ENGLISH PASTORAL--(CONTINUED); AND SCOTCH PASTORAL.
FLETCHER’S “FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.”--PROBABLE REASON OF ITS
NON-SUCCESS.--“COMUS” AND “LYCIDAS.”--DR. JOHNSON’S “WORLD.”--BURNS
AND ALLAN RAMSAY.
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The title and story of the _Sad Shepherd_ of Ben Jonson, in combination
with those of the _Faithful Shepherd_ (_Pastor Fido_) of Guarini, appear
to have suggested to Fletcher his _Faithful Shepherdess_. This is
undoubtedly the chief pastoral play in our language, though, with all its
beauties, we can hardly think it ought to have been such, considering
what Shakspeare and Spenser have shown that they could have done in this
Arcadian region. The illustrious author, exquisite poet as he was, and son
of a bishop to boot, had the misfortune, with his friend Beaumont, to be
what is called a “man upon town;” which polluted his sense of enjoyment
and rendered him but imperfectly in earnest, even when he most wished to
be so. Hence his subserviency to the taste of those painful gentlemen
called men of pleasure, and his piecing out his better sentiments with
exaggeration. Hence the revolting character, in this play, of a “Wanton
Shepherdess,” which is an offence to the very voluptuousness it secretly
intended to interest; and hence the opposite offence of the character of
the “Faithful Shepherdess” herself, who is ostentatiously made such a
paragon of chastity, and values herself so excessively on the self-denial,
that the virtue itself is compromised, and you can see that the author had
very little faith in it. And we have little doubt that this was the cause
why the play was damned (for such is the startling fact), and not the
ignorance of the audience, to which Beaumont and Ben Jonson indignantly
attributed it. The audience could not reconcile such painful, and, as it
must have appeared to them, such hypocritical contradictions: and very
distressing to the author must it have been to find, that he had himself
contributed to create that sceptical tone of mind in the public respecting
both himself and the female sex, which refused to take him at his word
when he was for putting on a graver face, and claiming their ultra-belief
in all that he chose to assume. The “Faithful Shepherdess” is a young
widow, who is always talking of devoting herself to her husband’s memory;
and her lover Thenot is so _passionately_ enamoured of her, that he says
if she were to give up the devotion, his passion would be lost. He
_entreats_ her at once to “hear him” and to “_deny_!” This child’s play is
what the audience could not tolerate. It was a pity; for there are
passages in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ as lovely as poet could write. We
are never tired of hearing--
How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
_How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,
To kiss her sweetest_.
So of the dessert gathered by the Satyr for the nymph Syrinx:--
Here be grapes, whose lusty blood
Is the learned poet’s good;
Sweeter yet did never crown
The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown
Than the squirrel’s teeth that crack them;
Deign, oh, fairest fair, to take them.
_For these black-eyed Driope
Hath oftentimes commanded me
With my claspèd knee to climb_:
See how well _the lusty time
Hath decked their rising cheeks in red_,
Such as on your lips is spread.
Here be berries for a queen,
_Some be red, some be green;
These are of that luscious meat,
The great god Pan himself doth eat_;
All these, and what the woods can yield,
The hanging mountain or the field,
I freely offer, and ere long
Will bring you more, more sweet and strong;
Till then humbly leave I take,
_Lest the great Pan do awake,
That sleeping lies in a deep glade
Under a broad beech’s shade_.
I must go, I must run,
_Swifter than the fiery sun_.
See also the love made by the river-god at the end of the third Act, which
we have not room to quote; and the Satyr’s account of dawn, which opens
with the four most exquisite lines perhaps in the whole play:--
See, the day begins to break,
_And the light shoots like a streak
Of subtle fire.--The wind blows cold,
While the morning doth unfold._
Who has not felt this mingled charmingness and chilliness (we do not use
the words for the sake of the alliteration) at the first opening of the
morning! Yet none but the finest poets venture upon thus combining
pleasure with something that might be thought a drawback. But it is truth;
and it is truth in which the beauty surmounts the pain; and therefore they
give it. And how simple and straightforward is every word! There are no
artificial tricks of composition here. The words are not suggested to the
truth by the author, but to the author by the truth. We feel the wind
blowing as simply as it does in nature; so that if the reader be
artificially trained, and does not bring a feeling for truth with him
analogous to that of the poet, the very simplicity is in danger of losing
him the perception of the beauty. And yet there is art as well as nature
in the verses; for art in the poet must perfect what nature does by her
own art. Observe, for instance, the sudden and strong emphasis on the word
_shoots_, and the variety of tone and modulation in the whole passage,
with the judicious exceptions of the two _o_’s in the “wind blows cold,”
which have the solemn continuous sound of what it describes: also, the
corresponding ones in “doth unfold,” which maintain the like continuity of
the growing daylight. And exquisite, surely, is the dilatory and golden
sound of the word “morning” between them:
The wind blows cold,
While the _mor_-ning doth unfold.
Milton’s _Comus_, though not equal throughout to the _Faithful
Shepherdess_ in descriptive judgment (for it talks of “groves of myrrh and
cinnamon” on the banks of a British river), is altogether a finer poem,
and a far better recommendation of chastity. Indeed, it might rather have
been called _Castitas_ than _Comus_; for _Comus_ has little justice done
to his powers of temptation. Perhaps Fletcher’s failure in recommending
chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to Milton. His emulation of
particular passages in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, particularly on that
subject, has been noticed by the commentators. But _Comus_ is a mask, not
a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a pastoral mask; for the shepherd
is the least person in it; and though the Italians identify the pastoral
with the sylvan drama, or fable transacted in the woods, which are the
scene of action in _Comus_, the reader feels that the woods have really
almost as little to do with it as the fields;--that the moral, in fact, is
all in all; which is the reason why nobody takes very heartily to the
subject, especially as Milton acts in morals like a kind of solemn
partisan, and does not run, like Shakspeare, the whole circle of humanity
in arguing his question.
Milton’s only real pastoral (with the exception of the country part of the
_Allegro_) is his allegorical monody on the death of his friend King,--the
_Lycidas_; and a beautiful one it is, though Dr. Johnson, in his one-sided
misapplication of a right principle, laughed at grief which departs from
the ordinary phases of life, and which talks of nymphs and river-gods, and
“satyrs with cloven heel.” “Grief,” he said, “does not talk of such
things;” to which Warton said very truly, “But Poetry does;” and he might
have added (still more literally than he puts it), that Grief does so too,
when it is the grief of one young poet mourning for another. Johnson says
that Milton and his friend were not “nursed on the same hill,” as
represented in _Lycidas_; and that they did not “feed the same flock,” &c.
But they were, and they did. They were nursed on the same hill of Arcady,
and fed the same flock of the ideal pastoral life; and very grievous it
was for them to be torn asunder, to be deprived by death of their mutual
delight in Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, the beloved haunts of
their minds, things which it has agonized friends and poets to be torn
away from, both before and since the time of Milton, however little they
may have been cared for by dear, good, dictatorial, purblind, un-ideal
Dr. Johnson, whose world, though it was a wit’s and a sage’s world too,
was not the universal and still sager world of the poet, but made up
(exclusively) of the Strand, hypochondria, charity, bigotry, wit,
argument, and a good dinner;--a pretty region, but not the green as _well_
as smoky world of Nature and Shakspeare.
Fault has been found also with the intermixture of theology in _Lycidas_;
but it is to be defended on the same ground--namely, that Milton’s young
friend studied theology with him as well as poetry; and hence the
propriety of introducing the pilot of the Galilean lake.
One ought to be grateful for it, if only for its giving the poet occasion
to dismiss the solemn vision, and encourage, in those lovely verses, the
beautiful fictions of Paganism and Theocritus to come back:--
Return, Alphèus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, _Sicilian Muse_,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
_Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks_,
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint-enamell’d eyes
That on the green turf _suck the honied showers_,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy, _freak’d_ with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
_And daffodillies fill their cups with tears_,
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies.
* * * * *
Thus sang the swain to the oaks and rills,
_While the still morn went out with sandals grey_.
These are the chief pastoral writers in the language of the ideal class.
Pope professed to be a classical pastoral writer, and split, accordingly,
on the hard rock of Latin imitation. Even Gay’s burlesque pastoral was
better, for it went to the real fields for its imagery; and Phillips would
have surpassed both, if he had not been affected. His verses from
Copenhagen, describing a northern winter, are fresh from Nature.
Allan Ramsay is the prince of the homely pastoral drama. Burns wrote in
this class of poetry at no such length as Ramsay; but he was pastoral
poetry itself, in the shape of an actual, glorious peasant, vigorous as if
Homer had written him, and tender as generous strength, or as memories of
the grave. Ramsay and he have helped Scotland for ever to take pride in
its heather, and its braes, and its bonny rivers, and be ashamed of no
beauty or honest truth, in high estate or in low;--an incalculable
blessing. Ramsay, to be sure, with all his genius, and though he wrote an
entire and excellent dramatic pastoral, in five legitimate acts, is but a
small part of Burns;--is but a field in a corner compared with the whole
Scots pastoral region. He has none of Burns’s pathos; none of his
grandeur; none of his burning energy; none of his craving after universal
good. How universal is Burns! What mirth in his cups! What softness in his
tears! What sympathy in his very satire! What manhood in everything! If
Theocritus, the inventor of a loving and affecting Polyphemus, could have
foreseen the verses on the _Mouse_ and the _Daisy_ turned up with plough,
the _Tam o’ Shanter, O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut, Ye banks and braes o’
bonnie Doon_, &c., (not to mention a hundred others, which have less to do
with our subject,) tears of admiration would have rushed into his eyes.
Nevertheless Allan Ramsay is not only entitled to the designation we have
given him, but in some respects is the best pastoral writer in the world.
There are, in truth, two sorts of genuine pastoral--the high ideal of
Fletcher and Milton, which is justly to be considered the more
poetical,--and the homely ideal, as set forth by Allan Ramsay and some of
the Idyls of Theocritus, and which gives us such feelings of nature and
passion as poetical rustics not only can, but have entertained, and
eloquently described. And we think the _Gentle Shepherd_, “in some
respects,” the best pastoral that ever was written, not because it has
anything, in a poetical point of view, to compare with Fletcher and
Milton, but because there is, upon the whole, more faith and more love in
it, and because the kind of idealized truth which it undertakes to
represent, is delivered in a more corresponding and satisfactory form than
in any other entire pastoral drama. In fact, the _Gentle Shepherd_ has no
alloy whatsoever to its pretensions, _such as they are_--no failure in
plot, language, or character--nothing answering to the coldness and
irrelevances of _Comus_, nor to the offensive and untrue violations of
decorum in the “Wanton Shepherdess” of Fletcher’s pastoral, and the
pedantic and ostentatious chastity of his Faithful one. It is a pure,
healthy, natural, and (of its kind) perfect plant, sprung out of an
unluxuriant but not ungenial soil; not hung with the beauty and fragrance
of the productions of the higher regions of Parnassus; not waited upon by
spirits and enchanted music; a dog-rose, if you will; say rather, a rose
in a cottage-garden, dabbled with the morning dew, and plucked by an
honest lover to give to his mistress.
Allan Ramsay’s poem is not only a probable and pleasing story, containing
charming pictures, much knowledge of life, and a good deal of quiet
humour, but in some respects it may be called classical, if by classical
is meant ease, precision, and unsuperfluousness of style. Ramsay’s diction
is singularly straightforward, seldom needing the assistance of
inversions; and he rarely says anything for the purpose of “filling
up;”--two freedoms from defect the reverse of vulgar and commonplace; nay,
the reverse of a great deal of what pretends to be fine writing, and is
received as such. We confess we never tire of dipping into it, “on and
off,” any more than into Fletcher, or Milton, or into Theocritus himself,
who, for the union of something higher with true pastoral, is unrivalled
in short pieces. The _Gentle Shepherd_ is not a forest, nor a
mountainside, nor Arcady; but it is a field full of daisies, with a brook
in it, and a cottage “at the sunny end;” and this we take to be no mean
thing, either in the real or the ideal world. Our Jar of Honey may well
lie for a few moments among its heather, albeit filled from Hybla. There
are bees, “look you,” in Habbie’s How. Theocritus and Allan shake hands
over a shepherd’s pipe. Take the beginning of Scene ii. Act i., both for
description and dialogue:--
A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes,
Where lassies use to wash and spread their claes;
_A trottin’ birnie wimplin’ through the ground,
Its channel pebbles shining smooth and round_.
Here view _twa barefoot beauties_, clean and clear,
First please your eye, next gratify your ear,
While Jenny _what she wishes discommends_,
And Meg, with better sense, true love defends.
JENNY. Come, Meg, lets fa’ to work upon this green,
This shining day will bleach our linen clean:
The waters clear, the lift unclouded blue,
Will make them _like a lily wet wi’ dew_.
PEGGY. Gae far’er up the burn to Habbie’s How,
Where a’ the sweets o’ spring and simmer grow;
_There ’tween twa birks, out ower a little lin,
The water fa’s, and maks a singin’ din;
A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,
Kisses, wi’ easy whirls, the bordering grass_.
We’ll end our washing while the morning’s cool,
And when the day grows het, we’ll to the pool,
There wash oursells; ’tis healthfu’ now in May,
And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day.
This is an out-door picture. Here is an indoor one quite as good--nay,
better:--
_While Peggy laces up her bosom fair,
With a blue snood Jenny binds up her hair_;
Glaud by his morning ingle takes a beek;
_The rising sun shines motty through the reek;
A pipe his mouth, the lasses please his een,
And now and then his joke maun intervene_.
We would quote, if we could--only it might not look so proper, when
isolated--the whole song at the close of Act the Second. The first line
of it alone is worth all Pope’s pastorals put together, and (we were going
to add) half of those of Virgil; but we reverence too much the great
follower of the Greeks, and true lover of the country. There is more
sentiment, and equal nature, in the song at the end of Act the Fourth.
Peggy is taking leave of her lover, who is going abroad:--
At setting day and rising morn,
Wi’ saul that still shall love thee,
I’ll ask o’ Heaven thy safe return,
Wi’ a’ that can improve thee.
I’ll visit aft the birkin bush,
Where first thou kindly tauld me
Sweet tales of love, _and hid my blush,
Whilst round thou didst infald me_.
To a’ our haunts I will repair,
To greenwood, shaw, or fountain;
Or where the summer day I’d share
Wi’ thee upon yon mountain.
There will I tell the trees and flowers
Frae thoughts unfeign’d and tender,
_By vows_ you’re mine, _by love_ is yours
A heart that cannot wander.
The charming and (so to speak) natural flattery of the loving delicacy of
this distinction--
_By vows_ you’re mine, _by love_ is yours,
was never surpassed by a passion the most refined. It reminds us of a like
passage in the anonymous words (Shakspeare might have written them) of
the fine old English madrigal by Ford, “Since first I saw your face.”
Perhaps Ford himself wrote them; for the author of that music had
sentiment enough in him for anything. The passage we allude to is--
What, I that _loved_, and you that _liked_,
Shall _we_ begin to wrangle?
The highest refinement of the heart, though too rare in most classes, is
luckily to be found in all; and hence it is, that certain meetings of
extremes in lovers of different ranks in life are not always to be
attributed either to a failure of taste on the one side, or unsuitable
pretensions on the other. Scottish dukes have been known to meet with real
Gentle-Shepherd heroines; and everybody knows the story of a lowly
Countess of Exeter, who was too sensitive to survive the disclosure of the
rank to which her lover had raised her.
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