Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/368

346 PASTORAL ture to bring upon a pastoral stage the actual rustics of a modern country, using their own peasant dialect. That Spenser s attempt was very imperfectly carried out does not militate against the genuineness of the effort, which the very adoption of such names as Willie and Cuddie, instead of the customary Damon and Daphnis, is enough to prove. Having led up to this work, the influence of which was to be confined to England, we return to Sannazaro s Arcadia, which left its mark upon every literature in Europe. This remarkable romance, which was the type and the original of so many succeeding pastorals, is written in rich but not laborious periods of musical prose, into which are inserted at frequent intervals passages of verse, contests between shepherds on the " humile fistula di Coridone," or laments for the death of some beautiful virgin. The characters move in a world of supernatural and brilliant beings ; they commune without surprise with " i gloriosi spirti degli boschi," and reflect with singular completeness their author s longing for an innocent voluptuous existence, with no hell or heaven in the background. It was in Spain that the influence of the Arcadia made itself most rapidly felt outside Italy. Gil Vicente, who was also a Portuguese writer, had written Spanish religious pastorals early in the 16th century. But Garcilaso de la Vega is the founder of Spanish pastoral. His first eclogue, El dulee lamentar de los pastores, is considered one of the finest poems of its kind in ancient or in modern literature. He wrote little and died early, in 1536. Two Portuguese poets followed him, and composed pastorals in Spanish, Francisco de S& de Miranda, who imitated Theocritus, and the famous Jorge de Montemayor, whose Diana (1524) was founded on Sannazaro s Arcadia. Gaspar Gil Polo, after the death of Montemayor in 1561, completed his romance, and published in 1564 a Diana enamorada. It will be recollected that both these works are mentioned with respect, in their kind, by Cervantes. The author of Don Quixote himself published an admirable pastoral romance, Galatea, in 1584. The rise of the taste for picaresque literature in Spain towards the close of the 16th century was fatal to the writers of pastoral. In Portugal it can hardly be said that this form of literature has ever existed, although Camoens published idyls. In France there has always been so strong a tendency towards a graceful sort of bucolic literature that it is hard to decide what should and what should not be mentioned here. The charming pastourdles of the 1 3th century, with their knight on horseback and shepherdess by the road side, need not detain us further than to hint that when the influence of Italian pastoral began to be felt in France these earlier lyrics gave it a national inclination. We have mentioned the Eergerie of Remy Belleau, in which the art of Sannazaro seems to join hands with the simple sweetness of the mediaeval pastourelle. But there was nothing in France that could compare with the school of Spanish pastoral writers which we have just noticed. Even the typical French pastoral, the Astree of Honor d Urfe (1610), has almost more connexion with the knightly romances which Cervantes laughed at than with the pastorals which he praised. D Urf6 had been preceded by Nicolas de Montreux, whose Bergeries de Juliette are just worthy of mention. The famous Astree was the result of the study of Tasso s Aminta on the one hand and Montemayor s Diana on the other, with a strong flavouring of the romantic spirit of the Amadis. To remedy the pagan tendency of the Astree a priest, Camus de Pontcarre, wrote a series of Christian pastorals. Of the romances which followed in the wake of the Astree, and in which the pastoral element was gradually reduced to a minimum, a succinct but admirable account is given in Mr Saintsbury s Short History of French Literature, The main authors in this style were Mademoiselle de Scudery, La Calprenede, and Gomberville. Racon produced in 1625 a pastoral drama, Les Bergeries, founded on the Astree of D Urfe". In England the movement in favour of Theocritean simplicity which had been introduced by Spenser in the Shepherds Calendar was immediately defeated by the success of Sir Philip Sidney s Arcadia, a romance closely modelled on the masterpiece of Sannazaro. So far from attempting to sink to colloquial idiom, and adopt a realism in rustic dialect, the tenor of Sidney s narrative is even more grave and stately than it is conceivable that the con versation of the most serious nobles can have ever been. In these two remarkable books, then, we have two great contemporaries and friends, the leading men of letters of their generation, trying their earliest flights in the region of pastoral, and producing typical masterpieces in each of the two great branches of that species of poetry. Hence forward, in England, pastoral took one or other of these forms. It very shortly appeared, however, that the San- nazarean form was more suited to the temper of the age, even in England, than the Theocritean. In 1583 a great impetus was given to the former by Robert Greene, who was composing his Morando, and still more in 1584 by the publication of two pastoral dramas, the Gallathea of Lyly and the Arraignment of Paris of Peele. It is doubtful whether either of these writers knew anything about the Arcadia of Sidney, which was posthumously published, but Greene, at all events, became more and more imbued with the Italian spirit of pastoral. His Menaplion and his Never too Late are pure bucolic romances. While in the general form of his stories, how ever, he follows Sidney, the verse which he introduces is often, especially in the Menaplion, extremely rustic and colloquial. In 1589 Lodge appended some eclogues to his Scilla s Metamorphosis, but in his Rosalynde (1590) he made a much more important contribution to English literature in general, and to Arcadian poetry in particular. This beautiful and fantastic book is modelled more exactly upon the masterpiece of Sannazaro than any other in our language. The other works of Lodge scarcely come under the head of pastoral, although his Phillis in 1593 included some pastoral sonnets, and his Margarite of America (1596) is modelled in form upon the Arcadia. The Siooe Idillia of 1588, paraphrases of Theocritus, are anonymous, but conjecture has attributed them to Sir Edward Dyer. In 1598 Bartholomew Young published an English version of the Diana of Montemayor. In 1585 Watson published his collection of Latin elegiacal eclogues, entitled Amyntas, which was translated into English by Abraham Fraunce in 1587. Watson is also the author of two frigid pastorals, Meliboeus (1590) and Amyntse Gaudia (1592). John Dickenson printed at a date unstated, but probably not later than 1592, a " pas sionate eclogue " called The Shepherd s Complaint, which begins with a harsh burst of hexameters, but which soon settles down into a harmonious prose story, with lyrical interludes. In 1594 the same writer published the romance of Arisbas. Drayton is the next pastoral poet in date of publication. His Idea : Shepherd s Garland bears the date 1593, but was probably written much earlier. In 1595 the same poet produced an Endimion and I hwbe, which was the least happy of his works. He then turned his fluent pen to the other branches of poetic literature; but after more than thirty years, at the very close of his life, he returned to this early love, and published in 1627 two pastorals, The Quest of Cynthia and The Shepherd s Sirena. The general character of all these pieces is rich, but vague and unimpassioned. The Queen s Arcadia of Daniel must be allowed to lie open to the same