We are to fancy the Sicilian girls on a summer night (all the world is out of door there on summer nights) calling to Polyphemus up the mountain. They live at the foot of it—of Ætna. They have heard him stirring in the trees. The stir ceases. They know he is listening; and in the silence of the glen below, he hears them laughing at his attention. Such scenes take place all over the world, where there is any summer, Britain included. We doubt whether Virgil or Tasso would have ventured upon the word. But Ariosto would. Homer and Shakspeare would. So would Dante. So would Catullus, a very Greek man. And it would surely not have been avoided by the author of the Gentle Shepherd, whose perception of homely truth puts him on a par in this respect with the greatest truth poetical.
This love-story of Polyphemus is pastoral poetry in its highest passionate condition. Of pastoral, in the sense in which it is generally understood, a briefer or better specimen cannot be given than in the opening passages of our poet’s volume. You are in the circle of pastoral at once, and in one of its loveliest spots. You are in the open air under pine-trees by fountain-heads, in company with two born poets, goatherd and shepherd though they be; poets such as Burns and Allan Ramsay might have been, had they been born in Sicily.
A word, before we proceed, in respect to that interfusion of eloquent and therefore sometimes elegant expression which has been charged on one of the most natural of poets as an affectation, but which, as he treats it, is only in unison with the popular genius of the south. In Virgil it became a rhetorical mistake; an artificial flower stuck in the ground. In Theocritus it was the growth of the soil; myrtle and almond springing by the wayside.
Poetical expression in humble life is to be found all over the south. In the instances of Burns, Ramsay, and others, the north also has seen it. Indeed, it is not a little remarkable, that Scotland, which is more northern than England, and possesses not even a nightingale, has had more of it than its southern neighbour. What that is owing to, is a question; perhaps to the very restrictions of John Knox and his fellows, and Nature’s happy tendency to counteract them. Or it may have originated in the wild and uncertain habits of highlanders and borderers. Certainly, the Scotch have shown a more genial and impulsive spirit in their songs and dances than the English. We have nothing among us like the Highland Fling, or the reel of Tullochgorum, or the songs of Gaberlunzie Men, Jolly Beggars, and The gude man he cam’ hame at e’en. But extremes meet; and the Scotch, in their hardihood, their very poverty, and occasional triumphs over it in fits of excess, appear to have been driven by a jovial desperation into the vivacities inspired by the sunshine of the south. Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in this respect; for they are poorer; their land is in the English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling is far more common and more eloquent among them, than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, very like a southern people; and, if a doubt, alas! did not arise that misfortune itself was their inspirer by sharpening their sensibility, would give an almost laughable corroboration to their claims of a Milesian descent. Now, the Italian peasantry to this day, particularly the Tuscan, exhibit, as they always did, a like poetical fancy, but with more elegance; and so, we doubt not, did those of Greece and Sicily. The latter, in modern times, have been checked in their faculties by unfavourable government; but in the time of Theocritus, the subjects of the overflowingly rich cities of Syracuse and Agrigentum must have been as willing and able to pour out all they felt, as so many well-fed thrushes and blackbirds; and anybody at all acquainted with the less rich, but not ill-governed, Tuscan peasantry, knows well with how much eloquence, and even refinement, it is possible for people in humble life to express themselves, when the language is favourable, and circumstances not otherwise. Mr. Stewart Rose has given some amusing instances in his Letters from the North of Italy. Asking a Florentine servant if he understood some directions given him, the man said, “Yes, for he always spoke in relief” (“Che parlava sempre scolpito”). Nothing could be better expressed than this. Another time, his good-natured master, inquiring if he was comfortable on the coach-box, the servant answered that he was very well off; for “here,” said he, “one springs it” (“che quì si molleggia”). The verb was coined for the occasion from the noun molla, a spring. Another man being asked the way to a particular house, told him to go straight forwards to the end of the street, and it would “tumble on his head.” This is very Irish. An Italian acquaintance of Mr. Rose was passing through a street in Florence at serenade time, when he beheld a dog looking up at a female of his species in a balcony, and at the same time scratching his ribs. One of the Florentine populace, who happened to be passing, stopped, and cried out, “He is in love, and playing the guitar, serenading the fair one” (“È innamorato; suona la chitarra; fà la cucchiata alla bella”). A Roman laquais de place (but he is a more sophisticate authority) once asked the same writer, on seeing him look at a wild-flower in the fields, whether it was the signor’s “pleasure that he should cull it?” (“Commanda che lo carpa?”) For our poetical word “cull,” though its meaning is different, may represent the unvernacular elegance of carpa, pluck. The laquais de place, it seems, “talked like a cardinal.” We have ourselves, however, heard a coachman’s wife, who was a Roman, pour forth a stream of elegant language that astonished us.
A neighbour of ours, near Fiesole, a fine old Tuscan peasant, who was clipping a hedge, said to us one day, as we exchanged salutation with him, “I am trimming the bush’s beard” (“Fò la barba al bosco”). But a Florentine female servant, who had the child of an acquaintance in her arms, and who, like the generality of her countrywomen, was perfectly unaffected, carried the aristocratic refinement of her style higher, perhaps, than any of the persons mentioned. Some remarks being made respecting the countenances of her master’s children, she asked us whether the one in her arms did not form an exception; whether, in fact, we did not think that it had “a kind of plebeian look” (“un certo aspetto plebeo”).
So much for the ability of the humbler orders to speak with force and delicacy, when sensibility gives them the power of expression, and animal spirits the courage to use it.
PASSAGES FROM THE FIRST IDYLL OF THEOCRITUS.
In Theocritus’s opening poem, the time of day is a hot noon, and a shepherd and goatherd appear to have been piping under their respective trees, we suppose at a reasonable distance. The shepherd goes towards the goatherd, who seems to stop playing; and on approaching him commences the dialogue by observing, that there is something extremely pleasant in the whisper of the pine under which he is sitting, but not less so was the something he was playing just now on his pipe. He declares that he is the next best player after Pan himself; and that if Pan were to have a ram for his prize, the ewe would of necessity fall to the goatherd.
Sweet sings the rustling of your pine to-day
Over the fountain-heads; and no less sweet
Upon the pipe play you.
The Greek word for rustling, or rather whispering—psithurisma—is much admired. “Whispering” is hardly strong enough, and not so long drawn out. There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma. The goatherd returns the compliment by telling the shepherd that his singing during such hot weather (for we must always keep in mind the accessories implied by good poets) is sweeter than the flowing abundance of the waterfall out of the rock. The two verses in which this is expressed are a favourite quotation, on account of the imitative beauty of the second sentence. We know not whether they would equally please every critical ear, for “doctors,” even of music, “differ.” Much of the divine writing of Beethoven seems to have been as appalling at first to the orchestral world, as olives are to most palates; and there is a passage in Mozart which to this day is a choke-pear to the scientific, albeit they acknowledge that he intended it to be written as it stands. For our parts, we have great faith in the ultra-delights perceptible in the enormities of Beethoven, Mozart, and olives; and suspect there is more music in the very hissing and clatter in the sentence in Theocritus, to say nothing of its obvious rush and leaping, than has been quite perceived by every scholar who has praised it. It is a pity that all musical people do not read Greek; for they deserve to do so; which is what cannot be said of all scholars. Perhaps some of them would be glad to see the passage, even in English characters. We remember, before we knew any others, the delight we used to take in the Greek quotations, thus printed in the novels of Smollett and Fielding, and shall make no further apology for a like bit of typography. We shall first give the measure of the original verse in corresponding English hexameters. The English language does not take kindly to the measure. The hexameter is too salient and cantering for it. But once and away the anomaly may be tolerated, especially for illustration’s sake. The passage in English words may run thus:—