By every soft and touching art that wins a maiden’s love.[[1816]]
There is here no straining after the ideal. Like Titian’s beauties, these shepherdesses are all creatures of this earth, filled with robust health, dark-eyed, warm, impassioned, and somewhat deficient in reserve. They understand well how to act their part in a dialogue. For every bolt shot at them they can return another as keen. Each bower and bosky bourne seems redolent of their smiles; their laughter awakens the echoes; their ruddy lips and pearly teeth hang like a vision over every bubbling spring and love-hiding thicket which they were wont to frequent. Hence the charm of Theocritus. And a still stronger charm perhaps would have belonged to the pages of him who should have painted the shepherd’s life of a remoter age,[[1817]] when none were above such an occupation, which therefore united at once all the dignity of lofty independence with the careless freedom of manners and unapprehensive enjoyment in which consists the secret source of all the pleasure which rustic pictures afford. Most of his creations, though not all, are in this respect wanting. Ideas of penury[[1818]] slip in, and, in the midst of rich poetry, check the developement of pleasurable feelings. For the musical swains, though apparently ambitious of nought but the reputation of song, permit us to discover, that they are but hirelings tending flocks not their own. The contrast between persons of this class and those who are owners of the sheep they tend, is forcibly pointed out in the sacred language of Christ: “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling and not the shepherd and whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep and fleeth, and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd and know my sheep and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me even so know I the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”[[1819]] The same affectionate tenderness is attributed to shepherds in the prophetic writings: “he shall feed his flocks like a shepherd, he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.”[[1820]]
In the matter of virtues and vices, the shepherds of antiquity were very much, no doubt, like other men. Their habits were such as grew naturally out of their position. Towards whatever their feelings led them they proceeded vehemently, and with that singleness of purpose which belongs to men of simple and decided character.[[1821]] They were too commonly creatures of mere impulse. From the peculiar form of their communion with nature, which, like the masses of Egyptian architecture, was continued and monotonous, they acquired a peculiarity of mental temperament, warm, as it were, in parts, and cold in parts. Every circumstance around them tended to rouse, pique, and inflame the passion of desire and its concomitants; the pairing of their flocks, of the birds, of the very wild beasts whose courage or ferocity they dreaded; their own leisure combined with the excess of health, the influence of climate, the solicitations of opportunity, impelled them into excess; and, accordingly, their morals in this respect sank to a low standard, and rendered them any thing but models of the golden age. The intellect of course was comparatively little cultivated; and there being no other check upon the feelings, suicides, murders of jealousy, and other evidences of ill-regulated passion would often occur.[[1822]]
But, in proportion as we pierce further back into antiquity, these tragical incidents become fewer: not merely because our knowledge of those ages is more scanty, but that in ruder times morality is comparatively lax, and men’s taste less fastidious. The rigid laws of marriage were then little observed. Women passed from husband to husband without losing character or caste; and when they produced illegitimate offspring attributed the paternity to some god, and scarcely considered the circumstance a misfortune. Half the princes of the Homeric age were illegitimate; for this is what is always meant by saying they were descended from the gods. Æneas was the son of some young woman whom Anchises met on the mountains, where he pastured his father’s flocks and pretended to have been loved by Aphrodite.[[1823]] Persons so circumstanced were, doubtless, capable of much romance. Nymphs and goddesses peopled their imagination, and their imagination let loose its brood upon the woods. Poets afterwards, able to infuse a soul into these rustic traditions, gave a local habitation and a name to every beautiful legend they could collect. Hence that sunny picture, the interview of Aphrodite and Anchises amid the lofty recesses, the grassy slopes, the sparkling leaping brooks, and old umbrageous forests of Mount Ida. Already, however, the force of dress was known, which Montaigne afterwards celebrated; for the Homeric bard, about to record an interview between the goddess and her shepherd-lover, instead of supposing her to have been
“When unadorned, adorned the most,”
describes all the arts of a luxurious toilette.
The picture, however, of pastoral life which he suggests rather than describes, is worked out with strokes of great simplicity. All the other herdsmen disperse in the execution of their several duties, leaving Anchises alone in the cattle-sheds,[[1824]] spacious in dimensions, and tastefully erected, where he amuses his solitary leisure with the music of the cithara. While thus engaged he beholds the approach of the goddess,[[1825]] and is at once struck with her beauty and the splendour of her raiment. At the unearthly vision his love is kindled; but the poet, skilled in the mysteries of the heart, chastens his passion by overmastering feelings of reverence, such as necessarily belong to unsophisticated youth. Anchises constitutes, indeed, the beau idéal of an heroic shepherd, simple, high-minded, ingenuous, venturous and fearless in contests with man or beast, but in his intercourse with woman gentle, reverent,
“And of his port as meek as is a maid.”
In fact, the gallant knights of romance seem rather to have been modelled after the heroic warriors of Greece, than from any realities supplied by the chivalrous ages. The author of the Hymn is careful in describing the shepherd’s couch, to insinuate with how great strength and courage he was endowed. He reclines, we are told, on skins of bears and lions slain by his own hand, though over these there were cast, for show, garments of the softest texture.[[1826]]
Throughout this work it has been seen how the influence of climate and position concurred in the formation of the Greek character. We may ourselves put the doctrine to the proof by observing the effect upon our minds of those reflections of landscapes which appear in language; rude Boreal scenes exciting the spirit of contention and energy; while the soft valleys, groves, and odoriferous gardens of the South produce a calm upon our thoughts favourable to the more benevolent emotions. Hellenic shepherds, therefore, no other causes preventing, may upon the whole be supposed to have been humane.