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dying medieval romance. At one moment the hero is performing wonders of chivalry, at another he is disguised as a shepherd, making love to a shepherdess, herself in truth only a disguised princess. The Arcadia was begun at Wilton in 1580, for the amusement of the author's sister, Mary, Lady Pembroke. Sidney was then under a cloud at court, and must have gladly sought the solace of meadow and garden, and the congenial tasks of literature. The Arcadia was not intended for the world, and Sidney requested on his deathbed that it might be destroyed. Lady Pembroke, however, decided otherwise, and it appeared, pieced together from the scattered sheets on which it was written, in 1590. Like its foreign predecessors, it is a medley of prose and verse, verse which in Sidney's case, at least, is often neither relevant to the story, nor in itself delightful, being for the most part indiscreet exercises in the English versifying', the exotic metres, which it was the creed of the Areopagus to impose upon English song. Analysis or criticism of the Arcadia would be out of place here, more especially as the plan of this volume does not include any specimens of pastoral prose. Tedious it is, yet full of beauty, and instinct with a high seriousness, by no means meriting its author's contemptuous dismissal as "vain, vain, vain", nor Milton's echoed denunciation of a "vain, amatorious poem". It set a fashion, although it had no successors of importance; the new affectations of the style replaced the earlier euphuism of Lyly; the matter did much to extend the popularity of pastoralism. It is probably to Sannazaro and to

Sidney that we owe the substitution of Arcadia for Sicily as the traditional home of the pastoral life, though here they do but expand a hint in the seventh eclogue of Virgil, where Corydon and Thyrsis are spoken of as 'Arcades ambo'1

Sidney was not the only man to adopt the pastoral to the purposes of prose fiction. Between the time of the writing and the publication of the Arcadia, Greene, Lodge, and others had already begun to occupy the field with short pamphlet novels, conceived in a pastoral vein. These were based rather on the Italian novelle than on the heroic romance. The two best of them, Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), and Greene's Dorastus and Fawnia (1588), are well worth reading, apart from the fact that they served as material to be transmuted by the incomparable art of Shakespeare. Nor is the influence of the pastoral to be found only in the drama and the romance. It meets us in the love-sonnet, in the epic, in the allegorical poem. Lodge indites his Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets (1593); Spenser introduces Pastorella and her "lustie shepheard swains" into the sixth book of The Faerie Queene; Phineas Fletcher puts the tedious disquisitions of The Purple Island into the mouth of the shepherd Thirsil. Through this breaking down of literary barriers, the shepherds often find themselves in strange company. With the gods and goddesses, the nymphs and satyrs,

1 The two latest editions of the Arcadia are those by Hain Friswell (1867), and H. O. Sommer (1891).

Lodge's story is the basis of As You Like It, and Greene's of A Winter's Tale.

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of pagan mythology, they may be thought not incongruous, although in Theocritus these have no part, save as objects of legend and worship. But they are distinctly less at home with the spirits of another sort, the elves and fairies of Celtic and Teutonic folk-lore, with whom they are sometimes, as in Drayton's Muses' Elizium, called upon to appear.

We have spoken of the eclogue proper, of the pastoral drama and the pastoral romance, of the overflow of pastoral into other fields of literature, and yet we have left untouched the chief glory of Elizabethan pastoral. This is assuredly the pastoral lyric. From the time of Theocritus the introduction of songs had been a regular feature of eclogue. These had often but a very slight connection in subject with the dialogue in which they were inserted. Spenser had further given them a metrical independence. It was but a short step to detach them entirely from their setting, to treat them as self-contained lyrical poems. From such lyrics the poetic anthologies of the day, England's Helicon and the rest, derive much of their peculiar charm; they star the pages of innumerable song-books. But whether isolated or included in eclogue, drama, and romance, there is nothing in the whole of Elizabethan literature more purely felicitous than the pastoral songs and short descriptive pieces of simple rhythm, which poured in such profusion from the pens of Lodge and Greene, of Breton and Campion, and many another less famous writer. They bubble over with woodland music, the notes of the birds in spring, the rhythms of falling waters.

Nor at a later period are Herrick and Marvell, this in his sober, that in his pagan mood, less happy in the same kind of composition. Many might hold that it is in the Corinna's Going A-Maying, or in The Mower to the Glowworms that English bucolic poetry reaches its high-water mark.

These, then, are the main forms in which Elizabethan pastoral shaped itself. We turn to another aspect of the matter. The genius which creates a novel mode of literature or art must necessarily leave a heritage of difficulty for those who come after. It is so hard at all times to steer clear of the exact point where discipleship ends and imitation begins. Just as the domineering individuality of Pope

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his tune by heart,"

so, in the region of pastoral, the fascinating individuality of Theocritus became a standing danger in the path of his successors. Theocritus sang of themes that he knew well, of the scenery and the society familiar to his boyhood. His idylls were a poet's transcript from actuality. So haunting were his memories, so vivid his pictures, that their influence hung like an atmosphere over all subsequent attempts of other men to render the pastoral life in song. His incidents, his very phrases, became a common stock upon which all who followed him drew alike. But the difference between model and copy is a fundamental one. When Theocritus' descriptions of Sicilian shepherds were transferred to other lands, they naturally lost all such realistic

Herrick

elements as they possessed, and took on the character of mere convention. The habitual daily life of the slopes of Etna could only be fantasy in the meadows of Kent, or even upon the plain of Lombardy. Probably the shepherds of Mantua never sang against each other for a cup of white maple wood, whereon was wrought the loves of Ares and Aphrodite, with a border of acanthus leaves; certainly this was not the form of competition celebrated at the meeting at which Master Page's fallow greyhound was "outrun on Cotsall".

Thus, as is the case with all art that depends mainly upon reproduction, the pastoral was in a constant state of menace from the artificial elements in it; the liberal use of conventions threatened conventionality; the poetry was always on the point of degenerating into a mere literary exercise. Nor can it be denied that, for long periods together, this fate actually did overtake it; after Virgil, for instance, and after, or perhaps, not only after, Pope. And part of the interest of the history of pastoral, during its more vigorous and productive seasons, is in the study of the various methods by which different writers strove to overcome this tendency, to revitalize a decadent tradition. Four ways in which this process of revitalizing has been attempted may be profitably distinguished. The first two have this in common, that they introduce elements quite alien to the pastoral life, treating of that, not for its own sake, but only as a symbol of what actually occupies the mind of the writer. There is the method of personal allusion. The poet brings in himself, his friends, his mistress, in the guise of

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