Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy {xii} were avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil. Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his Daphnis and Chloe depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel began its course with the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the Galatea of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of Diana, who added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which the spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.

The pastoral, however, was only a digression in the slow advance of the English novel towards its goal; and though it furnished perhaps half the inspiration of Sidney’s romance, it does not bear upon the present theme, the significance of the Elizabethan novel as represented by the Arcadia in the evolution of English fiction. The pastoral romance, it should nevertheless be noted, is more closely allied to poetry than to prose fiction proper, not merely because it mingles verse with a flowery and emotional prose, but chiefly because it is an offspring of the free imagination and not of the study of real life. The pastoral impulse has always been something factitious and retrograde in the history of literature and art, something exactly contrary to the return to nature to which Wordsworth gave the strongest impetus, and which exercised such an enormous effect on the advance of realism.

{xiii}

The Elizabethan novel, the general characteristics of which are roughly summed up in the words “poetic invention,” came next to mediaeval romance in a natural order of succession. It did not bring fiction any nearer the type conditioned by the laws of expression in strict prose, of the eighteenth century pattern. In an age of poetry the novel had become more poetic in style and in attitude to life than it had ever been. The Arcadia and Euphues have less than the Morte d’Arthur of the real world of men and women. A superficial view, accordingly, might suggest that with a hybrid and unfruitful type of art like the poetic novel one line of development came to an end, especially as we see that Defoe, in the next age, makes an entirely new beginning, abjuring romance and free imagination, turning directly to actual experience for his material, and using a homespun style, as close as he could make it to the speech of everyday life. Yet the semi-poetic novel represents a definite stage of transition, and it does contain elements that were to be developed later. The masterpieces of Italian story-tellers had made their mark upon the Elizabethans, who acquired the art of constructing a plot, and giving their narratives a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They showed also a more conscious effort to portray individual character; and by Lyly the analysis of motive and feeling was carried to a point that seems to anticipate Richardson. More than this, they came a good step nearer to reality, although they failed so flagrantly to reproduce the atmosphere of the real. They chose their subjects from the sphere of human experience; and they rejected giants, fairies, and witchcraft, together with the

“Forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear,”

which were stock features of the romantic literature; although, on the other hand, they put wild improbabilities in the place of supernatural marvels, and revelled in coincidences and disguises almost as incredible as the Celtic magic of the trouvère.

Sidney the critic expounds in his Apologie for Poetry his view that the novel of his time and of all anterior times, together {xiv} indeed with all literature having an imaginative and idealistic tendency, was comprehended under his definition of poetry.

“For Xenophon,” says he, “who did imitate so excellently as to give us the portraiture of a just Empire under the name of Cyrus, made therein an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagines and Cariclea. And yet both writ in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gowne maketh an Advocate.”

What his theory of poetry was may be gathered from his description of the poet, who,

“disdayning to be tied to any such subjection (as the natural rules of things), lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, dooth growe in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anewe, formes such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like; so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit. Nature never set the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.”

This corresponds to Bacon’s famous account of the nature of poetry, in the Advancement of Learning:--

“Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atque poetis, etc. It is taken in two senses in respect of words and matter. In the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter it is (as hath been said) one of the principal parts of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.

“The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, {xv} because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.”

These definitions are too broad for poetry, and too narrow for imaginative literature in general, though that is what they aimed to define. It was as difficult for Sidney and Bacon as for Aristotle to propound a theory embracing literary forms that were not yet invented; and furthermore it is probable that had they witnessed the birth of naturalism in Defoe, or its ultimate developments in our own age, they would have denied to it the name of literature or art. But there is no place in such a definition for many works that neither Sidney nor Bacon would have hesitated to admit, the novels of George Eliot, for instance, or those of Fielding. Yet a modern explanation of poetry, that of Newman, would not exclude even such prose works as these. He says,