Chapter I: Foreign Pastoral Poetry (1)

In approaching a subject of literary inquiry we are often able to fix upon some essential feature or condition which may serve as an Ariadne's thread through the maze of historical and aesthetic development, or to distinguish some cardinal point affording a fixed centre from which to survey or in reference to which to order and dispose the phenomena that present themselves to us. It is the disadvantage of such an artificial form of literature as that which bears the name of pastoral that no such _a priori_ guidance is available. To lay down at starting that the essential quality of pastoral is the realistic or at least recognizably 'natural' presentation of actual shepherd life would be to rule out of court nine tenths of the work that comes traditionally under that head. Yet the great majority of critics, though they would not, of course, subscribe to the above definition, have yet constantly betrayed an inclination to censure individual works for not conforming to some such arbitrary canon. It is characteristic of the artificiality of pastoral as a literary form that the impulse which gave the first creative touch at seeding loses itself later and finds no place among the forces at work at blossom time; the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of learning, and its insipid convention having become 'a literary plague in every European capital,' it finally disappeared from view amid the fopperies of the Roman Arcadia and the puerile conceits of the Petit Trianon.

Wherein then, it may be wondered, does the pastoral's title to consideration lie. It does not lie primarily, or chiefly, in the fact that it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Milton; nor yet that works such as the _Idyls_, the _Aminta_, the _Faithful Shepherdess_, and _Lycidas_ contain some of the most graceful and perfect verse to be found in any language. Rather is its importance to be sought in the fact that the form is the expression of instincts and impulses deep-rooted in the nature of humanity, which, while affecting the whole course of literature, at times evince themselves most clearly and articulately here; that it plays a distinct and distinctive part in the history of human thought and the history of artistic expression. Moreover, it may be argued that, from this point of view, the very contradictions and inconsistencies to which I have alluded make it all the more important to discover wherein lay the strange vitality of the form and its power of influencing the current of European letters.

From what has already been said it will be apparent that little would be gained by attempting beforehand to give any strict account of what is meant by 'pastoral' in literature. Any definition sufficiently elastic to include the protean forms assumed by what we call the 'pastoral ideal' could hardly have sufficient intension to be of any real value. If after considering a number of literary phenomena which appear to be related among themselves in form, spirit, and aim we come at the end of our inquiry to any clearer appreciation of the term I shall so far have attained my object. I notice that I have used the expression 'pastoral ideal,' and the phrase, which comes naturally to the mind in connexion with this form of literature, may supply us with a useful hint. It reminds us, namely, that the quality of pastoralism is not determined by the fortuitous occurrence of certain characters, but by the fact of the pieces in question being based more or less evidently upon a philosophical conception, which no doubt underwent modification through the ages, but yet bears evidence of organic continuity. Thus the shepherds of pastoral are primarily and distinctively shepherds; they are not mere rustics engaged in sheepcraft as one out of many of the employments of mankind. As soon as the natural shepherd-life had found an objective setting in conscious artistic literature, it was felt that there was after all a difference between hoeing turnips and pasturing sheep; that the one was capable of a particular literary treatment which the other was not. The Maid of Orleans might equally well have dug potatoes as tended a flock, and her place is not in pastoral song. Thus pastoral literature must not be confounded with that which has for its subject the lives, the ideas, and the emotions of simple and unsophisticated mankind, far from the centres of our complex civilization. The two may be in their origin related, and they occasionally, as it were, stretch out feelers towards one another, but the pastoral of tradition lies in its essence as far from the human document of humble life as from a scientific treatise on agriculture or a volume of pastoral theology. Thus the tract which lies before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex. Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the fold the fanciful animalism of Mr. Hewlett. By far the most remarkable work of recent years to assume the title is Signor d'Annunzio's play _La Figlia di Iorio_, a work in which the author's powerful and delicate imagination and wealth of pure and expressive language appear in matchless perfection. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that there is nothing in common between the 'pastoral ideal' and the rugged strength and suppressed fire of the great modern Italian's portrait of his native land of the Abruzzi.

I

Some confusion of thought appears to have prevailed among writers as to the origin of pastoral. We are, for instance, often told that it is the earliest of all forms of poetry, that it characterizes primitive peoples and permeates ancient literatures. Song is, indeed, as old as human language, and in a sense no doubt the poetry of the pastoral age may be said to have been pastoral. It does not, however, follow that it bears any essential resemblance to that which subsequent ages have designated by the name. All that we know concerning the songs of pastoral nations leads us to suppose that they bear a close resemblance to the type of popular verse current wherever poetry exists, folk-songs of broad humanity in which little stress is laid on the peculiar circumstances of shepherd life. An insistence upon the objective pastoral setting is of prime importance in understanding the real nature of pastoral poetry; it not only serves to distinguish the pastoral proper from the more vaguely idyllic forms of lyric verse, but helps us further to understand how it was that the outward features of the kind came to be preserved, even after the various necessities of sophisticated society had metamorphosed the content almost beyond recognition. No common feature of a kind to form the basis of a scientific classification can be traced in the spontaneous shepherd-songs and their literary counterpart. What does appear to be a constant element in the pastoral as known to literature is the recognition of a contrast, implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of civilization. At no stage in its development does literature, or at any rate poetry, concern itself with the obvious, with the bare scaffolding of life: whenever we find an author interested in the circle of prime necessity we may be sure that he himself stands outside it. Thus the shepherd when he sang did not insist upon the conditions amid which his uneventful life was passed. It was left to a later, perhaps a wiser and a sadder, generation to gaze with fruitless and often only half sincere longing at the shepherd-boy asleep under the shadow of the thorn, lulled by the low monotonous rustle of the grazing flock. Only when the shepherd-songs ceased to be the outcome of unalloyed pastoral conditions did they become distinctively pastoral. It is therefore significant that the earliest pastoral poetry with which we are acquainted, whatever half articulate experiments may have preceded it, was itself directly born of the contrast between the recollections of a childhood spent among the Sicilian uplands and the crowded social and intellectual city-life of Alexandria[1].

As the result of this contrast there arises an idea which comes perhaps as near being universal in pastoral as any--the idea, namely, of the 'golden age.' This embraces, indeed, a field not wholly coincident with that of pastoral, but the two are connected alike by a common spring in human emotion and constant literary association. The fiction of an age of simplicity and innocence found birth among the Augustan writers in the midst of the complex and luxurious civilization of Rome, as an illustration of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that 'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the _Quadriregio_, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in _Don Quixote_, and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral life was effected by Vergil, and in this form it was treated with loving minuteness by Tasso in his _Aminta_ and by Browne in his _Britannia's Pastorals_[2]. The fiction no doubt answered to some need in human nature, but in literature it soon came to be no more than a polite convention.

The conception of a golden age of rustic simplicity does not, indeed, involve the whole of pastoral literature. It does not account either for the allegorical pastoral, in which actual personages are introduced, in the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy at the rustic freedom of the country. What it does comprehend is that outburst of pastoral song which sprang from the yearning of the tired soul to escape, if it were but in imagination and for a moment, to a life of simplicity and innocence from the bitter luxury of the court and the menial bread of princes[3].

And this, the reaction against the world that is too much with us, is, after all, the keynote of what is most intimately associated with the name of pastoral in literature--the note that is struck with idyllic sweetness in Theocritus, and, rising to its fullest pitch of lyrical intensity, lends a poignant charm to the work of Tasso and Guarini. For everywhere in these soft melodies of luscious beauty, even in the studied sketches of primitive innocence itself, there is an undercurrent of tender melancholy and pathos:

Il mondo invecchia
E invecchiando intristisce.

I have said that a sense of the contrast between town and country was essential to the development of a distinctively pastoral literature. It would be an interesting task to trace how far this contrast is the source of the various subsidiary types--of the ideal where it breeds desire for a return to simplicity, of the realistic where the humour of it touches the imagination, and of the allegorical where it suggests satire on the corruption of an artificial civilization.

When the kind first makes its appearance in a world already old, it arises purely as a solace and relief from the fervid life of actuality, and comes as a fresh and cooling draught to lips burning with the fever of the city. In passing from Alexandria to Rome it lost much of its limpid purity; the clear crystal of the drink was mixed with flavours and perfumes to fit the palate of a patron or an emperor. The example of adulteration being once set, the implied contrast of civilization and rusticity was replaced by direct satire on the former, and later by the discussion under the pastoral mask of questions of religious and political controversy. Proving itself but a left-handed weapon in such debate, it became a court plaything, in which princes and great ladies, poets and wits, loved to see themselves figured and complimented, and the practice of assuming pastoral names becoming almost universal in polite circles, the convention, which had passed from the eclogue on to the stage, passed from the stage into actual existence, and court life became one continual pageant of pastoral conceit. From the court it passed into circles of learning, and grave jurists and administrators, poets and scholars, set about the refining of language and literature decked out in all the fopperies of the fashionable craze. One is tempted to wonder whether anything more serious than light loves and fantastic amours can have flourished amid eighteenth-century pastoralism. When the ladies of the court began to talk dairy-farming with the scholars and statesmen of the day, the pretence of pastoral simplicity could hardly be long kept up. Nor was there any attempt to do so. In the introduction to his famous romance d'Urfé wrote in answer to objectors: 'Responds leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy, ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suivent, de ces Bergeres necessiteuses, qui pour gaigner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux aux pasturages; mais que vous n'avez toutes pris cette condition que pour vivre plus doucement et sans contrainte.' No wonder that to Fontenelle Theocritus' shepherds 'sentent trop la campagne[4].' But the hour of pastoralism had come, and while the ladies and gallants of the court were playing the parts of Watteau swains and shepherdesses amid the trim hedges and smooth lawns of Versailles, the gates were already bursting before the flood, which was to sweep in devastation over the land, and to purge the old order of social life.

II

The Alexandria of the Ptolemies was not the nurse of a great literature, though the age was undoubtedly one of considerable literary activity. Scholastic learning and poetic imitation were rife; the rehandling of Greek masterpieces was a fashionable pastime. For serious and original composition, however, the conditions were not favourable. That the age produced no great epic was less due to the disparagement of the form indulged in by Callimachus, chief librarian and literary dictator, than to the inherent temper of society. The prevailing taste was for an arrogant display of rare and costly pageantry. At the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of Alexandria lacked the 'high seriousness' of purpose to produce an _Aeneid_, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a _Faery Queen_. What they possessed was delicacy, refinement, and wit; what they created, while perfecting the epigram and stereotyping the hymn, was a form intermediate between epic and lyric, namely the idyl as we find it in the works of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus.

It is interesting to note that the literary _milieu_ in which Theocritus moved at Alexandria must have abounded in all those temptations which proved the bane of pastoral poetry at Rome, Florence, and Ferrara. There were princes and patrons to be flattered, there were panegyrics to be sung and ancestral feats of arms to be recorded; nor does Theocritus appear to have stood aloof from the throng of court poetasters. In spite of the doubtful authenticity of some of the pieces connected with his name, there appears no sufficient reason to deprive him of the rather conventional hymns and other poems composed with a view to court-favour. These have little interest for us to-day: his fame rests on works which probably gained him little advantage at the time. It was for his own solace, forgetful for a moment of the intrigues of court life and the uncertain sunshine of princes, that he wrote his Sicilian idyls. For him, as at a magic touch, the walls of the heated city melted like a mirage into the sands of the salt lagoon, and he wandered once more amid the green woods and pastures of Trinacria, the noonday sun tempered by the shade of the chestnuts and the babbling of the brook, and by the cool airs that glide down from the white cliffs of Aetna. There once more he saw the shepherds tend their flocks, singing or wrangling with one another, dreamily piping on their wax-stopped reeds or plotting to annex their neighbours' gear; or else there sounded in his ears the love-song or the dirge, or the incantation of the forsaken girl rose amid the silence to the silver moon. Once again he stood upon the shore and watched the fishers cast their nets, while around him the goats browsed on the close herbage of the cliff, and the crystal stream leapt down, and the waves broke upon the rocks below, till he saw the breasts of the nymphs shine in the whiteness of the foam and their hair spread wide in the weed, and the fair Galatea, the enticing and the fickle, mocked the clumsy suit of the Cyclops, as she tossed upward the bitter spray from off her shining limbs. All these memories he recorded with a loving faithfulness of detail that it is even now possible to verify from the folk-songs of the south. To this day in the Isles of Greece ruined girls seek to lure back their lovers with charms differing but little from that sung by the Syracusan to Lady Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality, and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical illusion of primitive simplicity; he elaborated no imaginary cult of mystical worship. His art, however little it may tempt us to the use of the term realism, is nevertheless based on an almost passionate sympathy with actual human nature. This is the fount of his inspiration, the central theme of his song. The literary genius of Greece showed little aptitude for landscape, and seldom treated inanimate nature except as a background for human action and emotion, or it may be in the guise of mythological allegory. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Theocritus, so tenderly concerned with the homely aspects of human life, was not likewise sensitive to the beauties of nature. At least it is impossible to doubt his attachment to the land of his childhood, and it is at worst a welcome dream when we imagine him, as the evening of life drew on, leaving the formal gardens and painted landscapes of Alexandria and returning to Syracuse and his beloved Sicily once more.[5]

The verse of Theocritus was echoed by his younger contemporaries, Bion and Moschus.[6] The former is best known through the oriental passion of his 'Woe, woe for Adonis,' probably written to be sung at the annual festival of Syrian origin commemorated by Theocritus in his fifteenth idyl.[7] The most important extant work of Moschus is the 'Lament for Bion,' characterized by a certain delicate sentimentality alien to the spirit of either of his predecessors. It is perhaps significant that Theocritus appears to have been of Syracusan, Bion of Smyrnian, and Moschus of Ausonian origin.[8] With the exception of this poem, which is modelled on Theocritus' 'Lament for Daphnis,' there is little in the work of either of the younger poets of a pastoral nature. Certain fragments, however, if genuine, suggest that poems of the kind may have perished. Among the remains of Moschus occurs the following:

Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep,
For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep,
Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep;[9]

lines in which we already take leave of the genuine love of the pastoral life, springing from an intimate knowledge of and delight in nature, and see world-weariness arraying itself in the sentimental garb of the imaginary swain.

Once again, five centuries later,[10] the spirit of Greece shone for one brief moment in a work of pastoral elegance that has survived the changing tastes of succeeding generations. The 'romance of _Daphnis and Chloe_ is the last word of a world of sensuous enervation toying with the idea of vernal freshness and virginity. It is a genuine picture of the purity of awakening love, wrought with every delicacy of sentiment and expression, and yet in such manner as by its very _naïveté_ and innocence to serve as a goad to satiated appetite. It has been suggested that the work should properly be styled the _Lesbiaca_, a name which recalls the _Aethiopica_ and _Babylonica_, and reminds us that the author, though a student of Alexandrian literature, belonged to the school of the erotic romanciers and traditional bishops, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Of his life we know nothing, and even his name--Longus--has been called in question. The story, unlike those of most later pastoral romances, is of the simplest. The author, however, was no longer satisfied with the natural refinement of popular love poetry; the central characters are represented as foundlings nurtured by the shepherds of Lesbos, and are ultimately identified, on much the same conventional evidence as Ion and others had been before, as the children of certain rich and aristocratie families.[11] The interest of the story lies in the growth of their unconscious love, which constitutes the central theme of the work, though relieved here and there by wholly colourless adventure.

A Latin translation made the book popular after the introduction of printing, and the renaissance saw the French version by Amyot, a work of European reputation. This was translated into English under Elizabeth; an Italian translation followed in the seventeenth century,[12] and a Spanish is also extant. There is no doubt that it was widely read throughout the sixteenth and following centuries, but it exercised little influence on the development of pastoral literature. By the time it became generally known the main features of renaissance pastoral were already fixed, and in motive and treatment alike it was alien to the spirit that animated the fashionable masterpieces. The modern pastoral romance had already evolved itself from a blending of the eclogue with the mythological tale. The drama was developing on independent lines. Thus although, like the other romances of the late Greek school, it supplied many incidents and descriptions to be found in later works, it played no vital part in the history of pastoral, and left no mark either on the general form or on the spirit that animated the kind. Longus' romance finds its true descendant, as well as its closest imitation, in a work that achieved celebrity on the eve of the French revolution, that masterpiece of unreal and sentimental simplicity, Saint-Pierre's _Paul et Virginie_.

III

A faithful reproduction of the main conditions of actual life was the characteristic of Theocritus' poetry. It was subject to this ever-present limitation that his graceful fancy exercised its power of idealization. He took the singing match, the dirge, and the love-song or complaint as he found them among the shepherd-folk of Sicily, and gave them that objective setting which is as necessary to pastoral as to every other merely accidental form of poetry; for the true subjective lyric is independent of circumstances. The first of his great successors made the bucolic eclogue what, with trifling variation, it was to remain for eighteen centuries, a form based upon artificiality and convention. I have already pointed out that the literary conditions at Alexandria did not differ materially from those of Rome; it follows that the change must have been due to the character of Vergil himself. That intense love of beauty for its own sake which characterized the Greek mind had little hold over the Roman. Nor did the latter understand the charm of untaught simplicity. It is true that to the Roman poets of the Augustan period we owe the conception of the golden age, but it remained with them rather a philosophical mythus than the dream of an idyllic poet. To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more pith and moment. Although he followed Theocritus in his use of the several types of song and stamped them to all future ages in pastoral convention, though he may have begun with fairly close imitation of his model and only gradually diverged into a more independant style, he at no time showed himself content with the earlier poet's simplicity of motive.[13] The eclogue in which he followed Theocritus most closely, the eighth, is equally, perhaps, the most pleasing of the series. It combines the motives of the love-lament and incantation, and the closeness with which it follows while playing variations on its models is striking. One instance will suffice. Take the passage in the second Idyl thus rendered by Symonds:[14]

Hail, Hecatë, dread dame! to the end be thou my assistant,
Making my medicines work no less than the philtre of Circë,
Or Medea's charms, or yellow-haired Perimedë's.
Wheel of the magic spells, draw thou that man to my dwelling.

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

Song hath power to draw from heaven the wandering huntress,
Song was the witch's spell transformed the mates of Ulysses....
Home from the city to me, my song, lead home to me Daphnis.

Vergil was the first to begin the dissociation of pastoral from the conditions of actual life, and just as his shepherds cease to present the features and characters of the homely keepers of the flock, so his landscape becomes imaginary and undefined. This peculiarity has been noticed by Professor Herford in some very suggestive remarks prefixed to his edition of the _Shepherd's Calender_. 'The profiles of the Sicilian uplands,' he writes, 'waver uncertainly amid traits drawn from the Mantuan plain. In this confusion lay, perhaps, the germ of those debates between highland and lowland shepherds which reverberate through the later pastoral, and are still loud in Spenser.' The gulf that separated Vergil from his predecessor, in so far as their treatment of shepherd-life is concerned, may be measured by the manner in which they respectively deal with the supernatural. In the Greek Idyls we find the simple faith or superstition as it lived among the shepherd-folk; no Pan appears to sow dismay in the breasts of the maidens, nor do we find aught of the mystical worship that later gathered round him in the imaginary Arcadia. He is mentioned only as the rugged patron of herds and song, the wild indweller of the savage woods as he appeared to the minds of the simple swains, who hushed their midday piping fearful lest they should disturb the sleep of the god. It is true that Theocritus introduces mythological characters in the tale of Galatea, but it should be noticed that this merely forms the theme of a song or the subject of a poetical epistle to a friend. Moreover, it is open to more than one rationalistic interpretation. Symonds treats it as an allegory in harmony with the mythopoeic genius of Greek poetry. It is equally possible to regard the Cyclops as emblematic merely of the rough neatherd flouted by the more delicate shepherd-maiden--the contrast is of constant occurrence in later works--for, alike in one of his own fragments and in Moschus' lament, Bion is represented as courting this same Galatea after she has rid herself of the suit of Polyphemus. Vergil was content with no such simple mythology as this. He must needs shake Silenus from a drunken sleep and bid him tell of Chaos and old Time, of the infancy of the world and the birth of the gods. This mixture of obsolescent theology and Epicurean philosophy probably possessed little reality for Vergil himself, and would have conveyed no meaning whatever to the Sicilian shepherds. Its introduction stamps his eclogues with that unreality which has been the reproach of the pastoral from his day to ours. The didactic homily was one fresh convention introduced. Far more important was the tendency to make every form subserve some ulterior purpose of allegory and panegyric.[15] For the Roman its own beauty was no sufficient end of art. That the _Aeneid_ was written for the glorification of Rome cannot be made a reproach to the poet; the greatness of the end lent dignity to the means. That the pastoral was forced to serve the menial part of a vehicle of sycophantic praise is less easily pardoned. In Vergil's hands a conversation between shepherds becomes an expression of gratitude to the emperor for the restitution of his villa, a lament for Daphnis is interwoven with an apotheosis of Julius Caesar, and in the complaint of the forsaken shepherd, whom Apollo and Pan seek in vain to comfort, we may trace the wounded vanity of his patron deserted by his mistress for the love of a soldier. The fourth eclogue was written after the peace of Brundisium, and describes the golden age to which Vergil looked forward as consequent upon the birth of a marvellous infant, perhaps some offspring of the marriages of Antonius and Octavianus, celebrated in solemnization of the treaty. The poem achieved considerable fame, which lasted as late as the time of Dryden, owing to the belief that it contained a prophecy of the birth of Christ drawn from the Sibylline books, and won for Vergil throughout the middle ages the title of prophet and magician. Whether this belief was well founded or not may be left to those whom it may interest to inquire; it is sufficient for our purpose to note that in the poem in question Vergil first introduced the convention of the golden age into pastoral verse.

The first of the long line of imitators of whom we have any notice was a certain Calpurnius. His diction is correct and his verse smooth, but the suggestion that he belonged to the age of Augustus has not met with much favour among those competent to judge. He followed Vergil closely, chiefly developing the panegyric. His poems, however, include all the usual conventions, singing matches, invocations, cosmologies, and the rest, in the treatment of which originality never appears to have been his aim. Some of his pieces deal with husbandry, and belong more strictly to the school of the _Georgics_ and didactic poetry. The most interesting of his eclogues is one in which he contrasts the life of the town with that of the country, the direct comparison of which he appears to have been the first to treat. The poem likewise possesses some antiquarian interest, owing to a description of a wild-beast show in an amphitheatre in which the animals were brought up in lifts through the floor of the arena. Calpurnius is sometimes supposed, on account of a dedication to Nemesianus found in some manuscripts, to have lived at the end of the third century, but even supposing the dedication to be genuine, which is more than doubtful, it does not follow that the person referred to is that Nemesianus who contested the poetic crown with Prince Numerianus about the year 283[16]. This Nemesianus was probably the author of some eclogues which have been frequently ascribed to Calpurnius (numbers 8 to 11 in most editions), but which must be discarded from the list of his authentic works on a technical question of the employment of elision[17]. The _editio princeps_ of these eclogues is not dated, but probably appeared in 1471, so that they were at any rate accessible to writers of the _cinquecento_. It is not easy to trace any direct influence, unless, as perhaps we should, we credit to Calpurnius the suggestion of those poems in which a 'wise' shepherd describes to his less-travelled hearers the manners of the town.

A few pieces from the _Idyllia_ of Ausonius appear in some of the bucolic collections, but they cannot strictly be regarded as coming within the range of pastoral poetry.

IV

Events conspired to make Vergil the model for later writers of eclogues. The fame of the poet was a potent cause among many. Another reason why Theocritus found no direct imitators may be sought in the respective methods of the two poets. Work of the nature of the _Idyls_ has to depend for its value and interest upon the artistic qualities of the poetry alone. Such work may spring up spontaneously under almost any conditions; it is seldom produced through imitation. On the other hand, any scholar with a gift for easy versification could achieve a certain distinction as a follower of Vergil. His verse depended for its interest not on its poetic qualities but upon the importance of the themes it treated. Accidental conditions, too, told in favour of the Roman poet. During the middle ages Latin was a universal language among the lettered classes, while the knowledge of Greek, though at no time so completely lost as is sometimes supposed, was a far rarer accomplishment, and was restricted for the most part to a few linguistic scholars. Thus before the revival of learning had made Greek a possible source of literary inspiration, the Vergilian tradition, through the instrumentality of Petrarch and Boccaccio, had already made itself supreme in pastoral[18].

During the middle ages the stream of pastoral production, though it nowhere actually disappears, is reduced to the merest trickle. Notices of such isolated poems as survive have been carefully collected by Macrì-Leone in the introduction to his elaborate but as yet unfinished work on the Latin eclogue in the Italian literature of the fourteenth century. As early as the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century we find a poem by Severus Sanctus Endelechius, variously entitled 'Carmen bucolicum de virtute signi crucis domini' or 'de mortibus boum.' It is a hymn to the saint cross, and in it for the first time the pastoral suffered violence from the tyranny of the religious idea. The 'Ecloga Theoduli' alluded to by Chaucer in the _House of Fame_[19] appears to be the work of an Athenian writer, and is ascribed to various dates ranging from the fifth to the eighth centuries. While preserving as its main characteristic a close subservience to its Vergilian model, the eclogue participated in the general rise of allegory which marked the later middle ages. Pastoral colouring of no very definite order had shown itself in the elegies of Alcuin in the eighth century, as also in the 'Conflictus veris et hiemis,' traditionally ascribed to the Venerable Bede, but more probably the work of one Dodus, a disciple of Alcuin. Of the tenth century we possess an allegorical religious lament entitled 'Ecloga duarum sanctimonialium.' About 1160 a Benedictine monk named Metellus composed twelve poems under the title of _Bucolica Quirinalium_, in honour of St. Quirinus and in obvious imitation of Vergil. Reminiscences and paraphrases of the Roman poet are scattered throughout the monk's own barbarous hexameters, as in the opening verses:

Tityre tu magni recubans in margine stagni
Silvestri tenuique fide pete iura peculi!

It would hardly be worth recording these medieval clerks, the undistinguished writers, 'de quibus,' Boccaccio said, 'nil curandum est,' were it not that they show how the memory at least of the classical pastoral survived amid the ruins of ancient learning, and so serve to lead up to one last spasmodic manifestation of the kind in certain poems which else appear to stand in a curiously isolated position.

It was in 1319, during the bitter years of his exile at Ravenna, that Dante received from one John of Bologna, known, on account of his fame as a writer of Latin verse, as Giovanni del Virgilio, a poetical epistle inviting him to visit the author in his native city. His correspondent, while doing homage to his poetic genius, incidentally censured him for composing his great work in the base tongue of the vulgar[20]. Dante replied in a Vergilian eclogue, courteously declining Giovanni's invitation to Bologna, on the ground that it was a place scarcely safe for his person. As regarded the strictures of his correspondent, his triumphant answer in the shape of the _Paradiso_ lay yet unfinished, so the author of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ trifled with the charge and purported to compose the present poem in earnest of reform. There is a tone of not unkindly irony about the whole. Was it an elaborate jest at the expense of Giovanni, the writer of Vergilian verse? The Bolognese replied, this time also in bucolic form, repeating his invitation and holding out the special attraction of a meeting with Mussato, the most regarded poet of his day in Europe. Dante's second eclogue, if indeed it is correctly ascribed to his pen, introduces several historical characters. It is said not to have reached Bologna till after his death. These poems were not included in any of the early bucolic collections, and first appeared in print in the eighteenth century. They seem, from their purely occasional nature, their inconspicuous bulk, and lack of any striking characteristics, to have attracted little notice in their own day, and to have been ignored by later writers on pastoral as forming no link in the chain of historical development. Given, indeed, the Bucolics of Vergil, they are imitations such as might at any moment have appeared, irrespective of date and surroundings, and independent of any living literary tradition[21]. It is therefore impossible to regard them as in any way belonging to, or foreshadowing, the great body of renaissance pastoral, a division of literature endowed with remarkable vitality and evolutionary force, which must in its growth and decay alike be studied in close connexion with the ideas and temperament of the age, and in relation to the general development of the history of letters[22].

The grandeur of the Roman Empire, the background against which in historical retrospect we see the bucolic eclogues of Vergil and his immediate followers, had vanished when Italian literature once more rose out of chaos. The political organism had resolved itself into its constituent elements, and fresh combinations had arisen. Nevertheless, though the Empire was hardly now the shadow of its pristine greatness, men still looked to Rome as the centre of the civilized world. As the seat of the Church, it stood for the one force capable of supplying a permanent element among the warring interests of European politics. Nothing was more natural than that the poetic form that had reflected the glories of imperial Rome should bow to the fascination of Rome, the visible emblem on earth of the spiritual empire of Christ. To the medieval mind, so far from there being any antagonism between the two ideas, the one seemed almost to involve and necessitate the other. It saw in the splendeur of the Empire the herald of a glory not of this world, a preparation as it were, a decking of the chamber against the advent of the bride; and thus the pastoral which sang of the greatness of pagan Rome appeared at the same time a hymn prophetic of the glory of the Church[23].

Moreover, during the centuries that had elapsed since the days of Vergil the term 'pastoral' had gained a new meaning and new associations. In the days of Augustus Pan was a boorish anachronism; it was left to medieval Christianity to create a god who was in fact a shepherd of men[24] and so to render possible a pastoral allegory that should embody the dearest hopes and aspirations of the human heart. That Christian pastoralists availed themselves successfully of the possibilities of the theme it would be difficult to maintain. It is a singular fact that, at a time when allegory was the characteristic literary form, it was yet so impossible even for the finer spirits to follow a train of thought clearly and consistently, that it was only when a mind passed beyond the limitations of its own age, and assumed a position _sub specie aeternitatis_, that it was able to free itself from the prevalent confusion of the imaginary and the real, the word and the idea, and to perceive that success in allegory depends, not on the chaotic intermingling of the attributes of the type and the thing typified, but on so representing the one as to suggest and illuminate the other.

In the early days of renascent humanism, the first to renew the pastoral tradition, broken for some ten centuries, was Francesco Petrarca. It is not without significance that the first modern eclogues were from the same pen as the sonnet 'Fontana di dolore, albergo d'ira,' expressive of the shame with which earnest sons of the Church contemplated the captivity of the holy father at Avignon; for thus on the very threshold of Arcadia we are met with those bitter denunciations of ecclesiastical corruption which strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton. In one eclogue the poet mourns over the ruin and desolation of Rome, as a mother deserted of her children; another is a dialogue between two shepherds, in which St. Peter, under the pastoral disguise of Pamphilus, upbraids the licentious Clement VI with the ignoble servitude in which he is content to abide; a third shows us Clement wantoning with the shameless mistress of a line of pontifical shepherds, a figure allegorical of the corruption of the Church[25]; in yet a fourth Petrarch laments his estrangement from his patron Giovanni Colonna, a cardinal in favour at the papal court, whom it would appear his outspoken censures had offended. Petrarch's was not the only voice that was raised urging the Pope to return from the 'Babylonian captivity,' but the protest had peculiar significance from the mouth of one who stood forth as the embodiment of the new age still struggling in the throes of birth. When 'the first Italian' accepted the laurel crown at the Capitol, he dreamed of Rome as once more the heart of the world, the city which should embody that early Italian idea of nationality, the ideal of the humanistic commonwealth. The course urged alike by Petrarch and by St. Catherine was in the end followed, but the years of exile were yet to bear their bitterest fruit of mortification and disgrace. In 1377 Gregory XI transferred the seat of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, with the resuit that the world was treated to the edifying spectacle of three prelates each claiming to be the vicar of Christ and sole father of the Church.

These ecclesiastical eclogues form the most important contribution made by Italy's greatest lyric poet to pastoral. Others, one in honour of Robert of Sicily, another recording the defeat of Pan by Articus on the field of Poitiers, follow already existing pastoral convention. Some few, again, of less importance in literary history, are of greater personal or poetic interest. In one we see Francesco and his brother Gherardo wandering in the realm of shepherds, and there exchanging their views concerning religious verse. A group of three, standing apart from the rest, connect themselves with the subject of the _Canzoniere_. The first describes the ravages of the plague at Avignon; the second mourns over the death of poetry in the person of Laura, who fell a victim on April 6, 1348; the third is a dirge sung by the shepherdesses over her grave. One, lastly, a neo-classic companion to Theocritus' tale of Galatea, recounts the poet's unrequited homage to Daphne of the Laurels, thus again suggesting the idealized source of Petrarch's inspiration. This poem is not only the gem of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.

The, eclogues, twelve in number, appear to have been mostly composed about the middle of the fourteenth century. In the days of Petrarch the art of Latin verse was yet far from the perfection it attained in those of Poliziano and Vida; it was a clumsy vehicle in comparison with the vulgar tongue, which he affected to despise while setting therein the standard for future ages. Nevertheless, Petrarch's Latin poems bear witness to the natural genius for composition and expression to which we owe the _Canzoniere_. The _editio princeps_ of the pastorals appeared in the form of a beautifully printed folio at Cologne in 1473, ninety-nine years after the poet's death. They were entitled _Eglogae_[26] (i.e. _aeglogae_), by which, as Dr. Johnson remarked, Petrarch, finding no appropriate meaning in the form _eclogae_, 'meant to express the talk of goatherds, though it will only mean the talk of goats.'

No two men ever won for themselves more diverse literary reputations than Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio. The Latin eclogue is one of their few points of literary contact. The bucolic collections contain no less than sixteen such poems from the pen of the younger writer[27], which, though not devoid of merit as poetical exercises, show that as a metrist Boccaccio fell almost as far short of his friend in the learned as in the vulgar tongue. They were composed at various dates, mostly, it would appear, after 1360, though some are certainly earlier; and it would be difficult to say whether to him or to Petrarch belonged the honour of reviving the form, were it not that, both in the poems themselves and in his correspondance, he explicitly mentions Petrarch as his master in the kind[28]. In any case the dates of composition must cover a wide period, for the poems reflect varions phases of his life. 'Le Egloghe del Boccaccio,' says an Italian critic, 'rappresentano tutta la vita psicologica del poeta, dalle febbri d'amore alle febbri ascetiche.' The amorous eclogues, to which in later life Boccaccio attached little importance, are early; several are historical in subject and are probably of later date, though one may be as early as 1348; there are others of a religions nature which belong to the author's later years. The allusions in these poems are so obscure that it would in most cases be hopeless to seek to unravel the meaning had not the author left us a key in a letter to Martino da Signa, prior of the Augustinians. Many of the subjects are purely conventional, such as those of the early poems on the loves of the shepherds, the historical panegyrics and laments, and the satire on rich misers. The same may be said of a dispute on the respective merits of poetry and commerce, and of a poem in praise of poetry; although the former has an obvious relation to the author's own circumstances, and the latter appears to be inspired by genuine enthusiasm and love of art. The forces of confusion that have dogged the pastoral in all ages show themselves where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch's influence over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was later embodied by Spenser in his _Hymns_. One poem stands out from the rest somewhat after the manner of Petrarch's _Daphne_. In it Boccaccio tells us, under the thinnest veil of pastoral, how his daughter Violante, dead in childhood many years before, appeared to him bearing tidings of the land beyond the grave. The theme is the same as that of the almost contemporary _Pearl_; and in treating it Boccaccio achieves something of the sweetness and pathos of the English poem. One eclogue, finally, the _Valle tenebrosa (Vallis Opaca)_, which appears to owe something to Dante's description of hell, is probably historical in its intention, but the gloss explains _obscurum per obscurius_, and we can only suppose that the author intended that the inner sense should remain a mystery.

When Boccaccio wrote, the eclogue had not yet degenerated into the literary convention it became in the following century; and, though he was no doubt tempted to the use of the form by Vergilian tradition and the example of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural inclination and no mere dictate of fashion. Even in these poems the humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love. His eclogues, however, never attained the same reputation as Petrarch's, and remained in manuscript till the appearance of Giunta's bucolic collection of 1504.

* * * * *

As humanism advanced and the golden age of the renaissance approached, Latin bucolic writers sprang up and multiplied. The fullest collection--that printed by Oporinus at Basel in March, 1546--contains the poems of thirty-eight authors, and even this makes no pretence of giving those of the middle ages. The collection, however, ranges from Calpurnius to Castalio (i.e. the French theologian Sébastien Châteillon), and includes the work of Petrarca, Boccaccio, Spagnuoli, Urceo, Pontano, Sannazzaro, Erasmus, Vida, and others. There is a strong family likeness in the pastoral verse of these authors, and the majority are devoid of individual interest. A few, however, merit separate notice.

It was in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the renaissance eclogue, abandoning its last claims to poetic inspiration, assumed its definitive form in the works of Battista Spagnuoli, more commonly known from the place of his birth by the name of Mantuanus. His eclogues, ten in number, were accepted by the sixteenth century as models of pastoral composition, inferior to those of Vergil alone, were indeed any inferiority allowed. Starting with the simple theme of love, the author proceeds to depict its excess in the love-lunes of the distraught Amyntas. Thence he passes to one of those satires on women in which the fifteenth century delighted, so bitter, that when Thomas Harvey came to translate it in 1656 he felt constrained, for his credit's sake, to add the note, 'What the author meant of all, the translater intends only of ill women[29].' There follows the old complaint of the niggardliness of rich patrons towards poor poets, and a satire on the luxury of city life. The remaining poems are ecclesiastical. One is in praise of the religious life, another describes the simple faith of the country folk and the joys of conversion; finally, we have a satire on the abuses of Rome, and a discussion on points of theological controversy. None of these subjects possess the least novelty; the author's merit, if merit it can be called, lies in having stamped them with their definitive form for the use of subsequent ages. Combined with this lack of originality, however, it is easy to trace a strong personal element in the bitterness of the satire that pervades many of the themes, the orthodox eclogue on conversion standing in curious contrast with that on ecclesiastical abuses.

It is not easy to account for Spagnuoli's popularity, but the curiously representative quality of his work was no doubt in part the cause. His poems were what, through the changing fashions of centuries, men had come to expect of bucolic verse. They crystallized into a standard mould whatever in pastoral, whether classical or renaissance, was most obviously and easily reducible to a type, and so attained the position of models beyond which it was needless to go. They were first printed in 1498, and went through a number of editions during the author's lifetime. As a young man--and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be attributed--Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order, but retired in 1515, the year before his death.

Three eclogues are extant from the pen of Pontano, a distinguished humanist at the court of Ferdinand I and his successors at Naples, and a Latin poet of considerable grace and feeling. His poems were first published by Aldus in 1505, two years after his death. In one characteristic composition he laments the loss of his wife, to whom he was deeply attached; another introduces under a pastoral name his greater disciple Sannazzaro[30].