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The chord of pastoral elegy,
first struck by Bion in his Lament
for Adonis, is one which
through varying expansion and modification has
kept its resonance down to the present day. The
Lament for Bion by Moschus, the Lycidas
of Milton, the Adonais of Shelley, the
Thyrsis of Arnold, the Ave atque Vale
of Swinburne, these all have their origin,
more of less directly, in that brief and simple
idyl. My purpose here is to seek out the relations
existing between these poems, and to endeavor
to indicate the development of this species of
verse. Neither the purely subjective In Memoriam,
nor the impersonal revery of the Elegy in a
Country Churchyard falls
within my scope, as neither adopts any part of
the conventional framework upon which the pastoral
elegy relies.
The form taught by Bion has shown
itself adaptable and expansive. For the expression
of a grief which is personal, but not too passionately
so, and which is permitted to utter itself in
panegyric, it has proved exactly fitted. A rapid
inter-transition between subjective and objective
treatment, a breadth of appeal, a reliance upon
general sympathy, these are characteristics which
endow this species of verse with its wonderful
flexibility and freshness. The lines of its structure,
moreover, admit of an almost indefinite degree
of decoration, without an appearance of over-abundant
and extrinsic detail, or departure from the unity
of the design.
In the Lament
for Adonis the design
is marked by extreme simplicity. The singer vibrates
between musical reiterations of his own sorrow
and reiterations of the sorrow of Aphrodite. Her
grief, together with the beauty and the fate of
Adonis, is dwelt upon with a wealth of emotional
description, and reverted to again and again,
while in the intervals are heard lamentations
from the rivers and the springs; from the hounds
of the slain hunter, and the nymphs of his forest
glades; from the mountains, the oak-trees, the
flowers that redden for anguish; from the Loves
who clip their locks, the Muses, the Graces, and
Hymenæus with benignant torch extinguished. The
most passionate passage in the poem comes from
the mouth of Aphrodite herself; and even this,
dramatic as it is in expression, is held strictly
within the bounds of self-conscious and melodious
utterance. Throbbing irregularly through the verse,
as a peal of bells borne in between the pauses
of the wind, now complete, now fragmentary and
vanishing, come the notes of the refrain,
"Woe,
woe for Adonis, the Loves join in the lament."
When
we turn to the poem of Moschus, we see what an
expansion has been wrought in the slender pastoral,
and not with loss but with gain in unity and artistic
effect. The advance is toward a more definite
purpose in the use of reiteration, a more orderly
evolution, a wider vision, a more vivid and human
interest, and a substitution of the particular
for the general. Here, in place of undistinguished
springs and rivers, we find the "Dorian water,"
the fountain Arethusa, and Meles, "most melodious
of streams." It is not the flowers in general
that redden in their anguish, but each manifests
its pain in its own fashion: the roses and the
wind-flowers blush to a deeper crimson; the hyacinth
breathes more poignantly the ai
ai upon its petals,
and the trees throw down their young fruit. It
is no longer to the unnamed array of nymphs that
appeal is made, but with far more potent spell
to Galatea herself, to the Nymphs Bistonian, to
the damsels of Æagria. The heifers reject their
pasture, the ewes with-hold their milk, and the
honey has dried up for sorrow in the wax. Apollo
himself is added to the mourners, with the Satyrs
and the Fauns. The illustrious among cities bring
their tribute, Ascra lamenting more than for her
Hesiod, Mitylene than for her Sappho; and Syracuse
grieves through the lips of her Theocritus. The
nightingales of Sicily join their song, and the
Strymonian swans, and the bird of Memnon, the
halycon, "the swallow on the long ranges
of the hills," and in the sea the music-loving
dolphins. Finally the poet, recalling the descent
of Orpheus to Hades, and how his song there sped
him, laments that he himself cannot travel the
same path on like errand, and dreams that Persephone
were already half won to grant his suit, seeing
that she, too, is Sicilian, and skilled in the
Dorian song. All this is development along the
same lines as those laid down in the Lament
for Adonis. The method is still almost wholly
emotional and pictorial, but two or three new
elements begin to hint their advent. The strain
of philosophical meditation, later to assume a
preponderating influence in this species of verse,
here begins in a passage of exquisite loveliness,
which is expanded from a single phrase in the
Lament for Adonis.
In the latter poem Cypris cries out to Persephone,
"All lovely things drift down to thee."
Observe what this becomes in the hands of Moschus:
"Ah
me, when the mallows wither in the garden, and
the green parsley, and the curled tendrils of
the anise, on a later day they live again, and
spring in another year, but we men, we the great
and mighty and wise, when once we have died,
in the hollow earth we sleep, gone down into
silence; a right long, and endless, and unawakening
sleep."
A
new note, too, is that touched in the references
to Homer, wherein a swift comparison is instituted
between the epic and the idyl, and their respective
sources of inspiration; and here is the first
appearance of the autobiographic tendency, which
in some later poems of the class becomes a prominent
feature. In the matter of direct verbal borrowing
Moschus seems to owe but little to his master,
his indebtedness in this respect being as nothing
in comparison with that of Milton and Shelley.
The refrain ("Begin, Ye Sicilian Muses, begin
the dirge"), as used by Moschus, has not
quite the same functions as those allotted it
by Bion. It is used with greater frequency and
regularity, as a sort of solemnly sweet response
marking off stanzaic divisions, and in its substance
is not so interwoven with the body of the song.
In
Lycidas the same lines are pursued through
the greater portion of the poem. The personal
note is intensified, which follows from the fact
that the lament is for a friend no less than for
a fellow-singer. The conventional disguise of
the art of song under the homely shepherd’s trade
is more insisted upon; it becomes now the basis
of every detail, and the parallel is carried out
to its limits. A higher degree of complexity is
attained, but not without a loss in congruity
and in clearness. The verse is not less responsive
to the touch of external nature, but it has acquired
a new susceptibility to the influences of learning,
of morals, and of the tumultuous questions of
the day. It cannot refrain from polemics, it allegorizes
on the smallest excuse, and it indulges in an
almost pedantic amount of abstruse and remote
allusion. It is scholastic poetry; but informed,
nevertheless, with such imaginative vigor, filled
with such sympathy for nature, attuned to such
sonorous harmonies, and modulated to cadences
so subtle, as to surpass in all but simplicity
the distinctive excellences of its models. The
treatment is still frankly objective, transparently
free from introspection, the atmosphere and coloring
of a noonday vividness, the descriptions drawn
at first-hand from that affluent landscape which
the poet’s early manhood knew at Horton. As in
its predecessors, the objects of familiar nature
are appealed to, the "Dorian water"
and other classic streams, the dolphins, the Nymphs,
the Muses, and Apollo himself; but, by a strange
anomaly, St. Peter, too, comes amid the pagan
train, and pronounces a scathing diatribe against
the opponents of Milton’s theological school of
thought. This is a lesson learned of Dante, perhaps.
And it is quite in keeping with later mediæval
methods that the passage of most exalted spirituality
which the poem affords should be placed on the
lips of Apollo. An element which here makes its
first appearance in the pastoral elegy is discovered
in the lofty rejoicing of the conclusion. The
note of hope was wanting in the pagan elegies,
so their sorrow deepens to the end. But Lycidas
is the expression of a confident immortality,
and hence the temporal grief which it bewails
passes at length into a solemn gladness of consolation.
In
regard to style Milton has not conformed closely
to his originals. The departure is from a direct
to an indirect utterance, the singer being, ostensibly,
not the poet himself, but the "uncouth swain"
depicted in that matchless bit of purest Greek
objectivity which, in terminating the poem, appears
to throw it out into clear relief. The refrain
has dwindled to nothing more than he unobtrusive
repetition of a few phrases. And for the fluent,
direct, pellucid Sicilian hexameters we have the
measured and delaying pace of the Iambic pentameter.
The measure is one of high and stately loveliness,
but bearing little resemblance to the line of
Bion and Moschus.
When
we come to the Adonis, we find ourselves
in another atmosphere. Hitherto our path has lain
along the valleys and the gentle hill-slopes,
where nature is all fertility and peace, where
the winds are soft, the waters slow-winding, the
meadows thick with flowers, and the sunshine heavy
with fragrance. We have been in the region of
the pipe, the safe flocks, the "azure pillars
of the hearth." However much the strain may
have been laden with allegory and with symbol,
yet the joys recalled, the griefs lamented, the
hopes and desires rehearsed, have all been definite,
not only measurable but measured and stated. It
is with material conceptions that the singer has
occupied. But Shelley hurries us out upon the
heights, where the air is keen and stimulating,
and the horizon so vast that the gaze acquires
a wide-eyed eagerness; where the more minute details
of life are lost as the shifting pageantry of
night and day is unrolled in dazzling nearness.
The coloring is transparent, of a celestial purity,
and ordered in strangely vivid contrasts, and,
instead of a pastoral stillness, we have the unrest
of winds, the aspiration of flame.
The
many points of resemblance between the Adonais
and its models, though obvious enough to force
themselves upon the most casual attention, are
yet far more superficial that those existing between
the models themselves. So extraneous indeed is
the likeness, that I am tempted to illustrate
it by the comparison of a seed of grain which
is easily recognizable after its germination because
it carries with it, upon its expanding seed-leaf,
the remnants of its husk. To identify it is a
simple matter, but its transformation is none
the less complete. In Adonais we find verbal
borrowings so ingenuous and so abundant that the
censor of literary morals has not breath enough
to cry "stop thief." In
truth, to change the figure, Shelley has not scrupled
to appropriate the gold of his predecessors as
a setting for his diamonds. In place of the Paphian
goddess we now find Urania, the heavenly muse;
instead of the Loves and Nymphs, the Desires,
Adorations, and Dreams of the dead poet; and for
the shepherds, under thin disguise, come the great
contemporary singers, Byron, Moore, Hunt, Shelley
himself. After the fashion of the Loves in Bion,
a Dream seeks to break her bow and shafts, while
another clips her locks; as in Moschus, Echo feeds
on the dead singer’s music, and the trees cast
down their expanding buds; and one of Shelley’s
Ministers of Thought is heard to cry, with voice
not all unlike that of the shepherd in Lycidas,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not dead."
These parallels, and others like them, are sufficiently
emphatic, but their little importance is to be
estimated from the fact that they might all be
obliterated without destroying the unity of the
poem, without even making serious inroad upon
its highest and most distinctive beauties. The
material conceptions of his predecessors Shelley
has adopted, but he has made them subservient
to an intensely spiritualized emotion and aspiration.
The very imagery of the poem is to a great extent
psychological in its origin, yet as vivid as if
derived from the most familiar of physical phenomena.
The
height of attainment in the Adonais is
not reached until the poet’s passion of thought
has carried him clear of his models. So long as
his song was of loss he was, perhaps, neither
greater nor less than they, only more metaphysical,
more fierce in invective, less serenely and temperately
beautiful. But when he comes to speak of consolation,
the theme, even in Lycidas, of only one
brief passage, he straightway attains his full
measure of inspiration. The whiteness to which
this thought has kindled his imagination transfuses
nearly every line of the concluding seventeen
stanzas. This consolation is based upon a sort
of spiritualized pantheism, vivified by a breath
of the essence of Christian philosophy, and finds
its fullest expression in stanzas xlii. and xlii:
"He
is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the voice of night’s sweet
bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and
stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may
move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied
love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles
it above.
"He
is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth
bear
His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic
stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling
there,
All new successions to the forms they
wear;
Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks
its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may
bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the
Heaven’s light."
The
unsatisfying element in this faith is compensated
for by the creed of personal immortality, of inextinguishable
identity, expressed in stanzas xliv., xlv., and
xlvi.:
"The
splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished
not;
Like stars to their appointed height they
climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil."
* * *
"The
inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond
mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent,
* * *
Oblivion
as they rose shrank like a thing reproved."
"And
many more, whose names on Earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot
die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality."
Then
follows an inspired digression describing the
loveliness of that last resting-place of the mortal
vesture of Adonais—a loveliness suggesting the
dead poet’s own utterance: "I have been half
in love with easeful Death." And the poem
concludes with a majesty which is thus admirably
analyzed by Mr. Symonds:
"Yet
again the thought of Death as the deliverer,
the revealer, the mystagogue, through whom the
soul of man is reunited to the spirit of the
universe, returns; and on this solemn note the
poem closes. The symphony of exaltation which
had greeted the passage of Adonais into the
eternal world is here subdued to a grave key,
as befits the mood of one whom mystery and mourning
still oppress on earth. Yet even in the somewhat
less than jubilant conclusion we feel that highest
of all Shelley’s qualities, the liberation of
incalculable energies, the emancipation and
expansion of a force within the soul, victorious
over circumstance, exhilarated and elevated
by contact with such hopes as make a feebler
spirit tremble."
"The
breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling
throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest
given;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are
riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil
of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal
are."
The
Thyrsis of Mr. Arnold, in temper one of the
most modern of poems, maintains, nevertheless,
a closer relationship than does the Adonais
to the work of the Sicilian elegists. With
a far less degree of external resemblance, it
makes at the same time a less marked spiritual
departure from the field and scope of its models.
The conventional metonymy of shepherd and pipe
is still adhered to consistently; the names of
Corydon and Daphnis still figure. But the heterogeneous
train of mourners is gone; the solitary singer
makes no call upon Nymphs of Loves, Dreams or
Desires, Deities or the phenomena of Nature to
assist his sorrow. The use of iteration still
remains, much modified; but the refrain has vanished
utterly; and, save for stanzas ix. and x., which
read almost like an adorned and expanded paraphrase
of the conclusion of the epitaph on Bion, there
is scarcely an instance of adaptation or verbal
borrowing. So much for external likeness and contrast.
But a profound internal resemblance makes itself
felt, I think, in a sense of something approaching
finality in the mourner’s loss. There is, indeed,
in Thyrsis a search made for consolation,
but the result of the search is inadequate and
slight. The consolation excites no such melodious
fervor as does that found by Milton and by Shelley.
Indeed, it seems scarcely to win the thorough
confidence of even Mr. Arnold himself:
"Let
in thy voice a whisper often come
To chase fatigue
and fear:
Why
faintest thou? I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light
we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask
proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved
hill-side."
The
proof is scarcely such as to carry conviction,
and the faith it upholds is somewhat thin and
pale after the creeds of Lycidas
and the Adonais. Nevertheless, though cold,
it is a high and severe philosophy which informs
the Thyrsis:
"A
fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
Shy to illumine;
and I seek it too.
This
does not come with houses or with gold,
With place, with
honor, and a flattering crew;
‘Tis
not in the world’s market bought and sold—
But
the smooth-slipping weeks
Drop by, and leave its seeker still
untired;
Out of the heed
of mortals he is gone,
He wends unfollowed,
he must house alone;
Yet on he fares, by his own heart
inspired."
This
goes beyond any motive or aspiration expressed
by the Sicilian singers. But the philosophy lightly
suggested in stanza viii. is not far from identical
with that of the passage already quoted from Moschus;
and the elysium claimed for Thyrsis ("within
a folding of the Apennine," to hearken "the
immortal chants of old") is not fundamentally
different form that to which Adonis and Bion were
snatched reluctant away.
I
have spoken of the modern temper of the Thyrsis.
This is to be found, I think, in its underlying
scepticism, and in a profound consciousness of
the weariness and the meagre rewards of struggle.
The heroic and stimulating element in the poem
consists in the lofty courage with which this
depressing consciousness is held at bay, that
it exert not its demoralizing influence on life
and conduct. Another peculiarly modern quality
is that which Mr. Hutton describes as a "craving
after a reconciliation between the intellect of
man and the magic of nature." The keen and
ever-present perception of this magic of nature
is the origin of that which constitutes perhaps
the crowning excellence of the work, its faithful
and yet not slavish realism, its minute yet inspired
depictions. This is the sort of realism, interpretive,
selective, imaginative, which forms the basis
of all the most enduring and satisfying verse.
In its most selective phase it pervades stanza
vii., which furnishes an interesting parallel
to the exquisite flower-passage in Lycidas.
A
minor difference between the Thyrsis and
its predecessors, yet a difference reaching far
in its effects, is to be found in the quality
of its color. This has little of the flooding
sunlight and summer luxuriance to which Moschus
and Milton introduced us; it has none of the iridescent
and auroral splendors which steep the verse of
Shelley. It is light, cool, and pure; most temperate
in the use of strong tints, and matchless for
its tenderness and its exquisite delicacy of gradation.
This coloring contributes appreciably to what
I take to be the central impression which the
Thyrsis aims to convey—the impression of
a serious and lofty calm, the result, not of joy
attained, but of clear-sighted and unsanguine
endurance.
Arriving
at Mr. Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale, we seem
to have rounded a cycle. While structural resemblances
have all but vanished, in substance of consolation
we stand once more where Bion stood, and Moschus.
In motive there is a vast descent from the Thyrsis
to this poem. No longer is there any high endurance
to spiritualize the hopelessness of the mourner,
and hold him above the reach of despair. Nothing
but the negative prospect of a sort of perpetual
coma, or, at most, the sensuous solace of a palely
luxurious peace.
"It
is enough; the end and the beginning
Are one thing
to thee, who art past the end.
O hand unclasped
of unbeholden friend!
For thee no fruit to pluck, no palms
for winning,
No triumph and
no labor and no lust,
Only dead yew-leaves
and a little dust.
O quiet eyes wherein the light saith
nought,
Whereto the day
is dumb, nor any night
With obscure finger
silences your sight,
Nor in your speech the sudden soul
speaks thought,
Sleep, and have
sleep for light."
But
while motive lessened and conception lowered,
execution was rising to an almost unsurpassable
height. With the exception of the Lament for
Bion, no one of the poems we have been considering
can equal this in perfection of structure. In
unity of effect, in strong continuity of impulse,
it seems to me unexcelled. Never varying from
its majestic restraint, it achieves such matchless
verbal music as that of stanza ii., such serious
breadth of imagination as is exemplified in stanza
vi., and such haunting cadences of regret as these
lines from stanza ix. express:
"Yet
with some fancy, yet with some desire,
Dreams pursue death as winds a flying
fire,
Our dreams pursue our dead, and do not find.
Still, and more swift than they,
the thin flame flies,
The low light fails us in elusive
skies,
Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind
Are still the eluded eyes."
Of
what may be called the machinery of mourning,
with which the Sicilians set out so well equipped,
we find here little remaining. It has nearly all
seemed superfluous to the later elegist. A remnant
appears in stanza xi., and still
"bending
us-ward with memorial urns
The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
Weep."
Still
Apollo is present, and
"Compassionate,
with sad and sacred heart,
Mourns thee of many his children the last dead."
And
Aphrodite keeps place among the mourners; but
she is no longer either the spiritual Venus Urania,
or the gladly fair and sanely passionate Cytherea
of the Greeks. She has become that bastard conception
of the Middle Ages, the Venus of the hollow hill,
"a ghost, a bitter and luxurious god."
To
conclude with a brief recapitulation: it would
appear that the pastoral elegy, originated by
Bion, reached its complete structural development
in the hands of Moschus; and that, in its inner
meaning, the work of these two poets was adequate
to the spiritual stature of their day. The Lycidas
was an inspired adaptation of like materials to
the needs of a more complex period. In the Adonais
we find the structure undergoing a violent expansion,
and a new and vast departure made in the sphere
of conception and motive. In hopefulness, in consolation,
in exalted thought, in uplifting emotion, Shelley’s
poem occupies the pinnacle of achievement for
this species of verse. In the Thyrsis we
see structural conformity diminishing, but at
the same time a reapproach to the religious attitude
of the Greek originals. The elements of spirituality
and hope have declined, but to support us till
the coming of "the morning-less and unawakening
sleep," some inward consolation yet remains,
in a spirit akin to that of the best wisdom of
Greek philosophies. In this poem we discover,
too, if not the complete contemporary adequacy
of the work of Bion and Moschus, nevertheless
a most sympathetic expression of the intellectual
tendencies of the period.
Finally,
in the Ave atque Vale, with a structural
resemblance reduced to its lowest terms, we find
a remarkable return to the spirit of the laments
for Adonis and Bion. To the sorrow of this elegy
there is no mitigation suggested. The goal it
points to is but a form of annihilation, or such
gray pretence of immortality as that of the ghosts
in the abode of Hades. Nevertheless, though without
spiritual sincerity or a stimulating faith, the
poem is effectually redeemed from hollowness,
and endowed, I believe, with a perpetual interest,
by the sincerity of its lyric impulse, its passion
for beauty, its imagination, and its flawless
art. |
