THE PASTORAL
The discovery and exploitation of Arcadia.
The Pastoral, whose influence touches even the Elizabethan novels not professedly Arcadian, had been fished up from sunken antiquity by the early scholars of the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning, to be able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they did their best to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a classical country. They used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun names of their own times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by them in the Golden Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The best time of all the world had a date for them, and they did their best to live up to its particular antiquity. But in using conventions so different from real life, in a time of hurry and stress, it was natural that they should be led into daydreams of a greater simplicity than their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too, that by refining character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its sweetest season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond all measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until, when the curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece and calls them 'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,' the niece hurriedly replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I beseech you; for should my uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy, and betake himself to the reading of these books, we should have him turn shepherd, and so wander through the woods and fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn poet, which they say is a catching and incurable disease.'
Shepherds' plaints.
The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet shepherdesses, it seems that for the benefit of a Renaissance public they must pour their sorrows out in verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner does one shepherd begin his song than another joins him and another, until there is a chorus of complaining lovers; the infection is so virulent that it leaps from man to man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a poem to his lass, it is great odds that she will cap it with another, and then they will keep it up between them like a shuttlecock. The disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no one to cross Muses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:—
'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease?
Ease.
And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain?
Vain.
Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove?
Prove.
Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone?
One.
Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love?
Love.
What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy?
Joy.
What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains?
Pains.
Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end?
End.'
These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which, of course, was not in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are hexameters. How delightfully they scan:—
'Wh¯at d˘o l˘ov | er¯s se¯ek | f¯or l¯ong | se¯ekin¯g | f¯or t˘o e˘n | j¯oy?
J¯oy.'
On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind in Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselves had used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of 'Phaleuciaks,' and then Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from saying something which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.' And they thought the night had passed quickly.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
An apology to Sidney.
This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?' but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the language of the Gods.'
The slow progress of Arcadian narrative.
The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian substitute for rain, was not the only drag on the narrative of the pastoral story-tellers. Serenity was considered essential, and so, while the story was being everlastingly shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it had also for every step it took forward to take another back in order to catch again the chosen atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result was 'a note of linked sweetness long drawn out,' a series of agitated standstills, and a narrative impossible to end. Cervantes' Galatea was never finished; the last books of Arcadia were written by another hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end to l'Astrée; and Montemor abandoned his Diana.
In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that is important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to understand the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to hide real people under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put ribboned crooks and silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends. At first it was the genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his Fiammetta; at the end it degenerated into mere privy gossip and books uninteresting without their keys; but in general it was simply a desire of flattering elaborate people into thinking themselves of simple heart. |The motive of the Pastoral.|The pastorals were like the paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find the ladies of a lively court playing innocent games under the trees, while, if we searched in the brushwood, we should find in the soft earth under the brambles the hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings of author and subjects were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when they sat before the portrait painter:—'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only by the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since the writer was able to put them in so very inexpensively.
Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie.
There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and Sidney were dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and sweeter than Watteau, an idea of the pastoral spirit. You can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses using paint. It would be impossible to suspect the same of one of Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man who was shocked as if by sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment of Virgil. There is in the Louvre (how many times have I been to see it) a picture called 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most inaccurately as to facts, but most precisely as to feeling, in his essay on the painter:[6]—'But above all, who shall celebrate in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription: Et Ego in Arcadia vixi! The eager curiosity of some, the expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys low where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospects speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!'
In those sentences Hazlitt, who found the written pastoral dull, shows us the very secret of its life. In trying to copy the classic country writing, it came to be an attempt to reconstruct the time that has always been past since the beginning of the world. Real shepherds never do and never did show fear and surprise and eager curiosity on their weather-beaten faces; but then in Arcadia is no rain. Sweet, sunny days, soft, peaceful nights, green grass, white sheep, and smooth-cheeked shepherds Grecian limbed; the whole is the convention of a dream. It was the dream of busy men in close touch with a life whose end was apt to come short and sharp between the lifting of a flagon and putting the lips to it. And in Sidney's dream especially, there is something of the true Renaissance worship of the ancient gods. Sidney's dream was of a pastoral life; yes, but to him other things in it were more important than its rusticity. For him, at least, it must be a life where the goatfoot god still moved in the green undergrowth, where Diana hunted the white fawns, while Silenus tippled in the valley, and Apollo looked serenely from the wooded hill.
Conventional and realistic art.
This was the same art as that of Malory, though not that of the chansons or the sagas. It is the art in which life is simplified into a convention, and human figures worked into a tapestry. The pastoral romances are duller than those of chivalry, partly, no doubt, because their conventions are not home-made but taken as strictly as possible from another civilisation, and partly because they are too long for their motives—the pattern is repeated too often. But they do not represent a dead or a dying art, but rather a stage in the infancy of an art that has blossomed in our own day, in some of the work of Théophile Gautier, for example; in Mr. Nevinson's Plea of Pan, in some of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Sidney's Arcadia is terribly unwieldy, but passage after passage in it breathes a fragrance different from anything in the literature of realism.
Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these two arts, the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other that shows us life, that one that, using symbols disentangled from ordinary existence, can legitimately fill books with things beautiful in themselves, and the other that reconciles us to ugliness by showing us some vital interest, some hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty in things as they generally are. The spirit of the one set statues of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the Grecian women, the spirit of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers. Both spirits have shown their right to be by the works of art whose inspiration they have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art of the one by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds, the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying 'Open Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we should be legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and enter the robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the Arcadian shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet about the hills, any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut called Cinderella for riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal is all we may ask of dreams. And the pastorals, in spite of their borrowed conventions, do hold an ideal, suffocated though it sometimes is under an impossible technique, and the weight of ornament which is so tempting to those who have but newly learned the secrets of its manufacture.
Poetic prose.
Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves. They have made short stories instead of labyrinthine narratives, and they have been able, as Sidney tried to do, to disclaim any competition with utilitarian homespun literature by the use of a poetic prose. In the prose of Sidney's Arcadia, imitated from that of Lyly, but a little less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between poetry and prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament perfected by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by the recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the prose of use.