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 Phoenix 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
