_THE IDYLLISTS._
Theocritus; his Life.--The Canon of his Poems.--The Meaning
of the Word Idyl.--Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome,
Modern Europe.--The Scenery of Theocritus.--Relation of
Southern Nature to Greek Mythology and Greek Art.--Rustic
Life and Superstitions.--Feeling for Pure Nature in
Theocritus.--How Distinguished from the same Feeling in
Modern Poets.--Galatea.--Pharmaceutria.--Hylas.--Greek
Chivalry.--The Dioscuri.--Thalysia.--Bion.--The Lament for
Adonis.--Moschus.--Europa.--Megara.--Lament for Bion.--The
Debts of Modern Poets to the Idyllists.
Of the lives of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus there is very little
known, and that little has been often repeated. Theocritus was a
Syracusan, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna. Some confusion as to
his parentage arose from the fact that in the seventh idyl Theocritus
introduced himself under the artificial name of Simichidas, which
led early critics to suppose he had a father called Simichus. It is,
however, quite clear that the concurrent testimony of Suidas and of
an epigram in the anthology, which distinctly asserts his descent
from Praxagoras and Philinna, is to be accepted in preference to all
conjectures founded on a _nom de plume_. Theocritus flourished between
283 and 263 B.C., but the dates and circumstances of his birth and
death are alike unknown. We may gather, inferentially or directly
from his poems, that he sought the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus
at Alexandria, and lived for some time among the men of letters at
his court. Indeed, Theocritus was the most brilliant ornament of that
somewhat artificial period of literature; he above all the Alexandrian
poets carried the old genius of Greece into new channels instead of
imitating, annotating, and rehandling ancient masterpieces. The sixth
and seventh idyls prove that Aratus, the astronomer, was a familiar
friend of the Syracusan bard; probably the frequent allusions to
meteorology and the science of the stars which we trace in the poems of
Theocritus may be referred to this intimacy. From the idyls, again, we
learn that the poet left Alexandria wearied with court life, and, like
Spenser, unwilling
To lose good nights that might be better spent,
To waste long days in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, and pine with fear and sorrow.
He seems, however, to have once more made trial of princely favor at
the Syracusan court of Hiero, and to have been as much offended with
the want of appreciation and good taste as with the illiberality that
he found there. Among his friends were numbered Nicias, the physician
of Miletus, and his wife Theugenis, to whom he addressed the beautiful
little poem called #êlakatê#, or _The Distaff_--a charming specimen of
what the Greek muse could produce by way of _vers de société_. The end
of his life is buried in obscurity. We can easily believe that he spent
it quietly among the hills and fields of Sicily, in close communion
with the nature that he loved so well. His ill success as a court poet
does not astonish us; the panegyrics of Hiero and Ptolemy are among
his worst poems--mere pinchbeck when compared with the pure gold of
the idyls proper. It was in scenes of natural beauty that he felt at
home, and when he died he left a volume of immortal verse, each line of
which proclaims of him--"Et ego in Arcadia." We cannot give him a more
fitting epitaph than that of his own Daphnis:
#eba rhoon; eklyse dina
ton Môsais philon andra, ton ou Nymphaisin apechthê.#[142]
If we know little of Theocritus, less is known of Bion. Suidas says
that he was born at Smyrna, and the elegy written on his death leads
us to suppose that he lived in Sicily, and died of poison wilfully
administered by enemies. Theocritus, though his senior in age and
his predecessor in bucolic poetry, seems to have survived him.
Bion's elegist, from which the few facts which we have related with
regard to the poet of Smyrna's life and untimely death are gathered,
has generally been identified with Moschus. Ahrens, however, with
characteristic German scepticism, places the #Epitaphios Biônos#
upon a list of _Incertorum Idyllia_. Nor can it be denied that the
author of this poem leads us to believe that he was a native of Magna
Græcia, whereas Moschus is known to have been a Syracusan. The third
and last of the Sicilian idyllists, he stands at a great distance
from Theocritus in all essential qualities of pastoral composition.
He has more of the grammarian or man of erudition about him; and we
can readily conceive him to have been, according to the account of
Suidas, a friend of Aristarchus. Of the dates of his life nothing can
be recorded with any certainty. He seems to have lived about the end of
the third century B.C.
During the short period in which bucolic poetry flourished under
Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, Syracuse remained beneath the sceptre
of Hiero. While the bloody strife was being waged between Rome and
Carthage for the empire of the Mediterranean, Syracuse, intermediate
between the two great combatants, was able not only to maintain a
splendid independence under the sway of her powerful tyrant, but also
to afford the Romans signal aid upon the battle-fields of Sicily. In
Sicily the sun of Greece still shone with some of its old radiance on
the spots where, before Athens had assumed the intellectual supremacy
of Hellas, poetry, philosophy, and all the arts of life had first
displayed their splendid spring-time. The island in which the April of
the Greek spirit had disclosed its earliest flowers now bore the last
but not least lovely wreath of autumn. The winter was soon coming.
Rome and her Verres were already looking upon Trinacria as their prey;
and the idyllic garland was destined to crown with exotic blossoms the
brows of Virgil.
About the authenticity of many of the idyls grave questions have been
raised. It is hard to believe that all the thirty which bear the
name of Theocritus were really written by him. The twenty-third and
twenty-fifth, for instance, are not in his style; while the nineteenth
reminds us more of the Anacreontic elegance of Bion or Moschus than of
his peculiarly vigorous workmanship. The twenty-ninth, again, though
admitted as genuine by Ahrens, might well pass for the work of an
earlier Æolic writer. But, without some shock to my feelings, I cannot
entertain the spuriousness of the twenty-first idyl, which Ahrens
places among the productions of some doubtful author. The whole series
after the eighteenth have been questioned. These, however, include
the epical compositions of Theocritus, who might well have assumed a
different manner when treating of Hercules or the Dioscuri from that in
which he sang the loves of Lycidas and Daphnis. That they are inferior
to his pastorals is not to be wondered at; for he who blows his own
flute with skill may not be, therefore, strong enough to sound the
trumpet of Homer. Ahrens, as observed above, extends his criticism to
the lament for Bion, which, I confess, appears to me more full of fire
and inventive genius than any other of the poems attributed to Moschus.
Yet in these matters of minute evidence too much depends upon mere
conjecture and comparison of styles for us to remove old landmarks
with certainty. Suppose all records of Raphael's works had been lost,
and a few fragments of the Cartoons, together with the Transfiguration
and the little picture of the Sleeping Knight alone remained of all
his paintings, would not some Ahrens be inclined to attribute the
Sleeping Knight to a weaker if not less graceful artist of the Umbrian
school? The _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_ might, by a similar process of
disjunctive criticism, be severed from the _Paradise Lost_. On the
other hand, nothing can be more doubtful than assertions in favor of
authenticity. It is almost impossible for a foreigner to perceive
minute differences of style in the works of two contemporary poets,
and infinitely more difficult for a modern to exercise the same exact
discrimination in deciding on the monuments of classic art. Schlegel,
in his _History of Dramatic Literature_, asserts that he discovers no
internal difference between Massinger and Fletcher. Yet an English
student is struck by the most marked divergences of feeling, language,
natural gifts, and acquired habits of thought in these two dramatists.
Thus the difficulty of such criticism is twofold. If a Syracusan of
200 B.C. could discuss our lucubrations on the text of the bucolic
poets, he would probably in one case express astonishment at our having
ascribed two dissimilar idyls to Theocritus, and in another case
explain away our scepticism by enumerating the three or four successive
manners of the poet. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus are the eponyms of
idyllic poetry. To each belongs a peculiar style. It is quite possible
that some idyls of successful imitators whose names have been lost may
have been fathered upon the three most eminent founders of the school.
The name of the idyl sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little
picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of
personal experience supply the idyllist with subjects. He does not
treat them lyrically, following rather the rules of epic and dramatic
composition. Generally there is a narrator, and in so far the idyl is
epic; its verse, too, is the hexameter. But occasionally the form of
dramatic monologue, as in the _Pharmaceutria_, or that of dramatic
dialogue, as in the _Adoniazusæ_, takes the place of narrative. Bion's
lament for Adonis, again, is a kind of sacred hymn; while the dirge
on Bion's death is elegiac. Two idyls of Theocritus are encomiastic;
several celebrate the deeds of ancestral Doric heroes--Herakles and
the Dioscuri. One is an epistle. Many of Bion's so-called idyls differ
little, except in metre, from the Anacreontics, while one at least
of the most highly finished pieces of Theocritus must be ranked with
erotic poetry of the purely lyrical order. It will be seen from these
instances that the idyllic genus admitted many species, and that
the idyllists were far from being simply pastoral poets. This form
of composition was, in fact, the growth of a late age of Greek art,
when the great provinces had been explored and occupied, and when the
inventor of a new style could legitimately adopt the tone and manner
of his various predecessors. Perhaps the plastic arts determined the
direction of idyllic poetry, suggesting the name and supplying the
poet with models of compact and picturesque treatment. In reading the
idyls it should never be forgotten that they are pictures, so studied
and designed by their authors. They ought to affect us in the same way
as the bass-reliefs and vases of Greek art, in which dramatic action
is presented at one moment of its evolution, and beautiful forms are
grouped together with such simplicity as to need but little story to
enhance their value. If we approach the idyls from this point of view,
and regard them as very highly finished works of decorative art, we
shall probably be able to enjoy their loveliness without complaining
that the shepherds and shepherdesses are too refined, or that the
landscapes have not been drawn from nature.
Without discussing the whole hackneyed question of bucolic poetry, a
word must be said about its origin, and about the essential difference
between Theocritus and modern pastorals. It is natural to suppose that
country folk, from the remotest period of Greek history, refreshed
themselves with dance and song, and that music formed a part of their
religious ceremonials. The trials of strength which supply the _motive_
of so many Theocritean idyls were quite consistent with the manners
of the Greeks, who brought all rival claims of superiority to the
touchstone of such contests. Their antiquity in the matter of music
may be gathered from the legends of Pan and Apollo, and of Apollo and
Marsyas. Phoebus, in the character of shepherd to Admetus, gave divine
sanction to bucolic minstrelsy. In respect of bodily strength, the
gymnastic rivalry of Olympia and other great Hellenic centres was so
important as to determine the chronology of Greece, while even claims
to personal beauty were decided by the same trial: the three goddesses
submitted to the arbitration of Paris; and there were in many states
#aristeia# of physical charms, not to mention the boys' prize for
kisses at Nisæan Megara. Bucolic poetry may therefore be referred to
the pastoral custom of shepherds singing together and against each
other at festivals or on the green.
It was the genius of Theocritus in all probability which determined the
Doric and Sicilian character of the idyls we possess. He, a Syracusan
and a Dorian, perfected the _genre_, and was followed by his imitators.
Nothing can be more simple and lifelike than the conversations of
his rustics, or more nicely discriminated than the pedestrian style
of their dialogue and the more polished manner of their studied
songs. The poet has, no doubt, invested these rural encounters with
the imaginative beauty which belongs to art. He has attributed to
Corydon and Thyrsis much of his own imagination and delicate taste and
exquisite sense of natural loveliness. Had he refrained from doing
so, his idyls would not have challenged the attention and won the
admiration of posterity. As it is, we find enough of rustic grossness
on his pages, and even complain that his cowherds and goatherds savor
too strongly of their stables. Of his appreciation of scenery it is
difficult to speak in terms of exaggerated praise. As I purpose to
discuss this subject more minutely further on, it may here be enough to
remark that he alone of pastoral poets drew straight from nature, and
fully felt the charm which underlies the facts of rustic life.
In comparison with Theocritus, Bion and Moschus are affected and
insipid. Their pastorals smack of the study more than of the fields.
Virgil not only lacks his vigor and enthusiasm for the open-air life of
the country, but, with Roman bad taste, he commits the capital crime of
allegorizing. Virgil's pernicious example infected Spenser, Milton, and
a host of inferior imitators, flooding literature with dreary pastorals
in which shepherds discussed politics, religion, and court-gossip, so
that at last bucolic poetry became a synonym for everything affected
and insipid. Poetry flourishes in cities, where rustic song must
always be an exotic plant. To analyze Poliziano, Sanazaro, Guarini,
Tasso, Spenser, Fletcher, Jonson, Barnfield, Browne, Pope, etc., and
to show what strains of natural elegance adorn their imitations of the
ancients, would be a very interesting but lengthy task. As society
became more artificial, especially at Florence, Paris, and Versailles,
the taste for pseudo-pastorals increased. Court-ladies tucked up
their petticoats and carried crooks with ribbons at their tops, while
court-poets furnished aristocratic Corydons with smooth verses about
pipes and pine-trees, and lambs and wattled cotes. The whole was a
dream and a delusion; but this mirage of rusticity appropriated the
_name_ of pastoral, and reflected discredit even on the great and
natural Theocritus. At length this _genre_ of composition, in which
neither invention nor observation nor truth nor excellence of any kind
except inglorious modulation of old themes was needed, died a natural
death; and the true bucolic genius found fresh channels. Crabbe revived
an interest in village life; Burns sang immortal lyrics at the plough;
Goethe achieved a masterpiece of idyllic delineation; Wordsworth
reasserted the claims of natural simplicity; Keats expressed the
sensuous charms of rustic loveliness; Tennyson and Barnes have written
rural idyls in the dialects of Lincolnshire and Dorsetshire; while
other writers are pursuing similar lines of composition. Theocritus,
it is true, differs widely from these poets both in his style and
matter. But he deserves to rank among the most realistic artists of the
nineteenth century on account of his simplicity and perfect truth to
nature. In reading him we must divest ourselves of any prejudices which
we have acquired from the perusal of his tasteless imitators. We must
take his volume with us to the scenes in which he lived, and give him a
fair trial on his own merits.
It is on the shores of the Mediterranean--at Sorrento, at Amalfi,
or near Palermo, or among the valleys of Mentone--that we ought to
study Theocritus, and learn the secret of his charm.[143] Few of us
pass middle life without visiting one or other of these sacred spots,
which seem to be the garden of perpetual spring. Like the lines of
the Sicilian idyllist, they inspire an inevitable and indescribable
#pothos#, touching our sense of beauty with a subtle power, and
soothing our spirits with the majesty of classical repose. Straight
from the sea-beach rise mountains of distinguished form, not capped
with snow or clothed with pines, but carved of naked rock. We must
accept their beauty as it is, nude, well defined, and unadorned, nor
look in vain for the mystery or sublimity or picturesqueness of the
Alps. Light and color are the glory of these mountains. Valleys divide
their flanks, seaming with shadow-belts and bands of green the broad
hillside, while lower down the olives spread a hoary grayness and
soft robe of silver mist, the skirts of which are kissed by tideless
waves. The harmony between the beauty of the olive-boughs and the
blue sea can be better felt than described. Guido, whose subtlety of
sentiment was very rare, has expressed it in one or two of his earliest
and best pictures by graduated tones of silver, azure and cool gray.
The definite form and sunny brightness of the olive-tree suits our
conception of the Greek character. It may well have been the favorite
plant of the wise and calm Athene. Oaks with their umbrageous foliage,
pine-trees dark and mournful upon Alpine slopes, branching limes, and
elms in which the wind sways shadowy masses of thick leaves, belong,
with their huge girth and gnarled boles and sombre roof-age, to the
forests of the North, where nature is rather an awful mother than a
kind foster-nurse and friend of man. In northern landscapes the eye
travels through vistas of leafy boughs to still, secluded crofts and
pastures, where slow-moving oxen graze. The mystery of dreams and the
repose of meditation haunt our massive bowers. But in the South, the
lattice-work of olive boughs and foliage scarcely veils the laughing
sea and bright blue sky, while the hues of the landscape find their
climax in the dazzling radiance of the sun upon the waves, and the
pure light of the horizon. There is no concealment and no melancholy
here. Nature seems to hold a never-ending festival and dance, in
which the waves and sunbeams and shadows join. Again, in Northern
scenery, the rounded forms of full-foliaged trees suit the undulating
country, with its gentle hills and brooding clouds; but in the South
the spiky leaves and sharp branches of the olive carry out the defined
outlines which are everywhere observable through the broader beauties
of mountain and valley and sea-shore. Serenity and intelligence
characterize this Southern landscape, in which a race of splendid men
and women lived beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god.
Pallas protected them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty.
Nations as great and noble have arisen among the oak and beech woods
of the North; strong-sinewed warriors, heroic women, counsellors with
mighty brains, and poets on whose tongue the melody of music lingers
like a charm. But the Greeks alone owned the gift of innate beauty
and unerring taste. The human form, upon those bare and sunny hills,
beneath those twinkling olive-boughs, beside that sea of everlasting
laughter, reached its freedom; and the spirit of human loveliness was
there breathed fully into all the forms of art. Poetry, sculpture,
architecture, music, dancing, all became the language of that moderate
and lucid harmony which we discover in the landscape of the Greeks.
Olives are not, however, by any means the only trees which play a part
in idyllic scenery. The tall stone-pine is even more important; for,
underneath its shade the shepherds loved to sing, hearing the murmur in
its spreading roof, and waiting for the cones with their sweet fruit to
fall. Near Massa, by Sorrento, there are two gigantic pines so placed
that, lying on the grass beneath them, one looks on Capri rising from
the sea, Baiæ, and all the bay of Naples sweeping round to the base
of Vesuvius. Tangled growths of olives, oranges, and rose-trees fill
the garden-ground along the shore, while far away in the distance pale
Inarime sleeps, with her exquisite Greek name, a virgin island on the
deep. In such a place we realize Theocritean melodies, and find a new
and indestructible loveliness in the opening line of his first idyl:
#hady ti to psithyrisma kai ha pitys, aipole, têna.#
These pines are few and far between. Growing alone or in pairs, they
stand like monuments upon the hills, their black forms sculptured on
the cloudlike olive-groves, from which at intervals spring spires and
columns of slender cypress-trees.
Here and there in this bright garden of the age of gold white
villages are seen, and solitary cottage roofs high up among the
hills--dwellings, perhaps, of Amaryllis, whom the shepherds used to
serenade. Huge fig-trees lean their weight of leaves and purple fruit
upon the cottage walls, while cherry-trees and apricots snow the grass
in spring with a white wealth of April blossoms. The stone walls and
little wells in the cottage gardens are green with immemorial moss
and ferns, and fragrant with gadding violets that ripple down their
sides and checker them with blue. On the wilder hills you find patches
of ilex and arbutus glowing with crimson berries and white waxen
bells, sweet myrtle rods and shafts of bay, frail tamarisk and tall
tree-heaths that wave their frosted boughs above your head. Nearer the
shore the lentisk grows, a savory shrub, with cytisus and aromatic
rosemary. Clematis and polished garlands of tough sarsaparilla wed the
shrubs with clinging, climbing arms; and here and there in sheltered
nooks the vine shoots forth luxuriant tendrils bowed with grapes
stretching from branch to branch of mulberry or elm, flinging festoons
on which young loves might sit and swing, or weaving a lattice-work
of leaves across the open shed. Nor must the sounds of this landscape
be forgotten--sounds of bleating flocks, and murmuring bees, and
nightingales, and doves that moan, and running streams, and shrill
cicadas, and hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There is not a single
detail which a patient student may not verify from Theocritus.
Then, too, it is a landscape in which sea and country are never
sundered. This must not be forgotten of idyllic scenery; for it was
the warm seaboard of Sicily, beneath protecting heights of Ætna, that
gave birth to the bucolic muse. The intermingling of pastoral and sea
life is exquisitely allegorized in the legend of Galatea; and on the
cup which Theocritus describes in his first idyl the fisherman plays
an equal part with the shepherd youths and the boy who watches by the
vineyard wall. The higher we climb upon the mountain-side the more
marvellous is the beauty of the sea, which seems to rise as we ascend
and stretch into the sky. Sometimes a little flake of blue is framed
by olive-boughs, sometimes a turning in the road reveals the whole
broad azure calm below. Or after toiling up a steep ascent we fall upon
the undergrowth of juniper, and lo! a double sea, this way and that,
divided by the sharp spine of the jutting hill, jewelled with villages
along its shore, and smiling with fair islands and silver sails. Upon
the beach the waves come tumbling in, swaying the corallines and green
and purple sea-weeds in the pools. Ceaseless beating of the spray has
worn the rocks into jagged honeycombs, on which lazy fishermen sit
perched, dangling their rods like figures in Pompeian frescos.
In landscapes such as these we are readily able to understand the
legends of rustic gods; the metamorphoses of Syrinx, Narcissus, Echo,
Hyacinthus, and Adonis; the tales of slumbering Pan and horned satyrs
and peeping fauns with which the idyllists have adorned their simple
shepherd songs. Here, too, the Oread dwellers of the hills and dryads
and sylvans and water-nymphs seem possible. They lose their unreality
and mythic haziness; for men themselves are more a part of Nature here
than in the North, more fit for companionship with deities of stream
and hill. Their labors are lighter and their food more plentiful.
Summer leaves them not, and the soil yields fair and graceful crops.
There is surely some difference between hoeing turnips and trimming
olive-boughs, between tending turkeys on a Norfolk common and leading
goats to browse on cytisus beside the shore between the fat pasturage
and bleak winters of our midland counties and the spare herbage of
the South dried by perpetual sunlight. It cannot be denied that men
assimilate something from their daily labor, and that the poetry of
rustic life is more evident upon Mediterranean shores than in England.
Nor must the men and women of classical landscape be forgotten. When we
read the idyls of Theocritus, and wish to see before us Thestylis and
Daphnis and Lycidas, we have but to recall the perfect forms of Greek
sculpture. We may, for instance, summon to our mind the Endymion of
the Capitol, nodding in eternal slumber, with his sheep-dog slumbering
by: or Artemis stepping from her car; her dragons coil themselves
between the shafts and fold their plumeless wings: or else Hippolytus
and Meleager booted for the boar-chase: or Bacchus finding Ariadne
by the sea-shore; mænads and satyrs are arrested in their dance;
flower-garlands fall upon the path; or a goat-legged satyr teaches a
young faun to play; the pipe and flute are there, and from the boy's
head fall long curls upon his neck. Or Europa drops anemone and crocus
from her hand, trembling upon the bull as he swims onward through
the sea: or tritons blow wreathed shells, and dolphins splash the
water: or the eagle's claws clasp Ganymede, and bear him up to Zeus:
or Adonis lies wounded, and wild Aphrodite spreads hungry arms, and
wails with rent robes tossed above her head. From the cabinet of gems
we draw a Love, blind, bound, and stung by bees; or a girl holding an
apple in her hand; or a young man tying on his sandal. Then there is
the Praxitelean genius of the Vatican who might be Hylas, or Uranian
Eros, or Hymenæus, or curled Hyacinthus--- the faun who lies at Munich
overcome with wine, his throat bare, and his deep chest heaving with
the breath of sleep--Hercules strangling the twin snakes in his cradle,
or ponderous with knotty sinews and huge girth of neck--Demeter,
holding fruits of all sorts in one hand and cornstalks in the other,
sweeping her full raiment on the granary floor. Or else we bring again
the pugilist from Caracalla's bath--bruised faces and ears livid with
unheeded blows--their strained arms bound with thongs, and clamps of
iron on their fists. Processions move in endless line, of godlike
youths on prancing steeds, of women bearing baskets full of cakes
and flowers, of oxen lowing to the sacrifice. The Trojan heroes fall
with smiles upon their lips; the athlete draws the strigil down his
arm; the sons of Niobe lie stricken, beautiful in death. Cups, too,
and vases help us, chased with figures of all kinds--dance, festival,
love-making, rustic sacrifice, the legendary tales of hate and woe, the
daily idyls of domestic life.
Such are some of the works of Greek art which we may use in our attempt
to realize Theocritus. Nor need we neglect the monuments of modern
painting--Giorgione's pastoral pictures of piping men and maidens
crowned with jasmine-flowers, Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, and
Tintoretto's Marriage of Ariadne, or the Arcadians of Poussin reading
the tale of death upon the gravestone, and its epitaph--"Et ego."
To reconstruct the mode of life of the Theocritean _dramatis personæ_
is not a matter of much difficulty. Pastoral habits are singularly
unchangeable, and nothing strikes us more than the recurrence of
familiar rustic proverbs, superstitions, and ways of thinking which we
find in the idyllic poets. The mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, of
prosaic interest in worldly affairs and of an unconscious admiration
for the poetry of nature, which George Sand has recently assigned with
delicate analysis to the bucolic character in her Idyls of Nohant,
meets us in every line of the Sicilian pastorals. On the Mediterranean
shores, too, the same occupations have been carried on for centuries
with little interruption. The same fields are being ploughed, the
same vineyards tilled, the same olive-gardens planted, as those in
which Theocritus played as a child. The rocks on which he saw old
Olpis watching for the tunnies, with fishing-reed and rush basket
are still haunted through sunny hours by patient fishermen. Perhaps
they cut their reeds and rushes in the same river-beds; certainly
they use the same sort of #kalamos#. The goats have not forgotten
to crop cytisus and myrtle, nor have the goatherds changed their
shaggy trousers and long crooks. You may still pick out a shepherd
lad among a hundred by his skin and cloak. It is even said that the
country ditties of the Neapolitans are Greek; and how ancient is the
origin of local superstitions who shall say? The country folk still
prefer, like Comatas in the fifth idyl, garden-grown roses to the
wild eglantine and anemones of the hedgerow, scorning what has not
required some cost or trouble for its cultivation. Gretchen's test
of love by blowing on thistle-down does not differ much from that of
the shepherd in the third idyl. Live blood in the eye is still a sign
of mysterious importance (Idyl iii. 36). To spit is still a remedy
against the evil eye (vii. 39). Eunica, the town girl, still turns up
her nose at the awkward cowherd; city and country are not yet wholly
harmonized by improved means of locomotion. Then the people of the
South are perfectly unchanged--the fisher boys of Castellamare; the
tall, straight girls of Capri singing as they walk with pitchers on
their heads and distaffs in their hands; the wild Apulian shepherds;
the men and maidens laughing in the olive-fields or vineyards; the
black-browed beauties of the Cornice trooping to church on Sundays with
gold earrings, and with pink tulip-buds in their dark hair. One thing,
however, is greatly altered. Go where we will, we find no statues of
Priapus and the Nymphs. No lambs are sacrificed to Pan. No honey or
milk is poured upon the altars of the rustic muse. The temples are in
ruins. Aloes and cactuses have invaded the colonnades of Girgenti, and
through the halls of Pæstum winds whistle and sunbeams stream unheeded.
But though the gods are gone, men remain unaltered. A little less
careless, a little more superstitious they may be; but their joys and
sorrows, their vices and virtues, their loves and hates, are still the
same.
Such reflections are trite and commonplace. Yet who can resist the
force of their truth and pathos?
#ouch hamin ton Erôta monois etech', hôs edokeumes,
Nikia, hôitini touto theôn poka teknon egento;
ouch hamin ta kala pratois kala phainetai êmes,
hoi thnatoi pelomestha, to d' aurion ouk esorômes#[144]--
said Theocritus, looking back into the far past, and remembering
that the gifts of love and beauty have belonged to men and gods from
everlasting. With what redoubled force may we, after the lapse of
twenty centuries, echo these words, when we tread the ground he knew
and read the songs he sang! His hills stir our vague and yearning
admiration, his sea laughs its old laugh of waywardness and glee,
his flowers bloom yearly, and fade in the spring, his pine and olive
branches overshadow us; we listen to the bleating of his goats, and
taste the sweetness of the spring from which he drank; the milk and
honey are as fresh upon our lips, the wine in winter by the wood fire,
when the winds are loud is just as fragrant; youth is still youth, nor
have the dark-eyed maidens lost their charm. Truly #ouch hamin ta kala
pratois kala phainetai êmes#. In this consists the power of Theocritean
poetry. It strikes a note which echoes through our hearts by reason
of its genuine simplicity and pathos. The thoughts which natural
beauty stirs in our minds find their embodiment in his sweet, strong
verse; and though since his time the world has grown old, though the
gods of Greece have rent their veils and fled with shrieks from their
sanctuaries, though in spite of ourselves we turn our faces skyward
from the earth, though emaciated saints and martyrs have supplanted
Adonis and the Graces, though the cold, damp shades of Calvinism have
chilled our marrow and our blood, yet there remain deep down within our
souls some primal sympathies with nature, some instincts of the faun or
satyr or sylvan, which education has not quite eradicated. "The hand
which hath long time held a violet doth not soon forego her perfume,
nor the cup from which sweet wine had flowed his fragrance."
I have dwelt long upon the peculiar properties of classical landscape
as described by the Greek idyllists, and as they still exist for
travellers upon the more sheltered shores of the Mediterranean, because
it is necessary to understand them before we can appreciate the _truth_
of Theocritus. Of late years much has been written about the difference
between classical and modern ways of regarding landscape. Mr. Ruskin
has tried to persuade us that the ancients only cared for the more
cultivated parts of nature, for gardens or orchards, from which food or
profit or luxurious pleasure might be derived. And in this view there
is no doubt some truth. The Greeks and Romans paid far less attention
to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled
by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring
landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or
the picturesqueness of decay. In this they resembled all Southern
nations. An Italian of the present day avoids ruinous places and
solitudes however splendid. Among the mountains he complains of the
_brutto paese_ in which he has to live, and is always longing for town
gayeties and the amenities of civilized society.[145] The ancients,
again, despised all interests that pretended to rival the paramount
interest of civic or military life. Seneca's figurative expression
_circum flosculos occupatur_ might be translated literally as applied
to a trifler to denote the scorn which thinkers, statesmen, patriots,
and generals of Greece and Rome felt for mere rural prettiness; while
Quintilian's verdict on Theocritus (whom, however, he allows to be
_admirabilis in suo genere_), _musa illa rustica et pastoralis non
forum modo verum ipsam etiam urbem reformidat_, characterizes the
insensibility of urban intellects to a branch of art which we consider
of high importance. But it is very easy to overstrain this view, and
Mr. Ruskin, perhaps, has laid an undue stress on Homer in his criticism
of the classics, whereas it is among the later Greek and Roman
poets that the analogy of modern literature would lead us to expect
indications of a genuine taste for unadorned nature. These signs the
idyllic poets amply supply; but in seeking for them we must be prepared
to recognize a very different mode of expression from that which
we are used to in the florid poets of the modern age. Conciseness,
simplicity, and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing
attributes of classical descriptive art. Moreover, humanity was always
more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy
from a Greek unless it appeared before him in a human shape, or in
connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe
inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields
and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied
in such poems as Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_ gave birth in their
imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest
and conflict of passions. We who are apt to look for rhapsodies and
brilliant outpourings of eloquent fancy can scarcely bring ourselves to
recollect what a delicate sense of nature and what profound emotions
are implied in the conceptions of Pan and Hyacinthus and Galatea. The
misuse which has been made of mythology by modern writers has effaced
half its vigor and charm. It is only by returning to the nature which
inspired these myths that we can reconstruct their exquisite vitality.
Different ages and nations express themselves by different forms of
art. Music appears to be dominant in the present period; sculpture
ruled among the Greeks, and struck the key-note for all other arts.
Even those sentiments which in our mind are most vague, the admiration
of sunset skies, or flowers or copsewoods in spring, were expressed by
them in the language of definite human form. They sought to externalize
and realize as far as possible, not to communicate the inmost feelings
and spiritual suggestions arising out of natural objects. Never
advancing beyond corporeal conditions, they confined themselves to
form, and sacrificed the charm of mystery, which is incompatible with
very definite conception. It was on this account that sculpture, the
most exactly imitative of the arts, became literally architectonic
among the Greeks. And for a precisely similar reason music, which is
the most abstract and subjective of the arts, the most evanescent in
its material, and the vaguest, assumes the chief rank among modern
arts. Sculpture is the poetry of the body, music the language of the
soul.
Having once admitted their peculiar _mode_ of feeling Nature, no
one can deny that landscape occupies an important place in Greek
literature. Every line of Theocritus is vital with a strong passion for
natural beauty, incarnated in myths. But even in descriptive poetry
he is not deficient. His list of trees and flowers is long, and the
epithets with which they are characterized are very exquisite--not,
indeed, brilliant with the inbreathed fancy of the North, but so
perfectly appropriate as to define the special beauty of the flower
or tree selected. In the same way, a whole scene is conveyed in a few
words by mere conciseness of delineation, or by the artful introduction
of some incident suggesting human emotion. Take for example this
picture of the stillness of the night:
#ênide sigâi men pontos, sigônti d' aêtai;
ha d' ema ou sigâi sternôn entosthen ania,
all' epi tênôi pasa kataithomai, hos me talainan
anti gynaikos ethêke kakan kai aparthenon êmen.#[146]
_Idyl_ ii. 38-41.
Or this:
#alla ty men chairoisa pot' ôkeanon trepe pôlous
potni', egô d' oisô ton emon ponon, hôsper hypestan.
chaire, Selanaia liparochroe; chairete d', alloi
asteres, eukêloio kat' antyga Nyktos opadoi.#[147]
_Idyl_ ii. 163 _et seq._
Or this of a falling star:
#katêripe d' es melan hydôr
athroos, hôs hoka pyrsos ap' ouranô êripen astêr
athroos en pontôi, nautais de tis eipen hetairois:
kouphoter', ô paides, poieisth' hopla; pleustikos ouros.#[148]
_Idyl_ xiii. 49-52.
Or the sea-weeds on a rocky shore (vii. 58), or the summer bee (iii.
15), or the country party at harvest time (vii. 129 to the end). In all
of these a peculiar simplicity will be noticed, a self-restraint and
scrupulosity of definite delineation. To Theocritus the shadowy and
iridescent fancies of modern poetry would have been unintelligible. The
creations of a Keats or Shelley would have appeared to be monstrous
births, like the Centaurs of Ixion, begotten by lawless imaginations
upon cloud and mist. When the Greek poet wished to express the
charm of summer waves he spoke of Galatea, more fickle and light
than thistle-down, a maiden careless of her lover and as cruel as
the sea. The same waves suggested to Shakespeare these lines, from
_Midsummer-Night's Dream_:
Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music;
and to Weber the ethereal "mermaid's song" in _Oberon_. No one
acquainted with Shakespeare and Weber can deny that both have expressed
with marvellous subtlety the magic of the sea in its enchanting calm,
whereas the Greek poet works only by indirect suggestion, and presents
us with a human portrait more than a phantom of the glamour of the
deep. What we have lost in definite projection we have gained in truth,
variety, and freedom. The language of our art appeals immediately to
the emotions, disclosing the spiritual reality of things, and caring
less for their form than for the feelings they excite in us. Greek art
remains upon the surface, and translates into marble the humanized
aspects of the external world. The one is forever seeking to set
free, the other to imprison, thought. The Greek tells with exquisite
precision what he has observed, investing it perhaps with his own
emotion. He says, for instance:
#aithe genoiman
ha bombeusa melissa, kai es teon antron hikoiman,
ton kisson diadys kai tan pterin, hâi ty pikasdêi.#[149]
The modern poet, to use Shelley's words,
Will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom;
Nor heed nor see what shapes they be,
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,
endeavoring to look through and beyond the objects of the outer
world, to use them as the starting-points for his creative fancy, and
to embroider their materials with the dazzling _fioriture_ of his
invention. Metamorphosis existed for the Greek poet as a simple fact.
If the blood of Adonis turned to anemones, yet the actual drops of
blood and the flowers remained distinct in the poet's mind; and even
though he may have been sceptical about the miracle, he restrained
his fancy to the reproduction of the one old fable. The modern poet
believes in no metamorphosis but that which is produced by the alchemy
of his own brain. He loves to confound the most dissimilar existences,
and to form startling combinations of thoughts which have never before
been brought into connection with each other. Uncontrolled by tradition
or canons of propriety, he roams through the world, touching its
various objects with the wand of his imagination. To the west wind he
cries:
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning; there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, e'en from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm....
Imagine how astonished even Æschylus would have been at these violent
transitions and audacious transformations. The Greeks had few
conceits:[150] they did not call the waves "nodding hearse-plumes" like
Calderon, or the birds "winged lyres" like Marini, or daisies "pearled
Arcturi of the earth" like Shelley, or laburnums "dropping wells of
fire" like Tennyson. If they ventured on such licenses in their more
impassioned lyrics, they maintained the metaphor with strict propriety.
One good instance of the difference in this respect between the two
ages is afforded by Ben Jonson, who translates Sappho's
#êros himerophônos angelos aêdôn,#
by "the dear glad angel of the spring, the nightingale." Between
#angelos# and _angel_ there is the distance of nearly twenty centuries;
for though Ben Jonson may have meant merely to Anglicize the Greek
word, he could not but have been glad of the more modern meaning.
So much of this essay has already been devoted to the consideration of
Theocritean poetry in general that I cannot here afford to enter into
the details of his several idyls. A few, however, may be noticed of
peculiar beauty and significance. None are more true to local scenery
than those which relate to the story of Galatea. In this brief tale,
the life of the mountains and the rivers and the sea is symbolized--the
uncouth and gigantic hills rude in their rusticity; the clear and
lovable stream; the merry sea, inconstant and treacherous, with
shifting waves. The mountain stands forever unremoved; love as he will,
he can but gaze upon the dancing sea, and woo it with gifts of hanging
trees, and cool shadowy caverns, and still sleeping-places in sheltered
bays. But the stream leaps down from crag to crag, and gathers strength
and falls into the arms of the expectant nymph--a fresh lover fair
and free, and full of smiles. Supposing this marriage of the sea and
river to have been the earliest idea of the mythus, in course of time
the persons of Acis and Galatea, and the rejected lover Polyphemus,
became more and more humanized, until the old symbolism was lost in a
pastoral romance. Polyphemus loves, but never wins: he may offer his
tall bay-trees and slender cypresses and black ivy and sweet-fruited
vines and cold water flowing straight--a drink divine--from the white
snows of wooded Ætna; he may sit whole days above the sea, and gaze
upon the smiling waves, and tell the nymph of all his flocks and herds,
and lure her with promises of flowers and fawns and bear's whelps, to
leave the sea to beat upon its shore and come and live with him, and
feed his sheep. It is of no use. Galatea heeds him not, and Polyphemus
has to shepherd his love as best he can. Poetry in this idyl is blended
with the simplest country humor. The pathos of Polyphemus is really
touching, and his allusions to the sweetness of a shepherd's life
among the hills abound in unconscious poetry, side by side with which
are placed the most ludicrous expressions of uncouth disappointment,
together with shrewd observations on the value of property and
other prosaic details. If I mistake not, this is true of the rustic
character, in which, though stirred by sorrow into sympathy with
nature, habitual caution and shrewdness survive. The meditations of the
shepherd in the third idyl exhibit the same mixture of sentiments.
As a specimen of the idyls which illustrate town life I select the
second, the humor of its rival, the fifteenth, being of that perfect
sort which must be read and laughed over, but which cannot well
be analyzed. The subject of the _Pharmaceutria_ is an incantation
performed in the stillness of the night by a proud Syracusan lady who
has been deserted by her lover. In delineating the fierceness of her
passion and the indomitable resolution of her will Theocritus has
produced a truly tragic picture. Simætha, maddened by vehement despair,
resorts to magic arts. Love, she says, has sucked her life-blood like
a leech, and parched her with the fever of desire. She cannot live
without the lover for whose possession she has sacrificed her happiness
and honor. If she cannot charm him back again, she will kill him.
There are poisons ready to work her will in the last resort. Meanwhile
we see her standing at the magic wheel, turning it round before the
fire, and charging it to draw false Delphis to her home. A hearth with
coals upon it is at hand, on which her maid keeps sprinkling the meal
that typifies the bones of Delphis, the wax by which his heart is to
be consumed, and the laurel-bough that stands for his body. At the
least sign of laziness Simætha scolds her with hard and haughty words.
She stands like a Medea, seeking no sympathy, sparing no reproaches,
tiger-like in her ferocity of thwarted passion. When the magic rites
have been performed, and Thestylis has gone to smear an ointment on the
doors of Delphis, Simætha leaves the wheel and addresses her soliloquy
to the Moon, who has just risen, and who is journeying in calm and
silver glory through the night. There is something sublime in the
contrast between the moonlight on the sea of Syracuse and the fierce
agony of the deserted lioness. To the Moon she confides the story of
her love: "Take notice of my love, whence it arose, dread Queen." It
is a vivid and tragic tale of Southern passion: sudden and consuming,
recklessly gratified, and followed by desertion on the one side and by
vengeance on the other.[151] Simætha has no doubt many living parallels
among Sicilian women. The classical reader will find in her narration a
description of the working of love hardly to be surpassed by Sappho's
Ode or Plato's _Phædrus_. The wildness of the scene, the magic rites,
the august presence of the Moon, and the murderous determination of
Simætha heighten the dramatic effect, and render the tale excessively
interesting.
As a picture of classical sorcery this idyl is very curious. Nothing
can be more erroneous than to imagine that witchcraft is a Northern
invention of the Middle Ages, or that the Brocken is its headquarters.
With the exception of a few inconsiderable circumstances, all the
terrible or loathsome rites of magic were known to the ancients, and
merely copied by the moderns. Circe in Homer, Simætha in Theocritus,
Canidia in Horace, the Libyan sorceress of Virgil, the Saga of
Tibullus, Medea in Ovid, Erichtho in Lucan, and Megæra in Claudian
(to mention no more), make up a list of formidable witches to whom
none of the hideous details of the black art were unknown. They sought
for poisonous herbs at night; lived in ruinous places; ransacked
charnel-houses for dead bodies; killed little children to obtain their
fat for unguents; compelled the spirits of the dead to rise, and, after
entering a fresh corpse, to reveal the mysteries of fate; devoured
snakes; drank blood; raised storms at sea; diverted the moon from her
course; muttered spells of fearful import; and loved above all things
to "raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf o'er life."
Even in the minutest details of sorcery they anticipated the witches
of the Middle Ages. Hypsipyle in Ovid mentions a waxen portrait stuck
full of needles, and so fashioned as to waste the life of its original.
The witch in the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius anoints herself, and flies
about like a bird at night. Nor were were-wolves, those most ghastly
creations of diseased imagination, unfamiliar to the Greeks and
Romans, as may be proved from Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, and
Apuleius. Those who care to pursue this subject will find a vast amount
of learning collected on the point by Ben Jonson in his annotations
to _The Masque of Queens_. One fact, however, must be always borne in
mind: the ancients regarded witchcraft either as a hideous or a solemn
exercise of supernatural power, not recognizing any Satanic agency or
compact with Hell. _Hecate triviis ululata per urbes_, the "Queen of
the Night and of the Tombs," assisted sorcerers; but this meant merely
that they trafficked in the dark with the foul mysteries of death and
corruption. The classical witches were either grave and awful women,
like the Libyan priestess in the _Æneid_, or else loathsome pariahs,
terrible for their malignity, like Lucan's Erichtho. Mediævalism added
a deeper horror to this superstitious and ghoulish conception by the
thoughts of spiritual responsibility and of league with God's enemies.
Damnation was the price of magic power; witchcraft being not merely
abominable in the eyes of men, but also unpardonable at the bar of
divine justice.
Several poems of Theocritus are written on the theme of Doric chivalry,
and illustrate the heroic age of Greece. They may be compared to the
_Idyls of the King_, for their excellence consists in the consummate
art with which episodes from the legendary cycles of a bygone age are
wrought into polished pictures by a cultivated poet. The thirteenth
idyl is especially remarkable for the exquisite finish of its style
and also for the light it throws on the mutual relations of knight and
squire in early Greek warfare. Theocritus chooses for the subject of
this poem an episode in the life of Herakles, the Dorian hero, when he
and other foremost men of Hellas, #theios aôtos hêrôôn#, followed Jason
in the Argo to the Colchian shores, and he took young Hylas with him;
"for even," says Theocritus, "the brazen-hearted son of Amphitryon,
who withstood the fierceness of the lion, loved a youth, the charming
Hylas, and taught him like a father everything by which he might become
a good and famous man; nor would he leave the youth at dawn or noon or
evening, but sought continually to fashion him after his own heart,
and to make him a right yoke-fellow with him in mighty deeds." How he
lost Hylas on the Cianian shore, and in the wildness of his sorrow let
Argo sail without him, and endured the reproach of desertion, is well
known. Theocritus has wrought the story with more than his accustomed
elegance. But I wish to confine attention to the ideal of knighthood
and knightly education presented in the passage quoted. Herakles was
not merely the lover, but the guardian also and tutor, of Hylas. He
regarded him not only as an object of tenderness, but also as a future
friend and helper in the business of life. His constant aim was to form
of him a brave and manly warrior, a Herculean hero. And in this respect
Herakles was the eponym and patron of an order which existed throughout
Doric Hellas. This order, protected by religious tradition and public
favor, regulated by strict rules, and kept within the limits of honor,
produced the Cretan lovers, the Lacedæmonian "hearers" and "inspirers,"
the Theban immortals who lay with faces turned so stanchly to their
foes that vice seemed incompatible with so much valor. Achilles was
another eponym of this order. In the twenty-ninth idyl, the phrase
#Achillêïoi philoi# is used to describe the most perfect pair of manly
friends. The twelfth idyl is written in a similar if a weaker and more
wanton vein. The same longing retrospect is cast upon the old days
"when men indeed were golden, when the love of comrades was mutual,"
and constancy is rewarded with the same promise of glorious immortality
as that which Plato holds out in the _Phædrus_. Bion, we may remark
in passing, celebrates with equal praise the friendships of Theseus,
Orestes, and Achilles. Without taking some notice of this peculiar
institution, in its origin military and austere, it is impossible to
understand the chivalrous age of Greece among the Dorian tribes. In the
midst of brute force and cunning, and an almost absolute disregard of
what we are accustomed to understand by chivalry--gentleness, chastity,
truth, regard for women and weak persons--this one anomalous sentiment
emerges.
Passing to another point in which Greek differed from mediæval
chivalry, we notice the semi-divine nature of the heroes: #theios
aôtos# is the name by which they are designated, and supernatural
favor is always showered upon them. This indicates a primitive
society, a national consciousness ignorant of any remote past. The
heroes whom Theocritus celebrates are purely Dorian--Herakles, a Jack
the Giant-Killer in his cradle, brawny, fearless, of huge appetite,
a mighty trainer, with a scowl to frighten athletes from the field;
Polydeuces, a notable bruiser; Castor, a skilled horseman and a man of
blood. In one point the twin sons of Leda resembled mediæval knights.
They combined the arts of song with martial prowess. Theocritus
styles them #hippêes kitharistai, aethlêtêres aoidoi#--harp-playing
riders of horses, athlete poets. Their achievements, narrated in
the twenty-second idyl, may be compared with those of Tristram and
Lancelot. The gigantic warrior whom they find by the well in the
land of the Bebrycians, gorgeously armed, insolent, and as knotty
as a brazen statue, who refuses access to the water and challenges
them to combat, exactly resembles one of the lawless giants of the
_Mort d'Arthur_. The courtesy of the Greek hero contrasts well with
the barbarian's violence; and when they come to blows, it is good to
observe how address, agility, training, nerve, enable Polydeuces to
overcome with ease the vast fury and brute strength of the Bebrycian
bully. As the fight proceeds, the son of Leda improves in flesh and
color, while Amycus gets out of breath, and sweats his thews away.
Polydeuces pounds the giant's neck and face, reducing him to a hideous
mass of bruises, and receiving the blows of Amycus upon his chest
and loins. At the end of the fight he spares his prostrate foe, on
the condition of his respecting the rites of hospitality and dealing
courteously with strangers. Throughout it will be noticed how carefully
Theocritus maintains the conception of the Hellenic as distinguished
from the barbarian combatant. Christian and pagan are not more distinct
in a legend of the San Graal. But Greek chivalry has no magic, no
monstrous exaggeration. All is simple, natural, and human. Bellerophon,
it is true, was sent after the Chimæra, and Perseus freed Andromeda
like St. George from a dragon's mouth. But these fancies of Greek
infancy formed no integral part of artistic mythology; instead of being
multiplied, they were gradually winnowed out, and the poets laid but
little stress upon them.
The achievement of Castor is not so favorable to the character of
Hellenic chivalry. Having in concert with Polydeuces borne off by guile
the daughters of Leucippus from their affianced husbands, Castor kills
one of the injured lovers who pursues him and demands restitution. He
slays him, though he is his own first cousin, ruthlessly; and while the
other son of Aphareus is rushing forward to avenge his brother's death,
Zeus hurls lightning and destroys him. Theocritus remarks that it is no
light matter to engage in battle with the Tyndarids; but he makes no
reflection on what we should call "the honor" of the whole transaction.
Of all the purely pastoral idyls by which Theocritus is most widely
famous, perhaps the finest is the seventh, or Thalysia. It glows with
the fresh and radiant splendor of Southern beauty. In this poem the
idyllist describes the journey of three young men in summer from the
city to the farm of their friend Phrasidamus, who has asked them to
take part in the feast with which he proposes to honor Demeter at
harvest-time. On their way they meet with a goatherd, Lycidas, who
invites them, "with a smiling eye," to recline beneath the trees and
while away the hours of noontide heat with song. "The very lizard,"
he says, "is sleeping by the wall; but on the hard stones of the
footpath your heavy boots keep up a ceaseless ringing." Thus chided
by the goatherd they resolve upon a singing-match between Simichidas,
the teller of the tale, and Lycidas, who offers his crook as the prize
of victory. Lycidas begins the contest with that exquisite song to
Ageanax, which has proved the despair of all succeeding idyllists,
and which furnished Virgil with one of the most sonorous lines in his
_Georgics_. No translation can do justice to the smooth and liquid
charm of its melodious verse, in which the tenderest feeling mingles
gracefully with delicate humor and with homely descriptions of a
shepherd's life. The following lines, forming a panegyric on Comatas,
some famed singer of the rustic muse, may be quoted for their pure
Greek feeling. Was ever an unlucky mortal envied more melodiously, and
yet more quaintly, for his singular fortune?
#aisei d', hôs pok' edekto ton aipolon eurea larnax
zôon eonta kakêisin atasthaliêisin anaktos;
hôs te nin hai simai leimônothe pherbon ioisai
kedron es hadeian malakois anthessi melissai;
houneka hoi glyky Moisa kata stomatos chee nektar.
ô makariste Komata, ty thên tade terpna peponthês,
kai ty kateklasthês es larnaka, kai ty, melissan
kêria pherbomenos, etos hôrion exetelessas.#[152]
The song with which Simichidas contends against his rival is not of
equal beauty; but the goatherd hands him the crook "as a gift of
friendship from the Muses." Then he leaves the three friends, who
resume their journey till they reach the house of Phrasidamus. There
elms and poplar-trees and vines embower them with the pleasant verdure
of rustling leaves and the perfumes of summer flowers and autumn
fruits. The jar of wine as sweet as that which made the Cyclops dance
among his sheepfold spreads its fragrance through the air; while the
statue of Demeter, with her handfuls of corn and poppy-heads, stands
smiling by.
This seventh idyl, of which no adequate idea can be conveyed by mere
description, may serve as the type of those purely rustic poems which
since the days of Theocritus have from age to age been imitated by
versifiers emulous of his gracefulness. If space allowed, it would
not be uninteresting to analyze the idyl of the two old fishermen,
who gossip together so wisely and contentedly in their hut by the
sea-shore, mending their nets the while, and discoursing gravely of
their dreams. In this idyl, which is, however, possibly the work of
one of Theocritus's imitators, and in the second, which consists of a
singing-match between two harvest-men, the native homeliness of the
idyllic muse appears to best advantage.
With this brief and insufficient notice I must leave Theocritus in
order to say a few words about his successors. Bion's poetry, when
compared with that of Theocritus, declines considerably from the
bucolic type. His idyls are for the most part fragments of delicately
finished love-songs, remarkable for elegance and sweetness more than
for masculine vigor or terse expression. In Bion the artificial style
of pastoral begins. Theocritus had made cows and pipes and shepherds
fashionable. His imitators followed him, without the humor and natural
taste which rendered his pictures so attractive. We already trace
the frigid affectation of bucolic interest in the elegy on Bion: "He
sang no song of wars or tears, but piped of Pan and cowherds, and
fed flocks, singing as he went; pipes he fashioned, and milked the
sweet-breathed heifer, and taught kisses, and cherished in his bosom
love, and stole the heart of Aphrodite." As it happens, the most
original and powerful of Bion's remaining poems is a "Song of Tears,"
of passionate lamentation, of pathetic grief, composed, not as a
pastoral ditty, but on the occasion of one of those splendid festivals
in which the Syrian rites of slain Adonis were celebrated by Greek
women. The #epitaphios Adônidos# is written with a fiery passion and a
warmth of coloring peculiar to Bion. The verse bounds with tiger leaps,
its full-breathed dactyls panting with the energy of rapid flight. The
tender and reflective beauty of Theocritus, the concentrated passion of
his Simætha, and the flowing numbers of his song to Adonis are quite
lost and swallowed up in the Asiatic fury of Bion's lament. The poem
begins with the cry #Aiazô ton Adônin#, which is variously repeated in
idyllic fashion as a refrain throughout the lamentation.[153] After
the prelude, having, as it were, struck the key-note to the music, the
singer cries:
#mêketi porphyreois eni pharesi Kypri katheude;
egreo deilaia kyanostole kai platagêson
stathea, kai lege pasin, apôleto kalos Adônis.#[154]
Notice how the long words follow one another with quick pulses
and flashes of sound. The same peculiar rhythm recurs when, after
describing the beautiful dead body of Adonis, the poet returns to
Aphrodite:
#ha d' Aphrodita
lysamena plokamidas ana drymôs alalêtai
penthalea, nêplektos, asandalos; hai de batoi nin
erchomenan keironti kai hieron haima drepontai
oxy de kôkyoisa di' ankea makra phoreitai,
Assyrion booôsa posin, kai paida kaleusa.#[155]
There are few passages of poetical imagery more striking than this
picture of the queen of beauty tearing through the forest, heedless
of her tender limbs and useless charms, and calling on her Syrian
lover. What follows is even more passionate; after some lines of mere
description, the ecstasy again descends upon the poet, and he bursts
into the wildest of most beautiful laments:
#hôs iden, hôs enoêsen Adônidos ascheton helkos,
hôs ide phoinion haima marainomenôi peri mêrôi,
pacheas ampetasasa kinyreto; meinon Adôni,
dyspotme meinon Adôni, k.t.l.#[156]
The last few lines of her soliloquy are exquisitely touching,
especially those in which Aphrodite deplores her immortality, and
acknowledges the supremacy of the queen of the grave over Love and
Beauty. What follows is pitched at a lower key. There is too much of
merely Anacreontic prettiness about the description of the bridal bed
and the lamenting Loves. Aphrodite's passion reminds us of a Neapolitan
_Stabat Mater_, in which the frenzy of love and love-like piety are
strangely blended. But the concluding picture suggests nothing nobler
than a painting of Albano, in which _amoretti_ are plentiful, and there
is much elegance of composition. This remark applies to the rest of
Bion's poetry. If Theocritus deserves to be illustrated by the finest
of Greek bass-reliefs, Bion cannot claim more than an exquisitely
chiselled gem. Certainly the second and third fragments are very
charming; and the lines to Hesper (fragment 16) have so much beauty
that I attempt a version of them:
Hesper, thou golden light of happy love,
Hesper, thou holy pride of purple eve,
Moon among stars, but star beside the moon,
Hail, friend! and since the young moon sets to-night
Too soon below the mountains, lend thy lamp
And guide me to the shepherd whom I love.
No theft I purpose; no wayfaring man'
Belated would I watch and make my prey;
Love is my goal, and Love how fair it is,
When friend meets friend sole in the silent night,
Thou knowest, Hesper!
In Moschus we find less originality and power than belong to Bion.
His _Europa_ is an imitation of the style in which Theocritus wrote
_Hylas_; but the copy is frigid and affected by the size of its
model. Five-and-twenty lines for instance are devoted to an elaborate
description of a basket, which leaves no very definite impression
on the mind;[157] whereas every leaf and tendril on the cup which
Theocritus introduces into the first idyl stands out vividly before us.
Nothing, moreover, could be more unnatural and tedious than the long
speech which Europa makes when she is being carried out to sea upon
the bull's back. Yet we must allow that there is spirit and beauty in
the triumph of sea monsters who attend Poseidon and do honor to the
chosen bride of Zeus; Nereids riding on dolphins, and Tritons, "the
deep-voiced minstrels of the sea, sounding a marriage-song on their
long-winding conchs."[158] The whole of this piece is worthy of Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_. Moschus is remarkable for occasional felicities of
language. In this line, for example,
#eute kai atrekeôn poimainetai ethnos oneirôn,#
an old thought receives new and subtle beauty by its expression. If
_Megara_ (Idyl iv.) be really the work of Moschus, which is doubtful,
it reflects more honor on him. The dialogue between the wife and mother
of the maddened Herakles, after he has murdered his children and gone
forth to execute fresh labors, is worthy of their tragic situation.
#Erôs drapetês# (Runaway Love), again, is an exquisite little poem in
the Anacreontic style of Bion, fully equal to any of its models. The
fame of Moschus will, however, depend upon the elegy on Bion. I have
already hinted that its authorship is questioned. In my opinion it far
surpasses any of his compositions in respect of definite thought and
original imagination. Though the bucolic commonplaces are used with
obvious artificiality, and much is borrowed from Theocritus's _Lament
for Daphnis_, yet so true and delicate a spirit is inbreathed into the
old forms as to render them quite fresh. The passage which begins #ai
ai tai malachai# every dabbler in Greek literature knows by heart. And
what can be more ingeniously pathetic than the _nuances_ of feeling
expressed in these lines?
#pharmakon êlthe, Biôn, poti son stoma; pharmakon eides.
pôs teu tois cheilessi potedrame kouk eglykanthê?
tis de brotos tossouton anameros ê kerasai toi
ê dounai laleonti to pharmakon?#[159]
And:
#tis pote sâi syringi melixetai, ô tripothête?
tis d' epi sois kalamois thêsei stoma? tis thrasys houtôs?
eiseti gar pneiei ta sa cheilea kai to son asthma;
achô d' en donakessi teas epibosket' aoidas.#[160]
Or again:
#achô d' en petrêisin odyretai hotti siôpêi,
kouketi mimeitai ta sa cheilea.#[161]
There is also something very touching in the third line of this strophe:
#keinos ho tais agelaisin erasmios ouketi melpei,
ouket' erêmaiêisin hypo drysin hêmenos âidei,
alla para Ploutêi melos Lêthaion aeidei,#[162]
and in the allusion made to the Sicilian girlhood of grim Persephone
(126-129). This vein of tender and melodious sentiment, which verges
on the _concetti_ of modern art, seems different from the style of
_Europa_.
To English readers, the three elegies, on Daphnis, on Adonis, and on
Bion, severally attributed to Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, will
always be associated with the names of Milton and Shelley. There is
no comparison whatever between Lycidas and Daphnis. In spite of the
misplaced apparition of St. Peter, and of the frigidity which belongs
to pastoral allegory, Lycidas is a richer and more splendid monument
of elegiac verse. The simplicity of the Theocritean dirge contrasts
strangely with the varied wealth of Milton's imagery, the few ornaments
of Greek art with the intricate embroideries of modern fancy. To quote
passages from these well-known poems would be superfluous; but let a
student of literature compare the passages #pâi pok' ar' êsth'# and
#ô Pan Pan# with Milton's paraphrase "Where were ye, nymphs--," or
the concise paragraphs about the flowers and valleys that mourned for
Daphnis with the luxuriance of Milton's invocation "Return, Alpheus."
When Shelley wrote _Adonais_ his mind was full of the elegies on Bion
and Adonis. Of direct translation in his Lament there is very little;
but he has absorbed both of the Greek poems, and transmuted them into
the substance of his own mind. Urania takes the place of Aphrodite--the
heavenly queen, "most musical of mourners," bewails the loss of her
poetical consort. Instead of loves, the couch of Adonais is surrounded
by the thoughts and fancies of which he was the parent; and, instead
of gods and goddesses, the power of nature is invoked to weep for
him and take him to herself. Whatever Bion and Moschus recorded as a
fact becomes, consistently with the spiritualizing tendency of modern
genius, symbolical in Shelley's poem. His art has alchemized the whole
structure, idealizing what was material and disembodying the sentiments
which were incarnated in simple images. _Adonais_ is a sublime
rhapsody; its multitudinous ideas are whirled like drops of golden
rain, on which the sun of the poet's fancy gleams with ever-changing
rainbow hues. In drifts and eddies they rush past, delighting us with
their rapidity and brilliancy; but the impression left upon our mind
is vague and incomplete, when compared with the few and distinct ideas
presented by the Doric elegies. At the end of _Alastor_ there occurs a
touching reminiscence of Moschus, but the outline is less faint than in
_Adonais_, the transmutation even more complete.
Tennyson, among the poets of the nineteenth century, owes much to
the Greek idyllists. His genius appears to be in many respects akin
to theirs, and the age in which he lives is not unlike the Ptolemaic
period. Unfitted, perhaps, by temperament for the most impassioned
lyrics, he delights in minutely finished pictures, in felicities of
expression, and in subtle harmonies of verse. Like Theocritus, he
finds in nature and in the legends of past ages subjects congenial to
his muse. _Oenone_ and _Tithonus_ are steeped in the golden beauty of
Syracusan art. "Come down, O maid," transfers, with perfect taste,
the Greek idyllic feeling to Swiss scenery; it is a fine instance of
new wine being poured successfully into old bottles, for nothing can
be fresher, and not even the _Thalysia_ is sweeter. It would be easy
enough to collect minor instances which prove that the laureate's mind
is impregnated with the thoughts and feelings of the poems I have been
discussing. For instance, both the figure "softer than sleep," and the
comparison of a strong man's muscles to the smooth rush of running
water over sunken stones, which we find in _Enid_, occur in Theocritus.
At the end of this chapter I cannot refrain from once more recommending
all lovers of pure verse and perfect scenery to study the Greek
idyllists upon the shores of the Mediterranean. Nor would it be
possible to carry a better guide-book to the statue-galleries of Rome
and Naples. For in the verses of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, the
æsthetic principles of the Greeks, in the age to which our relics of
their statuary for the most part belong, are feelingly and pithily
expressed; while the cold marble, that seems to require so many
commentaries, receives from their idyllic coloring new life.
FOOTNOTES:
[142]
Down the dark stream he went; the eddies drowned
The muses' friend, the youth the nymphs held dear.
[143] I may refer my readers to the chapter on the Cornice in my
_Sketches in Italy and Greece_ for a fuller treatment of this landscape.
[144] Not for us alone, as we once thought, friend Nicias, did Love's
parent, whosoever among gods that was, beget Lord Eros. Not for us did
fair things first reveal their fairness; we who are mortal men, and
have no vision of to-morrow.
[145] One bright morning in the first week of June I went out into the
fields at Borca below Macugnaga, which were then full of brilliant
and sweet flowers. There I met an old woman, with whom I talked about
her life in what seemed to me a terrestrial Paradise. She threw her
arms and eyes to heaven, and looking round her, cried, "_Che brutto
paese!_"--"Ah, what an ugly country to live in!" Compare Browning's _Up
at a Villa, Down in the City_.
[146]
Now rests the deep, now rest the wandering winds,
But in my heart the anguish will not rest,
While for his love I pine who stole my sweetness,
And made me less than virgin among maids.
[147]
Adieu, dread queen, thou to the ocean turn
Thy harnessed steeds; but I abide and suffer:
Adieu, resplendent moon, and all you stars
That follow on the wheels of night, adieu!
[148]
Into the black wave
Fell headlong as a fiery star from heaven
Falls headlong to the deep, and sailors cry
One to another, Lighten sail; behold,
The breeze behind us freshens!
[149]
Would I were
The murmuring bee, that through the ivy screen
And through the fern that hides thee, I might come
Into thy cavern!
[150] Perhaps this is over-stated. In the later Greek literature of
the Sophists we find many very exquisite _concetti_. Philostratus,
for example, from whom Jonson translated "Drink to me only with thine
eyes," calls the feet of the beloved one #erêreismena philêmata#, or
"kisses pressed upon the ground." Even Empedocles (see vol. i. p.
220) and Pindar (see vol. i. p. 369) are not free from the vice of
artificial metaphor. Compare, too, the labored metaphors and compound
epithets quoted from Chæremon above, chap. xvi., and the specimens
quoted below from Meleager, chap. xxi.
[151] How wonderfully beautiful is her description of Delphis and
his comrade Eudamnippus: "Their cheeks and chin were yellower than
helichrysus; their breasts more radiant far than thou, O Moon, as
having lately left the fair toil of the wrestling-ground."
[152]
How of old
The goatherd by his cruel lord was bound,
And left to die in a great chest; and how
The busy bees, up coming from the meadows,
To the sweet cedar, fed him with soft flowers,
Because the Muse had filled his mouth with nectar.
Yes, all these sweets were thine, blessed Comatas;
And thou wast put into the chest, and fed
By the blithe bees, and passed a pleasant time.
LEIGH HUNT'S _Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla_.
[153] This ought probably to be printed, after Ahrens, #aiaz' ô ton
Adônin#. The exclamation occurs in a fragment of Sappho (Bergk, No.
63), whose lyric on the legend of Adonis may have suggested Bion's idyl.
[154]
Sleep, Cypris, no more, on thy purple-strewed bed;
Arise, wretch stoled in black--beat thy breast unrelenting,
And shriek to the worlds, "Fair Adonis is dead."
_Translation by_ Mrs. BARRETT BROWNING.
[155]
And the poor Aphrodite, with tresses unbound,
All dishevelled, unsandalled, shrieks mournful and shrill
Through the dusk of the groves. The thorns, tearing her feet,
Gather up the red flower of her blood, which is holy,
Each footstep she takes; and the valleys repeat
The sharp cry which she utters, and draw it out slowly.
She calls on her spouse, her Assyrian.--_Ibid._
[156]
When, ah! ah!--she saw how the blood ran away
And empurpled the thigh; and, with wild hands flung out,
Said with sobs, "Stay, Adonis! unhappy one, stay!"
_Translation by_ Mrs. BARRETT BROWNING.
[157] This basket for holding flowers, the work of Hephæstus, had
the tale of Io carved upon it. So Catullus, in the counterpane of
Thetis, has wrought in needlework the story of Ariadne; and Statius,
in the mantle given by Adrastus to Admetus, has woven that of Hero and
Leander. Both of these Roman poets excel Moschus in picturesque effect.
[158] Italian art of the Renaissance in the designs of Mantegna and
Raphael and Giulio Romano did full justice to these marine triumphs.
[159]
There came, O Bion, poison to thy mouth,
Thou didst feel poison! how could it approach
Those lips of thine, and not be turned to sweet?
LEIGH HUNT.
[160]
Who now shall play thy pipe, oh! most desired one;
Who lay his lips against thy reeds? who dare it?
For still they breathe of thee, and of thy mouth,
And Echo comes to seek her voices there.--_Ibid._
[161]
Echo too mourned among the rocks that she
Must hush, and imitate thy lips no longer.--LEIGH HUNT.
[162]
No longer pipes he to the charmèd herds,
No longer sits under the lonely oaks,
And sings; but to the ears of Plato now
Tunes his Lethean verse.--_Ibid._