work of recent years to assume the title is Signor d'Annunzio's play _La
Figlia di Iorio_, a work in which the author's powerful and delicate
imagination and wealth of pure and expressive language appear in matchless
perfection. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that there is nothing
in common between the 'pastoral ideal' and the rugged strength and
suppressed fire of the great modern Italian's portrait of his native land
of the Abruzzi.



I


Some confusion of thought appears to have prevailed among writers as to
the origin of pastoral. We are, for instance, often told that it is the
earliest of all forms of poetry, that it characterizes primitive peoples
and permeates ancient literatures. Song is, indeed, as old as human
language, and in a sense no doubt the poetry of the pastoral age may be
said to have been pastoral. It does not, however, follow that it bears any
essential resemblance to that which subsequent ages have designated by the
name. All that we know concerning the songs of pastoral nations leads us
to suppose that they bear a close resemblance to the type of popular verse
current wherever poetry exists, folk-songs of broad humanity in which
little stress is laid on the peculiar circumstances of shepherd life. An
insistence upon the objective pastoral setting is of prime importance in
understanding the real nature of pastoral poetry; it not only serves to
distinguish the pastoral proper from the more vaguely idyllic forms of
lyric verse, but helps us further to understand how it was that the
outward features of the kind came to be preserved, even after the various
necessities of sophisticated society had metamorphosed the content almost