Italian Pastoral Drama I We have now passed in review the main classes of non-dramatic pastoral both abroad and in this country.

It does not account either for the allegorical pastoral, in which actual personages are introduced, in the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy at the rustic freedom of the country.

In this confusion lay, perhaps, the germ of those debates between highland and lowland shepherds which reverberate through the later pastoral, and are still loud in Spenser.'

The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.

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 chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,

Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric tradition with the fashionable 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.

And yet, strangely enough, not a little of the convention at least of chivalrous love survives in the debased Arcadian love of the sentimental pastoral.

It is in thought and expression rather than in actual language that these poems distinguish themselves from the literary pastoral.

The Pickerel Pond: a double pastoral.

The first and the tenth pastorals, whatever be determined of the rest, are sufficient to place their author above the reach of rivalry.

"Shall it be a comedy, or a tragedy, or a burlesque pastoral?"

This theme had already caught the fancy of the song-writers of the fourteenth century, who produced some of the most delightful examples of native and unconventional pastoral anywhere to be found[40].

In substance, then, the romantic pastoral in England was a combination of the Arcadian drama of Italy with the chivalric romance of Spain, as familiarized through the medium of Sidney's work, and also, though less consistently, with the never very fully developed tradition of the mythological play.

Would we but breathe within a wax-bound quill, Pan's seven-fold pipe, some plaintive pastoral; To teach each hollow grove, and shrubby hill, Each murmuring brook, each solitary vale To found our love, and to our song accord, Wearying Echo with one changelesse word.

The poetical pastoral, however, very soon descended to the real pastoral; and, as if to make people what they were not was considered enough of the historical of portrait, even this took.

In it the strains of the polished pastoral are varied by the humours of the clown Hobbinall, the whole ending with a speech by Pan and a dance of satyrs.

Into the post-restoration pastorals it is no part of my present scheme to enter.

It was further rendered imperative by more particular considerations which will appear in the course of the present chapter, for we shall find that the pastoral drama comes into being, not through the infusion of the Arcadian ideal into pre-existing dramatic forms, but through the actual evolution of a new dramatic form from the pre-existing non-dramatic pastoral.

To this period likewise, if we are to believe the author, belongs a 'nova favola pastorale' entitled Calisto, by Luigi Groto, the blind littérateur of Adria, whose preposterous pastoral, Il pentimento amoroso, was produced between the Aminta and the Pastor fido.

It does not account either for the allegorical pastoral, in which actual personages are introduced, in the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy at the rustic freedom of the country.

Their typical attitude is seen in his Shepherd's Week, with its ludicrous picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, where the pastoral, once remote from life, assumes the manners and dialect of the countryside in order to arouse laughter.

Into the post-restoration pastorals it is no part of my present scheme to enter.

St. Dorothea is also a favourite saint in these sacred pastorals.

Sometimes stretched out on a carpet of verdure, he listened to the enchanting music she drew from her instrument, or drank in the sweet voice of his shepherdess singing melodious pastorals.

But nowhere are things more apt to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gather a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.