In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect. Sâ de Miranda has been mentioned above. Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[[68]] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sâ de Miranda's, in the short measures more natural to the language than the terza rima and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro:
O pescador Sincero, que amansado
Tém o pégo de Prochyta co' o canto
Por as sonoras ondas compassado.
D'este seguindo o som, que póde tanto,
E misturando o antigo Mantuano,
Façamos novo estylo, novo espanto.
Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fashion passed from Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first to imitate the Arcadia was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as Ticknor styles it, entitled from the first words of the text Menina e moça. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of the story anticipating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of real characters, which, though their identity was concealed under anagrams and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the Arcadia. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.
The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who composed in Castilian dialect the famous Diana. 'Los siete libres de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor'--the Spanish form of Montemôr's name and that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages--appeared at Valencia, without date, but about 1560.[[69]] As in the case of its Italian and Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in love with the nymph Diana, of whose identity Lope de Vega claimed to be cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fashion. Sireno is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple, and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance of his passion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is interwoven with a multitude of episodes and incidental narratives, pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears, being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.
Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain graces of style which it possesses, the Diana held the field until the picaresque romance developed into a recognized genre, and exercised a very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance; Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Pérez, only got so far as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the work of Jerónimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a rifacimento of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming a sequel to Pérez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions parody by Fra Bartolomé Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin one of Gil Polo's portion at least.
Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the Galatea of Cervantes, imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to have suggested the Arcadia, written a few years later at the instigation of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: 'many of its shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,' Cervantes confesses of his romance, while Lope announces that 'the Arcadia is a true history.' Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese Primavera of Francisco Rodrígues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and 1614, and is pronounced by Ticknor to be 'among the best full-length pastoral romances extant.'
All these works resemble one another in their general features. The characteristics of the genre as found in Spain, in spite of a real feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an adherence to the circumstances of actual existence even closer than was the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole mise en scène consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fashionable pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced, and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious and enduring works.
VIII
In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is summed up in the work of one man--Clément Marot. It is he who forms the central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pléiade. While belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation of Sannazzaro's Salices and her lament on the death of her brother François I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her comédie of human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject. In his early work he continued the tradition of the Romance of the Rose; later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance. By nature an easy-going bon vivant, his only real affection appears to have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.
But, however fascinating Marot may be as an historical figure, he was in no sense a great poet. His chief merit in literature, apart from his often delicate epigrams, his élégant badinage and his graceful if at times facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the charm of naïve simplicity and genuine feeling. In his Éclogue au Roi he addresses Francis under the name of Pan, while in the Pastoureau chrestien he applies the same name to the Deity; yet in either case there is a justness of sentiment underlying the convention which saves the verse from degenerating into mere sycophancy or blasphemy. His chief claim to notice as a pastoral writer is his authorship of an eclogue on the death of Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis; a poem through which, more than any other, he influenced his greater English disciple, and thereby acquired the importance he possesses for our present inquiry.