at once recognizable. The shepherdess disguised as a man became popular after the Restoration. The localities where these plays were laid suffered during this period a general change. Sicily and Arcadia do not predominate; the habitat, the setting, may be anywhere and everywhere: Cuba, Greece, England, Scotland, Italian groves, India, Sidon, and only rarely in Arcadia or Sicily. toral drama. The entire absence of cause and effect in pastoral drama reveals the fact that it was very necessary for it to take refuge in some type, device, Absence of design, some conventional champfering. cause and For the pastoral shows no insight into effect in pashuman nature; it invariably substitutes superficial, mechanical confusions for the vital entanglements and difficulties of real life. It was, therefore, peculiarly unadapted for tragedy, and except for an occasional throe, does not seem to have aspired after tragedy, in fact, to have been serenely unconscious of it. Tragedy must find its counterpart in real life to be either vital or interesting; if such be the truth, then Gay's Dione is a mistaken attempt, without altering the nature, to prove the capacity of pastoral drama larger than it really is. If pleasure is the aim of comedy, then the coarse burlesques of this period are a revelation of that in which the people delighted; if correc- The aim of tion is the aim of comedy, then these comedy. dramatic pastorals absolutely failed, pushed by compulsion from Love in a Riddle to Damon and Phillida. As English comedy dealt increasingly with the actual, it is small wonder that, despite its efforts, the dramatic pastoral became more and more unpopular. Pastoralists showed their recognition of the general trend of English comedy to use contemporary setting and events, but in their attempts to change the nature of that which could exist legitimately only in the realm of the ideal, they hastened its downfall. Singularly devoid of humour and of perception of its own possibilities, this species of drama became the more easily a laughing-stock. At the best the pastoral was never a virile species of drama, for its stronghold lay in a sentimental conception of life. It had no No innate moral innate moral purpose, and losing the purpose. æsthetic, as it had practically by the beginning of the eighteenth century, lost all. It occasionally assumed a moral purpose, as, for instance, in the Faithful Shepherdess, in Crowne's Calisto, or in Cibber's Love in a Riddle. But the moral tone appeared only to suffer a quick compulsion of silence, whether in main plot or subplot. Often an author, as, for example, Cibber, would conscientiously locate all his indecencies in the sub-plot, which invariably "took," and sometimes managed to support the central story. These plays were not so much immoral as indecent, if one can make such a distinction; immorality does not always imply coarseness or grossness, two distinctive traits of the majority of pastoral plays appearing after 1660. Even where the pastoral boldly condemned a vice, it dwelt so upon the details of the evil that it "expressed too much of the vice which it decried."1 Ward says that there are two forces which no dramatic literature can afford to neglect: national traditions, and "the enduring principles of moral law and order." 2 At their best, pastoral plays had idealized love, tenaciously followed an æsthetic ideal, if not a moral one, and displayed a delicate, if conventional, appreciation of nature, and a beauty of language whether in prose or verse. After the Restoration, they rapidly degenerated, they travestied love, their motive was sentimental or farcical, they ignored nature, and used a cheap and tawdry language. The only condition upon which their trifling multiplicity existed, was that they should perish quickly. The century was weary of them, and the farm play, perhaps nourished by the pastoral, was decidedly more to the taste of the public. If the pastoral drama had not been marked for death, then the end of the century, with its new lyric beauty, its Burns, 1 Margaret Sherwood: Dryden's Dramatic Theory and Practice, p. 42, quoted from Scott and Saintsbury ed. of Dryden's Dramatic Works, vol. iv. p. 9. 2 Ward: History of English Dram. Lit. Macmillan, 1899, vol. iii. p. 517. its visionary Blake, its Lyrical Ballads, was the moment when it would have been revivified, retouched with life, and not, as it was, cast aside, its poetic beauty utterly dissipated in metre, word, and thought. The serious concern of the eighteenth century was, after all, not even literature at its best, and certainly not pastorals; in the dryest sermon of the time some honest questioning may be found which indicates at least more intellectual life than the pastoral possessed. Commerce, industrial development, mechanical inventions, deistical questioning, revolutionary theory, political reform, social advance,-these were the serious interests of this century. |