The central motive of the piece is the struggle between the feverish passion of Aminta and the virginal coldness of Silvia.  Of this motive and of the manner in which it is treated it is not altogether easy to speak, and this less from any inherent element in the subject or from the difficulty of accurately apprehending the peculiarities of sentiment proper to former ages, than from the readiness of all ages alike to accept in such matters the counterfeit coin of conventional protestation for the sterling reticence of natural delicacy.  No doubt this tendency has been aided by the fact that the secrets of a girl’s heart, whatever may be their true dramatic value, form an unsuitable and ineffective subject for declamation.  The difficulties must not, however, be allowed to weigh against the importance of coming to a clear understanding as to the true nature of this non so che of false sentiment, of which it would hardly be too much to affirm that it made the fortune of the pastoral in aristocratic Italy on the one hand, and proved its ruin in middle-class London on the other.

To Tasso is due that assumption of extravagant and conventional pudor which forms one of the most abiding features of the pastoral drama.  To censure an exaggeration of the charm of modesty on the threshold of the seicento, or to object a strained sense of chastity against the author of the golden-age chorus, may indeed seem strange; but, as with Fletcher at a later date, the very extravagance of the paradox may supply us with the key to its solution.

The falsity of Tasso’s position is evinced partly in the main action of the drama, partly in the commentary supplied by the minor personages.  The character of Aminta himself is unimportant in this respect; when we have described him as effeminate, sickly, and over-refined, we have said all that is necessary in view of the position he occupies with regard to Silvia.  She, we are given to understand, is the type of the ‘careless’ shepherdess, the unspotted nymph of Diana[177], rejoicing in the chase alone, and importuned by the love of Aminta, which she neither reciprocates nor understands, and of the genuineness of which she shows herself, indeed, not a little sceptical.  If, however, she is as careless as she appears, her conversion is certainly most sudden.  The picture, moreover, drawn by Dafne of Silvia coquetting with her shadow in the pool, though possibly coloured by malice, supplies a sufficient hint of the true state of the girl’s fancy.  She is in truth such a Chloe of innocence as might spring up in the rank soil of a petty Italian court infected with post-Tridentine morality.  Were she indeed careless of Aminta’s devotion we could easily sympathize with her when she brushes aside Dafne’s importunity with the words: 

Faccia Aminta di se e de’ suoi amori
Quel ch’ a lui piace; a me nulla ne cale. (I. i.)

It is altogether different with her attitude of arrogant pudicity when she announces: