NORMAN TIMES—LEGEND OF KING ROBERT.
HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS THRONE; AND WHO SAT UPON IT.—HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, AND REPENTANCE.
HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS THRONE; AND WHO SAT UPON IT.—HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, AND REPENTANCE.
Inthe glance at the ancient history of Sicily in our third chapter, we have seen that the Greek and Roman sway was succeeded by that of the Saracens. They were masters of the island for the space of two hundred years, but have left no memorials, with the exception of a building or two, and traces of Arabic in the Sicilian tongue. The island wasthen conquered by a handful of Norman gentlemen, who had obtained possession of Naples, and whose history would be romantic enough to be worth repeating, if it were anything but a succession of wars. Their wonderful ascendency, and no less extraordinary personal prowess, are supposed by some, not without reason, to have given rise to much of the gigantic fable of the Orlandos and other peers of Charlemagne, who were all Frenchmen.
As an old ruin, therefore, standing in some spot surrounded by architecture of different orders, will sometimes be found to be the sole representative of a former age, we shall make the good old legend of King Robert, in this our Sicilian and Pastoral Sketch-book, stand for the whole Norman portion of its chronology. It is not military, except in thebrusqueself-sufficiency with which the character of King Robert sets out; but it is emphatically what we understand by Gothic; which, in modern parlance, implies the character of the interval between ancient and modern times. The Greek Sicilian poets, could they have foreseen it, would have loved it; and their successors, the pastoral writers of modern times, of whom we have afterwards to speak, unquestionably did so, whenever they met with it among their old reading. Shakspeare would have made a divine play of it, for it is very dramatic. Fancy what he would havedone with the angel, and the court fool, and the pathos! Oh, that we had had but time to try even to dramatize it ourselves.
Who King Robert of Sicily may have been, in common earthly history—whether intended to shadow forth one of the aforesaid Norman chieftains who obtained possession of that island, or one of the various dukes who contend for the honour of being called Robert the Devil, or whether he was Robert of Anjou, hight Robert the Wise, the friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and father of the calumniated Joanna—we must leave to antiquaries to determine. Suffice to say, that in history angelical, and in the depths of one of the very finest kinds of truth, he was King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban, and of the EmperorValemond. A like story has been told of the EmperorJovinian(whoever that prince may have been); and we shall not dispute that something of the kind may have occurred to him also; since very strange things happen to the most haughty of princes, if we did but know their whole lives; not excepting their being taken for fools by their people. We shall avail ourselves of any light which the histories of the king and the emperor may serve to throw on each other.
Writers, then, inform us, that King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban and of the EmperorValemond, was a prince of great courage and renown, but of a temper so proud and impatient, that he did not choose to bend his knee to Heaven itself, but would sit twirling his beard, and looking with something worse than indifference round about him, during the gravest services of the church.
One day, while he was present at vespers on the eve of St. John, his attention was excited to some words in the Magnificat, in consequence of a sudden dropping of the choristers’ voices. The words were these. “Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.” (“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.”) Being far too great and warlike a prince to know anything about Latin, he asked a chaplain near him the meaning of these words; and being told what it was, observed, that such expressions were no better than an old song, since men like himself were not so easily put down, much less supplanted by poor creatures whom people call “humble.”
The chaplain, doubtless out of pure astonishment and horror, made no reply; and his majesty, partly from the heat of the weather, and partly to relieve himself from the rest of the service, fell asleep.
After some lapse of time, the royal “sitter in the seat of the scornful,” owing, as he thought, to the sound of the organ, but in reality to a great droningfly in his ear, woke up in more than his usual state of impatience; and he was preparing to vent it, when, to his astonishment, he perceived the church empty. Every soul was gone, excepting a deaf old woman who was turning up the cushions. He addressed her to no purpose; he spoke louder and louder, and was proceeding, as well as rage and amaze would let him, to try if he could walk out of the church without a dozen lords before him, when, suddenly catching a sight of his face, the old woman uttered a cry of “Thieves!” and shuffling away, closed the door behind her.
King Robert looked at the door in silence, then round about him at the empty church, then at himself. His cloak of ermine was gone. The coronet was taken from his cap. The very jewels from his fingers. “Thieves, verily!” thought the king, turning white from shame and rage. “Here is conspiracy—rebellion! This is that sanctified traitor, the duke. Horses shall tear them all to pieces. What, ho, there! Open the door for the king!”
“For the constable, you mean,” said a voice through the key-hole. “You’re a pretty fellow!”
The king said nothing.
“Thinking to escape, in the king’s name,” said the voice, “after hiding to plunder his closet. We’ve got you.”
Still the king said nothing.
The sexton could not refrain from another jibe at his prisoner:
“Isee you there,” said he, “by the big lamp, grinning like a rat in a trap. How do you like your bacon?”
Now, whether King Robert was of the blood of that Norman chief who felled his enemy’s horse with a blow of his fist, we know not; but certain it is, that the only answer he made the sexton was by dashing his enormous foot against the door, and bursting it open in his teeth. The sexton, who felt as if a house had given him a blow in the face, fainted away; and the king, as far as his sense of dignity allowed him, hurried to his palace, which was close by.
“Well,” said the porter, “what doyouwant?”
“Stand aside, fellow!” roared the king, pushing back the door with the same gigantic foot.
“Go to the devil!” said the porter, who was a stout fellow too, and pushed the king back before he expected resistance. The king, however, was too much for him. He felled him to the ground; and half strode, half rushed into the palace, followed by the exasperated janitor.
“Seize him!” cried the porter.
“On your lives!” cried the king. “Look at me, fellow:—who am I?”
“A mad beast and fool; that’s what you are,” cried the porter; “and you’re a dead man for coming drunk into the palace, and hitting the king’s servants. Hold him fast.”
In came the guards, with an officer at their head, who was going to visit his mistress, and had been dressing his curls at a looking-glass. He had the looking-glass in his hand.
“Captain Francavilla,” said the king, “is the world run mad? or what is it? Do your rebels pretend not even to know me? Go before me, sir, to my rooms.” And as he spoke, the king shook off his assailants, as a lion does curs, and moved onwards.
Captain Francavilla put his finger gently before the king to stop him; and then looking with a sort of staring indifference in his face, said in a very mincing tone, “Some madman.”
King Robert tore the looking-glass from the captain’s hand, and looked himself in the face.It was not his own face.It was another man’s face, very hot and vulgar; and had something in it at once melancholy and ridiculous.
“By the living God!” exclaimed Robert, “here is witchcraft! I am changed.” And, for the first time in his life, a sensation of fear came upon him, but nothing so great as the rage and fury that remained.All the world believed in witchcraft, as well as King Robert; but they had still more certain proofs of the existence of drunkenness and madness. The royal household had seen the king come forth from church as usual; and they were ready to split their sides for laughter at the figment of this raving impostor, pretending to be his majestychanged!
“Bring him in—bring him in!” now exclaimed other voices, the news having got to the royal apartments; “the king wants to see him.”
King Robert was brought in; and there, amidst roars of laughter (for courts were not quite such well-bred places then as they are now), he found himself face to face withanother King Robert, seated on his throne, and as like his former self as he himself was unlike, but with more dignity.
“Hideous impostor!” exclaimed Robert, rushing forward to tear him down.
The court, at the word “hideous,” roared with greater laughter than before; for the king, in spite of his pride, was at all times a handsome man; and there was a strong feeling at present, that he had never in his life looked so well.
Robert, when half way to the throne, felt as if a palsy had smitten him. He stopped, and essayed to vent his rage, but could not speak.
The figure on the throne looked him steadily in the face. Robert thought it was a wizard, but hated far more than he feared it; for he was of great courage.
It was an Angel.
But the Angel was not going to disclose himself yet, nor for a long time. Meanwhile, he behaved, on the occasion, very much like a man; we mean, like a man of ordinary feelings and resentments, though still mixed with a dignity beyond what had been before observed in the Sicilian monarch. Some of the courtiers attributed it to a sort of royal instinct of contrast, excited by the claims of the impostor; but others (by the Angel’s contrivance) had seen him, as he came out of the church, halt suddenly, with an abashed and altered visage, before the shrine of St. Thomas, as if supernaturally struck with some visitation from Heaven for his pride and unbelief. The rumour flew about on the instant, and was confirmed by an order given from the throne, the moment the Angel seated himself upon it, for a gift of hitherto unheard-of amount to the shrine itself.
“Since thou art royal-mad,” said the new sovereign, “and in truth a very king of idiots, thou shalt be crowned and sceptred with a cap and bauble, and be my fool.”
Robert was still tongue-tied. He tried in vain tospeak—to roar out his disgust and defiance; and half mad, indeed, with the inability, pointed with his quivering finger to the inside of his mouth, as if in apology to the beholders for not doing it. Fresh shouts of laughter made his brain seem to reel within him.
“Fetch the cap and bauble,” said the sovereign, “and let the King of Fools have his coronation.”
Robert felt that he must submit to what he thought the power of the devil. He began even to have glimpses of a real though hesitating sense of the advantage of securing friendship on the side of Heaven. But rage and indignation were uppermost; and while the attendants were shaving his head, fixing the cap, and jeeringly dignifying him with the bauble-sceptre, he was racking his brain for schemes of vengeance. What exasperated him most of all, next to the shaving, was to observe, that those who had flattered him most when a king, were the loudest in their contempt, now that he was the court-zany. One pompous lord in particular, with a high and ridiculous voice, which continued to laugh when all the rest had done, and produced fresh peals by the continuance, was so excessively provoking, that Robert, who felt his vocal and muscular powers restored to him as if for the occasion, could not help shaking his fist at the grinning slave, and crying out, “Thou beast, Terranova!” which, in all but the person so addressed, onlyproduced additional merriment. At length, the king ordered the fool to be taken away, in order to sup with the dogs. Robert was stupefied; but he found himself hungry against his will, and gnawed the bones which had been chucked away by his nobles.
The proud King Robert of Sicily lived in this way for two years, always raging in his mind, always sullen in his manners, and subjected to every indignity which his quondam favourites could heap on him, without the power to resent it. For the new monarch seemed unjust to him only. He had all the humiliations, without any of the privileges, of the cap and bells, and was the dullest fool ever heard of. All the notice the king took of him consisted in his asking, now and then, in full court, when everything was silent, “Well, fool, art thou still a king?” Robert, for some weeks, loudly answered that he was; but, finding that the answer was but a signal for a roar of laughter, he converted his speech into the silent dignity of a haughty and royal attitude; till, observing that the laughter was greater at this dumb show, he ingeniously adopted a manner which expressed neither defiance nor acquiescence, and the Angel for some time let him alone.
Meantime, everybody but the unhappy Robert blessed the new, or, as they supposed him, the altered king: for everything in the mode of government was changed.Taxes were light; the poor had plenty; work was reasonable; the nobles themselves were expected to work after their fashion—to study, to watch zealously over the interests of their tenants, to travel, to bring home new books and innocent luxuries. Half the day throughout Sicily was given to industry, and half to healthy and intellectual enjoyment; and the inhabitants became at once the manliest and tenderest, the gayest and most studious people in the world. Wherever the king went, he was loaded with benedictions; and the fool heard them, and began to wonderwhat the devilthe devil had to do with appearances so extraordinary. And thus, for the space of time we have mentioned, he lived wondering, and sullen, and hating, and hated, and despised.
At the expiration of these two years, or nearly so, the king announced his intention of paying a visit to his brother the Pope and his brother the Emperor, the latter agreeing to come to Rome for the purpose. He went accordingly with a great train, clad in the most magnificent garments, all but the fool, who was arrayed in fox-tails, and put side by side with an ape, dressed like himself. The people poured out of their houses, and fields, and vineyards, all struggling to get a sight of the king’s face, and to bless it; the ladies strewing flowers, and the peasants’ wives holding up their rosy children, which last sight seemed particularly to delightthe sovereign. The fool, bewildered, came after the court pages, by the side of his ape, exciting shouts of laughter; though some persons were a little astonished to think how a monarch so kind and considerate to all the rest of the world, should be so hard upon a sorry fool. But it was told them, that this fool was the most perverse and insolent of men towards the prince himself; and then, although their wonder hardly ceased, it was full of indignation against the unhappy wretch, and he was loaded with every kind of scorn and abuse. The proud King Robert seemed the only blot and disgrace upon the island.
The fool had still a hope, that when his Holiness the Pope saw him, the magician’s arts would be at an end; for though he had had no religion at all, properly speaking, he had retained something even of a superstitious faith in the highest worldly form of it. The good Pope, however, beheld him without the least recognition; so did the Emperor; and when he saw them both gazing with unfeigned admiration at the exalted beauty of his former altered self, and not with the old faces of pretended good-will and secret dislike, a sense of awe and humility, for the first time, fell gently upon him. Instead of getting as far as possible from his companion the ape, he approached him closer and closer, partly that he might shroud himself under the veryshadow of his insignificance, partly from a feeling of absolute sympathy, and a desire to possess, if not one friend in the world, at least one associate who was not an enemy.
It happened that day, that it was the same day on which, two years ago, Robert had scorned the words in the Magnificat. Vespers were performed before the sovereigns: the music and the soft voices fell softer as they came to the words; and Robert again heard, with far different feelings, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble.” Tears gushed into his eyes, and, to the astonishment of the court, the late brutal fool was seen with his hands clasped upon his bosom in prayer, and the water pouring down his face in floods of penitence. Holier feelings than usual had pervaded all hearts that day. The king’s favourite chaplain had preached from the text which declares charity to be greater than faith or hope. The Emperor began to think mankind really his brothers. The Pope wished that some new council of the church would authorise him to set up, instead of the Jewish Ten Commandments, and in more glorious letters, the new,eleventh, or great Christian commandment,—“Behold I give unto you anewcommandment,Love one another.” In short, Rome felt that day like angel-governed Sicily.
When the service was over, the unknown King Robert’s behaviour was reported to the unsuspected King-Angel, who had seen it but said nothing. The sacred interloper announced his intention of giving the fool his discharge; and he sent for him accordingly, having first dismissed every other person. King Robert came in his fool’s cap and bells, and stood humbly at a distance before the strange great charitable unknown, looking on the floor and blushing. He had the ape by the hand, who had long courted his good-will, and who, having now obtained it, clung to his human friend in a way that, to a Roman, might have seemed ridiculous, but to the Angel, was affecting.
“Art thou still a king?” said the Angel, putting the old question, but without the word “fool.”
“I am a fool,” said King Robert, “and no king.”
“What wouldst thou, Robert?” returned the Angel, in a mild voice.
King Robert trembled from head to foot, and said, “Even what thou wouldst, O mighty and good stranger, whom I know not how to name,—hardly to look at!”
The stranger laid his hand on the shoulder of King Robert, who felt an inexpressible calm suddenly diffuse itself over his being. He knelt down, and clasped his hands to thank him.
“Not to me,” interrupted the Angel, in a grave, butsweet voice; and kneeling down by the side of Robert, he said, as if in church, “Let us pray.”
King Robert prayed, and the Angel prayed, and after a few moments, the king looked up, and the Angel was gone; and then the king knew that it was an Angel indeed.
And his own likeness returned to King Robert, but never an atom of his pride; and after a blessed reign, he died, disclosing this history to his weeping nobles, and requesting that it might be recorded in the Sicilian Annals.
King Robert
ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL.
TASSO’S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE GOLDEN AGE.—GUARINI’S RETURN OF SPRING.—SHEPHERD’S VISION OF THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER.—SAD SHEPHERD OF BEN JONSON.
TASSO’S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE GOLDEN AGE.—GUARINI’S RETURN OF SPRING.—SHEPHERD’S VISION OF THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER.—SAD SHEPHERD OF BEN JONSON.
Thebest pastoral is often written when the author least intends it. A completer feeling of the country and of a shepherd’s life is given us in a single passage of theJerusalem Delivered,where Erminia finds herself among a set of peaceful villagers, than in the wholeAminta—beautiful, too, as the latter is in many respects, and containing the divine ode on the Golden Age, the crown of all pastoral aspiration. That, indeed, carries everything, even truth itself, before it; saving the truth of man’s longing after a state of happiness compatible with his desires. The first line of it, the most beautiful of sighs, is familiar as a proverb in the lips of Italy, and of the lovers of Italy:—
O bella età de l’oro!Non già perchè di latteSen corse il fiume, e stillò mele il bosco;Non perchè i frutti loroDier da l’ aratro intatteLe terre, e i serpi errar senz’ ira o tosco;Non perchè nuvol foscoNon spiegò allor suo velo,Ma in primavera eternaCh’ ora s’ accende, e verna,Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo,Nè portò peregrinoO guerra o merce a gli altrui lidi il pino.Ma sol perchè quel vanoNome senza soggetto,Quell’ idolo d’ errori, idol d’ inganno,Quel che dal volgo insanoOnor poscia fù detto,Che di nostra natura il feo tiranno,Non mischiava il suo affannoFra le liete dolcezzeDe l’ amoroso gregge;Nè fu sua dura leggeNota a quell’ alme in libertate avvezze:Ma legge aurea e felice,Che natura scolpì,—s’ ei piace, ei lice.O lovely age of gold!Not that the rivers roll’dWith milk, or that the woods wept honey-dew;Not that the ready groundProduced without a wound,Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew;Not that a cloudless blueFor ever was in sight,Or that the heaven, which burnsAnd now is cold by turns,Look’d out in glad and everlasting light;No, nor that even the insolent ships from farBrought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war.But solely that that vainAnd breath-invented pain,That idol of mistake, that worshipp’d cheat,That Honour—since so call’dBy vulgar minds appall’d,Play’d not the tyrant with our nature yet.It had not come to fretThe sweet and happy foldOf gentle human-kind;Nor did its hard law bindSouls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold,That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,Which nature’s own hand wrote—What pleases, is permitted.
Guarini, who wrote hisPastor Fidoin emulation of theAminta, undertook to show that these regrets were immoral, and agreeably to an Italian fashion, made at once a grave rebuke and a literal rhyming parody of the original, in an ode beginning with the same words, and repeating most of them! His version of “What pleases, is permitted,” is “Take pleasure, if permitted!” as if Tasso did not know all about that side of the question, and was not prepared to be quite as considerate in his moral conduct and his discountenance of rakes and seducers as Guarini: whose poem, after all, incurred charges of licence and temptation, from which that of his prototype was free;—an old conventional story! All which Tasso did, was to put into the mouths of his shepherds, themselves an ideal people, a wish which is felt by the whole world—namely, that duty and inclination could be more reconciled to innocence than they are; and the world has shown that it agreed with his honest sighs, and not with the pick-thank commonplaces of his reprover; for it has treasured his beautiful ode in its memory, and forgotten its insulting echo.
Nevertheless, there are fine things in Guarini, and such as the world has consented to remember, though not of this all-affecting sort. One of these is the address to the woods, beginning—
Care selve beate,E voi, solinghi e taciturni orrori,Di riposo e di pace alberghi veri:—
an exordium, which somebody (was it Mrs. Katherine Phillips, the “matchless Orinda”?) has well translated:—
Dear happy groves, and you, the dark retreatOf silent horror, rest’s eternal seat.
We are sorry we cannot recollect any more. It expresses the wish, which so many have felt, to live in retirement, and be devoted to the beauties of nature. Another passage, more generally known, turns also upon a very general feeling of regret—that of seeing spring-time reappear, unaccompanied with the joys we have lost. Guarini was safer in following his original into these sincere corners of the heart, than when he attempted to refute him with a boy’s copy-book. The passage is very beautiful, and no less popular:—
O Primavera, gioventù de l’ anno,Bella madre de’ fiori,D’ erbe novelle e di novelli amori,Tu torni ben; ma tecoNon tornano i sereniE fortunati di de le mie gioje:Tu torni ben, tu torni,Ma teco altro non tornaChe del perduto mio caro tesoroLa rimembranza misera e dolente:Tu quella sei, tu quella,Ch’ era pur dianzi si vezzosa e bella;Ma non son io già quel ch’un tempo fui,Sì caro a gli occhi altrui.Pastor Fido, atto iii. sc. i.O Spring, thou youthful beauty of the year,Mother of flowers, bringer of warbling quires,Of all sweet new green things and new desires,Thou, Spring, returnest; but, alas! with theeNo more return to meThe calm and happy days these eyes were used to see.Thou, thou returnest, thou,But with thee returns nowNought else but dread remembrance of the pleasureI took in my lost treasure.Thou still, thou still, art the same blithe, sweet thingThou ever wast, O Spring;But I, in whose weak orbs these tears arise,Am what I was no more, dear to another’s eyes.
The repetitions in this beautiful lament,
Tu torni ben, tu torni, &c.,
are particularly affecting. Perhaps the tone of them was caught from Ariosto:—
Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso:Quel ch’era Orlando, è morto, ed è sotterra.Furioso, canto xxiii. st. 128.No more, no more am I what I appear:He that Orlando was, is dead and gone.
It is no critical violence at any time to pass from the Italian schools of poetry to those of our own country. They have always been closely connected, at least on the side of England, for the others knew little of their Northern admirers—men in whom Ariosto and Tasso would have delighted. Our language, till of late years, was not so widely spread as the Italian.
Our earliest pastoral poet of any name is Spenser; and a great name he is, though he was not a great pastoral poet. He was deeply intimate both with Greek and Italian pastoral; but in admiring Theocritus, and hoping to rival his natural language, he unwisely attempted to engraft the sweet fruit of the south on the rudest crab-apple of northern rusticity. Hence, in his only pastoral professing to be such, entitled theShepherd’s Calendar, he has almost entirely failed. There are some touching lines in the story of theFox and Kid, and a beautiful paraphrase of that ofCupid and the Fowler, from Bion; but in truth, with all his love of the woods and fields, for which he had a poet’s passion, and never could be without, Spenser was not qualified to excel as a purely pastoral writer. He was too learned for it, too full of the writers before him, and could not dispense with their chivalry and mythology. His words were Greek rather than English;or if English, they were the English of a former time. When Venus and the Graces were not there, he saw enchantresses and knights-errant. He always had visions, as Milton had, either of Jove or Proserpine, or of
Faery damsels met in forests wideBy knights of Logres and of Lyones,Làncelot, or Pèlleas, or Pellenòre.
But this elevated him to the high ideal of the subject; and no man could have written so fine a pastoral as he, of the classical or romantic sort, had he set his luxuriant wits to it, instead of attempting to get up an uncouth dance with the “clouted shoon” of Hobbinol and Davie. He could have beaten Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and all. Under picturesque influences, he never failed to add beauty to beauty. In the original of the passage we have alluded to, which he imitated from Bion, (the story ofCupid and the Fowler,) Bion merely makes the young fowler take Cupid in the trees for a bird, and endeavour to ensnare him; ending with a pretty admonition, from an old master of the craft, not to persevere in his attempt, seeing that the bird in question was a very dangerous bird, and would come to him soon enough by-and-by of his own accord. In Spenser, Cupid has wings coloured like a peacock’s train; and after flashing out beautifullyfrom the bushes to a tree, the little god leaps from bough to bough, and playfully catches the stones thrown at him in his hand. All the introductory details, too, which are full of truth, are Spenser’s:—
At length within the yvie todde(There shrowded was the little god)I heard a busie bustling;I bent my bolt against the bush,Listning if anie thing did rush,But then heard no more rustling.Tho, peeping close into the thicke,Might see the moving of some quicke,Whose shape appearèd not;But were it faerie, feend, or snake,My courage yearn’d it to awake,And manfully thereat shotte:With that sprang forth a naked swayne,With spotted winges like peacock’s trayne,And, laughing, lope to a tree;His gylden quiver at his back;And silver bowe, which was but slacke,Which lightly he bent at me:That seeing, I leveld againe,And shot at him with might and mayne,As thick as it had hayled:So long I shott, that all was spent;The pumie-stones I hastily hent,And threw; but nought avayled:He was so nimble and so wight,From bough to bough he leppèd light,And oft the pumies latchèd.—Shepherd’s Calendar, March, v. 67.
Latched, iscaught; andpumies, andpumie-stones, arepumice-stones, a very light mineral. The fowler is considerate, and would not break the bird’s head. This passage is one of the least obsolete in its style of all theShepherd’s Calendar; yet what a pity to see it deformed with words requiring explanation, such aslatchedforcaught,thoforthen,lopeforleaped, &c. With the like needless perversity, forgetful of his elevated calling, Spenser, in his pastoral character, delights to designate himself as “Colin Clout,” as though he were nothing better than a patch in the very heels of clodhopping. And yet, under this name, he sees the Nymphs and Graces dancing round his shepherdess upon Mount Acidale! The passage, otherwise, is one of his most elegant pieces of invention; and with the Grecian topography, may be said to exhibit the very highest region and crown of the pastoral side of Parnassus. Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy (for thus does he mix up the classical and romantic grounds; but no matter for that, since they are both in the regions of imagination), hears a noise of music and dancing as he is approaching the top of Mount Acidale. Upon looking amongst the trees, when he reaches it, he sees a shepherd piping to his love, in the midst of
An hundred naked maidens, lily-white,All rangèd in a ring, and dancing in delight.
But we must not lose the description of the place itself:—
It was an hill, plaiste in an open plaine,That round about is border’d with a woodOf matchless hight, that seem’d th’ earth to disdaine,In which all trees of honour stately stood,And did all winter as in summer bud,Spredding pavillions for the birds to bowre,Which in their lower braunches sang aloud;And in their tops the soring hawk did towre,Sitting like king of foules in majesty and powre:And at the foote thereof a gentle fludHis silver waves did softly tumble down,Unmar’d with ragged mosse or filthy mud;Ne mote wild beastes, ne mote the ruder clowne,Thereto approach; ne filth mote therein drowne:But Nymphs and Faeries by the bancks did sitIn the wood’s shade, which did the waters crowne,Keeping all noysome things away from it,And to the water’s fall tuning their accents fit.And on the top thereof a spacious plaineDid spred itselfe, to serve to all delight,Either to daunce, when they to daunce would faineOr else to course about their bases light;Ne ought there wanted, which for pleasure mightDesirèd be, or thence to banish bale;So pleasantly the hill with equall hightDid seem to overlooke the lowly vale;Therefore it rightly cleepèd was Mount Acidale.[6]They say that Venus, when she did disposeHerselfe to pleasaunce, usèd to resortUnto this place, and therein to reposeAnd rest herself, as in a gladsome port;Or with the Graces, there to play and sport;That even her own Cytheron, though in itShe usèd most to keep her royall court,And in her soveraine majesty to sit,She, in regard thereof, refusde and thought unfit.Unto this place when as the elfin knightApproacht, him seemèd that the merry soundOf a shrill pipe he playing heard on hight,And many feete fast thumping th’ hollow ground,That through the woods their echo did rebound.He hither drew, to weete what mote it be:There he a troupe of ladies dauncing foundFull merrily, and making gladfull glee,And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.He durst not enter into th’ open greene,For dread of them unawares to be descryde,For breaking of their daunce, if he were seene;But in the covert of the wood did byde,Beholding all, yet of them unespyde:There he did see, that pleased much his sight,That even he himself his eyes envyde,An hundred naked maidens, lilly white,All raungèd in a ring and dauncing in delight.
In the middle of this orb of fair creatures, the beauty of which there is nothing of the sort to equal, (unless it be those circles of lily-white stamens which, with such exquisite mystery, adorn the commonestflower-cups—so profuse of her poetry is Nature!), Sir Calidore sees “three other ladies,” both dancing and singing—to wit, the Graces; and in the midst of “those same three” was yet another lady, or rather “damsel” (for she was of rustic origin), crowned with a garland of roses, and so beautiful, that she was the very gem of the ring, and “graced” the Graces themselves. The hundred nymphs, as they danced, threw flowers upon her; the Graces endowed her with the gifts which she reflected upon them, enhanced; and a shepherd sat piping to them all.
Never, surely, was such deification of a “country lass;” and well might the poet hail his spectacle in a rapture of self-complacency, and encourage his pipe to play on:—
Pype, jolly shepheard! pype thou now apaceUnto thy love, that made thee low to lout.
(He has raised her from the condition to which he stooped to obtain her.)
Thy love is present there with thee in place—
(That is, in the midst of his poetry and his fame.)
Thy love is there advaunstto be another Grace.
But a mishap is on the heels of this vision,connected with our author’s professed attempts at pastoral; for so we have little doubt it is, though the commentators have given it another meaning. Sir Calidore, envying his eyes a sight which so “enriched” them, left the covert through which he looked, and went towards it:—
But soone as he appearèd to their view,They vanisht all away, out of his sight,And cleane were gone, which way he never knew,All save the shepherd; who, for fell despightOf that displeasure, broke his bag-pipe quight,And made great mone for that unhappy turne;But Calidore, though no less sorry wightFor that mishap, yet seeing him to mourne,Drew neare, that he the truth of all by him might learne.
Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, is understood to be Sir Philip Sidney, who, in hisDefence of Poesy, had objected to the style of theShepherd’s Calendar; and as his word was taken for law in matters of taste, and the criticism was probably fatal to the poet’s continuance in that style (for at all events he dropped it), we have scarcely a doubt that Spenser alludes to the fact of his giving up pastoral writing in consequence. He breaks his pipe; not, it seems (like most authors, when they give way to critics), without much secret vexation—nay, “a fell despight,” as he calls it; candidly, if not a little maliciously, owning the whole extent of his feelings onthe subject to his illustrious critic, who had since become his friend. It was a disadvantage which his pride could not feel itself easy with, till it had set it to rights. The following is the passage in Sidney’s essay:—
TheShepherd’s Kalanderhath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language, I dare not allow; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazarro in Italian, did affect it.
TheShepherd’s Kalanderhath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language, I dare not allow; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazarro in Italian, did affect it.
He means that Theocritus and the others wrote in the language of their times, and that to be obsolete is not to be natural. Spenser, it is to be observed, expressly designates himself in this episode as Colin Clout, which is the title he assumed as the author of theShepherd’s Calendar; a “country lassie” is his goddess in that work; and it seems far more likely that under this identity of appellation he should complain, in one poem, of the discouragement given to another, than simply shadow forth (as the commentators think) the circumstance of Sir Philip Sidney’s having drawn him from the country to the court. In what consisted the abrupt intervention of a proceeding like that? What particular vision did it dissipate? Or how could he pretend any right of soreness in his tone of complaint about it? And he is very sore indeed at the knight’sinterruption, notwithstanding his courtesy. Tell me, says Calidore—
Tell me what mote these dainty damsels be,Which here with thee do make their pleasant playes:Right happy thou, that mayst them freely see;But why, when I them saw, fled they away from me?Not I so happy, answered then that swaine,As thou unhappy, which them thence did chase,Whom by no meanes thou canst recall againe.
He could not look back with comfort upon having been forced to give up his pastoral visions.
But to return to our subject. The all-including genius of Shakspeare has given the finest intimations of pastoral writing in some of the masques introduced in his plays, and in his plays themselves; if indeedAs You Like Itmight not equally as well be called a pastoral play as a comedy; though, to be sure, the duke and his followers do not willingly take to the woods, with the exception of the “sad shepherd” Jacques; and this is a great drawback on the pleasures of the occasion, which ought to breathe as freely as the air and the wild roses. Rosalind, however, is a very bud of the pastoral ideal, peeping out of her forest jerkin. Again, in theWinter’s Tale, where the good housewife is recorded, who has “her face o’ fire” with attending to the guests, and “my sister,” who has the purchaseof the eatables, “lays it on” (as her brother the clown says) in the article of rice, there is the truest pastoral of both kinds, the ideal and the homely:—
Shepherd.Fie, daughter! When my old wife liv’d, uponThis day she was both pantler, butler, cook,—Both dame and servant;welcomed all, serv’d all;Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here,At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle;On his shoulder, and his; her face o’ fireWith labour; and the thing she took to quench it,She would to each one sip.
What a poet, and what a painter! Now a Raphael, or Michael Angelo; now a Jan Steen or a Teniers. Here also is Autolycus, the most exquisite of impudent vagabonds, better even than theBrassof Sir John Vanbrugh; selling his love ballads, so without indecency, “which is strange,” and another ballad of a singingFish, with “five justices’ hands to it,” to vouch for its veracity. But, above all, here is Perdita:—
The prettiest low-born lass that everRan on the green sward.No shepherdess, but Flora,Peering in April’s front.
Perdita, also, though supposed to be a shepherdess born, is aSicilianprincess, and makes ourBLUE JARglisten again in the midst of its native sun and flowers.
O Prosèrpina!For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fallFrom Dis’s waggon!—
(“Waggon,” be it observed, was as much a word of respect in those days as “chariot” is now.)
DaffodilsThat come before the swallow dares,and takeThe winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,Or Cytherea’s breath;bold oxlips, andThe crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,The flower-de-luce being one. O, these I lackTo make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend,[Turning to her lover.To strew him o’er and o’er.Florizel.What! like a corse?Perdita.No: like a bank, for love to lie and play on.Not like a corse; or if,—not to be buried,But quick, and in mine arms.
Shelley has called a woman “one of Shakspeare’s women,” implying by that designation all that can be suggested of grace and sweetness. They were “very subtle,” as Mr. Wordsworth said of the French ladies. Not that they were French ladies, or English either; but Nature’s and refinement’s best possible gentlewomen all over the world. Tullia d’Aragona, the Italian poetess, who made all her suitors love one another instead of quarrel, must have been a Shakspeare woman.Gaspara Stampa was another; and we should take the authoress ofAuld Robin Grayfor one.
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,
and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, must have been such. So was Mrs. Brooke, who wroteEmily Montague; and probably Madame Riccoboni; and certainly my Lady Winchelsea, who worshipped friendship, and green retreats, and her husband;—terrible people all, to look upon, if the very sweetness of their virtue did not enable us to bear it.
Ben Jonson left an unfinished dramatic pastoral, entitled theSad Shepherd. It is a story of Robin Hood, in connection with a shepherd who has gone melancholy mad for the supposed death of his mistress—a lucky character for the exalted wilfulness of the author’s style. The lover opens the play with the following elegant extravagance:—
Æglamour.Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:The world may find the spring by following her.
This is a truly lover-like fancy; and the various, impulsive, and flowery versification is perfect. Ben Jonson can never leave out his learning. The lost mistress must be compared, in the impossible lightness of herstep, with Virgil’s Camilla, who ran over the tops of corn:—
For other print her airy steps ne’er left;Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk.
What unsubstantial womanhood! How different from the bride of Bedreddin Hassan!
“Up, up in haste!” the young man cries:Ah! slender waist! she cannot riseFor heavy hips, that say, “Sit still,”And make her linger ’gainst her will.—Torrens’sArabian Nights.
The best passage in theSad Shepherdis a description of a witch and her habits—a subject which every way suited the arbitrary and sullen side of the poet’s notions of power. It also enabled him to show his reading, as he takes care to let us know, by means of one of the bystanders:—
Alken.Know ye the witch’s dell?Scathlock.No more than I do know the ways of hell.Alken.Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell,Down in a pit, o’ergrown with brakes and briers,Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey,Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground,’Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house,Where you shall find her sitting in her form,As fearful and melàncholic as thatShe is about with caterpillars’ kellsAnd knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells.Thence she steals forth to revel in the fogsAndrotten mistsupon the fens and bogs,Down to the drownèd lands of Lincolnshire;To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow,The housewife’s tun not work, nor the milk churn!Writhe children’s wrists, and suck their breath in sleep,Get vials of their blood; and where the seaCasts up its slimy ooze, search for a weedTo open locks with, and to rivet charms,Planted about her in the wicked featOf all her mischiefs, which are manifold.John.I wonder such a story could be toldOf her dire deeds.George.I thought a witch’s banksHad enclosed nothing but the merry pranksOf some old woman.Scarlet.Yes, her malice more.Scathlock.As it would quickly appear had we the storeOf his collects.George.Ay, this good learned manCan speak her rightly.Scarlet.He knows her shifts and haunts.Alken.And all her wiles and turns. The venom’d plantsWherewith she kills; where the sad mandrake grows,Whose groans are dreadful; the dead-numbing nightshade,The stupifying hemlock, adder’s tongue,And martagan; the shrieks of luckless owlsWe hear, and croaking night-crows in the air;Green-bellied snakes, blue fire-drakes in the sky,And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings,And scaly beetleswith their habergeons,That make a humming murmur as they fly.There, in the stocks of trees,white faies do dwell,And span-long elves that dance about a poolWith each a little changeling in their arms!And airy spirits play with falling stars,And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon,While she sits reading (by the glow-worm’s light,Of rotten wood,o’er which the worm hath crept)The baneful schedule of her nocent charms.
The idea of “span-long elves” who dance about a pool, carrying each a stolen infant, that must be bigger than themselves, is a very capital and fantastic horror.
Old burly and strong-sensation-loving Ben (as his friend Chapman, or Mr. Bentham, might have called him) could show, however, a great deal of delicacy when he had a mind to it. He could turn his bluster into a zephyr that inspired the young genius of Milton. Some of his court masques are pastoral; and the following is the style in which he receives the king and queen. Maia (the goddess of May) says—
If all the pleasures were distill’dOfeveryflower ineveryfield—
(This kind of return of words was not common then, as he has since made it)
And all that Hybla’s hives do yield,Were into one broad mazer fill’d;If thereto added all the gumsAnd spice that from Panchaia comes,The odours that Hydaspes lends,Or Phœnix proves before she ends;If all the air my Flora drew,Or spirit that Zephyr ever blew,Were put therein;and all the dewThat ever rosy morning knew;Yet all, diffused upon this bower,To make one sweet detaining hour,Were much too little for the graceAnd honour you vouchsafe the place.
In the masque ofOberon, Silenus bids his Satyrs rouse up a couple of sleeping Sylvans, who ought to have been keeping watch; “at which,” says the poet’s direction, “the Satyrs fell suddenly into this catch”—Musicians know it well:—
Buz, quoth the blue fly;Hum, quoth the bee;Buz and hum they cry,And so do we.In hisear, in hisnose,Thus, do you see![They tickle them.Heeatthe dormouse,Else it washe.
It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the Satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even the harmony, theintercourse, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion with a very musical ear could have written it. It was not for nothing that Ben lived in the time of the fine old English composers, Bull and Ford; or partook his canarywith his “lov’d Alphonso,” as he calls him,—the Signor Ferrabosco.
We have not yet done with this delightful portion of our subject. Fletcher and Milton await us still; together with the pastoral poet, William Browne; and a few other poets, who, though they wrote no pastorals, were pastoral men.
ENGLISH PASTORAL—(Continued); AND SCOTCH PASTORAL.