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In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is summed up in the work of one man--Clément Marot. It is he who forms the central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pléiade. While belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation of Sannazzaro's Salices and her lament on the death of her brother François I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her comédie of human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject. In his early work he continued the tradition of the Romance of the Rose; later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance. By nature an easy-going bon vivant, his only real affection appears to have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.

But, however fascinating Marot may be as an historical figure, he was in no sense a great poet. His chief merit in literature, apart from his often delicate epigrams, his élégant badinage and his graceful if at times facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the charm of naïve simplicity and genuine feeling. In his Éclogue au Roi he addresses Francis under the name of Pan, while in the Pastoureau chrestien he applies the same name to the Deity; yet in either case there is a justness of sentiment underlying the convention which saves the verse from degenerating into mere sycophancy or blasphemy. His chief claim to notice as a pastoral writer is his authorship of an eclogue on the death of Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis; a poem through which, more than any other, he influenced his greater English disciple, and thereby acquired the importance he possesses for our present inquiry.

Marot, however, whose inspiration, in so far as it was not born of his own genius, appears to be chiefly derived from Vergil, whose first eclogue he translated in his youth, was far from being the only poet who wrote bucolic verse or bore other witness to pastoral influence. France was not behind other nations in embracing the Italian models. Margaret, as I have said, imitated Sannazzaro in her Histoire des satyres et nymphes de Diane. The Arcadia was translated in 1544. Du Bellay was familiar with the original and honoured its author with imitation, translation, and even a respectful mention of it in his famous Défense. Elsewhere he asks:

Qui fera taire la musette

Du pasteur néapolitain?

The first part of Belleau's Bergerie appeared in 1565, the complete work, including a piscatory poem, in 1572. On the stage Nicolas Filleul anticipated the regular Italian drama in a dramatized eclogue entitled Les Ombres in 1566. Later Nicolas de Montreux, better known under the name of Ollenix du Mont-Sacré, a writer of a religious cast, and author of a romantic comedy on the story of Potiphar's wife, composed three pastoral plays, Athlette, Diane, and Arimène, which appeared in 1585, 1592, and 1597 respectively. They are conventional pastorals on the Italian model, futile in plot and commonplace in style. He was also the author of the Bergerie de Juliette, a romance published in 1592, which Robert Tofte is credited with having translated in his Honour's Academy,' or the Famous Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta,' which appeared at London in 1610. Tofte's work, however, while purporting to be 'done into English,' makes no mention of the original author, and though indebted for its form and title to Nicholas' romance does not appear to bear much further resemblance to it. A far more important work in itself, but one which does not much concern us here, is Honoré d'Urfé's Astrée, an autobiographic compilation in which the fashionable pastoral romance found its most consummate example. The work was translated into English as early as 1620, but the history of its influence in this country belongs almost exclusively to the French vogue, which began about the middle of the century, and formed such an important element in the literature of the restoration.

The comparatively small influence exerted by the French pastoral of the renaissance on that of England must excuse the scanty summary given in the preceding paragraphs. It remains to be said that there had existed at an earlier period in France another and very different tradition, which supplied one of the regular forms of composition in vogue among trouvères and troubadours alike. The pastourelle has sometimes been described as a popular form, but it would be difficult to determine wherein its 'popularity,' in the sense intended, consists, for it is easily recognized as the offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue. Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes. Others--and the fact is at least significant--serve to convey allusions, political, personal or didactic: a variety found as early as the twelfth century in Provençal, and about the fourteenth in northern French. Wandering scholars adopted the form from the knightly singers and produced a plentiful crop of Latin pastoralia, usually of a somewhat burlesque nature. An idea of the general style of these may be gathered from such lines as the following, which contain the reply of a country girl hesitating before the advances of a merry student:

Si senserit meus pater

uel Martinus maior frater,

erit mihi dies ater;

uel si sciret mea mater,

cum sit angue peior quater:

uirgis sum tributa.[70]

Appropriated, lastly, and refashioned by the hand of an original genius, the pastourelle gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its Minnesang in Walther's 'Under der linden,' with its irrepressibly roguish refrain:

Kuster mich? wol tûsentstunt:

tandaradei,

seht wie rôt mir ist der munt!

Connected with the pastourelles of the langue d'oïl is an isolated dramatic effort, of a primitive and naïve sort, but of singular grace and charm. Li jus Robins et Marion, the work of Adan le Bochu or de le Hale, is in fact a dramatized pastourelle of some eight hundred lines beginning with the rejection by a shepherdess of the advances of a knight and ending with the rustic sports of the shepherds on the green. Unsophisticated nature and playful cunning unite in no ordinary degree to lend delicacy and savour to the work, while the literary quality of Adan's verse is evident in such incidental songs as Marion's often quoted:

Robins m'aime, Robins m'a, Robins m'a demandee, si m'ara.

In spite, however, of the genuine naïveté and natural realism of the piece, it is easy to recognize in it something of the same spirit of gentle raillery that sparkles in the graceful octaves of Lorenzo's Nencia.

A real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealization of the actual shepherd class, is reflected in a poem written about 1460 by René of Anjou, ex-king of Naples, describing in pastoral guise the rustic retreat which he enjoyed in company with his wife, Jeanne de Laval, on the banks of the Durance. The conventional pastoralism that veils the identity of the shepherd and shepherdess is scarcely more than a pretence, for at the end of the manuscript we find blazoned the arms of the royal pair, with the inscription:

Icy sont les armes, dessoubz ceste couronne, Du bergier dessus dit et de la bergeronne.

We have now completed the first section of our introductory survey of pastoral literature. We have passed in review, in a necessarily rapid and superficial, but, it is to be hoped, not altogether inadequate, manner, the varions manifestations of the kind in the non-dramatic literature of continental Europe. The Italian pastoral drama has been reserved for separate and more detailed consideration in close connexion with that of this country. It must, however, be borne in mind that in such a survey as the present many of the byways and more or less obscure and devious channels by which pastoral permeated the wide fields of literature have of necessity been left unexplored. Nothing, for instance, has been said about the pastoral interludes which occupy a not inconspicuous place in the martial cantos both of the Orlando and the Gerusalemme. Before passing on, however, I should like to say a few words concerning one particular department of renaissance literature, and that chiefly by way of illustrating the limitations of the tradition of literary pastoral. I refer to the novelle or nouvelles, in which, although pastoral subjects are occasionally introduced, the treatment is entirely independent of conventional tradition. Without making any pretence at covering the whole field of the novellieri, I may instance a tale of Giraldi's, not lacking in the homely charm which belongs to that author, of a child exposed in a wood and brought up by the shepherds. These are represented as simple unpretending Lombard peasants, who look to their own business and are credited with none of the arts and graces of their literary fellows. More exclusively rustic in setting is an anecdote concerning the amours of a shepherd and shepherdess, told with broad humour in the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles and elaborated with characteristic gusto and extraordinarily graphic art by Pietro Fortini. The crude obscenity of the subject alone serves to show how free the writer was from any influence of the pastoral of polite literature.[71] Numerous other stories concerning shepherds or villani might be cited, from Boccaccio to Bandello, the point of which, whether openly licentious or ostensibly moral, is brought home with a brutal and physical directness utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the whole, what one would expect. The coarse realism that gave life and vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-class cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition. The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the novel. It is true that when we speak of the bourgeois spirit of the novella on the one hand, and the 'ideal' pastoral on the other, it is well to remember that the author of the Decameron also wrote the first modern pastoral romance; that the century and country which saw the publication of the Arcadia, the Aminta, and the Pastor fido, also welcomed the work of Fortini, Giraldi, and Bandello; and that to Margaret of Navarre, the imitator of Sannazzaro and patroness of Marot, we are likewise indebted for the Heptameron. Nevertheless the tendencies, though sometimes united in the person of a single author, yet keep distinct. Both alike had become a fashion, both alike followed a more or less conventional type. The novel remained coarse and realistic; the pastoral, whatever may be said of its morality, remained refined and at a conscious remove from real life. To examine thoroughly the cause of this disseverance from actuality which haunted the pastoral throughout its many transformations would lead us beyond all possible bounds of this inquiry. One important point may, however, here be noted. The pastoral, whatever its form, always needed and assumed some external circumstance to give point to its actual content. The interest seldom arises directly from the narrative itself. In Theocritus and Sannazzaro this objective point is supplied by the delight of escape from the over-civilization of the city; in Petrarch and Mantuan, by their allegorical intention; in Sacchetti and Lorenzo, by the contrast of town and country, with all its delicate humour; in Boccaccio and Poliziano, by the opening it gave for golden dreams of exquisite beauty or sensuous delight; in Tasso, by the desire of that freedom in love and life which sentimental philosophers have always associated with a return to nature. In all these cases the content per se may be said to be matter of indifference; it only receives meaning in relation to some ulterior intention of the author. Realism under these circumstances was impossible. Nor could satire call it forth, for no one would be at pains to satirize actual rusticity. The only loophole left by which a realistic treatment could find its way into pastoral was when, as in Folengo's macaronics, it was not the actual rustic life but the conventional representation of it that was the object of satire. But this case was naturally a rare one.