Chapter XX: The Idyllists (1)

Theocritus; his Life.--The Canon of his Poems.--The Meaning
of the Word Idyl.--Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome,
Modern Europe.--The Scenery of Theocritus.--Relation of
Southern Nature to Greek Mythology and Greek Art.--Rustic
Life and Superstitions.--Feeling for Pure Nature in
Theocritus.--How Distinguished from the same Feeling in
Modern Poets.--Galatea.--Pharmaceutria.--Hylas.--Greek
Chivalry.--The Dioscuri.--Thalysia.--Bion.--The Lament for
Adonis.--Moschus.--Europa.--Megara.--Lament for Bion.--The
Debts of Modern Poets to the Idyllists.

Of the lives of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus there is very little known, and that little has been often repeated. Theocritus was a Syracusan, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna. Some confusion as to his parentage arose from the fact that in the seventh idyl Theocritus introduced himself under the artificial name of Simichidas, which led early critics to suppose he had a father called Simichus. It is, however, quite clear that the concurrent testimony of Suidas and of an epigram in the anthology, which distinctly asserts his descent from Praxagoras and Philinna, is to be accepted in preference to all conjectures founded on a _nom de plume_. Theocritus flourished between 283 and 263 B.C., but the dates and circumstances of his birth and death are alike unknown. We may gather, inferentially or directly from his poems, that he sought the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria, and lived for some time among the men of letters at his court. Indeed, Theocritus was the most brilliant ornament of that somewhat artificial period of literature; he above all the Alexandrian poets carried the old genius of Greece into new channels instead of imitating, annotating, and rehandling ancient masterpieces. The sixth and seventh idyls prove that Aratus, the astronomer, was a familiar friend of the Syracusan bard; probably the frequent allusions to meteorology and the science of the stars which we trace in the poems of Theocritus may be referred to this intimacy. From the idyls, again, we learn that the poet left Alexandria wearied with court life, and, like Spenser, unwilling

To lose good nights that might be better spent,
To waste long days in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, and pine with fear and sorrow.

He seems, however, to have once more made trial of princely favor at the Syracusan court of Hiero, and to have been as much offended with the want of appreciation and good taste as with the illiberality that he found there. Among his friends were numbered Nicias, the physician of Miletus, and his wife Theugenis, to whom he addressed the beautiful little poem called #êlakatê#, or _The Distaff_--a charming specimen of what the Greek muse could produce by way of _vers de société_. The end of his life is buried in obscurity. We can easily believe that he spent it quietly among the hills and fields of Sicily, in close communion with the nature that he loved so well. His ill success as a court poet does not astonish us; the panegyrics of Hiero and Ptolemy are among his worst poems--mere pinchbeck when compared with the pure gold of the idyls proper. It was in scenes of natural beauty that he felt at home, and when he died he left a volume of immortal verse, each line of which proclaims of him--"Et ego in Arcadia." We cannot give him a more fitting epitaph than that of his own Daphnis:

#eba rhoon; eklyse dina
ton Môsais philon andra, ton ou Nymphaisin apechthê.#[142]

If we know little of Theocritus, less is known of Bion. Suidas says that he was born at Smyrna, and the elegy written on his death leads us to suppose that he lived in Sicily, and died of poison wilfully administered by enemies. Theocritus, though his senior in age and his predecessor in bucolic poetry, seems to have survived him. Bion's elegist, from which the few facts which we have related with regard to the poet of Smyrna's life and untimely death are gathered, has generally been identified with Moschus. Ahrens, however, with characteristic German scepticism, places the #Epitaphios Biônos# upon a list of _Incertorum Idyllia_. Nor can it be denied that the author of this poem leads us to believe that he was a native of Magna Græcia, whereas Moschus is known to have been a Syracusan. The third and last of the Sicilian idyllists, he stands at a great distance from Theocritus in all essential qualities of pastoral composition. He has more of the grammarian or man of erudition about him; and we can readily conceive him to have been, according to the account of Suidas, a friend of Aristarchus. Of the dates of his life nothing can be recorded with any certainty. He seems to have lived about the end of the third century B.C.

During the short period in which bucolic poetry flourished under Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, Syracuse remained beneath the sceptre of Hiero. While the bloody strife was being waged between Rome and Carthage for the empire of the Mediterranean, Syracuse, intermediate between the two great combatants, was able not only to maintain a splendid independence under the sway of her powerful tyrant, but also to afford the Romans signal aid upon the battle-fields of Sicily. In Sicily the sun of Greece still shone with some of its old radiance on the spots where, before Athens had assumed the intellectual supremacy of Hellas, poetry, philosophy, and all the arts of life had first displayed their splendid spring-time. The island in which the April of the Greek spirit had disclosed its earliest flowers now bore the last but not least lovely wreath of autumn. The winter was soon coming. Rome and her Verres were already looking upon Trinacria as their prey; and the idyllic garland was destined to crown with exotic blossoms the brows of Virgil.

About the authenticity of many of the idyls grave questions have been raised. It is hard to believe that all the thirty which bear the name of Theocritus were really written by him. The twenty-third and twenty-fifth, for instance, are not in his style; while the nineteenth reminds us more of the Anacreontic elegance of Bion or Moschus than of his peculiarly vigorous workmanship. The twenty-ninth, again, though admitted as genuine by Ahrens, might well pass for the work of an earlier Æolic writer. But, without some shock to my feelings, I cannot entertain the spuriousness of the twenty-first idyl, which Ahrens places among the productions of some doubtful author. The whole series after the eighteenth have been questioned. These, however, include the epical compositions of Theocritus, who might well have assumed a different manner when treating of Hercules or the Dioscuri from that in which he sang the loves of Lycidas and Daphnis. That they are inferior to his pastorals is not to be wondered at; for he who blows his own flute with skill may not be, therefore, strong enough to sound the trumpet of Homer. Ahrens, as observed above, extends his criticism to the lament for Bion, which, I confess, appears to me more full of fire and inventive genius than any other of the poems attributed to Moschus.

Yet in these matters of minute evidence too much depends upon mere conjecture and comparison of styles for us to remove old landmarks with certainty. Suppose all records of Raphael's works had been lost, and a few fragments of the Cartoons, together with the Transfiguration and the little picture of the Sleeping Knight alone remained of all his paintings, would not some Ahrens be inclined to attribute the Sleeping Knight to a weaker if not less graceful artist of the Umbrian school? The _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_ might, by a similar process of disjunctive criticism, be severed from the _Paradise Lost_. On the other hand, nothing can be more doubtful than assertions in favor of authenticity. It is almost impossible for a foreigner to perceive minute differences of style in the works of two contemporary poets, and infinitely more difficult for a modern to exercise the same exact discrimination in deciding on the monuments of classic art. Schlegel, in his _History of Dramatic Literature_, asserts that he discovers no internal difference between Massinger and Fletcher. Yet an English student is struck by the most marked divergences of feeling, language, natural gifts, and acquired habits of thought in these two dramatists. Thus the difficulty of such criticism is twofold. If a Syracusan of 200 B.C. could discuss our lucubrations on the text of the bucolic poets, he would probably in one case express astonishment at our having ascribed two dissimilar idyls to Theocritus, and in another case explain away our scepticism by enumerating the three or four successive manners of the poet. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus are the eponyms of idyllic poetry. To each belongs a peculiar style. It is quite possible that some idyls of successful imitators whose names have been lost may have been fathered upon the three most eminent founders of the school.

The name of the idyl sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience supply the idyllist with subjects. He does not treat them lyrically, following rather the rules of epic and dramatic composition. Generally there is a narrator, and in so far the idyl is epic; its verse, too, is the hexameter. But occasionally the form of dramatic monologue, as in the _Pharmaceutria_, or that of dramatic dialogue, as in the _Adoniazusæ_, takes the place of narrative. Bion's lament for Adonis, again, is a kind of sacred hymn; while the dirge on Bion's death is elegiac. Two idyls of Theocritus are encomiastic; several celebrate the deeds of ancestral Doric heroes--Herakles and the Dioscuri. One is an epistle. Many of Bion's so-called idyls differ little, except in metre, from the Anacreontics, while one at least of the most highly finished pieces of Theocritus must be ranked with erotic poetry of the purely lyrical order. It will be seen from these instances that the idyllic genus admitted many species, and that the idyllists were far from being simply pastoral poets. This form of composition was, in fact, the growth of a late age of Greek art, when the great provinces had been explored and occupied, and when the inventor of a new style could legitimately adopt the tone and manner of his various predecessors. Perhaps the plastic arts determined the direction of idyllic poetry, suggesting the name and supplying the poet with models of compact and picturesque treatment. In reading the idyls it should never be forgotten that they are pictures, so studied and designed by their authors. They ought to affect us in the same way as the bass-reliefs and vases of Greek art, in which dramatic action is presented at one moment of its evolution, and beautiful forms are grouped together with such simplicity as to need but little story to enhance their value. If we approach the idyls from this point of view, and regard them as very highly finished works of decorative art, we shall probably be able to enjoy their loveliness without complaining that the shepherds and shepherdesses are too refined, or that the landscapes have not been drawn from nature.

Without discussing the whole hackneyed question of bucolic poetry, a word must be said about its origin, and about the essential difference between Theocritus and modern pastorals. It is natural to suppose that country folk, from the remotest period of Greek history, refreshed themselves with dance and song, and that music formed a part of their religious ceremonials. The trials of strength which supply the _motive_ of so many Theocritean idyls were quite consistent with the manners of the Greeks, who brought all rival claims of superiority to the touchstone of such contests. Their antiquity in the matter of music may be gathered from the legends of Pan and Apollo, and of Apollo and Marsyas. Phoebus, in the character of shepherd to Admetus, gave divine sanction to bucolic minstrelsy. In respect of bodily strength, the gymnastic rivalry of Olympia and other great Hellenic centres was so important as to determine the chronology of Greece, while even claims to personal beauty were decided by the same trial: the three goddesses submitted to the arbitration of Paris; and there were in many states #aristeia# of physical charms, not to mention the boys' prize for kisses at Nisæan Megara. Bucolic poetry may therefore be referred to the pastoral custom of shepherds singing together and against each other at festivals or on the green.

It was the genius of Theocritus in all probability which determined the Doric and Sicilian character of the idyls we possess. He, a Syracusan and a Dorian, perfected the _genre_, and was followed by his imitators. Nothing can be more simple and lifelike than the conversations of his rustics, or more nicely discriminated than the pedestrian style of their dialogue and the more polished manner of their studied songs. The poet has, no doubt, invested these rural encounters with the imaginative beauty which belongs to art. He has attributed to Corydon and Thyrsis much of his own imagination and delicate taste and exquisite sense of natural loveliness. Had he refrained from doing so, his idyls would not have challenged the attention and won the admiration of posterity. As it is, we find enough of rustic grossness on his pages, and even complain that his cowherds and goatherds savor too strongly of their stables. Of his appreciation of scenery it is difficult to speak in terms of exaggerated praise. As I purpose to discuss this subject more minutely further on, it may here be enough to remark that he alone of pastoral poets drew straight from nature, and fully felt the charm which underlies the facts of rustic life.

In comparison with Theocritus, Bion and Moschus are affected and insipid. Their pastorals smack of the study more than of the fields. Virgil not only lacks his vigor and enthusiasm for the open-air life of the country, but, with Roman bad taste, he commits the capital crime of allegorizing. Virgil's pernicious example infected Spenser, Milton, and a host of inferior imitators, flooding literature with dreary pastorals in which shepherds discussed politics, religion, and court-gossip, so that at last bucolic poetry became a synonym for everything affected and insipid. Poetry flourishes in cities, where rustic song must always be an exotic plant. To analyze Poliziano, Sanazaro, Guarini, Tasso, Spenser, Fletcher, Jonson, Barnfield, Browne, Pope, etc., and to show what strains of natural elegance adorn their imitations of the ancients, would be a very interesting but lengthy task. As society became more artificial, especially at Florence, Paris, and Versailles, the taste for pseudo-pastorals increased. Court-ladies tucked up their petticoats and carried crooks with ribbons at their tops, while court-poets furnished aristocratic Corydons with smooth verses about pipes and pine-trees, and lambs and wattled cotes. The whole was a dream and a delusion; but this mirage of rusticity appropriated the _name_ of pastoral, and reflected discredit even on the great and natural Theocritus. At length this _genre_ of composition, in which neither invention nor observation nor truth nor excellence of any kind except inglorious modulation of old themes was needed, died a natural death; and the true bucolic genius found fresh channels. Crabbe revived an interest in village life; Burns sang immortal lyrics at the plough; Goethe achieved a masterpiece of idyllic delineation; Wordsworth reasserted the claims of natural simplicity; Keats expressed the sensuous charms of rustic loveliness; Tennyson and Barnes have written rural idyls in the dialects of Lincolnshire and Dorsetshire; while other writers are pursuing similar lines of composition. Theocritus, it is true, differs widely from these poets both in his style and matter. But he deserves to rank among the most realistic artists of the nineteenth century on account of his simplicity and perfect truth to nature. In reading him we must divest ourselves of any prejudices which we have acquired from the perusal of his tasteless imitators. We must take his volume with us to the scenes in which he lived, and give him a fair trial on his own merits.

It is on the shores of the Mediterranean--at Sorrento, at Amalfi, or near Palermo, or among the valleys of Mentone--that we ought to study Theocritus, and learn the secret of his charm.[143] Few of us pass middle life without visiting one or other of these sacred spots, which seem to be the garden of perpetual spring. Like the lines of the Sicilian idyllist, they inspire an inevitable and indescribable #pothos#, touching our sense of beauty with a subtle power, and soothing our spirits with the majesty of classical repose. Straight from the sea-beach rise mountains of distinguished form, not capped with snow or clothed with pines, but carved of naked rock. We must accept their beauty as it is, nude, well defined, and unadorned, nor look in vain for the mystery or sublimity or picturesqueness of the Alps. Light and color are the glory of these mountains. Valleys divide their flanks, seaming with shadow-belts and bands of green the broad hillside, while lower down the olives spread a hoary grayness and soft robe of silver mist, the skirts of which are kissed by tideless waves. The harmony between the beauty of the olive-boughs and the blue sea can be better felt than described. Guido, whose subtlety of sentiment was very rare, has expressed it in one or two of his earliest and best pictures by graduated tones of silver, azure and cool gray. The definite form and sunny brightness of the olive-tree suits our conception of the Greek character. It may well have been the favorite plant of the wise and calm Athene. Oaks with their umbrageous foliage, pine-trees dark and mournful upon Alpine slopes, branching limes, and elms in which the wind sways shadowy masses of thick leaves, belong, with their huge girth and gnarled boles and sombre roof-age, to the forests of the North, where nature is rather an awful mother than a kind foster-nurse and friend of man. In northern landscapes the eye travels through vistas of leafy boughs to still, secluded crofts and pastures, where slow-moving oxen graze. The mystery of dreams and the repose of meditation haunt our massive bowers. But in the South, the lattice-work of olive boughs and foliage scarcely veils the laughing sea and bright blue sky, while the hues of the landscape find their climax in the dazzling radiance of the sun upon the waves, and the pure light of the horizon. There is no concealment and no melancholy here. Nature seems to hold a never-ending festival and dance, in which the waves and sunbeams and shadows join. Again, in Northern scenery, the rounded forms of full-foliaged trees suit the undulating country, with its gentle hills and brooding clouds; but in the South the spiky leaves and sharp branches of the olive carry out the defined outlines which are everywhere observable through the broader beauties of mountain and valley and sea-shore. Serenity and intelligence characterize this Southern landscape, in which a race of splendid men and women lived beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god. Pallas protected them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty. Nations as great and noble have arisen among the oak and beech woods of the North; strong-sinewed warriors, heroic women, counsellors with mighty brains, and poets on whose tongue the melody of music lingers like a charm. But the Greeks alone owned the gift of innate beauty and unerring taste. The human form, upon those bare and sunny hills, beneath those twinkling olive-boughs, beside that sea of everlasting laughter, reached its freedom; and the spirit of human loveliness was there breathed fully into all the forms of art. Poetry, sculpture, architecture, music, dancing, all became the language of that moderate and lucid harmony which we discover in the landscape of the Greeks.

Olives are not, however, by any means the only trees which play a part in idyllic scenery. The tall stone-pine is even more important; for, underneath its shade the shepherds loved to sing, hearing the murmur in its spreading roof, and waiting for the cones with their sweet fruit to fall. Near Massa, by Sorrento, there are two gigantic pines so placed that, lying on the grass beneath them, one looks on Capri rising from the sea, Baiæ, and all the bay of Naples sweeping round to the base of Vesuvius. Tangled growths of olives, oranges, and rose-trees fill the garden-ground along the shore, while far away in the distance pale Inarime sleeps, with her exquisite Greek name, a virgin island on the deep. In such a place we realize Theocritean melodies, and find a new and indestructible loveliness in the opening line of his first idyl:

#hady ti to psithyrisma kai ha pitys, aipole, têna.#

These pines are few and far between. Growing alone or in pairs, they stand like monuments upon the hills, their black forms sculptured on the cloudlike olive-groves, from which at intervals spring spires and columns of slender cypress-trees.

Here and there in this bright garden of the age of gold white villages are seen, and solitary cottage roofs high up among the hills--dwellings, perhaps, of Amaryllis, whom the shepherds used to serenade. Huge fig-trees lean their weight of leaves and purple fruit upon the cottage walls, while cherry-trees and apricots snow the grass in spring with a white wealth of April blossoms. The stone walls and little wells in the cottage gardens are green with immemorial moss and ferns, and fragrant with gadding violets that ripple down their sides and checker them with blue. On the wilder hills you find patches of ilex and arbutus glowing with crimson berries and white waxen bells, sweet myrtle rods and shafts of bay, frail tamarisk and tall tree-heaths that wave their frosted boughs above your head. Nearer the shore the lentisk grows, a savory shrub, with cytisus and aromatic rosemary. Clematis and polished garlands of tough sarsaparilla wed the shrubs with clinging, climbing arms; and here and there in sheltered nooks the vine shoots forth luxuriant tendrils bowed with grapes stretching from branch to branch of mulberry or elm, flinging festoons on which young loves might sit and swing, or weaving a lattice-work of leaves across the open shed. Nor must the sounds of this landscape be forgotten--sounds of bleating flocks, and murmuring bees, and nightingales, and doves that moan, and running streams, and shrill cicadas, and hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There is not a single detail which a patient student may not verify from Theocritus.

Then, too, it is a landscape in which sea and country are never sundered. This must not be forgotten of idyllic scenery; for it was the warm seaboard of Sicily, beneath protecting heights of Ætna, that gave birth to the bucolic muse. The intermingling of pastoral and sea life is exquisitely allegorized in the legend of Galatea; and on the cup which Theocritus describes in his first idyl the fisherman plays an equal part with the shepherd youths and the boy who watches by the vineyard wall. The higher we climb upon the mountain-side the more marvellous is the beauty of the sea, which seems to rise as we ascend and stretch into the sky. Sometimes a little flake of blue is framed by olive-boughs, sometimes a turning in the road reveals the whole broad azure calm below. Or after toiling up a steep ascent we fall upon the undergrowth of juniper, and lo! a double sea, this way and that, divided by the sharp spine of the jutting hill, jewelled with villages along its shore, and smiling with fair islands and silver sails. Upon the beach the waves come tumbling in, swaying the corallines and green and purple sea-weeds in the pools. Ceaseless beating of the spray has worn the rocks into jagged honeycombs, on which lazy fishermen sit perched, dangling their rods like figures in Pompeian frescos.

In landscapes such as these we are readily able to understand the legends of rustic gods; the metamorphoses of Syrinx, Narcissus, Echo, Hyacinthus, and Adonis; the tales of slumbering Pan and horned satyrs and peeping fauns with which the idyllists have adorned their simple shepherd songs. Here, too, the Oread dwellers of the hills and dryads and sylvans and water-nymphs seem possible. They lose their unreality and mythic haziness; for men themselves are more a part of Nature here than in the North, more fit for companionship with deities of stream and hill. Their labors are lighter and their food more plentiful. Summer leaves them not, and the soil yields fair and graceful crops. There is surely some difference between hoeing turnips and trimming olive-boughs, between tending turkeys on a Norfolk common and leading goats to browse on cytisus beside the shore between the fat pasturage and bleak winters of our midland counties and the spare herbage of the South dried by perpetual sunlight. It cannot be denied that men assimilate something from their daily labor, and that the poetry of rustic life is more evident upon Mediterranean shores than in England.

Nor must the men and women of classical landscape be forgotten. When we read the idyls of Theocritus, and wish to see before us Thestylis and Daphnis and Lycidas, we have but to recall the perfect forms of Greek sculpture. We may, for instance, summon to our mind the Endymion of the Capitol, nodding in eternal slumber, with his sheep-dog slumbering by: or Artemis stepping from her car; her dragons coil themselves between the shafts and fold their plumeless wings: or else Hippolytus and Meleager booted for the boar-chase: or Bacchus finding Ariadne by the sea-shore; mænads and satyrs are arrested in their dance; flower-garlands fall upon the path; or a goat-legged satyr teaches a young faun to play; the pipe and flute are there, and from the boy's head fall long curls upon his neck. Or Europa drops anemone and crocus from her hand, trembling upon the bull as he swims onward through the sea: or tritons blow wreathed shells, and dolphins splash the water: or the eagle's claws clasp Ganymede, and bear him up to Zeus: or Adonis lies wounded, and wild Aphrodite spreads hungry arms, and wails with rent robes tossed above her head. From the cabinet of gems we draw a Love, blind, bound, and stung by bees; or a girl holding an apple in her hand; or a young man tying on his sandal. Then there is the Praxitelean genius of the Vatican who might be Hylas, or Uranian Eros, or Hymenæus, or curled Hyacinthus--- the faun who lies at Munich overcome with wine, his throat bare, and his deep chest heaving with the breath of sleep--Hercules strangling the twin snakes in his cradle, or ponderous with knotty sinews and huge girth of neck--Demeter, holding fruits of all sorts in one hand and cornstalks in the other, sweeping her full raiment on the granary floor. Or else we bring again the pugilist from Caracalla's bath--bruised faces and ears livid with unheeded blows--their strained arms bound with thongs, and clamps of iron on their fists. Processions move in endless line, of godlike youths on prancing steeds, of women bearing baskets full of cakes and flowers, of oxen lowing to the sacrifice. The Trojan heroes fall with smiles upon their lips; the athlete draws the strigil down his arm; the sons of Niobe lie stricken, beautiful in death. Cups, too, and vases help us, chased with figures of all kinds--dance, festival, love-making, rustic sacrifice, the legendary tales of hate and woe, the daily idyls of domestic life.

Such are some of the works of Greek art which we may use in our attempt to realize Theocritus. Nor need we neglect the monuments of modern painting--Giorgione's pastoral pictures of piping men and maidens crowned with jasmine-flowers, Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, and Tintoretto's Marriage of Ariadne, or the Arcadians of Poussin reading the tale of death upon the gravestone, and its epitaph--"Et ego."

To reconstruct the mode of life of the Theocritean _dramatis personæ_ is not a matter of much difficulty. Pastoral habits are singularly unchangeable, and nothing strikes us more than the recurrence of familiar rustic proverbs, superstitions, and ways of thinking which we find in the idyllic poets. The mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, of prosaic interest in worldly affairs and of an unconscious admiration for the poetry of nature, which George Sand has recently assigned with delicate analysis to the bucolic character in her Idyls of Nohant, meets us in every line of the Sicilian pastorals. On the Mediterranean shores, too, the same occupations have been carried on for centuries with little interruption. The same fields are being ploughed, the same vineyards tilled, the same olive-gardens planted, as those in which Theocritus played as a child. The rocks on which he saw old Olpis watching for the tunnies, with fishing-reed and rush basket are still haunted through sunny hours by patient fishermen. Perhaps they cut their reeds and rushes in the same river-beds; certainly they use the same sort of #kalamos#. The goats have not forgotten to crop cytisus and myrtle, nor have the goatherds changed their shaggy trousers and long crooks. You may still pick out a shepherd lad among a hundred by his skin and cloak. It is even said that the country ditties of the Neapolitans are Greek; and how ancient is the origin of local superstitions who shall say? The country folk still prefer, like Comatas in the fifth idyl, garden-grown roses to the wild eglantine and anemones of the hedgerow, scorning what has not required some cost or trouble for its cultivation. Gretchen's test of love by blowing on thistle-down does not differ much from that of the shepherd in the third idyl. Live blood in the eye is still a sign of mysterious importance (Idyl iii. 36). To spit is still a remedy against the evil eye (vii. 39). Eunica, the town girl, still turns up her nose at the awkward cowherd; city and country are not yet wholly harmonized by improved means of locomotion. Then the people of the South are perfectly unchanged--the fisher boys of Castellamare; the tall, straight girls of Capri singing as they walk with pitchers on their heads and distaffs in their hands; the wild Apulian shepherds; the men and maidens laughing in the olive-fields or vineyards; the black-browed beauties of the Cornice trooping to church on Sundays with gold earrings, and with pink tulip-buds in their dark hair. One thing, however, is greatly altered. Go where we will, we find no statues of Priapus and the Nymphs. No lambs are sacrificed to Pan. No honey or milk is poured upon the altars of the rustic muse. The temples are in ruins. Aloes and cactuses have invaded the colonnades of Girgenti, and through the halls of Pæstum winds whistle and sunbeams stream unheeded. But though the gods are gone, men remain unaltered. A little less careless, a little more superstitious they may be; but their joys and sorrows, their vices and virtues, their loves and hates, are still the same.

Such reflections are trite and commonplace. Yet who can resist the force of their truth and pathos?

#ouch hamin ton Erôta monois etech', hôs edokeumes,
Nikia, hôitini touto theôn poka teknon egento;
ouch hamin ta kala pratois kala phainetai êmes,
hoi thnatoi pelomestha, to d' aurion ouk esorômes#[144]--

said Theocritus, looking back into the far past, and remembering that the gifts of love and beauty have belonged to men and gods from everlasting. With what redoubled force may we, after the lapse of twenty centuries, echo these words, when we tread the ground he knew and read the songs he sang! His hills stir our vague and yearning admiration, his sea laughs its old laugh of waywardness and glee, his flowers bloom yearly, and fade in the spring, his pine and olive branches overshadow us; we listen to the bleating of his goats, and taste the sweetness of the spring from which he drank; the milk and honey are as fresh upon our lips, the wine in winter by the wood fire, when the winds are loud is just as fragrant; youth is still youth, nor have the dark-eyed maidens lost their charm. Truly #ouch hamin ta kala pratois kala phainetai êmes#. In this consists the power of Theocritean poetry. It strikes a note which echoes through our hearts by reason of its genuine simplicity and pathos. The thoughts which natural beauty stirs in our minds find their embodiment in his sweet, strong verse; and though since his time the world has grown old, though the gods of Greece have rent their veils and fled with shrieks from their sanctuaries, though in spite of ourselves we turn our faces skyward from the earth, though emaciated saints and martyrs have supplanted Adonis and the Graces, though the cold, damp shades of Calvinism have chilled our marrow and our blood, yet there remain deep down within our souls some primal sympathies with nature, some instincts of the faun or satyr or sylvan, which education has not quite eradicated. "The hand which hath long time held a violet doth not soon forego her perfume, nor the cup from which sweet wine had flowed his fragrance."

I have dwelt long upon the peculiar properties of classical landscape as described by the Greek idyllists, and as they still exist for travellers upon the more sheltered shores of the Mediterranean, because it is necessary to understand them before we can appreciate the _truth_ of Theocritus. Of late years much has been written about the difference between classical and modern ways of regarding landscape. Mr. Ruskin has tried to persuade us that the ancients only cared for the more cultivated parts of nature, for gardens or orchards, from which food or profit or luxurious pleasure might be derived. And in this view there is no doubt some truth. The Greeks and Romans paid far less attention to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of decay. In this they resembled all Southern nations. An Italian of the present day avoids ruinous places and solitudes however splendid. Among the mountains he complains of the _brutto paese_ in which he has to live, and is always longing for town gayeties and the amenities of civilized society.[145] The ancients, again, despised all interests that pretended to rival the paramount interest of civic or military life. Seneca's figurative expression _circum flosculos occupatur_ might be translated literally as applied to a trifler to denote the scorn which thinkers, statesmen, patriots, and generals of Greece and Rome felt for mere rural prettiness; while Quintilian's verdict on Theocritus (whom, however, he allows to be _admirabilis in suo genere_), _musa illa rustica et pastoralis non forum modo verum ipsam etiam urbem reformidat_, characterizes the insensibility of urban intellects to a branch of art which we consider of high importance. But it is very easy to overstrain this view, and Mr. Ruskin, perhaps, has laid an undue stress on Homer in his criticism of the classics, whereas it is among the later Greek and Roman poets that the analogy of modern literature would lead us to expect indications of a genuine taste for unadorned nature. These signs the idyllic poets amply supply; but in seeking for them we must be prepared to recognize a very different mode of expression from that which we are used to in the florid poets of the modern age. Conciseness, simplicity, and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art. Moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from a Greek unless it appeared before him in a human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_ gave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions. We who are apt to look for rhapsodies and brilliant outpourings of eloquent fancy can scarcely bring ourselves to recollect what a delicate sense of nature and what profound emotions are implied in the conceptions of Pan and Hyacinthus and Galatea. The misuse which has been made of mythology by modern writers has effaced half its vigor and charm. It is only by returning to the nature which inspired these myths that we can reconstruct their exquisite vitality. Different ages and nations express themselves by different forms of art. Music appears to be dominant in the present period; sculpture ruled among the Greeks, and struck the key-note for all other arts. Even those sentiments which in our mind are most vague, the admiration of sunset skies, or flowers or copsewoods in spring, were expressed by them in the language of definite human form. They sought to externalize and realize as far as possible, not to communicate the inmost feelings and spiritual suggestions arising out of natural objects. Never advancing beyond corporeal conditions, they confined themselves to form, and sacrificed the charm of mystery, which is incompatible with very definite conception. It was on this account that sculpture, the most exactly imitative of the arts, became literally architectonic among the Greeks. And for a precisely similar reason music, which is the most abstract and subjective of the arts, the most evanescent in its material, and the vaguest, assumes the chief rank among modern arts. Sculpture is the poetry of the body, music the language of the soul.

Having once admitted their peculiar _mode_ of feeling Nature, no one can deny that landscape occupies an important place in Greek literature. Every line of Theocritus is vital with a strong passion for natural beauty, incarnated in myths. But even in descriptive poetry he is not deficient. His list of trees and flowers is long, and the epithets with which they are characterized are very exquisite--not, indeed, brilliant with the inbreathed fancy of the North, but so perfectly appropriate as to define the special beauty of the flower or tree selected. In the same way, a whole scene is conveyed in a few words by mere conciseness of delineation, or by the artful introduction of some incident suggesting human emotion. Take for example this picture of the stillness of the night:

#ênide sigâi men pontos, sigônti d' aêtai;
ha d' ema ou sigâi sternôn entosthen ania,
all' epi tênôi pasa kataithomai, hos me talainan
anti gynaikos ethêke kakan kai aparthenon êmen.#[146]

_Idyl_ ii. 38-41.

Or this:

#alla ty men chairoisa pot' ôkeanon trepe pôlous
potni', egô d' oisô ton emon ponon, hôsper hypestan.
chaire, Selanaia liparochroe; chairete d', alloi
asteres, eukêloio kat' antyga Nyktos opadoi.#[147]

_Idyl_ ii. 163 _et seq._

Or this of a falling star:

#katêripe d' es melan hydôr
athroos, hôs hoka pyrsos ap' ouranô êripen astêr
athroos en pontôi, nautais de tis eipen hetairois:
kouphoter', ô paides, poieisth' hopla; pleustikos ouros.#[148]

_Idyl_ xiii. 49-52.

Or the sea-weeds on a rocky shore (vii. 58), or the summer bee (iii. 15), or the country party at harvest time (vii. 129 to the end). In all of these a peculiar simplicity will be noticed, a self-restraint and scrupulosity of definite delineation. To Theocritus the shadowy and iridescent fancies of modern poetry would have been unintelligible. The creations of a Keats or Shelley would have appeared to be monstrous births, like the Centaurs of Ixion, begotten by lawless imaginations upon cloud and mist. When the Greek poet wished to express the charm of summer waves he spoke of Galatea, more fickle and light than thistle-down, a maiden careless of her lover and as cruel as the sea. The same waves suggested to Shakespeare these lines, from _Midsummer-Night's Dream_:

Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music;

and to Weber the ethereal "mermaid's song" in _Oberon_. No one acquainted with Shakespeare and Weber can deny that both have expressed with marvellous subtlety the magic of the sea in its enchanting calm, whereas the Greek poet works only by indirect suggestion, and presents us with a human portrait more than a phantom of the glamour of the deep. What we have lost in definite projection we have gained in truth, variety, and freedom. The language of our art appeals immediately to the emotions, disclosing the spiritual reality of things, and caring less for their form than for the feelings they excite in us. Greek art remains upon the surface, and translates into marble the humanized aspects of the external world. The one is forever seeking to set free, the other to imprison, thought. The Greek tells with exquisite precision what he has observed, investing it perhaps with his own emotion. He says, for instance:

#aithe genoiman
ha bombeusa melissa, kai es teon antron hikoiman,
ton kisson diadys kai tan pterin, hâi ty pikasdêi.#[149]

The modern poet, to use Shelley's words,

Will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom;
Nor heed nor see what shapes they be,
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,

endeavoring to look through and beyond the objects of the outer world, to use them as the starting-points for his creative fancy, and to embroider their materials with the dazzling _fioriture_ of his invention. Metamorphosis existed for the Greek poet as a simple fact. If the blood of Adonis turned to anemones, yet the actual drops of blood and the flowers remained distinct in the poet's mind; and even though he may have been sceptical about the miracle, he restrained his fancy to the reproduction of the one old fable. The modern poet believes in no metamorphosis but that which is produced by the alchemy of his own brain. He loves to confound the most dissimilar existences, and to form startling combinations of thoughts which have never before been brought into connection with each other. Uncontrolled by tradition or canons of propriety, he roams through the world, touching its various objects with the wand of his imagination. To the west wind he cries:

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning; there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, e'en from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm....

Imagine how astonished even Æschylus would have been at these violent transitions and audacious transformations. The Greeks had few conceits:[150] they did not call the waves "nodding hearse-plumes" like Calderon, or the birds "winged lyres" like Marini, or daisies "pearled Arcturi of the earth" like Shelley, or laburnums "dropping wells of fire" like Tennyson. If they ventured on such licenses in their more impassioned lyrics, they maintained the metaphor with strict propriety. One good instance of the difference in this respect between the two ages is afforded by Ben Jonson, who translates Sappho's

#êros himerophônos angelos aêdôn,#

by "the dear glad angel of the spring, the nightingale." Between #angelos# and _angel_ there is the distance of nearly twenty centuries; for though Ben Jonson may have meant merely to Anglicize the Greek word, he could not but have been glad of the more modern meaning.

So much of this essay has already been devoted to the consideration of Theocritean poetry in general that I cannot here afford to enter into the details of his several idyls. A few, however, may be noticed of peculiar beauty and significance. None are more true to local scenery than those which relate to the story of Galatea. In this brief tale, the life of the mountains and the rivers and the sea is symbolized--the uncouth and gigantic hills rude in their rusticity; the clear and lovable stream; the merry sea, inconstant and treacherous, with shifting waves. The mountain stands forever unremoved; love as he will, he can but gaze upon the dancing sea, and woo it with gifts of hanging trees, and cool shadowy caverns, and still sleeping-places in sheltered bays. But the stream leaps down from crag to crag, and gathers strength and falls into the arms of the expectant nymph--a fresh lover fair and free, and full of smiles. Supposing this marriage of the sea and river to have been the earliest idea of the mythus, in course of time the persons of Acis and Galatea, and the rejected lover Polyphemus, became more and more humanized, until the old symbolism was lost in a pastoral romance. Polyphemus loves, but never wins: he may offer his tall bay-trees and slender cypresses and black ivy and sweet-fruited vines and cold water flowing straight--a drink divine--from the white snows of wooded Ætna; he may sit whole days above the sea, and gaze upon the smiling waves, and tell the nymph of all his flocks and herds, and lure her with promises of flowers and fawns and bear's whelps, to leave the sea to beat upon its shore and come and live with him, and feed his sheep. It is of no use. Galatea heeds him not, and Polyphemus has to shepherd his love as best he can. Poetry in this idyl is blended with the simplest country humor. The pathos of Polyphemus is really touching, and his allusions to the sweetness of a shepherd's life among the hills abound in unconscious poetry, side by side with which are placed the most ludicrous expressions of uncouth disappointment, together with shrewd observations on the value of property and other prosaic details. If I mistake not, this is true of the rustic character, in which, though stirred by sorrow into sympathy with nature, habitual caution and shrewdness survive. The meditations of the shepherd in the third idyl exhibit the same mixture of sentiments.

As a specimen of the idyls which illustrate town life I select the second, the humor of its rival, the fifteenth, being of that perfect sort which must be read and laughed over, but which cannot well be analyzed. The subject of the _Pharmaceutria_ is an incantation performed in the stillness of the night by a proud Syracusan lady who has been deserted by her lover. In delineating the fierceness of her passion and the indomitable resolution of her will Theocritus has produced a truly tragic picture. Simætha, maddened by vehement despair, resorts to magic arts. Love, she says, has sucked her life-blood like a leech, and parched her with the fever of desire. She cannot live without the lover for whose possession she has sacrificed her happiness and honor. If she cannot charm him back again, she will kill him. There are poisons ready to work her will in the last resort. Meanwhile we see her standing at the magic wheel, turning it round before the fire, and charging it to draw false Delphis to her home. A hearth with coals upon it is at hand, on which her maid keeps sprinkling the meal that typifies the bones of Delphis, the wax by which his heart is to be consumed, and the laurel-bough that stands for his body. At the least sign of laziness Simætha scolds her with hard and haughty words. She stands like a Medea, seeking no sympathy, sparing no reproaches, tiger-like in her ferocity of thwarted passion. When the magic rites have been performed, and Thestylis has gone to smear an ointment on the doors of Delphis, Simætha leaves the wheel and addresses her soliloquy to the Moon, who has just risen, and who is journeying in calm and silver glory through the night. There is something sublime in the contrast between the moonlight on the sea of Syracuse and the fierce agony of the deserted lioness. To the Moon she confides the story of her love: "Take notice of my love, whence it arose, dread Queen." It is a vivid and tragic tale of Southern passion: sudden and consuming, recklessly gratified, and followed by desertion on the one side and by vengeance on the other.[151] Simætha has no doubt many living parallels among Sicilian women. The classical reader will find in her narration a description of the working of love hardly to be surpassed by Sappho's Ode or Plato's _Phædrus_. The wildness of the scene, the magic rites, the august presence of the Moon, and the murderous determination of Simætha heighten the dramatic effect, and render the tale excessively interesting.

As a picture of classical sorcery this idyl is very curious. Nothing can be more erroneous than to imagine that witchcraft is a Northern invention of the Middle Ages, or that the Brocken is its headquarters. With the exception of a few inconsiderable circumstances, all the terrible or loathsome rites of magic were known to the ancients, and merely copied by the moderns. Circe in Homer, Simætha in Theocritus, Canidia in Horace, the Libyan sorceress of Virgil, the Saga of Tibullus, Medea in Ovid, Erichtho in Lucan, and Megæra in Claudian (to mention no more), make up a list of formidable witches to whom none of the hideous details of the black art were unknown. They sought for poisonous herbs at night; lived in ruinous places; ransacked charnel-houses for dead bodies; killed little children to obtain their fat for unguents; compelled the spirits of the dead to rise, and, after entering a fresh corpse, to reveal the mysteries of fate; devoured snakes; drank blood; raised storms at sea; diverted the moon from her course; muttered spells of fearful import; and loved above all things to "raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf o'er life." Even in the minutest details of sorcery they anticipated the witches of the Middle Ages. Hypsipyle in Ovid mentions a waxen portrait stuck full of needles, and so fashioned as to waste the life of its original. The witch in the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius anoints herself, and flies about like a bird at night. Nor were were-wolves, those most ghastly creations of diseased imagination, unfamiliar to the Greeks and Romans, as may be proved from Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius. Those who care to pursue this subject will find a vast amount of learning collected on the point by Ben Jonson in his annotations to _The Masque of Queens_. One fact, however, must be always borne in mind: the ancients regarded witchcraft either as a hideous or a solemn exercise of supernatural power, not recognizing any Satanic agency or compact with Hell. _Hecate triviis ululata per urbes_, the "Queen of the Night and of the Tombs," assisted sorcerers; but this meant merely that they trafficked in the dark with the foul mysteries of death and corruption. The classical witches were either grave and awful women, like the Libyan priestess in the _Æneid_, or else loathsome pariahs, terrible for their malignity, like Lucan's Erichtho. Mediævalism added a deeper horror to this superstitious and ghoulish conception by the thoughts of spiritual responsibility and of league with God's enemies. Damnation was the price of magic power; witchcraft being not merely abominable in the eyes of men, but also unpardonable at the bar of divine justice.