FOOTNOTES:

When thou wouldst know thyself, what man thou art,Look at the tombstones as thou passest by:Within those monuments lie bones and dustOf monarchs, tyrants, sages, men whose prideRose high because of wealth, or noble blood,Or haughty soul, or loveliness of limb;Yet none of these things strove for them 'gainst time:One common death hath ta'en all mortal men.See thou to this, and know thee who thou art.

Such moralizing sounds commonplace to us who have been lessoned by thememento moriof the Middle Ages. Yet it should be remembered that, comingfrom a Greek of Menander's age, it claims originality of insight, and even now a ring of freshness as well as of truth marks its absolute sincerity. The following fragment (p.58) again expresses Stoical, rather than Epicurean, philosophy of life:

Being a man, ask not release from pain,But strength to bear pain, from the gods above;If thou wouldst fain escape all woe for aye,Thou must become god, or, if not, a corpse.

The exquisite lines in which the life of man is compared to a fair, wherefrom, when he has once seen the shows, he should be glad to pass away again in quiet, might be adduced to prove, if it were necessary, that Menander was no mere hedonist. To the same end might be quoted the passage upon destiny, which explains that chance and providence are only two names for one controlling power, face to face with which human forethought is but smoke and nonsense.[137]There is something even almost awful in the placid acquiescence of Menander. He has come to the end of passions and pleasures; he expects pain and is prepared to endure it; his happiness consists in tranquil contemplation of life, from which he no longer hopes for more than what Balzac calls theà peu prèsof felicity.[138]This tranquillity does not diminish, but rather increases, his power of enjoyment and the clearness of his vision. He combines the exact knowledge of the scientific analyst with judicial impartiality; and yet his worldly wisdom is not cold or dry. To make selections from fragments, every word whereof is golden, would be weary work; nor is it possible to preserve in translation the peculiar savor of this Attic salt. Menander should be spared this profanation. Before we leave him, let us remember what Goethe, a man as like Menander as a modern man can be, has said of him: "He is thoroughly pure, noble, great, and cheerful, and his grace is unattainable. It is to be lamented that we possess so little of him, but that little is invaluable."

The name of Philemon will always be coupled with that of Menander. In their lifetime they were competitors, and the Athenian audience preferred Philemon to his rival. Posterity in ancient days reversed this judgment—with justice, if our scanty fragments may be taken as sufficient basis for comparison. The lines in which Philemon praises peace as the good vainly sought by sages, and declares that no painter or statuary can compete with truth, are fair examples of his fluent and at the same time polished style.[139]So are the comparison of men with animals to the disadvantage of the former, and the invective against Prometheus for dividing human nature into complex varieties of character.[140]Yet there is an element of sophistry in these examples, placing them below the pithy sayings of Menander. If I were to choose one fragment as illustrative of Philemon, and at the same time favorable to his reputation, it should be the following:[141]

Have faith in God and fear; seek not to know him;For thou wilt gain naught else beyond thy search:Whether he is or is not, shun to ask:As one who is, and sees thee, always fear him.

The comedy of Menander determined the form of the drama in Rome, and, through the influence of Plautus and Terence upon the renascent culture of the sixteenth century, fixed the type of comedy in modern Europe. We are often struck, in reading his fragments, with their modern tone of thought and feeling. We recognize that here, as in the case of Molière, is a man who "chastised men by drawing them as they are," and that the men whom he chastised, the social follies he ridiculed, are among us at the present day. This observation leads us to consider what we mean by modernism, when we say we find it in ancient literature. Sometimes the phrase is loosely used to indicate the permanent and invariable qualities of human nature emergent from local and temporary conditions. The chorus in theAgamemnonupon the beautiful dead warriors in the Trojan war is called modern because it comes home directly to our own experience. Not their special mode of sepulture, or the lamentation of captive women over their heaped-up mounds, or the slaughter of human victims, or the trophies raised upon their graves, are touched upon. Such circumstances would dissociate them, if only accidentally, from our sympathies. It is the grief of those who stay at home and mourn, the pathos of youth and beauty wasted, that Æschylus has chosen for his threnos. This grief and this pathos are imperishable, and are therefore modern, inasmuch as they are not specifically ancient. Yet such use of the phrase is inaccurate. We come closer to the true meaning through the etymology of the word modern, derived perhaps frommodo, orjust now; so that what is modern is, strictly speaking, that which belongs to the present moment. From this point of view modernism must continually be changing, for the moment now is in perpetual flux. Still, there is one characteristic of the now which comprehends the modern world, that does not and cannot alter: we are never free from the consciousness of a long past.Nous vieillards nés d'hieris essentially true of us; and to this characteristic may be referred what we mean to express by modernism. When nations have reached a certain growth and pitch of culture, certain sentiments, affectations, ways of thinking, modes of self-expression, habits of life, fashions, and the like, appear as the outcome of complex and long-established social conditions. Whatever may be the political groundwork of the national existence, the phase in question is sure to manifest itself, if only the nation lasts for a sufficient length of time. We, who have assuredly arrived at the climacteric in question, when we recognize the signs of it elsewhere, call them modern; and nowhere can we find them more emphatically marked than in the age of Attic ripeness that produced Menander. "O Menander and life," said the grammarian of Alexandria, "which of you is the imitator of the other?" This apostrophe might also have been addressed to Homer; but what made it more specially applicable to Menander was that, while Homer invested the profound truths of passion and action with heroic dignity, Menander drew a no less faithful picture of human life together with the accidents of civilized and social circumstance. His delicate delineation of Attic society seemed nearer to the Alexandrian scholar, because it reproduced, not the remote conditions of the prehistoric age, but those which are common to periods of advanced culture. For a like reason he seems to us more obviously modern than Homer. He contemplates the drama of human life with eyes and mind not very differently trained from ours, and from a point of view close to ours. As a single instance, take this fragment. He is quietly laughing at the pompous and pretentious sages who said in Athens, as they say now, that a man must go into the wilderness to discover truth:

εὑρετικὸν εἶναί φασι τὴν ἐρημίανοἱ τὰς ὄφρυς αἴροντες.

We must not, however, be blinded by the modernism of Menander to the fact that ancient comedy differed in many most important respects from the comedy of modern Europe. If we only regard dramas of intrigue and manners, such as theMandragolaof Machiavelli, theVolponeof Ben Jonson, or theFourberies de Scapinof Molière, we are indeed dealing with a type of comedy derived directly through the Latin from the Greek. But modern comedy does not remain within these narrow limits. Its highest products are either works of pure creative fancy, like Shakespeare'sMidsummer-Night's Dreamand Fletcher'sPilgrim, or are so closely allied to tragedy, as in the case of Massinger'sA New Way to Pay Old Debtsand Molière'sAvare, that only a nominal difference divides the two species. Nothing remains, either in fragments or in critical notices, to justify us in believing that the ancients developed either the serious comedy, essentially tragic in its ruthless revelation of a hell of evil passion, or the comedy of pure imagination. Their strict sense of the requirements of external form excluded the former kind of drama, while for the creation of the latter the free play of the romantic fancy was absolutely necessary. The total loss of Agathon, Chæremon, and other tragic poets of the post-Euripidean period, forces us to speak with reservation on this topic. There are many indications of a confusion of types at Athens during the fourth century B.C. analogous to that which characterizes modern dramatic poetry. Yet it may be asserted with tolerable confidence that, while the Greeks understood by comedy a form of art that aimed at exciting mirth and was confined within the limits of domestic life, modern comedy has not unfrequently in her higher flights excited the passions of terror and pity, and has quitted the region of diurnal prose for the dream-world of fairyland. An ancient critic would have probably observed that Molière'sAvarewas too seriously sinister to be rightly called comic, and that the absence of parody or burlesque in Shakespeare'sTempestexcluded that play from comparison with theBirdsof Aristophanes. Here, then, as elsewhere, we have to notice the greater freedom demanded by the modern fancy in dealing with the forms of art, together with the absence of those firmly traced critical canons to which the antique genius willingly submitted. Modern art in general, when it is not directly and consciously imitative of antique models, demands a more complete liberation of the spiritual element. We cannot avoidles défauts de nos qualités. This superior freedom involves a bewildering complexity and intermixture of the serious and the ludicrous, the lyrical and the dramatic, the positive and the fanciful, defying classification, and in its very caprice approximating to the realities of existence.

FOOTNOTES:[122]Compare Anaxandrides (Incert. Fab.fr. 1), Eubulus (Chrysilla, fr. 2;Nannion, fr. 1), Alexis (Manteis, fr. 1;Incert. Fab.fr. 34, 39), and the anonymous fragments on p. 756 of Didot'sComici Græci.[123]I shall use the edition of Didot, one vol., 1855, for reference.[124]Compare Antiphanes (Didumoi, fr. 2;Progonoi, fr. 1), Alexis (Kubernetes, fr. 1), Diodorus (Epikleros, fr. 1), Timocles (Drakontion, fr. 1), the long passage from an uncertain play of Nicolaus. The invention of the part of the Parasite is usually ascribed to Alexis, but this is clearly a mistake. That he developed it and made it a fixed character of comedy is probable enough. TheSymposiumof Xenophon furnishes curious matter on the professional joker and diner-out as he existed at Athens.[125]See above, vol. i. p. 442.[126]The following anonymous line (Didot'sComici Græci, p. 732), συνεπίνομέν τε καὶ συνεκοτταβίζομεν, "together we drank, and played at cottabos together," seems to point to the good fellowship of the game.[127]Compare the praises of Athens quoted from anonymous comic poets by Athenæus, i. 20, B., and by Dio Chrysost., 64, p. 334, Reisk (Didot'sComici Græci, pp. 723, 729).[128]Compare Alexis (Hippeus, p. 536;Meropis, p. 550;Olympiodorus, p. 552;Parasitus, fr. 3, p. 558).[129]The only free gift which the gods gave men,To sleep.Sleep, that prepares our souls for endless night.[130]The great subject of cooks I leave for discussion in relation to the New Comedy. See below, pp.229-231.[131]The passages alluded to above are Eubulus (Nannion, fr. 1, p. 449), Xenarchus (Pentathlos, fr. 1, p. 624), and Philemon (Adelphoi, fr. 1).[132]Mid the philosophers I count the cook.[133]Compare Sosipater (Katapseudomenos, p. 677) for a similar display of science; Euphron (Incert. Fab.fr. 1, p. 682), for a comparison of cooks with poets; Hegesippus (Adelphi, p. 676), for an egregious display of culinary tall-talk.[134]Pollux mentions a list of celebrated authors on cookery.[135]See in particular Hegesippus (Philetæri, p. 676); Baton (Androphonus, fr. 1, p. 684, andSynexapaton, fr. 1, p. 686), and Damoxenus (Syntrophi, pp. 697, 698).[136]The fragment from the Ἁλιεῖς, p. 3 of Didot'sMenander, is clearly dramatic, and cannot be taken as an expression of the poet'smind.[137]Those fragments are from the Ὑποβολίμαιος, pp.48,49.[138]Compare Βοιωτία, fr. 2, p. 9; Μισογύνης, fr. 1, p. 32; Πλόκιον, fr. 8, p. 42.[139]Pp.114,115.[140]Pp.118,119.[141]Incert. Fab.fr. 26, p. 122. Cf. ib. fr. 86.

[122]Compare Anaxandrides (Incert. Fab.fr. 1), Eubulus (Chrysilla, fr. 2;Nannion, fr. 1), Alexis (Manteis, fr. 1;Incert. Fab.fr. 34, 39), and the anonymous fragments on p. 756 of Didot'sComici Græci.

[123]I shall use the edition of Didot, one vol., 1855, for reference.

[124]Compare Antiphanes (Didumoi, fr. 2;Progonoi, fr. 1), Alexis (Kubernetes, fr. 1), Diodorus (Epikleros, fr. 1), Timocles (Drakontion, fr. 1), the long passage from an uncertain play of Nicolaus. The invention of the part of the Parasite is usually ascribed to Alexis, but this is clearly a mistake. That he developed it and made it a fixed character of comedy is probable enough. TheSymposiumof Xenophon furnishes curious matter on the professional joker and diner-out as he existed at Athens.

[125]See above, vol. i. p. 442.

[126]The following anonymous line (Didot'sComici Græci, p. 732), συνεπίνομέν τε καὶ συνεκοτταβίζομεν, "together we drank, and played at cottabos together," seems to point to the good fellowship of the game.

[127]Compare the praises of Athens quoted from anonymous comic poets by Athenæus, i. 20, B., and by Dio Chrysost., 64, p. 334, Reisk (Didot'sComici Græci, pp. 723, 729).

[128]Compare Alexis (Hippeus, p. 536;Meropis, p. 550;Olympiodorus, p. 552;Parasitus, fr. 3, p. 558).

[129]The only free gift which the gods gave men,To sleep.Sleep, that prepares our souls for endless night.

[129]

The only free gift which the gods gave men,To sleep.Sleep, that prepares our souls for endless night.

The only free gift which the gods gave men,To sleep.

Sleep, that prepares our souls for endless night.

[130]The great subject of cooks I leave for discussion in relation to the New Comedy. See below, pp.229-231.

[131]The passages alluded to above are Eubulus (Nannion, fr. 1, p. 449), Xenarchus (Pentathlos, fr. 1, p. 624), and Philemon (Adelphoi, fr. 1).

[132]Mid the philosophers I count the cook.

[133]Compare Sosipater (Katapseudomenos, p. 677) for a similar display of science; Euphron (Incert. Fab.fr. 1, p. 682), for a comparison of cooks with poets; Hegesippus (Adelphi, p. 676), for an egregious display of culinary tall-talk.

[134]Pollux mentions a list of celebrated authors on cookery.

[135]See in particular Hegesippus (Philetæri, p. 676); Baton (Androphonus, fr. 1, p. 684, andSynexapaton, fr. 1, p. 686), and Damoxenus (Syntrophi, pp. 697, 698).

[136]The fragment from the Ἁλιεῖς, p. 3 of Didot'sMenander, is clearly dramatic, and cannot be taken as an expression of the poet'smind.

[137]Those fragments are from the Ὑποβολίμαιος, pp.48,49.

[138]Compare Βοιωτία, fr. 2, p. 9; Μισογύνης, fr. 1, p. 32; Πλόκιον, fr. 8, p. 42.

[139]Pp.114,115.

[140]Pp.118,119.

[141]Incert. Fab.fr. 26, p. 122. Cf. ib. fr. 86.

Theocritus; his Life.—The Canon of his Poems.—The Meaning of the Word Idyl.—Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome, Modern Europe.—The Scenery of Theocritus.—Relation of Southern Nature to Greek Mythology and Greek Art.—Rustic Life and Superstitions.—Feeling for Pure Nature in Theocritus.—How Distinguished from the same Feeling in Modern Poets.—Galatea.—Pharmaceutria.—Hylas.—Greek Chivalry.—The Dioscuri.—Thalysia.—Bion.—The Lament for Adonis.—Moschus.—Europa.—Megara.—Lament for Bion.—The Debts of Modern Poets to the Idyllists.

Of the lives of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus there is very little known, and that little has been often repeated. Theocritus was a Syracusan, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna. Some confusion as to his parentage arose from the fact that in the seventh idyl Theocritus introduced himself under the artificial name of Simichidas, which led early critics to suppose he had a father called Simichus. It is, however, quite clear that the concurrent testimony of Suidas and of an epigram in the anthology, which distinctly asserts his descent from Praxagoras and Philinna, is to be accepted in preference to all conjectures founded on anom de plume. Theocritus flourished between 283 and 263 B.C., but the dates and circumstances of his birth and death are alike unknown. We may gather, inferentially or directly from his poems, that he sought the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria, and lived for some time among the men of letters at his court. Indeed, Theocritus was the most brilliant ornament of that somewhat artificial period of literature; he above all the Alexandrian poets carried the old genius of Greece into new channels instead of imitating, annotating, and rehandling ancient masterpieces. The sixth and seventh idyls prove that Aratus, the astronomer, was a familiar friend of the Syracusan bard; probably the frequent allusions to meteorology and the science of the stars which we trace in the poems of Theocritus may be referred to this intimacy.From the idyls, again, we learn that the poet left Alexandria wearied with court life, and, like Spenser, unwilling

To lose good nights that might be better spent,To waste long days in pensive discontent,To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,To feed on hope, and pine with fear and sorrow.

He seems, however, to have once more made trial of princely favor at the Syracusan court of Hiero, and to have been as much offended with the want of appreciation and good taste as with the illiberality that he found there. Among his friends were numbered Nicias, the physician of Miletus, and his wife Theugenis, to whom he addressed the beautiful little poem called ἠλακατή, orThe Distaff—a charming specimen of what the Greek muse could produce by way ofvers de société. The end of his life is buried in obscurity. We can easily believe that he spent it quietly among the hills and fields of Sicily, in close communion with the nature that he loved so well. His ill success as a court poet does not astonish us; the panegyrics of Hiero and Ptolemy are among his worst poems—mere pinchbeck when compared with the pure gold of the idyls proper. It was in scenes of natural beauty that he felt at home, and when he died he left a volume of immortal verse, each line of which proclaims of him—"Et ego in Arcadia." We cannot give him a more fitting epitaph than that of his own Daphnis:

ἔβα ῥόον· ἔκλυσε δίνατὸν Μώσαις φίλον ἄνδρα, τὸν οὐ Νύμφαισιν ἀπεχθῆ.[142]

If we know little of Theocritus, less is known of Bion. Suidas says that he was born at Smyrna, and the elegy written on his death leads us to suppose that he lived in Sicily, and died of poison wilfully administered by enemies. Theocritus, though his senior in age and his predecessor in bucolic poetry, seems to have survived him. Bion's elegist, from which the few facts which we have related with regard to the poet of Smyrna's life and untimely death are gathered, has generally been identified with Moschus. Ahrens, however, with characteristic German scepticism, places the Ἐπιτάφιος Βίωνος upon a list ofIncertorum Idyllia. Nor can it be denied that the author of this poem leads us to believe that he was a native of Magna Græcia, whereas Moschus is known to have been a Syracusan. The third and last of the Sicilian idyllists, he stands at a great distance from Theocritus in all essential qualities of pastoral composition. He has more of the grammarian or man of erudition about him; and we can readily conceive him to have been, according to the account of Suidas, a friend of Aristarchus. Of the dates of his life nothing can be recorded with any certainty. He seems to have lived about the end of the third century B.C.

During the short period in which bucolic poetry flourished under Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, Syracuse remained beneath thesceptre of Hiero. While the bloody strife was being waged between Rome and Carthage for the empire of the Mediterranean, Syracuse, intermediate between the two great combatants, was able not only to maintain a splendid independence under the sway of her powerful tyrant, but also to afford the Romans signal aid upon the battle-fields of Sicily. In Sicily the sun of Greece still shone with some of its old radiance on the spots where, before Athens had assumed the intellectual supremacy of Hellas, poetry, philosophy, and all the arts of life had first displayed their splendid spring-time. The island in which the April of the Greek spirit had disclosed its earliest flowers now bore the last but not least lovely wreath of autumn. The winter was soon coming. Rome and her Verres were already looking upon Trinacria as their prey; and the idyllic garland was destined to crown with exotic blossoms the brows of Virgil.

About the authenticity of many of the idyls grave questions have been raised. It is hard to believe that all the thirty which bear the name of Theocritus were really written by him. The twenty-third and twenty-fifth, for instance, are not in his style; while the nineteenth reminds us more of the Anacreontic elegance of Bion or Moschus than of his peculiarly vigorous workmanship. The twenty-ninth, again, though admitted as genuine by Ahrens, might well pass for the work of an earlier Æolic writer. But, without some shock to my feelings, I cannot entertain the spuriousness of the twenty-first idyl, which Ahrens places among the productions of some doubtful author. The whole series after the eighteenth have been questioned. These, however, include the epical compositions of Theocritus, who might well have assumed a different manner when treating of Hercules or the Dioscuri from that in which he sang the loves of Lycidas and Daphnis. That they are inferior to his pastorals is not to be wondered at; for he who blows his own flute with skill may not be, therefore, strong enough to sound the trumpet of Homer. Ahrens, as observed above, extends his criticism to the lament for Bion, which, I confess, appears to me more full of fire and inventive genius than any other of the poems attributed to Moschus.

Yet in these matters of minute evidence too much depends upon mere conjecture and comparison of styles for us to remove old landmarks with certainty. Suppose all records of Raphael's works had been lost, and a few fragments of the Cartoons, together with the Transfiguration and the little picture of the Sleeping Knight alone remained of all his paintings, would not some Ahrens be inclined to attribute the Sleeping Knight to a weaker if not less graceful artist of the Umbrian school? TheAllegroandPenserosomight, by a similar process of disjunctive criticism, be severed from theParadise Lost. On the other hand, nothing can be more doubtful than assertions in favor of authenticity. It is almost impossible for a foreigner to perceive minute differences of style in the works of two contemporary poets, and infinitelymore difficult for a modern to exercise the same exact discrimination in deciding on the monuments of classic art. Schlegel, in hisHistory of Dramatic Literature, asserts that he discovers no internal difference between Massinger and Fletcher. Yet an English student is struck by the most marked divergences of feeling, language, natural gifts, and acquired habits of thought in these two dramatists. Thus the difficulty of such criticism is twofold. If a Syracusan of 200 B.C. could discuss our lucubrations on the text of the bucolic poets, he would probably in one case express astonishment at our having ascribed two dissimilar idyls to Theocritus, and in another case explain away our scepticism by enumerating the three or four successive manners of the poet. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus are the eponyms of idyllic poetry. To each belongs a peculiar style. It is quite possible that some idyls of successful imitators whose names have been lost may have been fathered upon the three most eminent founders of the school.

The name of the idyl sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience supply the idyllist with subjects. He does not treat them lyrically, following rather the rules of epic and dramatic composition. Generally there is a narrator, and in so far the idyl is epic; its verse, too, is the hexameter. But occasionally the form of dramatic monologue, as in thePharmaceutria, or that of dramatic dialogue, as in theAdoniazusæ, takes the place of narrative. Bion's lament for Adonis, again, is a kind of sacred hymn; while the dirge on Bion's death is elegiac. Two idyls of Theocritus are encomiastic; several celebrate the deeds of ancestral Doric heroes—Herakles and the Dioscuri. One is an epistle. Many of Bion's so-called idyls differ little, except in metre, from the Anacreontics, while one at least of the most highly finished pieces of Theocritus must be ranked with erotic poetry of the purely lyrical order. It will be seen from these instances that the idyllic genus admitted many species, and that the idyllists were far from being simply pastoral poets. This form of composition was, in fact, the growth of a late age of Greek art, when the great provinces had been explored and occupied, and when the inventor of a new style could legitimately adopt the tone and manner of his various predecessors. Perhaps the plastic arts determined the direction of idyllic poetry, suggesting the name and supplying the poet with models of compact and picturesque treatment. In reading the idyls it should never be forgotten that they are pictures, so studied and designed by their authors. They ought to affect us in the same way as the bass-reliefs and vases of Greek art, in which dramatic action is presented at one moment of its evolution, and beautiful forms are grouped together with such simplicity as to need but little story to enhance their value. If we approach the idyls from this point of view, and regard them as very highly finished works of decorative art, we shall probably be able to enjoy their loveliness without complaining that the shepherds and shepherdesses are too refined, or that the landscapes have not been drawn from nature.

Without discussing the whole hackneyed question of bucolic poetry, a word must be said about its origin, and about the essential difference between Theocritus and modern pastorals. It is natural to suppose that country folk, from the remotest period of Greek history, refreshed themselves with dance and song, and that music formed a part of their religious ceremonials. The trials of strength which supply themotiveof so many Theocritean idyls were quite consistent with the manners of the Greeks, who brought all rival claims of superiority to the touchstone of such contests. Their antiquity in the matter of music may be gathered from the legends of Pan and Apollo, and of Apollo and Marsyas. Phœbus, in the character of shepherd to Admetus, gave divine sanction to bucolic minstrelsy. In respect of bodily strength, the gymnastic rivalry of Olympia and other great Hellenic centres was so important as to determine the chronology of Greece, while even claims to personal beauty were decided by the same trial: the three goddesses submitted to the arbitration of Paris; and there were in many states ἀριστεῖα of physical charms, not to mention the boys' prize for kisses at Nisæan Megara. Bucolic poetry may therefore be referred to the pastoral custom of shepherds singing together and against each other at festivals or on the green.

It was the genius of Theocritus in all probability which determined the Doric and Sicilian character of the idyls we possess. He, a Syracusan and a Dorian, perfected thegenre, and was followed by his imitators. Nothing can be more simple and lifelike than the conversations of his rustics, or more nicely discriminated than the pedestrian style of their dialogue and the more polished manner of their studied songs. The poet has, no doubt, invested these rural encounters with the imaginative beauty which belongs to art. He has attributed to Corydon and Thyrsis much of his own imagination and delicate taste and exquisite sense of natural loveliness. Had he refrained from doing so, his idyls would not have challenged the attention and won the admiration of posterity. As it is, we find enough of rustic grossness on his pages, and even complain that his cowherds and goatherds savor too strongly of their stables. Of his appreciation of scenery it is difficult to speak in terms of exaggerated praise. As I purpose to discuss this subject more minutely further on, it may here be enough to remark that he alone of pastoral poets drew straight from nature, and fully felt the charm which underlies the facts of rustic life.

In comparison with Theocritus, Bion and Moschus are affected and insipid. Their pastorals smack of the study more than of the fields. Virgil not only lacks his vigor and enthusiasm for the open-air life of the country, but, with Roman bad taste, he commits the capital crime of allegorizing. Virgil's pernicious example infected Spenser, Milton, and a host of inferior imitators, flooding literature with dreary pastorals in which shepherds discussed politics, religion, and court-gossip, so that at last bucolic poetry became a synonym for everything affected and insipid. Poetry flourishes in cities, where rustic song must always be an exotic plant. To analyze Poliziano, Sanazaro, Guarini, Tasso, Spenser, Fletcher, Jonson, Barnfield, Browne, Pope, etc., and to show what strains of natural elegance adorn their imitations of the ancients, would be a very interesting but lengthy task. As society became more artificial, especially at Florence, Paris, and Versailles, the taste for pseudo-pastorals increased. Court-ladies tucked up their petticoats and carried crooks with ribbons at their tops, while court-poets furnished aristocratic Corydons with smooth verses about pipes and pine-trees, and lambs and wattled cotes. The whole was a dream and a delusion; but this mirage of rusticity appropriated thenameof pastoral, and reflected discredit even on the great and natural Theocritus. At length thisgenreof composition, in which neither invention nor observation nor truth nor excellence of any kind except inglorious modulation of old themes was needed, died a natural death; and the true bucolic genius found fresh channels. Crabbe revived an interest in village life; Burns sang immortal lyrics at the plough; Goethe achieved a masterpiece of idyllic delineation; Wordsworth reasserted the claims of natural simplicity; Keats expressed the sensuous charms of rustic loveliness; Tennyson and Barnes have written rural idyls in the dialects of Lincolnshire and Dorsetshire; while other writers are pursuing similar lines of composition. Theocritus, it is true, differs widely from these poets both in his style and matter. But he deserves to rank among the most realistic artists of the nineteenth century on account of his simplicity and perfect truth to nature. In reading him we must divest ourselves of any prejudices which we have acquired from the perusal of his tasteless imitators. We must take his volume with us to the scenes in which he lived, and give him a fair trial on his own merits.

It is on the shores of the Mediterranean—at Sorrento, at Amalfi, or near Palermo, or among the valleys of Mentone—that we ought to study Theocritus, and learn the secret of his charm.[143]Few of us pass middle life without visiting one or other of these sacred spots, which seem to be the garden of perpetual spring. Like the lines of the Sicilian idyllist, they inspire an inevitable and indescribable πόθος, touching our sense of beauty with a subtle power, and soothing our spirits with the majesty of classical repose. Straight from the sea-beach rise mountains of distinguished form, not capped with snow or clothed with pines, but carved of naked rock. We must accept their beauty as it is, nude, well defined, and unadorned, nor look in vain for the mystery or sublimity or picturesqueness of the Alps. Light and color are the glory of these mountains. Valleys divide their flanks, seaming with shadow-belts and bands of green the broad hillside, while lower down the olives spread a hoary grayness and soft robe of silver mist, the skirts of which are kissed by tideless waves. The harmony between the beauty of the olive-boughs and the blue sea can be better felt than described. Guido, whose subtlety of sentiment was very rare, has expressed it in one or two of his earliest and best pictures by graduated tones of silver, azure and cool gray. The definite form and sunny brightness of the olive-tree suits our conception of the Greek character. It may well have been the favorite plant of the wise and calm Athene. Oaks with their umbrageous foliage, pine-trees dark and mournful upon Alpine slopes, branching limes, and elms in which the wind sways shadowy masses of thick leaves, belong, with their huge girth and gnarled boles and sombre roof-age, to the forests of the North, where nature is rather an awful mother than a kind foster-nurse and friend of man. In northern landscapes the eye travels through vistas of leafy boughs to still, secluded crofts and pastures, where slow-moving oxen graze. The mystery of dreams and the repose of meditation haunt our massive bowers. But in the South, the lattice-work of olive boughs and foliage scarcely veils the laughing sea and bright blue sky, while the hues of the landscape find their climax in the dazzling radiance of the sun upon the waves, and the pure light of the horizon. There is no concealment and no melancholy here. Nature seems to hold a never-ending festival and dance, in which the waves and sunbeams and shadows join. Again, in Northern scenery, the rounded forms of full-foliaged trees suit the undulating country, with its gentle hills and brooding clouds; but in the South the spiky leaves and sharp branches of the olive carry out the defined outlines which are everywhere observable through the broader beauties of mountain and valley and sea-shore. Serenity and intelligence characterize this Southern landscape, in which a race of splendid men and women lived beneath the pure light of Phœbus, their ancestral god. Pallas protected them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty. Nations as great and noble have arisen among the oak and beech woods of the North; strong-sinewed warriors, heroic women, counsellors with mighty brains, and poets on whose tongue the melody of music lingers like a charm. But the Greeks alone owned the gift of innate beauty and unerring taste. The human form, upon those bare and sunny hills, beneath those twinkling olive-boughs, beside that sea of everlasting laughter, reached its freedom; and the spirit of human loveliness was there breathed fully into all the forms of art. Poetry, sculpture, architecture, music, dancing, all became the language of that moderate and lucid harmony which we discover in the landscape of the Greeks.

Olives are not, however, by any means the only trees which play a part in idyllic scenery. The tall stone-pine is even more important; for, underneath its shade the shepherds loved to sing, hearing the murmur in its spreading roof, and waiting for the cones with their sweet fruit to fall. Near Massa, by Sorrento, there are two gigantic pines so placed that, lying on the grass beneath them, one looks on Capri rising from the sea, Baiæ, and all the bay of Naples sweeping round to the base of Vesuvius. Tangled growths of olives, oranges, and rose-trees fill the garden-ground along the shore, while far away in the distance pale Inarime sleeps, with her exquisite Greek name, a virgin island on the deep. In such a place we realize Theocritean melodies, and find a new and indestructible loveliness in the opening line of his first idyl:

ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς, αἰπόλε, τήνα.

These pines are few and far between. Growing alone or in pairs, they stand like monuments upon the hills, their black forms sculptured on the cloudlike olive-groves, from which at intervals spring spires and columns of slender cypress-trees.

Here and there in this bright garden of the age of gold white villages are seen, and solitary cottage roofs high up among the hills—dwellings, perhaps, of Amaryllis, whom the shepherds used to serenade. Huge fig-trees lean their weight of leaves and purple fruit upon the cottage walls, while cherry-trees and apricots snow the grass in spring with a white wealth of April blossoms. The stone walls and little wells in the cottage gardens are green with immemorial moss and ferns, and fragrant with gadding violets that ripple down their sides and checker them with blue. On the wilder hills you find patches of ilex and arbutus glowing with crimson berries and white waxen bells, sweet myrtle rods and shafts of bay, frail tamarisk and tall tree-heaths that wave their frosted boughs above your head. Nearer the shore the lentisk grows, a savory shrub, with cytisus and aromatic rosemary. Clematis and polished garlands of tough sarsaparilla wed the shrubs with clinging, climbing arms; and here and there in sheltered nooks the vine shoots forth luxuriant tendrils bowed with grapes stretching from branch to branch of mulberry or elm, flinging festoons on which young loves might sit and swing, or weaving a lattice-work of leaves across the open shed. Nor must the sounds of this landscape be forgotten—sounds of bleating flocks, and murmuring bees, and nightingales, and doves that moan, and running streams, and shrill cicadas, and hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There is not a single detail which a patient student may not verify from Theocritus.

Then, too, it is a landscape in which sea and country are never sundered. This must not be forgotten of idyllic scenery; for it was the warm seaboard of Sicily, beneath protecting heights of Ætna, that gave birth to the bucolic muse. The intermingling of pastoral and sea life is exquisitely allegorized in the legend of Galatea; and on the cup which Theocritus describes in his first idyl the fisherman plays an equal part with the shepherd youths and the boy who watches by the vineyard wall. The higher we climb upon the mountain-side the more marvellous is the beauty of the sea, which seems to rise as we ascend and stretch into the sky. Sometimes a little flake of blue is framed by olive-boughs, sometimes a turning in the road reveals the whole broad azure calm below. Or after toiling up a steep ascent we fall upon the undergrowth of juniper, and lo! a double sea, this way and that, divided by the sharp spine of the jutting hill, jewelled with villages along its shore, and smiling with fair islands and silver sails. Upon the beach the waves come tumbling in, swaying the corallines and green and purple sea-weeds in the pools. Ceaseless beating of the spray has worn the rocks into jagged honeycombs, on which lazy fishermen sit perched, dangling their rods like figures in Pompeian frescos.

In landscapes such as these we are readily able to understand the legends of rustic gods; the metamorphoses of Syrinx, Narcissus, Echo, Hyacinthus, and Adonis; the tales of slumbering Pan and horned satyrs and peeping fauns with which the idyllists have adorned their simple shepherd songs. Here, too, the Oread dwellers of the hills and dryads and sylvans and water-nymphs seem possible. They lose their unreality and mythic haziness; for men themselves are more a part of Nature here than in the North, more fit for companionship with deities of stream and hill. Their labors are lighter and their food more plentiful. Summer leaves them not, and the soil yields fair and graceful crops. There is surely some difference between hoeing turnips and trimming olive-boughs, between tending turkeys on a Norfolk common and leading goats to browse on cytisus beside the shore between the fat pasturage and bleak winters of our midland counties and the spare herbage of the South dried by perpetual sunlight. It cannot be denied that men assimilate something from their daily labor, and that the poetry of rustic life is more evident upon Mediterranean shores than in England.

Nor must the men and women of classical landscape be forgotten. When we read the idyls of Theocritus, and wish to see before us Thestylis and Daphnis and Lycidas, we have but to recall the perfect forms of Greek sculpture. We may, for instance, summon to our mind the Endymion of the Capitol, nodding in eternal slumber, with his sheep-dog slumbering by: or Artemis stepping from her car; her dragons coil themselves between the shafts and fold their plumeless wings: or else Hippolytus and Meleager booted for the boar-chase: or Bacchus finding Ariadne by the sea-shore; mænads and satyrs are arrested in their dance; flower-garlands fall upon the path; or a goat-legged satyr teaches a young faun to play; the pipe and flute are there, and from the boy's head fall long curls upon his neck. Or Europa drops anemone and crocus from her hand, trembling upon the bull as he swims onward through the sea: or tritons blow wreathed shells, and dolphins splash the water: or the eagle's claws clasp Ganymede, and bear him up to Zeus: or Adonis lies wounded, and wild Aphrodite spreads hungry arms, and wails with rent robes tossed above her head. From the cabinet of gems we draw a Love, blind, bound, and stung by bees; or a girl holding an apple in her hand; or a young man tying on his sandal. Then there is the Praxitelean genius of the Vatican who might be Hylas, or Uranian Eros, or Hymenæus, or curled Hyacinthus—- the faun who lies at Munich overcome with wine, his throat bare, and his deep chest heaving with the breath of sleep—Hercules strangling the twin snakes in his cradle, or ponderous with knotty sinews and huge girth of neck—Demeter, holding fruits of all sorts in one hand and cornstalks in the other, sweeping her full raiment on the granary floor. Or else we bring again the pugilist from Caracalla's bath—bruised faces and ears livid with unheeded blows—their strained arms bound with thongs, and clamps of iron on their fists. Processions move in endless line, of godlike youths on prancing steeds, of women bearing baskets full of cakes and flowers, of oxen lowing to the sacrifice. The Trojan heroes fall with smiles upon their lips; the athlete draws the strigil down his arm; the sons of Niobe lie stricken, beautiful in death. Cups, too, and vases help us, chased with figures of all kinds—dance, festival, love-making, rustic sacrifice, the legendary tales of hate and woe, the daily idyls of domestic life.

Such are some of the works of Greek art which we may use in our attempt to realize Theocritus. Nor need we neglect the monuments of modern painting—Giorgione's pastoral pictures of piping men and maidens crowned with jasmine-flowers, Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, and Tintoretto's Marriage of Ariadne, or the Arcadians of Poussin reading the tale of death upon the gravestone, and its epitaph—"Et ego."

To reconstruct the mode of life of the Theocriteandramatis personæis not a matter of much difficulty. Pastoral habits are singularly unchangeable, and nothing strikes us more than the recurrence of familiar rustic proverbs, superstitions, and ways of thinking which we find in the idyllic poets. The mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, of prosaic interest in worldly affairs and of an unconscious admiration for the poetry of nature, which George Sand has recently assigned with delicate analysis to the bucolic character in her Idyls of Nohant, meets us in every line of the Sicilian pastorals. On the Mediterranean shores, too, the same occupations have been carried on for centuries with little interruption. The same fields are being ploughed, the same vineyards tilled, the same olive-gardens planted, as those in which Theocritus played as a child. The rocks on which he saw old Olpis watching for the tunnies, with fishing-reed and rush basket are still haunted through sunny hours by patient fishermen. Perhaps they cut their reeds and rushes in the same river-beds; certainly they use the same sort of κάλαμος. The goats have not forgotten to crop cytisus and myrtle, nor have the goatherds changed their shaggy trousers and long crooks. You may still pick out a shepherd lad among a hundred by his skin and cloak. It is even said that the country ditties of the Neapolitans are Greek; and how ancient is the origin of local superstitions who shall say? The country folk still prefer, like Comatas in the fifth idyl, garden-grown roses to the wild eglantine and anemones of the hedgerow, scorning what has not required some cost or trouble for its cultivation. Gretchen's test of love by blowing on thistle-down does not differ much from that of the shepherd in the third idyl. Live blood in the eye is still a sign of mysterious importance (Idyl iii. 36). To spit is still a remedy against the evil eye (vii. 39). Eunica, the town girl, still turns up her nose at the awkward cowherd; city and country are not yet wholly harmonized by improved means of locomotion. Then the people of the South are perfectly unchanged—the fisher boys of Castellamare; the tall, straight girls of Capri singing as they walk with pitchers on their heads and distaffs in their hands; the wild Apulian shepherds; the men and maidens laughing in the olive-fields or vineyards; the black-browed beauties of the Cornice trooping to church on Sundays with gold earrings, and with pink tulip-buds in their dark hair. One thing, however, is greatly altered. Go where we will, we find no statues of Priapus and the Nymphs. No lambs are sacrificed to Pan. No honey or milk is poured upon the altars of the rustic muse. The temples are in ruins. Aloes and cactuses have invaded the colonnades of Girgenti, and through the halls of Pæstum winds whistle and sunbeams stream unheeded. But though the gods are gone, men remain unaltered. A little less careless, a little more superstitious they may be; but their joys and sorrows, their vices and virtues, their loves and hates, are still the same.

Such reflections are trite and commonplace. Yet who can resist the force of their truth and pathos?

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