Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama

_Far, far from here ...
The sunshine in the happy glens is fair,
And by the sea, and in the brakes
The grass is cool, the sea-side air
Buoyant and fresh._

Matthew Arnold.

Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama

A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in
England.

By Walter W. Greg, M.A.

MCMVI.

Oxford: Horace Hart
Printer to the University

MAGISTRIS MEIS
AMICISQVE

Preface

Some ten years ago, it may be, Mr. St. Loe Strachey suggested that I
should write an article on 'English Pastoral Drama' for a magazine of
which he was then editor. The article was in the course of time written,
and in the further course of time appeared. I learnt two things from
writing it: first, that to understand the English pastoral drama it was
necessary to have some more or less extensive knowledge of the history of
European pastoralism in general; secondly, that there was no critical work
from which such knowledge could be obtained. I set about the revision and
expansion of my crude and superficial essay, proposing to prefix to it
such an account of pastoral literature generally as should make the
special form it assumed on the English stage appear in its true light as
the reasonable and rational outcome of artistic and historical conditions.
Unfortunately perhaps, but at least inevitably, this preliminary inquiry
grew to ever greater and more alarming proportions as I proceeded, till at
last it swelled to something over half of the whole work. Part of this
bulk was claimed by foreign pastoral poetry, the origins of the kind; part
by English pastoral poetry, and the introduction of the fashion into this
country; part by the pastoral drama of Italy, the immediate parent of that
of England. The original title proved too narrow to cover the subject with
which I dealt. Hence the rather vague and perhaps ambitions title of the
present volume. I make no pretence of offering the reader a general
history of pastoral literature, nor even of pastoral drama. The real
subject of my work remains the pastoral drama in Elizabethan
literature--understanding that term in the wide sense in which, quite
reasonably, we have learnt to use it--and even though I may have been
sometimes carried away by the interest of the immediate subject of
investigation, I have done my best to keep the main object of my inquiry
at all times in view. The downward limit of my work is a little vague. The
old stage traditions, upon which all the dramatic production of the time
was at least in some measure, and in different cases more or less
consciously, based, were killed by the act of 1642: the new traditions,
created or imported by a company of gentlemen who had come under the
influence of the French genius during the eleven years of their exile,
first announced themselves authoritatively in 1660. During the intervening
eighteen years a number of works were produced, some of which continued
the earlier traditions, while some anticipated the later. My treatment has
been eclectic. Where a work appeared to me to belong to or to illustrate
the older school I have included it, where not, I have refrained from
doing so. Fanshawe's _Pastor fido_ (1647) will be found mentioned in the
following pages, T. R.'s _Berger extravagant_ (1654) will not.

Some explanation may be advisable with regard to my method of quotation.
Where a satisfactory modern edition of the work under discussion was
available I have taken my quotations from it, whether the spelling of the
text was modernized or not. Where none such existed I have had recourse to
the original. This explains the perhaps alarming mixture of old and modern
orthographies which appear in my pages. Such inconsistency seemed to me a
lesser evil than making nonce texts to suit my immediate purpose. I have,
however, exercised the right of following my own fancy in the matter of
punctuation throughout, and also in that of capitalization, though I have
been chary of alterations in the case of old-spelling texts. This applies
to English works. I have found it necessary myself to modernize to some
extent the spelling of the quotations from early Italian in order to
render it less bewildering to readers who may possibly, like myself, have
no very profound knowledge of the antiquities of that tongue. I have been
as sparing as possible, however, and trust I may have committed no
enormities to shock Romance scholars. Lastly, the italics and contractions
which are of more or less frequent occurrence in the original editions
have been disregarded, and certain typographical details made to conform
to modern practice.

My indebtedness is not small to a number of friends who, during the
progress of my work, have helped me more or less directly in a variety of
ways. A few have received specific mention in the notes. Alike to those
who have, and to the far greater number, I fear me, who have not, I desire
hereby to confess my debt, and humbly to beg them to claim their share in
the dedication of this volume. More specifically I should mention Mr. R.
B. McKerrow, who was the first to read the following pages in manuscript,
and to make many useful suggestions, and Mr. Frank Sidgwick, to whose
careful revision alike of manuscript and proof and to whose kind and
candid criticism I am indebted perhaps more than an author's vanity may
readily allow me to acknowledge. Lastly, it would argue worse than
ingratitude to pass over my obligation to the admirable readers of the
Clarendon Press, whose marvellous accuracy in the most diverse fields and
whose almost infallible vigilance form a real asset of English
scholarship.

W. W. G.
Park Lodge, Wimbledon.
_December_, 1905.

Contents

Chapter I. Foreign Pastoral Poetry

Introduction
I. The origin and nature of pastoral
II. Greek pastoral poetry
III. The bucolic eclogue in classical Latin
IV. Medieval and humanistic eclogues
V. Italian pastoral poetry
VI. The Italian pastoral romance
VII. Pastoral in Spain
VIII. Pastoral in France

Chapter II. Pastoral Poetry in England

I. Early pastoral verse
II. Spenser
III. Spenser's immediate followers
IV. The regular eclogists
V. Lyrical and occasional verse
VI. Milton's _Lycidas_ and Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_
VII. The pastoral romances

Chapter III. Italian Pastoral Drama

I. Mythological plays containing pastoral elements
II. Evolution of the pastoral drama (see Appendix I)
III. Tasso and his _Aminta_
IV. Guarini and the _Pastor fido_
V. Minor pastoral drama

Chapter IV. Dramatic Origins of the English Pastoral Drama

I. Mythological plays
II. Translations from the Italian
III. Daniel's imitations of Tasso and Guarini

Chapter V. The Three Masterpieces

I. Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_
II. Randolph's _Amyntas_
III. Jonson's _Sad Shepherd_

Chapter VI. The English Pastoral Drama

I. Plays founded on the pastoral romances
II. The English stage pastoral

Chapter VII. Masques and General Influence

I. Pastoral in the masques and slighter dramatic compositions
II. Milton's masques: _Arcades_ and _Comus_
III. General influence. Pastoral theory. Conclusion.

Appendix I. On the origin and development of the Italian pastoral drama
Appendix II. Bibliography

Index

Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama

Chapter I.

Foreign Pastoral Poetry

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

Il mondo invecchia
E invecchiando intristisce.

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

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

II

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

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