CHAPTER VII

ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL.

TASSO’S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE GOLDEN AGE.--GUARINI’S RETURN OF SPRING.--SHEPHERD’S VISION OF THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER.--SAD SHEPHERD OF BEN JONSON.

The best pastoral is often written when the author least intends it. A completer feeling of the country and of a shepherd’s life is given us in a single passage of the _Jerusalem Delivered_, where Erminia finds herself among a set of peaceful villagers, than in the whole _Aminta_--beautiful, too, as the latter is in many respects, and containing the divine ode on the Golden Age, the crown of all pastoral aspiration. That, indeed, carries everything, even truth itself, before it; saving the truth of man’s longing after a state of happiness compatible with his desires. The first line of it, the most beautiful of sighs, is familiar as a proverb in the lips of Italy, and of the lovers of Italy:--

O bella età de l’oro! Non già perchè di latte Sen corse il fiume, e stillò mele il bosco; Non perchè i frutti loro Dier da l’ aratro intatte Le terre, e i serpi errar senz’ ira o tosco; Non perchè nuvol fosco Non spiegò allor suo velo, Ma in primavera eterna Ch’ ora s’ accende, e verna, Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo, Nè portò peregrino O guerra o merce a gli altrui lidi il pino.

Ma sol perchè quel vano Nome senza soggetto, Quell’ idolo d’ errori, idol d’ inganno, Quel che dal volgo insano Onor poscia fù detto, Che di nostra natura il feo tiranno, Non mischiava il suo affanno Fra le liete dolcezze De l’ amoroso gregge; Nè fu sua dura legge Nota a quell’ alme in libertate avvezze: Ma legge aurea e felice, Che natura scolpì,--s’ ei piace, ei lice.

O lovely age of gold! Not that the rivers roll’d With milk, or that the woods wept honey-dew; Not that the ready ground Produced without a wound, Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew; Not that a cloudless blue For ever was in sight, Or that the heaven, which burns And now is cold by turns, Look’d out in glad and everlasting light; No, nor that even the insolent ships from far Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war.

But solely that that vain And breath-invented pain, That idol of mistake, that worshipp’d cheat, That Honour--since so call’d By vulgar minds appall’d, Play’d not the tyrant with our nature yet. It had not come to fret The sweet and happy fold Of gentle human-kind; Nor did its hard law bind Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold, That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, Which nature’s own hand wrote--What pleases, is permitted.

Guarini, who wrote his _Pastor Fido_ in emulation of the _Aminta_, undertook to show that these regrets were immoral, and agreeably to an Italian fashion, made at once a grave rebuke and a literal rhyming parody of the original, in an ode beginning with the same words, and repeating most of them! His version of “What pleases, is permitted,” is “Take pleasure, if permitted!” as if Tasso did not know all about that side of the question, and was not prepared to be quite as considerate in his moral conduct and his discountenance of rakes and seducers as Guarini: whose poem, after all, incurred charges of licence and temptation, from which that of his prototype was free;--an old conventional story! All which Tasso did, was to put into the mouths of his shepherds, themselves an ideal people, a wish which is felt by the whole world--namely, that duty and inclination could be more reconciled to innocence than they are; and the world has shown that it agreed with his honest sighs, and not with the pick-thank commonplaces of his reprover; for it has treasured his beautiful ode in its memory, and forgotten its insulting echo.

Nevertheless, there are fine things in Guarini, and such as the world has consented to remember, though not of this all-affecting sort. One of these is the address to the woods, beginning--

Care selve beate, E voi, solinghi e taciturni orrori, Di riposo e di pace alberghi veri:--

an exordium, which somebody (was it Mrs. Katherine Phillips, the “matchless Orinda”?) has well translated:--

Dear happy groves, and you, the dark retreat Of silent horror, rest’s eternal seat.

We are sorry we cannot recollect any more. It expresses the wish, which so many have felt, to live in retirement, and be devoted to the beauties of nature. Another passage, more generally known, turns also upon a very general feeling of regret--that of seeing spring-time reappear, unaccompanied with the joys we have lost. Guarini was safer in following his original into these sincere corners of the heart, than when he attempted to refute him with a boy’s copy-book. The passage is very beautiful, and no less popular:--

O Primavera, gioventù de l’ anno, Bella madre de’ fiori, D’ erbe novelle e di novelli amori, Tu torni ben; ma teco Non tornano i sereni E fortunati di de le mie gioje: Tu torni ben, tu torni, Ma teco altro non torna Che del perduto mio caro tesoro La rimembranza misera e dolente: Tu quella sei, tu quella, Ch’ era pur dianzi si vezzosa e bella; Ma non son io già quel ch’un tempo fui, Sì caro a gli occhi altrui. _Pastor Fido_, atto iii. sc. i.

O Spring, thou youthful beauty of the year, Mother of flowers, bringer of warbling quires, Of all sweet new green things and new desires, Thou, Spring, returnest; but, alas! with thee No more return to me The calm and happy days these eyes were used to see. Thou, thou returnest, thou, But with thee returns now Nought else but dread remembrance of the pleasure I took in my lost treasure. Thou still, thou still, art the same blithe, sweet thing Thou ever wast, O Spring; But I, in whose weak orbs these tears arise, Am what I was no more, dear to another’s eyes.

The repetitions in this beautiful lament,

Tu torni ben, tu torni, &c.,

are particularly affecting. Perhaps the tone of them was caught from Ariosto:--

Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso: Quel ch’era Orlando, è morto, ed è sotterra. _Furioso_, canto xxiii. st. 128.

No more, no more am I what I appear: He that Orlando was, is dead and gone.

It is no critical violence at any time to pass from the Italian schools of poetry to those of our own country. They have always been closely connected, at least on the side of England, for the others knew little of their Northern admirers--men in whom Ariosto and Tasso would have delighted. Our language, till of late years, was not so widely spread as the Italian.

Our earliest pastoral poet of any name is Spenser; and a great name he is, though he was not a great pastoral poet. He was deeply intimate both with Greek and Italian pastoral; but in admiring Theocritus, and hoping to rival his natural language, he unwisely attempted to engraft the sweet fruit of the south on the rudest crab-apple of northern rusticity. Hence, in his only pastoral professing to be such, entitled the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, he has almost entirely failed. There are some touching lines in the story of the _Fox and Kid_, and a beautiful paraphrase of that of _Cupid and the Fowler_, from Bion; but in truth, with all his love of the woods and fields, for which he had a poet’s passion, and never could be without, Spenser was not qualified to excel as a purely pastoral writer. He was too learned for it, too full of the writers before him, and could not dispense with their chivalry and mythology. His words were Greek rather than English; or if English, they were the English of a former time. When Venus and the Graces were not there, he saw enchantresses and knights-errant. He always had visions, as Milton had, either of Jove or Proserpine, or of

_Faery damsels met in forests wide_ By knights of Logres and of Lyones, Làncelot, or Pèlleas, or Pellenòre.

But this elevated him to the high ideal of the subject; and no man could have written so fine a pastoral as he, of the classical or romantic sort, had he set his luxuriant wits to it, instead of attempting to get up an uncouth dance with the “clouted shoon” of Hobbinol and Davie. He could have beaten Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and all. Under picturesque influences, he never failed to add beauty to beauty. In the original of the passage we have alluded to, which he imitated from Bion, (the story of _Cupid and the Fowler_,) Bion merely makes the young fowler take Cupid in the trees for a bird, and endeavour to ensnare him; ending with a pretty admonition, from an old master of the craft, not to persevere in his attempt, seeing that the bird in question was a very dangerous bird, and would come to him soon enough by-and-by of his own accord. In Spenser, Cupid has wings coloured like a peacock’s train; and after flashing out beautifully from the bushes to a tree, the little god leaps from bough to bough, and playfully catches the stones thrown at him in his hand. All the introductory details, too, which are full of truth, are Spenser’s:--

At length within the yvie todde (There shrowded was the little god) I heard a busie bustling; I bent my bolt against the bush, _Listning if anie thing did rush_, But then heard no more rustling. Tho, peeping close into the thicke, Might see the moving of some quicke, Whose shape appearèd not; But were it faerie, feend, or snake, My courage yearn’d it to awake, And manfully thereat shotte: _With that sprang forth a naked swayne, With spotted winges like peacock’s trayne, And, laughing, lope to a tree; His gylden quiver at his back; And silver bowe, which was but slacke, Which lightly he bent at me_: That seeing, I leveld againe, And shot at him with might and mayne, As thick as it had hayled: So long I shott, that all was spent; The pumie-stones I hastily hent, And threw; but nought avayled: He was so nimble and so wight, _From bough to bough he leppèd light, And oft the pumies latchèd_. --_Shepherd’s Calendar_, March, v. 67.

_Latched_, is _caught_; and _pumies_, and _pumie-stones_, are _pumice_-stones, a very light mineral. The fowler is considerate, and would not break the bird’s head. This passage is one of the least obsolete in its style of all the _Shepherd’s Calendar_; yet what a pity to see it deformed with words requiring explanation, such as _latched_ for _caught_, _tho_ for _then_, _lope_ for _leaped_, &c. With the like needless perversity, forgetful of his elevated calling, Spenser, in his pastoral character, delights to designate himself as “Colin Clout,” as though he were nothing better than a patch in the very heels of clodhopping. And yet, under this name, he sees the Nymphs and Graces dancing round his shepherdess upon Mount Acidale! The passage, otherwise, is one of his most elegant pieces of invention; and with the Grecian topography, may be said to exhibit the very highest region and crown of the pastoral side of Parnassus. Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy (for thus does he mix up the classical and romantic grounds; but no matter for that, since they are both in the regions of imagination), hears a noise of music and dancing as he is approaching the top of Mount Acidale. Upon looking amongst the trees, when he reaches it, he sees a shepherd piping to his love, in the midst of

_An hundred naked maidens, lily-white_, All rangèd in a ring, and dancing in delight.

But we must not lose the description of the place itself:--

It was an hill, plaiste in an open plaine, That round about is border’d with a wood Of matchless hight, that seem’d th’ earth to disdaine, In which all trees of honour stately stood, And did all winter as in summer bud, Spredding pavillions for the birds to bowre, Which in their lower braunches sang aloud; And in their tops the soring hawk did towre, _Sitting like king of foules in majesty and powre_:

And at the foote thereof a gentle flud His silver waves did softly tumble down, Unmar’d with ragged mosse or filthy mud; Ne mote wild beastes, ne mote the ruder clowne, Thereto approach; ne filth mote therein drowne: _But Nymphs and Faeries by the bancks did sit In the wood’s shade, which did the waters crowne, Keeping all noysome things away from it, And to the water’s fall tuning their accents fit_.

And on the top thereof a spacious plaine Did spred itselfe, to serve to all delight, Either to daunce, when they to daunce would faine Or else to course about their bases light; Ne ought there wanted, which for pleasure might Desirèd be, or thence to banish bale; So pleasantly the hill with equall hight Did seem to overlooke the lowly vale; Therefore it rightly cleepèd was Mount Acidale.[6]

They say that Venus, when she did dispose Herselfe to pleasaunce, usèd to resort Unto this place, and therein to repose And rest herself, as in a gladsome port; Or with the Graces, there to play and sport; That even her own Cytheron, though in it She usèd most to keep her royall court, And in her soveraine majesty to sit, She, in regard thereof, refusde and thought unfit.

Unto this place when as the elfin knight Approacht, him seemèd that the merry sound Of a shrill pipe he playing heard on hight, And many feete fast thumping th’ hollow ground, That through the woods their echo did rebound. He hither drew, to weete what mote it be: There he a troupe of ladies dauncing found Full merrily, and making gladfull glee, And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

He durst not enter into th’ open greene, For dread of them unawares to be descryde, For breaking of their daunce, if he were seene; But in the covert of the wood did byde, Beholding all, yet of them unespyde: There he did see, that pleased much his sight, That even he himself his eyes envyde, _An hundred naked maidens, lilly white, All raungèd in a ring and dauncing in delight_.

In the middle of this orb of fair creatures, the beauty of which there is nothing of the sort to equal, (unless it be those circles of lily-white stamens which, with such exquisite mystery, adorn the commonest flower-cups--so profuse of her poetry is Nature!), Sir Calidore sees “three other ladies,” both dancing and singing--to wit, the Graces; and in the midst of “those same three” was yet another lady, or rather “damsel” (for she was of rustic origin), crowned with a garland of roses, and so beautiful, that she was the very gem of the ring, and “graced” the Graces themselves. The hundred nymphs, as they danced, threw flowers upon her; the Graces endowed her with the gifts which she reflected upon them, enhanced; and a shepherd sat piping to them all.

Never, surely, was such deification of a “country lass;” and well might the poet hail his spectacle in a rapture of self-complacency, and encourage his pipe to play on:--

_Pype, jolly shepheard! pype thou now apace Unto thy love_, that made thee low to lout.

(He has raised her from the condition to which he stooped to obtain her.)

Thy love is present there with thee in place--

(That is, in the midst of his poetry and his fame.)

Thy love is there advaunst _to be another Grace_.

But a mishap is on the heels of this vision, connected with our author’s professed attempts at pastoral; for so we have little doubt it is, though the commentators have given it another meaning. Sir Calidore, envying his eyes a sight which so “enriched” them, left the covert through which he looked, and went towards it:--

But soone as he appearèd to their view, They vanisht all away, out of his sight, And cleane were gone, which way he never knew, All save the shepherd; who, for fell despight Of that displeasure, broke his bag-pipe quight, And made great mone for that unhappy turne; But Calidore, though no less sorry wight For that mishap, yet seeing him to mourne, Drew neare, that he the truth of all by him might learne.

Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, is understood to be Sir Philip Sidney, who, in his _Defence of Poesy_, had objected to the style of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_; and as his word was taken for law in matters of taste, and the criticism was probably fatal to the poet’s continuance in that style (for at all events he dropped it), we have scarcely a doubt that Spenser alludes to the fact of his giving up pastoral writing in consequence. He breaks his pipe; not, it seems (like most authors, when they give way to critics), without much secret vexation--nay, “a fell despight,” as he calls it; candidly, if not a little maliciously, owning the whole extent of his feelings on the subject to his illustrious critic, who had since become his friend. It was a disadvantage which his pride could not feel itself easy with, till it had set it to rights. The following is the passage in Sidney’s essay:--

The _Shepherd’s Kalander_ hath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language, I dare not allow; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazarro in Italian, did affect it.

He means that Theocritus and the others wrote in the language of their times, and that to be obsolete is not to be natural. Spenser, it is to be observed, expressly designates himself in this episode as Colin Clout, which is the title he assumed as the author of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_; a “country lassie” is his goddess in that work; and it seems far more likely that under this identity of appellation he should complain, in one poem, of the discouragement given to another, than simply shadow forth (as the commentators think) the circumstance of Sir Philip Sidney’s having drawn him from the country to the court. In what consisted the abrupt intervention of a proceeding like that? What particular vision did it dissipate? Or how could he pretend any right of soreness in his tone of complaint about it? And he is very sore indeed at the knight’s interruption, notwithstanding his courtesy. Tell me, says Calidore--

Tell me what mote these dainty damsels be, Which here with thee do make their pleasant playes: Right happy thou, that mayst them freely see; But why, when I them saw, fled they away from me?

_Not I so happy_, answered then that swaine, _As thou unhappy_, which them thence did chase, Whom by no meanes thou canst recall againe.

He could not look back with comfort upon having been forced to give up his pastoral visions.

But to return to our subject. The all-including genius of Shakspeare has given the finest intimations of pastoral writing in some of the masques introduced in his plays, and in his plays themselves; if indeed _As You Like It_ might not equally as well be called a pastoral play as a comedy; though, to be sure, the duke and his followers do not willingly take to the woods, with the exception of the “sad shepherd” Jacques; and this is a great drawback on the pleasures of the occasion, which ought to breathe as freely as the air and the wild roses. Rosalind, however, is a very bud of the pastoral ideal, peeping out of her forest jerkin. Again, in the _Winter’s Tale_, where the good housewife is recorded, who has “her face o’ fire” with attending to the guests, and “my sister,” who has the purchase of the eatables, “lays it on” (as her brother the clown says) in the article of rice, there is the truest pastoral of both kinds, the ideal and the homely:--

SHEPHERD. Fie, daughter! When my old wife liv’d, upon This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,-- Both dame and servant; _welcomed all, serv’d all; Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here, At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle; On his shoulder, and his; her face o’ fire With labour; and the thing she took to quench it, She would to each one sip_.

What a poet, and what a painter! Now a Raphael, or Michael Angelo; now a Jan Steen or a Teniers. Here also is Autolycus, the most exquisite of impudent vagabonds, better even than the _Brass_ of Sir John Vanbrugh; selling his love ballads, so without indecency, “which is strange,” and another ballad of a singing _Fish_, with “five justices’ hands to it,” to vouch for its veracity. But, above all, here is Perdita:--

The prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green sward. No shepherdess, but Flora, Peering in April’s front.

Perdita, also, though supposed to be a shepherdess born, is a _Sicilian_ princess, and makes our BLUE JAR glisten again in the midst of its native sun and flowers.

O Prosèrpina! For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall From Dis’s waggon!--

(“Waggon,” be it observed, was as much a word of respect in those days as “chariot” is now.)

Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, _and take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes_, Or Cytherea’s breath; bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. O, these I lack To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend, [_Turning to her lover._ To strew him o’er and o’er. FLORIZEL. What! like a corse? PERDITA. No: like a bank, for love to lie and play on. Not like a corse; or if,--not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms.

Shelley has called a woman “one of Shakspeare’s women,” implying by that designation all that can be suggested of grace and sweetness. They were “very subtle,” as Mr. Wordsworth said of the French ladies. Not that they were French ladies, or English either; but Nature’s and refinement’s best possible gentlewomen all over the world. Tullia d’Aragona, the Italian poetess, who made all her suitors love one another instead of quarrel, must have been a Shakspeare woman. Gaspara Stampa was another; and we should take the authoress of _Auld Robin Gray_ for one.

Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,

and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, must have been such. So was Mrs. Brooke, who wrote _Emily Montague_; and probably Madame Riccoboni; and certainly my Lady Winchelsea, who worshipped friendship, and green retreats, and her husband;--terrible people all, to look upon, if the very sweetness of their virtue did not enable us to bear it.

Ben Jonson left an unfinished dramatic pastoral, entitled the _Sad Shepherd_. It is a story of Robin Hood, in connection with a shepherd who has gone melancholy mad for the supposed death of his mistress--a lucky character for the exalted wilfulness of the author’s style. The lover opens the play with the following elegant extravagance:--

ÆGLAMOUR. Here she was wont to go! and here! and here! Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow: _The world may find the spring by following her_.

This is a truly lover-like fancy; and the various, impulsive, and flowery versification is perfect. Ben Jonson can never leave out his learning. The lost mistress must be compared, in the impossible lightness of her step, with Virgil’s Camilla, who ran over the tops of corn:--

For other print her airy steps ne’er left; Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk.

What unsubstantial womanhood! How different from the bride of Bedreddin Hassan!

“Up, up in haste!” the young man cries: Ah! slender waist! she cannot rise For heavy hips, that say, “Sit still,” And make her linger ’gainst her will. --TORRENS’S _Arabian Nights_.

The best passage in the _Sad Shepherd_ is a description of a witch and her habits--a subject which every way suited the arbitrary and sullen side of the poet’s notions of power. It also enabled him to show his reading, as he takes care to let us know, by means of one of the bystanders:--

ALKEN. Know ye the witch’s dell? SCATHLOCK. No more than I do know the ways of hell. ALKEN. Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, Down in a pit, o’ergrown with brakes and briers, _Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey, Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground, ’Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house_, Where you shall find her sitting in her form, As fearful and melàncholic as that She is about with caterpillars’ kells And knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells. Thence she steals forth to revel in the fogs And _rotten mists_ upon the fens and bogs, _Down to the drownèd lands of Lincolnshire_; To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow, The housewife’s tun not work, nor the milk churn! _Writhe children’s wrists_, and suck their breath in sleep, Get vials of their blood; and where the sea Casts up its slimy ooze, search for a weed To open locks with, and to rivet charms, Planted about her in the wicked feat Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold. JOHN. I wonder such a story could be told Of her dire deeds. GEORGE. I thought a witch’s banks Had enclosed nothing but the merry pranks Of some old woman. SCARLET. Yes, her malice more. SCATHLOCK. As it would quickly appear had we the store Of his collects. GEORGE. Ay, this good learned man Can speak her rightly. SCARLET. He knows her shifts and haunts. ALKEN. And all her wiles and turns. The venom’d plants Wherewith she kills; where the sad mandrake grows, Whose groans are dreadful; the dead-numbing nightshade, The stupifying hemlock, adder’s tongue, And martagan; the shrieks of luckless owls We hear, and croaking night-crows in the air; _Green-bellied snakes_, blue fire-drakes in the sky, _And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings_, And scaly beetles _with their habergeons, That make a humming murmur as they fly_. There, in the stocks of trees, _white faies do dwell, And span-long elves that dance about a pool With each a little changeling in their arms_! And airy spirits play with falling stars, And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon, While she sits reading (by the glow-worm’s light, Of rotten wood, _o’er which the worm hath crept_) The baneful schedule of her nocent charms.

The idea of “span-long elves” who dance about a pool, carrying each a stolen infant, that must be bigger than themselves, is a very capital and fantastic horror.

Old burly and strong-sensation-loving Ben (as his friend Chapman, or Mr. Bentham, might have called him) could show, however, a great deal of delicacy when he had a mind to it. He could turn his bluster into a zephyr that inspired the young genius of Milton. Some of his court masques are pastoral; and the following is the style in which he receives the king and queen. Maia (the goddess of May) says--

If all the pleasures were distill’d Of _every_ flower in _every_ field--

(This kind of return of words was not common then, as he has since made it)

And all that Hybla’s hives do yield, Were into one broad mazer fill’d; If thereto added all the gums And spice that from Panchaia comes, The odours that Hydaspes lends, Or Phœnix proves before she ends; If all the air my Flora drew, Or spirit that Zephyr ever blew, Were put therein; _and all the dew That ever rosy morning knew_; Yet all, diffused upon this bower, _To make one sweet detaining hour_, Were much too little for the grace And honour you vouchsafe the place.

In the masque of _Oberon_, Silenus bids his Satyrs rouse up a couple of sleeping Sylvans, who ought to have been keeping watch; “at which,” says the poet’s direction, “the Satyrs fell suddenly into this catch”--Musicians know it well:--

_Buz_, quoth the blue fly; _Hum_, quoth the bee; _Buz and hum they cry, And so do we_. In his _ear_, in his _nose_, _Thus_, do you see! [_They tickle them._ _He_ eat _the dormouse_, Else it was _he_.

It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the Satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even the harmony, the _intercourse_, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion with a very musical ear could have written it. It was not for nothing that Ben lived in the time of the fine old English composers, Bull and Ford; or partook his canary with his “lov’d Alphonso,” as he calls him,--the Signor Ferrabosco.

We have not yet done with this delightful portion of our subject. Fletcher and Milton await us still; together with the pastoral poet, William Browne; and a few other poets, who, though they wrote no pastorals, were pastoral men.