Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep,
For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep,
Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep;[[9]]

lines in which we already take leave of the genuine love of the pastoral life, springing from an intimate knowledge of and delight in nature, and see world-weariness arraying itself in the sentimental garb of the imaginary swain.

Once again, five centuries later,[[10]] the spirit of Greece shone for one brief moment in a work of pastoral elegance that has survived the changing tastes of succeeding generations. The 'romance of Daphnis and Chloe is the last word of a world of sensuous enervation toying with the idea of vernal freshness and virginity. It is a genuine picture of the purity of awakening love, wrought with every delicacy of sentiment and expression, and yet in such manner as by its very naïveté and innocence to serve as a goad to satiated appetite. It has been suggested that the work should properly be styled the Lesbiaca, a name which recalls the Aethiopica and Babylonica, and reminds us that the author, though a student of Alexandrian literature, belonged to the school of the erotic romanciers and traditional bishops, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Of his life we know nothing, and even his name--Longus--has been called in question. The story, unlike those of most later pastoral romances, is of the simplest. The author, however, was no longer satisfied with the natural refinement of popular love poetry; the central characters are represented as foundlings nurtured by the shepherds of Lesbos, and are ultimately identified, on much the same conventional evidence as Ion and others had been before, as the children of certain rich and aristocratie families.[[11]] The interest of the story lies in the growth of their unconscious love, which constitutes the central theme of the work, though relieved here and there by wholly colourless adventure.

A Latin translation made the book popular after the introduction of printing, and the renaissance saw the French version by Amyot, a work of European reputation. This was translated into English under Elizabeth; an Italian translation followed in the seventeenth century,[[12]] and a Spanish is also extant. There is no doubt that it was widely read throughout the sixteenth and following centuries, but it exercised little influence on the development of pastoral literature. By the time it became generally known the main features of renaissance pastoral were already fixed, and in motive and treatment alike it was alien to the spirit that animated the fashionable masterpieces. The modern pastoral romance had already evolved itself from a blending of the eclogue with the mythological tale. The drama was developing on independent lines. Thus although, like the other romances of the late Greek school, it supplied many incidents and descriptions to be found in later works, it played no vital part in the history of pastoral, and left no mark either on the general form or on the spirit that animated the kind. Longus' romance finds its true descendant, as well as its closest imitation, in a work that achieved celebrity on the eve of the French revolution, that masterpiece of unreal and sentimental simplicity, Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie.

III

A faithful reproduction of the main conditions of actual life was the characteristic of Theocritus' poetry. It was subject to this ever-present limitation that his graceful fancy exercised its power of idealization. He took the singing match, the dirge, and the love-song or complaint as he found them among the shepherd-folk of Sicily, and gave them that objective setting which is as necessary to pastoral as to every other merely accidental form of poetry; for the true subjective lyric is independent of circumstances. The first of his great successors made the bucolic eclogue what, with trifling variation, it was to remain for eighteen centuries, a form based upon artificiality and convention. I have already pointed out that the literary conditions at Alexandria did not differ materially from those of Rome; it follows that the change must have been due to the character of Vergil himself. That intense love of beauty for its own sake which characterized the Greek mind had little hold over the Roman. Nor did the latter understand the charm of untaught simplicity. It is true that to the Roman poets of the Augustan period we owe the conception of the golden age, but it remained with them rather a philosophical mythus than the dream of an idyllic poet. To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more pith and moment. Although he followed Theocritus in his use of the several types of song and stamped them to all future ages in pastoral convention, though he may have begun with fairly close imitation of his model and only gradually diverged into a more independant style, he at no time showed himself content with the earlier poet's simplicity of motive.[[13]] The eclogue in which he followed Theocritus most closely, the eighth, is equally, perhaps, the most pleasing of the series. It combines the motives of the love-lament and incantation, and the closeness with which it follows while playing variations on its models is striking. One instance will suffice. Take the passage in the second Idyl thus rendered by Symonds:[[14]]

Hail, Hecatë, dread dame! to the end be thou my assistant,
Making my medicines work no less than the philtre of Circë,
Or Medea's charms, or yellow-haired Perimedë's.
Wheel of the magic spells, draw thou that man to my dwelling.

Corresponding to this we find the following passage in the Latin poem:

Song hath power to draw from heaven the wandering huntress,
Song was the witch's spell transformed the mates of Ulysses....
Home from the city to me, my song, lead home to me Daphnis.

Vergil was the first to begin the dissociation of pastoral from the conditions of actual life, and just as his shepherds cease to present the features and characters of the homely keepers of the flock, so his landscape becomes imaginary and undefined. This peculiarity has been noticed by Professor Herford in some very suggestive remarks prefixed to his edition of the Shepherd's Calender. 'The profiles of the Sicilian uplands,' he writes, 'waver uncertainly amid traits drawn from the Mantuan plain. In this confusion lay, perhaps, the germ of those debates between highland and lowland shepherds which reverberate through the later pastoral, and are still loud in Spenser.' The gulf that separated Vergil from his predecessor, in so far as their treatment of shepherd-life is concerned, may be measured by the manner in which they respectively deal with the supernatural. In the Greek Idyls we find the simple faith or superstition as it lived among the shepherd-folk; no Pan appears to sow dismay in the breasts of the maidens, nor do we find aught of the mystical worship that later gathered round him in the imaginary Arcadia. He is mentioned only as the rugged patron of herds and song, the wild indweller of the savage woods as he appeared to the minds of the simple swains, who hushed their midday piping fearful lest they should disturb the sleep of the god. It is true that Theocritus introduces mythological characters in the tale of Galatea, but it should be noticed that this merely forms the theme of a song or the subject of a poetical epistle to a friend. Moreover, it is open to more than one rationalistic interpretation. Symonds treats it as an allegory in harmony with the mythopoeic genius of Greek poetry. It is equally possible to regard the Cyclops as emblematic merely of the rough neatherd flouted by the more delicate shepherd-maiden--the contrast is of constant occurrence in later works--for, alike in one of his own fragments and in Moschus' lament, Bion is represented as courting this same Galatea after she has rid herself of the suit of Polyphemus. Vergil was content with no such simple mythology as this. He must needs shake Silenus from a drunken sleep and bid him tell of Chaos and old Time, of the infancy of the world and the birth of the gods. This mixture of obsolescent theology and Epicurean philosophy probably possessed little reality for Vergil himself, and would have conveyed no meaning whatever to the Sicilian shepherds. Its introduction stamps his eclogues with that unreality which has been the reproach of the pastoral from his day to ours. The didactic homily was one fresh convention introduced. Far more important was the tendency to make every form subserve some ulterior purpose of allegory and panegyric.[[15]] For the Roman its own beauty was no sufficient end of art. That the Aeneid was written for the glorification of Rome cannot be made a reproach to the poet; the greatness of the end lent dignity to the means. That the pastoral was forced to serve the menial part of a vehicle of sycophantic praise is less easily pardoned. In Vergil's hands a conversation between shepherds becomes an expression of gratitude to the emperor for the restitution of his villa, a lament for Daphnis is interwoven with an apotheosis of Julius Caesar, and in the complaint of the forsaken shepherd, whom Apollo and Pan seek in vain to comfort, we may trace the wounded vanity of his patron deserted by his mistress for the love of a soldier. The fourth eclogue was written after the peace of Brundisium, and describes the golden age to which Vergil looked forward as consequent upon the birth of a marvellous infant, perhaps some offspring of the marriages of Antonius and Octavianus, celebrated in solemnization of the treaty. The poem achieved considerable fame, which lasted as late as the time of Dryden, owing to the belief that it contained a prophecy of the birth of Christ drawn from the Sibylline books, and won for Vergil throughout the middle ages the title of prophet and magician. Whether this belief was well founded or not may be left to those whom it may interest to inquire; it is sufficient for our purpose to note that in the poem in question Vergil first introduced the convention of the golden age into pastoral verse.