Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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