How once upon a time the great chest prison'd the living goatherd, Comatas, by his master's infatuate and evil will, and how the blunt-faced bees, as they came up from the meadow to the fragrant cedar chest, fed him with food from tender flowers, because the Muse ever dropped sweet nectar on his lips."

Then he breaks out

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O blessed Comatas, surely these joyful things did befall thee, and thou wast enclosed within the chest and fed on honeycomb through the Spring-time, and so didst serve out thy bondage. Ah! would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living-how gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats and listened to thy voice, whilst thou under oaks and pine trees lying, didst sweetly sing, Comatas!"

Then Simichidas sings in turn, and Lycidas leaves them, and Simichidas and Eucritus and Amyntas go to the farm and picnic there, lying on deep beds of fragrant nut-branches and vine leaves:

"And high above our heads waved many a poplar, many an elm tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the Nymphs' own cave welled forth with murmurs musical. On shadowy boughs the burnt cicalas kept up their chattering toil, and aloof in the tangled brake the tree-frog made his chirrup; the ring-dove moaned, the yellow bees were flitting round the springs. All breathed the scent of summer, very rich, and the scent of autumn fruits; pears at our feet and apples by our sides were rolling plentiful, the tender branches laden with wild plums were earthward bowed, and the fouryear-old seal of pitch was loosened from the mouth of the wine-jars."

Wine was not all they drank:

"Such a draught as ye Nymphs gave us that day from your spring, there by the altar of Demeter of the threshing-floor.

Ah! once again may I plant the great winnowing fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by with sheaves and poppies in her hands.”

Whether as song or as picture, this idyll of the Harvest Feast is, I think, perfect a perfect example of the oneness of form and creative imagination. Theocritus certainly has not, as Virgil has, that sense of tears, that still sad music of humanity; but he has a joy in the beauty of earth, and a vision of the human and divine life which haunts it, that no Roman ever had. You will not find in Virgil any portrait like that of Lycidas, nor any such sense of the characters and intercourse of men, nor any fairies in the woods nor visible figures of august and smiling gods, standing like Demeter by the corn-heap of any little farm. These Idylls belong to the poetry of unmixed gold; they are, in the old use of the word, sincere.

Virgil's Eclogues, too, have sincerity of feeling, or they would never have so stirred and changed the Roman mind. But their sincerity is not so full, so unmixed with alien stuff. Some of Virgil's scenery, some of his best phrases, and of course all his wonderful rhythms and cadences, are his own. But his names, his rocks and caves and scenery, are mostly borrowed from Theocritus, imported from the Sicily day long past. The importation is done by a great and wily borrower," but it makes the poems a little less vital, a little more artificial, than they might have been. Incidentally it has also made it difficult for archaeologists to distinguish between what is relevant for their purpose and what is not. The case of the Eclogues is not an isolated one. 108

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VOL. V, N.S.

Theocritus first, and Virgil after him, had shown the world what an admirable form was that of pastoral poetry, how pleasing to the ear and eye, how full of incidental opportunities, and above all how capable of expressing one of the most universal moods of men that which dwells on country scenes with a momentary and impossible belief in a golden age. It was inevitable that others should follow the tradition; and they have done so even in our own country, where we have little in the way of sunburnt cicalas or practicable caves, and where if any goddess stands by the threshing machine it is Moneta rather than Demeter and Moneta does not smile on poppies. But it is interesting to watch our pastoral poets struggling with the same problem, the same temptation which befel Virgil. They also are too often led to use alien material; they borrow not only the traditional form, which is eternal, but the local names and details, which are temporal and second-hand. They even borrow scenery and customs, which are fatally out of place in the English landscape they are presenting. In a word, they are to some extent not sincere but conventional.

The struggle for sincerity is clearly visible in Edmund Spenser. In his poem "Colin Clout's Come Home Again" he describes himself as

'The Shepherd's boy (best knowen by that name)
That after Tityrus first sang his lay."

And then, with his "oaten pipe" in hand he

goes off

singing of the Irish scenery and Irish names among which he had been spending years- "Mulla's shore "

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and my river Bregog" and "Mole running down to Buttevant" where spreading forth at length

"It giveth name unto that antient city
Which Kilnemullah clepèd is of old."

And among all these he mingles such names as Proteus, and Cynthia, and Astrophel-Greek names, but denoting persons very like his own contemporaries -as like as Tityrus or Menalcas are in circumstance to Virgil.

In the "Shepherd's Calendar" it would almost seem as though Spenser had seen the danger of confusing his own sincerity by a too devoted attempt to follow his Roman master. His shepherds are named Colin, Diggon, Piers and Cuddy. In the verses for June he gives a purely English landscape:

"Lo, Colin, here the place whose pleasant sight
From other shades hath wean'd my wandering mind.
Tell me what wants me here to work delight?
The simple air, the gentle warbling wind

So calm, so cool as nowhere else I find ;
The grassy ground with dainty daisies dight,
The bramble bush, where birds of every kind
To the water's fall their tunes attemper right."

In October he actually names the Augustans and disclaims them:

"Indeed, the Romish Tityrus I hear

Through his Maecenas left his oaten reed
Whereon he erst had taught his flocks to feed
And laboured lands to yield the timely ear,
And erst did sing of wars and deadly dreed
So as the heavens did quake his verse to hear.

774

"But ah! Maecenas is yclad in clay
And great Augustus long ygo is dead
And all the Worthies liggen wrapt in lead
That matter made for poets on to play:
For ever who in derring-do were dread
The lofty verse of them was lovèd aye.'

Yet Spenser had his own peculiar touch of convention; he was a little too much of an archaeologist in language, and this has always, for some readers, veiled his poetry. Pope spoils with a far more grotesque travesty whatever perception of the Greek he may have received through Virgil. His own Pastorals have many merits; but their faults are glaringly illuminated by his own theory of the relation between poetry and nature. In his "Discourse on Pastoral Poetry" he says:

"A Pastoral is an imitation of the action of a Shepherd, or one considered under that character that they call the golden age

an image of

so that we are not to

describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been when the best of men followed the employment it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life. And an air of piety to the gods and some relish of the old of way writing. But nothing more conduces to make these composures natural than when some knowledge in rural affairs is discovered. This may be made to appear rather done by chance than on design. We must use therefore some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries. It is from the practice of Theocritus and Virgil (the only undisputed authors of Pastoral) that the Critics have drawn the foregoing notions concerning it."