Chapter I: Foreign Pastoral Poetry (2)

Jacopo Sannazzaro, known to humanism as Actius Sincerus, disciple of the 'Accademia Pontana,' and editor of his master's works, the greatest explorer, if not the greatest exponent, of the mysteries of Arcadia, was born of parents of Spanish origin at Naples in 1458. His boyhood was spent at San Cipriano, but he soon returned to Naples, where he fell in love with Carmosina Bonifacia. His passion does not appear to have been reciprocated, but the lady has her place in literature as the Phillis of the eclogues. He attached himself to the court of Frederick of Aragon, whom he followed into exile in France. Returning to Naples after his patron's death in 1503, he again fell in love, this time with a certain Cassandra Marchesa, to whom he continued to pay court, _more Platonico_, till his death in 1530. He is said to have died at her house.

To his Italian work I shall have to return later; here it is his five Latin piscatory eclogues that demand notice. There is nothing in the subject-matter to arrest attention--they consist of a lament for Carmosina, a lover's complaint, a singing match, a panegyric, and a poem in honour of Cassandra--but the form is interesting. Of course the claim sometimes put forward for Sannazzaro, as the inventor of the piscatory eclogue, ignores various passages in Theocritus, notably the twenty-first Idyl, whence he presumably borrowed the idea. But it is certainly refreshing, after wandering in an unreal Sicily and an imaginary Arcadia, and listening to shepherds discourse of the abuses of the Roman Curia, to dive into the waters of the bay of Naples, or wanton in fancy along its sunlit shore from the low rocks of Baiae to the sheer cliffs of Sorrento, and to feel that, even though Jacopo was no Neapolitan fisher-boy, and Carmosina no nymph of Posilipo, yet the poet had at least before him the blue water and the dark rocks, and in his heart the love that formed the theme of his song[31].

Sannazzaro also wrote a mythological poem entitled _Salices_, in which certain nymphs pursued by satyrs are changed by Diana into willows. The tale was evidently suggested by Ovid, and cannot strictly be classed as pastoral, though it may have helped to fix in pastoral convention the character of the satyr; who, however, at no time enjoyed a very savoury reputation. The Latin works were first published at Naples in 1536, and though far from rivalling the popularity of the _Arcadia_, went through several editions.

The Latin eclogues of the renaissance are distinguished from all other forms of allegory by the obscure and recondite allusions that they affected. There were few among their authors for whom the narration of simple loves and sorrows or the graces of untutored nature possessed any attraction; we find them either making their shepherds openly discuss contemporary affairs, or more often clothing their references to actual events in a sort of pastoral allegory, fatuous as regards its form and obscure as regards its content. Tityrus and Mopsus are alternately lovers, courtiers and spiritual pastors; Pan, when he does not conceal under his shaggy outside the costly robes of a prince, is a strange abortive monster, drawing his attributes in part from pagan superstition, in part from Christian piety; a libel upon both. The seed sown by Petrarch and Boccaccio bore fruit only too freely. The writers of eclogues, either debarred from or incapable of originality, sought distinction by ever more and more elaborate and involved allusions; and their works, in their own day held the more sublime the more incomprehensible they were, are now the despair of those who would wring from them any semblance of meaning.

The absurdities of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his _Zanitonella_ in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ample scope for his wit in anatomizing the foible of the day, fashionable society continued none the less to encourage the exquisite inanity, and to be flattered by the elegant obscurity, of the allegorical pastoral.

V

In 1481 appeared an Italian translation of the Bucolics of Vergil from the pen of Bernardo Pulci. The same volume also contained a collection of eclogues in the vernacular by various authors, none of which have any particular interest beyond what attaches to them as practically heading the list of Italian pastorals[32]. It will be noticed that these poems correspond in date with the later school of Latin bucolic writers, represented by Mantuan; and the vernacular compositions developed approximately parallel to, though usually in imitation of, those in the learned tongue. But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included by Boccaccio in his _Ameto_ is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in _terza rima_, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for 'pastoral,' as _ottava rima_ for 'rustic,' composition. The poem is a contention between an upland and a lowland shepherd, and begins in genuine pastoral fashion:

Come Titan del seno dell' aurora
Esce, così con le mie pecorelle
I monti cerco sema far dimora.

It is chiefly differentiated from many similar compositions in Latin--and the distinction is of some importance--in that the interest is purely pastoral; no political or religious allusions being discernible under the arguments of the somewhat quarrelsome swains[33]. This peculiarity is on the whole characteristic of the later vernacular pastoral likewise, which, after the appearance of the collection of 1481, soon became extremely common, Siena and Urbino, Ferrara, Bologna and Padua, Florence and Naples, all alike bearing practical witness to the popularity of the kind[34].

In 1506 Castiglione[35] and Cesare Gonzaga, in the disguise of shepherds, recited an eclogue interspersed with songs before the court of Duke Guidubaldo at Urbino. The Duchess Elizabeth was among the spectators. The _Tirsi,_ as it is called, begins with the simple themes of pastoral complaint, whence by swift transition it passes to a panegyric of the court and the circle of the _Cortegiano_. It was not the first attempt at bringing the pastoral upon the boards, since Poliziano's _Orfeo_ with its purely bucolic opening had been performed as early as 1471; but Castiglione's _ecloga rappresentativa_ was the first of any note to depend purely on the pastoral form and to introduce on the stage the convention of the allegorical pastoral. Some years later a further step was taken in the dramatization of the eclogue by Luigi Tansillo in his _Due pelegrini_, performed at Messina in 1538, though composed and probably originally acted some ten years before. It is through these and similar poems that we shall have to trace the gradual evolution of the pastoral drama in a later section of this work. Tansillo was likewise the author, both of a poem called _Il Vendemmiatore_, one of those obscene debauches of fancy which throw a lurid light on the luxurious imagination of the age, and of a didactic work, _Il Podere_, in which, as his editor somewhat naïvely remarks, 'ci rende amabile la campagna e l'agricoltura[36].'

The practice of eclogue-writing soon became no less general in the vernacular than in Latin, and the band of pastoral poets included men so different in temperament as Machiavelli, who left a 'Capitolo pastorale' among his miscellaneous works, and Ariosto, whose eclogue on the conspiracy contrived in 1506 against Alfonso d'Este was published from manuscript in 1835. The fashion of the piscatory eclogue, set by Sannazzaro in Latin, was followed in Italian by his fellow-citizen Bernardino Rota, and later by Bernardino Baldi of Urbino, Abbot of Guastalla, in whose poems we are able at times to detect a ring of simple and refreshing sincerity.

Though, as will be understood even from the brief summary given above, the allusive element is not wholly absent from these poems, it is nevertheless true, as already said, that it appears less persistently than in the Latin works, the weighty matters of religion and politics being as a rule avoided. The reason is perhaps not far to seek, since, being in the vulgar tongue, they appealed to a wider and less learned audience, before whom it might have been injudicious to utter too strong an opinion on questions of church and state.

So far the pastoral poetry of Italy had been composed exclusively in the literary Tuscan of the day. To Florence and to Lorenzo de' Medici in particular is due the honour of having first introduced the rustic speech of the people. His two poems written in the language of the peasants about Florence, _La Nencia da Barberino_ and a canzonet _In morte della Nencia_, possess a grace to which the quaintness of the diction adds point and flavour. A short extract must suffice to illustrate the style.

Ben si potrà tener avventurato
Chi sia marito di sì bella moglie;
Ben si potrà tener in buon dì nato
Chi arà quel fioraliso senza foglie;
Ben si potrà tenersi consolato
Che si contenti tutte le sue voglie
D' aver la Nencia, e tenersela in braccio
Morbida e bianca, che pare un sugnaccio.

* * * * *

Nenciozza mia, vuo' tu un poco fare
Meco a la neve per quel salicale?--
Sì, volentier, ma non me la sodare
Troppo, chè tu non mi facessi male.--
Nenciozza mia, deh non ti dubitare,
Chè l' amor ch' io ti porto sì è tale,
Che quando avessi mal, Nenciozza mia,
Con la mia lingua te lo leveria.

This form of composition at once became fashionable. Luigi Pulci[37] composed his _Beca di Dicomano_, which attained almost equal success and passed for the work of Lorenzo. It is, however, a far inferior production, in which the quaintness of the model is replaced by coarse caricature and its delicate rusticity by a cruder realism. Other imitations followed, but none bear comparison with Lorenzo's poem[38]. It is in thought and expression rather than in actual language that these poems distinguish themselves from the literary pastoral. More noticeably dialectal is an anonymous _Pescatoria amorosa_ printed about 1550. It is a Venetian serenade sung in the persons of fishermen, and possesses a certain grace of language:

Cortese donne, belle innamorae,
Donzelle, vedovette, e maridae,
Ascholte ste parole, che le no se cortelae,
Che intendere la causa del vegnir in ste contrae[39].

Symonds and D'Ancona alike remark, with perfect truth, that Lorenzo's rustic style, in spite of its sympathetic grace, is not altogether dissociated from burlesque. While free from the artificiality of court pastoral, it is equally distinct from the natural simplicity of the Theocritean idyl. Its flavour depends upon the half cynical, half kindly, amusement afforded by the contrast between the _naïveté_ of the country and the familiar and conventional polish of town life. This theme had already caught the fancy of the song-writers of the fourteenth century, who produced some of the most delightful examples of native and unconventional pastoral anywhere to be found[40]. Franco Sacchetti the novelist, for example, gives us a series of charming vignettes of country life and scenery, but always from the point of view of the town observer. One poem of his in particular gained wide popularity, and a modernized and somewhat altered version was iater printed among the works of Poliziano. It was originally a _ballata_, but I prefer to quote some stanzas from the traditional version:

Vaghe le montanine e pastorelle,
Donde venite sì leggiadre e belle?--

Vegnam dall' alpe, presso ad un boschetto;
Picciola capannella è il nostro sito;
Col padre e colla madre in picciol tetto,
Dove natura ci ha sempre nutrito,
Torniam la sera dal prato fiorito
Ch' abbiam pasciute nostre pecorelle.--

Ben si posson doler vostre bellezze,
Poichè tra valli e monti le mostrate,
Chè non è terra di sì grandi altezze
Che voi non foste degne ed onorate.
Ora mi dite, se vi contentate
Di star nell' alpe così poverelle?--

Più si contenta ciascuna di noi
Gire alla mandria, dietro alla pastura,
Più che non fate ciascuna di voi
Gire a danzare dentro a vostre mura;
Ricchezza non cerchiam, nè più ventura,
Se non be' fiori, e facciam ghirlandelle[41].

Other writers besides Sacchetti produced songs of the sort, but in all alike the strictly pastoral element was accidental, and merged insensibly into the more delicately romantic of the _novelle_ themes. The following lines touch on a situation familiar in later pastoral and also found in English ballad poetry. They are by Alesso Donati, a contemporary of Sacchetti's. A nun sings:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica
Gittar voglio e lo scapolo
Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica;
Poi teco a guisa d'assetato giovane,
Non già che si sobbarcoli,
Venir me n' voglio ove fortuna piovane:

E son contenta star per serva e cuoca,
Chè men mi cocerò ch' ora mi cuoca[42].

But if pastoralism made its appearance in the lyric, the lyric equally influenced pastoral, for it is in the songs of the fifteenth century that we first meet with that spirit of graceful melancholy sighing over the transitoriness of earthly things, the germ of the _voluttà idillica_ of the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido._ This vein is strong in Lorenzo's charming carnival songs, which at once recall Villon's burden, 'Où sont les neiges d'antan?' and anticipate Tasso's warning:

Cangia, cangia consiglio,
Pazzerella che sei;
Che il pentirsi dassezzo nulla giova.

The 'triumph' of _Bacchus and Ariadne_, introduced with amorous nymphs and satyrs, has the refrain:

Quant' è bella giovinezza,
Che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
Di doman non c' è certezza.

The flower of lyric melancholy is already full blown. So, too, in another carnival song of his:

Or che val nostra bellezza?
Se si perde, poco vale.
Viva amore e gentilezza!

_Gentilezza, morbidezza_--the yielding fancy in the disguise of pity, the nerveless languor that passes for beauty--such is the dominant note of the song upon men's lips in the troublous times of the renaissance[43].

Another of the outlying realms of pastoral is the mythological tale, more or less directly imitated from Ovid. The first to introduce it in vernacular literature was Boccaccio, who in his _Ninfale fiesolano_ uses a pagan allegory to convey a favourite _novella_ theme. The shepherd Affrico loves a nymph of Diana, and the tale ends by the goddess changing her faithless votary into a fountain. It is written in somewhat cumbrous _ottava rima_, and seldom shows any conspicuous power of narrative. Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of _Ambra_. The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists. The poem recounts how the wood-nymph Ambra, beloved of Lauro, is pursued by the river-god Ombrone, one of Arno's tributary divinities, and praying to Diana in her hour of need, is by her transformed into a rock[44]. Lorenzo's _Selva d'amore_ and _Caccia col falcone_ might also be mentioned in the same connexion.

Less pastoral in motive and less connected in narrative, but of even greater importance in the formation of pastoral taste, is the famous _Giostra_ written in honour of the young Giuliano de' Medici. I have already more than once had occasion to mention its author, Angelo Ambrogini, better known from the place of his birth as Poliziano or Politian[45], the contemporary, dependent, and fellow-littérateur of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and the greatest scholar and learned writer of the Italian renaissance. As the author of the _Orfeo_ he will occupy our attention when we come to trace the evolution of the pastoral drama. Though he left no poems belonging to the recognized forms of pastoral composition, his work constantly borders upon the kind, and evinces a genuine sympathy with rustic life which makes the ascription to him of the already quoted modernization of Sacchetti not inappropriate. He left several other pieces of a similar nature, some of which at least are known to be adaptations of popular songs[46]. Such, for instance, is the irregular _canzone_ beginning:

La pastorella si leva per tempo
Menando le caprette a pascer fuora,
Di fuora, fuora: la traditora
Co' suoi begli occhi la m' innamora,
E fa di mezza notte apparir giorno.

The _Giostra_ is composed, like its predecessors, in the octave stanza, and presents a series of pictures drawn from classical mythology or from the poet's own imagination, adorned with all the physical beauty the study of antiquity could supply and a rich and refined taste crystallize into chastest jewellery of verse[47]. This blending of luxuriance and delicacy is the characteristic quality of Poliziano's and Lorenzo's poetry. It is admirably expressed in the phrase of a recent critic, 'the decorum of things exquisite.' After the lapse of another half-century, during which the renaissance advanced from its graceful youth to the full bloom of its maturity, appeared the _Ninfa tiberina_ of Francesco Maria Molza. 'The _voluttà idillica_[48],' writes Symonds, 'which opened like a rosebud in the _Giostra_, expands full petals in the _Ninfa tiberina_; we dare not shake them, lest they fall.' Like the earlier poem it possesses little narrative unity--the taie of Eurydice introduced by way of illustration occupies more than a third of the whole--but every point is made the occasion of minute decoration of the richest beauty. It was written for Faustina Mancina, a celebrated courtesan, whose empire lay till the day of her death over the papal city. The wealth of sensuality and wit that made a fatal seduction of Rome for Molza, scholar and libertine, is reflected as it were in the rich cadences and overwrought adornment of his verse. Such compositions as these had a powerful influence over the tone of idyllic poetry. I have mentioned only a few out of a considerable list. The _Driadeo d'amore_ earlier--a mythological medley variously ascribed in different editions to Luca and to Luigi Pulci--and Marino's _Adone_ later, were likewise among the works that went to form the courtly taste to which the pastoral drama appealed. The detailed criticism, however, of such compositions lies beyond the scope of this work.

VI

We must now return to an earlier period in order to follow the development of the pastoral romance. When dealing with _Daphnis and Chloe_ I pointed out that the Greek work could claim no part in the formation of the later prose pastoral. Between it and the work of Boccaccio and Sannazzaro there exists no such continuity of tradition as between the bucolics of the classical Mantuan and those of his renaissance follower. The Italian pastoral romance, in spite of its almost pedantic endeavour after classical and mythological colouring, was as essentially a product of its age as the pastoral drama itself. So far as any influence on the evolution of the subsequent Arcadia was concerned, Longus might as well never have written of the pastures of Lesbos. Indeed, were we here concerned in assigning to its historical source each particular trait in individual works, rather than in tracing the general development of an idea, it would be casier to distinguish a faint and slightly cynical reminiscence of _Daphnis and Chloe _ in the _Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_ than in the _Ameto_ or the _Arcadia_.

In his pastoral romance, 'Ameto, ovvero Commedia delie ninfe fiorentine,' Boccaccio set a fashion in literature, namely the intermingling for purposes of narration of prose and verse[49], in which he was followed a century and a half later by Pietro Bembo, the Socrates of Castiglione's renaissance Symposium, in his dialogue on love entitled _Gli Asolani_, and by Jacopo Sannazzaro in his still more famous _Arcadia_. The _Ameto_ is one of Boccaccio's early compositions, written about 1341, after his return from Naples, but before he had gained his later mastery of language. It is not unfairly characterized by Symonds as 'a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition.' It is, however, possible to underrate its merits, and it would be easy to overlook its historical importance. Ameto is a rude hunter of the neighbourhood of Florence. One day, while in the woods, he discovers a company of nymphs resting by a stream, and overhears the song of the beautiful Lia. His rough nature is touched by the sweetness of the music and he falls in love with the singer. Their meetings are interrupted by the advent of winter, but he finds her again at the feast of Venus, when shepherds, fauns, and nymphs forgather at the temple of the goddess. In this company Lia proposes that each of the nymphs present, seven in number, shall narrate the story of her love. This they in turn do, each ending with a song of praise to the gods; and Ameto feels his love burn for each in turn as he listens to their tales. When the last has ended a sudden brightness shines around and 'there descended with wondrous noise a column of pure flame, even such as by night went before the Israelitish people in the desert places,' Out of the brightness cornes the voice of Venus:

Io son luce del cielo unica e trina,
Principio e fine di ciascuna cosa,
Del quai men fù, nè fia nulla vicina.

Ameto, though half blinded by the heavenly effulgence, sees a new joy and beauty shine upon the faces of the nymphs, and understands that the flame-shrouded presence is that, not of the wanton _mater cupidinum_, but of the goddess of divine fire who comes to reveal to him the mysteries of love. Cleansed of his grosser nature by a baptismal rite, in which each of the nymphs performs some symbolic ceremonial, he feels heavenly love replacing human in his heart, and is able to bear undazzled the radiance of the divine purity. He salutes the goddess with a song:

O diva luce, quale in tre persone
Ed una essenza il ciel governi e 'l mondo
Con giusto amore ed eterna ragione,
Dando legge alle stelle, ed al ritondo
Moto del sole, principe di quelle,
Siccome discerniamo in questo fondo[50].

Various interpretations have been suggested for this work, with its preposterous mixture of pagan and Christian motives. This peculiarity, which we have already met with in Boccaccio's eclogues, and in his _Ninfale fiesolano_, was indeed one of the most persistent as it was one of the least admirable characteristics of pastoral composition. Francesco Sansovino, who edited the _Ameto_ in 1545, discovered real personages underlying the characters of the romance. Fiammetta is introduced by name, and her lover Caleone can hardly be other than Boccaccio. More recent commentators are probably right in detecting an allegorical intention. The seven nymphs, according to them, represent the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and their stories are to be interpreted symbolically. This view derives support from the baptismal ceremony, in which after the public lustration one of the nymphs removes the scales from Ameto's eyes, while another, 'breathing between his lips, kindled within him a flame such as he had never felt before.' In these ministrants it is not difficult to recognize the virtues respectively of faith and love. Ameto may be taken as typical of humanity, tamed of its savage nature by love, and through the service of the virtues led to the knowledge of the divine essence. The conception of love as a civilizing and humanizing power already underlay the sensuous stanzas of the _Ninfale fiesolano_, while the later part of the romance was not uninfluenced by recollections of the _Divine Comedy_[51]. It is true that a modern mind will with difficulty be able to reconcile the amorous confessions of the nymphs with the characteristics of the virtues, but in Boccaccio's day the tradition of the _Gesta Romanorum_ was still strong, and the age that mysticized Vergil, and moralized Ovid, was capable of much in the way of allegorical interpretation[52].

The point to which this allegorical interpretation can legitimately be carried need not trouble us here. Having set himself to characterize the virtues, it is moreover likely enough that Boccaccio sought at the same time to connect his figures more or less definitely with actual persons. It is sufficient for our present purpose if we recognize in the _Ameto_ something of the same triple intention which, not to put too fine a metaphysical point upon the parallel, we meet with in Dante and in the _Faery Queen_. Having fashioned in accordance with these motives the framework of his book, Boccaccio further concerned himself but little with this philosophical intention, and the allegorical setting having served its artistic purpose of linking them together into one connected whole, it was upon the detail of the narratives themselves that the author's attention was concentrated. It is, however, just in this artistic purpose of the setting that one of the chief interests of the _Ameto_ lies; for if in the mingling of verse and prose it is the forerunner of the _Arcadia_, in the linking together of a series of isolated stories it anticipates Boccaccio's own _Decameron_.

While there is little that is distinctly bucolic about the _Ameto_, the atmosphere is eminently pastoral in the wider sense. Nymphs and shepherds, foresters and fauns meet at the temple of Venus; the limpid fountains and shady laurels belong essentially to the conventional landscape, whether of Sicily, of Arcadia, or of the hills overlooking the valley of the Arno. The Italian imagination was not careful to differentiate between field and forest: _favola boschereccia_ was used synonymously with _commedia pastorale_; _drammi dei boschi_ is a term which covers the whole of the pastoral drama. But what really gives the _Ameto_ its importance in the history of pastoral literature is the manner in which, undisturbed by its religions and allegorical machinery, it introduces us to a purely sensual and pagan paradise, in which love with all its pains and raptures reigns supreme.

The narratives of the nymphs, and indeed the whole of the prose portions of the work, are composed in a style of surcharged and voluptuous beauty, congested with lengthy periods, and accumulated superlatives and relative clauses, which, in its endeavour to maintain itself and its subject at the highest possible pitch, only succeeds in being intensely and almost uniformly monotonous and dull. It is perfectly true that the work possesses some at least of the qualities of its defects. There are passages which argue a feeling for beauty, none the less real for being of a somewhat conventional order, while we not seldom detect a certain rich luxuriance about the descriptions; but it must be admitted that on the whole the style exhibits most of Boccaccio's faults and few of his merits. The verse interspersed throughout is in _terza rima_, and offers small attraction to the ordinary reader: 'meschinissima cosa' is a verdict which, if somewhat severe, will probably find few to contradict it.

In a certain passage, speaking of Poliziano's _Orfeo_, Symonds remarks that 'while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero.' Without inquiring too closely how far the writers of the renaissance actually connected the hero of music, as a power of civilization, with their newly discovered country, it is interesting to note that the earliest work in the Italian language containing in however amoebean a state the pastoral ideal opens with an allusion to Orpheus.

Quella vertù, che già l'ardito Orfeo
Mosse a cercar le case di Plutone,
Allor che forse lieta gli rendeo
La cercata Euridice a condizione,
E dal suon vinto dell' arguto legno,
E dalla nota della sua canzone,
Per forza tira il mio debile ingegno
A cantar le tue Iode, o Citerea,
Insieme con le forze del tuo regno[53].

Orpheus, however, does not stand alone. Venus, Phoebus, Mars, Cupid, and finally Jove, are each in turn invoked, to say nothing of the incidental mention of Aeneas, Mirra, and Europa. This love of mythology in and out of season is one of the most prominent features of the work. One of the nymphs describes her youth in the following words:

il padre mio .... visse eccellentissimo ne' beni pubblici tra' reggenti,
e de' beni degli iddii copioso: me a lui donata da loro, nominò Mopsa, e
vedentemi nella giovanetta età mostrante già bella forma, ai servigi
dispose di Pallade, la quale me benivola ricevente nelle sante grotte
del cavallo Gorgoneo, tra le sapientissime Muse commise, là dov' io
gustai l'acque Castalie, e l'altezza di Cirra tentante, le stelle cercai
con ferma mano; e i pallidi visi, quelli luoghi colenti, sempre con
riverenza seguii; e molte volte sonando Apollo la cetera sua, lui nel
mezzo delle nove Muse ascoltai[54].

She continues for pages in the same strain with illustrative allusions to Caius Julius, Claudius, and Britannicus.

At the risk of devoting to the _Ameto_ an altogether disproportionate amount of the space at my disposai I must before passing on attempt to give some notion of the kind of narrative contained in the romance, all the more so as it is little known except to students. With this object I have translated a characteristic passage from the tale of Agape[55].

I came from my home nigh unto the temple, before whose altars, with due
devotion, I began thus to pray: 'O Venus, full of pity, sacred goddess
whose altars I am joyful to approach, lend thou thy merciful ears unto
my prayer; for I come to thee a young girl, though fairly fashioned yet
ill-starred in love, fearful lest my empty years lead comfortless to a
chill old age; therefore, if my beauty merit that I be counted among thy
followers, enter thou into my breast who so desire thee, and grant that
in the love of a youth not unworthy of my beauty, and through whom my
wasted hours may be with delight made good, I may feel those fires of
thine which many times and endlessly I have heard praised.' I know not
whether while I was thus engrossed in prayer I fell on sleep, and
sleeping saw those things whereof I am about to tell, or whether,
indeed, I was rapt thence in bodily form to see them; all I can tell is
that suddenly I found myself borne through the heavens in a gleaming
chariot drawn by white doves, and that inclining my eyes to things below
I beheld the fruitful earth shrunk to a narrow room, and the rivers
thereof after the fashion of serpents; and after that I had left behind
the pleasant lands of Italy and the rugged mountains of Emathia, I
beheld the waters of the Dircean fount and the ancient walls raised by
the sound of Amphion's lyre, and soon there appeared to me the pleasant
Cytherean mount, and on it resting the holy chariots drawn by the
spotless birds. Whereon having alighted I went straying, alike uncertain
of the way and of the fortune that might await me, when, as to Aeneas
upon the Afric shore, so to me there amid the myrtles there appeared the
goddess I had invoked, and I was filled with wonder such as I had never
known before. She was disrobed except for the thinnest purple veil,
which hid but little of her form, falling in double curve with many
artful foldings over her left side; her face shone even as the sun, and
her head was adorned with great length of golden hair rippling down over
white shoulders; her eyes flashed with light never seen till then. Why
should I labour to tell the loveliness of her mouth and of her snowy
neck, of her marble breast and of her every part, since to do so lies so
far beyond my powers, and even where I able, hardly should my words gain
credence? But whereas she was now at hand I bowed my knees before her
godhead, and with such voice as I could command, repeated my petition in
her presence. She listened thereto, and approaching bade me rise,
saying, 'Follow me; thy prayer is heard, thy desire granted,' and
thereupon withdrew me to a somewhat loftier spot. There hidden amidst
the dense foliage she discovered to me her only son, upon whom gazing in
admiration, I found his beauty such that in all things did he appear
fashioned like unto her, except in so far as being he a god and she a
goddess. O how oft, remembering Psyche, I counted her happy and unhappy;
happy in the possession of such a husband, unhappy in his loss, most
happy in receiving him again from Jove. But even as I gazed, he, beating
the air with his sacred wings that gleamed with clearest gold, departed
with his load of newly fashioned arrows from those parts, and at the
bidding of the goddess I turned to the spring wherein he used to temper
his golden darts fresh forged with fiercest fire. Its silver waters,
gushing of themselves from the earth and shaded along the margin by a
growth of myrtle and dogwood, were neither violated in their purity by
the approach of bird or beast, nor suffered aught from the sun's
distemperature, and as I leaned forward to catch the reflection of my
own figure I could discern the clear bottom free from every trace of
mud[56]. The goddess, for that the hour was already hot, had doffed her
transparent veil and plunged her into the cool water, and now commanded
me that having stripped I too should enter the spring. We were yet
disporting ourselves in the lovely fountain, when, raising my head and
gazing with longing eyes around, I saw amid the leaves a youth, pale and
shy of appearance, who with slow steps was advancing towards the sacred
water. As I looked on him he was pleasant in my eyes, but that he should
behold me naked filled me with shame, and I turned away to hide my
unwonted blushes. And in like manner at the sight of me he too changed
colour and was troubled; he stayed his steps and advanced no further.
Then at the pleasure of the goddess leaving the water we resumed our
apparel, and crowned with myrtle sought a neighbouring glade, full of
finest grass and diapered with many flowers, where in the freshness we
stretched our limbs to rest. Thereupon the goddess, having called the
youth to us, began to speak in these words: 'Agape, most dear to me,
this youth, Apyros by name, whom thou seest thus shy amid our glades,
shall satisfy thy longing; but see that with care thou preserve
inviolate our fires, which in thy heart thou shalt bear with thee
hence.' I was about to make answer when my tender breast was of a sudden
pierced by the flying arrow loosed by the strong hand of the son of her
who added these unto her former words: 'We give him thee as thy first
and only servant; he lacks nought but our fires, which, kindled even now
by thee in him, be it thy care to nourish, that the frost that bound him
like to Aglauros being driven from his heart, he may burn with the
divine fire no less than father Jove himself.' She ceased; and I,
trembling yet with fear, no sooner opened my lips to assent to her
command, than I found myself once more in prayer before her altars;
whereat marvelling not a little, and casting my eyes around in search of
Apyros, I became aware of the golden arrow in my breast, and near me the
pale youth, his intent gaze fixed upon me, and like me wounded by the
god; and so seeing him inflamed with a passion no other than that which
burned in me, I laughed, and filled with contentment and desire, made
sign to him to be of hopeful cheer.

The advance in style that marks the transition from the _Ameto_ to the _Arcadia_ must be largely accredited to Boccaccio himself. The language of the _Decameron_ became the model of _cinquecento_ prose. Sannazzaro, however, wrote in evident imitation not of the structural method only, but of the actual style of the _Ameto_. Something, it is true, he added beyond the greater mastery of literary form due to training. Even in his most luxuriant descriptions and most sensuous images we find that grace and clearness of vision which characterize the early poetry of the Renaissance proper, and combine in literature the luminous purity of Botticelli and the gem-like detail of Pinturicchio. The mythological affectation of the elder work appears in the younger modified, refined, subordinated; there is the same delight in detailed description, but relieved by greater variety of imagination; while, even in the most laboured passages, there is a poetical feeling as well as a more subjective manner, which, combined with a remarkable power of visualization, saves them from the danger of the catalogue. Again, there is everywhere visible the same artificiality of style which characterizes the _Ameto_, but purged of its more extravagant elements and less affected and conceited than it became in the works of Lyly and Sidney. Like the _Ameto_, lastly, but unlike its Spanish and English successors, the _Arcadia_ is purely pastoral, free from any chivalric admixture.

The narrative interest in the _Arcadia_ is of the slightest. It opens with a description of the 'dilettevole piano, di ampiezza non molto spazioso,' lying at the summit of Parthenium, 'non umile monte della pastorale Arcadia,' which was henceforth to be the abode sacred to the shepherd-folk. There, as in Vergil's Italy and in Browne's Devon, in Chaucer's dreamland, and in the realm of the Faery Queen, 'son forse dodici o quindici alberi di tanto strana ed eccessiva bellezza, che chiunque li vedesse, giudicherebbe che la maestra natura vi si fosse con sommo diletto studiata in formarli.'[57] The shepherds, who are assembled with their flocks, are about to seek their homes at the approach of night, when they meet Montano playing upon his pipe, and a musical contest ensues between him and Uranio. Next day is celebrated the feast of Pales, an account of which is given at length, and is followed by a song in which Galicio sings the praises of his mistress Amaranta, of whom the narrator proceeds to give a minute description. After another singing-match between Logisto and Elpino the company betake themselves to the tomb of Androgeo, whose praises are set forth in prose and rime. There follows a song by the old shepherd Opico, on the superiority of the 'former age'; after which Carino asks the narrator, Sincero--the pseudonym under which Sannazzaro travelled in the realm of shepherds--to recount his history, which he does at length, ending with a lament in _sestina_ form. By way of consoling him in his exile Carino, in return, tells the tale of his own amorous adventures. Next the reverend Opico is induced to discourse of the powers of magic as the shepherds proceed to the sacred grove of Pan, who shares with Pales the honours of Arcadian worship, and to the games held at the tomb of sibyllic Massilia--a name under which Sannazzaro is said to have commemorated his own mother. At this point the narrator is troubled by a dream portending death to the lady of his love. As, tormented by this thought, he wanders lonely in the chill dawn he meets a nymph, who leads him through a marvellous cavern into the depths of the earth, where he beholds the springs of many famous rivers, and finally, following the course of the Sabeto, arrives at his native city of Naples, where he learns the truth of his sorrowful forebodings.

The form has been systematized since Boccaccio wrote, the whole being divided into twelve _Prose_, alternating with as many _Ecloghe_, preceded by a _Proemio_ and followed by an address _Alla sampogna_, both in prose. The verse is mediocre, and several of the eclogues are composed in the unattractive _sestina_ form, while others affect the wearisome _rime sdrucciole_.[58] The most pleasing is Ergasto's lament at Androgeo's tomb, beginning:

Alma beata e bella,
Che da' legami sciolta
Nuda salisti ne' superni chiostri,
Ove con la tua stella
Ti godi insieme accolta;
E lieta ivi schernendo i pensier' nostri,
Quasi un bel sol ti mostri
Tra li più chiari spirti;
E coi vestigi santi
Calchi le stelle erranti;
E tra pure fontane e sacri mirti
Pasci celesti greggi;
E i tuoi cari pastori indi correggi. (_Ecloga_ V.)

One would hardly turn to the artificiality of the _Arcadia_ for representations of nature, and yet there is in the romance a genuine love of the woods and the fields, and of the rustic sports of the season. 'Sogliono il più delle volte gli alti e spaziosi alberi negli orridi monti dalla natura prodotti, più che le coltivate piante, da dotte mani espurgate negli adorni giardini, a' riguardanti aggradare,' remarks Sannazzaro at the outset. Elsewhere he furnishes us with an entertaining description of the various ways in which birds may be trapped, introduced possibly in pursuance of a hint from Longus.[59] Yet, in spite of his professed love of savage scenery and his knowledge of pastoral sports, it is after all in a very artificial and straitened form that nature filters to us through Sannazzaro's pages. Rather do we turn to them for the sake of the paintings on the temple walls, of Amaranta's lips, 'fresh as the morning rose,' of her wild lapful of flowers, and of a hundred other incidental pictures, one of the most charming of which, interesting on another score also, I make no apology for here transcribing.

Subito ordinò i premi a coloro, che lottare volessero, offrendo di dare
al vincitore un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano
Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo, eran
dipinte molte cose: ma tra l' altre una ninfa ignuda, con tutti i membri
bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli delle capre; la
quale, sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo satirello, e
con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carità tutta
si struggesse: e 'l fanciullo nell' una mammella poppava, nell' altra
tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l' occhio la si guardava, quasi
temendo che tolta non gli fosse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean due
fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti due volti orribili di
maschere cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre
spavento a duo altri, che davanti loro stavano; de' quali l' uno
fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava; l' altro caduto già
in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimenti aitare, stendeva la mano
per graffiarlo. (_Prosa_ XI.)

I shall make no attempt at translation. Some versions, really wonderful in the success with which they reproduce the style of the original, will be found in Symonds' _Italian Literature_[60]. It is probably unnecessary to put in a warning that the _Arcadia_ is a work of which extracts are apt to give a somewhat too favourable impression. In its long complaints, speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull, but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There were several imitations later, such as the _Accademia tusculana_ of Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third _Prosa_ in his _Sacrifizio pastorale_; while collections of tales and _facetiae_ such as the _Arcadia in Brenta_ of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of the name. A French translation published in 1544 went through three editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578. It may have been due to the existence of Sidney's more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever appeared in English.

* * * * *

Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later, has of necessity been lengthy. It was at Italian breasts that the infant ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed. The other countries of continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn contributed characteristics of its own. It was to Italy that England too was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements peculiar to France and Spain. It will therefore be necessary briefly to review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though they need detain us but a brief space in comparison with the Italian fountain-head.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work of Sannazzaro. Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to Vergil, who had the worship of Pan in mind, but the selection of the barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.

When children weave fancies of wonderland they use the resources of the imagination with economy; uninterrupted sunshine soon cloys. So too with these other children of the renaissance. Their wonderland is a place whither they may escape from the pressure of the world that is too much with them; they seek in it at least the virtue that its evils shall be the opposite of those from which they fly. They could not, it is true, believe in an Arcadia in which all the cares of this world should end--the golden age is always a time to be sung and remembered, or else to be dreamed of, in the years to come, it is never the present--but if they cannot escape from the changes and chances of this mortal life, if death and unfaith are still realities in their dreamland as on earth, they will at least utter their grief melodiously, and water fair pastures with their tears. Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival; the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fashion, where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,' there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian pastoralism, in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido_, we trace a yearning towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the sight of Helena, to find in it a place for the earthly affections that bound them, and at the touch of reality the vision dissolved in mist.

VII

When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these circumstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the richest national literatures of the world.

It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind, which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models, bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is, namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important examples in this place.[63]

An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_, the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of literature are certain poems--_Éclogas_ they are for the most part styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama. About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide, and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his master and Lope de Vega.