Chapter II

Pastoral Poetry in England

I

We have seen how there arose in the Italian songs of the fourteenth century a spontaneous form of pastoral independent of the regular tradition, and somewhat similar examples are furnished by the dramatic eclogues of Spain. In the former case, however, pastoral was never more than a passing note; while in the latter, the impulse, though possessing some vitality, was early overwhelmed by the rising tide of Italian influence. In England it was otherwise. On the one hand the spontaneous and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance. As a resuit the earlier native fashion affected in a noticeable degree later pastoral work, colouring and blending with instead of being overpowered by the regular tradition. Thus it is possible to trace two distinct though mutually reacting tendencies far down the stream of English literature, and to this double origin must be referred many of the peculiar phenomena of English pastoral work. There was furthermore a constant struggle for supremacy between the two traditions, in which now one now the other appeared likely to go under. The greatest poets of their day, Spenser and Milton, threw the weight of their authority on to the side of pastoral orthodoxy. Spenser, however, was himself too much influenced by the popular impulse for his example to be decisive in favour of the regular tradition, while, by the time Milton wrote, a hybrid form had established itself on a more or less secure basis and a modus vivendi had already been achieved. Meanwhile the bulk of pastofal poets affected a less weighty and more spontaneous song, whether they wrote in the light fanciful mood of Drayton or the more passionate and romantic spirit of Browne.

To this double origin may be ascribed a certain noticeable vitality that characterizes English pastoral composition. Since this quality has been habitually overlooked by literary historians, I may be excused for dwelling on it somewhat in this place. The stigma which, not altogether undeservedly, attaches to pastoral as a whole has tempted critics to confine their attention to the more notable examples of the kind, and to treat these as more or less sporadic manifestations. Thus they have failed, on the whole, to appreciate the relation in which these works stand to the general pastoral tradition, which was mainly carried on in works of little individual interest. It is no blame to them if they considered that these undistinguished productions were of small importance in the general history of literature: any one who goes through them with care will probably arrive at a not very dissimilar conclusion. Nevertheless the fact remains that the neglect of them has obscured both the relative positions of the greater and more enduring works, and also the general nature of the pastoral tradition in this country. That tradition I believe to have been of a far more noteworthy character than has hitherto been realized. I am not, of course, prepared to maintain that pastoral composition in England ever attained, as a whole, to the rank of great literature, or that it formed such a remarkable body of work as we find, for example, in the Arcadian drama of Italy. But when we come to regard the pastoral production of this country in the light of a more or less connected tradition, it is impossible not be struck by the originality and diversity of the various forms which it assumed. Though as a literary kind it never rivalled its Italian model in fertility, it evinced an individual and versatile quality which we seek in vain in other countries. To substantiate this claim and to show how far the vitality of the English pastoral was due to its hybrid origin will be my chief aim in this chapter. When I come to deal with the main subject of this inquiry it will be necessary to determine how far similar considerations apply in the case of the pastoral drama.

In the first place we have to consider what was produced on the one hand by the purely native impulse, and on the other under the sole inspiration of foreign tradition, at a period when these two influences had not yet begun to interact. As an argument in favour of the spontaneous and genuine nature of the earlier fashion may be noticed its appearance in that miscellaneous body of anonymous literature which, whatever may be its origin--and it is impossible to enter on so controversial a subject in this place--is at least 'popular' in the sense of having been long handed down from generation to generation in the mouths of the people. The acceptance of pastoral ballads into this great mass of traditional literature is at least as good evidence of their popular character as that of authorship could be. In such a body of literature it would indeed be surprising had the pastourelle motive not found entrance; but it is noteworthy that whereas the French and Latin poems are habitually written from the point of view of the lover, the English ballads adopt that of the peasant maiden to whom the high-born suitor pays his court. At once the simplest and most poetical of the ballads on this model is that printed by Scott as The Broom of Cowdenknows, a title to which in all probability it has little claim. It is a delightful example of the minor ballad literature, and I am by no means inclined to regard it as a mere amplification of the much shorter and rather abrupt Bonny May of Herd's collection, though the latter, so far as it goes, probably offers a less sophisticated text. In either case a gentleman riding along meets a girl milking, obtains her love, and ultimately returns and marries her. A similar incident, in which, however, the seducer marries the girl under compulsion and then discovers her to be of noble parentage, is told in a ballad, of which a number of versions have been collected in Scotland under the title of Earl Richard or Earl Lithgow, and of which an English version was current in the seventeenth century and was quoted more than once by Beaumont and Fletcher.[72] This was printed by Percy in the Reliques, and two broadsides of it dating from the restoration are preserved in the Roxburghe collection. It is inferior to the northern versions, but both are probably late, and contain stanzas belonging to or copied from other ballads, notably the Bonny Hynd of the Herd manuscript and Burd Helen (the Scotch version of Child Waters). The title of the broadsides is interesting as betraying the influence of the regular pastoral tradition: 'The beautifull Shepherdesse of Arcadia. A new pastarell Song of a courteous young Knight, and a supposed Shepheards Daughter.'[73] Again, apparently from the Aberdeen district, comes a ballad on the marriage of a shepherd's daughter to the Laird of Drum. On the other hand we find three somewhat similar ballads, Lizie Lindsay or Donald of the Isles, Lizie Baillie, and Glasgow Peggie, recording the elopement of a town girl with a highland gentleman in the disguise of a shepherd. These are obviously late, though a certain resemblance in style with Johnie Faa makes it possible that they are as old as the middle of the seventeenth century. None of the pastoral ballads, indeed, can show any credentials which would suggest an earlier date than the second half of the sixteenth century, nor can any of them lay claim to first-rate poetic merit.[74]

Another example of native pastoral, earlier and far more genuine in character, is to be found in the religious drama. The romantic possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the 'shepherd' plays of the mystery cycles. We possess the plays on the adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all. The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the fail dyke of the 'bought i' the lirk o' the hill' that caught the imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York, Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of the guild cycle.[75]

It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the two Towneley plays. These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three portions: first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration. The two latter do not particularly concern us. Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the Gloria, in the Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for

More remarkable still is one shepherd's familiarity with the classics:

It is perhaps no matter for surprise that one of his less learned fellows should break out with more force than delicacy:

It is one of the little ironies of literature that in the earliest picture of pastoral life in England the greatest pastoral writer of Rome should be quoted, not as a pastoralist, but as a magician.

Before the appearance of the angels, however, there is nothing to lead one to expect this strange display of learning. A rougher, simpler set of countrymen it would have been hard to find in the England of Chaucer and Langland. In the shepherd-play known as prima pastorum the comic element consists mostly in quarrels and feasting among the shepherds, but in the secunda pastorum it constitutes a regular little three-scene farce, which at its date was absolutely unique in literature. It is thence only a step, and a very short one, to John Heywood's interludes--though it is a step that took more than a century to accomplish.

The first shepherd comes in complaining of the hard weather; his fingers are chapped, the storms blow from every quarter in turn. 'Sely shepardes,' moreover, are put upon by any rich upstart and have no redress. A second shepherd appears with another grumble: 'We sely wedmen dre mekyll wo.' Some men, indeed, have been known to desire two wives or even three, but most would sooner have none at all. Whereupon enters Daw, a third shepherd, complaining of portents 'With mervels mo and mo.' 'Was never syn noe floode sich floodys seyn'; even 'I se shrewys pepe'--apparently a portentous omen. At this point Mak comes on the scene. He is a notorious bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself 'a yoman, I tell you, of the king,' and complains that his wife eats him out of house and home. The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they lie down to rest they place him the middle man of three. As soon, however, as the shepherds are asleep--'that may ye all here'--Mak borrows a sheep and makes off. Arrived at home he would like to eat the sheep at once, but he is afraid of being followed, so the animal is put in the cradle and wrapped up to resemble a baby, and Mak goes back to take his place among the shepherds. Before long these awake and rouse Mak, who, pretending he has dreamt that Gill his wife has been brought to bed of another child, goes off home. The shepherds miss one of their sheep and, following him, find Gill on the bed while Mak sings a lullaby at the cradle. They proceed to search the house, Gill the while praying she may eat the child in the cradle if ever she deceived them. They find nothing, and are about to depart when Daw insists on kissing the new baby. Gill vows she saw the child changed by an elf as the clock struck midnight, but Mak pleads guilty and gets off with a blanketing.

So far, intentionally in the case of the drama, and if not intentionally at least practically in that of the ballads, the appeal of the native pastoral impulse--tradition it could hardly yet be called--was to an audience little if at all removed from the actual condition of life depicted. This ensured at least essential reality, for though in the one case there may be idealization in a romantic and in the other in a burlesque direction, either implies that familiarity with the actual world which appears to underlie all vital art.[79] It was not long, however, before the pastoral began to address itself to a more cultivated society, and in so doing sacrificed that wholesome corrective of a genuinely critical audience which is needed in the long run to keep any literary form from degeneration. The impulse is still, however, found in all its freshness and genuineness in such a poem as the following fifteenth-century nativity carol, which, in its blending of piety and humorous rusticity, is strongly reminiscent of the dramatic productions we have just been reviewing:

So, again, in the delightful poem that has won for Robert Henryson the title of the first English pastoralist the warm blood of natural feeling yet runs full. Robene and Makyne stands on the threshold of the sixteenth century, a modest and pastoral counterpart of the Nut-Brown Maid, as evidence that there were poets of purely native inspiration capable of writing verses every whit as perfect in form as anything produced by the Italianizers of the next generation, and commonly far more genuine in feeling. Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development and conventionalization of the native tendency. Such is the Harpelus' Complaint of 'Tottel's Miscellany.' This was originally printed among the poems of uncertain authors, but when it re-appeared in England's Helicon, in 1600, it was subscribed with Surrey's name. The ascription does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus' epitaph:

The relation of the early Italianizers to pastoral is rather strange. Pastoral names, imagery and conventions are freely scattered throughout their works, yet with the exception of the above there is scarcely a poem to which the term pastoral can be properly applied. They borrowed from their models a kind of pastoral diction merely, not their partiality for the form: 'shepherd' is with them merely another word for lover or poet, while almost any act of such may be described as 'folding his sheep' or the like. Allegory has reduced itself to a few stock phrases. In this fashion Surrey complains to his fair Geraldine, and a whole company of unknown lovers celebrate the cruelty and beauty of their ladies. It is rarely that we catch a note of fresher reminiscence or more spontaneous song as in Wyatt's:

Happily the seed of Phillida's coyness bore fruit, and the amorous pastoral ballad or picture, a true idyllion, became a recognized type in English verse. It certainly owed something to foreign pastoral models, and, like the bulk of Elizabethan lyrics, a good deal to Italian poetry in general; but in its freshness and variety, as in its tendency to narrative form, it asserts its independence of any rigid tradition, and justifies us in regarding it as an outcome of that native impulse which we have already noticed. Such a poem is Nicholas Breton's ever charming Phyllida and Corydon, printed above his signature in England's Helicon.[83] Although we are thereby anticipating, it may be quoted as a representative specimen of its kind:

We must now turn to the beginnings of regular pastoral tradition in this country, springing up under direct foreign influence and in conscious and avowed imitation of specific foreign models. Passing over the Latin eclogues of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe. Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay's case at any rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators, from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish them. Of the professed translators themselves it may be well to say a few words in this place and allow them at once to resume their veil of well-deserved oblivion. Their influence may be taken as non-existent, and their only interest lies in the indication they afford of the trend of literary fashion. The earliest was George Turberville, who in 1567 translated the first nine of Mantuan's eclogues into English fourteeners. The verse is fairly creditable, but the exaggeration of style, endeavouring by sheer brutality of phrase to force the moral judgement it lacks the art of more subtly stimulating, produces neither a very pleasing nor a very edifying effect. This translation went through three editions before the end of the century. The whole ten eclogues did not find a translator till 1656, when Thomas Harvey published a version in decasyllabic couplets. The next poet to appear in English dress was Theocritus, of whose works 'Six Idillia, that is, Six Small, or Petty, Poems, or Aeglogues,' were translated by an anonymous hand and dedicated to E. D.--probably or possibly Sir Edward Dyer--in 1588. As before, the verse, mostly fourteeners, is far from bad, but the selection is not very much to our purpose. Three of the pieces, a singing match, a love complaint, and one of the Galatea poems, are more or less pastoral; but the rest--among which is the dainty conceit of Venus and the boar well rendered in a three-footed measure--do not belong to bucolic verse at all. Incidental mention may be also made of a 'dialogue betwixt two sea nymphs, Doris and Galatea, concerning Polyphemus, briefly translated out of Lucian,' by Giles Fletcher the elder, in his Licia of 1593; and a version of 'The First Eidillion of Moschus describing Love,' in Barnabe Barnes' Parthenophil and Parthenophe, which probably appeared the same year. Lastly we have the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil, translated in 1589 by Abraham Fleming into rimeless fourteeners.[84] Besides these there are a few odd translations from Vergil among the experiments of the classical versifiers. Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586), gives hexametrical translations of the first and second eclogues, while another version of the second in the same metre appears first in Fraunce's Lawyer's Logic (1588), and again with corrections in his Ivychurch (1591).[85] Several further translations followed in the seventeenth century.

But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt's Stultifera Navis, priest and monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury. It seems to have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues. They appeared at various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the writer's death, to the Ship of Fools of 1570.[86] They are there headed 'Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium, compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.' This sufficiently indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of the previous century. The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon, a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix, for whom the great world has long lost its glamour. The fourth eclogue, 'treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,' is similarly 'taken out of' Mantuan. In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very individual but pretty lusty satire against Skelton.[88] He also introduces, as recited by one of the characters, 'The description of the Towre of vertue and honour, into which the noble Howarde contended to enter by worthy actes of chivalry,' a stanzaic composition in honour of Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513. The fifth eclogue, 'of the disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,' or the Cytezen and Uplondyshman, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series. These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre--in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the Shepherd's Calender. The following lines from the fifth eclogue may serve to illustrate Barclay's style:

It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original step. The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant. Such credit as attaches to the innovation should be allowed him.

A somewhat more independent writer is Barnabe Googe--writer, indeed, as original, may be, as the lesser Latin pastoralists of the renaissance. The fact of his altering the conventional forms to fit the mood of a sturdy protestantism, of a protestantism still bitter from the Marian persecutions, is scarcely to be regarded so much as evidence of his invention as of the stability of literary tradition under the varying forms imposed by external circumstances. The collection of his poems, 'imprinted at London' in 1563,[89] includes eight eclogues written in fourteeners, the majority of which may fairly be said to represent Mantuan adjusted to the conditions of contemporary life in reformation England. Others show the influence of the author's visit to Spain in 1561-3. The best that can be said for the verse and style is that they pursue their 'middle flight' on the whole modestly, and that the diction is at times not without a touch of simple dignity. There are, moreover, moments of genuine feeling when the author recalls the fires of Smithfield, and of generous if naïve appreciation when he speaks of his predecessors in English song. A brief summary of contents will give some idea of the nature of these poems. The first recounts the pains of love; in the second Dametas rails on the blind boy and ends his song by dying. The third treats of the vices of the city, not the least of them being religious persecution. In the next Melibeus relates how Dametas, having as we now learn killed himself for love, appeared to him amid hell-fire. Eclogue V contains the pitiful tale of Faustus who courted Claudia through the agency of Valerius. Claudia unfortunately fell in love with the messenger, and finding him faithful to his master slew herself. This is imitated, in part closely, from the tale of the shepherdess Felismena in the second book of Montemayor's Diana, the identical story upon which Shakespeare is supposed ultimately to have founded his Two Gentlemen of Verona, though it is difficult at first sight to trace much resemblance between the play and Googe's poem. In the sixth eclogue Faustus--the Don Felix of the Spanish and the Proteus of Shakespeare--himself appears, for no better reason it would seem than to give his interlocutor an opportunity of enlarging on the delights of country life and introducing the remarks on fowling borrowed from Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso's second eclogue. The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration is in his partiality for some sort of narrative ballad motive as the subject of his poems.

So far the literary quality to be registered has not been high among those owing allegiance to the regular pastoral tradition. The next step to be taken is a long one. The pastoral writings of Spenser not only themselves belong to a very different order of work, but likewise brings us face to face with literary problems of a most complex and interesting kind.

II

In the Shepherd's Calender we have the one pastoral composition in English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser's eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not of course the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser's work: it is with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence upon subsequent pastoral work that we are immediately concerned. This is an aspect of the Shepherd's Calender to which literary historians have naturally devoted less attention. These two reasons--namely, the intrinsic importance of the work and the neglect of its pastoral bearing--must excuse a somewhat lengthy treatment of a theme that may possibly be regarded as already sufficiently familiar.

The Shepherd's Calender[90], which first appeared in 1579, was published without author's name, but with an envoy signed 'Immerito.' It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and contained a commentary by one E. K., who also signed an epistle to Master Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. 'Immerito' was a name used by Spenser in his familiar correspondence with Harvey, and can in any case have presented no mystery to his Cambridge friends. Among these must clearly be reckoned the commentator E. K., who may be identified with one Edward Kirke with all but absolute certainty.[91] Within certain well defined limits we may also accept E. K. as a competent exponent of his friend's work, and his identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser's editors and biographers to fight over. It will be sufficient to add in this place that however 'literary' may have been Spenser's attachment to Rosalind there is no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little response his advances may have met with there is reason to suppose that his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional.

Spenser's design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the penning of impossible iambic trimeters, 'minding,' as E. K. directly informs us, 'to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.' He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality, freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his pastoral work that justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there, modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[92], but the investigation of his originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although, as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has remarked, 'it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not due.'

The chief point of originality in the Calender is the attempt at linking the separate eclogues into a connected series. We have already seen how with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern. This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues, 'proportionable,' as the title is careful to inform us, 'to the twelve monethes.'

In the 'January,' a monologue, Spenser, under the disguise of Colin Clout, laments the ill-success of his love for Rosalind, who meets his advances with scorn. He also alludes to his friendship with Harvey, who is introduced throughout under the name of Hobbinol. The 'February' is a disputation between youth and age in the persons of Cuddie and Thenot. It introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in which the eclogue is composed. For the 'March' Spenser recasts in English surroundings Bion's fantasy of the fight with Cupid, without however achieving any conspicuous success. In the April eclogue Hobbinol recites to the admiring Thenot Colin's lay

This lay is in an intricate lyrical stanza which Spenser shows considerable skill in handling. The following lines, for instance, already show the musical modulation characteristic of much of his best work:

In the 'May' we return to the four-beat accentual measure, this time applied to a discussion by the herdsmen Palinode and Piers of the lawfulness of Sunday sports and the corruption of the clergy. Here we have a common theme treated from an individual point of view. The eclogue is interesting as showing that the author, whose opinions are placed in the mouth of the precise Piers; belonged to what Ben Jonson later styled 'the sourer sort of shepherds.' A fable is again introduced which is of a pronounced Aesopic cast. In the 'June' we return to the love-motive of Rosalind, which, though alluded to in the April eclogue, has played no prominent part since January. It is a dialogue between Colin and Hobbinol, in which the former recounts his final defeat and the winning of Rosalind by Menalcas. This eclogue contains Spenser's chief tribute to Chaucer:

The July eclogue again leads us into the realm of ecclesiastical politics. It is a disputation between upland and lowland shepherds, the descendant therefore of Mantuan and Barclay, though the use of 'high places' as typifying prelatical pride appears to be original. The confusion of things Christian and things pagan, of classical mythology with homely English scenery, nowhere reaches a more extravagant pitch than here. Morrell, the advocate of the old religion, defends the hills with the ingeniously wrong-headed argument:

or else, gazing over the Kentish downs, he announces that

In the 'August' Spenser again handles a familiar theme with more or less attempt at novelty. Willie and Peregot meeting on the green lay wagers in orthodox fashion, and, appointing Cuddie judge, begin their singing match. The 'roundel' that follows, a song inserted in the midst of decasyllabic stanzas, is composed of alternate lines sung by the two competitors. The verse is of the homeliest; indeed it is only a rollicking indifference to its own inanity that saves it from sheer puerility and gives it a careless and as it were impromptu charm of its own. Even in an age of experiment it must have needed some self-confidence to write the dialect of the Calender; it must have required nothing less than assurance to put forth such verses as the following:

Many a reader of the anonymous quarto of 1579 must have joined in Cuddie's exclamation:

Sidney, we know, was not altogether pleased with the homeliness of the verses dedicated to him; and there must have been not a few among Spenser's academic friends to feel a certain incongruity between the polished tradition of the Theocritean singing match and the present poem. Moreover, as if to force the incongruity upon the notice of the least sensitive of his readers, Spenser followed up the ballad with a poem which is not only practically free from obsolete or dialectal phrasing, but which is composed in the wearisomely pedantic sestina form. This song is attributed to Colin, whose love for Rosalind is again mentioned.

Passing to the 'September' we find an eclogue of the 'wise shepherd' type. It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet which roused the ire of Dr. Johnson:

Diggon is a shepherd, who, in hope of gain, drove his flock into a far country, and coming home the poorer, relates to Hobbinol the evil ways of foreign shepherds among whom,

The 'October' eclogue belongs to the stanzaic group, and consists of a dialogue on the subject of poetry between the shepherds Piers and Cuddie. It is one of the most imaginative of the series, and in it Spenser has refashioned time-honoured themes with more conspicuous taste than elsewhere. The old complaint for the neglect of poetry acquires new life through the dramatic contrast of the two characters in which opposite sides of the poetic temperament are revealed. In Cuddie we have a poet for whom the prize is more than the praise[93], whose inspiration is cramped because of the indifference of a worldly court and society. Things were not always so--

And in the same strain he laments over what might have been his song:

Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new age of England's song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own unworthiness, adds:

Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the Hymnes:

And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than Mantuan's Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece. One might well question whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of Spenser's than ever went to the composition of Vergil's Pollio.

The 'November,' like the 'April,' consists for the most part of a lay composed in an elaborate stanza--there a panegyric, here an elegy. This time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the Rosalind motive. The subject of the threnody is a nymph of the name of Dido, whose identity can only be vaguely conjectured. The chief point of external form in which Spenser has departed from his model, namely Marot's dirge for Loyse de Savoye, and from other pastoral elegies, is in the use of a different form of verse in the actual lament from that in which the setting of the poem is composed. Otherwise he has followed tradition none the less closely for having infused the conventional form with a poetry of his own. The change by which the lament passes into the song of rejoicing is traditional--and though borrowed by Spenser from Marot, is as old as Vergil. Both Browne and Milton later made use of the same device. Spenser writes:

Although some critics, looking too exclusively to the poetic merit of the Calender as the cause of its importance, have perhaps overestimated the beauty of this and the April lyrics, the skill with which the intricate stanzas are handled must be apparent to any careful reader. As the Calender in poetry generally, so even more decidedly in their own department, do these songs mark a distinct advance in formal evolution. Just as they were themselves foreshadowed in the recurrent melody of Wyatt's farewell to his lute--

so they in their turn heralded the full strophic sonority of the Epithalamium.

Lastly, in the 'December' we have the counterpart of the January eclogue, a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for

It will be seen from the above analysis that the architectonic basis of Spenser's design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the year. These are symmetrically arranged: the 'January' and 'December' are both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the 'June' is a dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both of which another shepherd sings one of Colin's lays and refers incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of poems into a single fabric is Spenser's chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts so as to produce the singleness of impression necessary to a work of art, and the measure of success which he achieved, though they belong more strictly to the general history of poetry, must also detain us for a moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the title--The Shepherd's Calender--'Conteyning twelve Aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes.' This might, indeed, have been no more than a fanciful name for any series of twelve poems;[95] with Spenser it indicates a conscious principle of artistic construction. It suggests, what is moreover apparent from the eclogues themselves, that the author intended to represent the spring and fall of the year as typical of the life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to correspond with the seasons represented; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle through the year was to reflect and thereby unify the emotions, thoughts, and passions of the shepherds. This was a perfectly legitimate artistic device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily into the absurdities of the 'pathetic fallacy,' or that Spenser himself is not wholly guiltless of the charge.

These lines bear witness to Spenser's intention. But the conceit is not fully or consistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not only does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season--the very nature of the theme at times made this impossible--but the time of year is not so much as mentioned. This is more especially the case in the summer months; there is no joy of the 'hygh seysoun,' and when it is mentioned it is rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin mourns for other days:

In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods--

Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin's lament, 'The God of shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,' containing the lines:

We have here a specifie inversion of the 'pathetic fallacy.' The moods of nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought, consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central motive--the Rosalind drama--in the subsidiary scenes. Or should we not rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure? The unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character.

It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the Calender and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since both have a particular bearing upon Spenser's attitude towards pastoral in general.

Ben Jonson, in one of those utterances which have won for him the reputation of churlishness, but which are often marked by acute critical sense, asserted that Spenser 'in affecting the Ancients writ no Language.'[96] The remark applies first and foremost, of course, to the Calender, and opens up the whole question of archaism and provincialism in literature. This is far too wide a question to receive adequate treatment here, and yet it appears forced upon us by the nature of the case. For Spenser's archaism, in his pastoral work at least, is no unmeaning affectation as Jonson implies. He perceived that the language of Chaucer bore a closer resemblance to actual rustic speech than did the literary language of his own day, and he adopted it for his imaginary shepherds as a fitting substitute for the actual folk-tongue with which he had grown familiar, whether in the form of rugged Lancashire or full-mouthed Kentish. And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured platitudes that they repeat from their learned predecessors. With our wider appreciation of literary effect, and our more historical and less authoritative manner of judging works of art, we can no longer endorse Sidney's famous criticism:[97] 'That same framing of his stile, to an old rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.'[98] If a writer finds an effective and picturesque word in an old author or in a homely dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when he claimed the right of mingling Ayrshire with his Lothian verse. Even such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken,' such colloquialisms as the pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of such variants as 'gate' beside the usual 'goat,' of 'sike' and 'sich' beside 'such'; the coining of words like 'stanck,' apparently from the Italian stanco; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, 'yede' as an infinitive, 'behight' in the same sense as the simple verb, 'betight,' 'gride,' and many others--all of which do not tend to produce the homely effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and unnatural.[99]

The influence of Chaucer was not confined to the language: from him Spenser borrowed the metre of a considerable portion of the Calender. It may at first sight appear strange to attribute to imitation of Chaucer's smooth, carefully ordered verse the rather rugged measure of, say, the February eclogue, but a little consideration will, I fancy, leave no doubt upon the subject. This measure is roughly reducible to four beats with a varying number of syllables in the theses, being thus purely accentual as distinguished from the more strictly syllabic measures of Chaucer himself on the one hand and the English Petrarchists on the other. Take the following example:

The syllabic value of the final e, already weakening in the London of Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the syllabic e had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a passage from the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales as it appears in Thynne's second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read as follows:

This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser's measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:

Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:

and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circumstances there can, I think, be little doubt as to the literary parentage of Spenser's accentual measure.[102]

Like the archaic dialect, this homely measure tends to bring Spenser's shepherds closer to their actual English brethren. And hereby, it should be frankly acknowledged, the incongruity of the speakers and their discourse is emphasized and increased. That discourse, it is true, runs on pastoral themes, but the disguise and allegory have worn thin with centuries of use. We can no longer separate the words from the allusions, and consequently we can no longer accept the speakers in their unsophisticated shepherd's rôle. Yet it was precisely the desire to give reality to these transparent phantasms that led Spenser to endow them with a rustic speech. Whether he failed or succeeded the paradox of the form remains about equal.[103]

The importance of the Shepherd's Calender was early recognized, not only by friendly critics, but by the general public likewise, and six editions were called for in less than twenty years. Not long after its appearance John Dove, a Christ Church man, who appears to have been ignorant of the authorship, turned the whole into Latin verse, dedicating the manuscript to the Dean.[104] Another Latin version is found in manuscript in the British Museum copy of the edition of 1597, and after undergoing careful revision finally appeared in print in 1653. This was the work of one Bathurst, a fellow of Spenser's own college of Pembroke at Cambridge.[105]

The Shepherd's Calender was Spenser's chief contribution to pastoral; indeed it was by so much his most important contribution that it would hardly be worth while examining the others did they not bear witness to a certain change in his attitude towards the pastoral ideal.

The first of these later works is the isolated but monumental eclogue entitled Colin Clouts come Home again, of which the dedication to Raleigh is dated 1591, though it was not published till four years later. This, perhaps the longest and most elaborate eclogue ever written, describes how the Shepherd of the Ocean, that is Raleigh, induced Colin Clout, who as before represents Spenser, to leave his rustic retreat in

and try his fortune at the court of the great shepherdess Cynthia, and how he ultimately returned to Ireland. The verse marks, as might be expected, a considerable advance in smoothness and command of rhythm over the non-lyrical portions of the Calender, and the dialect, too, is much less harsh, being far advanced towards that peculiar poetic diction which Spenser adopted in his more ambitions work. On the other hand, in spite of a certain allegrezza in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves--

Thus though time has purged the bitterness of his sorrow, the regret remains; his early love is still the mistress of his thoughts, but years have softened his reproaches, and he admits:

a petard, it may be incidentally remarked, which, sprung within the bounds of pastoral, is of power to pulverize in an instant the whole artificial system of amatory ethics.

The most notable points in the poem are the loves of the rivers Bregog and Mulla, the famous list of contemporary poets, and the presentation of the seamy side of court life, recalling the more direct satire of the probably contemporary Mother Hubberd's Tale. The first of these belongs to the class of Ovidian myths already noticed in such works as Lorenzo's Ambra. The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological Naturanschauung may be traced in Drayton's chorographical epic.

Of the miscellaneous Astrophel, edited and in part composed by Spenser, which was appended to Colin Clout, and of the Daphnaïda published in 1596, though, like the former volume, containing a dedication dated 1591, a passing mention must suffice. The former is chiefly remarkable as illustrating the uniformly commonplace character of the verse called forth by the death of one who, while he lived, was held the glory of Elizabethan chivalry. It contains, beside other verse, pastoral elegies from the pens, certainly of Spenser, and probably of the Countess of Pembroke, Matthew Roydon, and Lodowick Bryskett. The last-named, or at any rate a contributor with the same initiais, also supplied a 'Pastorall Aeglogue' on the same theme. Daphnaïda is a long lament in pastoral form on the death of Douglas Howard, daughter of the Earl of Northampton.

Of far greater importance for our present purpose is the pastoral interlude in the quest of Sir Calidore, which occupies the last four cantos of the sixth book of the Faery Queen.[107] Here is told how Sir Calidore, the knight of courtesy, in his quest of the Blatant Beast came among the shepherd-folk and fell in love with the fair Pastorella, reputed daughter of old Meliboee; how he won her love in return through his valour and courtesy; how while he was away hunting she was carried off by a band of robbers; how he followed and rescued her; and finally, how she was discovered to be the daughter of the lord of Belgard--at which point the poem breaks off abruptly. The story has points of resemblance with the Dorastus and Fawnia, or Florizel and Perdita, legend; but it also has another and more important claim upon our attention. For as Shakespeare in As You Like It, so Spenser in this episode has, as it were, passed judgement upon the pastoral ideal as a whole. He is acutely sensitive to the charm of that ideal and the seductions it offers to his hero--

says the poet of the Faery Queen recalling the days when he was plain Colin Clout--but the

are not allowed to afford more than a temporary solace to the knight; the robbers break in upon the rustic quietude, rapine and murder succeed the peaceful occupations of the shepherds, and Sir Calidore is driven once again to resume his arduous quest. The same idea may be traced in the knight's visit to the heaven-haunted hill where he meets Colin Clout. In the

to the sound of Colin's bagpipe, and who, together with the Graces and their sovereign lady, vanish at the knight's approach, it is surely not fanciful to see the gracious shadows of the idyllic poet's vision trooping reluctantly away at the call of a more lofty theme. With this sense of regret at the vanishing of an ideal long cherished, but at last deliberately abandoned for matters of deeper and more real import, we may turn from the work of the most important figure in English pastoral poetry to his less famous contemporaries.

III

Besides its wider influence on English verse, and the stimulus it gave to pastoral composition as a whole, the Shepherd's Calender called forth a series of direct imitations. Of these the majority are but of accidental and ephemeral interest and of inconspicuous merit; and it is probable that Spenser himself lived to see the end of this over-direct school of discipleship. Several examples appeared in Francis Davison's famous miscellany known as the Poetical Rhapsody, the first edition of which, though it only appeared in 1602, contained the gleanings of the entire sixteenth century.[108] Of these imitations, four in number, the first, the work of the editor himself, is a very poor production. It is a love lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the Calender. The other three poems are ascribed, either in the Rhapsody itself or in Davison's manuscript list, to a certain A. W., who so far remains unidentified, if, indeed, the letters conceal any individuality and do not merely stand for 'Anonymous Writer,' as has been sometimes thought. The three eclogues at any rate bear evidence of coming from the same pen, and the following lines show that the writer was no incompetent imitator, and at the same time argue some genuine feeling:

The first of these poems is a monologue 'entitled Cuddy,' modelled on the January eclogue. The second is a lament 'made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney,' in which the writer wonders at Colin's silence, and which consequently must, at least, date from before the appearance of Astrophel in 1595, and is probably some years earlier. It is in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom sings Cuddy's lament in lyrical stanzas, thus recalling Spenser's 'November.' These stanzas do not reveal any great metrical gift. The last poem is a fragment 'concerning old age,' which connects itself by its theme with the February eclogue, though the form is stanzaic.[109] Again we find mention of Cuddy, a name evidently assumed by the author, though whether he can be identified with the Cuddie of the Calender it is impossible to say. Whoever he was, he shows more disposition than most of his fellow imitators to preserve Spenser's archaisms.

But undoubtedly the greatest poet who was content to follow immediately in Spenser's footsteps was Michael Drayton, who in 1593 published a volume entitled 'Idea The Shepheards Garland, Fashioned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands Sacrifice to the nine Muses.' This connexion between the number of the eclogues and the muses is purely fanciful; Rowland is Drayton's pastoral name, and Idea, which re-appeared as the title of the 1594 volume of sonnets, is that of his poetic mistress.[110] It can hardly be said that the verse of these poems attains any very high order of merit, but the imitation of Spenser is evident throughout. In the first eclogue Rowland bewails, in the midst of spring, 'the winter of his grief.' In this and the corresponding monologue at the end he clearly follows Spenser's arrangement and likewise adopts his minor key--

In Eclogue II a 'wise' shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a somewhat gruesome picture of human fate--

Even this, however, fails to shake the lover's faith in the gentle passion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from Spenser:

The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of Beta, is closely modelled on the 'April,' and abounds with such reminiscences as the following:

Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators. In the fourth eclogue two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is Sidney. In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke. The seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly, in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the Calender, amid the frosts of winter.

These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the 'Poems Lyric and Pastoral' (c. 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth. This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work, and one song at least is in the author's daintiest manner. He seldom surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines:

Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book--

could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime:

and his disciple is not to be outdone. Never was truer lover or sweeter singer--

Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he, and small success befell him in his uncongenial task. He knew little and cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the pastoral tradition. He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others: the Spenserian and traditional garb fits him ill. His golden age is rather amorous than philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad of Dowsabel. The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard to the court of Faery. So again in the barren dispute of the seventh eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged god flits across his path--

If these eclogues formed Drayton's only claim upon our attention as a pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him. He left other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at least thoroughly so in form and spirit. The Muses Elizium did not appear till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in this place. It is, however, so important as illustrating the freer and more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his originality, in the work of Spenser.

The Muses Elizium is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of pastoral work. Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness. The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are full of it, and so are the romances and the plays. To this lyrical tradition belong Breton's songs, of which one has already been quoted; there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who did not contribute his quota. We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton's Shepherds' Sirena containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the Agincourt ballad:

In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,

a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of the Muses Elizium. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate's most imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom

There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of Agincourt:

the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests:

There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response:

or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of bridal songs--

There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender breasts half veiled when Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads the decree:

We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had generated since the days of Moschus.

How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or less exaggerated panegyrics--how is it that in spite of all this we still regard the Shepherd's Calender as serious literature; while with all its exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the Muses' Elizium remains a toy? It is not merely the prestige of the author's name: it is not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation. We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not only has the Shepherd's Calender behind it a vast tradition, reverend if somewhat otiose--the devotion of men counts for something--but also that, however stiffly laced in an unsuitable garb, it sought to deal with matters of real import to man, or at any rate with what man has held as such. It treated questions of religious policy which touched the majority of men more nearly then than now; with moral problems calculated to interest the mind of an age still tinged with medievalism; with philosophical theories of human and divine love. In other words, the Shepherd's Calender lay in the main stream of literature, and reflected the mind of the age, while the Muses' Elizium, in common with so much pastoral work, did not. These considerations open up an interesting field of speculation. Are we to suppose that there is indeed a line of demarcation between great art and little art wholly independent of that which divides good art from bad art? Are we to go further, and assume that these two lines of division intersect, so that a work may be akin to great art though it be not good art, while, however perfect a work of art may be, it may remain little art for some wholly non-aesthetic reason? But we digress.

IV

It will be convenient, in dealing with the considerable volume of English pastoral verse which has come down to us from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to divide it into two portions, according as it tends to attach itself to orthodox foreign tradition on the one hand, or to the more spontaneous native type on the other. To the former division belong in the main the more ambitious set pieces and eclogue-cycles, to the latter the lighter and more occasional verse, the pastoral ballads and the lyrics. The division is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, for the two traditions act and react on one another incessantly, and the types merge almost imperceptibly the one into the other; but that does not prevent the spirit that manifests itself in Drayton's eclogues being essentially different from that which produced Breton's songs. I shall not, however, try to draw any hard and fast line between the two, but shall rather deal first with those writers whose most important work inclines to the more formal tradition, and shall then endeavour to give some account of the lighter pastoral verse of the time.

After the appearance of the Shepherd's Calender some years elapsed before English poetry again ventured upon the domain of pastoral, at least in any serious composition. In 1589, however, appeared a small quarto volume, with the title: 'An Eglogue. Gratulatorie. Entituled: To the right honorable, and renowmed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall. Done by George Peele. Maister of arts in Oxon.' Like the 'A. W.' of the Rhapsody, Peele followed Spenser more closely than most of his fellow imitators in the use of dialect, but his eclogue on the not particularly glorious return of Essex has little interest. His importance as a pastoralist lies elsewhere.

The following year the poet of the Hecatompathia, Thomas Watson, a pastoralist of note according to the critics of his own age, but whose work in this line is chiefly Latin, published his 'Ecloga in Obitum Honoratissimi Viri, Domini Francisci Walsinghami, Equitis aurati, Divae Elizabethae a secretis, & sanctioribus consiliis,' entitled Meliboeus, and also in the same year a translation of the piece into English. The latter is considerably shorter than the original, but still of tedious length. The usual transition from the dirge to the paean is managed with more than the usual lack of effect. The eclogue contains a good deal beyond its immediate subject; for instance, a lament for Astrophel, a passage in praise of Spenser, and a panegyric on

all subjects hardly possible for a poet to escape, writing more pastorali in 1590. Watson also left several other pastoral compositions in the learned tongue, which, from their eponymous hero, won for him the shepherd-name of Amyntas. Thus in 1585 he published a work in Latin hexameter verse with the title 'Amyntas Thomae Watsoni Londinensis I. V. studiosi,' divided into eleven 'Querelae,' which was 'paraphrastically translated' by Abraham Fraunce into English hexameters, and published under the title 'The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis' in 1587. This translation, 'somewhat altered' to serve as a sequel to an English hexametrical version of Tasso's Aminta, was republished in 'The Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch' of 1591. Again in 1592 Watson produced another work entitled Amintae Gaudia, part of which was translated under the title An Old-fashioned Love, and published as by I. T. in 1594.[111]

Next in order--passing over Drayton, with whom we have been already sufficiently concerned--is a writer who, without the advantage of original genius or brilliant imagination, succeeded by mere charm of poetic style and love of natural beauty, in lifting his work above the barren level of contemporary pastoral verse. Richard Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd, imitated, as he frankly confesses, from Vergil's Alexis, appeared in 1594. Appended to it was a poem similar in tone and spirit, entitled The Shepherd's Content, containing a description of country life and scenery, together with a lamentation for Sidney, a hymn to love, a praise of the poets, and other similar matters. The easy if somewhat monotonous grace which pervades both these pieces is seen to better advantage in the delightful Shepherd's Ode, which appeared in his Cynthia of 1595, and begins:

or in the yet more perfect song:

No particular interest attaches to the four eclogues included in Thomas Lodge's Fig for Momus, published in 1595, but they serve to throw light on a kind of pastoral freemasonry that was springing up at this period. Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his complaint to Love in the Shepherd's Content:

Now we find Lodge dedicating his four eclogues respectively to Colin, Menalcus, Rowland, and Daniel. Who Menalcus was is uncertain; not, it would seem, a poet. The themes are serious, even weighty according to the estimation of the author, and befit the mood of the poet who first sought to acclimatize the classical satire[114]. These eclogues do not, however, testify to any high poetic gift, any more than do the couple in a lighter vein found in the Phillis of 1593. Lodge was happier in the lyric verses with which he strewed his romances--such for instance as the lines to Phoebe in Rosalynde, though these did certainly lay themselves open to parody[115]. In the same romance Lodge rose for once to a perfection of delicate conceit unsurpassed from his day to ours:

The year 1595 also saw the publication of Francis Sabie's Pan's Pipe, which contains, according to the not wholly accurate title-page, 'Three Pastorall Eglogues, in English Hexameter.' These constituted the first attempt in English at writing original eclogues in Vergilian metre, and the injudicious experiment has not, I believe, been repeated. The subjects present little novelty of theme, but the treatment illustrates the natural tendency of English pastoral writers towards narrative and the influence of the romantic ballad motives. The same volume contains another work of Sabie's, namely, the Fishermaris Tale, a blank-verse rendering of Greene's Pandosto[116].

The three pastoral elegies of William Basse, published in 1602, the last work of the kind to appear in Elizabeth's reign, form in reality a short pastoral romance. The court-bred Anander falls in love with the shepherdess Muridella, and charges the sheep-boy Anetor to convey to her the knowledge of his passion. His love proving unkind he turns shepherd, and resolves to remain so until his suit obtains better grace. More than half a century later, namely in 1653, Basse prepared for press a manuscript containing a series of pastorals headed 'Clio, or The first Muse in 9 Eglogues in honor of 9 vertues,' and arranged according to the days of the week. The whole composition is singularly lacking alike in interest and merit.[117]

It is not surprising to find the eclogues of the early years of James' reign reflecting current events. In 1603 appeared a curious compilation, the work of Henry Chettle, bearing the title: 'Englandes Mourning Garment: Worne here by plaine Shepheardes; in memorie of their sacred Mistresse, Elizabeth, Queene of Vertue while shee lived, and Theame of Sorrow, being dead. To which is added the true manner of her Emperiall Funerall. After which foloweth the Shepheards Spring-Song, for entertainement of King James our most potent Soveraigne. Dedicated to all that loved the deceased Queene, and honor the living King.' The book is a strange medley of verse and prose, elegies on Elizabeth in the form of eclogues, and political lectures written in the style of the pastoral romance. The most interesting passage is an address to contemporary poets reproaching them for their neglect of the praises of the late queen. The pastoral names under which they are introduced appear to be merely nonce appellations, but are worth recording as they refer to a set outside the usual pastoral circle. Thus Corin is Chapman; Musaeus, of course Marlowe; English Horace, no doubt Jonson; Melicert, Shakespeare; Coridon, Drayton; Anti-Horace, most likely Dekker, and Moelibee, mentioned with him, possibly Marston. To Musidore, 'Hewres last Musaeus' (no doubt corrupt), and the 'infant muse,' it is more difficult to assign an identity.[118] Throughout Chettle assumes to himself Spenser's pastoral title.

To the same or the following year belong the twelve eclogues by Edward Fairfax, the translater of Tasso's Gerusalemme, which are now for the most part lost. One, the fourth, was printed in 1737 from the original manuscript, another in 1883 from a later transcript in the Bodleian, while a third is preserved in a fragmentary state in the British Museum.[119] All three deal chiefly with contemporary affairs, the two former being concerned with the abuses of the church, while the last is a panegyric of the 'present age,' and especially of English maritime adventure. This is certainly the most pleasing of the three, though the style is at times pretentious and over-charged with far-fetched allusions. There are, however, fine passages, as for instance the lines on Drake:

More directly concerned with the political events of the day is the curious eclogue Δάφνις Πολυστέφανος by Sir George Buc, published in 1605, in praise of the Genest crown, the royal right by Apollo's divine decree of a long line of English kings, who are passed in review by way of introduction to the praises of their latest representative. The work was revised by an unknown hand for the accession of Charles, and republished under the title of The Great Plantagenet in 1635, as by 'Geo. Buck, Gent.' Sir George held the post of Master of the Revels from 1608 to 1622, and died the following year.

In 1607 appeared a poem 'Mirrha the Mother of Adonis,' by William Barksted, to which were appended three eclogues by Lewes Machin.[120] Of these, one describes the love of a shepherd and his nymph, while the other two treat the theme of Apollo and Hyacinth. Composed in easy verse of no particular distinction these poems belong to that borderland between the idyllic and the salacious on which certain shepherd-poets loved to dally.

The years 1614 and 1615 saw the appearance of works of considerably greater interest from every point of view, among others from that of what I have described as pastoral freemasonry. In the former year there appeared a small octavo volume entitled The Shepherd's Pipe. The chief contributor was William Browne of Tavistock, the first book of whose pastoral epic, Britannia's Pastorals, had appeared the previous year. Besides seven eclogues from his pen, the volume contained one by Christopher Brooke, one by Sir John Davies, and two by George Wither. These last two were republished in 1615, with three additional pieces, in Wither's collection entitled The Shepherd's Hunting. With the exception of one or two of Browne's, these fourteen eclogues all deal with the personal relation of the friends who disguise themselves respectively, Browne as Willy, Wither as Roget (a name later exchanged for that of Philarete), Brooke as Cuddie, and Davies as Wernock. Wither's were written, as we learn from the title-page of the 1615 volume, while the author was in prison in the Marshalsea for hunting vice with a pack of satires in full cry, that is, the Abuses Stript and Whipt of 1611. The verse seldom rises above an amiable mediocrity, the best that can be said for it being that it carries on, in a not wholly unworthy manner, the dainty tradition of the octosyllabic couplet between the Faithful Shepherdess and Milton's early poems. Browne's eclogues are chiefly remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather tedious tale derived from a manuscript of Thomas Occleve's. The last of the series, an elegy on the death of Thomas, son of Sir Peter Manwood, has been quoted as the model of Lycidas, but the resemblance begins and ends with the fact that in either case the subject of the poem met his death by drowning--a resemblance which will scarcely support a charge of plagiarism[121].

In 1621 appeared six eclogues under the title of The Shepherd's Tales by the prolific miscellaneous writer Richard Brathwaite. Each in its turn recounts the amorous misfortunes of some swain, which usually arise out of the inconstancy of his sweetheart, and the prize of infelicity having been adjudged, the author, not perhaps without a touch of malice, sends the whole company off to a wedding. The Tales are noteworthy for the very pronounced dramatic gift they reveal, being in this respect quite unique in their kind. The same year saw the publication of the not very successful expansion of one of these eclogues into the pastoral narrative in verse, entitled 'Omphale or the Inconstant Shepherdesse.' Brathwaite had already in 1614 published the Poet's Willow, containing a 'Pastorall' which recounts the unsuccessful love of Berillus, an Arcadian shepherd, for the nymph Eliza[122].

Pursuing the chronological order we come next to Phineas Fletcher's 'Piscatorie Eclogs' appended to his Purple Island in 1633. Except that the scene is laid on the banks of a river instead of in the pastures, and that the characters spend their time looking after boats and nets instead of tending flocks, they differ in nought from the strictly pastoral compositions. They are seven in number, and deal either with personal subjects or with conventional themes. As an imitation of the Shepherd's Calender, without its uncouthness whether of subject or language, and equally without its originality or higher poetic value, the work is not wanting in merit, but it is most decidedly wanting in all power to arrest the reader's attention.