Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/97

 LYCIDAS

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��impossible. Still, just there beyond the walls the country lay, and for the seeing eye of the artist could not but have an irresistible appeal. Being chiefly external and visual, this appeal naturally came first to the painters and worked itself out in those conventionalized but still lovely back- grounds of hill and river which the early artists put behind their madonnas. The poets were not slow to take the hint, and to provide a country setting for their fancies. But they came to nature with their minds full of classical images. They saw nature only across a vague mist of literary recol- lection. They peopled their landscapes with nymphs and goddesses, satyrs and fauns, because the poets they revered had done so. The whole topography, fauna, and flora of the country where the poet lived suffered a change into something re- membered from Latin or Greek poetry.

In the midst of this fantastic landscape, with its mythological accessories, they set, not real country - folk, of whose charac- ters and modes of mind an understanding was denied to them, but men and women of their acquaintance, disguised in bucolic costume, and following, in the intervals of love-making and song-piping, the mildest of bucolic pursuits. The result of all this was a type of literature perhaps more com- pletely separated from fact than any other that has ever existed under the sun. This unreality, however, so far from lessening the hold of pastoral literature on men's minds, proved to be the chief element of its charm. Men welcomed with eagerness this odd, remote world of the pastoral, where existence smoothed itself out into languid summer sweetness, where time and its tragedies were a tale told in the shade, and where no fact intervened to break with harsh angle the soft sky line of fancy. The pastoral ministered to the longing for evasion, for an escape from the tyranny of the actual, which is a constant element in the human imagination. It was at the same time a facile genre to cultivate. It

��appealed to the finest talents by reason of its ideality, as strongly as it attracted mediocre wits by the easy successes which it offered.

When the pastoral went over into Eng- land, in the wake of the Italianizing school headed by Spenser and Sidney, two changes took place in it. It gained in spontaneity of nature-feeling, chiefly in the hands of Spenser and William Browne, and it gained in moral earnestness, especially in the work of George Wither and Phineas Fletcher. The pastoral form came to Milton's hands, therefore, with all its original quaint re- moteness and fantastic ideality unimpaired, but with a new freshness of feeling added to it, and the proved possibility that its pretty fictions could be used to convey a serious message.

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��In the late summer of 1637 news came to Milton of the drowning of Edward King off the Welsh coast; and after the open- ing of the fall term at Cambridge, he was asked to contribute to a memorial volume of verse to be dedicated to King's memory. When he began to cast about for a form in which to put his thought, several con- siderations urged him toward the pastoral elegy. Because - its classical origin and prototypes, that form had a traditional academic flavor appropriate to the circum- stances. The pastoral fiction had moreover been used by two generations of English poets as a vehicle for affectionate communi- cation with each other in verse ; and King, though not a gifted singer, had at least jus- tified his shepherdship by frequent verse- making. These, however, were minor con- siderations. Of much more moment in determining Milton's choice must have been his perception of the double fact that his real interest in King and his fate was a symbolic rather than a personal one, and that the pastoral was of all forms of poetry the most amenable to svmbolic treatment.

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