogue a wide school of
imitation.
Renaissance taste in Greek inclined to that later literature called
Alexandrian: to neo-Platonism, to the rhetoric of Hermogenes, to
Callimachus oftener than to Pindar, to the Byzantine imitators of
Anacreon and the Byzantine Anthology of epigrams, to the descriptive
show-pieces inserted in that late oratory called sophistic and in the
“Greek Romances,” both the long melodramas narrated by Apollonius,
Heliodorus, and Tatius and the idyllic _Daphnis and Chloe_ of that Longus
who was called “the sophist.” But the Renaissance literary creed for
Latin was classicism. Inclined rather to the dilation of such later poets
as Lucan, and even to Ausonius and Claudian, the Renaissance professed
its faith in the artistic restraint of Vergil. Now pastoral had the
promise of reconciling Alexandria with imperial Rome. It could turn for
decoration both to the sophists and to Ovid. It was both Theocritus and
Vergil.
The extant poems of Theocritus are by no means all pastoral. Called
Idylls, that is little poems, they are love lyrics (II, III, XX);
epigrams, that is, inscriptions of the sort collected in the _Anthology_
(XXVIII and the following); myths (I in part, XI, XIII, XXIV-V); encomia
(XIV in part, XVI-XVIII, XXII); and mimes, that is, dramatic dialogues
(X, XV). Only seven of those that are surely his are such poetry-matches
between shepherds as came to be called eclogues (I, IV-VII, X in part,
XIV). Though this charming variety has suggested to modern critics hints
for later pastoral development, especially toward drama, the vivacious
realistic dialogue (XV) between two city women at the festival of Adonis
is essentially different from pastoral. Nor is it true to either poet to
say that pastoral with Theocritus was fresh and natural; with Vergil it
became artificial. Both poets knew the country, Vergil apparently better
than Theocritus; but neither gives it that direct, immediate expression
which in modern times has been called nature poetry. Theocritus is
specific with wild olive, peas, and acorns; sometimes concrete with
a smoky hen-roost, waving green leaves, or a crested lark. For an
Alexandrian he is exceptionally free from the dilation of descriptive
show-pieces; but he has the Alexandrian habit of seeing nature through
art. Gorgo and Praxinoa (XV) are conveyed by their chatter; and the
dirge to Adonis describes the _putti_ on the ceremonial coverlet as like
fledgling nightingales trying their wings. Sicily is romantic for us with
blue sea, wild uplands, and volcanic steeps. The shepherds of Theocritus
live nearer to sophisticated Syracuse or Agrigentum, or to the other
western cities of ancient Greece. Unlike enough otherwise, Theocritus and
Vergil are alike in viewing the country through the eyes of the city.
The _Bucolics_ of Vergil established pastoral in its most familiar
pattern. One of the few schoolbooks to hold their place from ancient into
modern times, they have drilled into successive thousands the poetic
scheme of a lyric contest for some rustic prize, and the idea that this
contest, symbolizing some other more momentous, may express the poet’s
own hopes and fears. Thus in school, as from time immemorial boys got
their first notions of worldly wisdom by memorizing Latin beast-fables,
so they learned Latin grammar, with Latin verse, from shepherd rivalries
typifying wider struggles. Since many Renaissance boys continued to
imitate the _Bucolics_ when they grew up, many Renaissance eclogues
are published themes. That Vergil’s eclogues have survived all this is
evidence of immortality. They need no further praise; but having been
used for grammar, they need to be read again for poetry and for literary
history.
The inspiration of Theocritus, gracefully acknowledged by Vergil (IV,
VI, X), is hardly of style. The avoidance of descriptive dilation, the
preference of specific indication to ornament, are Vergil’s own choice.
Pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen (I. 69)
More characteristic of his economy is his use of concrete predicates.
Molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,
Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva;
Et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella (IV. 28).
More concise than Theocritus in style, and graver, he is quite
independent in composition. The _Pharmaceutria_ (VIII) owes to the second
idyll of Theocritus little but the subject. The encomium of _Pollio_
(IV), instead of following the sophistic recipe item by item, selects
and weaves into an integrated vision of the Golden Age. But such economy
of phrase and movement seems to have had less influence in making his
eclogues models than his use of shepherd rivalries to suggest larger
struggles and personal concerns.
Moralized eclogue was familiar from the schoolbook called _Auctores
octo_. As used at Troyes in 1436, this collection contained, with an
_Isopet_ (Aesop’s fables), a _Cathonet_ (maxims of Cato), and other
medieval compends, a _Théodolet_. The work thus familiarly styled is
_Theodulus_ (or _Liber Theoduli_), _ecloga qua comparantur miracula
Veteris Testamenti cum veterum poetarum commentis_. It matches pagan
with Christian instances in a contest of Falsehood (Pseustis) with Truth
(Alethia) which is judged by Reason (Phronesis). Probably of the ninth
century, it was printed as late as the sixteenth.[29] Literary use of
Latin eclogues during the intervening centuries is sufficiently indicated
by Dante’s in reply to Giovanni di Virgilio. Petrarch’s Vergilian
_Bucolicum carmen_ expresses the actual conflict of Christian with pagan
poetry. Boccaccio’s eclogues are less distinctive than his Italian prose
narrative _Ameto_. Though this is far longer than any previous pastoral
and is dilated with lavish description, it must be remembered not only
for its pastoral setting, but for its alternations of verse and for its
myth. The successive interviews of the shepherd with the nymphs and
demigoddesses symbolize the progress from earthly to heavenly love.[30]
But humanism must have its own eclogues and its own symbolism. The
eclogues (1498) of Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo, known as Mantuanus,
1448-1513) were lifted out of the humanist throng by being adopted for
use in school. The imitation thus invited through some two hundred
years was the easier because they are far less concise than Vergil’s.
Vicar General of the Carmelites, Mantuan doubtless owed some of his
vogue to his edification. Nevertheless he admits that classicizing
which Erasmus attacked later as paganizing: _Tonans_, for instance,
or _Regnator Olympi_ for God. Eclogue III presents the convention of
hopeless, ill-starred love; IX, the conventional contrast of country to
city; but X makes the shepherds debate the actual controversy over the
Observantists. Eclogue IV finds women still, as of old, _servile genus_,
_crudele_, _superbum_. Most of its examples being classical, boys could
learn simultaneously to recognize allusions and to beware women. Mantuan
occasionally indulges in word-play.
invida res amor est, res invidiosa voluptas (II. 167).
Nescio quis ventos tempestatesque gubernat;
id scio (sed neque si scio, sat scio, sed tamen ausim
dicere—quid?) (III. 12-14).
his igitur quae scire nefas nescire necesse est
posthabitis (III. 41-42).
He may overlook an awkward internal rhyme.
quae mea s_it_ me cog_it_ amor sententia fari
liberaque ora fac_it_ (II. 160-61).
But generally he is as accomplished in ease as in classicism.
Six years after Mantuan’s collection, another Italian writer of
Latin eclogues, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), published a vernacular
pastoral, _Arcadia_ (1504),[31] so widely popular as to become almost
the sixteenth-century type. Though the name is Greek, Arcadia and
Arcadian have been ever since reminiscent of Sannazaro. Through him,
more than through any other single influence, vernacular pastoral
spread over western Europe. For he gathered up in prose narrative with
verse interludes most of what pastoral in its long history had become.
Saturated in Vergil, familiar among the other Latin poets and with Greek,
he had caught the possibilities of Boccaccio’s _Ameto_; and though he
weaves throughout from literature, never directly from life, he was
artist enough to weave originally. The _Arcadia_ shows Renaissance
imitation at its best.
Apter most often to attract the eye are the tall and spreading
trees reared by nature on rugged mountains than the cultivated
plants pruned by expert hands in decorative gardens; and
much apter to please the ear the wild birds singing on green
branches amid solitary thickets than among city crowds the
trained ones in winsome and decorated cages. For which reason
the woodland songs, too, methinks, inscribed in the stiff bark
of beeches no less delight the reader than the choice verses
written on the fair pages of illuminated volumes; and the waxed
reeds of the shepherds in their flowery valleys offer perchance
a pleasanter sound than the polished and vaunted instruments of
the musicians in halls of ceremony. And who doubts that more
attractive to human minds is a fountain springing naturally
from the living rock, surrounded by green herbage, than all
the others made by art of whitest marble resplendent with
gold? Surely, as I believe, no one. Relying, therefore, on
this, I may well on these deserted slopes, to the listening
trees and to such few shepherds as may be there, tell the
rude eclogues springing from the vein of nature, leaving them
as bare of ornament as I heard them sung by the shepherds of
Arcadia to the liquid murmur of their fountains. For to these
not once, but a thousand times, the mountain gods, won by
their sweetness, gave attentive ear; and the tender nymphs,
forgetting to chase their wandering prey, left their quivers
and bows beneath the lofty pines of Menalus and Lycus. Whence
I, if I may, would rather have the glory of putting my lips to
the humble reed of Corydon, given him long ago by Dametas as
a precious gift, than to the resounding clarinet of Pallas,
with which the presumptuous satyr challenged Apollo to his own
destruction. For surely it is better to cultivate well a little
plot than to leave a great one by ill management foully crowded
with stubble.
There lies toward the summit of Parthenio, no mean mountain
of shepherd Arcadia, a delectable plain, not very ample in
size, being bounded by the build of the place, but so full
of fine and greenest herbage that only the sportive flocks,
feeding there greedily, hinder perpetual verdure. [Follows a
list of its trees, with appropriate adjectives and allusions.
In spring, when the glade is at its best, shepherds meet there
to match their skill with lance or bow, with leap and rustic
song. At such a time Ergasto, moping apart, was challenged by
Selvaggio in _terza rima_.]
Such are the prelude to _Arcadia_ and its first eclogue; and so it
continues. For the whole book is an alternating series of prose
descriptions and lyrics. There is no narrative sequence and arrival.
We are bidden to linger in Arcadia, to move only from one grouping to
another. The alternation of prose and verse, as old as Boethius, was
new for pastoral. For its time the fluent rhythmic prose, at once easy
and regulated, was the distinctive achievement. The verse is competent
in a considerable range of meters. Both prose and verse, whether in
reminiscence of pastoral hexameters or in feeling for a rhythm natural to
Italian speech, are largely dactylic. Meter XII ends with a dactyl every
one of its 325 lines; but Sannazaro’s habit is no such _tour de force_.
His dactyls are not insistent; they are merely predominant in a pleasant
variety. For he is studious of variation. In the first eclogue Ergasto’s
reply links some ten tercets by internal rhyme (lines 61-91):
Menando un giorno l’agni presso un fi_ume_,
Viddi un bel l_ume_ in mezzo di quell’_onde_,
Che con due bi_onde_ trezze allor me str_inse_,
Et me dip_inse_ un volto in mezzo al c_ore_,
Che di col_ore_ avanza lacte e r_ose_;
Poy si nasc_ose_ immodo dentro all’_alma_,
Che d’altra s_alma_ non me aggrava il peso.
and then resumes the _terza rima_. In Meter II, lines 86-96, the
responses begin by repeating the rival’s last line, somewhat as in the
refrains of popular poetry. Sannazaro is a careful artist.
The diction achieves a pretty balance between ease and suggestiveness.
Easy with conventionally appropriate adjectives and fluent cadences,
it is full of echoes. At once we are reminded of Vergil, soon of Ovid,
Horace, Theocritus, Catullus, and also of their imitators. The great
range of this appropriation can be measured by the crowded footnotes
of the commentators; but without measuring, sometimes without distinct
recognition, we hear a constant accompaniment. Renaissance allusiveness,
too often paraded, is here subdued to serve the pastoral mood. Vergil was
in this glade. Theocritus set such a jar for the rustic prize. This myth
is prettiest in Ovid. But though an allusion lurks under every bush, it
will not leap out to detain us. Whatever pastoral poets we know help to
make us yield ourselves with at least a wistful “Et ego in Arcadia vixi.”
Tasso, indeed, was to outdo him with _Aminta_; but the difference is in
degree, not in method. In 1504 Sannazaro succeeded at the Renaissance
task of making literature out of literature.
Dramatic pastoral was one of the forms of Renaissance pageantry. It put
shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs on the stage to enhance the celebration
of court festivity with scenic device and music. It gave mythology
representation without changing the pastoral type.
Though carefully limited in time to secure consecutive action, Tasso’s
_Aminta_[32] is much less dramatic than pastoral. It weaves within the
dramatic frame the pastoral tissue of wistful reminiscence. It revives
the ancient dream of the Golden Age, not only through scenery and the
music of instruments and of verse, but by constant allusiveness of style.
Within twenty-five pages Solerti’s notes record echoes of Sappho,
Theocritus, and Achilles Tatius; of Lucretius, Vergil (oftenest),
Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Claudian, Statius,
Nemesianus, Calpurnius, Cornelius Gallus; of Dante, Petrarch (oftenest),
Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Bembo—but why go on? Even so heavy a
charge of reminiscence is managed without overloading. The _Aminta_ is
the most consistent, as it is perhaps the most accomplished, example
of this form of Renaissance borrowing. Tasso makes discreet use of
alliteration and of word-play. His musical verse should be heard, not
merely read. The pervasive harmony, various and subtle, can be but
suggested by underlining a few recurrences in the opening scene.
L’acqua e le ghi_and_e ed or l’acqua e le ghi_and_e,
Sono cibo e bev_and_a.
Che tu dim_and_i am_ant_e ed _i_o nem_i_co
La v_it_a s’avv_it_icchia a’l suo marito.
The delicate weaving of sound and sense, allusion and image, has not
faded. Few works of the Renaissance have had more modern admirers than
the _Aminta_.
The continuance of the type and the spread of its vogue appear in the
twelve eclogues of the _Shepherds’ Calendar_ (1579). Spenser turned to it
as to the established European form in which to prove oneself classical
and offer one’s poetic encomium. It was the obvious medium by which to
win rank as a poet. But at once appears a marked difference. Instead of
relying on the pastoral fund of allusion, Spenser provides an apparatus
of explanation: a dedicatory epistle, a general argument for the whole
series, a prefatory argument for each eclogue, and a gloss. The last
explains even obvious classical allusions, interprets the allegory,
indicates that this phrase is taken from Theocritus and that from Vergil,
and sometimes adds learned references. Did English readers need all this?
The answer is not that Sidney, Leicester, Raleigh, Burleigh, Elizabeth
herself, had not read Vergil and Mantuan, but rather that Spenser, even
while he must still depend for a living on the court, was conscious of a
wider audience. There were already English lovers of poetry, and there
were soon to be more, who, having less culture than they desired, were
glad to be guided in Arcadia.
The gloss also supports Spenser’s attempt to make his pastoral English.
It explains his deliberate archaism; for he tries to recall the language
of Chaucer without quite understanding it himself. Though of course he
caught Chaucer’s drift, he did not always catch his rhythms, nor even his
grammar. Archaism, dubious enough in itself, is thus doubly dubious here.
The diction of pastoral has an added strangeness. Sidney deplored this in
his _Defense of Poesy_: “That same framing of his stile to an old rustick
language I dare not alowe, sith neyther _Theocritus_ in Greeke, _Virgill_
in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it.” Ben Jonson’s dismissal
may be blunt; but it is precise: “Spenser in affecting the ancients writ
no language.” If such diction may occasionally suggest actual country
speech, it is but the farther removed from the pastoral mood.
Spenser’s eclogues are English also in their nationalist fear and
scorn of Rome. Cultivated by government policy, this was so widespread
as to assure him a response. Moreover pastoral had always expressed
controversies beyond shepherds. But pastoral allegory has been most
acceptable when it is least local. Mantuan’s Observantist discussion
and Spenser’s “Papists” have long been tedious. We might look them up
in the footnotes, if they did not seem too remote from the concerns of
the Golden Age. For pastoral at its best is not English, nor French, nor
Italian; it is Arcadian, translatable readily into any language because
it has no country. Its allusiveness breaks down when it sends us to a
guidebook.
Otherwise Spenser’s eclogues are not distinctive. Their verbal mythology
is discreetly limited to familiar deities; their imitation, except for
one paraphrase of Marot, is of the usual authors; their pattern is the
Vergilian type. If the April encomium of Elizabeth is fulsome, that
was the habit of her court. If the metric is sometimes disappointing
with crowded stresses, or padded rhymes, or even jingle, that is
because Spenser was experimenting. The significance of the _Shepherds’
Calendar_ is not its pastoral achievement, but its use of the mode to win
recognition and its attempt to push pastoral farther than it would go.
In spite of its pastoral title, Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ (c. 1583)
has a different pattern. Though it has incidental pastoral, its design is
that of the long, loose, complicated, melodramatic tales of Alexandria
known as the Greek Romances. These decadent Greek prose stories had wide
circulation in the Renaissance; and one, the _Daphnis and Chloe_, is both
better organized than most of them and clearly reminiscent of pastoral.
Since its vogue was increased by the French translation of Amyot, it
may be counted among Renaissance pastoral influences. For pastoral has
appeared again and again not as the main intention of a whole work,
but as an incidental interest. Though Renaissance imitation was thus
sometimes of style, sometimes merely of decoration, it was also quite
clearly the study of an ancient literary form.