The title and story of the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, in combination with those of the Faithful Shepherd (Pastor Fido) of Guarini, appear to have suggested to Fletcher his Faithful Shepherdess. This is undoubtedly the chief pastoral play in our language, though, with all its beauties, we can hardly think it ought to have been such, considering what Shakspeare and Spenser have shown that they could have done in this Arcadian region. The illustrious author, exquisite poet as he was, and son of a bishop to boot, had the misfortune, with his friend Beaumont, to be what is called a “man upon town;” which polluted his sense of enjoyment and rendered him but imperfectly in earnest, even when he most wished to be so. Hence his subserviency to the taste of those painful gentlemen called men of pleasure, and his piecing out his better sentiments with exaggeration. Hence the revolting character, in this play, of a “Wanton Shepherdess,” which is an offence to the very voluptuousness it secretly intended to interest; and hence the opposite offence of the character of the “Faithful Shepherdess” herself, who is ostentatiously made such a paragon of chastity, and values herself so excessively on the self-denial, that the virtue itself is compromised, and you can see that the author had very little faith in it. And we have little doubt that this was the cause why the play was damned (for such is the startling fact), and not the ignorance of the audience, to which Beaumont and Ben Jonson indignantly attributed it. The audience could not reconcile such painful, and, as it must have appeared to them, such hypocritical contradictions: and very distressing to the author must it have been to find, that he had himself contributed to create that sceptical tone of mind in the public respecting both himself and the female sex, which refused to take him at his word when he was for putting on a graver face, and claiming their ultra-belief in all that he chose to assume. The “Faithful Shepherdess” is a young widow, who is always talking of devoting herself to her husband’s memory; and her lover Thenot is so passionately enamoured of her, that he says if she were to give up the devotion, his passion would be lost. He entreats her at once to “hear him” and to “deny!” This child’s play is what the audience could not tolerate. It was a pity; for there are passages in the Faithful Shepherdess as lovely as poet could write. We are never tired of hearing—

How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,
To kiss her sweetest.

So of the dessert gathered by the Satyr for the nymph Syrinx:—

Here be grapes, whose lusty blood
Is the learned poet’s good;
Sweeter yet did never crown
The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown
Than the squirrel’s teeth that crack them;
Deign, oh, fairest fair, to take them.
For these black-eyed Driope
Hath oftentimes commanded me
With my claspÈd knee to climb:
See how well the lusty time
Hath decked their rising cheeks in red,
Such as on your lips is spread.
Here be berries for a queen,
Some be red, some be green;
These are of that luscious meat,
The great god Pan himself doth eat;
All these, and what the woods can yield,
The hanging mountain or the field,
I freely offer, and ere long
Will bring you more, more sweet and strong;
Till then humbly leave I take,
Lest the great Pan do awake,
That sleeping lies in a deep glade
Under a broad beech’s shade.
I must go, I must run,
Swifter than the fiery sun.

See also the love made by the river-god at the end of the third Act, which we have not room to quote; and the Satyr’s account of dawn, which opens with the four most exquisite lines perhaps in the whole play:—

See, the day begins to break,
And the light shoots like a streak
Of subtle fire.—The wind blows cold,
While the morning doth unfold.Who has not felt this mingled charmingness and chilliness (we do not use the words for the sake of the alliteration) at the first opening of the morning! Yet none but the finest poets venture upon thus combining pleasure with something that might be thought a drawback. But it is truth; and it is truth in which the beauty surmounts the pain; and therefore they give it. And how simple and straightforward is every word! There are no artificial tricks of composition here. The words are not suggested to the truth by the author, but to the author by the truth. We feel the wind blowing as simply as it does in nature; so that if the reader be artificially trained, and does not bring a feeling for truth with him analogous to that of the poet, the very simplicity is in danger of losing him the perception of the beauty. And yet there is art as well as nature in the verses; for art in the poet must perfect what nature does by her own art. Observe, for instance, the sudden and strong emphasis on the word shoots, and the variety of tone and modulation in the whole passage, with the judicious exceptions of the two o’s in the “wind blows cold,” which have the solemn continuous sound of what it describes: also, the corresponding ones in “doth unfold,” which maintain the like continuity of the growing daylight. And exquisite, surely, is the dilatory and golden sound of the word “morning” between them:

The wind blows cold,
While the mor-ning doth unfold.

Milton’s Comus, though not equal throughout to the Faithful Shepherdess in descriptive judgment (for it talks of “groves of myrrh and cinnamon” on the banks of a British river), is altogether a finer poem, and a far better recommendation of chastity. Indeed, it might rather have been called Castitas than Comus; for Comus has little justice done to his powers of temptation. Perhaps Fletcher’s failure in recommending chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to Milton. His emulation of particular passages in the Faithful Shepherdess, particularly on that subject, has been noticed by the commentators. But Comus is a mask, not a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a pastoral mask; for the shepherd is the least person in it; and though the Italians identify the pastoral with the sylvan drama, or fable transacted in the woods, which are the scene of action in Comus, the reader feels that the woods have really almost as little to do with it as the fields;—that the moral, in fact, is all in all; which is the reason why nobody takes very heartily to the subject, especially as Milton acts in morals like a kind of solemn partisan, and does not run, like Shakspeare, the whole circle of humanity in arguing his question.

Milton’s only real pastoral (with the exception of the country part of the Allegro) is his allegorical monody on the death of his friend King,—the Lycidas; and a beautiful one it is, though Dr. Johnson, in his one-sided misapplication of a right principle, laughed at grief which departs from the ordinary phases of life, and which talks of nymphs and river-gods, and “satyrs with cloven heel.” “Grief,” he said, “does not talk of such things;” to which Warton said very truly, “But Poetry does;” and he might have added (still more literally than he puts it), that Grief does so too, when it is the grief of one young poet mourning for another. Johnson says that Milton and his friend were not “nursed on the same hill,” as represented in Lycidas; and that they did not “feed the same flock,” &c. But they were, and they did. They were nursed on the same hill of Arcady, and fed the same flock of the ideal pastoral life; and very grievous it was for them to be torn asunder, to be deprived by death of their mutual delight in Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, the beloved haunts of their minds, things which it has agonized friends and poets to be torn away from, both before and since the time of Milton, however little they may have been cared for by dear, good, dictatorial, purblind, un-ideal Dr. Johnson, whose world, though it was a wit’s and a sage’s world too, was not the universal and still sager world of the poet, but made up (exclusively) of the Strand, hypochondria, charity, bigotry, wit, argument, and a good dinner;—a pretty region, but not the green as well as smoky world of Nature and Shakspeare.

Fault has been found also with the intermixture of theology in Lycidas; but it is to be defended on the same ground—namely, that Milton’s young friend studied theology with him as well as poetry; and hence the propriety of introducing the pilot of the Galilean lake.

One ought to be grateful for it, if only for its giving the poet occasion to dismiss the solemn vision, and encourage, in those lovely verses, the beautiful fictions of Paganism and Theocritus to come back:—

Return, AlphÈus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint-enamell’d eyes
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy, freak’d with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies.
******
Thus sang the swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals grey.

These are the chief pastoral writers in the language of the ideal class. Pope professed to be a classical pastoral writer, and split, accordingly, on the hard rock of Latin imitation. Even Gay’s burlesque pastoral was better, for it went to the real fields for its imagery; and Phillips would have surpassed both, if he had not been affected. His verses from Copenhagen, describing a northern winter, are fresh from Nature.

Allan Ramsay is the prince of the homely pastoral drama. Burns wrote in this class of poetry at no such length as Ramsay; but he was pastoral poetry itself, in the shape of an actual, glorious peasant, vigorous as if Homer had written him, and tender as generous strength, or as memories of the grave. Ramsay and he have helped Scotland for ever to take pride in its heather, and its braes, and its bonny rivers, and be ashamed of no beauty or honest truth, in high estate or in low;—an incalculable blessing. Ramsay, to be sure, with all his genius, and though he wrote an entire and excellent dramatic pastoral, in five legitimate acts, is but a small part of Burns;—is but a field in a corner compared with the whole Scots pastoral region. He has none of Burns’s pathos; none of his grandeur; none of his burning energy; none of his craving after universal good. How universal is Burns! What mirth in his cups! What softness in his tears! What sympathy in his very satire! What manhood in everything! If Theocritus, the inventor of a loving and affecting Polyphemus, could have foreseen the verses on the Mouse and the Daisy turned up with plough, the Tam o’ Shanter, O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut, Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon, &c., (not to mention a hundred others, which have less to do with our subject,) tears of admiration would have rushed into his eyes.

Nevertheless Allan Ramsay is not only entitled to the designation we have given him, but in some respects is the best pastoral writer in the world. There are, in truth, two sorts of genuine pastoral—the high ideal of Fletcher and Milton, which is justly to be considered the more poetical,—and the homely ideal, as set forth by Allan Ramsay and some of the Idyls of Theocritus, and which gives us such feelings of nature and passion as poetical rustics not only can, but have entertained, and eloquently described. And we think the Gentle Shepherd, “in some respects,” the best pastoral that ever was written, not because it has anything, in a poetical point of view, to compare with Fletcher and Milton, but because there is, upon the whole, more faith and more love in it, and because the kind of idealized truth which it undertakes to represent, is delivered in a more corresponding and satisfactory form than in any other entire pastoral drama. In fact, the Gentle Shepherd has no alloy whatsoever to its pretensions, such as they are—no failure in plot, language, or character—nothing answering to the coldness and irrelevances of Comus, nor to the offensive and untrue violations of decorum in the “Wanton Shepherdess” of Fletcher’s pastoral, and the pedantic and ostentatious chastity of his Faithful one. It is a pure, healthy, natural, and (of its kind) perfect plant, sprung out of an unluxuriant but not ungenial soil; not hung with the beauty and fragrance of the productions of the higher regions of Parnassus; not waited upon by spirits and enchanted music; a dog-rose, if you will; say rather, a rose in a cottage-garden, dabbled with the morning dew, and plucked by an honest lover to give to his mistress.

Allan Ramsay’s poem is not only a probable and pleasing story, containing charming pictures, much knowledge of life, and a good deal of quiet humour, but in some respects it may be called classical, if by classical is meant ease, precision, and unsuperfluousness of style. Ramsay’s diction is singularly straightforward, seldom needing the assistance of inversions; and he rarely says anything for the purpose of “filling up;”—two freedoms from defect the reverse of vulgar and commonplace; nay, the reverse of a great deal of what pretends to be fine writing, and is received as such. We confess we never tire of dipping into it, “on and off,” any more than into Fletcher, or Milton, or into Theocritus himself, who, for the union of something higher with true pastoral, is unrivalled in short pieces. The Gentle Shepherd is not a forest, nor a mountainside, nor Arcady; but it is a field full of daisies, with a brook in it, and a cottage “at the sunny end;” and this we take to be no mean thing, either in the real or the ideal world. Our Jar of Honey may well lie for a few moments among its heather, albeit filled from Hybla. There are bees, “look you,” in Habbie’s How. Theocritus and Allan shake hands over a shepherd’s pipe. Take the beginning of Scene ii. Act i., both for description and dialogue:—

A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes,
Where lassies use to wash and spread their claes;
A trottin’ birnie wimplin’ through the ground,
Its channel pebbles shining smooth and round.
Here view twa barefoot beauties, clean and clear,
First please your eye, next gratify your ear,
While Jenny what she wishes discommends,
And Meg, with better sense, true love defends.
Jenny. Come, Meg, lets fa’ to work upon this green,
This shining day will bleach our linen clean:
The waters clear, the lift unclouded blue,
Will make them like a lily wet wi’ dew.
Peggy. Gae far’er up the burn to Habbie’s How,
Where a’ the sweets o’ spring and simmer grow;
There ’tween twa birks, out ower a little lin,
The water fa’s, and maks a singin’ din;
A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,
Kisses, wi’ easy whirls, the bordering grass.
We’ll end our washing while the morning’s cool,
And when the day grows het, we’ll to the pool,
There wash oursells; ’tis healthfu’ now in May,
And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day.

This is an out-door picture. Here is an indoor one quite as good—nay, better:—

While Peggy laces up her bosom fair,
With a blue snood Jenny binds up her hair;
Glaud by his morning ingle takes a beek;
The rising sun shines motty through the reek;
A pipe his mouth, the lasses please his een,
And now and then his joke maun intervene.

We would quote, if we could—only it might not look so proper, when isolated—the whole song at the close of Act the Second. The first line of it alone is worth all Pope’s pastorals put together, and (we were going to add) half of those of Virgil; but we reverence too much the great follower of the Greeks, and true lover of the country. There is more sentiment, and equal nature, in the song at the end of Act the Fourth. Peggy is taking leave of her lover, who is going abroad:—

At setting day and rising morn,
Wi’ saul that still shall love thee,
I’ll ask o’ Heaven thy safe return,
Wi’ a’ that can improve thee.
I’ll visit aft the birkin bush,
Where first thou kindly tauld me
Sweet tales of love, and hid my blush,
Whilst round thou didst infald me.
To a’ our haunts I will repair,
To greenwood, shaw, or fountain;
Or where the summer day I’d share
Wi’ thee upon yon mountain.
There will I tell the trees and flowers
Frae thoughts unfeign’d and tender,
By vows you’re mine, by love is yours
A heart that cannot wander.

The charming and (so to speak) natural flattery of the loving delicacy of this distinction—

By vows you’re mine, by love is yours,

was never surpassed by a passion the most refined. It reminds us of a like passage in the anonymous words (Shakspeare might have written them) of the fine old English madrigal by Ford, “Since first I saw your face.” Perhaps Ford himself wrote them; for the author of that music had sentiment enough in him for anything. The passage we allude to is—

What, I that loved, and you that liked,
Shall we begin to wrangle?

The highest refinement of the heart, though too rare in most classes, is luckily to be found in all; and hence it is, that certain meetings of extremes in lovers of different ranks in life are not always to be attributed either to a failure of taste on the one side, or unsuitable pretensions on the other. Scottish dukes have been known to meet with real Gentle-Shepherd heroines; and everybody knows the story of a lowly Countess of Exeter, who was too sensitive to survive the disclosure of the rank to which her lover had raised her.