Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/96

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��POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��LYCIDAS

��I

��Lycidas is an elegy, and as such offers no peculiar difficulties of interpretation for a modern reader ; but it is also a pastoral elegy, and belongs therefore to a type of literature which has fallen so completely into disuse that an act of the historic imagination is required to place us in the proper attitude toward it. Unless we un- derstand something of the theory under- lying the pastoral poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and something of the mental conditions lying behind that theory, we can with difficulty do justice to a poem like Lycidas, which moves in a world of deliberate artifice, where the re- strictions and the liberties are alike fan- tastic. Dr. Johnson's amusingly jejune animadversions upon Lycidas represent in its extremest form the danger of judg- ing such a poem by standards of mere " common-sense." The letter of such criti- cism as his is often true, but the spirit is grotesquely false, because it leaves out of account both the general differences which mark off poetry from prose, and, still more flagrantly, the particular mould into which the pastoral poets deliberately chose to cast their thoughts.

The rise and progress of pastoral poetry on the Continent and in England forms one of the most curious chapters in the history of literature. From Portugal, where it took its rise in the fourteenth century, it spread rapidly through the whole of civilized Europe, and persisted in various forms until late in the eighteenth century. It enlisted the pens of the greatest writers, Cervantes in Spain, Tasso and Boccaccio in Italy, Spenser, Fletcher, and Milton in England. It invaded the drama; it found its way into politics, and into religion. In France it produced at least one great

��painter, Watteau, and built up a system of manners and sentiments which not even the subtle laughter of Moliere could overthrow. The mock village where Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at being shepherdesses and milkmaids still stands in the park of the Petit Trianon at Ver- sailles; and the royal toy, with its pathetic associations, reminds us how persistent was the enthusiasm for the pastoral idea, and in what curious ramifications the enthusi- asm worked itself out. No movement of mind ever takes place on such a scale as this unless it springs from deep causes; the art products which accompany it, however artificial and perverse they may seem on the surface, minister to real spiritual needs of the age wherein they appear.

The source of the pastoral poetry and romance of the Renaissance is to be found, naturally, in the country idylls of the Sici- lian poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and in the Bucolics of Virgil. Even the earliest and simplest of the Sicilian idylls have a note of artificiality, in that they are studies of country life from the outside, by minds more or less artistically sophisti- cated. Virgil, essentially an urban poet, though with a keen sensibility to the idyllic aspects of country life, took still more plainly this outside point of view, a view exactly opposite (to choose a modern instance) from that which Wordsworth constantly tried to assume. This primary bent away from realism received, when the pastoral forms of poetry began to be received in southern Europe, a great reinforcement from the nature of the Renaissance itself. The life of the Renaissance was an urban life; be- yond the circumvallations of defense within which the great revival ran its course still lay the shadow of medievalism. Any real sympathy with the life of the woods and fields on the part of a man of the town was

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