As the result of this contrast there arises an idea
which comes perhaps as near being universal in pastoral
as any—the idea, namely, of the ’golden
age.’ This embraces, indeed, a field not
wholly coincident with that of pastoral, but the two
are connected alike by a common spring in human emotion
and constant literary association. The fiction
of an age of simplicity and innocence found birth
among the Augustan writers in the midst of the complex
and luxurious civilization of Rome, as an illustration
of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that
’literature has constantly the double tendency
to negative the life around it, as well as to reproduce
it.’ Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and
been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary
legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was
incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical
composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice
handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by
Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became the prey
of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and
Hall. The association of this ideal world with
the simplicity of pastoral life was effected by Vergil,
and in this form it was treated with loving minuteness
by Tasso in his Aminta and by Browne in his
Britannia’s Pastorals[2]. The fiction
no doubt answered to some need in human nature, but
in literature it soon came to be no more than a polite
convention.
The conception of a golden age of rustic simplicity
does not, indeed, involve the whole of pastoral literature.
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. What it does comprehend is that
outburst of pastoral song which sprang from the yearning
of the tired soul to escape, if it were but in imagination
and for a moment, to a life of simplicity and innocence
from the bitter luxury of the court and the menial
bread of princes[3].
And this, the reaction against the world that is too
much with us, is, after all, the keynote of what is
most intimately associated with the name of pastoral
in literature—the note that is struck with
idyllic sweetness in Theocritus, and, rising to its
fullest pitch of lyrical intensity, lends a poignant
charm to the work of Tasso and Guarini. For everywhere
in these soft melodies of luscious beauty, even in
the studied sketches of primitive innocence itself,
there is an undercurrent of tender melancholy and
pathos:
Il
mondo invecchia
E invecchiando intristisce.
I have said that a sense of the contrast between town
and country was essential to the development of a
distinctively pastoral literature. It would be
an interesting task to trace how far this contrast
is the source of the various subsidiary types—of
the ideal where it breeds desire for a return to simplicity,
of the realistic where the humour of it touches the
imagination, and of the allegorical where it suggests
satire on the corruption of an artificial civilization.
