INTRODUCTION.

THE

HE Pastoral has fallen to a tarnished name, even amongst many who genuinely love their poets. It stands for something faded and fantastic; hesterna rosa, or rather, a rose which must even yesterday have been a scentless thing, a florist's flower. And yet this little instrument has discoursed most eloquent music; princes have breathed upon it in the palmy days of English song; ladies and scholars, a court and a people, have attuned their ears to the strains of its sweet piping. Now it lies broken and mute. King Pandion is dead;

"And Phillida the Fair has lost

The comfort of her favour".

'A frigid pastoral': in quite other sense than the 'cold pastoral' of Keats, the phrase has become a commonplace of ready criticism.

The

It is easy enough, in the light of literary history, to understand this ill repute of Arcadia. eighteenth century made the pastoral ridiculous, and worse than ridiculous. Ridiculous, when Corydon, in ruffles and knee-breeches, piped it to a Phillis with patched cheeks and a ribbon on her crook; worse than ridiculous, when Marie Antoinette played the shepherdess in the gardens of Trianon, while the real peasants were dying upon their

nettle-broth outside. Our great-grandfathers put

away many conventions, both in life and art, with

Pastoral poetry their full-bottomed wigs. Even of poetry they de merged with themanded a greater naturalism, a closer fidelity to

the observed truth. When Crabbe was narrating

the simple facts of the cottager's life, when Words

simplification Worth was finding deep lessons of spiritual encour

Rousseau and modern romaniciem

agement and consolation in the austere homes of
Cumbrian dalesmen, there was no longer any room
for the old conception of the singing shepherd. The
'swink'd hedger' ceased to be a mere element in
the landscape; he became a human being, to be
known and understood; a problem, not a play-
thing.

However, all this was in our great-grandfathers' days; and perhaps now, without injustice to the new spirit which they brought into literature, a spirit which has indeed recreated literature for us, we may be allowed to revise their somewhat impulsive condemnation. Indeed, whatever we may think of the eighteenth century-and it would be as wise to draw an indictment against a whole nation as against a whole century-it has not much to do with pastoral poetry. That had had its beginnings and its triumphs, its honourable career had ended in a peaceful grave, long before Pope plumed himself as the sole inheritor of the mantle of Spenser. The impudence, the ignorance of that boast! To annihilate the sweetest rhythms of Fletcher and Jonson and Milton; to blot out of the book of song, with one pedantic word, the names, the golden names, of Breton and Greene, of Drayton and Browne, of Herrick and Wither! One supposes that for Pope,

steeped in his lore of Virgil and Theocritus, the pastoral meant only the formal eclogue. Untouched by the spirit of the thing, he never thought how the full stream of bucolic poetry had overleaped those narrow banks, to make vocal with its murmuring the lyric meads and the tangled woods of comedy.

Rightly to judge of the pastoral impulse in English verse we must look not to the eighteenth century, and not to the nineteenth, but strictly to the period between the coming of Elizabeth and that inauspicious moment, nearly a hundred years later, when Puritanism for a while snuffed out literature. Outside the drama, with only the fringes of which we are concerned, the poetry, and in a measure the prose, of that hundred years, is the outcome of two distinct and partly-opposed waves of tendency. One does not like the expression, 'a school of poetry'; but it is difficult to dissociate the tendencies or tempers in question from the influence of two representative and dominant personalities, those of Spenser the musical, and of Donne the imaginative. On the one hand there is a body of poetry, transparent, sensuous, melodious, dealing with all the fresh and simple elements of life, fond of the picture and the story, rejoicing in love and youth, in the morning and the spring; on the other, a more complex note, a deeper thrill of passion, an affection for the sombre, the obscure, the intricate, alike in rhythm and in thought, a verse frequent with reflections on birth and death, and their philosophies, a humour often cynical or pessimistic, always making its appeal rather to the intellect than to the senses. The manner of Spenser

and the manner of Donne, the Elizabethan style and the Jacobean, if you will; the two have to be carefully distinguished in any adequate treatment of the age. Yet either nomenclature is misleading; we have not to deal with two rival masters and two coteries of imitators, nor with two styles, whereof one at some moment of crisis or upheaval succeeded and replaced the other, as, for instance, the literature of the romantic revival succeeded and replaced the literature of the age of Pope. Rather we have

to deal with two habits of thinking and writing, which belong to different and alternating tendencies in the one full life of a complex age, but which, throughout that age, co-existed and interpenetrated each other in a hundred ways. Certainly Spenser and Donne are the typical exponents of their respective groups; certainly the personal influence of either would be hard to overestimate; certainly the poetry of melody began earlier than the poetry of imagination; for in national as in individual life, the simple invariably comes before the complex, feeling precedes thought; but though the one temper grows and the other diminishes, still to the last they appear side by side, often directing in this mood and in that the harmonies of the same pen.

There can be no question that pastoral poetry is the proper province of those writers whom we have associated with the name of Spenser. Amongst them alone it reaches its complete and characteristic development. Donne and his fellows write pastorals, but the shepherd's smock sits awkwardly upon them. They twist the bucolic theme and imagery

to the expression of alien emotions and alien ideas. The convention becomes too obvious. It is the philosopher in the hay-field; the hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. But to the Spenserian manner, with its simple attitudes and ideals, its simple delight in natural and spiritual beauty, the pastoral lends itself admirably. Even before Spenser wrote, a charming example had already appeared in Tottel's Miscellany. In the interval Barclay and Googe had produced their stiff imitations of Virgil and Mantuan. But when The Shepheard's Calender was born, the breath of genius inspired the old forms with a Chaucerian freshness and a new melody. And from this moment the popularity of the pastoral was assured. It became the normal mode alike for panegyric and erotic verse. A shepherd stood as the well understood symbol for a lover or a poet. A Spenser, a Sidney, had each his recognized poetic alias in Colin or Cuddie, Elphin or Philisides. Every branch of literature, lyric and sonnet, elegy and romance, comedy and masque, bears its marks of the prevailing fashion. The rich contents of the great miscellanies, above all, those of the England's Helicon of 1600, are but garlands woven from the finest blossoms of bucolic song.

It was Spenser, then, who first made the pastoral a thing of significance for English writers; but he was by no means the creator of it as a literary species. We cannot claim here, as we can with a proper pride in the case of the contemporary romantic drama, to be dealing with an essentially national growth. The pastoral was an exotic,