SOURCE: “The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 1, No. 2, April-June 1961, pp. 254-61.

[In the following essay, Heninger claims that in the sixteenth century the classical pastoral was “perverted” to express moral, satirical, and sentimental themes, and that this adaptation was the result of a humanist desire to explore real life in a form that was originally developed to reflect the ideal.]

When the youthful Alexander Pope had finished his pastorals, he wrote a “Discourse” which offers both an encomium of the pastoral tradition and an apologia for his interpretation of it. He began with a characteristically waspish declaration, made with the confidence and careful balance of impeccable authority:

There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called Pastorals, nor a smaller, than of those which are truly so.¹

With a neo-classical eye, Pope had surveyed his predecessors in pastoral, using Theocritus and Vergil as norms. Quite rightly he found little genuine pastoral since classical times, because the Renaissance had violently perverted both its purpose and its method, both its content and its form.

Pastoral was rife during the Renaissance, but not as the ancients had practised it. The idyll and eclogue persisted, but not with the former sweetness and beauty. Instead, the shepherd spoke with a dread voice that shrank the streams of Sicily and blasted the spreading beeches of Arcadia. The setting still purveyed the well-known delights of pasture and forest, but beneath this superficial loveliness rankled the wretchedness of man. The eclogue became a favored form for satire and sarcasm, while idyllicism itself moved over to other literary forms.

To understand the renaissance perversion of pastoral, we must of course first understand the mode in its pure form. This is difficult—rather like trying to isolate a melodic theme from symphonic variations on it. But there is a sizable corpus of critical opinion upon which we may draw. Recent critics, speaking to the theory of pastoral, have emphasized its optimistic simplicity, its denial of reality by simplifying confusion and complexity to an irreducible orderliness. W. W. Greg makes the statement categorical:

What does appear to be a constant element in the pastoral as known to literature is the recognition of a contrast, implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of civilization.²

William Empson likewise insists upon this single criterion for pastoral; in Some Versions of Pastoral, he includes any work which involves the “process of putting the complex into the simple.”³ So pastoral depicts some imagined life in contrast to the complexity of real life. As Greg reiterates a few pages later, it is “the reaction against the world that is too much with us.”⁴

This is certainly the understanding of pastoral that Spenser promulgates in the Pastorella episode in Book VI of The Faerie Queene. There Sir Calidore interrupts his pursuit of the Blatant Beast for an amatory interlude with Pastorella, an obvious allegorical figure representing the perfection of pastoral existence. After sampling the simple pleasures of country life, Calidore

          Gan highly to commend the happie life,
Which Shepheards lead, without debate or bitter strife.
How much (sayd he) more happie is the state,
          In which ye father here doe dwell at ease,
          Leading a life so free and fortunate,
          From all the tempests of these worldly seas,
          Which tosse the rest in daungerous disease;
          Where warres, and wreckes, and wicked enmitie
          Doe them afflict, which no man can appease.

(VI.ix.18.8-9, 19.1-7)

This same interpretation of pastoral is advanced by Voltaire, though diametrically opposed to Spenser in artistic temperament and purpose. Candide, disillusioned after testing innumerable ways of life in both the Old World and the New, finds permanent value only in the conduct of the good old man taking the air at his door within a bower of orange-trees, eloigned from worldly affairs. By self-sufficient management of his twenty acres, he has staved off the three great evils of l'ennui, le vice, et le besoin.

This smug atmosphere has pervaded literary pastoral from the time of its inception. Theocritus revolutionized hexameter verse by the use of mime, and prepared the way for the Arcadian pastoral that was to follow. Writing under the influence of a sophisticated coterie in Cos and later under the stultifying patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus in over-civilized Alexandria, he composed fragile little poems about simple folk in a dulcet setting of his native Sicily. He depicted a real rural scene in the sense that actual flora and fauna and place-names are recognizable, and he simulated a Doric dialect to suggest genuine rusticity. But it is reality refined, purified of sordidness. The only ugliness appears as naïveté, and pain—such as unrequited love or grief for a dead friend—even pain is etherealized into an exquisite masochism.

So from its inception, pure pastoral has described some half-remembered place in archaic terms, a nostalgic reminiscence of an idealized child-scape, an Eden-like state of innocence and harmonious perfection. Any realistic elements in pastoral appear within this carefully constructed frame of psychological reference, from a carefully prescribed psychological distance. The milieu is Arcadia in terms of space, or the Golden Age in terms of time. But all takes place at least one remove from the here-and-now. The purpose of pastoral, as it developed from Theocritus, is to create an ideal existence in contradistinction to the real world. This is precisely the dichotomy which Vergil stresses so pointedly in his very first eclogue: Tityrus, piping beneath the beech tree, is secure in his bucolic bliss, while the displaced Meliboeus goes sadly forth to travail in a non-pastoral life.

Pastoral depends upon this distinction between ideal and reality; but equally important, it insists upon juxtaposition of the two worlds. The boundaries are contiguous, and the frontiers must be crossable. Meliboeus is evicted from his farm to become an urbanite; or moving in the other direction, the courtier Sir Calidore can sport with Pastorella in the shade. This intercourse between actual and ideal, for another example, is the point of Shakespeare's As You Like It. The banished Duke and his retainers live blissfully in the Forest of Arden, where there are also Silvius and Phebe, Arcadian rustics, contrasted with Audrey and William, realistic rustics. At the end, all return to the court and to happiness, having benefited from a pastoral interlude.

This is the optimistic spirit of pastoral. It is available to all. Arcadia is always just over the next hill, or a new Golden Age is just around the next corner. This easy access between reality and illusion, though only by means of some mental freeway, is essential to pure pastoral. The psychology of the Arcadian experience is described by Andrew Marvell in “The Garden”:

                    Here at the Fountains sliding foot,
Or at some Fruit-trees mossy root,
Casting the Bodies Vest aside,
My Soul into the boughs does glide.

(lines 49-52)

Marvell explains man's predilection for pastoral: “The Mind … / Withdraws into its happiness,” “annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade.” Or as Keats said, it is “a thing of beauty” that “keep[s] a bower quiet for us.” This haven of perfection provides refuge from the disappointments and depravity of our real lives. John Hughes, the XVIIIth-century editor of Spenser, emphasized this temporary return to radical innocence in his “Remarks on the Shepherd's Calendar”:

[Pastoral] is a wonderful Amusement to the Imagination, to be sometimes transported, as it were, out of modern Life, and to wander in these pleasant Scenes which the Pastoral Poets provide for us, and in which we are apt to fancy our selves reinstated for a time in our first Innocence and Happiness.⁵

One function of pure pastoral is to provide such solace through escape into a system of pristine goodness. It is escapist literature in a therapeutic sense.

Transcending this individual response, yet as a corollary to it, there is a sociological explanation for pastoral's genesis: it is art as compensation for what a culture lacks, rather than art as expression of what a culture has achieved. Art is often cultural compensation. For instance, the serenity of Greek architecture belies the political turmoil of the city-states, and the saccharine sentimentality of German lieder is clearly antithetical to Prussian militarism. Just so, it is the city-dweller who writes pastorals. When love and leisure are in short supply, pastoral provides these staples—in fiction if not in fact. The pastoralist voices man's inherent longing for the tranquillity of Arcadia, for the innocence of a lost Golden Age. This accounts for the usual charge of artificiality: pure pastoral must be artificial because it describes what is not.

Pastoral, then, is not so much a literary genre—like epic or tragedy or the novel—as a state of mind, a euphoria. Nonetheless, the pastoral exhibits several traditional features of method, conventions introduced by Theocritus and confirmed by Vergil. The idyll or eclogue, the form of pastoral in classical times, has a poetic structure more elaborately articulated than the lyric but less formal than the ode, and in many cases comparable to the drama. It is always a dramatic monologue or a dialogue between shepherds, usually two. The metre is normally the stately hexameter. The theme is consistently love—of woman, of man, of nature—expressed often in set-pieces, such as the singing-match, the amorous complaint, and the dirge. The context is harmonious nature, animate and inanimate, described in realistic detail but without unpleasantness. The prevailing tone approaches the serious mock-heroic, if I may be permitted an oxymoron: our gravest griefs and most earnest joys are presented with straight-faced intensity in the silly activities of shepherds.

So much for the purpose and method of pastoral as the Renaissance found it. It had not been a dominant theme among the ancients: there were Theocritus and his disciples, Moschus and Bion, then Vergil and a few insignificant imitators. Pastoral was unknown among the classical Greeks, and neither Aristotle nor Horace had mentioned it. But in the Renaissance every major author tried his hand at it—from Dante, who wrote two eclogues, to Milton, who offered pastoral in several forms. And the changes rung on the traditional theme were sometimes sonorous, sometimes giddy.

In the Renaissance the pastoral suffered a dissociation between its classic purpose and its standardized method. Poets often ignored the original intention of pastoral, though they continued to use its means—its accoutrements and conventions—for other ends. There are, in consequence, perversions of purpose and perversions of method. In the first category the literary pastoral assumed new rôles as satire, as moral allegory, and as sentiment; in the second category the pastoral spirit assumed new forms of prose, drama, and verse.

The signal perversion of pastoral was its adaptation for the purpose of satire. Those for whom the world really was too much took the pessimistic view that Arcadia does not exist and therefore is available to no one. Renaissance reformers with malice aforethought conceded that pastoral expressed an unattainable ideal, meaningful only as a foil to set off sharply the defects of reality. The speculum of the Golden Age provided a norm against which to measure the degree of man's degradation in this last and worst Age of Iron.

The purpose of pastoral was easily corrupted to satire because it contained a ready-made mechanism for personal allusion. The guise of shepherds was a handy camouflage for actual men. In the ten pastoral poems of Theocritus there is no covert identification except in Idyll VII, “The Harvest-Home,” where several fellow poets appear as shepherds.⁶ But other poems by Theocritus, published regularly with the pastorals to make up the thirty idyllia, contain undisguised names of patrons: for example, Idyll XVI is a plea for patronage addressed to Hiero II of Syracuse, and Idyll XVII is a panegyric of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Vergil took this as license to expand the use of personal allusion,⁷ both covert and open, so that even the earliest scholiasts explicated many of the eclogues as historical allegory.⁸ Not until the Renaissance, however, not until Petrarch and Boccaccio revived the eclogue, was personal allusion an indispensable feature of pastoral.⁹ Then every shepherd embodied an historical personage; every episode recorded an historical event. Rather than being a graceful ornament, personal allusion became the raison d'être for pastoral. E. K. Chambers confides the rationale behind Spenser's Shepheardes Calender: “He chose rather to unfold great matter of argument covertly … which moved him rather in Æglogues, then other wise to write.”¹⁰

Moreover, in antiquity hidden reference had been no more than a pretty compliment to a friend or patron. It was an aristocratic masquerade. But in the Renaissance, covert identification offered a disguise for dissent in an age of political and ecclesiastical turbulence; not only did it permit a panegyric for a patron, but also a philippic against an opponent. Pastoral turned from compliment to abuse. And following the example of Petrarch, malcontents for three centuries proclaimed their bitterest denunciations in the uncongenial and ridiculous garb of shepherds.

A fortuitous circumstance conspired to make pastoral a vehicle of satire. The Renaissance was quick to adapt pastoral terminology to religious meanings, so that shepherd = pastor, the flock = the congregation, and Pan = Christ, the All-inclusive and All-powerful.¹¹ This fusion of classical and Christian iconography, abetted by a syncretic etymology, gave pastoral an inherent advantage for religious satire. Petrarch was the first to utilize this advantage, but it was exploited most notably by Mantuan in Italy, Marot in France, and Spenser in England.

An outgrowth of the pastoral perverted to religious satire was pastoral as moral allegory. Both share the purpose of encouraging goodness in its struggle with evil. Chambers, classifying Spenser's twelve eclogues, claimed that the largest number (5) are “Moral: which for the most part be mixed with some Satyrical bitterness.”¹² Puttenham imputed a didactic intention to Vergil, whose eclogues “containe and enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour.”¹³ But the later Mantuan is the first to make a decided point of moralizing in pastoral, which may account for the widespread use of his eclogues as a textbook. Moral allegory in the guise of pastoral was especially dear to the Puritans; it figured prominently in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, and after a brief career culminated in Milton's Comus.

But clearly satire and allegory are side-tracks for pastoral, which properly depicts an ideal, not a particular nor even a universal. Therefore satire, which depends upon particular reference, and allegory, which implies a universal reference, are foreign to the true pastoral spirit. Pastoral as satire never rose above ingenious raillery, and therefore sticks in the mire of polemics; while pastoral as moral allegory, even that conceived by Milton, remains platitudinous.

In the XVIth century the perversion of pastoral for purposes of satire was paralleled by an equally strong tendency in an opposite direction: the utilization of pastoral for generating sentiment. A precedent for a sentimental love-story in the pastoral milieu had been set by Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, a Hellenistic tale of refined passions, dangers to both life and virtue, and revelations of unsuspected aristocratic lineage. But in the Renaissance the innovator of pastoral as sentiment was Sannazaro, whose authorized Arcadia appeared in 1504. The prose narrative interspersed with twelve eclogues seems to have no purpose but decorous emotionalism. Tasso's Aminta, acted in 1573, inaugurated the sentimental pastoral in dramatic form, soon to be seconded by Guarini's Pastor Fido, acted in 1585. These genuine artists engendered a languid sentiment that brooded on the mutability of lovely things. They knew that in Arcadia, the very kingdom of delight, veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine. But in the hands of imitators, this wakeful wistfulness rapidly degenerated to maudlin affectation.

Those are the distinguishable perversions of the purpose of pastoral, intentions beyond the ken of ancient practitioners in the mode. The Renaissance likewise revamped the method of pastoral. The set-pieces were generally ignored, and the eclogue, traditional form of the pastoral, became less and less common. Although Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Mantuan faithfully perpetuated the classical eclogue, the pastoral mode was most often expressed in other forms.

Pastoral drama, for example, became a distinct genre.¹⁴ As early as 1472, Poliziano presented the tragedy of Orfeo within a pastoral setting; and after a somewhat discontinuous evolution, pastoral drama reached its greatest triumphs in Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido. Pastoral also appeared prominently in the masque, a late sub-dramatic form, such as Ronsard's Bergerie and Jonson's Sad Shepherd.

Another distinct genre in the pastoral milieu was the multiplot prose romance, inaugurated by Boccaccio's Ameto and solidified into convention by Sannazaro's Arcadia. A half century later Montemayor amalgamated pastoral and the medieval chivalric romance to produce Diana, and Sidney followed the same formula for his Arcadia. In these works, shepherds began to posture strangely in courtly and heroic attitudes. From there, the pastoral romance sank ever deeper into banality, from which not even Don Quixote could shame it.

There were pastoral elegies, such as Marot's dirge for Louise de Savoye and Milton's “Lycidas,” both contaminated with satire; pastoral odes, such as Ronsard's “Aux Cendres de Marguerite de Valois” and Spenser's “April”; and pastoral verse-narrative, such as Boccaccio's Ninfale fiesolano and Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe. The lyric, though, became the most prevalent verse form assumed by pastoral, and certainly it is the form which has had enduring popularity. In the lyric the true spirit of pastoral found a resting-place. Freed from the metrical demands of the Latin eclogue, the shepherd sang seductively in his vernacular: Come live with me in a constant round of pleasures. The pastoral lyric had been a standard feature in the shepherd-mimes of Theocritus, and it developed in the Renaissance as a graceful adjunct to the prose narrative of the romances. Under the stimulus of Lorenzo de Medici, it also achieved an autonomous existence.¹⁵ The Pléiade brought the pastoral lyric to high art, and Elizabethans in the poetical miscellanies refined it to a curiously elegant simplicity.

But Marlowe's “Passionate Shepherd” was too self-consciously a city-dweller; he promised gold buckles and madrigals rather than cheese and music on the pipes. And Raleigh's “Nymph's Reply” was a well-known rider on any proposition to lead the pastoral life, a rider inevitable in the world-weary later Renaissance. Moreover, the metrics of the “Passionate Shepherd” are an adaptation of the standard ballad stanza, so the song has more affinities with the vulgar ballad than with the dignified hexameter. When Pope sat down to write pastorals, he found a multitude of works feigning loyalty to this time-honored tradition, but he rightly noted that almost none were pastoral in both purpose and method.

Pastoral had irresistibly attracted the greatest renaissance poets because, like tragedy, it offers the opportunity of juxtaposing the ideal and the actual in a single neat system. The ancients had developed the ideal aspects of pastoral; for them it served as an escape mechanism. Such an interpretation presupposes that literature and life are separate experiences, however, that literature provides a haven from life. So the renaissance humanist could not accept this facile dichotomy which fragmented man rather than making him whole. He wanted real literature as well as an ideal life. Literature, like life, must take form within the human sphere; yet it should reflect the perfection glimpsed by the poet in his moment of ecstasy. The humanist was forced to concede that man is limited—Genesis established this fact as well as its wherefore; yet under optimum conditions man is still capable of conceiving the ideal and affirming it. Then the ideal momentarily becomes actual. Although the ideal, like Adam, is mortal, mortality is its only imperfection. And for the circumscribed period of its existence, the ideal is a unique, unqualified value. In fact, awareness that the ideal is limited to an ephemeral existence makes it all the more to be cherished—an attitude developed later by the romantics.

The Renaissance, though, most frequently expressed the enigma of perfection's finitude in terms of mutability: time brings inevitable change, but this change is itself part of the pattern, indeed is essential to realizing the pattern. This cognizance of finitude haunted the poet, and frightened him into explaining it—hence, Spenser's “Cantos of Mutabilitie.” The theme intruded even into the realm of pastoral, and shepherds for the first time in the Renaissance recovered moldering tombstones from the Golden Age with the pointed inscription, “Et in Arcadia ego,” where the speaker is clearly Death.¹⁶ Arcadia invaded by Death is Eden delimited by sin—but each is itself an untarnished ideal. And if man, though debased, can somehow re-enter Paradise—if only through the artifice of pastoral—he will regain a measure of his pristine goodness and will comprehend the reasons for his fall from such a blissful seat. The pastoral world provides a literary Eden where man fallen cohabits with man innocent. Pastoral can present the mystery of man's relation to this harmonious universe, the paradox of his simultaneous mortality and godlikeness. When handled properly, pastoral can place the immediate in a cosmic context—witness Milton's “Lycidas.”

But only rarely did pastoral build the lofty rhyme. There were some dizzy raptures in the lyrics and a few aching joys in the drama; but then the still, sad music of humanity smothered all, even the carping of the malcontents, so that pastoral petered out in self-conscious dirges … Astrophel … Adonais … Thyrsis. Pastoral failed to achieve greatness in the Renaissance, when the humanistic poet could have given substance to its wavering vision of man's nature. Instead, pastoral was perverted to satire, moral allegory, and sentimental narrative; it assumed modish, superficial forms. Unlike tragedy, pastoral never realized its potentiality.

Notes

1. Pope, Prose Works, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford, 1936), 297.

2. W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama (London, 1906), 4.

3. (London, 1935), 23, 53. Empson's purpose—a sociological one—is perspicaciously summarized by J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1798 (Univ. of Florida Press, 1952), 4-5; and later, Congleton cites several XVIIth- and XVIIIth-century critics who similarly discussed pastoral as the ultimate simplification of complex reality (169-177).

4. Pastoral Poetry, 6.

5. The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser (6 vols.; London, 1715), I, ci-cii.

6. H. J. Rose pinpoints the importance of this idyll in the development of pastoral as personal allegory (The Eclogues of Vergil [Univ. of California Press, 1942], 10-11).

7. See John S. Phillimore, Pastoral and Allegory, a Re-reading of the Bucolics of Virgil (Oxford, 1925), 13ff.

8. The inability of scholars to agree upon the identity of prominent figures—such as the expected child in Eclogue IV and Daphnis in Eclogue V—proves that personal allegory in Vergil is not cut-and-dried, however, and suggests strongly that personal allegory is not intended in every eclogue. Allegory was merely one step which Vergil took in the direction of generalizing his thought or emotion. In his chapter on “Vergil and Allegory,” Rose concludes: “There is in the Eclogues rather less than one might expect of hidden meaning, and especially of figurative allusion to the author's own circumstances” (Eclogues of Vergil, 138). When Vergil intended unmitigated personal allusion, he used real names—e.g., Pollio and Varus and Gallus.

9. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio are explicit on this point; see Greg, Pastoral Poetry, 18 (n. 1), and Congleton, Theories of Pastoral, 15, 172-173.

10. Variorum Spenser, Minor Poems (Johns Hopkins Press, 1943), I, 10

11. For other affinities between pastoral and the Christian tradition, see E. K. Chambers, English Pastorals (London, 1895), xxv-xxvi.

12. Minor Poems, I, 12. Cf. Philip Sidney's comments on pastoral in the Defence of Poesie (in Complete Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat [4 vols.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922-1926], III, 22).

13. The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), 39.

14. For the details of this evolution, see Greg, Pastoral Poetry, 155ff.; Enrico Carrara, La Poesia pastorale (Milan, 1909), 205ff. and 297ff.; and Louis E. Lord, tr., The “Orpheus” of Angelo Politian and the “Aminta” of Torquato Tasso (Oxford Univ. Press, 1931), 54-60.

15. See Greg, Pastoral Poetry, 33-36; Carrara, Poesia pastorale, 164ff., 225ff., and 415ff.; and Lord, tr., “Orpheus” of Politian, 52.

16. See Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), 295-320.