elements appeared in England, showing the Italian influence at work. Peele's Arraignment of Paris (1584) contains pastoral and mythological features. Lyly's Midas (1592), Gallathea (1592), and Woman in the Moon (1597), Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream (1600), all are coloured by the pastoral. Up to the date of the publication of the Faithful Shepherdess England produced at least a dozen plays of a pastoral or semi-pastoral nature. Legitimately, however, any discussion of the pastoral drama in England from 1584 to 1660 would centre about Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess (1609 or 1610) and Jonson's Sad Shepherd (1640). These plays are distinctively pastoral, and at the same time characteristically English. But it must not be forgotten that even they owed their inspiration, just as Sidney was indebted to Sannazzaro, primarily to Italian influence.

So far the history of the pastoral has been briefly traced, the eclogue, its classical antecedents, its modern poets, and its introduction Popularity of pastoral into England, the expansion of eclogue lyrics. into romance and the establishment of the eclogue in England, the development of Italy's pastoral drama through its periods of beginning and power, the natural step from musical play to pastoral opera, and, finally, the grafting of the pastoral literary mode upon English dramatic poetry. Up to this point nothing has been said about pastoral lyrics; their popularity and

numerousness are so conspicuous that it seems scarcely necessary to mention them. Their popularity was due, I think, in large measure, to just the literary phases that have been considered; the eclogue was frequently in part lyric song, the romance made much of lyric interludes, the play was interspersed with lyric songs, and the opera set them to music. But deep at the heart of these poems, often exquisitely beautiful, lay a song impulse which these factors but nourished.

The pastoral drama is frequently regarded, perhaps from the bewilderment of its plots, as chaotic rather than coherent. But grant- Divisions of ing the disorder of some of the dramas, pastoral the development of the literature is clear literature. and simple. Some such tentative divisions as these might be made. From Theocritus to the fifteenth century the eclogue, when used, remained in ascendancy. With the fifteenth century and Boccaccio (although Boccaccio's Ameto did not precede Poliziano's Orfeo) began that expansion of eclogue into romance which antedated the full development of pastoral drama, the chief pastoral romances occupying the first part of the sixteenth century, whereas the last half of the century was devoted chiefly to play and opera. In England during the first half of the seventeenth century the popularity of the pastoral drama was confirmed not only by the creation of plays, among them most notable the Faithful Shepherdess and the Sad Shepherd, but also

C

by numerous translations of the Aminta and three of the Pastor Fido. Nor did the pleasure of translating pastorals flag with the close of this period in 1660, but proudly rounded out two centuries and a quarter.

Regarding simply the Faithful Shepherdess and the Sad Shepherd, we are tempted to believe temporarily that the English might have acclimatized and then naturalized this species of drama. Certainly both Jonson in his fragment, and Allan Ramsay in his Gentle Shepherd, written almost a century later than the Sad Shepherd, point to an English school of pastoralists. But their primacy and isolation in the pastoral world show, as we look more deeply into the nature of English drama, that a permanent adoption would have been out of the question. If from reading the plays of the first sixty years of the seventeenth century the impossibility of their naturalization and improvement remains but a suspicion, a study of the eighteenth century brings a final conviction of their alien position and ephemeral hold upon England.

1 See Bibliography.

II

DEFINITIONS

To define is to limit.

Fontenelle.

O define is to limit, and that is precisely what in this study it is neither best nor possible to do. There has been so much haggling over definitions of the pastoral and so little, that is really final, defined. Out of a score of definitions not one can be selected which seems incontrovertible, and the last word to be said upon the subject. So much depends upon the age and the point of view. Fontenelle writes of the eclogue, meaning thereby the pastoral in general: L'eglogue n'est pas attaché aux choses rustiques, mais à ce qu'il y a de tranquille dans la vie de la campagne." In exact accord with such an exposition of the nature of pastoral, Fontenelle speaks of the delicacy, the gallantry of Bion and Moschus, and of the grossness of Theocritus. His whole theory of pastoral poetry is a deliberate attempt to create an ideal, delicate, over-refined, conscious. You must reveal the simplicity of shepherd life, but

"

1 Fontenelle, p. 13. For full reference to publishers, editions, and titles of all pastoral critical works, v. Bib., Sec. 5.

conceal its consequent deprivations and miseries; the sentiments must be finer and more delicate than those of real shepherds, and they must be given the simplest form possible. He finds the Aminta an excellent exercise in simplicity, far superior to the Pastor Fido. In every way the pastoral must avoid the burden and grossness of reality, and produce for the pleasure of the refined reader an atmosphere of tranquillity. Alors on a le cœur rempli, et non pas troublé; on a des soins, et non pas des inquiétudes; on est remué, mais non pas déchiré; et ce mouvement doux est precisement tel que l'amour du l'amour du repos, et que la paresse naturelle le peut souffrir." And the shepherds who represent this life must not be sombre, jealous, angry, desperate, but tender, simple, delicate, faithful, and filled with hope.

poetry.

Pastorals constructed upon these rules Waldberg terms the product of fashion, as indeed they are. Two schools The artistry of such poems represents of pastoral an entire school, mainly concerned in dressing their shepherds very much as they like, and in refusing to see them dressed as they really are. In fact, the two large schools of the pastoralists may be aptly described as idealistic and realistic; the idealists with artificial, raffiniert tendencies, the realists somewhat subject to coarseness and rusticity. Both schools carried to the extreme are likely to become either ludicrous or 1 Fontenelle, p. 11. 2 Waldberg, p. 84.