In the early days of renascent humanism, the first to renew the pastoral tradition, broken for some ten centuries, was Francesco Petrarca. It is not without significance that the first modern eclogues were from the same pen as the sonnet 'Fontana di dolore, albergo d'ira,' expressive of the shame with which earnest sons of the Church contemplated the captivity of the holy father at Avignon; for thus on the very threshold of Arcadia we are met with those bitter denunciations of ecclesiastical corruption which strike so characteristic a note in the works of the satirical Mantuan, and seem so out of place in the songs of Spenser and Milton. In one eclogue the poet mourns over the ruin and desolation of Rome, as a mother deserted of her children; another is a dialogue between two shepherds, in which St. Peter, under the pastoral disguise of Pamphilus, upbraids the licentious Clement VI with the ignoble servitude in which he is content to abide; a third shows us Clement wantoning with the shameless mistress of a line of pontifical shepherds, a figure allegorical of the corruption of the Church[[25]]; in yet a fourth Petrarch laments his estrangement from his patron Giovanni Colonna, a cardinal in favour at the papal court, whom it would appear his outspoken censures had offended. Petrarch's was not the only voice that was raised urging the Pope to return from the 'Babylonian captivity,' but the protest had peculiar significance from the mouth of one who stood forth as the embodiment of the new age still struggling in the throes of birth. When 'the first Italian' accepted the laurel crown at the Capitol, he dreamed of Rome as once more the heart of the world, the city which should embody that early Italian idea of nationality, the ideal of the humanistic commonwealth. The course urged alike by Petrarch and by St. Catherine was in the end followed, but the years of exile were yet to bear their bitterest fruit of mortification and disgrace. In 1377 Gregory XI transferred the seat of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, with the resuit that the world was treated to the edifying spectacle of three prelates each claiming to be the vicar of Christ and sole father of the Church.
These ecclesiastical eclogues form the most important contribution made by Italy's greatest lyric poet to pastoral. Others, one in honour of Robert of Sicily, another recording the defeat of Pan by Articus on the field of Poitiers, follow already existing pastoral convention. Some few, again, of less importance in literary history, are of greater personal or poetic interest. In one we see Francesco and his brother Gherardo wandering in the realm of shepherds, and there exchanging their views concerning religious verse. A group of three, standing apart from the rest, connect themselves with the subject of the Canzoniere. The first describes the ravages of the plague at Avignon; the second mourns over the death of poetry in the person of Laura, who fell a victim on April 6, 1348; the third is a dirge sung by the shepherdesses over her grave. One, lastly, a neo-classic companion to Theocritus' tale of Galatea, recounts the poet's unrequited homage to Daphne of the Laurels, thus again suggesting the idealized source of Petrarch's inspiration. This poem is not only the gem of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.
The, eclogues, twelve in number, appear to have been mostly composed about the middle of the fourteenth century. In the days of Petrarch the art of Latin verse was yet far from the perfection it attained in those of Poliziano and Vida; it was a clumsy vehicle in comparison with the vulgar tongue, which he affected to despise while setting therein the standard for future ages. Nevertheless, Petrarch's Latin poems bear witness to the natural genius for composition and expression to which we owe the Canzoniere. The editio princeps of the pastorals appeared in the form of a beautifully printed folio at Cologne in 1473, ninety-nine years after the poet's death. They were entitled Eglogae[[26]] (i.e. aeglogae), by which, as Dr. Johnson remarked, Petrarch, finding no appropriate meaning in the form eclogae, 'meant to express the talk of goatherds, though it will only mean the talk of goats.'
No two men ever won for themselves more diverse literary reputations than Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio. The Latin eclogue is one of their few points of literary contact. The bucolic collections contain no less than sixteen such poems from the pen of the younger writer[[27]], which, though not devoid of merit as poetical exercises, show that as a metrist Boccaccio fell almost as far short of his friend in the learned as in the vulgar tongue. They were composed at various dates, mostly, it would appear, after 1360, though some are certainly earlier; and it would be difficult to say whether to him or to Petrarch belonged the honour of reviving the form, were it not that, both in the poems themselves and in his correspondance, he explicitly mentions Petrarch as his master in the kind[[28]]. In any case the dates of composition must cover a wide period, for the poems reflect varions phases of his life. 'Le Egloghe del Boccaccio,' says an Italian critic, 'rappresentano tutta la vita psicologica del poeta, dalle febbri d'amore alle febbri ascetiche.' The amorous eclogues, to which in later life Boccaccio attached little importance, are early; several are historical in subject and are probably of later date, though one may be as early as 1348; there are others of a religions nature which belong to the author's later years. The allusions in these poems are so obscure that it would in most cases be hopeless to seek to unravel the meaning had not the author left us a key in a letter to Martino da Signa, prior of the Augustinians. Many of the subjects are purely conventional, such as those of the early poems on the loves of the shepherds, the historical panegyrics and laments, and the satire on rich misers. The same may be said of a dispute on the respective merits of poetry and commerce, and of a poem in praise of poetry; although the former has an obvious relation to the author's own circumstances, and the latter appears to be inspired by genuine enthusiasm and love of art. The forces of confusion that have dogged the pastoral in all ages show themselves where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch's influence over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was later embodied by Spenser in his Hymns. One poem stands out from the rest somewhat after the manner of Petrarch's Daphne. In it Boccaccio tells us, under the thinnest veil of pastoral, how his daughter Violante, dead in childhood many years before, appeared to him bearing tidings of the land beyond the grave. The theme is the same as that of the almost contemporary Pearl; and in treating it Boccaccio achieves something of the sweetness and pathos of the English poem. One eclogue, finally, the Valle tenebrosa (Vallis Opaca), which appears to owe something to Dante's description of hell, is probably historical in its intention, but the gloss explains obscurum per obscurius, and we can only suppose that the author intended that the inner sense should remain a mystery.
When Boccaccio wrote, the eclogue had not yet degenerated into the literary convention it became in the following century; and, though he was no doubt tempted to the use of the form by Vergilian tradition and the example of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural inclination and no mere dictate of fashion. Even in these poems the humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love. His eclogues, however, never attained the same reputation as Petrarch's, and remained in manuscript till the appearance of Giunta's bucolic collection of 1504.
As humanism advanced and the golden age of the renaissance approached, Latin bucolic writers sprang up and multiplied. The fullest collection--that printed by Oporinus at Basel in March, 1546--contains the poems of thirty-eight authors, and even this makes no pretence of giving those of the middle ages. The collection, however, ranges from Calpurnius to Castalio (i.e. the French theologian Sébastien Châteillon), and includes the work of Petrarca, Boccaccio, Spagnuoli, Urceo, Pontano, Sannazzaro, Erasmus, Vida, and others. There is a strong family likeness in the pastoral verse of these authors, and the majority are devoid of individual interest. A few, however, merit separate notice.
It was in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the renaissance eclogue, abandoning its last claims to poetic inspiration, assumed its definitive form in the works of Battista Spagnuoli, more commonly known from the place of his birth by the name of Mantuanus. His eclogues, ten in number, were accepted by the sixteenth century as models of pastoral composition, inferior to those of Vergil alone, were indeed any inferiority allowed. Starting with the simple theme of love, the author proceeds to depict its excess in the love-lunes of the distraught Amyntas. Thence he passes to one of those satires on women in which the fifteenth century delighted, so bitter, that when Thomas Harvey came to translate it in 1656 he felt constrained, for his credit's sake, to add the note, 'What the author meant of all, the translater intends only of ill women[[29]].' There follows the old complaint of the niggardliness of rich patrons towards poor poets, and a satire on the luxury of city life. The remaining poems are ecclesiastical. One is in praise of the religious life, another describes the simple faith of the country folk and the joys of conversion; finally, we have a satire on the abuses of Rome, and a discussion on points of theological controversy. None of these subjects possess the least novelty; the author's merit, if merit it can be called, lies in having stamped them with their definitive form for the use of subsequent ages. Combined with this lack of originality, however, it is easy to trace a strong personal element in the bitterness of the satire that pervades many of the themes, the orthodox eclogue on conversion standing in curious contrast with that on ecclesiastical abuses.
It is not easy to account for Spagnuoli's popularity, but the curiously representative quality of his work was no doubt in part the cause. His poems were what, through the changing fashions of centuries, men had come to expect of bucolic verse. They crystallized into a standard mould whatever in pastoral, whether classical or renaissance, was most obviously and easily reducible to a type, and so attained the position of models beyond which it was needless to go. They were first printed in 1498, and went through a number of editions during the author's lifetime. As a young man--and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be attributed--Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order, but retired in 1515, the year before his death.
Three eclogues are extant from the pen of Pontano, a distinguished humanist at the court of Ferdinand I and his successors at Naples, and a Latin poet of considerable grace and feeling. His poems were first published by Aldus in 1505, two years after his death. In one characteristic composition he laments the loss of his wife, to whom he was deeply attached; another introduces under a pastoral name his greater disciple Sannazzaro[[30]].