Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose | Page 4

oak-trees or of
pines, where the dry fir-needles are strown, or where the feathered ferns
make a luxurious 'couch more soft than sleep,' or where the flowers
bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls. Again, Theocritus will
sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as in the third idyl, just
where the olive-gardens cease, and where the short grass of the heights
alternates with rocks, and thorns, and aromatic plants. None of his
pictures seem complete without the presence of water. It may be but the
wells that the maidenhair fringes, or the babbling runnel of the fountain
of the Nereids. The shepherds may sing of Crathon, or Sybaris, or
Himeras, waters so sweet that they seem to flow with milk and honey.
Again, Theocritus may encounter his rustics fluting in rivalry, like
Daphnis and Menalcas in the eighth idyl, 'on the long ranges of the
hills.' Their kine and sheep have fed upwards from the lower valleys to
the place where

'The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling
shallows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high
mountain pastures and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them
past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for 'tis the last
Of all the woody,
high, well-water'd dells
On Etna, . . .
. . . glade,
And stream, and
sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna beyond, in the broad glare

Of the hot noon, without a shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the
peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.' {0b}
Theocritus never drives his flock so high, and rarely muses on such
thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound
of water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava. The day is
always cooled and soothed, in his idyls, with the 'music of water that
falleth from the high face of the rock,' or with the murmurs of the sea.
From the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries on the
arbutus shrubs, his shepherds flute to each other, as they watch the
tunny fishers cruising far below, while the echo floats upwards of the
sailors' song. These shepherds have some touch in them of the satyr
nature; we might fancy that their ears are pointed like those of
Hawthorne's Donatello, in 'Transformation.'
It should be noticed, as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus, that
the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he might really
have heard on the shores of Sicily. This is the real answer to the
criticism which calls him affected. When mock pastorals flourished at
the court of France, when the long dispute as to the merits of the
ancients and moderns was raging, critics vowed that the hinds of
Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their wooings.
Refinement and sentiment were to be reserved for princely shepherds
dancing, crook in hand, in the court ballets. Louis XIV sang of himself
-
'A son labeur il passe tout d'un coup,
Et n'ira pas dormir sur la
fougere,
Ny s'oublier aupres d'une Bergere,
Jusques au point d'en
oublier le Loup.' {0c}

Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace, Fontenelle (a severe
critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian who
wore a skin 'stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the smell of
the rennet clinging to it still.' Thus Fontenelle cries, 'Can any one
suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say "Would I were
the humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and dip beneath the
branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee"?' and then he quotes other
graceful passages from the love-verses of Theocritean swains. Certainly
no such fancies were to be expected from the French peasants of
Fontenelle's age, 'creatures blackened with the sun, and bowed with
labour and hunger.' The imaginative grace of Battus is quite as remote
from our own hinds. But we have the best reason to suppose that the
peasants of Theocritus's time expressed refined sentiment in language
adorned with colour and music, because the modern love-songs of
Greek shepherds sound like memories of Theocritus. The lover of
Amaryllis might have sung this among his ditties -
[Greek]
'To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow, To kiss
thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.' {0d}
In his despair, when Love 'clung to him like a leech of the fen,' he
might have murmured -
[Greek]
'Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags, and no
more was troubled with the thought of thee.'
Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the
tone of Battus's song in the tenth idyl -
'White thou art not, thou art not golden haired,
Thou art brown,