Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/369

 PASTORAL 347 charge, and to have been written rather in accordance with a fashion, than in following of the author s predomin ant impulse. It may be added that the extremely bucolic title of Warner s first work, Pan: his Syrinx, is mislead ing. These prose stories have nothing pastoral about them. The singular eclogue by Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepherd, printed in 1594, is an exercise on the theme &quot; O crudelis Alexi, nihil mea carmina curas,&quot; and, in spite of its juvenility and indiscretion, takes rank as the first really poetical following of Spenser and Virgil, in distinc tion to Sidney and Sannazaro. Marlowe s pastoral lyric Come live with Me, although not printed until 1599, has been attributed to 1589. In 1600 was printed the anony mous pastoral comedy in rhyme, The Maid s Metamor phosis, long attributed to Lyly. With the close of the 16th century pastoral literature was not extinguished in England as suddenly or as com pletely as it was in Italy and Spain. Throughout the romantic Jacobean age the English love of country life asserted itself under the guise of pastoral sentiment, and the influence of Tasso and Guarini was felt in England just when it had ceased to be active in Italy. In England it became the fashion to publish lyrical eclogues, usually in short measure, a class of poetry peculiar to the nation and to that age. The lighter staves of The Shepherd s Calendar were the model after which all these graceful productions were drawn. We must confine ourselves to a brief enumeration of the principal among these Jacobean eclogues. Nicholas Breton came first with his Passionate Shepherd in 1604. Wither followed with The Shepherd s Hunting in 1615, and Braithwaite, an inferior writer, published The Poet s Willow in 1613 and Shepherd s Tales in 1621. The mention of Wither must recall to our minds that of his friend William Browne, who published in 1613-16 his beautiful collection of Devonshire idyls called Britannia s Pastorals. These were in heroic verse, and less distinctly Spenserian in character than those eclogues recently mentioned. In 1614 Browne, Wither, Christopher Brook, and Davies of Hereford united in the composition of a little volume of pastorals entitled The Shepherd s Pipe. Meanwhile the composition of pastoral dramas was not entirely discontinued. In 1606 Day dramatized part of Sidney s Arcadia in his Isle of Gulls, and about 1625 the Rev. Thomas Goffe composed his Careless Shepherdess, which Ben Jonson deigned to imitate in the opening lines of his Sad Shepherd. In 1610 Fletcher produced his Faithful Shepherdess in emulation of the Aminta of Tasso. This is the principal pastoral play in our language, and, in spite of its faults in moral taste, it preserves a fascination which has evaporated from most of its fellows. The Arcades of Milton is scarcely dramatic ; but it is a bucolic ode of great stateliness and beauty. In the Sad Shepherd, which was perhaps written about 1635, and in his pastoral masques, we see Ben Jonson not disdaining to follow along the track that Fletcher had pointed out in the Faithfid Shepherdess. With the Piscatory Eclogues of Phineas Fletcher, in 1633, we may take leave of the more studied forms of pastoral in England early in the 17th century. When pastoral had declined in all the other nations of Europe, it enjoyed a curious recrudescence in Holland. More than a century after date, the Arcadia of Sannazaro began to exercise an influence on Dutch literature. Johan van Heemskirk led the way with his popular Batavische Arcadia in 1637. In this curious romance the shepherds and shepherdesses move to and fro between Katwijk and the Hague, in a landscape unaffectedly Dutch. Heemskirk had a troop of imitators. Hendrik Zoeteboom published his Zaanlandsche Arcadia in 1658, and Lambertus Bos his Dordtsche Arcadia in 1662. These local imitations of the suave Italian pastoral were followed by still more crude romances, the Rotterdamsche Arcadia of Willem den Elger, the Walchersche Arcadia of Gargon, and the Noordwyker Arcadia of Jacobus van der Valk. Germany has nothing to offer us of this class, for the Diana of Werder (1644) and Die adriatische Rosamund of Zesen (1645) are scarcely pastorals even in form. In England the writing of eclogues of the sub-Spenserian class of Breton and Wither led in another generation to a rich growth of lyrics which may be roughly called pastoral, but are not strictly bucolic. Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Stanley, and Cartwright are lyrists who all contributed to this harvest of country-song, but by far the most copious and the most characteristic of the pastoral lyrists is Herrick. He has, perhaps, no rival in modern literature in this particular direction. His command of his resources, his deep originality and observation, his power of concen trating his genius on the details of rural beauty, his interest in recording homely facts of country life, combined with his extraordinary gift of song to place him in the very first rank among pastoral writers; and it is noticeable that in Herrick s hands, for the first time, the pastoral became a real and modern, instead of being an ideal and humanistic thing. From him AVC date the recognition in poetry of the humble beauty that lies about our doors. His genius and influence were almost instantly obscured by the Restoration. During the final decline of the Jacobean drama a certain number of pastorals were still produced. Of these the only ones which deserve mention are three dramatic adaptations, Shirley s Arcadia (1640), Fanshawe s Pastor Fido (1646), and Leonard Willan s Astrsea (1651). The last pastoral drama in the 17th century was Settle s Pastor Fido (1677). The Restoration was extremely unfavourable to this species of literature. Sir Charles Sedley, Aphra Behn, and Congreve published eclogues, and the Pastoral Dialogue between Thirsis and Strephon of the first-mentioned was much admired. All of these, however, are in the highest degree insipid and unreal, and partook of the extreme artificiality of the age. Pastoral came into fashion again early in the 18th century. The controversy in the Guardian, the famous critique on Ambrose Philips s Pastorals, the anger and rivalry of Pope, and the doubt which must always exist as to Steele s share in the mystification, give 1708 a consider able importance in the annals of bucolic writing. Pope had written his idyls first, and it was a source of infinite annoyance to him that Philips contrived to precede him in publication. He succeeded in throwing ridicule on Philips, however, and his own pastorals were greatly admired. Yet there was some nature in Philips, and, though Pope is more elegant and faultless, he is not one whit more genuinely bucolic than his rival. A far better writer of pastoral than either is Gay, whose Shepherd s Week was a serious attempt to throw to the winds the ridiculous Arcadian tradition of nymphs and swains, and to copy Theocritus in his simplicity. Gay was far more successful in executing this pleasing and natural cycle of poems than in writing his pastoral tragedy of Dione or his &quot; tragi-comico pastoral farce &quot; of The What d ye call it (1715). He deserves a very high place in the history of English pastoral on the score of his Shepherd s Week. Swift proposed to Gay that he should write a Newgate pastoral in which the swains and nymphs should talk and warble in slang This Gay never did attempt ; but a northern admirer of his and Pope s achieved a veritable and lasting success in Lowland Scotch, a dialect then considered no less beneath the dignity of verse. Allan Ramsay s Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725, was the last, and remains the most vertebrate and interesting, bucolic drama produced in Great Britain. The literary value of this play has been exaggerated, but it is a very clever and natural essay, and