Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 7

III

Besides its wider influence on English verse, and the stimulus it gave to pastoral composition as a whole, the _Shepherd's Calender_ called forth a series of direct imitations. Of these the majority are but of accidental and ephemeral interest and of inconspicuous merit; and it is probable that Spenser himself lived to see the end of this over-direct school of disciples.h.i.+p. Several examples appeared in Francis Davison's famous miscellany known as the _Poetical Rhapsody_, the first edition of which, though it only appeared in 1602, contained the gleanings of the entire sixteenth century.[108] Of these imitations, four in number, the first, the work of the editor himself, is a very poor production. It is a love lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the _Calender_. The other three poems are ascribed, either in the _Rhapsody_ itself or in Davison's ma.n.u.script list, to a certain A. W., who so far remains unidentified, if, indeed, the letters conceal any individuality and do not merely stand for 'Anonymous Writer,' as has been sometimes thought. The three eclogues at any rate bear evidence of coming from the same pen, and the following lines show that the writer was no incompetent imitator, and at the same time argue some genuine feeling:

Thou 'ginst as erst forget thy former state, And range amid the busks thyself to feed: Fair fall thee, little flock! both rathe and late; Was never lover's sheep that well did speed.

Thou free, I bound; thou glad, I pine in pain; I strive to die, and thou to live full fain.

The first of these poems is a monologue 'ent.i.tled Cuddy,' modelled on the January eclogue. The second is a lament 'made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney,' in which the writer wonders at Colin's silence, and which consequently must, at least, date from before the appearance of _Astrophel_ in 1595, and is probably some years earlier. It is in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom sings Cuddy's lament in lyrical stanzas, thus recalling Spenser's 'November.' These stanzas do not reveal any great metrical gift. The last poem is a fragment 'concerning old age,' which connects itself by its theme with the February eclogue, though the form is stanzaic.[109] Again we find mention of Cuddy, a name evidently a.s.sumed by the author, though whether he can be identified with the Cuddie of the _Calender_ it is impossible to say. Whoever he was, he shows more disposition than most of his fellow imitators to preserve Spenser's archaisms.

But undoubtedly the greatest poet who was content to follow immediately in Spenser's footsteps was Michael Drayton, who in 1593 published a volume ent.i.tled 'Idea The Shepheards Garland, Fas.h.i.+oned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands Sacrifice to the nine Muses.' This connexion between the number of the eclogues and the muses is purely fanciful; Rowland is Drayton's pastoral name, and Idea, which re-appeared as the t.i.tle of the 1594 volume of sonnets, is that of his poetic mistress.[110] It can hardly be said that the verse of these poems attains any very high order of merit, but the imitation of Spenser is evident throughout. In the first eclogue Rowland bewails, in the midst of spring, 'the winter of his grief.' In this and the corresponding monologue at the end he clearly follows Spenser's arrangement and likewise adopts his minor key--

Fayre Philomel, night-musicke of the spring, Sweetly recordes her tunefull harmony, And with deepe sobbes, and dolefull sorrowing, Before fayre Cinthya actes her Tragedy.

In Eclogue II a 'wise' shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a somewhat gruesome picture of human fate--

And when the bell is readie to be tol'd To call the wormes to thine Anatomie, Remember then, my boy, what once I said to thee!

Even this, however, fails to shake the lover's faith in the gentle pa.s.sion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from Spenser:

Oh divine love, which so aloft canst raise, And lift the minde out of this earthly mire.

The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of Beta, is closely modelled on the 'April,' and abounds with such reminiscences as the following:

Make her a goodly Chapilet of azur'd Colombine, And wreath about her Coronet with sweetest Eglantine: Bedeck our Beta all with Lillies, And the dayntie Daffadillies, With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice, With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice.

Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators. In the fourth eclogue two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is Sidney. In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke. The seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly, in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the _Calender_, amid the frosts of winter.

These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the 'Poems Lyric and Pastoral' (_c._ 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth.

This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work, and one song at least is in the author's daintiest manner. He seldom surpa.s.sed the graceful conceit of the lines:

Through yonder vale as I did pa.s.se, Descending from the hill, I met a smerking bony la.s.se; They call her Daffadill:

Whose presence as along she went, The prety flowers did greet, As though their heads they downward bent With homage to her feete.

Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book--

Dare not to match thy pype with t.i.tyrus his style, Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle--

could nevertheless a.s.sert in semi-burlesque rime:

It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution;

and his disciple is not to be outdone. Never was truer lover or sweeter singer--

Oenon never upon Ida hill So oft hath cald on Alexanders name, As hath poore Rowland with an Angels quill Erected trophies of Ideas fame: Yet that false shepheard, Oenon, fled from thee; I follow her that ever flies from me.

Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he, and small success befell him in his uncongenial task. He knew little and cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the pastoral tradition. He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others: the Spenserian and traditional garb fits him ill. His golden age is rather amorous than philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad of Dowsabel. The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard to the court of Faery. So again in the barren dispute of the seventh eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged G.o.d flits across his path--

That pretie Cupid, little G.o.d of love, Whose imped winges with speckled plumes been dight, Who striketh men below and G.o.ds above, Roving at randon with his feathered flight, When lovely Venus sits and gives the ayme, And smiles to see her little Bantlings game.

If these eclogues formed Drayton's only claim upon our attention as a pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him. He left other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at least thoroughly so in form and spirit. The _Muses Elizium_ did not appear till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in this place. It is, however, so important as ill.u.s.trating the freer and more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his originality, in the work of Spenser.

The _Muses Elizium_ is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of pastoral work. Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness.

The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are full of it, and so are the romances and the plays. To this lyrical tradition belong Breton's songs, of which one has already been quoted; there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who did not contribute his quota. We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton's _Shepherds' Sirena_ containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the _Agincourt_ ballad:

Neare to the Silver Trent Sirena dwelleth, Shee to whom Nature lent All that excelleth; By which the Muses late And the neate Graces, Have for their greater state Taken their places: Twisting an Anadem Wherewith to Crowne her, As it belong'd to them Most to renowne her.

On thy Bancke, In a Rancke Let thy Swanes sing her And with their Musick along let them bring her.

In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chast.i.ty, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,

The winter here a Summer is, No waste is made by time, Nor doth the Autumne ever misse The blossomes of the Prime;

The flower that July forth doth bring, In Aprill here is seene, The Primrose, that puts on the Spring, In July decks each Greene,

a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hea.r.s.e, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of the _Muses Elizium_. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate's most imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom

Some said a G.o.d did her beget, But much deceiv'd were they, Her Father was a Rivelet, Her Mother was a Fay.

Her Lineaments so fine that were She from the Fayrie tooke, Her Beauties and Complection cleere By nature from the Brooke.

There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of _Agincourt_:

'Cloe, I scorne my Rime Should observe feet or time, Now I fall, then I clime, What is't I dare not?'

'Give thy Invention wing, And let her flert and fling, Till downe the Rocks she ding, For that I care not';

the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests:

The gentle winds sally Upon every Valley, And many times dally And wantonly sport, About the fields tracing, Each other in chasing, And often imbracing, In amorous sort.

There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response:

Sweet Muse, perswade our Phoebus to inspire Us for his Altars with his holiest fire, And let his glorious, ever-s.h.i.+ning Rayes Give life and growth to our Elizian Bayes;

or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of bridal songs--

For our t.i.ta is this day Married to a n.o.ble Fay.

There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender b.r.e.a.s.t.s half veiled when Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads the decree:

To all th' Elizian Nimphish Nation, Thus we make our Proclamation Against Venus and her Sonne, For the mischeefe they have done: After the next last of May, The fixt and peremptory day, If she or Cupid shall be found Upon our Elizian ground, Our Edict mere Rogues shall make them, And as such, who ere shall take them, Them shall into prison put; Cupids wings shall then be cut, His Bow broken, and his Arrowes Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes; And this Vagabond be sent, Having had due punishment, To mount Cytheron, which first fed him, Where his wanton Mother bred him, And there, out of her protection, Dayly to receive correction.

Then her Pasport shall be made, And to Cyprus Isle convayd, And at Paphos, in her Shryne, Where she hath beene held divine, For her offences found contrite, There to live an Anchorite.

We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had generated since the days of Moschus.

How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or less exaggerated panegyrics--how is it that in spite of all this we still regard the _Shepherd's Calender_ as serious literature; while with all its exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the _Muses' Elizium_ remains a toy? It is not merely the prestige of the author's name: it is not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation.

We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not only has the _Shepherd's Calender_ behind it a vast tradition, reverend if somewhat otiose--the devotion of men counts for something--but also that, however stiffly laced in an unsuitable garb, it sought to deal with matters of real import to man, or at any rate with what man has held as such. It treated questions of religious policy which touched the majority of men more nearly then than now; with moral problems calculated to interest the mind of an age still tinged with medievalism; with philosophical theories of human and divine love. In other words, the _Shepherd's Calender_ lay in the main stream of literature, and reflected the mind of the age, while the _Muses' Elizium_, in common with so much pastoral work, did not. These considerations open up an interesting field of speculation. Are we to suppose that there is indeed a line of demarcation between great art and little art wholly independent of that which divides good art from bad art? Are we to go further, and a.s.sume that these two lines of division intersect, so that a work may be akin to great art though it be not good art, while, however perfect a work of art may be, it may remain little art for some wholly non-aesthetic reason? But we digress.