THEOCRITUS.—Concluded.

Having seen the force and comic humour of Theocritus, let us now, if we can, give something of a taste of his pathos, and conclude with him as the Prince of Pastoral. We shall find the one leading to the other, or rather identified with it, for Polyphemus was himself a shepherd, and all his imagery and associations are drawn from pastoral life. Our English, it is to be borne in mind, is not the Greek. The poet must have all the benefit of that admission. But at any rate we have done our best not to spoil the original with such artificial modes of speech as destroy all pathos; and feeling has a common language everywhere, which he who is thoroughly moved by it, can never wholly misrepresent.

The story is that of Polyphemus under the circumstances alluded to in our second chapter. It is addressed to the poet’s friend Nicias, and is the earliest evidence of that particular personal regard for the medical profession, which is so observable in the history of men of letters; for Nicias was a physician.

THE CYCLOPS IN LOVE.
There is no other medicine against love,
My Nicias, (so at least it seems to me,)
Either to cure it or to calm, but song.
That, that indeed is balmy to men’s minds,
And sweet; but ’tis a balm rare to be found;
Though not by you, my friend, who are at once
Physician, and belov’d by all the Nine.
It was by this the Cyclops liv’d among us,
I mean that ancient shepherd, Polypheme,
Who lov’d the sea-nymph, when he budded first
About the lips and curling temples;—lov’d,
Not in the little present-making style,
With baskets of new fruit and pots of roses,
But with consuming passion. Many a time
Would his flocks go home by themselves at eve,
Leaving him wasting by the dark sea-shore;
And sunrise would behold him wasting still.
Yet ev’n a love like his found balm in verse,
For he would sit, and look along the sea,
And from his rock pipe to some strain like this:—
“O my white love, my Galatea, why
Avoid me thus? O whiter than the curd,
Gentler than any lamb, fuller of play
Than kids, yet bitterer than the bright young grape,
You come sometimes, when sweet sleep holds me fast;
You break away, when sweet sleep lets me loose;
Gone, like a lamb at sight of the grey wolf.
“Sweet, I began to love you, when you first
Came with my mother to the mountain side
To gather hyacinths. I show’d the way;
And then, and afterwards, and to this hour,
I could not cease to love you; you, who care
Nothing about my love—Great Jove! no, nothing.
“Fair one, I know why you avoid me thus:
It is because one rugged eyebrow spreads
Across my forehead, solitary and huge,
Shading this eye forlorn. My nose, too, presses
Flat tow’rds my lip. And yet, such as I am,
I feed a thousand sheep; and from them drink
Excellent milk; and never want for cheese
In summer, nor in autumn, nor dead winter,
Dairies I have, so full. I can play, too,
Upon the pipe, so as no Cyclops can,
Singing, sweet apple mine, of you and me,
Often till midnight. And I keep for you
Four bears’ whelps, and eleven fawns with collars:
Come to me then, for you shall have them all.
Let the sea rake on the dull shore. Your nights
Would be far sweeter here, well hous’d with me.
The place is beautiful with laurel-trees,
With cypresses, with ivy, and the vine,
The dulcet vine: and here, too, is a stream,
Heavenly to drink, the water is so cold.
The woody Ætna sends it down to me
Out of her pure white snows. Who could have this,
And choose to live in the wild salt-sea waves?
Perhaps, when I am talking of my trees,
You think me ruder than the trunks? more rough;
More rugged-bodied? Ah, they keep me warm;
They blaze upon my hearth; yet, I could lose
Warmth, life, and all, and burn in the same fire,
Rather than dwell beside it without you.
Nay, I could burn the eye from out my head,
Though nothing else be dearer.
“Oh, poor me!
Alas! that I was born a finless body,
And cannot dive to you, and kiss your hand;
Or, if you grudg’d me that, bring you white lilies,
And the fresh poppy with its thin red leaves.
And yet not so; for poppies grow in summer,
Lilies in spring; and so I could not, both.
But should some coaster, sweetest, in his ship
Come here to see me, I would learn to swim;
And then I might find out what joy there is
In living, as you do, in the dark deeps.
“O Galatea, that you would but come;
And having come, forget, as I do now,
Here where I sat me, to go home again!
You should keep sheep with me, and milk the dams,
And press the cheese from the sharp-tasted curd.
It is my mother that’s to blame. She never
Told you one kind, endearing thing of me,
Though she has seen me wasting day by day.
My very head and feet, for wretchedness,
Throb—and so let ’em; for I too am wretched.
O Cyclops, Cyclops, where are thy poor senses?
Go to thy basket-making; get their supper
For the young lambs. ’Twere wiser in thee, far.
Prize what thou hast, and let the lost sheep go.
Perhaps thou’lt find another Galatea,
Another, and a lovelier; for at night
Many girls call to me to come and play,
And when they find me list’ning, they all giggle
So that e’en I seem counted somebody.”
Thus Polyphemus medicined his love
With pipe and song; and found it ease him more
Than all the balms he might have bought with gold.

What say you, reader? Is not the monster touching? Do we not accord with his self-pity? feel for his throbbing pulse and his hopeless humility, and wish it were possible for a beauty to love a shepherd with one eye?—For the poet, observe, with great address, has said nothing about the giant. He has sunk the man-mountain. We may rate him at what equivocal measure we please, and consider him a respectable primÆval sort of pastoral Orson. It appears to us, that there is no truer pathos of its kind in the whole circle of poetry than the passages about the sheep and wolf, the throbbing pulses just mentioned, and the lover’s humble attempt to get a little consolation of vanity out of the equivocal interest taken in him by the “giggling” damsels at the foot of his hill. The word “giggle,” which is the literal translation of the Greek word, and singularly like it in the main sound, would have been thought very bold by a conventional poet. Not so thought the poet whose truth to nature has made him immortal.

We are to fancy the Sicilian girls on a summer night (all the world is out of door there on summer nights) calling to Polyphemus up the mountain. They live at the foot of it—of Ætna. They have heard him stirring in the trees. The stir ceases. They know he is listening; and in the silence of the glen below, he hears them laughing at his attention. Such scenes take place all over the world, where there is any summer, Britain included. We doubt whether Virgil or Tasso would have ventured upon the word. But Ariosto would. Homer and Shakspeare would. So would Dante. So would Catullus, a very Greek man. And it would surely not have been avoided by the author of the Gentle Shepherd, whose perception of homely truth puts him on a par in this respect with the greatest truth poetical.

This love-story of Polyphemus is pastoral poetry in its highest passionate condition. Of pastoral, in the sense in which it is generally understood, a briefer or better specimen cannot be given than in the opening passages of our poet’s volume. You are in the circle of pastoral at once, and in one of its loveliest spots. You are in the open air under pine-trees by fountain-heads, in company with two born poets, goatherd and shepherd though they be; poets such as Burns and Allan Ramsay might have been, had they been born in Sicily.

A word, before we proceed, in respect to that interfusion of eloquent and therefore sometimes elegant expression which has been charged on one of the most natural of poets as an affectation, but which, as he treats it, is only in unison with the popular genius of the south. In Virgil it became a rhetorical mistake; an artificial flower stuck in the ground. In Theocritus it was the growth of the soil; myrtle and almond springing by the wayside.

Poetical expression in humble life is to be found all over the south. In the instances of Burns, Ramsay, and others, the north also has seen it. Indeed, it is not a little remarkable, that Scotland, which is more northern than England, and possesses not even a nightingale, has had more of it than its southern neighbour. What that is owing to, is a question; perhaps to the very restrictions of John Knox and his fellows, and Nature’s happy tendency to counteract them. Or it may have originated in the wild and uncertain habits of highlanders and borderers. Certainly, the Scotch have shown a more genial and impulsive spirit in their songs and dances than the English. We have nothing among us like the Highland Fling, or the reel of Tullochgorum, or the songs of Gaberlunzie Men, Jolly Beggars, and The gude man he cam’ hame at e’en. But extremes meet; and the Scotch, in their hardihood, their very poverty, and occasional triumphs over it in fits of excess, appear to have been driven by a jovial desperation into the vivacities inspired by the sunshine of the south. Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in this respect; for they are poorer; their land is in the English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling is far more common and more eloquent among them, than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, very like a southern people; and, if a doubt, alas! did not arise that misfortune itself was their inspirer by sharpening their sensibility, would give an almost laughable corroboration to their claims of a Milesian descent. Now, the Italian peasantry to this day, particularly the Tuscan, exhibit, as they always did, a like poetical fancy, but with more elegance; and so, we doubt not, did those of Greece and Sicily. The latter, in modern times, have been checked in their faculties by unfavourable government; but in the time of Theocritus, the subjects of the overflowingly rich cities of Syracuse and Agrigentum must have been as willing and able to pour out all they felt, as so many well-fed thrushes and blackbirds; and anybody at all acquainted with the less rich, but not ill-governed, Tuscan peasantry, knows well with how much eloquence, and even refinement, it is possible for people in humble life to express themselves, when the language is favourable, and circumstances not otherwise. Mr. Stewart Rose has given some amusing instances in his Letters from the North of Italy. Asking a Florentine servant if he understood some directions given him, the man said, “Yes, for he always spoke in relief” (“Che parlava sempre scolpito”). Nothing could be better expressed than this. Another time, his good-natured master, inquiring if he was comfortable on the coach-box, the servant answered that he was very well off; for “here,” said he, “one springs it” (“che quÌ si molleggia”). The verb was coined for the occasion from the noun molla, a spring. Another man being asked the way to a particular house, told him to go straight forwards to the end of the street, and it would “tumble on his head.” This is very Irish. An Italian acquaintance of Mr. Rose was passing through a street in Florence at serenade time, when he beheld a dog looking up at a female of his species in a balcony, and at the same time scratching his ribs. One of the Florentine populace, who happened to be passing, stopped, and cried out, “He is in love, and playing the guitar, serenading the fair one” (“È innamorato; suona la chitarra; fÀ la cucchiata alla bella”). A Roman laquais de place (but he is a more sophisticate authority) once asked the same writer, on seeing him look at a wild-flower in the fields, whether it was the signor’s “pleasure that he should cull it?” (“Commanda che lo carpa?”) For our poetical word “cull,” though its meaning is different, may represent the unvernacular elegance of carpa, pluck. The laquais de place, it seems, “talked like a cardinal.” We have ourselves, however, heard a coachman’s wife, who was a Roman, pour forth a stream of elegant language that astonished us.

A neighbour of ours, near Fiesole, a fine old Tuscan peasant, who was clipping a hedge, said to us one day, as we exchanged salutation with him, “I am trimming the bush’s beard” (“FÒ la barba al bosco”). But a Florentine female servant, who had the child of an acquaintance in her arms, and who, like the generality of her countrywomen, was perfectly unaffected, carried the aristocratic refinement of her style higher, perhaps, than any of the persons mentioned. Some remarks being made respecting the countenances of her master’s children, she asked us whether the one in her arms did not form an exception; whether, in fact, we did not think that it had “a kind of plebeian look” (“un certo aspetto plebeo”).

So much for the ability of the humbler orders to speak with force and delicacy, when sensibility gives them the power of expression, and animal spirits the courage to use it.

PASSAGES FROM THE FIRST IDYLL OF THEOCRITUS.

In Theocritus’s opening poem, the time of day is a hot noon, and a shepherd and goatherd appear to have been piping under their respective trees, we suppose at a reasonable distance. The shepherd goes towards the goatherd, who seems to stop playing; and on approaching him commences the dialogue by observing, that there is something extremely pleasant in the whisper of the pine under which he is sitting, but not less so was the something he was playing just now on his pipe. He declares that he is the next best player after Pan himself; and that if Pan were to have a ram for his prize, the ewe would of necessity fall to the goatherd.

Sweet sings the rustling of your pine to-day
Over the fountain-heads; and no less sweet
Upon the pipe play you.

The Greek word for rustling, or rather whispering—psithurisma—is much admired. “Whispering” is hardly strong enough, and not so long drawn out. There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma. The goatherd returns the compliment by telling the shepherd that his singing during such hot weather (for we must always keep in mind the accessories implied by good poets) is sweeter than the flowing abundance of the waterfall out of the rock. The two verses in which this is expressed are a favourite quotation, on account of the imitative beauty of the second sentence. We know not whether they would equally please every critical ear, for “doctors,” even of music, “differ.” Much of the divine writing of Beethoven seems to have been as appalling at first to the orchestral world, as olives are to most palates; and there is a passage in Mozart which to this day is a choke-pear to the scientific, albeit they acknowledge that he intended it to be written as it stands. For our parts, we have great faith in the ultra-delights perceptible in the enormities of Beethoven, Mozart, and olives; and suspect there is more music in the very hissing and clatter in the sentence in Theocritus, to say nothing of its obvious rush and leaping, than has been quite perceived by every scholar who has praised it. It is a pity that all musical people do not read Greek; for they deserve to do so; which is what cannot be said of all scholars. Perhaps some of them would be glad to see the passage, even in English characters. We remember, before we knew any others, the delight we used to take in the Greek quotations, thus printed in the novels of Smollett and Fielding, and shall make no further apology for a like bit of typography. We shall first give the measure of the original verse in corresponding English hexameters. The English language does not take kindly to the measure. The hexameter is too salient and cantering for it. But once and away the anomaly may be tolerated, especially for illustration’s sake. The passage in English words may run thus:—

SweÈter, O shÈpherd, thy sÌnging is, thÀn the sonÒrous
GÙsh from abÒve of the wÀterfall oÙt of the rÒck-stone.

There is no imitative attempt of another sort in this version. It is given simply to show a general likeness to the measure. The sound of the original, as everybody will discern, is much more to the purpose, though judges will differ perhaps as to whether it is more effective in softness or in strength, in leap or in volume. We are obliged to adapt the spelling, in one or two instances, to the necessities of the pronunciation. The literal Greek order of the words would, in English, be:—

Sweeter, O shepherd, the thy song, than the sonorous
That (or yonder) from the rock-stone much flows from above water.
HÀdion o poiman to teÒn melos È to katÀches
Teen appo tas pÈtras katalÈibetai hÈupsothen hÈudor.KatalÈibetai (much, or strongly, or abundantly, flows), with the accent on the diphthong ei, is certainly a fine strenuous word, at once strong and liquid, and appreciable by any ear. And hÈupsothen hÈudor (from above water), with its two successive u’s, will be equally admitted, we think, to express the constant yearning rush of the water from inside the well.

The goatherd promises the shepherd, if he will sing to him, the gift of a huge wine-cup, adorned with figures. The following exquisite picture is among them. We give it in the version of Mr. M. J. Chapman, a living writer, not unworthy his venerable namesake, and by far the best translator of Theocritus that has appeared:—

??t?s?e? d? ????, &c.
With flowing robe, and Lydian head-dress on,
Within, a woman to the life is done—
An exquisite design! On either side
Two men with flowing locks each other chide,
By turns contending for the woman’s love;
But not a whit her mind their pleadings move:
One while she gives to this a glance and smile,
And turns and smiles on that another while.

To the apparently formidable objection made by some critics, that no artist could make a woman look on two people one after the other, Mr. Chapman happily answers:—“Theocritus described an image that was before his mind’s eye, and for so doing he needs no defence; but the matter-of-fact critic may be able, perhaps, to obtain an approximation to the idea, by considering attentively the print of ‘Garrick divided between Tragedy and Comedy.’”[5]

This picture is followed by one of an old able-bodied fisherman at his labours, with the muscles of his neck swelling like those of a strong young man; and to this succeeds a third, as good as that of the Coquette—some will think better. It is a boy so intent upon making a trap, that he is not aware of the presence of two foxes, one of whom is meditating to abduct his breakfast.

A little boy sits by the thorn-edge trim,
To watch the grapes—two foxes watching him;

(The version of this line is original in the turn of it, and very happy.)

One through the ranges of the vine proceeds,
And on the hanging vintage slily feeds;
The other plots and vows his scrip to search,
And for his breakfast leave him in the lurch.
Meanwhile he twines, and to a rush fits well
A locust-trap, with stalks of asphodel;
And twines away with such absorbing glee,
Of scrip or vines he never thinks, not he!
Chapman, p. 8.In the pastorals of Bion we know nothing of prominent interest, though he is eloquent and worth reading. But in those of Moschus there is a passage which has found an echo in all bosoms, like the sigh that answers a wind over a churchyard. It is in the Elegy on Bion’s death:—

??, a?, ta? a???a? ?? ?p?? ?at? ??p?? ????ta?,
? t? ????? s????a, t? t’ e??a?e? ????? ??????,
?ste??? a? ????t?, ?a? e?s ?t?? ???? f???t?·
?e? d’ ?? e?????, ?a? ?a?t????, ? s?f?? ??d?e?,
?pp?te p??ta ????e?, ??a???? ?? ????? ????a,
??d?e? e? ??a a????, ?t????a, ????et?? ?p???.
Idyll iii. v. 104.
Alas! when mallows in the garden die,
Green parsley, or the crisp luxuriant dill,
They live again, and flower another year;
But we, how great soe’er, or strong, or wise,
When once we die, sleep, in the senseless earth,
A long, an endless, unawakeable sleep.

The beautiful original of these verses, every word so natural and sincere, so well placed, and the whole so affecting, may stand by the side of any poetry, even that of the passage in the Book of Job too well known to most of us. But we confess that after such Greek verses as these, and the fresh flowers of Theocritus, we never have the heart to quote the artificial ones of Virgil, critically accomplished as they are. They are the pattern of too many others which brought the word Pastoral into disrepute; and it is not pleasant to be forced to object to a great name.

Virgil, however, appears to have been very fond of the country; and after he was settled in Rome, longed for it, like Horace, with a feeling which produced some of his most admired passages; things which other metropolitan poets and tired court gentlemen have delighted to translate. Such are the Delights of a Country Life, versified out of the Georgics by Cowley, Sir William Temple, Dryden, and others, lines of which remain for ever in the memory.

Oh happy (if his happiness he knows)
The country swain, &c.

He has no great riches, or visitors, or cares, &c., but his life

Does with substantial blessedness abound,
And the soft wings of peace cover him round.

That is Cowley, who betters his original.

In life’s cool vale let my low scene be laid;
Cover me, gods! with Tempe’s thickest shade.

So again of the shepherd:—

—In th’ evening of a fair sunny day,
With joy he sees his flocks and kids to play,
And loaded kine about his cottage stand,
Inviting with known sound the milker’s hand;
And when from wholesome labour he doth come,
With wishes to be there, and wish’d for home,
He meets at door the softest human blisses,
His chaste wife’s welcome, and dear children’s kisses.

Of a similar kind is Cowley’s translation of Claudian’s Old Man of Verona:—

Happy the man who his whole time doth bound
Within th’ enclosure of his little ground.—
Him no false distant lights, by fortune set,
Could ever into foolish wanderings get;—
No change of consuls marks to him the year:
The change of seasons is his calendar:
The cold and heat winter and summer shows;
Autumn by fruits, and spring by flow’rs, he knows:—
A neighb’ring wood born with himself he sees,
And loves his old contemporary trees.

The most original bit of Pastoral in Virgil (if it be his) is to be found in a poem of doubtful authority called the Gnat (Culex), which has been beautifully translated by Spenser. It is a true picture, combining the elegance of Claude with the minuteness of the Flemish painters:—

The fiery sun was mounted now on height
Up to the heavenly towers, and shot each where
Out of his golden charet glistering light;
And fayre Aurora, with her rosie haire,
The hatefull darkness now had put to flight;
When as the shepherd, seeing day appeare,
His little goats gan drive out of their stalls,
To feede abroad, where pasture best befalls.
To an high mountain’s top he with them went,
Where thickest grasse did cloath the open hills:
They, now amongst the woods and thicketts ment,
Now in the vallies wandring at their wills,
Spread themselves farre abroad through each descent;
Some on the soft green grasse feeding their fills;
Some, clambering through the hollow cliffes on hy,
Nibble the bushie shrubs which growe thereby.
Others the utmost boughs of trees doe crop,
And brouze the woodbine twigges that freshly bud;
This with full bit doth catch the utmost top
Of some soft willow or new-growen stud;
That with sharpe teeth the bramble leaves doth lop,
And chaw the tender prickles in her cud;
The whiles another high doth overlooke
Her own like image in a cristall brook.

This is picturesque and charming. Yet Virgil, though a country-loving, and also an agricultural poet, would have been nothing as a pastoral poet without Theocritus, and, as it was, he spoiled him. We shall see in what manner, when we come to speak of Pope.