Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 14

She is almost won; one last a.s.sault, and her defences fall. Why, indeed, should she hesitate--

Poi ch' Amor dice, ogni secreta e casta?

This stroke of cynicism is put forward as it were but half intentionally, and with no appreciation of its intense irony in the mouth of the husband.

Throughout the scene indeed he appears merely as a common seducer, and the author seems wholly to have failed to grasp the real dramatic value of the situation. On the other hand, the lesser art of the stage has been mastered with some success, and there is an adaptation of language to action which at least argues that the author had a vivid picture of the staging of his play in his mind when he wrote.

The moment Procri has consented to barter her honour, Cefalo discovers himself, and the unhappy girl flies in terror. Seeing now, too late, the resuit of his foolish mistrust, Cefalo follows with prayers and self-reproaches--

Son ben certo Che tu mi cognoscesti ancor coperto--

but in vain. The act ends with a song in which Aurora glories in the success of her revenge--

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 G.o.ddess. 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 polis.h.i.+ng, such as Poliziano's baccha.n.a.lian chorus received in revision, the scene would not be unworthy of the time and place of its production.

Oime sorelle, o Galatea, presto!

Donate al cervo ormai un poco pace; Soccorrete al pianger quel caso mesto.

Oime 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 G.o.ds, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 const.i.tute 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sume 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.

The dramatic tendency was indeed inherent in the eclogue from the very first. Throughout there is a steady growth in the use of dialogue: of the Idyls of Theocritus only about a third contain more than one character; of Vergil's Bucolics at least half; of Calpurnius' all but one; of the eclogues of Petrarch and Boccaccio all without exception. This tendency did not escape Guarini, who, when not led into puerilities by his love of self-laudation, often shows considerable insight. 'The eclogue,' he says, 'is nothing but a short discussion between shepherds, differing in no other manner from that sort of scene which the Latins call dialogue, except in so far as being whole and independent, possessing within itself both beginning and end[165].'

Having thus gradually altered the literary form of the eclogue, this tendency towards dramatic expression next showed itself in the manner in which the poem was presented to the world. For circulation in print or ma.n.u.script, or for informal reading, came to be subst.i.tuted recitation in character. The dialogue was divided between two persons who spoke alternately, and it is evident from the somewhat meagre texts that survive that, in the earliest examples, these _ecloghe rappresentative_, or dramatic eclogues as I shall call them, differed in no way from the purely literary productions which we considered in an earlier section. Evidence of actual representation is often wanting, and the exact date in most cases is uncertain; but, since there is no doubt that such performances actually did take place, we are not only justified in a.s.suming that several poems of the period belong to this cla.s.s, but we can also, on internai evidence, arrange them more or less in a natural sequence of dramatic development. One such eclogue has come down to us from the pen of Balda.s.sare Taccone, a Genoese who also wrote mythological plays on the subjects of Danae and Actaeon. Another, interesting as dealing with the corruption of the Curia at a moment when its scandalous traffic was carried on in the light of day with more than usually cynical indifference, was actually presented at Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna at the carnival of 1490, during the pontificate of Innocent VIII. Gradually a more complex form was evolved, the number of speakers was increased, and some of these made their entrance during the progress of the recitation. So too in the matter of metrical form, the strict _terza rima_ of the earlier examples came to be diversified with _rime sdrucciole_, and by being intermingled with verses with internal rime, with _ottava rima, settenari_ couplets, and lyrical measures.

Castiglione's representation at Urbino has been noticed previously. Among similar productions may be mentioned two poems by a certain Caperano of Faenza, printed in 1508, while others are found at Siena in 1517 and 1523.

Besides the texts that are extant we also have record of a good many which have perished. In 1493 the representation of eclogues formed part of the revels prepared by Alexander VI for the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia with Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, and this was again the case when, having been divorced from Giovanni, and her second husband having perished by the a.s.sa.s.sin's dagger, she finally in 1502 became the wife of Alfonso d'Este, heir to the duchy of Ferrara. Eclogues were again represented at Ferrara in 1508, and received specific mention among the dramatic performances dealt with by the laws of Venice.

We thus see that the eclogue had every opportunity of developing into a regular dramatic form. At this point a variety of external influences made themselves felt, which facilitated or modified its growth. Perhaps foremost among these should be reckoned that of the 'regular' drama--that is of the drama based upon an imitation of the cla.s.sics, chiefly of the Latin authors. The conception of dramatic art which was in men's minds at the time naturally and inevitably influenced the development of a form of poem which was daily becoming more sensibly dramatic. Next there was the influence of the mythological drama embodying the romantic and ideal elements of cla.s.sical myth, but in form representing the tradition of the old religious plays. This led to the occasional introduction of supernatural characters, counteracted the rationalizing influence of the Roman dramatists, and supplied the pastoral with its peculiar imaginative atmosphere. Lastly, there was the 'rustic' influence, which was at no time very strong, and left no mark upon the form as finally evolved, but which has nevertheless to be taken into account in tracing the process of development. The influence exercised by burlesque and realistic scenes from real life cannot have been brought to bear on the eclogue until it had already attained to a dramatic character of some complexity. The earliest text of the kind we possess dates from 1508, and it is doubtful whether or not it was acted. In 1513 we have record of a rustic performance at the Capitol, and a satyrical and allegorical piece of like nature, and belonging to the same year, is actually preserved, as is also one in Bellunese dialect. These shows became the special characteristic of the Rozzi society at Siena, in whose hands they soon developed into short realistic farces of low life, composed in dialectal verse and acted by members of the society at many of the courts of Italy. The fas.h.i.+on, though never widely spread, survived for many years, the most famous author of such pieces being Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger at the beginning of the next century.

These _drammi rusticali_, as they were called, may not improbably have owed their origin to the fas.h.i.+on of rustic composition set by Lorenzo de'

Medici in his _Nencia_, and may thus in their origin have been related to the courtly eclogue; but the subsequent development of the kind is at most parallel to that of the pastoral drama, and should not be regarded either as the origin or as a subdivision of this latter. Nor did the rustic compositions exercise any permanent influence on the pastoral drama; the most that can be said is that an occasional text shows signs of being affected by the low vulgarity of the kind.

Returning to the polite eclogues, we soon find an increase in the dramatic complexity of the form. Tansillo's _Due pellegrini_, which cannot be later than 1528, contains the rudiments of a plot, two lovers bent on suicide being persuaded by a miraculous voice to become reconciled with the world and life. Poetic justice befalls the two nymphs in an eclogue by Luca di Lorenzo, printed in 1530, the disdainful Diversa being condemned to love the boor Fantasia, while Euridice's loving disposition is rewarded by the devotion of Orindio.

We now come to what may almost be regarded as the first conscious attempt to write a pastoral play--an attempt, however, which met with but partial success. This is the _Amaranta_, a 'Comedia nuova pastorale' by Giambattista Casalio of Faenza, which most probably belongs to a date somewhat before 1538. In it the mutual love of Partenio and Amaranta is thwarted by the girl's mother Celia, who destines her for a goatherd.

Partenio is led to believe that his love has played him false, while in her turn Amaranta supposes herself forsaken. The two meet, however, at the hut of a wise nymph Lucina, through whose intervention they are reconciled and their union effected. The piece, which attains to some proportions, is divided into five acts, and, while owing a certain debt to the _Orfeo_, is itself pastoral in character with occasional coa.r.s.e touches borrowed from the rustic shows. It is in the _Amaranta_ that we first meet with an attempt to introduce a real plot of some human interest into a purely pastoral composition; we are no longer dealing with a merely occasional piece written in celebration of some special person or festivity, no longer with a mythological masque or pageant, nor with an amorous allegory, but with a piece the interest of which, slight as it is, lies in the fate of the characters involved.

The fifteen years or so which separate the work of Casalio from that of Beccari saw the production of a succession of more or less pastoral works which serve, to some extent at least, to bridge over the gap which separates even the most elaborate of the above compositions from the recognized appearance of the fully-developed pastoral drama in the _Sacrifizio_. The chief characteristic which marks the work of these years is a tendency to deliberate experiment. The writers appear to have been conscious that their work was striving towards a form which had not yet been achieved, though they were themselves vague as to what that form might be. Epicuro's _Mirzia_ tends towards the mythological drama; the _Silvia_ written by one Fileno, which, like the _Amaranta_, turns on the temporary estrangement of two lovers, introduces considerable elements from the rustic performances; in Cazza's _Erbusto_ the amorous skein is cut by the discovery of consanguinity and an ??a?????s?? after the manner of the Latin comedy. Similar in plot to this last is a fragmentary pastoral of Giraldi Cintio's published from ma.n.u.script by Signor Carducci.

Another curious but isolated experiment is Cintio's _Egle_, in intent a revival of the 'satyric' drama of the Greeks, in substance a dramatization of the motive of Sannazzaro's _Salices_. In one sense these experiments ended in failure; it was not through the elaboration of mythological or superhuman elements, nor through the humour of burlesque or realistic rusticity, nor yet through the violence of unexpected discoveries, that the destined form of the pastoral drama was to be attained. On the other hand, they undoubtedly served to introduce an elaboration of plot and complexity of dramatic structure which is altogether lacking in the earlier eclogues and masques, but without which the work of Ta.s.so and Guarini could never have occupied the commanding position that it does in the history of literature. They carry us forward to the point at which the pastoral drama took its shape and being.

Of the elements compounded of pastoral idealism and the graceful purity of cla.s.sical myth, and combining the scenic attractions of the masque with the reasoned action and human interest of the regular drama, the Arcadian pastoral first achieved definite form in the work of Agostino Beccari. His _Sacrifizio_, styled 'favola pastorale' on the t.i.tle-page of the first impression, was acted at the palace of Francesco d' Este at Ferrara in the presence of Ercole II and his son Luigi, and of the d.u.c.h.ess Renata and her daughters Lucrezia and Leonora, on two occasions in February and March 1554. The piece was revived more than thirty years later, namely in 1587, when the courtly world was already familiar with Ta.s.so's masterpiece, and was ringing with the prospective fame of the _Pastor fido_, and represented both at Sa.s.suolo and Ferrara.

The action involves three pairs of lovers. Turico loves Stellinia in spite of the fact that she has transferred her affections to Erasto. Erasto in his turn pays his homage to Callinome, the type of the 'careless'

shepherdess, a nymph vowed to the service of Diana. There remains Carpalio, whose love for Melidia is secretly returned; its consummation being prevented by the girl's brother Pimonio, who refuses to countenance the match, and keeps dragon guard over his sister. In the meanwhile shepherds and shepherdesses a.s.semble to honour the festival and sacrifice of Pan, which proves the occasion for the unravelling of the amorous tangle. Stellinia, wis.h.i.+ng to rid herself of her rival in Erasto's love, induces Callinome so far to break her vestal vow as to be present at the forbidden feast. Here she is promptly detected by the offended G.o.ddess and sentenced to do battle against one of the fiercest of the Erymanthian boars. Erasto comes to her aid with a magic ointment, which has the power of rendering the user invisible, and with the help of which she achieves her task unharmed. Out of grat.i.tude she rewards her preserver with her love. Not only is Stellinia thus condemned to witness the failure of her plot, but she is herself carried off by a satyr, who endeavours to deceive each of the nymphs in turn. Being rescued from his power by the faithful Turico, she too capitulates to love. Lastly, in the absence of Pimonio, who has gone to be present at the games held at the festival, Carpalio and Melidia pluck the fruit of love, and are saved from the anger of the brother through his conveniently falling into an enchanted lake whence he emerges in the shape of a boar.

In the prologue the author boldly announces the novelty of his work--

Una favola nova pastorale ............nova in tanto Ch' altra non fu giammai forse piu udita Di questa sorte recitarsi in scena.

Guarini, who is said to have supplied a prologue for the revival of the piece, bore out Beccari's claim when he wrote in his essay on tragi-comedy: 'First among the moderns to possess the happy boldness to make in this kind, namely the pastoral dramatic tale, of which there is no trace among the ancients, was Agostin de' Beccari, a worthy citizen of Ferrara, to whom alone does the world owe the fair creation of this sort of poem[166].'

Several pieces of no great interest or importance serve to fill the decade or so following on the production of Beccari's play. Groto, known as the Cieco d' Adria, combined the mythological motive with much of the vulgar obscenity of the Latin comedy. Lollio also produced a hybrid of an earlier type in his _Aretusa_. In 1567 a return was made to the pastoral tradition of Beccari in Agostino Argenti's play _Lo Sfortunato_. Among the spectators who witnessed the first performance of this piece before Duke Alfonso and his court at Ferrara was a youth of twenty-two, lately attached to the household of the Cardinal Luigi d' Este. In all probability this was Ta.s.so's first introduction to a style of composition which not many years later he was to make famous throughout Europe. The play he witnessed on that occasion, however, was no work of surpa.s.sing genius. It cannot, indeed, be said to mark any decided advance on Beccari's work except in so far, perhaps, as it at times foreshadows the somewhat sickly sentiment of later pastorals, including Ta.s.so's own. The shepherd Sfortunato loves Dafne, Dafne loves Iacinto, who in his turn pursues Flaminia, while she loves only Silvio, who loves himself. Nothing particular happens till the fourth scene of Act III. Then Silvio, tired of being the last link in the chain of love, devises a plan for placing Flaminia and Dafne in the power of their respective lovers. Flaminia, a.s.sailed by Iacinto, makes up her mind to bow to fate, and accepts with a good grace the love it is no longer in her power to fly. Sfortunato, on the other hand, rather than offend his mistress, allows her to depart unharmed, and since he thereby forgoes his only chance of enjoying the object of his pa.s.sion, determines to die. His vow is overheard by Dafne, who, seeing that her love for Iacinto may no more avail, at last relents.

A third nymph, introduced to make the numbers even, takes the veil among the followers of Diana, and so lives the object of Silvio's chaste regard.

It will be readily seen how in the character of Sfortunato we have the forerunner of Ta.s.so's Aminta; but it will also appear what poor use has been made of the situation. The truth is that we have up to now been dealing merely with origins, with productions which are of interest only in the reflected light of later work; whatever there is of real beauty and of permanent value in the pastoral drama of Italy is due to the breath of life inspired into the phantasms of earlier writers by the genius of Ta.s.so and Guarini.

III

We have now followed the dramatic pastoral from its obscure origin in the eclogue to the eve of its a.s.suming a recognized and abiding position in the literature of Europe[167]. But if it is in a measure easy thus to trace back the Arcadian drama to its historical sources, and to show how the _Aminta_ came to be possible, it is not so easy to show how it came to be actual. All creative work is the outcome of three fas.h.i.+oning forces, the historical position, the personal circ.u.mstances of the artist, and his individual genius. The pastoral drama had reached what I may perhaps be allowed to call the 'psychological point' in its development. At the same moment it happened that Ta.s.so, having returned from a fruitless and uncongenial mission to the Valois court, enjoyed a brief period of calm and prosperity in the congenial society of Leonora d' Este, before the critical bickerings to which he exposed himself in connexion with the _Gerusalemme_ wrought havoc with an already over-sensitive and overstrained temperament. Furthermore it happened that he brought to the spontaneous composition of his courtly toy just that touch of languorous beauty, that soft vein of sentiment, which formed perhaps his most characteristic contribution to the artistic tone of his age, veiling a novel mood in his favourite phrase, _un non so che_[168]. Had all this not been, had not the fortune of a suitable genius and the chance of personal surroundings jumped with the historical possibility, we might indeed have had any number of lifeless 'Sacrifices' and 'Unhappy Ones,' but Italy would have added no new kind to the forms of dramatic art. Had it not been for the _Aminta_, the pastoral drama must almost necessarily have been stillborn, for Guarini was too much of a pedant to do more than to imitate and enlarge, while other writers belong to the decline.

The _Aminta_, while possessing a delicate dramatic structure of its own, yet retains not a little of the simplicity of the _ecloga rappresentativa_. Indeed, it is worth noting, alike on account of this quality in the poem itself as also of its literary ancestry, that, in a letter written within a year of its original production, Tiburio Almerici speaks of it by the old name of eclogue[169]. Referring to its representation at Urbino, he writes: 'Il terzo spettacolo, che si e G.o.duto questo carnovale, e stato un' egloga del Ta.s.so, che fu recitata questo gioved pa.s.sato da alcuni gioveni d' Urbino nella sala, che fu fatta per la venuta delia Principessa.' The princess in question was none other than Lucrezia d' Este, who had lately become the wife of Ta.s.so's former companion Francesco Maria della Rovere, now Duke of Urbino, and who with her sister Leonora, the heroine of the Ta.s.so legend, had, it will be remembered, stood sponsor to Beccari's play nearly twenty years before.

The representation at Urbino to which Almerici alludes was not of course the first. Written in the winter of 1572-3 during the absence of Duke Alfonso, the piece was acted after his return from Rome in the summer of the latter year. Ferrara, as we have seen, had become and was long destined to remain the special home of the pastoral drama in Italy. Here on July 31, in the palace of Belvedere, built on an island in the Po, the court of the Estensi a.s.sembled to witness the production of Ta.s.so's play[170]. The staging, both on this and on subsequent occasions, was no doubt answerable to the nature of the piece, and added the splendour of the masque to the cla.s.sic grace of the fable. Almerici remarks on the special attractions for spectators and auditors alike of what he calls 'la novita del coro fra ciascuno atto,' by which he clearly meant the spectacular interludes known as _intermedi_, the verses for which are commonly printed at the end of the play[171]. But the representation which struck the imagination of contemporaries was that before the Grand Duke Ferdinand at Florence. This took place in 1590[172]. Guarini's play had in its turn won renown far beyond the frontiers of Italy, while the author of the _Aminta_, a yet attractive but impossible madman, was destined for the few remaining years of his life to drag his tale of woes and but too often his rags from one Italian court to another, ere he sank at last exhausted where S. Onofrio overlooks St. Peter's dome.

The structure of the play is not free from a good deal of stiffness and artificiality, which it bequeathed to its successors. It borrowed from the cla.s.sical drama a chorus, on the whole less Greek than Latin, the use of confidants, and the introduction of messengers and descriptive pa.s.sages.

These last, it may be noted, are deliberately and wantonly cla.s.sical, not merely necessitated by the exigencies of the action, difficult of representation as in the attempted suicide of Aminta, impossible as in the rescue of Silvia from the satyr, but resorted to in order to veil the dramatic weakness of the author's imagination, as is plain from the description of the final meeting of the lovers. Yet it may be freely admitted that to this device, the subst.i.tution namely of narrative for action, we owe most of the finest poetic pa.s.sages of the play: the description of the youthful loves of Aminta and Silvia and the former's ruse to win a kiss, the picture of Silvia bound to the tree by the pool, Tirsi's account of the court, the description of Silvia at the spring--one of the most elaborate in the piece--the account of her escape from the wolves, last but not least that description of Silvia finding the unconscious Aminta, so full of subtle and effeminate seduction, prophetic of a later age of morals and of taste:

Ma come Silvia il ricon.o.bbe, e vide Le belle guance tenere d' Aminta Iscolorite in s leggiadri modi, Che viola non e che impallidisca Si dolcemente, e lui languir s fatto, Che parea gia negli ultimi sospiri Esalar l'alma; in guisa di Baccante Gridando, e percotendosi il bel petto, Lasci cadersi in sul giacente corpo, E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca. (V. i.)

So too the chorus, though awkward enough from a dramatic point of view and in so far as it fulfils any dramatic purpose, offers a sufficient justification for its existence in the magnificent ode on 'honour,' that rapturous song of the golden age of love, the poetic supremacy of which has never been questioned, whatever may have been thought of its ethical significance. To that aspect we shall return later. At present it will be well to give some more or less detailed account of the action of the piece itself.

The shepherd Aminta loves Silvia, formerly as a child his playmate and companion, now a huntress devoted to the service of Diana, proud in her virginity and unfettered state. The play opens in a sufficiently conventional manner, but wrought with sparkling verse, with two companion scenes. In the first of these Silvia brushes aside the importunities of her confidant Dafne who seeks to allure her to the blandishments of love with sententious natural examples and modern instances.

Cangia, cangia consiglio, Pazzerella che sei, Che il pentirsi da.s.sezzo nulla giova;

such is the burden of her song, or yet again, recalling the golden days of love she too of yore had wasted: