Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 3

Subito ordin i premi a coloro, che lottare volessero, offrendo di dare al vincitore un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo, eran dipinte molte cose: ma tra l' altre una ninfa ignuda, con tutti i membri bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli delle capre; la quale, sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo satirello, e con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carita tutta si struggesse: e 'l fanciullo nell' una mammella poppava, nell' altra tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l' occhio la si guardava, quasi temendo che tolta non gli fosse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean due fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti due volti orribili di maschere cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre spavento a duo altri, che davanti loro stavano; de' quali l' uno fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava; l' altro caduto gia in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimenti aitare, stendeva la mano per graffiarlo. (_Prosa_ XI.)

I shall make no attempt at translation. Some versions, really wonderful in the success with which they reproduce the style of the original, will be found in Symonds' _Italian Literature_[60]. It is probably unnecessary to put in a warning that the _Arcadia_ is a work of which extracts are apt to give a somewhat too favourable impression. In its long complaints, speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull, but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There were several imitations later, such as the _Accademia tusculana_ of Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third _Prosa_ in his _Sacrifizio pastorale_; while collections of tales and _facetiae_ such as the _Arcadia in Brenta_ of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of the name. A French translation published in 1544 went through three editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578. It may have been due to the existence of Sidney's more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever appeared in English.

Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later, has of necessity been lengthy. It was at Italian b.r.e.a.s.t.s that the infant ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed. The other countries of continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn contributed characteristics of its own. It was to Italy that England too was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements peculiar to France and Spain. It will therefore be necessary briefly to review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though they need detain us but a brief s.p.a.ce in comparison with the Italian fountain-head.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work of Sannazzaro. Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to Vergil, who had the wors.h.i.+p of Pan in mind, but the selection of the barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.

When children weave fancies of wonderland they use the resources of the imagination with economy; uninterrupted suns.h.i.+ne soon cloys. So too with these other children of the renaissance. Their wonderland is a place whither they may escape from the pressure of the world that is too much with them; they seek in it at least the virtue that its evils shall be the opposite of those from which they fly. They could not, it is true, believe in an Arcadia in which all the cares of this world should end--the golden age is always a time to be sung and remembered, or else to be dreamed of, in the years to come, it is never the present--but if they cannot escape from the changes and chances of this mortal life, if death and unfaith are still realities in their dreamland as on earth, they will at least utter their grief melodiously, and water fair pastures with their tears.

Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival; the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fas.h.i.+on, where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,'

there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian pastoralism, in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido_, we trace a yearning towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the sight of Helena, to find in it a place for the earthly affections that bound them, and at the touch of reality the vision dissolved in mist.

VII

When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these circ.u.mstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the richest national literatures of the world.

It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind, which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models, bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is, namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important examples in this place.[63]

An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_, the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of literature are certain poems--_eclogas_ they are for the most part styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama.

About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited pa.s.sion ending in suicide, and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his master and Lope de Vega.

With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course, concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as such t.i.tles as the _Pastores de Belen_ might suggest. It is found equally in the religious or quasi-religious plays--such as the _Vuelta de Egypto_ with its shepherds and gypsies, and the _Pastor lobo_, an allegorical satire on the church Lope afterwards entered--and in such purely secular, amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the _Arcadia_--not to be confused with his romance of the same name--and the _Selva sin amor_, a regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have been recited after the manner of Castiglione's _Tirsi_.

While on the subject of the drama I may mention translations of the _Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_. Ta.s.so's piece was rendered into Castilian by Juan de Jauregui, and first printed at Rome in 1607, a revised edition appearing among the author's poems in 1618. The _Pastor fido_ was translated by Cristobal Suarez de Figueroa, the best version being that printed at Valentia in 1609, from which Ticknor quotes a pa.s.sage as typical as it is successful. It was to these two versions of the masterpieces of Italian pastoral that Cervantes accorded the highest meed of praise, declaring that 'they haply leave it doubtful which is the translation or original.'[64] There likewise exists a poor adaptation of Guarini's play, said to be the work of Solis, Coello, and Calderon[65].

The pastoral appears, however, never to have gained a very firm footing upon the mature Spanish stage, no doubt for the same reason that led to a similar result in England, namely, that the vigorous national drama about it overpowered and choked its delicate and exotic growth[66].

Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character, though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of Francisco de Sa de Miranda[67]. He appears to have begun writing independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity and genuineness of feeling. He probably had some direct knowledge of the Italians, for he writes:

Liamos....

.... os pastores italianos Do bom velho Sanazarro.

He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already appeared.

The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about 1526. To him, in conjunction with Boscan and Mendoza, the vogue was due.

At his best, when he really a.s.similates the foreign elements borrowed from his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius of his nation. The first of his three eclogues, which was probably composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author, while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscan. This poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.

Garcilaso's followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' _Galatea_; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor's _Diana_; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his _Siglo de Oro_ a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.

In spite of the fas.h.i.+on of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect. Sa de Miranda has been mentioned above.

Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sa de Miranda's, in the short measures more natural to the language than the _terza rima_ and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro:

O pescador Sincero, que amansado Tem o pego de Prochyta co' o canto Por as sonoras ondas compa.s.sado.

D'este seguindo o som, que pode tanto, E misturando o antigo Mantuano, Facamos novo estylo, novo espanto.

Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fas.h.i.+on pa.s.sed from Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first to imitate the _Arcadia_ was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as Ticknor styles it, ent.i.tled from the first words of the text _Menina e moca_. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of the story antic.i.p.ating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of real characters, which, though their ident.i.ty was concealed under anagrams and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the _Arcadia_. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.

The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who composed in Castilian dialect the famous _Diana_. 'Los siete libres de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor'--the Spanish form of Montemor's name and that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages--appeared at Valencia, without date, but about 1560.[69] As in the case of its Italian and Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in love with the nymph Diana, of whose ident.i.ty Lope de Vega claimed to be cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fas.h.i.+on. Sireno is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple, and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance of his pa.s.sion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is interwoven with a mult.i.tude of episodes and incidental narratives, pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears, being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.

Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric tradition with the fas.h.i.+onable Italian pastoral, and also to certain graces of style which it possesses, the _Diana_ held the field until the picaresque romance developed into a recognized _genre_, and exercised a very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers of Spain. Googe imitated pa.s.sages from it in his eclogues; Sidney translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance; Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. In the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Perez, only got so far as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the work of Jeronimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a _rifacimento_ of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming a sequel to Perez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions parody by Fra Bartolome Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin one of Gil Polo's portion at least.

Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the _Galatea_ of Cervantes, imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to have suggested the _Arcadia_, written a few years later at the instigation of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: 'many of its shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,' Cervantes confesses of his romance, while Lope announces that 'the _Arcadia_ is a true history.' Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese _Primavera_ of Francisco Rodrigues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and 1614, and is p.r.o.nounced by Ticknor to be 'among the best full-length pastoral romances extant.'

All these works resemble one another in their general features. The characteristics of the _genre_ as found in Spain, in spite of a real feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an adherence to the circ.u.mstances of actual existence even closer than was the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole _mise en scene_ consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fas.h.i.+onable pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced, and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fas.h.i.+on in their more serious and enduring works.

VIII

In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is summed up in the work of one man--Clement Marot. It is he who forms the central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pleiade. While belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation of Sannazzaro's _Salices_ and her lament on the death of her brother Francois I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her _comedie_ of human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject.

In his early work he continued the tradition of the _Romance of the Rose_; later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance.

By nature an easy-going _bon vivant_, his only real affection appears to have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pa.s.s his days as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.

But, however fascinating Marot may be as an historical figure, he was in no sense a great poet. His chief merit in literature, apart from his often delicate epigrams, his _elegant badinage_ and his graceful if at times facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the charm of nave simplicity and genuine feeling. In his _eclogue au Roi_ he addresses Francis under the name of Pan, while in the _Pastoureau chrestien_ he applies the same name to the Deity; yet in either case there is a justness of sentiment underlying the convention which saves the verse from degenerating into mere sycophancy or blasphemy. His chief claim to notice as a pastoral writer is his authors.h.i.+p of an eclogue on the death of Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis; a poem through which, more than any other, he influenced his greater English disciple, and thereby acquired the importance he possesses for our present inquiry.

Marot, however, whose inspiration, in so far as it was not born of his own genius, appears to be chiefly derived from Vergil, whose first eclogue he translated in his youth, was far from being the only poet who wrote bucolic verse or bore other witness to pastoral influence. France was not behind other nations in embracing the Italian models. Margaret, as I have said, imitated Sannazzaro in her _Histoire des satyres et nymphes de Diane_. The _Arcadia_ was translated in 1544. Du Bellay was familiar with the original and honoured its author with imitation, translation, and even a respectful mention of it in his famous _Defense_. Elsewhere he asks:

Qui fera taire la musette Du pasteur neapolitain?

The first part of Belleau's _Bergerie_ appeared in 1565, the complete work, including a piscatory poem, in 1572. On the stage Nicolas Filleul antic.i.p.ated the regular Italian drama in a dramatized eclogue ent.i.tled _Les...o...b..es_ in 1566. Later Nicolas de Montreux, better known under the name of Ollenix du Mont-Sacre, a writer of a religious cast, and author of a romantic comedy on the story of Potiphar's wife, composed three pastoral plays, _Athlette_, _Diane_, and _Arimene_, which appeared in 1585, 1592, and 1597 respectively. They are conventional pastorals on the Italian model, futile in plot and commonplace in style. He was also the author of the _Bergerie de Juliette_, a romance published in 1592, which Robert Tofte is credited with having translated in his _Honour's Academy_,' or the Famous Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta,' which appeared at London in 1610. Tofte's work, however, while purporting to be 'done into English,' makes no mention of the original author, and though indebted for its form and t.i.tle to Nicholas' romance does not appear to bear much further resemblance to it. A far more important work in itself, but one which does not much concern us here, is Honore d'Urfe's _Astree_, an autobiographic compilation in which the fas.h.i.+onable pastoral romance found its most consummate example. The work was translated into English as early as 1620, but the history of its influence in this country belongs almost exclusively to the French vogue, which began about the middle of the century, and formed such an important element in the literature of the restoration.

The comparatively small influence exerted by the French pastoral of the renaissance on that of England must excuse the scanty summary given in the preceding paragraphs. It remains to be said that there had existed at an earlier period in France another and very different tradition, which supplied one of the regular forms of composition in vogue among _trouveres_ and _troubadours_ alike. The _pastourelle_ has sometimes been described as a popular form, but it would be difficult to determine wherein its 'popularity,' in the sense intended, consists, for it is easily recognized as the offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue.

Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes.

Others--and the fact is at least significant--serve to convey allusions, political, personal or didactic: a variety found as early as the twelfth century in Provencal, and about the fourteenth in northern French.

Wandering scholars adopted the form from the knightly singers and produced a plentiful crop of Latin _pastoralia_, usually of a somewhat burlesque nature. An idea of the general style of these may be gathered from such lines as the following, which contain the reply of a country girl hesitating before the advances of a merry student:

Si senserit meus pater uel Martinus maior frater, erit mihi dies ater; uel si sciret mea mater, c.u.m sit angue peior quater: uirgis sum tributa.[70]

Appropriated, lastly, and refas.h.i.+oned by the hand of an original genius, the _pastourelle_ gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its _Minnesang_ in Walther's 'Under der linden,' with its irrepressibly roguish refrain:

Kuster mich? wol tusentstunt: tandaradei, seht wie rot mir ist der munt!

Connected with the _pastourelles_ of the _langue d'ol_ is an isolated dramatic effort, of a primitive and nave sort, but of singular grace and charm. _Li jus Robins et Marion_, the work of Adan le Bochu or de le Hale, is in fact a dramatized _pastourelle_ of some eight hundred lines beginning with the rejection by a shepherdess of the advances of a knight and ending with the rustic sports of the shepherds on the green.

Unsophisticated nature and playful cunning unite in no ordinary degree to lend delicacy and savour to the work, while the literary quality of Adan's verse is evident in such incidental songs as Marion's often quoted:

Robins m'aime, Robins m'a, Robins m'a demandee, si m'ara.

In spite, however, of the genuine _navete_ and natural realism of the piece, it is easy to recognize in it something of the same spirit of gentle raillery that sparkles in the graceful octaves of Lorenzo's _Nencia_.

A real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealization of the actual shepherd cla.s.s, is reflected in a poem written about 1460 by Rene of Anjou, ex-king of Naples, describing in pastoral guise the rustic retreat which he enjoyed in company with his wife, Jeanne de Laval, on the banks of the Durance. The conventional pastoralism that veils the ident.i.ty of the shepherd and shepherdess is scarcely more than a pretence, for at the end of the ma.n.u.script we find blazoned the arms of the royal pair, with the inscription:

Icy sont les armes, des...o...b.. ceste couronne, Du bergier dessus dit et de la bergeronne.

We have now completed the first section of our introductory survey of pastoral literature. We have pa.s.sed in review, in a necessarily rapid and superficial, but, it is to be hoped, not altogether inadequate, manner, the varions manifestations of the kind in the non-dramatic literature of continental Europe. The Italian pastoral drama has been reserved for separate and more detailed consideration in close connexion with that of this country. It must, however, be borne in mind that in such a survey as the present many of the byways and more or less obscure and devious channels by which pastoral permeated the wide fields of literature have of necessity been left unexplored. Nothing, for instance, has been said about the pastoral interludes which occupy a not inconspicuous place in the martial cantos both of the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_. Before pa.s.sing on, however, I should like to say a few words concerning one particular department of renaissance literature, and that chiefly by way of ill.u.s.trating the limitations of the tradition of literary pastoral. I refer to the _novelle_ or _nouvelles_, in which, although pastoral subjects are occasionally introduced, the treatment is entirely independent of conventional tradition. Without making any pretence at covering the whole field of the _novellieri_, I may instance a tale of Giraldi's, not lacking in the homely charm which belongs to that author, of a child exposed in a wood and brought up by the shepherds. These are represented as simple unpretending Lombard peasants, who look to their own business and are credited with none of the arts and graces of their literary fellows. More exclusively rustic in setting is an anecdote concerning the amours of a shepherd and shepherdess, told with broad humour in the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ and elaborated with characteristic gusto and extraordinarily graphic art by Pietro Fortini.