Festegiam con tutto il core;
Biastemate hor meco Amore!
In the second act Procri, having recovered from her fright, is bent on avenging herself for the deceit practised by Cefalo, upon whose supposed love for Aurora she throws the blame in the matter. She seeks the grove of Diana, where she is enrolled among the followers of the goddess. Cefalo, who has followed her flight, rejoins her in the wood, and there renews his prayers. She refuses to recognize him, denies being his wife, and is about to renew her flight, when an old shepherd, attracted by Cefalo's lamentation, stays her and forces her to hear her husband's pleading. Other shepherds appear on the scene, and the act ends with an eclogue. In the next we find her reconciled to Cefalo, to whom she gives the wind-swift dog and the unerring spear which she had received as a nymph of Diana. Cefalo at once sets the hound upon the traces of a boar, and goes off in pursuit, while his wife returns home. He shortly reappears, having lost boar and hound alike, and, tired with the chase, falls asleep. Meanwhile a faun, finding Procri alone, tells her that he had seen Cefalo meeting with his love Aurora in the wood--a piece of news in return for which he seeks her love. She, however, resolves to go and surprise the supposed lovers, and setting fire to the wood, herself to perish with them in the flames. On Cefalo's return he is met with bitter reproaches, and the act ends with a chorus of fauns and satyrs. The fourth contains the catastrophe. Procri hides in the wood in hope of surprising her husband with his paramour. Cefalo enters ready for the chase, and, seeing what he takes to be a wild beast among bushes, throws the fatal spear, which pierces Procri's breast. A reconciliation precedes her death, and the close of the act is rendered effective by the successive summoning of the Muses and nymphs in some graceful stanzas. With a little polishing, such as Poliziano's bacchanalian chorus received in revision, the scene would not be unworthy of the time and place of its production.
Oimè sorelle, o Galatea, presto!
Donate al cervo ormai un poco pace;
Soccorrete al pianger quel caso mesto.
Oimè sorelle, Procri morta giace,
L' alma spirata, e il ciel guardando tace.
At Cefalo's desire Calliope summons her sister Muses, Phillis the nymphs, after which all join in a choral ode calling upon the divinities of mountain, wood, and stream to join in a universal lament:
Weep, spirits of the woods and of the hills,
Weep, each pure nymph beside her fountain-head,
And weep, ye mountains, in a thousand rills,
For the fair child who here below lies dead:
Mourn, all ye gods, the last of human ills,
Your sacred foreheads all ungarlanded.
Here the traditional story of Cephalus and Procris, as founded on the rather inferior version in the seventh book of the Metamorphoses, ends. There remains, however, a fifth act, in which Diana appears, raises Procri, and restores her to her husband.
The play, composed for the most part in octaves with choruses in terza rima, is, from the dramatic point of view, open to obvious and fatal objections. The preposterous dea ex machina of the last act; the inconsequence of motive and inconsistency of character, partly, it is true, inherent in the original story, but by no means made less obvious by the dramatist; the insufficiency of the action to fill the necessary space, and the inability of the author to make the most of his materials, are all alike patent. On the other hand, we have already noticed a certain theatrical ability displayed in the writing of the first act, and we may further attribute the alteration by which Procri is represented as jealous of Cefalo's original lover, Aurora, instead of the wholly imaginary Aura, as in Ovid, to a desire for dramatic unity of motive.
The extent to which either the Orfeo or Cefalo can be regarded as pastoral will now be clear, and it must be confessed that they do not carry us very far. The two fifteenth-century plays constitute a distinct species which has attained to a high degree of differentiation if not of dramatic evolution, and critics who would see in them the origin of the later pastoral drama have to explain the strange phenomenon of the species lying dormant for nearly three-quarters of a century, and then suddenly developing into an equally individualized but very dissimilar form[[164]]. It should, moreover, be borne in mind that contemporary critics never regarded the Arcadian pastoral as in any way connected with the mythological drama, and that the writers of pastoral themselves claimed no kinship with Poliziano or Correggio, but always ranked themselves as the followers of Beccari alone in the line of dramatic development. On the other hand, there can be no reasonable doubt that such performances went to accustom spectators to that mixture of mythology and idealism which forms the atmosphere, so to speak, of the Aminta and the Pastor fido. This must be my excuse for lingering over these early works.
II
When dealing with the Italian eclogue we saw how, at a certain point, it began to assume a distinctly dramatic character, and in so doing took the first step towards the possible evolution of a real pastoral drama. It will be my task in the ensuing pages to follow up this clue, and to show how the pastoral drama arose through a process of natural development from the recited eclogue.