suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.
Garcilaso’s followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes’ _Galatea_; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor’s _Diana_; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his _Siglo de Oro_ a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.
In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect. Sa de Miranda has been mentioned above. Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso’s. They are composed, like some of Sa de Miranda’s, in the short measures more natural to the language than the _terza rima_ and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro:
O pescador Sincero, que amansado
Tem o pego de Prochyta co’ o canto Por as sonoras ondas compassado.
D’este seguindo o som, que pode tanto, E misturando o antigo Mantuano,
Facamos novo estylo, novo espanto.
Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fashion passed from Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first to imitate the _Arcadia_ was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during a two-years’ residence in Italy composed the ‘beautiful fragment,’ as Ticknor styles it, entitled from the first words of the text _Menina e moca_. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of the story anticipating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of real characters, which, though their identity was concealed under anagrams and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro’s writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the _Arcadia_. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.
The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who composed in Castilian dialect the famous _Diana_. ‘Los siete libres de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor’–the Spanish form of Montemor’s name and that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages–appeared at Valencia, without date, but about 1560.[69] As in the case of its Italian and Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in love with the nymph Diana, of whose identity Lope de Vega claimed to be cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fashion. Sireno is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple, and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance of his passion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is interwoven with a multitude of episodes and incidental narratives, pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears, being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.
Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain graces of style which it possesses, the _Diana_ held the field until the picaresque romance developed into a recognized _genre_, and exercised a very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance; Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. In the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Perez, only got so far as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and Sireno’s marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the work of Jeronimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a _rifacimento_ of Gil Polo’s continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming a sequel to Perez’ work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions parody by Fra Bartolome Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin one of Gil Polo’s portion at least.
Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the _Galatea_ of Cervantes, imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to have suggested the _Arcadia_, written a few years later at the instigation of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: ‘many of its shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,’ Cervantes confesses of his romance, while Lope announces that ‘the _Arcadia_ is a true history.’ Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese _Primavera_ of Francisco Rodrigues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and 1614, and is pronounced by Ticknor to be ‘among the best full-length pastoral romances extant.’
All these works resemble one another in their general features. The characteristics of the _genre_ as found in Spain, in spite of a real feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an adherence to the circumstances of actual existence even closer than was the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole _mise en scene_ consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fashionable pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced, and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious and enduring works.
VIII
In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is summed up in the work of one man–Clement Marot. It is he who forms the central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon’s song earlier, and later the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pleiade. While belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation of Sannazzaro’s _Salices_ and her lament on the death of her brother Francois I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her _comedie_ of human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject. In his early work he continued the tradition of the _Romance of the Rose_; later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance. By nature an easy-going _bon vivant_, his only real affection appears to have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.
But, however fascinating Marot may be as an historical figure, he was in no sense a great poet. His chief merit in literature, apart from his often delicate epigrams, his _elegant badinage_ and his graceful if at times facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the charm of naive simplicity and genuine feeling. In his _Eclogue au Roi_ he addresses Francis under the name of Pan, while in the _Pastoureau chrestien_ he applies the same name to the Deity; yet in either case there is a justness of sentiment underlying the convention which saves the verse from degenerating into mere sycophancy or blasphemy. His chief claim to notice as a pastoral writer is his authorship of an eclogue on the death of Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis; a poem through which, more than any other, he influenced his greater English disciple, and thereby acquired the importance he possesses for our present inquiry.
Marot, however, whose inspiration, in so far as it was not born of his own genius, appears to be chiefly derived from Vergil, whose first eclogue he translated in his youth, was far from being the only poet who wrote bucolic verse or bore other witness to pastoral influence. France was not behind other nations in embracing the Italian models. Margaret, as I have said, imitated Sannazzaro in her _Histoire des satyres et nymphes de Diane_. The _Arcadia_ was translated in 1544. Du Bellay was familiar with the original and honoured its author with imitation, translation, and even a respectful mention of it in his famous _Defense_. Elsewhere he asks:
Qui fera taire la musette
Du pasteur neapolitain?
The first part of Belleau’s _Bergerie_ appeared in 1565, the complete work, including a piscatory poem, in 1572. On the stage Nicolas Filleul anticipated the regular Italian drama in a dramatized eclogue entitled _Les Ombres_ in 1566. Later Nicolas de Montreux, better known under the name of Ollenix du Mont-Sacre, a writer of a religious cast, and author of a romantic comedy on the story of Potiphar’s wife, composed three pastoral plays, _Athlette_, _Diane_, and _Arimene_, which appeared in 1585, 1592, and 1597 respectively. They are conventional pastorals on the Italian model, futile in plot and commonplace in style. He was also the author of the _Bergerie de Juliette_, a romance published in 1592, which Robert Tofte is credited with having translated in his _Honour’s Academy_,’ or the Famous Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta,’ which appeared at London in 1610. Tofte’s work, however, while purporting to be ‘done into English,’ makes no mention of the original author, and though indebted for its form and title to Nicholas’ romance does not appear to bear much further resemblance to it. A far more important work in itself, but one which does not much concern us here, is Honore d’Urfe’s _Astree_, an autobiographic compilation in which the fashionable pastoral romance found its most consummate example. The work was translated into English as early as 1620, but the history of its influence in this country belongs almost exclusively to the French vogue, which began about the middle of the century, and formed such an important element in the literature of the restoration.
The comparatively small influence exerted by the French pastoral of the renaissance on that of England must excuse the scanty summary given in the preceding paragraphs. It remains to be said that there had existed at an earlier period in France another and very different tradition, which supplied one of the regular forms of composition in vogue among _trouveres_ and _troubadours_ alike. The _pastourelle_ has sometimes been described as a popular form, but it would be difficult to determine wherein its ‘popularity,’ in the sense intended, consists, for it is easily recognized as the offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue. Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes. Others–and the fact is at least significant–serve to convey allusions, political, personal or didactic: a variety found as early as the twelfth century in Provencal, and about the fourteenth in northern French. Wandering scholars adopted the form from the knightly singers and produced a plentiful crop of Latin _pastoralia_, usually of a somewhat burlesque nature. An idea of the general style of these may be gathered from such lines as the following, which contain the reply of a country girl hesitating before the advances of a merry student:
Si senserit meus pater
uel Martinus maior frater,
erit mihi dies ater;
uel si sciret mea mater,
cum sit angue peior quater:
uirgis sum tributa.[70]
Appropriated, lastly, and refashioned by the hand of an original genius, the _pastourelle_ gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its _Minnesang_ in Walther’s ‘Under der linden,’ with its irrepressibly roguish refrain:
Kuster mich? wol tusentstunt:
tandaradei,
seht wie rot mir ist der munt!
Connected with the _pastourelles_ of the _langue d’oil_ is an isolated dramatic effort, of a primitive and naive sort, but of singular grace and charm. _Li jus Robins et Marion_, the work of Adan le Bochu or de le Hale, is in fact a dramatized _pastourelle_ of some eight hundred lines beginning with the rejection by a shepherdess of the advances of a knight and ending with the rustic sports of the shepherds on the green. Unsophisticated nature and playful cunning unite in no ordinary degree to lend delicacy and savour to the work, while the literary quality of Adan’s verse is evident in such incidental songs as Marion’s often quoted:
Robins m’aime, Robins m’a,
Robins m’a demandee, si m’ara.
In spite, however, of the genuine _naivete_ and natural realism of the piece, it is easy to recognize in it something of the same spirit of gentle raillery that sparkles in the graceful octaves of Lorenzo’s _Nencia_.
A real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealization of the actual shepherd class, is reflected in a poem written about 1460 by Rene of Anjou, ex-king of Naples, describing in pastoral guise the rustic retreat which he enjoyed in company with his wife, Jeanne de Laval, on the banks of the Durance. The conventional pastoralism that veils the identity of the shepherd and shepherdess is scarcely more than a pretence, for at the end of the manuscript we find blazoned the arms of the royal pair, with the inscription:
Icy sont les armes, dessoubz ceste couronne, Du bergier dessus dit et de la bergeronne.
We have now completed the first section of our introductory survey of pastoral literature. We have passed in review, in a necessarily rapid and superficial, but, it is to be hoped, not altogether inadequate, manner, the varions manifestations of the kind in the non-dramatic literature of continental Europe. The Italian pastoral drama has been reserved for separate and more detailed consideration in close connexion with that of this country. It must, however, be borne in mind that in such a survey as the present many of the byways and more or less obscure and devious channels by which pastoral permeated the wide fields of literature have of necessity been left unexplored. Nothing, for instance, has been said about the pastoral interludes which occupy a not inconspicuous place in the martial cantos both of the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_. Before passing on, however, I should like to say a few words concerning one particular department of renaissance literature, and that chiefly by way of illustrating the limitations of the tradition of literary pastoral. I refer to the _novelle_ or _nouvelles_, in which, although pastoral subjects are occasionally introduced, the treatment is entirely independent of conventional tradition. Without making any pretence at covering the whole field of the _novellieri_, I may instance a tale of Giraldi’s, not lacking in the homely charm which belongs to that author, of a child exposed in a wood and brought up by the shepherds. These are represented as simple unpretending Lombard peasants, who look to their own business and are credited with none of the arts and graces of their literary fellows. More exclusively rustic in setting is an anecdote concerning the amours of a shepherd and shepherdess, told with broad humour in the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ and elaborated with characteristic gusto and extraordinarily graphic art by Pietro Fortini. The crude obscenity of the subject alone serves to show how free the writer was from any influence of the pastoral of polite literature.[71] Numerous other stories concerning shepherds or _villani_ might be cited, from Boccaccio to Bandello, the point of which, whether openly licentious or ostensibly moral, is brought home with a brutal and physical directness utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the whole, what one would expect. The coarse realism that gave life and vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-class cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition. The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the novel. It is true that when we speak of the _bourgeois_ spirit of the _novella_ on the one hand, and the ‘ideal’ pastoral on the other, it is well to remember that the author of the _Decameron_ also wrote the first modern pastoral romance; that the century and country which saw the publication of the _Arcadia_, the _Aminta_, and the _Pastor fido_, also welcomed the work of Fortini, Giraldi, and Bandello; and that to Margaret of Navarre, the imitator of Sannazzaro and patroness of Marot, we are likewise indebted for the _Heptameron_. Nevertheless the tendencies, though sometimes united in the person of a single author, yet keep distinct. Both alike had become a fashion, both alike followed a more or less conventional type. The novel remained coarse and realistic; the pastoral, whatever may be said of its morality, remained refined and at a conscious remove from real life. To examine thoroughly the cause of this disseverance from actuality which haunted the pastoral throughout its many transformations would lead us beyond all possible bounds of this inquiry. One important point may, however, here be noted. The pastoral, whatever its form, always needed and assumed some external circumstance to give point to its actual content. The interest seldom arises directly from the narrative itself. In Theocritus and Sannazzaro this objective point is supplied by the delight of escape from the over-civilization of the city; in Petrarch and Mantuan, by their allegorical intention; in Sacchetti and Lorenzo, by the contrast of town and country, with all its delicate humour; in Boccaccio and Poliziano, by the opening it gave for golden dreams of exquisite beauty or sensuous delight; in Tasso, by the desire of that freedom in love and life which sentimental philosophers have always associated with a return to nature. In all these cases the content _per se_ may be said to be matter of indifference; it only receives meaning in relation to some ulterior intention of the author. Realism under these circumstances was impossible. Nor could satire call it forth, for no one would be at pains to satirize actual rusticity. The only loophole left by which a realistic treatment could find its way into pastoral was when, as in Folengo’s macaronics, it was not the actual rustic life but the conventional representation of it that was the object of satire. But this case was naturally a rare one.
Chapter II.
Pastoral Poetry in England
I
We have seen how there arose in the Italian songs of the fourteenth century a spontaneous form of pastoral independent of the regular tradition, and somewhat similar examples are furnished by the dramatic eclogues of Spain. In the former case, however, pastoral was never more than a passing note; while in the latter, the impulse, though possessing some vitality, was early overwhelmed by the rising tide of Italian influence. In England it was otherwise. On the one hand the spontaneous and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance. As a resuit the earlier native fashion affected in a noticeable degree later pastoral work, colouring and blending with instead of being overpowered by the regular tradition. Thus it is possible to trace two distinct though mutually reacting tendencies far down the stream of English literature, and to this double origin must be referred many of the peculiar phenomena of English pastoral work. There was furthermore a constant struggle for supremacy between the two traditions, in which now one now the other appeared likely to go under. The greatest poets of their day, Spenser and Milton, threw the weight of their authority on to the side of pastoral orthodoxy. Spenser, however, was himself too much influenced by the popular impulse for his example to be decisive in favour of the regular tradition, while, by the time Milton wrote, a hybrid form had established itself on a more or less secure basis and a _modus vivendi_ had already been achieved. Meanwhile the bulk of pastofal poets affected a less weighty and more spontaneous song, whether they wrote in the light fanciful mood of Drayton or the more passionate and romantic spirit of Browne.
To this double origin may be ascribed a certain noticeable vitality that characterizes English pastoral composition. Since this quality has been habitually overlooked by literary historians, I may be excused for dwelling on it somewhat in this place. The stigma which, not altogether undeservedly, attaches to pastoral as a whole has tempted critics to confine their attention to the more notable examples of the kind, and to treat these as more or less sporadic manifestations. Thus they have failed, on the whole, to appreciate the relation in which these works stand to the general pastoral tradition, which was mainly carried on in works of little individual interest. It is no blame to them if they considered that these undistinguished productions were of small importance in the general history of literature: any one who goes through them with care will probably arrive at a not very dissimilar conclusion. Nevertheless the fact remains that the neglect of them has obscured both the relative positions of the greater and more enduring works, and also the general nature of the pastoral tradition in this country. That tradition I believe to have been of a far more noteworthy character than has hitherto been realized. I am not, of course, prepared to maintain that pastoral composition in England ever attained, as a whole, to the rank of great literature, or that it formed such a remarkable body of work as we find, for example, in the Arcadian drama of Italy. But when we come to regard the pastoral production of this country in the light of a more or less connected tradition, it is impossible not be struck by the originality and diversity of the various forms which it assumed. Though as a literary kind it never rivalled its Italian model in fertility, it evinced an individual and versatile quality which we seek in vain in other countries. To substantiate this claim and to show how far the vitality of the English pastoral was due to its hybrid origin will be my chief aim in this chapter. When I come to deal with the main subject of this inquiry it will be necessary to determine how far similar considerations apply in the case of the pastoral drama.
In the first place we have to consider what was produced on the one hand by the purely native impulse, and on the other under the sole inspiration of foreign tradition, at a period when these two influences had not yet begun to interact. As an argument in favour of the spontaneous and genuine nature of the earlier fashion may be noticed its appearance in that miscellaneous body of anonymous literature which, whatever may be its origin–and it is impossible to enter on so controversial a subject in this place–is at least ‘popular’ in the sense of having been long handed down from generation to generation in the mouths of the people. The acceptance of pastoral ballads into this great mass of traditional literature is at least as good evidence of their popular character as that of authorship could be. In such a body of literature it would indeed be surprising had the _pastourelle_ motive not found entrance; but it is noteworthy that whereas the French and Latin poems are habitually written from the point of view of the lover, the English ballads adopt that of the peasant maiden to whom the high-born suitor pays his court. At once the simplest and most poetical of the ballads on this model is that printed by Scott as _The Broom of Cowdenknows_, a title to which in all probability it has little claim. It is a delightful example of the minor ballad literature, and I am by no means inclined to regard it as a mere amplification of the much shorter and rather abrupt _Bonny May_ of Herd’s collection, though the latter, so far as it goes, probably offers a less sophisticated text. In either case a gentleman riding along meets a girl milking, obtains her love, and ultimately returns and marries her. A similar incident, in which, however, the seducer marries the girl under compulsion and then discovers her to be of noble parentage, is told in a ballad, of which a number of versions have been collected in Scotland under the title of _Earl Richard_ or _Earl Lithgow_, and of which an English version was current in the seventeenth century and was quoted more than once by Beaumont and Fletcher.[72] This was printed by Percy in the _Reliques_, and two broadsides of it dating from the restoration are preserved in the Roxburghe collection. It is inferior to the northern versions, but both are probably late, and contain stanzas belonging to or copied from other ballads, notably the _Bonny Hynd_ of the Herd manuscript and _Burd Helen_ (the Scotch version of _Child Waters_). The title of the broadsides is interesting as betraying the influence of the regular pastoral tradition: ‘The beautifull Shepherdesse of Arcadia. A new pastarell Song of a courteous young Knight, and a supposed Shepheards Daughter.'[73] Again, apparently from the Aberdeen district, comes a ballad on the marriage of a shepherd’s daughter to the Laird of Drum. On the other hand we find three somewhat similar ballads, _Lizie Lindsay_ or _Donald of the Isles, Lizie Baillie_, and _Glasgow Peggie_, recording the elopement of a town girl with a highland gentleman in the disguise of a shepherd. These are obviously late, though a certain resemblance in style with _Johnie Faa_ makes it possible that they are as old as the middle of the seventeenth century. None of the pastoral ballads, indeed, can show any credentials which would suggest an earlier date than the second half of the sixteenth century, nor can any of them lay claim to first-rate poetic merit.[74]
Another example of native pastoral, earlier and far more genuine in character, is to be found in the religious drama. The romantic possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the ‘shepherd’ plays of the mystery cycles. We possess the plays on the adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all. The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic ‘Coventry’ cycle of the Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the fail dyke of the ‘bought i’ the lirk o’ the hill’ that caught the imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York, Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of the guild cycle.[75]
It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the two Towneley plays. These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three portions: first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration. The two latter do not particularly concern us. Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the _Gloria_, in the Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for
Abacuc and ely prophesyde so,
Elezabeth and zachare and many other mo, And david as veraly is witnes thereto, Iohn Bapyste sewrly and daniel also.
More remarkable still is one shepherd’s familiarity with the classics:
Virgill in his poetre sayde in his verse, Even thus by gramere as I shall reherse; ‘Iam nova progenies celo demittitur alto, Iam rediet virgo, redeunt saturnia regna.'[78]
It is perhaps no matter for surprise that one of his less learned fellows should break out with more force than delicacy:
Weme! tord! what speke ye here in myn eeres? Tell us no clerge I hold you of the freres.
It is one of the little ironies of literature that in the earliest picture of pastoral life in England the greatest pastoral writer of Rome should be quoted, not as a pastoralist, but as a magician.
Before the appearance of the angels, however, there is nothing to lead one to expect this strange display of learning. A rougher, simpler set of countrymen it would have been hard to find in the England of Chaucer and Langland. In the shepherd-play known as _prima pastorum_ the comic element consists mostly in quarrels and feasting among the shepherds, but in the _secunda pastorum_ it constitutes a regular little three-scene farce, which at its date was absolutely unique in literature. It is thence only a step, and a very short one, to John Heywood’s interludes–though it is a step that took more than a century to accomplish.
The first shepherd comes in complaining of the hard weather; his fingers are chapped, the storms blow from every quarter in turn. ‘Sely shepardes,’ moreover, are put upon by any rich upstart and have no redress. A second shepherd appears with another grumble: ‘We sely wedmen dre mekyll wo.’ Some men, indeed, have been known to desire two wives or even three, but most would sooner have none at all. Whereupon enters Daw, a third shepherd, complaining of portents ‘With mervels mo and mo.’ ‘Was never syn noe floode sich floodys seyn’; even ‘I se shrewys pepe’–apparently a portentous omen. At this point Mak comes on the scene. He is a notorious bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself ‘a yoman, I tell you, of the king,’ and complains that his wife eats him out of house and home. The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they lie down to rest they place him the middle man of three. As soon, however, as the shepherds are asleep–‘that may ye all here’–Mak borrows a sheep and makes off. Arrived at home he would like to eat the sheep at once, but he is afraid of being followed, so the animal is put in the cradle and wrapped up to resemble a baby, and Mak goes back to take his place among the shepherds. Before long these awake and rouse Mak, who, pretending he has dreamt that Gill his wife has been brought to bed of another child, goes off home. The shepherds miss one of their sheep and, following him, find Gill on the bed while Mak sings a lullaby at the cradle. They proceed to search the house, Gill the while praying she may eat the child in the cradle if ever she deceived them. They find nothing, and are about to depart when Daw insists on kissing the new baby. Gill vows she saw the child changed by an elf as the clock struck midnight, but Mak pleads guilty and gets off with a blanketing.
So far, intentionally in the case of the drama, and if not intentionally at least practically in that of the ballads, the appeal of the native pastoral impulse–tradition it could hardly yet be called–was to an audience little if at all removed from the actual condition of life depicted. This ensured at least essential reality, for though in the one case there may be idealization in a romantic and in the other in a burlesque direction, either implies that familiarity with the actual world which appears to underlie all vital art.[79] It was not long, however, before the pastoral began to address itself to a more cultivated society, and in so doing sacrificed that wholesome corrective of a genuinely critical audience which is needed in the long run to keep any literary form from degeneration. The impulse is still, however, found in all its freshness and genuineness in such a poem as the following fifteenth-century nativity carol, which, in its blending of piety and humorous rusticity, is strongly reminiscent of the dramatic productions we have just been reviewing:
The shepherd upon a hill he sat,
He had on him his tabard and his hat, His tar-box, his pipe, and his flagat, His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat!
For he was a good herds-boy,
Ut hoy!
For in his pipe he made so much joy. Can I not sing but hoy.
* * * * *
The shepherd on a hill he stood,
Round about him his sheep they yode, He put his hand under his hood,
He saw a star as red as blood.
Ut hoy! &c.
* * * * *
Now must I go there Christ was born, Farewell! I come again to-morn,
Dog, keep well my sheep fro the corn! And warn well Warroke when I blow my horn! Ut hoy! &c.[80]
So, again, in the delightful poem that has won for Robert Henryson the title of the first English pastoralist the warm blood of natural feeling yet runs full. _Robene and Makyne_ stands on the threshold of the sixteenth century, a modest and pastoral counterpart of the _Nut-Brown Maid_, as evidence that there were poets of purely native inspiration capable of writing verses every whit as perfect in form as anything produced by the Italianizers of the next generation, and commonly far more genuine in feeling. Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development and conventionalization of the native tendency. Such is the _Harpelus’ Complaint_ of ‘Tottel’s Miscellany.’ This was originally printed among the poems of uncertain authors, but when it re-appeared in _England’s Helicon_, in 1600, it was subscribed with Surrey’s name. The ascription does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus’ epitaph:
Phylida was a fayer mayde,
And fresh as any flowre:
Whom Harpalus the herdman prayed
To be his paramour.
Harpalus and eke Corin
Were herdmen both yfere:
And Phillida could twist and spin And therto sing full clere.
But Phillida was all to coy
For Harpelus to winne.
For Corin was her onely joye,
Who forst her not a pynne.[82]
The relation of the early Italianizers to pastoral is rather strange. Pastoral names, imagery and conventions are freely scattered throughout their works, yet with the exception of the above there is scarcely a poem to which the term pastoral can be properly applied. They borrowed from their models a kind of pastoral diction merely, not their partiality for the form: ‘shepherd’ is with them merely another word for lover or poet, while almost any act of such may be described as ‘folding his sheep’ or the like. Allegory has reduced itself to a few stock phrases. In this fashion Surrey complains to his fair Geraldine, and a whole company of unknown lovers celebrate the cruelty and beauty of their ladies. It is rarely that we catch a note of fresher reminiscence or more spontaneous song as in Wyatt’s:
Ah, Robin!
Joly Robin!
Tell me how thy leman doth!
Happily the seed of Phillida’s coyness bore fruit, and the amorous pastoral ballad or picture, a true _idyllion_, became a recognized type in English verse. It certainly owed something to foreign pastoral models, and, like the bulk of Elizabethan lyrics, a good deal to Italian poetry in general; but in its freshness and variety, as in its tendency to narrative form, it asserts its independence of any rigid tradition, and justifies us in regarding it as an outcome of that native impulse which we have already noticed. Such a poem is Nicholas Breton’s ever charming _Phyllida and Corydon_, printed above his signature in _England’s Helicon_.[83] Although we are thereby anticipating, it may be quoted as a representative specimen of its kind:
In the merry month of May,
In a morn by break of day,
Forth I walk’d by a wood-side,
When as May was in his pride:
There I spied all alone,
Phyllida and Corydone.
Much ado there was, God wot!
He would love and she would not.
She said, never man was true;
He said, none was false to you.
He said, he had loved her long;
She said, Love should have no wrong. Corydon would kiss her then;
She said, maids must kiss no men, Till they did for good and all;
Then she made the shepherd call
All the heavens to witness truth
Never loved a truer youth.
Thus with many a pretty oath,
Yea and nay, and faith and troth, Such as silly shepherds use
When they will not Love abuse,
Love which had been long deluded
Was with kisses sweet concluded;
And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
Was made the lady of the May.
We must now turn to the beginnings of regular pastoral tradition in this country, springing up under direct foreign influence and in conscious and avowed imitation of specific foreign models. Passing over the Latin eclogues of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe. Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay’s case at any rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators, from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish them. Of the professed translators themselves it may be well to say a few words in this place and allow them at once to resume their veil of well-deserved oblivion. Their influence may be taken as non-existent, and their only interest lies in the indication they afford of the trend of literary fashion. The earliest was George Turberville, who in 1567 translated the first nine of Mantuan’s eclogues into English fourteeners. The verse is fairly creditable, but the exaggeration of style, endeavouring by sheer brutality of phrase to force the moral judgement it lacks the art of more subtly stimulating, produces neither a very pleasing nor a very edifying effect. This translation went through three editions before the end of the century. The whole ten eclogues did not find a translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was Theocritus, of whose works ‘Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty, Poems, or Aeglogues,’ were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated to E. D.–probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer–in 1588. As before, the verse, mostly fourteeners, is far from bad, but the selection is not very much to our purpose. Three of the pieces, a singing match, a love complaint, and one of the Galatea poems, are more or less pastoral; but the rest–among which is the dainty conceit of Venus and the boar well rendered in a three-footed measure–do not belong to bucolic verse at all. Incidental mention may be also made of a ‘dialogue betwixt two sea nymphs, Doris and Galatea, concerning Polyphemus, briefly translated out of Lucian,’ by Giles Fletcher the elder, in his _Licia_ of 1593; and a version of ‘The First Eidillion of Moschus describing Love,’ in Barnabe Barnes’ _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, which probably appeared the same year. Lastly we have the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil, translated in 1589 by Abraham Fleming into rimeless fourteeners.[84] Besides these there are a few odd translations from Vergil among the experiments of the classical versifiers. Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586), gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce’s _Lawyer’s Logic_ (1588), and again with corrections in his _Ivychurch_ (1591).[85] Several further translations followed in the seventeenth century.
But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt’s _Stultifera Navis_, priest and monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury. It seems to have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues. They appeared at various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the writer’s death, to the _Ship of Fools_ of 1570.[86] They are there headed ‘Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium, compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.’ This sufficiently indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of the previous century. The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon, a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix, for whom the great world has long lost its glamour. The fourth eclogue, ‘treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,’ is similarly ‘taken out of’ Mantuan. In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very individual but pretty lusty satire against Skelton.[88] He also introduces, as recited by one of the characters, ‘The description of the Towre of vertue and honour, into which the noble Howarde contended to enter by worthy actes of chivalry,’ a stanzaic composition in honour of Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513. The fifth eclogue, ‘of the disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,’ or the _Cytezen and Uplondyshman_, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series. These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre–in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the _Shepherd’s Calender_. The following lines from the fifth eclogue may serve to illustrate Barclay’s style:
I shall not deny our payne and servitude, I knowe that plowmen for the most part be rude, Nowe shall I tell thee high matters true and olde, Which curteous Candidus unto me once tolde, Nought shall I forge nor of no leasing bable, This is true history and no surmised fable.
It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original step. The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant. Such credit as attaches to the innovation should be allowed him.
A somewhat more independent writer is Barnabe Googe–writer, indeed, as original, may be, as the lesser Latin pastoralists of the renaissance. The fact of his altering the conventional forms to fit the mood of a sturdy protestantism, of a protestantism still bitter from the Marian persecutions, is scarcely to be regarded so much as evidence of his invention as of the stability of literary tradition under the varying forms imposed by external circumstances. The collection of his poems, ‘imprinted at London’ in 1563,[89] includes eight eclogues written in fourteeners, the majority of which may fairly be said to represent Mantuan adjusted to the conditions of contemporary life in reformation England. Others show the influence of the author’s visit to Spain in 1561-3. The best that can be said for the verse and style is that they pursue their ‘middle flight’ on the whole modestly, and that the diction is at times not without a touch of simple dignity. There are, moreover, moments of genuine feeling when the author recalls the fires of Smithfield, and of generous if naive appreciation when he speaks of his predecessors in English song. A brief summary of contents will give some idea of the nature of these poems. The first recounts the pains of love; in the second Dametas rails on the blind boy and ends his song by dying. The third treats of the vices of the city, not the least of them being religious persecution. In the next Melibeus relates how Dametas, having as we now learn killed himself for love, appeared to him amid hell-fire. Eclogue V contains the pitiful tale of Faustus who courted Claudia through the agency of Valerius. Claudia unfortunately fell in love with the messenger, and finding him faithful to his master slew herself. This is imitated, in part closely, from the tale of the shepherdess Felismena in the second book of Montemayor’s _Diana_, the identical story upon which Shakespeare is supposed ultimately to have founded his _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, though it is difficult at first sight to trace much resemblance between the play and Googe’s poem. In the sixth eclogue Faustus–the Don Felix of the Spanish and the Proteus of Shakespeare–himself appears, for no better reason it would seem than to give his interlocutor an opportunity of enlarging on the delights of country life and introducing the remarks on fowling borrowed from Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso’s second eclogue. The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the _Nut-Brown Maid_, again paraphrased from the _Diana_ (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration is in his partiality for some sort of narrative ballad motive as the subject of his poems.
So far the literary quality to be registered has not been high among those owing allegiance to the regular pastoral tradition. The next step to be taken is a long one. The pastoral writings of Spenser not only themselves belong to a very different order of work, but likewise brings us face to face with literary problems of a most complex and interesting kind.
II
In the _Shepherd’s Calender_ we have the one pastoral composition in English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser’s eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not of course the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser’s work: it is with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence upon subsequent pastoral work that we are immediately concerned. This is an aspect of the _Shepherd’s Calender_ to which literary historians have naturally devoted less attention. These two reasons–namely, the intrinsic importance of the work and the neglect of its pastoral bearing–must excuse a somewhat lengthy treatment of a theme that may possibly be regarded as already sufficiently familiar.
The _Shepherd’s Calender_[90], which first appeared in 1579, was published without author’s name, but with an envoy signed ‘Immerito.’ It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and contained a commentary by one E. K., who also signed an epistle to Master Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. ‘Immerito’ was a name used by Spenser in his familiar correspondence with Harvey, and can in any case have presented no mystery to his Cambridge friends. Among these must clearly be reckoned the commentator E. K., who may be identified with one Edward Kirke with all but absolute certainty.[91] Within certain well defined limits we may also accept E. K. as a competent exponent of his friend’s work, and his identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser’s editors and biographers to fight over. It will be sufficient to add in this place that however ‘literary’ may have been Spenser’s attachment to Rosalind there is no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little response his advances may have met with there _is_ reason to suppose that his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional.
Spenser’s design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the penning of impossible iambic trimeters, ‘minding,’ as E. K. directly informs us, ‘to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.’ He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality, freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his pastoral work that justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there, modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[92], but the investigation of his originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although, as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has remarked, ‘it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not due.’
The chief point of originality in the _Calender_ is the attempt at linking the separate eclogues into a connected series. We have already seen how with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern. This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues, ‘proportionable,’ as the title is careful to inform us, ‘to the twelve monethes.’
In the ‘January,’ a monologue, Spenser, under the disguise of Colin Clout, laments the ill-success of his love for Rosalind, who meets his advances with scorn. He also alludes to his friendship with Harvey, who is introduced throughout under the name of Hobbinol. The ‘February’ is a disputation between youth and age in the persons of Cuddie and Thenot. It introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in which the eclogue is composed. For the ‘March’ Spenser recasts in English surroundings Bion’s fantasy of the fight with Cupid, without however achieving any conspicuous success. In the April eclogue Hobbinol recites to the admiring Thenot Colin’s lay
Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all, Which once he made as by a spring he laye, And tuned it unto the Waters fall.
This lay is in an intricate lyrical stanza which Spenser shows considerable skill in handling. The following lines, for instance, already show the musical modulation characteristic of much of his best work:
See, where she sits upon the grassie greene, (O seemely sight!)
Yclad in Scarlot, like a mayden Queene, And ermines white:
Upon her head a Cremosin coronet, With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set: Bay leaves betweene,
And primroses greene,
Embellish the sweete Violet.
In the ‘May’ we return to the four-beat accentual measure, this time applied to a discussion by the herdsmen Palinode and Piers of the lawfulness of Sunday sports and the corruption of the clergy. Here we have a common theme treated from an individual point of view. The eclogue is interesting as showing that the author, whose opinions are placed in the mouth of the precise Piers; belonged to what Ben Jonson later styled ‘the sourer sort of shepherds.’ A fable is again introduced which is of a pronounced Aesopic cast. In the ‘June’ we return to the love-motive of Rosalind, which, though alluded to in the April eclogue, has played no prominent part since January. It is a dialogue between Colin and Hobbinol, in which the former recounts his final defeat and the winning of Rosalind by Menalcas. This eclogue contains Spenser’s chief tribute to Chaucer:
The God of shepheards, Tityrus, is dead, Who taught me homely, as I can, to make; He, whilst he lived, was the soveraigne head Of shepheards all that bene with love ytake: Well couth he wayle his Woes, and lightly slake The flames which love within his heart had bredd, And tell us mery tales to keepe us wake The while our sheepe about us safely fedde.
The July eclogue again leads us into the realm of ecclesiastical politics. It is a disputation between upland and lowland shepherds, the descendant therefore of Mantuan and Barclay, though the use of ‘high places’ as typifying prelatical pride appears to be original. The confusion of things Christian and things pagan, of classical mythology with homely English scenery, nowhere reaches a more extravagant pitch than here. Morrell, the advocate of the old religion, defends the hills with the ingeniously wrong-headed argument:
And wonned not the great God Pan
Upon mount Olivet,
Feeding the blessed flocke of Dan, Which dyd himselfe beget?
or else, gazing over the Kentish downs, he announces that
Here han the holy Faunes recourse,
And Sylvanes haunten rathe;
Here has the salt Medway his source, Wherein the Nymphes doe bathe.
In the ‘August’ Spenser again handles a familiar theme with more or less attempt at novelty. Willie and Peregot meeting on the green lay wagers in orthodox fashion, and, appointing Cuddie judge, begin their singing match. The ’roundel’ that follows, a song inserted in the midst of decasyllabic stanzas, is composed of alternate lines sung by the two competitors. The verse is of the homeliest; indeed it is only a rollicking indifference to its own inanity that saves it from sheer puerility and gives it a careless and as it were impromptu charm of its own. Even in an age of experiment it must have needed some self-confidence to write the dialect of the _Calender_; it must have required nothing less than assurance to put forth such verses as the following:
It fell upon a holy eve,
Hey, ho, hollidaye!
When holy fathers wont to shrieve; Now gynneth this roundelay.
Sitting upon a hill so hye,
Hey, ho, the high hyll!
The while my flocke did feede thereby; The while the shepheard selfe did spill. I saw the bouncing Bellibone,
Hey, ho, Bonibell!
Tripping over the dale alone,
She can trippe it very well.
Many a reader of the anonymous quarto of 1579 must have joined in Cuddie’s exclamation:
Sicker, sike a roundel never heard I none!
Sidney, we know, was not altogether pleased with the homeliness of the verses dedicated to him; and there must have been not a few among Spenser’s academic friends to feel a certain incongruity between the polished tradition of the Theocritean singing match and the present poem. Moreover, as if to force the incongruity upon the notice of the least sensitive of his readers, Spenser followed up the ballad with a poem which is not only practically free from obsolete or dialectal phrasing, but which is composed in the wearisomely pedantic _sestina_ form. This song is attributed to Colin, whose love for Rosalind is again mentioned.
Passing to the ‘September’ we find an eclogue of the ‘wise shepherd’ type. It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet which roused the ire of Dr. Johnson:
Diggon Davie! I bidde her god day;
Or Diggon her is, or I missaye.
Diggon is a shepherd, who, in hope of gain, drove his flock into a far country, and coming home the poorer, relates to Hobbinol the evil ways of foreign shepherds among whom,
playnely to speake of shepheards most what, Badde is the best.
The ‘October’ eclogue belongs to the stanzaic group, and consists of a dialogue on the subject of poetry between the shepherds Piers and Cuddie. It is one of the most imaginative of the series, and in it Spenser has refashioned time-honoured themes with more conspicuous taste than elsewhere. The old complaint for the neglect of poetry acquires new life through the dramatic contrast of the two characters in which opposite sides of the poetic temperament are revealed. In Cuddie we have a poet for whom the prize is more than the praise[93], whose inspiration is cramped because of the indifference of a worldly court and society. Things were not always so–
But ah! Mecaenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade, That matter made for Poets on to play.
And in the same strain he laments over what might have been his song:
Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should rage, O! if my temples were distaind with wine, And girt with girlonds of wild Yvie twine, How I could reare the Muse on stately stage, And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine, With queint Bellona in her equipage!
Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new age of England’s song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own unworthiness, adds:
For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne; He, were he not with love so ill bedight, Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne;
Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the _Hymnes_:
Ah, fon! for love doth teach him climbe so hie, And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre.
And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than Mantuan’s Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece. One might well question whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of Spenser’s than ever went to the composition of Vergil’s _Pollio_.
The ‘November,’ like the ‘April,’ consists for the most part of a lay composed in an elaborate stanza–there a panegyric, here an elegy. This time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the Rosalind motive. The subject of the threnody is a nymph of the name of Dido, whose identity can only be vaguely conjectured. The chief point of external form in which Spenser has departed from his model, namely Marot’s dirge for Loyse de Savoye, and from other pastoral elegies, is in the use of a different form of verse in the actual lament from that in which the setting of the poem is composed. Otherwise he has followed tradition none the less closely for having infused the conventional form with a poetry of his own. The change by which the lament passes into the song of rejoicing is traditional–and though borrowed by Spenser from Marot, is as old as Vergil. Both Browne and Milton later made use of the same device. Spenser writes:
Why wayle we then? why weary we the Gods with playnts, As if some evill were to her betight?
She raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes, That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light, And is enstalled nowe in heavens hight. I see thee, blessed soule, I see
Walke in Elisian fieldes so free. O happy herse!
Might I once come to thee, (O that I might!) O joyfull verse!
Although some critics, looking too exclusively to the poetic merit of the _Calender_ as the cause of its importance, have perhaps overestimated the beauty of this and the April lyrics, the skill with which the intricate stanzas are handled must be apparent to any careful reader. As the _Calender_ in poetry generally, so even more decidedly in their own department, do these songs mark a distinct advance in formal evolution. Just as they were themselves foreshadowed in the recurrent melody of Wyatt’s farewell to his lute–
My lute, awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste, And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past, My lute, be still, for I have done–
so they in their turn heralded the full strophic sonority of the _Epithalamium_.
Lastly, in the ‘December’ we have the counterpart of the January eclogue, a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for
Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath, And after Winter commeth timely death.
Adieu, delightes, that lulled me asleepe; Adieu, my deare, whose love I bought so deare; Adieu, my little Lambes and loved sheepe; Adieu, ye Woodes, that oft my witnesse were: Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true, Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.[94]
It will be seen from the above analysis that the architectonic basis of Spenser’s design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the year. These are symmetrically arranged: the ‘January’ and ‘December’ are both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the ‘June’ is a dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both of which another shepherd sings one of Colin’s lays and refers incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of poems into a single fabric is Spenser’s chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts so as to produce the singleness of impression necessary to a work of art, and the measure of success which he achieved, though they belong more strictly to the general history of poetry, must also detain us for a moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the title–_The Shepherd’s Calender_–‘Conteyning twelve Aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes.’ This might, indeed, have been no more than a fanciful name for any series of twelve poems;[95] with Spenser it indicates a conscious principle of artistic construction. It suggests, what is moreover apparent from the eclogues themselves, that the author intended to represent the spring and fall of the year as typical of the life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to correspond with the seasons represented; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle through the year was to reflect and thereby unify the emotions, thoughts, and passions of the shepherds. This was a perfectly legitimate artistic device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily into the absurdities of the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ or that Spenser himself is not wholly guiltless of the charge.
Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath, And after Winter commeth timely death.
These lines bear witness to Spenser’s intention. But the conceit is not fully or consistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not only does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season–the very nature of the theme at times made this impossible–but the time of year is not so much as mentioned. This is more especially the case in the summer months; there is no joy of the ‘hygh seysoun,’ and when it is mentioned it is rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin mourns for other days:
Tho couth I sing of love, and tune my pype Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made: Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype, To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade, To crowne her golden locks: but yeeres more rype, And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd, Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype.
In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods–
Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes, Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe, I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes: Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring, And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes, Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping, Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes.
Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin’s lament, ‘The God of shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,’ containing the lines:
But, if on me some little drops would flowe Of that the spring was in his learned hedde, I soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe, And teache the trees their trickling teares to shedde.
We have here a specifie inversion of the ‘pathetic fallacy.’ The moods of nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought, consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central motive–the Rosalind drama–in the subsidiary scenes. Or should we not rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure? The unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character.
It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the _Calender_ and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since both have a particular bearing upon Spenser’s attitude towards pastoral in general.
Ben Jonson, in one of those utterances which have won for him the reputation of churlishness, but which are often marked by acute critical sense, asserted that Spenser ‘in affecting the Ancients writ no Language.'[96] The remark applies first and foremost, of course, to the _Calender_, and opens up the whole question of archaism and provincialism in literature. This is far too wide a question to receive adequate treatment here, and yet it appears forced upon us by the nature of the case. For Spenser’s archaism, in his pastoral work at least, is no unmeaning affectation as Jonson implies. He perceived that the language of Chaucer bore a closer resemblance to actual rustic speech than did the literary language of his own day, and he adopted it for his imaginary shepherds as a fitting substitute for the actual folk-tongue with which he had grown familiar, whether in the form of rugged Lancashire or full-mouthed Kentish. And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured platitudes that they repeat from their learned predecessors. With our wider appreciation of literary effect, and our more historical and less authoritative manner of judging works of art, we can no longer endorse Sidney’s famous criticism:[97] ‘That same framing of his stile, to an old rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.'[98] If a writer finds an effective and picturesque word in an old author or in a homely dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when he claimed the right of mingling Ayrshire with his Lothian verse. Even such archaisms as ‘deemen’ and ‘thinken,’ such colloquialisms as the pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far towards justifying Jonson’s acrimony is the wanton confusion of different dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of such variants as ‘gate’ beside the usual ‘goat,’ of ‘sike’ and ‘sich’ beside ‘such’; the coining of words like ‘stanck,’ apparently from the Italian _stanco_; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, ‘yede’ as an infinitive, ‘behight’ in the same sense as the simple verb, ‘betight,’ ‘gride,’ and many others–all of which do not tend to produce the homely effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and unnatural.[99]
The influence of Chaucer was not confined to the language: from him Spenser borrowed the metre of a considerable portion of the _Calender_. It may at first sight appear strange to attribute to imitation of Chaucer’s smooth, carefully ordered verse the rather rugged measure of, say, the February eclogue, but a little consideration will, I fancy, leave no doubt upon the subject. This measure is roughly reducible to four beats with a varying number of syllables in the _theses_, being thus purely accentual as distinguished from the more strictly syllabic measures of Chaucer himself on the one hand and the English Petrarchists on the other. Take the following example:
The soveraigne of seas he blames in vaine, That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe: So loytring live you little heardgroomes, Keeping you beastes in the budded broomes: And, when the shining sunne laugheth once, You deemen the Spring is come attonce; Tho gynne you, fond flyes! the cold to scorne, And, crowing in pypes made of greene corn, You thinken to be Lords of the yeare;
But eft, when ye count you freed from feare, Cornes the breme Winter with chamfred browes, Full of wrinckles and frostie furrowes, Drerily shooting his stormy darte,
Which cruddles the blood and pricks the harte: Then is your carelesse corage accoied, Your careful heards with cold bene annoied: Then paye you the price of your surquedrie, With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]
The syllabic value of the final _e_, already weakening in the London of Chaucer’s later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:
Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry; For al my minde, wyth percyng influence, Was sette upon the most fayre lady
La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly, That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,
Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]
It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some of Wyatt’s verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late Chaucerians preserved of their master’s metric was the five-stress character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser’s day all memory of the syllabic _e_ had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted from Chaucer’s verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a passage from the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_ as it appears in Thynne’s second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read as follows:
When zephirus eke wyth hys sote breth Enspyred hath every holte and heth,
The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne Hath in the Ram halfe hys course yronne, And smale foules maken melodye
That slepen al nyght with open eye, &c.
This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser’s measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:
Tho opened he the dore, and in came The false Foxe, as he were starke lame.
Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:
Tho opened he the dore, and inne came The false fox, as he were starke lame,
and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circumstances there can, I think, be little doubt as to the literary parentage of Spenser’s accentual measure.[102]
Like the archaic dialect, this homely measure tends to bring Spenser’s shepherds closer to their actual English brethren. And hereby, it should be frankly acknowledged, the incongruity of the speakers and their discourse is emphasized and increased. That discourse, it is true, runs on pastoral themes, but the disguise and allegory have worn thin with centuries of use. We can no longer separate the words from the allusions, and consequently we can no longer accept the speakers in their unsophisticated shepherd’s role. Yet it was precisely the desire to give reality to these transparent phantasms that led Spenser to endow them with a rustic speech. Whether he failed or succeeded the paradox of the form remains about equal.[103]
The importance of the _Shepherd’s Calender_ was early recognized, not only by friendly critics, but by the general public likewise, and six editions were called for in less than twenty years. Not long after its appearance John Dove, a Christ Church man, who appears to have been ignorant of the authorship, turned the whole into Latin verse, dedicating the manuscript to the Dean.[104] Another Latin version is found in manuscript in the British Museum copy of the edition of 1597, and after undergoing careful revision finally appeared in print in 1653. This was the work of one Bathurst, a fellow of Spenser’s own college of Pembroke at Cambridge.[105]
The _Shepherd’s Calender_ was Spenser’s chief contribution to pastoral; indeed it was by so much his most important contribution that it would hardly be worth while examining the others did they not bear witness to a certain change in his attitude towards the pastoral ideal.
The first of these later works is the isolated but monumental eclogue entitled _Colin Clouts come Home again_, of which the dedication to Raleigh is dated 1591, though it was not published till four years later. This, perhaps the longest and most elaborate eclogue ever written, describes how the Shepherd of the Ocean, that is Raleigh, induced Colin Clout, who as before represents Spenser, to leave his rustic retreat in
the cooly shade
Of the greene alders by the Mallaes shore,
and try his fortune at the court of the great shepherdess Cynthia, and how he ultimately returned to Ireland. The verse marks, as might be expected, a considerable advance in smoothness and command of rhythm over the non-lyrical portions of the _Calender_, and the dialect, too, is much less harsh, being far advanced towards that peculiar poetic diction which Spenser adopted in his more ambitions work. On the other hand, in spite of a certain _allegrezza_ in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser’s note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves–
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.
Thus though time has purged the bitterness of his sorrow, the regret remains; his early love is still the mistress of his thoughts, but years have softened his reproaches, and he admits:
who with blame can justly her upbrayd, For loving not; for who can love compell?–
a petard, it may be incidentally remarked, which, sprung within the bounds of pastoral, is of power to pulverize in an instant the whole artificial system of amatory ethics.
The most notable points in the poem are the loves of the rivers Bregog and Mulla, the famous list of contemporary poets, and the presentation of the seamy side of court life, recalling the more direct satire of the probably contemporary _Mother Hubberd’s Tale_. The first of these belongs to the class of Ovidian myths already noticed in such works as Lorenzo’s _Ambra_. The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than by Ovid’s direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise characterizes Spenser’s tale of Molanna in the fragment on Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological _Naturanschauung_ may be traced in Drayton’s chorographical epic.
Of the miscellaneous _Astrophel_, edited and in part composed by Spenser, which was appended to _Colin Clout_, and of the _Daphnaida_ published in 1596, though, like the former volume, containing a dedication dated 1591, a passing mention must suffice. The former is chiefly remarkable as illustrating the uniformly commonplace character of the verse called forth by the death of one who, while he lived, was held the glory of Elizabethan chivalry. It contains, beside other verse, pastoral elegies from the pens, certainly of Spenser, and probably of the Countess of Pembroke, Matthew Roydon, and Lodowick Bryskett. The last-named, or at any rate a contributor with the same initiais, also supplied a ‘Pastorall Aeglogue’ on the same theme. _Daphnaida_ is a long lament in pastoral form on the death of Douglas Howard, daughter of the Earl of Northampton.
Of far greater importance for our present purpose is the pastoral interlude in the quest of Sir Calidore, which occupies the last four cantos of the sixth book of the _Faery Queen_.[107] Here is told how Sir Calidore, the knight of courtesy, in his quest of the Blatant Beast came among the shepherd-folk and fell in love with the fair Pastorella, reputed daughter of old Meliboee; how he won her love in return through his valour and courtesy; how while he was away hunting she was carried off by a band of robbers; how he followed and rescued her; and finally, how she was discovered to be the daughter of the lord of Belgard–at which point the poem breaks off abruptly. The story has points of resemblance with the Dorastus and Fawnia, or Florizel and Perdita, legend; but it also has another and more important claim upon our attention. For as Shakespeare in _As You Like It_, so Spenser in this episode has, as it were, passed judgement upon the pastoral ideal as a whole. He is acutely sensitive to the charm of that ideal and the seductions it offers to his hero–
Ne, certes, mote he greatly blamed be,
says the poet of the _Faery Queen_ recalling the days when he was plain Colin Clout–but the
perfect pleasures, which do grow Amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales,
are not allowed to afford more than a temporary solace to the knight; the robbers break in upon the rustic quietude, rapine and murder succeed the peaceful occupations of the shepherds, and Sir Calidore is driven once again to resume his arduous quest. The same idea may be traced in the knight’s visit to the heaven-haunted hill where he meets Colin Clout. In the
hundred naked maidens lilly white All raunged in a ring and dauncing in delight
to the sound of Colin’s bagpipe, and who, together with the Graces and their sovereign lady, vanish at the knight’s approach, it is surely not fanciful to see the gracious shadows of the idyllic poet’s vision trooping reluctantly away at the call of a more lofty theme. With this sense of regret at the vanishing of an ideal long cherished, but at last deliberately abandoned for matters of deeper and more real import, we may turn from the work of the most important figure in English pastoral poetry to his less famous contemporaries.
III
Besides its wider influence on English verse, and the stimulus it gave to pastoral composition as a whole, the _Shepherd’s Calender_ called forth a series of direct imitations. Of these the majority are but of accidental and ephemeral interest and of inconspicuous merit; and it is probable that Spenser himself lived to see the end of this over-direct school of discipleship. Several examples appeared in Francis Davison’s famous miscellany known as the _Poetical Rhapsody_, the first edition of which, though it only appeared in 1602, contained the gleanings of the entire sixteenth century.[108] Of these imitations, four in number, the first, the work of the editor himself, is a very poor production. It is a love lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the _Calender_. The other three poems are ascribed, either in the _Rhapsody_ itself or in Davison’s manuscript list, to a certain A. W., who so far remains unidentified, if, indeed, the letters conceal any individuality and do not merely stand for ‘Anonymous Writer,’ as has been sometimes thought. The three eclogues at any rate bear evidence of coming from the same pen, and the following lines show that the writer was no incompetent imitator, and at the same time argue some genuine feeling:
Thou ‘ginst as erst forget thy former state, And range amid the busks thyself to feed: Fair fall thee, little flock! both rathe and late; Was never lover’s sheep that well did speed. Thou free, I bound; thou glad, I pine in pain; I strive to die, and thou to live full fain.
The first of these poems is a monologue ‘entitled Cuddy,’ modelled on the January eclogue. The second is a lament ‘made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney,’ in which the writer wonders at Colin’s silence, and which consequently must, at least, date from before the appearance of _Astrophel_ in 1595, and is probably some years earlier. It is in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom sings Cuddy’s lament in lyrical stanzas, thus recalling Spenser’s ‘November.’ These stanzas do not reveal any great metrical gift. The last poem is a fragment ‘concerning old age,’ which connects itself by its theme with the February eclogue, though the form is stanzaic.[109] Again we find mention of Cuddy, a name evidently assumed by the author, though whether he can be identified with the Cuddie of the _Calender_ it is impossible to say. Whoever he was, he shows more disposition than most of his fellow imitators to preserve Spenser’s archaisms.
But undoubtedly the greatest poet who was content to follow immediately in Spenser’s footsteps was Michael Drayton, who in 1593 published a volume entitled ‘Idea The Shepheards Garland, Fashioned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands Sacrifice to the nine Muses.’ This connexion between the number of the eclogues and the muses is purely fanciful; Rowland is Drayton’s pastoral name, and Idea, which re-appeared as the title of the 1594 volume of sonnets, is that of his poetic mistress.[110] It can hardly be said that the verse of these poems attains any very high order of merit, but the imitation of Spenser is evident throughout. In the first eclogue Rowland bewails, in the midst of spring, ‘the winter of his grief.’ In this and the corresponding monologue at the end he clearly follows Spenser’s arrangement and likewise adopts his minor key–
Fayre Philomel, night-musicke of the spring, Sweetly recordes her tunefull harmony, And with deepe sobbes, and dolefull sorrowing, Before fayre Cinthya actes her Tragedy.
In Eclogue II a ‘wise’ shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a somewhat gruesome picture of human fate–
And when the bell is readie to be tol’d To call the wormes to thine Anatomie, Remember then, my boy, what once I said to thee!
Even this, however, fails to shake the lover’s faith in the gentle passion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from Spenser:
Oh divine love, which so aloft canst raise, And lift the minde out of this earthly mire.
The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of Beta, is closely modelled on the ‘April,’ and abounds with such reminiscences as the following:
Make her a goodly Chapilet of azur’d Colombine, And wreath about her Coronet with sweetest Eglantine: Bedeck our Beta all with Lillies,
And the dayntie Daffadillies,
With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice, With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice.
Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators. In the fourth eclogue two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is Sidney. In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke. The seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly, in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the _Calender_, amid the frosts of winter.
These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the ‘Poems Lyric and Pastoral’ (_c._ 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth. This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work, and one song at least is in the author’s daintiest manner. He seldom surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines:
Through yonder vale as I did passe, Descending from the hill,
I met a smerking bony lasse;
They call her Daffadill:
Whose presence as along she went,
The prety flowers did greet,
As though their heads they downward bent With homage to her feete.
Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book–
Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style, Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle–
could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime:
It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution;
and his disciple is not to be outdone. Never was truer lover or sweeter singer–
Oenon never upon Ida hill
So oft hath cald on Alexanders name, As hath poore Rowland with an Angels quill Erected trophies of Ideas fame:
Yet that false shepheard, Oenon, fled from thee; I follow her that ever flies from me.
Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he, and small success befell him in his uncongenial task. He knew little and cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the pastoral tradition. He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others: the Spenserian and traditional garb fits him ill. His golden age is rather amorous than philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad of Dowsabel. The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard to the court of Faery. So again in the barren dispute of the seventh eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged god flits across his path–
That pretie Cupid, little god of love, Whose imped winges with speckled plumes been dight, Who striketh men below and Gods above, Roving at randon with his feathered flight, When lovely Venus sits and gives the ayme, And smiles to see her little Bantlings game.
If these eclogues formed Drayton’s only claim upon our attention as a pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him. He left other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at least thoroughly so in form and spirit. The _Muses Elizium_ did not appear till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in this place. It is, however, so important as illustrating the freer and more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his originality, in the work of Spenser.
The _Muses Elizium_ is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of pastoral work. Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness. The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are full of it, and so are the romances and the plays. To this lyrical tradition belong Breton’s songs, of which one has already been quoted; there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who did not contribute his quota. We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton’s _Shepherds’ Sirena_ containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the _Agincourt_ ballad:
Neare to the Silver Trent
Sirena dwelleth,
Shee to whom Nature lent
All that excelleth;
By which the Muses late
And the neate Graces,
Have for their greater state
Taken their places:
Twisting an Anadem
Wherewith to Crowne her,
As it belong’d to them
Most to renowne her.
On thy Bancke,
In a Rancke
Let thy Swanes sing her
And with their Musick
along let them bring her.
In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,
The winter here a Summer is,
No waste is made by time,
Nor doth the Autumne ever misse
The blossomes of the Prime;
The flower that July forth doth bring, In Aprill here is seene,
The Primrose, that puts on the Spring, In July decks each Greene,
a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the ‘Nymphals’ of the _Muses Elizium_. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate’s most imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom
Some said a God did her beget,
But much deceiv’d were they,
Her Father was a Rivelet,
Her Mother was a Fay.
Her Lineaments so fine that were
She from the Fayrie tooke,
Her Beauties and Complection cleere By nature from the Brooke.
There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of _Agincourt_:
‘Cloe, I scorne my Rime
Should observe feet or time,
Now I fall, then I clime,
What is’t I dare not?’
‘Give thy Invention wing,
And let her flert and fling,
Till downe the Rocks she ding,
For that I care not’;
the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests:
The gentle winds sally
Upon every Valley,
And many times dally
And wantonly sport,
About the fields tracing,
Each other in chasing,
And often imbracing,
In amorous sort.
There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response:
Sweet Muse, perswade our Phoebus to inspire Us for his Altars with his holiest fire, And let his glorious, ever-shining Rayes Give life and growth to our Elizian Bayes;
or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of bridal songs–
For our Tita is this day
Married to a noble Fay.
There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender breasts half veiled when Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads the decree:
To all th’ Elizian Nimphish Nation, Thus we make our Proclamation
Against Venus and her Sonne,
For the mischeefe they have done: After the next last of May,
The fixt and peremptory day,
If she or Cupid shall be found
Upon our Elizian ground,
Our Edict mere Rogues shall make them, And as such, who ere shall take them,
Them shall into prison put;
Cupids wings shall then be cut,
His Bow broken, and his Arrowes
Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes; And this Vagabond be sent,
Having had due punishment,
To mount Cytheron, which first fed him, Where his wanton Mother bred him,
And there, out of her protection, Dayly to receive correction.
Then her Pasport shall be made,
And to Cyprus Isle convayd,
And at Paphos, in her Shryne,
Where she hath beene held divine, For her offences found contrite,
There to live an Anchorite.
We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had generated since the days of Moschus.
How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or less exaggerated panegyrics–how is it that in spite of all this we still regard the _Shepherd’s Calender_ as serious literature; while with all its exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the _Muses’ Elizium_ remains a toy? It is not merely the prestige of the author’s name: it is not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation. We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not only has the _Shepherd’s Calender_ behind it a vast tradition, reverend if somewhat otiose–the devotion of men counts for something–but also that, however stiffly laced in an unsuitable garb, it sought to deal with matters of real import to man, or at any rate with what man has held as such. It treated questions of religious policy which touched the majority of men more nearly then than now; with moral problems calculated to interest the mind of an age still tinged with medievalism; with philosophical theories of human and divine love. In other words, the _Shepherd’s Calender_ lay in the main stream of literature, and reflected the mind of the age, while the _Muses’ Elizium_, in common with so much pastoral work, did not. These considerations open up an interesting field of speculation. Are we to suppose that there is indeed a line of demarcation between great art and little art wholly independent of that which divides good art from bad art? Are we to go further, and assume that these two lines of division intersect, so that a work may be akin to great art though it be not good art, while, however perfect a work of art may be, it may remain little art for some wholly non-aesthetic reason? But we digress.
IV
It will be convenient, in dealing with the considerable volume of English pastoral verse which has come down to us from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to divide it into two portions, according as it tends to attach itself to orthodox foreign tradition on the one hand, or to the more spontaneous native type on the other. To the former division belong in the main the more ambitious set pieces and eclogue-cycles, to the latter the lighter and more occasional verse, the pastoral ballads and the lyrics. The division is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, for the two traditions act and react on one another incessantly, and the types merge almost imperceptibly the one into the other; but that does not prevent the spirit that manifests itself in Drayton’s eclogues being essentially different from that which produced Breton’s songs. I shall not, however, try to draw any hard and fast line between the two, but shall rather deal first with those writers whose most important work inclines to the more formal tradition, and shall then endeavour to give some account of the lighter pastoral verse of the time.
After the appearance of the _Shepherd’s Calender_ some years elapsed before English poetry again ventured upon the domain of pastoral, at least in any serious composition. In 1589, however, appeared a small quarto volume, with the title: ‘An Eglogue. Gratulatorie. Entituled: To the right honorable, and renowmed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall. Done by George Peele. Maister of arts in Oxon.’ Like the ‘A. W.’ of the _Rhapsody_, Peele followed Spenser more closely than most of his fellow imitators in the use of dialect, but his eclogue on the not particularly glorious return of Essex has little interest. His importance as a pastoralist lies elsewhere.
The following year the poet of the _Hecatompathia_, Thomas Watson, a pastoralist of note according to the critics of his own age, but whose work in this line is chiefly Latin, published his ‘Ecloga in Obitum Honoratissimi Viri, Domini Francisci Walsinghami, Equitis aurati, Divae Elizabethae a secretis, & sanctioribus consiliis,’ entitled _Meliboeus_, and also in the same year a translation of the piece into English. The latter is considerably shorter than the original, but still of tedious length. The usual transition from the dirge to the paean is managed with more than the usual lack of effect. The eclogue contains a good deal beyond its immediate subject; for instance, a lament for Astrophel, a passage in praise of Spenser, and a panegyric on
Diana, matchless Queene of Arcadie–
all subjects hardly possible for a poet to escape, writing _more pastorali_ in 1590. Watson also left several other pastoral compositions in the learned tongue, which, from their eponymous hero, won for him the shepherd-name of Amyntas. Thus in 1585 he published a work in Latin hexameter verse with the title ‘Amyntas Thomae Watsoni Londinensis I. V. studiosi,’ divided into eleven ‘Querelae,’ which was ‘paraphrastically translated’ by Abraham Fraunce into English hexameters, and published under the title ‘The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis’ in 1587. This translation, ‘somewhat altered’ to serve as a sequel to an English hexametrical version of Tasso’s _Aminta_, was republished in ‘The Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch’ of 1591. Again in 1592 Watson produced another work entitled _Amintae Gaudia_, part of which was translated under the title _An Old-fashioned Love_, and published as by I. T. in 1594.[111]
Next in order–passing over Drayton, with whom we have been already sufficiently concerned–is a writer who, without the advantage of original genius or brilliant imagination, succeeded by mere charm of poetic style and love of natural beauty, in lifting his work above the barren level of contemporary pastoral verse. Richard Barnfield’s _Affectionate Shepherd_, imitated, as he frankly confesses, from Vergil’s _Alexis_, appeared in 1594. Appended to it was a poem similar in tone and spirit, entitled _The Shepherd’s Content_, containing a description of country life and scenery, together with a lamentation for Sidney, a hymn to love, a praise of the poets, and other similar matters. The easy if somewhat monotonous grace which pervades both these pieces is seen to better advantage in the delightful _Shepherd’s Ode_, which appeared in his _Cynthia_ of 1595, and begins:
Nights were short and days were long, Blossoms on the hawthorn hong,
Philomel, night-music’s king,
Told the coming of the spring;
or in the yet more perfect song:
As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a group of myrtles made,
Beasts did leap and birds did sing, Trees did grow and plants did spring,
Everything did banish moan,
Save the nightingale alone;
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean’d her breast against a thorn, And there sung the dolefull’st ditty,
That to hear it was great pity…. Ah, thought I, thou mourn’st in vain,
None takes pity on thy pain.
Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee; Ruthless beasts, they will not cheer thee; King Pandion he is dead,
All thy friends are lapp’d in lead[112]; All thy fellow birds do sing,
Careless of thy sorrowing;
Even so, poor bird, like thee,
None alive will pity me[113].
No particular interest attaches to the four eclogues included in Thomas Lodge’s _Fig for Momus_, published in 1595, but they serve to throw light on a kind of pastoral freemasonry that was springing up at this period. Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his complaint to Love in the _Shepherd’s Content_:
By thee great Collin lost his libertie, By thee sweet Astrophel forwent his joy, By thee Amyntas wept incessantly,
By thee good Rowland liv’d in great annoy.
Now we find Lodge dedicating his four eclogues respectively to Colin, Menalcus, Rowland, and Daniel. Who Menalcus was is uncertain; not, it would seem, a poet. The themes are serious, even weighty according to the estimation of the author, and befit the mood of the poet who first sought to acclimatize the classical satire[114]. These eclogues do not, however, testify to any high poetic gift, any more than do the couple in a lighter vein found in the _Phillis_ of 1593. Lodge was happier in the lyric verses