§ 4.—On the Pastorals.
There were good reasons for Court and country being associated ideas, if only in contrast. Thus Touchstone states, when drolling with Colin, as to a Pastoral employment:—“Truly, shepherd in respect of itself it is a good life; but in respect it is not in the Court, it is tedious.” The large proportion of pastoral songs and poems in Choyce Drollery is one other noticeable characteristic. Even as Utopian schemes, with dreams of an unrealized Republic where laws may be equally administered, and cultivation given to all highest arts or sciences, are found to be most popular in times of discontent and tyranny, when no encouragement for hope appears in what the acting government is doing; even so, amid luxurious times, with artificial tastes predominant, there is always a tendency to dream of pastoral simplicity, and to sing or paint the joys of rural life. In the voluptuous languor of Miladi’s own boudoir, amid scented fumes of pastiles and flowers, hung round with curtains brought from Eastern palaces, Watteau, Greuze, Boucher, and Bachelier were employed to paint delicious panels of bare-feeted shepherdesses, herding their flocks with ribbon-knotted crooks and bursting bodices; while goatherd-swains, in satin breeches and rosetted pumps, languish at their side, and tell of tender passion through a rustic pipe. The contrast of a wimpling brook, birds twittering on the spray, and daintiest hint of hay-forks or of reaping-hooks, enhanced with piquancy, no doubt, the every-day delights of fashionable wantonness. And as it was in such later times with courtiers of La belle France surrounding Louis XV., so in the reign of either Charles of England—the Revolution Furies crept nearer unperceived.
Recurrence to Pastorals in Choyce Drollery is simply in accordance with a natural tendency of baffled Cavaliers, to look back again to all that had distinguished the earlier days of their dead monarch, before Puritanism had become rampant. Even Milton, in his youthful “Lycidas,” 1637, showed love for such Idyllic transformation of actual life into a Pastoral Eclogue. (A bitter spring of hatred against the Church was even then allowed to pollute the clear rill of Helicon: in him thereafter that Marah never turned to sweetness.) Some of these Pastorals remain undiscovered elsewhere. But there can be no mistaking the impression left upon them by the opening years of the seventeenth, if not more truly the close of the sixteenth, century. Dull, plodding critics have sneered at Pastorals, and wielded their sledge-hammers against the Dresden-china Shepherdesses, as though they struck down Dagon from his pedestal. What then? Are we forbidden to enjoy, because their taste is not consulted?——
“Fools from their folly ’tis hopeless to stay!
Mules will be mules, by the law of their mulishness;
Then be advised, and leave fools to their foolishness,
What from an ass can be got but a bray?”
Always will there be some smiling virtuosi, here or elsewhere, who can prize the unreal toys, and thank us for retrieving from dusty oblivion a few more of these early Pastorals. When too discordantly the factions jar around us, and denounce every one of moderate opinions or quiet habits, because he is unwilling to become enslaved as a partisan, and fight under the banner that he deems disgraced by falsehood and intolerance, despite its ostentatious blazon of “Liberation” or “Equality,” it is not easy, even for such as “the melancholy Cowley,” to escape into his solitude without a slanderous mockery from those who hunger for division of the spoil. Recluse philosophers of science or of literature, men like Sir Thomas Browne, pursue their labour unremittingly, and keep apart from politics; but even for this abstinence harsh measure is dealt to them by contemporaries and posterity whom they labour to enrich. It is well, no doubt, that we should be convinced as to which side the truth is on, and fight for that unto the death. Woe to the recreant who shrinks from hazarding everything in life, and life itself, defending what he holds to be the Right. Yet there are times when, as in 1656, the fight has gone against our cause, and no further gain seems promised by waging single-handedly a warfare against the triumphant multitude. Patience, my child, and wait the inevitable turn of the already quivering balance!—such is Wisdom’s counsel. Butler knew the truth of Cavalier loyalty:—
“For though out-numbered, overthrown,
And by the fate of war run down,