(That is, in the midst of his poetry and his fame.)
Thy love is there advaunst to be another Grace.
But a mishap is on the heels of this vision, connected with our author’s professed attempts at pastoral; for so we have little doubt it is, though the commentators have given it another meaning. Sir Calidore, envying his eyes a sight which so “enriched” them, left the covert through which he looked, and went towards it:—
But soone as he appearèd to their view,
They vanisht all away, out of his sight,
And cleane were gone, which way he never knew,
All save the shepherd; who, for fell despight
Of that displeasure, broke his bag-pipe quight,
And made great mone for that unhappy turne;
But Calidore, though no less sorry wight
For that mishap, yet seeing him to mourne,
Drew neare, that he the truth of all by him might learne.
Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, is understood to be Sir Philip Sidney, who, in his Defence of Poesy, had objected to the style of the Shepherd’s Calendar; and as his word was taken for law in matters of taste, and the criticism was probably fatal to the poet’s continuance in that style (for at all events he dropped it), we have scarcely a doubt that Spenser alludes to the fact of his giving up pastoral writing in consequence. He breaks his pipe; not, it seems (like most authors, when they give way to critics), without much secret vexation—nay, “a fell despight,” as he calls it; candidly, if not a little maliciously, owning the whole extent of his feelings on the subject to his illustrious critic, who had since become his friend. It was a disadvantage which his pride could not feel itself easy with, till it had set it to rights. The following is the passage in Sidney’s essay:—
The Shepherd’s Kalander hath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language, I dare not allow; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazarro in Italian, did affect it.
He means that Theocritus and the others wrote in the language of their times, and that to be obsolete is not to be natural. Spenser, it is to be observed, expressly designates himself in this episode as Colin Clout, which is the title he assumed as the author of the Shepherd’s Calendar; a “country lassie” is his goddess in that work; and it seems far more likely that under this identity of appellation he should complain, in one poem, of the discouragement given to another, than simply shadow forth (as the commentators think) the circumstance of Sir Philip Sidney’s having drawn him from the country to the court. In what consisted the abrupt intervention of a proceeding like that? What particular vision did it dissipate? Or how could he pretend any right of soreness in his tone of complaint about it? And he is very sore indeed at the knight’s interruption, notwithstanding his courtesy. Tell me, says Calidore—
Tell me what mote these dainty damsels be,
Which here with thee do make their pleasant playes:
Right happy thou, that mayst them freely see;
But why, when I them saw, fled they away from me?
Not I so happy, answered then that swaine,
As thou unhappy, which them thence did chase,
Whom by no meanes thou canst recall againe.
He could not look back with comfort upon having been forced to give up his pastoral visions.
But to return to our subject. The all-including genius of Shakspeare has given the finest intimations of pastoral writing in some of the masques introduced in his plays, and in his plays themselves; if indeed As You Like It might not equally as well be called a pastoral play as a comedy; though, to be sure, the duke and his followers do not willingly take to the woods, with the exception of the “sad shepherd” Jacques; and this is a great drawback on the pleasures of the occasion, which ought to breathe as freely as the air and the wild roses. Rosalind, however, is a very bud of the pastoral ideal, peeping out of her forest jerkin. Again, in the Winter’s Tale, where the good housewife is recorded, who has “her face o’ fire” with attending to the guests, and “my sister,” who has the purchase of the eatables, “lays it on” (as her brother the clown says) in the article of rice, there is the truest pastoral of both kinds, the ideal and the homely:—