While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing;
that is to say, the Muses of Theocritus of Sicily. He even appends notes to show what lines he has especially copied. We meet always the familiar Greek characters, Daphnis, Strephon, Alexis, Lycidas, and Thyrsis. Like the pastorals of Spenser, they are purely and confessedly artificial; they are anachronisms, carelessly mixing modern and antique ideas and associations. When Theocritus wrote pastorals in ancient and sunny Sicily he wrote, as we have remarked, of what lay within the range of conceivable possibility. Pope relegates the pastoral to a fictitious golden age in a purely fictitious golden land.
No one nowadays is likely to set any high value upon such eclogues as Pope’s Pastorals. Even Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender is rather talked of than read. Sidney’s Arcadia has had its day. But it is otherwise with a nobler species of composition which arose out of pastorals, to wit, the pastoral elegy. Theocritus and his disciples, Bion and Moschus, all compose poetic laments for a lost shepherd, either an imaginary Daphnis or a real friend lately dead. To this original conception we owe certain English poems which we could not spare. They include the Lycidas of Milton, on the death of his friend King, the Adonais of Shelley, on the death of Keats, the Thyrsis of Matthew Arnold, on the death of Clough. The Daphnaida of Spenser was apparently the first of such elegiac pastorals. Another is his Astrophel, “on the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney.” Dryden, too, did not disdain to write a pastoral elegy on the death of a supposed Amyntas, in which he sings his dirge in the good old style of the Sicilians. A more refined, more distant and subtle development from the same original is Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Finally we may take leave of this rural style with brief mention of the fact that Tennyson’s Œnone is in essence a pastoral idyll, inspired by the second of Theocritus.
We may also turn again to literary criticism. It is a significant thing that, no sooner had Sir John Cheke studied Greek and become its first regular professor at Cambridge, than he forthwith published maxims on the avoidance of bombast and pedantry in style. He had been to the fountain heads of criticism, to the Greek of Aristotle and Longinus. From that day down to the days of Matthew Arnold, in “essays in criticism” Greek principles have everywhere been theoretically worshipped, however much they may have been violated in practice. Following on the revival of Greek learning came a rage to discuss the rationale of the poetic art, as well as to exemplify its various forms. In the Elizabethan age Puttenham wrote on the Art of English Poesie; Sidney composed a Defence of Poesie. Later on Dryden put forth a prose treatise Of Dramatic Poesie, and the Earl of Roscommon an Essay on Translated Verse. Dryden expressly declares that true criticism began with the Greeks in the Poetics of Aristotle. He says:
Such once were critics; such the happy few
Athens and Rome in better ages knew.
The mighty Stagirite first left the shore,
Spread all his sails, and durst the deep explore;
He steered securely, and discovered far,