I. HISTORY
The p. is a fictionalized imitation of rural life, usually the life of an imaginary Golden Age, in which the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses play a prominent part; its ends are sometimes sentimental and romantic, but sometimes satirical or political. To insist on a realistic presentation of actual shepherd life would exclude the greater part of the works that are called p. Only when poetry ceases to imitate actual rural life does it become distinctly p. It must be admitted, however, that the term has been and still is used loosely to designate any treatment of rural life, as when Louis Untermeyer speaks of Robert Frost as a “p.” poet. Many critics might agree with Edmund Gosse that the “p. is cold, unnatural, artificial, and the humblest reviewer is free to cast a stone at its dishonored grave.” But there must be some unique value in a genre that lasted 2,000 years (and has generated the bibliography below).
For all practical purposes the p. begins with Theocritus’ Idylls, in the 3d c. B.c. Though the canon of Theocritus’ work is unsettled, enough of the poems in the collection made by Artemidorus are certainly his to justify the claim that Theocritus is the father of p. poetry. No. 11, for example, in which Polyphemus is depicted as being in love with Galatea and finding solace in song, becomes the prototype of the love lament; no. 1, in which Thyrsis sings of Daphnis’ death, sets the pattern and, to no small degree, the matter for the p. elegy (see below); no. 5 and no. 7 introduce the singing match conducted in amoebaean verses (“responsive verses”), whereby verses, couplets, or stanzas are spoken alternately by two speakers. The second speaker is expected not only to match the theme introduced by the first but also to improve upon it in some way (see Koster). And no. 7, in the appearance of contemporary poets under feigned names, contains the germ of the allegorical p. Theocritus wrote his ps. while he was at Ptolemy’s court in Alexandria, but he remembered the actual herdsmen of his boyhood and the beautiful countryside of Sicily, so he, like the p. poets who followed him, was a city man longing for the country. But perhaps no other p. poet has ever been able to strike such a happy medium between the real and the ideal.
Virgil’s Eclogues refine and methodize Theocritus’ idylls. Expressing the sentiment inspired by the beauty of external nature in her tranquil moods and the kindred charm inspired by ideal human relationships (love in particular) in verse notable for its exquisite diction and flowing rhythm, they consolidate and popularize the conventions of p. poetry. During the Middle Ages, the p. was chiefly confined to the pastourelle (q.v.), a type of vernacular dialogue (q.v.) first developed in Occitan poetry (q.v.), and to a few realistic scenes in the religious plays. The vast body of post-medieval p.—that is, p. elegy, p. drama, and p. romance—is a direct outgrowth of Ren. Humanism.
The p. elegy, patterned after such Cl. models as the Lament for Adonis, credited to Bion, the Lament for Bion, traditionally ascribed to Moschus but most probably by a disciple of Bion, and Theocritus’ first idyll, became conventional in the Ren. Its traditional machinery included the invocation, statement of grief, inquiry into the causes of death, sympathy and weeping of nature, procession of mourners, lament, climax, change of mood, and consolation. Marot and Spenser ( Astrophel [1595], for Sidney) produced important Ren. examples, and numerous other p. poets, including Pope, Ambrose Philips, and Gay tried their hand at the genre. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais conform rather closely to the classical conventions, of which vestiges can be seen even as late as Arnold’s Thyrsis. In the Eng. trad. it is Lycidas which unquestionably holds the first position.
The p. drama was latent in the idylls and eclogues, for the brief dialogue was easily expandable. Even as early as Boccaccio’s Ninƒale ƒeisolano the dramatic intensity of the eclogue was considerably heightened. With the addition of the crossed love plot and secret personal history, the p. drama emerged, and it grew in popularity as the medieval mystery plays lost ground. Poliziano’s Favola di Orfeo (1472) is perhaps more correctly classified as an opera, but p. elements are prominent. Agostino de’ Beccari’s Il Sacriƒicio (1554), the first fully-developed p. drama, led to the heyday of the p. drama in Italy during the last quarter of the 16th c. Tasso’s Aminta (1573), an allegory of the court of Ferrara, is no doubt the greatest of the kind and has exerted the most far-reaching influence on the trad. Second only to it is Guarini’s Il pastor ƒido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1580-89), the first important tragicomedy (q.v.). In France, the most famous drama is Racan’s Les Bergeries (1625), founded ond’Urfé’s Astrée. It was followed by countless bergeries, which, after the mode of Astrée, were so filled with galant shepherds and beautiful nymphs that the type wore itself out with its own artificiality. England’s first noteworthy p. dramas, Lyly’s Gallathea and Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, were both published in 1584, and the most excellent, Fletcher’s Faithƒul Shepherdess (imitating Tasso’s Aminta ), in 1610. In general, the Eng. plays differed from their predecessors in that, in the former, the p. setting and elements are merely a backdrop to courtly characters engaged in courtly intrigues. Because of the constant pressure of Eng. empiricism and the austerity of the Puritan taste, the p. drama in England never reached the extravagant artificiality that it attained on the Continent. The last p. drama in England was the belated Gentle Shepherd by Allan Ramsay in 1725. Written in Lowland Scots, detailing Scottish scenes, and using “real” shepherds, it was highly praised by the early romantic poets and critics.
The p. romance usually takes the form of a long prose narrative, interspersed with lyrics, built on a complicated plot, and peopled with characters bearing p. names. In antiquity it is represented by Longus’ charming story of sexual initiation, Daphnis and Chloe. The modern genre, while anticipated by Boccaccio’s prosimetric Ameto (1342), is usually dated from Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), a remarkable work, written in musical prose and filled with characters who live in innocent voluptuousness. Popular imitations are Montemayor’s Diana (1559?) in Portugal and Cervantes’ Galatea (1585) in Spain. In France the indigenous pastourelle held back the p. romance; but Rémy Belleau’s Bergerie (1572) established the type, and in d’Urfé’s Astrée the baroque p. romance found its most consummate example, as nymphs bedizened in pearls and satin cavort with chivalric shepherds. The most celebrated Eng. p. romance is Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (the “Old Arcadia,” written ca. 1580; rev. 1584, the “New Arcadia,” pub. 1590). Its lofty sentiment, sweet rhythm, ornate rhetoric, elaborate description, and high-flown oratory display one aspect of the Italianate style of Elizabethan courtly lit. In spite of the riddle of its plot, in which the strange turns of fortune and love make all the virtuous happy, it is still good reading as a romance of love and adventure. The literary influence of the Arcadia was pervasive: Greene and Lodge, for example, imitated it; Shakespeare drew from it for the character of Gloucester in King Lear, on the scaffold Charles I recited an adaptation of a Pamela’s prayer; in translation the Arcadia contributed to the elaborate plots of the Fr. romances; and traces of it may perhaps be seen even in Richardson and Scott. The sustained elaboration of its structure marks another step in the devel. of the novel away from the short story and the picaresque tale. Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), conventional and imitative, adds little to the genre except some delightful lyrics. Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), in the style of Lyly’s Euphues but diversified with sonnets and eclogues, was dramatized with little alteration by Shakespeare in As You Like It.
Early in the 14th c., the p. eclogue was profoundly influenced by the new learning, when Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio wrote Lat. eclogues after the mode of Virgil. They continued the allegory of their master, extended its political and religious scope, and introduced the personal lament. About the turn of the 15th c., Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus exploited the satirical possibilities of the p. by using rustic characters to ridicule the court, the church, and the women of his day. Late in the century, the It. poet Marino (1569-1625) developed a style paralleling gongorism and euphuism. His Fr. p. idyll, Adone (1623), filled with affected wordplay and outrageous conceits, represents a baroque (q.v.) aberration of the genre comparable to the contemporaneous Astrée. The Plèiade (q.v.) transplanted the classical eclogue into France, where Marot and Ronsard and many imitators produced conventional eclogues. In England, the eclogue makes its first appearance in the work of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe ( Es., Epitaphs, and Sonnets J. M. Kennedy [1989]), but important p. poetry effectually dates from Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), which inspired a host of late 16th-c. imitations. Though Spenser follows the conventions of the classical eclogue, he aims at simplicity and naturalness by making use of rustic characters speaking country lang. During the last quarter of the 16th c., England continued to produce much p. poetry in imitation of Spenser. According to modern taste and judgment, those of most merit are Michael Drayton’s Shepherds Garland (1593) and William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-16). In his Piscatory Eclogues (1633), Phineas Fletcher imitated Sannazaro, who may have taken his cue from Theocritus’ fisherman’s idyll, no. 21.
The swan song of the p. was sung by the Eng. poets of the 18th c. Revived by Pope and Philips, whose rival ps. appeared in Tonson’s Miscellany in 1709, the p. attracted a surprising amount of interest. Pope, inspired by Virgil’s Eclogues, produced one of the showpieces of rococo art—a part of “Summer” being so tuneful that Handel set it to music. Philips, under the rising influence of Eng. empiricism, tried to write pastorals that came closer to the realities of Eng. rural life. The followers of neither poet wrote any p. worthy of mention, and the genre soon died of its own inanition. So artificial and effete had it become that Gay’s Shepherd’s Week, in broad burlesque, was sometimes read as a p. in the true Theocritean style. The outstanding examples of the romantic p. are Ger.: Salomon Gessner’s Daphnis (1754), Idyllen (1756), and Der Tod Abels (1758). Wordsworth’s Michael, reflecting the empirical element of Eng. romanticism, well marks the end of serious attempts in the genre.
II. THEORY
Sustained criticism of the p. begins with the essays of the Ren. Humanists, the most important being Vida’s Ars poetica (1527), Sebillet’s Art poétique françoys . The interest of these critics in the p. sprang from their desire to enrich the vernacular by imitating the “ancients” in this genre and to exploit its allegorical potential.
But mere imitation of Theocritus and Virgil did not long suffice, as the debate over Guarini’s tragicomedy II pastor fido illustrates. In his Jason Denores attacked this play because, he argued, it is a bastard genre, unauthorized by Aristotle. In II verato, Guarini secured the new form against his adversary, thereby widening the scope of the genre. in L’Autheur à la bergere astrée (1610), further extended the bounds of the p. when he turned critic to defend his baroque romance. The extravagances of Marino’s Adone made him the main target of neoclassical attack.
In France, critical discussion of the p. followed in the course of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes In 1659, René Rapin argued that p. poets should return to the ancient models, and to his Eclogae sacrae he prefixed “Dissertatio de carmine pastorali,” wherein he declares that he will gather all his theory from “Theocritus and Virgil, those great and judicious Authors, whose very doing is Authority enough,” since “Pastoral belongs properly to the Golden Age.” The most significant rebuttal to Rapin’s theory is Fontenelle’s “Discours sur la nature de l’eglogue” (1688). Whereas Rapin looked for his fundamental criterion to the objective authority of the ancients, Fontenelle, like his master Descartes, sought a subjective standard in and expected illumination from “the natural light of Reason.” Fontenelle’s method is deductive. He starts with a basic assumption, the self-evident clarity of which he thinks no one will question: “all men would be happy, and that too at an easy rate.” From this premise he deduces the proposition that p. poetry, if it is to make men happy, must present “a concurrence of the two strongest passions, laziness and love.”
The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was transferred directly to England; Rapin was translated by Thomas Creech in 1684, and Fontenelle was “Englished by Mr. Motteux” in 1695. The clash between the objective authority of the classics and the subjective standards of reason divided the critics into two schools of opinion, which are best denominated as neoclassical and rationalist. The immediate source of the basic ideas of the Eng. Neoclassical critics of the p.—the chief of whom are Walsh, Pope, Gay, Gildon, and Newbery—is Rapin’s “Treatise.” Pope, in practice as in theory, epitomizes the neoclassical ideal.
The immediate source of the basic ideas of the Eng. rationalist critics—the chief of whom are Addison, Tickell, Purney, and Johnson—is Fontenelle’s “Discours.” But the Eng. followers of Fontenelle insist that the p. conform to experience as well as to reason. Though Dr. Johnson’s Rambler essays on the p. observe both Rationalist and empirical premises: his definition of a p. is that it is simply a poem in which “any action or passion is represented by its effects on a country life.”
Romantic p. theory evolved from Rationalist theory. As the critics became more certain of their empirical grounds, they showed more freedom to disregard the form and the content of the traditional p.; to look on nature with heightened emotion; to endow primitive life with benevolence and dignity; and to place a greater value on sentiment and feeling. For example, in An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), Joseph Warton, by arguing that Theocritus was primarily a realistic poet and that the Golden Age depicted in his poetry may be equated with 18th-c. rural life, substitutes cultural primitivism for chronological. In “Discours préliminaire” to Les Saisons, Jean-François de Saint-Lambert disregards the distinction between the p. and descriptive poetry (q.v.) and speaks with enthusiasm of the beauty of fields, rivers, and woods and of the felicity of rural life as he knew it in his childhood. In Lectures on Belles Lettres (1783), Hugh Blair singles out Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen as the poems in which his “ideas for the improvement of P. Poetry are fully realized.” Blair’s essay, along with Wordsworth’s Michael (which exemplifies much of Blair’s theory), ends serious consideration of the p. After that poem and Blair’s essay, the genre belongs to the academics.
User Comments Add a comment…