Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 4

The crude obscenity of the subject alone serves to show how free the writer was from any influence of the pastoral of polite literature.[71]

Numerous other stories concerning shepherds or _villani_ might be cited, from Boccaccio to Bandello, the point of which, whether openly licentious or ostensibly moral, is brought home with a brutal and physical directness utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the whole, what one would expect. The coa.r.s.e realism that gave life and vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-cla.s.s cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition.

The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the novel. It is true that when we speak of the _bourgeois_ spirit of the _novella_ on the one hand, and the 'ideal' pastoral on the other, it is well to remember that the author of the _Decameron_ also wrote the first modern pastoral romance; that the century and country which saw the publication of the _Arcadia_, the _Aminta_, and the _Pastor fido_, also welcomed the work of Fortini, Giraldi, and Bandello; and that to Margaret of Navarre, the imitator of Sannazzaro and patroness of Marot, we are likewise indebted for the _Heptameron_. Nevertheless the tendencies, though sometimes united in the person of a single author, yet keep distinct. Both alike had become a fas.h.i.+on, both alike followed a more or less conventional type. The novel remained coa.r.s.e and realistic; the pastoral, whatever may be said of its morality, remained refined and at a conscious remove from real life. To examine thoroughly the cause of this disseverance from actuality which haunted the pastoral throughout its many transformations would lead us beyond all possible bounds of this inquiry.

One important point may, however, here be noted. The pastoral, whatever its form, always needed and a.s.sumed some external circ.u.mstance to give point to its actual content. The interest seldom arises directly from the narrative itself. In Theocritus and Sannazzaro this objective point is supplied by the delight of escape from the over-civilization of the city; in Petrarch and Mantuan, by their allegorical intention; in Sacchetti and Lorenzo, by the contrast of town and country, with all its delicate humour; in Boccaccio and Poliziano, by the opening it gave for golden dreams of exquisite beauty or sensuous delight; in Ta.s.so, by the desire of that freedom in love and life which sentimental philosophers have always a.s.sociated with a return to nature. In all these cases the content _per se_ may be said to be matter of indifference; it only receives meaning in relation to some ulterior intention of the author. Realism under these circ.u.mstances was impossible. Nor could satire call it forth, for no one would be at pains to satirize actual rusticity. The only loophole left by which a realistic treatment could find its way into pastoral was when, as in Folengo's macaronics, it was not the actual rustic life but the conventional representation of it that was the object of satire. But this case was naturally a rare one.

Chapter II.

Pastoral Poetry in England

I

We have seen how there arose in the Italian songs of the fourteenth century a spontaneous form of pastoral independent of the regular tradition, and somewhat similar examples are furnished by the dramatic eclogues of Spain. In the former case, however, pastoral was never more than a pa.s.sing note; while in the latter, the impulse, though possessing some vitality, was early overwhelmed by the rising tide of Italian influence. In England it was otherwise. On the one hand the spontaneous and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance. As a resuit the earlier native fas.h.i.+on affected in a noticeable degree later pastoral work, colouring and blending with instead of being overpowered by the regular tradition. Thus it is possible to trace two distinct though mutually reacting tendencies far down the stream of English literature, and to this double origin must be referred many of the peculiar phenomena of English pastoral work. There was furthermore a constant struggle for supremacy between the two traditions, in which now one now the other appeared likely to go under. The greatest poets of their day, Spenser and Milton, threw the weight of their authority on to the side of pastoral orthodoxy. Spenser, however, was himself too much influenced by the popular impulse for his example to be decisive in favour of the regular tradition, while, by the time Milton wrote, a hybrid form had established itself on a more or less secure basis and a _modus vivendi_ had already been achieved. Meanwhile the bulk of pastofal poets affected a less weighty and more spontaneous song, whether they wrote in the light fanciful mood of Drayton or the more pa.s.sionate and romantic spirit of Browne.

To this double origin may be ascribed a certain noticeable vitality that characterizes English pastoral composition. Since this quality has been habitually overlooked by literary historians, I may be excused for dwelling on it somewhat in this place. The stigma which, not altogether undeservedly, attaches to pastoral as a whole has tempted critics to confine their attention to the more notable examples of the kind, and to treat these as more or less sporadic manifestations. Thus they have failed, on the whole, to appreciate the relation in which these works stand to the general pastoral tradition, which was mainly carried on in works of little individual interest. It is no blame to them if they considered that these undistinguished productions were of small importance in the general history of literature: any one who goes through them with care will probably arrive at a not very dissimilar conclusion.

Nevertheless the fact remains that the neglect of them has obscured both the relative positions of the greater and more enduring works, and also the general nature of the pastoral tradition in this country. That tradition I believe to have been of a far more noteworthy character than has. .h.i.therto been realized. I am not, of course, prepared to maintain that pastoral composition in England ever attained, as a whole, to the rank of great literature, or that it formed such a remarkable body of work as we find, for example, in the Arcadian drama of Italy. But when we come to regard the pastoral production of this country in the light of a more or less connected tradition, it is impossible not be struck by the originality and diversity of the various forms which it a.s.sumed. Though as a literary kind it never rivalled its Italian model in fertility, it evinced an individual and versatile quality which we seek in vain in other countries. To substantiate this claim and to show how far the vitality of the English pastoral was due to its hybrid origin will be my chief aim in this chapter. When I come to deal with the main subject of this inquiry it will be necessary to determine how far similar considerations apply in the case of the pastoral drama.

In the first place we have to consider what was produced on the one hand by the purely native impulse, and on the other under the sole inspiration of foreign tradition, at a period when these two influences had not yet begun to interact. As an argument in favour of the spontaneous and genuine nature of the earlier fas.h.i.+on may be noticed its appearance in that miscellaneous body of anonymous literature which, whatever may be its origin--and it is impossible to enter on so controversial a subject in this place--is at least 'popular' in the sense of having been long handed down from generation to generation in the mouths of the people. The acceptance of pastoral ballads into this great ma.s.s of traditional literature is at least as good evidence of their popular character as that of authors.h.i.+p could be. In such a body of literature it would indeed be surprising had the _pastourelle_ motive not found entrance; but it is noteworthy that whereas the French and Latin poems are habitually written from the point of view of the lover, the English ballads adopt that of the peasant maiden to whom the high-born suitor pays his court. At once the simplest and most poetical of the ballads on this model is that printed by Scott as _The Broom of Cowdenknows_, a t.i.tle to which in all probability it has little claim. It is a delightful example of the minor ballad literature, and I am by no means inclined to regard it as a mere amplification of the much shorter and rather abrupt _Bonny May_ of Herd's collection, though the latter, so far as it goes, probably offers a less sophisticated text. In either case a gentleman riding along meets a girl milking, obtains her love, and ultimately returns and marries her. A similar incident, in which, however, the seducer marries the girl under compulsion and then discovers her to be of n.o.ble parentage, is told in a ballad, of which a number of versions have been collected in Scotland under the t.i.tle of _Earl Richard_ or _Earl Lithgow_, and of which an English version was current in the seventeenth century and was quoted more than once by Beaumont and Fletcher.[72] This was printed by Percy in the _Reliques_, and two broadsides of it dating from the restoration are preserved in the Roxburghe collection. It is inferior to the northern versions, but both are probably late, and contain stanzas belonging to or copied from other ballads, notably the _Bonny Hynd_ of the Herd ma.n.u.script and _Burd Helen_ (the Scotch version of _Child Waters_). The t.i.tle of the broadsides is interesting as betraying the influence of the regular pastoral tradition: 'The beautifull Shepherdesse of Arcadia. A new pastarell Song of a courteous young Knight, and a supposed Shepheards Daughter.'[73] Again, apparently from the Aberdeen district, comes a ballad on the marriage of a shepherd's daughter to the Laird of Drum. On the other hand we find three somewhat similar ballads, _Lizie Lindsay_ or _Donald of the Isles, Lizie Baillie_, and _Glasgow Peggie_, recording the elopement of a town girl with a highland gentleman in the disguise of a shepherd. These are obviously late, though a certain resemblance in style with _Johnie Faa_ makes it possible that they are as old as the middle of the seventeenth century. None of the pastoral ballads, indeed, can show any credentials which would suggest an earlier date than the second half of the sixteenth century, nor can any of them lay claim to first-rate poetic merit.[74]

Another example of native pastoral, earlier and far more genuine in character, is to be found in the religious drama. The romantic possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the 'shepherd' plays of the mystery cycles. We possess the plays on the adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all.

The rustic element varies in each case, but it a.s.sumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the Cotton ma.n.u.script. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the fail d.y.k.e of the 'bought i' the lirk o' the hill' that caught the imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York, Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of the guild cycle.[75]

It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the two Towneley plays. These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three portions: first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration. The two latter do not particularly concern us. Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the _Gloria_, in the Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for

Abacuc and ely prophesyde so, Elezabeth and zachare and many other mo, And david as veraly is witnes thereto, Iohn Bapyste sewrly and daniel also.

More remarkable still is one shepherd's familiarity with the cla.s.sics:

Virgill in his poetre sayde in his verse, Even thus by gramere as I shall reherse; 'Iam nova progenies celo demitt.i.tur alto, Iam rediet virgo, redeunt saturnia regna.'[78]

It is perhaps no matter for surprise that one of his less learned fellows should break out with more force than delicacy:

Weme! tord! what speke ye here in myn eeres?

Tell us no clerge I hold you of the freres.

It is one of the little ironies of literature that in the earliest picture of pastoral life in England the greatest pastoral writer of Rome should be quoted, not as a pastoralist, but as a magician.

Before the appearance of the angels, however, there is nothing to lead one to expect this strange display of learning. A rougher, simpler set of countrymen it would have been hard to find in the England of Chaucer and Langland. In the shepherd-play known as _prima pastorum_ the comic element consists mostly in quarrels and feasting among the shepherds, but in the _secunda pastorum_ it const.i.tutes a regular little three-scene farce, which at its date was absolutely unique in literature. It is thence only a step, and a very short one, to John Heywood's interludes--though it is a step that took more than a century to accomplish.

The first shepherd comes in complaining of the hard weather; his fingers are chapped, the storms blow from every quarter in turn. 'Sely shepardes,'

moreover, are put upon by any rich upstart and have no redress. A second shepherd appears with another grumble: 'We sely wedmen dre mekyll wo.'

Some men, indeed, have been known to desire two wives or even three, but most would sooner have none at all. Whereupon enters Daw, a third shepherd, complaining of portents 'With mervels mo and mo.' 'Was never syn noe floode sich floodys seyn'; even 'I se shrewys pepe'--apparently a portentous omen. At this point Mak comes on the scene. He is a notorious bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself 'a yoman, I tell you, of the king,' and complains that his wife eats him out of house and home. The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they lie down to rest they place him the middle man of three. As soon, however, as the shepherds are asleep--'that may ye all here'--Mak borrows a sheep and makes off. Arrived at home he would like to eat the sheep at once, but he is afraid of being followed, so the animal is put in the cradle and wrapped up to resemble a baby, and Mak goes back to take his place among the shepherds. Before long these awake and rouse Mak, who, pretending he has dreamt that Gill his wife has been brought to bed of another child, goes off home. The shepherds miss one of their sheep and, following him, find Gill on the bed while Mak sings a lullaby at the cradle. They proceed to search the house, Gill the while praying she may eat the child in the cradle if ever she deceived them. They find nothing, and are about to depart when Daw insists on kissing the new baby. Gill vows she saw the child changed by an elf as the clock struck midnight, but Mak pleads guilty and gets off with a blanketing.

So far, intentionally in the case of the drama, and if not intentionally at least practically in that of the ballads, the appeal of the native pastoral impulse--tradition it could hardly yet be called--was to an audience little if at all removed from the actual condition of life depicted. This ensured at least essential reality, for though in the one case there may be idealization in a romantic and in the other in a burlesque direction, either implies that familiarity with the actual world which appears to underlie all vital art.[79] It was not long, however, before the pastoral began to address itself to a more cultivated society, and in so doing sacrificed that wholesome corrective of a genuinely critical audience which is needed in the long run to keep any literary form from degeneration. The impulse is still, however, found in all its freshness and genuineness in such a poem as the following fifteenth-century nativity carol, which, in its blending of piety and humorous rusticity, is strongly reminiscent of the dramatic productions we have just been reviewing:

The shepherd upon a hill he sat, He had on him his tabard and his hat, His tar-box, his pipe, and his flagat, His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat!

For he was a good herds-boy, Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Can I not sing but hoy.

The shepherd on a hill he stood, Round about him his sheep they yode, He put his hand under his hood, He saw a star as red as blood.

Ut hoy! &c.

Now must I go there Christ was born, Farewell! I come again to-morn, Dog, keep well my sheep fro the corn!

And warn well Warroke when I blow my horn!

Ut hoy! &c.[80]

So, again, in the delightful poem that has won for Robert Henryson the t.i.tle of the first English pastoralist the warm blood of natural feeling yet runs full. _Robene and Makyne_ stands on the threshold of the sixteenth century, a modest and pastoral counterpart of the _Nut-Brown Maid_, as evidence that there were poets of purely native inspiration capable of writing verses every whit as perfect in form as anything produced by the Italianizers of the next generation, and commonly far more genuine in feeling. Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development and conventionalization of the native tendency. Such is the _Harpelus'

Complaint_ of 'Tottel's Miscellany.' This was originally printed among the poems of uncertain authors, but when it re-appeared in _England's Helicon_, in 1600, it was subscribed with Surrey's name. The ascription does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus' epitaph:

Phylida was a fayer mayde, And fresh as any flowre: Whom Harpalus the herdman prayed To be his paramour.

Harpalus and eke Corin Were herdmen both yfere: And Phillida could twist and spin And therto sing full clere.

But Phillida was all to coy For Harpelus to winne.

For Corin was her onely joye, Who forst her not a pynne.[82]

The relation of the early Italianizers to pastoral is rather strange.

Pastoral names, imagery and conventions are freely scattered throughout their works, yet with the exception of the above there is scarcely a poem to which the term pastoral can be properly applied. They borrowed from their models a kind of pastoral diction merely, not their partiality for the form: 'shepherd' is with them merely another word for lover or poet, while almost any act of such may be described as 'folding his sheep' or the like. Allegory has reduced itself to a few stock phrases. In this fas.h.i.+on Surrey complains to his fair Geraldine, and a whole company of unknown lovers celebrate the cruelty and beauty of their ladies. It is rarely that we catch a note of fresher reminiscence or more spontaneous song as in Wyatt's:

Ah, Robin!

Joly Robin!

Tell me how thy leman doth!

Happily the seed of Phillida's coyness bore fruit, and the amorous pastoral ballad or picture, a true _idyllion_, became a recognized type in English verse. It certainly owed something to foreign pastoral models, and, like the bulk of Elizabethan lyrics, a good deal to Italian poetry in general; but in its freshness and variety, as in its tendency to narrative form, it a.s.serts its independence of any rigid tradition, and justifies us in regarding it as an outcome of that native impulse which we have already noticed. Such a poem is Nicholas Breton's ever charming _Phyllida and Corydon_, printed above his signature in _England's Helicon_.[83] Although we are thereby antic.i.p.ating, it may be quoted as a representative specimen of its kind:

In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day, Forth I walk'd by a wood-side, When as May was in his pride: There I spied all alone, Phyllida and Corydone.

Much ado there was, G.o.d wot!

He would love and she would not.

She said, never man was true; He said, none was false to you.

He said, he had loved her long; She said, Love should have no wrong.

Corydon would kiss her then; She said, maids must kiss no men, Till they did for good and all; Then she made the shepherd call All the heavens to witness truth Never loved a truer youth.

Thus with many a pretty oath, Yea and nay, and faith and troth, Such as silly shepherds use When they will not Love abuse, Love which had been long deluded Was with kisses sweet concluded; And Phyllida, with garlands gay, Was made the lady of the May.

We must now turn to the beginnings of regular pastoral tradition in this country, springing up under direct foreign influence and in conscious and avowed imitation of specific foreign models. Pa.s.sing over the Latin eclogues of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe.

Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay's case at any rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators, from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish them. Of the professed translators themselves it may be well to say a few words in this place and allow them at once to resume their veil of well-deserved oblivion. Their influence may be taken as non-existent, and their only interest lies in the indication they afford of the trend of literary fas.h.i.+on. The earliest was George Turberville, who in 1567 translated the first nine of Mantuan's eclogues into English fourteeners.

The verse is fairly creditable, but the exaggeration of style, endeavouring by sheer brutality of phrase to force the moral judgement it lacks the art of more subtly stimulating, produces neither a very pleasing nor a very edifying effect. This translation went through three editions before the end of the century. The whole ten eclogues did not find a translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was Theocritus, of whose works 'Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty, Poems, or Aeglogues,' were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated to E. D.--probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer--in 1588. As before, the verse, mostly fourteeners, is far from bad, but the selection is not very much to our purpose. Three of the pieces, a singing match, a love complaint, and one of the Galatea poems, are more or less pastoral; but the rest--among which is the dainty conceit of Venus and the boar well rendered in a three-footed measure--do not belong to bucolic verse at all.

Incidental mention may be also made of a 'dialogue betwixt two sea nymphs, Doris and Galatea, concerning Polyphemus, briefly translated out of Lucian,' by Giles Fletcher the elder, in his _Licia_ of 1593; and a version of 'The First Eidillion of Moschus describing Love,' in Barnabe Barnes' _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, which probably appeared the same year. Lastly we have the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil, translated in 1589 by Abraham Fleming into rimeless fourteeners.[84] Besides these there are a few odd translations from Vergil among the experiments of the cla.s.sical versifiers. Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586), gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce's _Lawyer's Logic_ (1588), and again with corrections in his _Ivychurch_ (1591).[85] Several further translations followed in the seventeenth century.

But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt's _Stultifera Navis_, priest and monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury. It seems to have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues. They appeared at various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the writer's death, to the _s.h.i.+p of Fools_ of 1570.[86] They are there headed 'Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium, compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.' This sufficiently indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of the previous century. The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon, a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix, for whom the great world has long lost its glamour. The fourth eclogue, 'treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,' is similarly 'taken out of' Mantuan. In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very individual but pretty l.u.s.ty satire against Skelton.[88] He also introduces, as recited by one of the characters, 'The description of the Towre of vertue and honour, into which the n.o.ble Howarde contended to enter by worthy actes of chivalry,' a stanzaic composition in honour of Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513. The fifth eclogue, 'of the disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,' or the _Cytezen and Uplondyshman_, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series.

These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre--in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refas.h.i.+oned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the _Shepherd's Calender_. The following lines from the fifth eclogue may serve to ill.u.s.trate Barclay's style: