ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL.
TASSO’S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE GOLDEN AGE.—GUARINI’S RETURN OF SPRING.—SHEPHERD’S VISION OF THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER.—SAD SHEPHERD OF BEN JONSON.
he best pastoral is often written when the author least intends it. A completer feeling of the country and of a shepherd’s life is given us in a single passage of the Jerusalem Delivered, where Erminia finds herself among a set of peaceful villagers, than in the whole Aminta—beautiful, too, as the latter is in many respects, and containing the divine ode on the Golden Age, the crown of all pastoral aspiration. That, indeed, carries everything, even truth itself, before it; saving the truth of man’s longing after a state of happiness compatible with his desires. The first line of it, the most beautiful of sighs, is familiar as a proverb in the lips of Italy, and of the lovers of Italy:—
O bella età de l’oro!
Non già perchè di latte
Sen corse il fiume, e stillò mele il bosco;
Non perchè i frutti loro
Dier da l’ aratro intatte
Le terre, e i serpi errar senz’ ira o tosco;
Non perchè nuvol fosco
Non spiegò allor suo velo,
Ma in primavera eterna
Ch’ ora s’ accende, e verna,
Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo,
Nè portò peregrino
O guerra o merce a gli altrui lidi il pino.
Ma sol perchè quel vano
Nome senza soggetto,
Quell’ idolo d’ errori, idol d’ inganno,
Quel che dal volgo insano
Onor poscia fù detto,
Che di nostra natura il feo tiranno,
Non mischiava il suo affanno
Fra le liete dolcezze
De l’ amoroso gregge;
Nè fu sua dura legge
Nota a quell’ alme in libertate avvezze:
Ma legge aurea e felice,
Che natura scolpì,—s’ ei piace, ei lice.
O lovely age of gold!
Not that the rivers roll’d
With milk, or that the woods wept honey-dew;
Not that the ready ground
Produced without a wound,
Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew;
Not that a cloudless blue
For ever was in sight,
Or that the heaven, which burns
And now is cold by turns,
Look’d out in glad and everlasting light;
No, nor that even the insolent ships from far
Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war.
But solely that that vain
And breath-invented pain,
That idol of mistake, that worshipp’d cheat,
That Honour—since so call’d
By vulgar minds appall’d,
Play’d not the tyrant with our nature yet.
It had not come to fret
The sweet and happy fold
Of gentle human-kind;
Nor did its hard law bind
Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold,
That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,
Which nature’s own hand wrote—What pleases, is permitted.
Guarini, who wrote his Pastor Fido in emulation of the Aminta, undertook to show that these regrets were immoral, and agreeably to an Italian fashion, made at once a grave rebuke and a literal rhyming parody of the original, in an ode beginning with the same words, and repeating most of them! His version of “What pleases, is permitted,” is “Take pleasure, if permitted!” as if Tasso did not know all about that side of the question, and was not prepared to be quite as considerate in his moral conduct and his discountenance of rakes and seducers as Guarini: whose poem, after all, incurred charges of licence and temptation, from which that of his prototype was free;—an old conventional story! All which Tasso did, was to put into the mouths of his shepherds, themselves an ideal people, a wish which is felt by the whole world—namely, that duty and inclination could be more reconciled to innocence than they are; and the world has shown that it agreed with his honest sighs, and not with the pick-thank commonplaces of his reprover; for it has treasured his beautiful ode in its memory, and forgotten its insulting echo.
Nevertheless, there are fine things in Guarini, and such as the world has consented to remember, though not of this all-affecting sort. One of these is the address to the woods, beginning—
Care selve beate,
E voi, solinghi e taciturni orrori,
Di riposo e di pace alberghi veri:—
an exordium, which somebody (was it Mrs. Katherine Phillips, the “matchless Orinda”?) has well translated:—
Dear happy groves, and you, the dark retreat
Of silent horror, rest’s eternal seat.