Chapter I.

Foreign Pastoral Poetry



In approaching a subject of literary inquiry we are often able to fix upon
some essential feature or condition which may serve as an Ariadne's thread
through the maze of historical and aesthetic development, or to
distinguish some cardinal point affording a fixed centre from which to
survey or in reference to which to order and dispose the phenomena that
present themselves to us. It is the disadvantage of such an artificial
form of literature as that which bears the name of pastoral that no such
_a priori_ guidance is available. To lay down at starting that the
essential quality of pastoral is the realistic or at least recognizably
'natural' presentation of actual shepherd life would be to rule out of
court nine tenths of the work that comes traditionally under that head.
Yet the great majority of critics, though they would not, of course,
subscribe to the above definition, have yet constantly betrayed an
inclination to censure individual works for not conforming to some such
arbitrary canon. It is characteristic of the artificiality of pastoral as
a literary form that the impulse which gave the first creative touch at
seeding loses itself later and finds no place among the forces at work at
blossom time; the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are
inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where
these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both
in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live
at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and
incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms,
pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a