I

Lycidas is an elegy, and as such offers no peculiar difficulties of interpretation for a modern reader; but it is also a pastoral elegy, and belongs therefore to a type of literature which has fallen so completely into disuse that an act of the historic imagination is required to place us in the proper attitude toward it. Unless we understand something of the theory underlying the pastoral poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and something of the mental conditions lying behind that theory, we can with difficulty do justice to a poem like Lycidas, which moves in a world of deliberate artifice, where the restrictions and the liberties are alike fantastic. Dr. Johnson's amusingly jejune animadversions upon Lycidas represent in its extremest form the danger of judging such a poem by standards of mere 66 common-sense." The letter of such criticism as his is often true, but the spirit is grotesquely false, because it leaves out of account both the general differences which mark off poetry from prose, and, still more flagrantly, the particular mould into which the pastoral poets deliberately chose to cast their thoughts.

The rise and progress of pastoral poetry on the Continent and in England forms one of the most curious chapters in the history of literature. From Portugal, where it took its rise in the fourteenth century, it spread rapidly through the whole of civilized Europe, and persisted in various forms until late in the eighteenth century. It enlisted the pens of the greatest writers,

Cervantes in Spain, Tasso and Boccaccio in Italy, Spenser, Fletcher, and Milton in England. It invaded the drama; it found its way into politics, and into religion. In France it produced at least one great

painter, Watteau, and built up a system of manners and sentiments which not even the subtle laughter of Molière could overthrow. The mock village where Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at being shepherdesses and milkmaids still stands in the park of the Petit Trianon at Versailles; and the royal toy, with its pathetic associations, reminds us how persistent was the enthusiasm for the pastoral idea, and in what curious ramifications the enthusiasm worked itself out. No movement of mind ever takes place on such a scale as this unless it springs from deep causes; the art products which accompany it, however artificial and perverse they may seem on the surface, minister to real spiritual needs of the age wherein they appear.

The source of the pastoral poetry and romance of the Renaissance is to be found, naturally, in the country idylls of the Sicilian poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and in the Bucolics of Virgil. Even the earliest and simplest of the Sicilian idylls have a note of artificiality, in that they are studies of country life from the outside, by minds more or less artistically sophisti cated. Virgil, essentially an urban poet, though with a keen sensibility to the idyllic aspects of country life, took still more plainly this outside point of view, a view exactly opposite (to choose a modern instance) from that which Wordsworth constantly tried to assume. This primary bent away from realism received, when the pastoral forms of poetry began to be received in southern Europe, a great reinforcement from the nature of the Renaissance itself. The life of the Renaissance was an urban life; beyond the circumvallations of defense within which the great revival ran its course still lay the shadow of medievalism. Any real sympathy with the life of the woods and fields on the part of a man of the town was

impossible. Still, just there beyond the walls the country lay, and for the seeing eye of the artist could not but have an irresistible appeal. Being chiefly external and visual, this appeal naturally came first to the painters and worked itself out in those conventionalized but still lovely backgrounds of hill and river which the early artists put behind their madonnas. The poets were not slow to take the hint, and to provide a country setting for their fancies. But they came to nature with their minds full of classical images. They saw nature only across a vague mist of literary recollection. They peopled their landscapes with nymphs and goddesses, satyrs and fauns, because the poets they revered had done so. The whole topography, fauna, and flora of the country where the poet lived suffered a change into something remembered from Latin or Greek poetry.

This

In the midst of this fantastic landscape, with its mythological accessories, they set, not real country - folk, of whose characters and modes of mind an understanding was denied to them, but men and women of their acquaintance, disguised in bucolic. costume, and following, in the intervals of love-making and song-piping, the mildest of bucolic pursuits. The result of all this was a type of literature perhaps more completely separated from fact than any other that has ever existed under the sun. unreality, however, so far from lessening the hold of pastoral literature on men's minds, proved to be the chief element of its charm. Men welcomed with eagerness this odd, remote world of the pastoral, where existence smoothed itself out into languid summer sweetness, where time and its tragedies were a tale told in the shade, and where no fact intervened to break with harsh angle the soft sky line of fancy. The pastoral ministered to the longing for evasion, for an escape from the tyranny of the actual, which is a constant element in the human imagination. It was at the same time a facile genre to cultivate. It

appealed to the finest talents by reason of its ideality, as strongly as it attracted mediocre wits by the easy successes which it offered.

When the pastoral went over into England, in the wake of the Italianizing school headed by Spenser and Sidney, two changes took place in it. It gained in spontaneity of nature-feeling, chiefly in the hands of Spenser and William Browne, and it gained in moral earnestness, especially in the work of George Wither and Phineas Fletcher. The pastoral form came to Milton's hands, therefore, with all its original quaint remoteness and fantastic ideality unimpaired, but with a new freshness of feeling added to it, and the proved possibility that its pretty fictions could be used to convey a serious message.

II

In the late summer of 1637 news came to Milton of the drowning of Edward King off the Welsh coast; and after the opening of the fall term at Cambridge, he was asked to contribute to a memorial volume of verse to be dedicated to King's memory. When he began to cast about for a form in which to put his thought, several considerations urged him toward the pastoral elegy. Because its classical origin and prototypes, that form had a traditional academic flavor appropriate to the circumstances. The pastoral fiction had moreover been used by two generations of English poets as a vehicle for affectionate communication with each other in verse; and King, though not a gifted singer, had at least justified his shepherdship by frequent versemaking. These, however, were minor considerations. Of much more moment in determining Milton's choice must have been his perception of the double fact that his real interest in King and his fate was a symbolic rather than a personal one, and that the pastoral was of all forms of poetry the most amenable to symbolic treatment.

Much misprision of Lycidas, from Dr. Johnson down, has resulted from a failure to accept the first of these premises. We do not, it is true, know exactly what the personal relations of young King and his future elegist were, during their common term of residence within the walls of Christ's College. King was Milton's junior, however, and so far as we can judge from his preserved writings, not of a type of mind to attract an isolated and haughty personality. Milton was not a man to contract those easy miscellaneous friendships open to a less exigent nature, nor was he a man to let a genuine friendship, once contracted, go unchronicled, as his letters and poems to Charles Diodati testify.

But no such a priori argument to prove the case is needed. Lycidas itself bears convincing testimony that it grew not out of a poignant personal grief, such as inspired three years later the elegy upon Diodati, but out of a passiou no less intense for being more generalized and imaginative. King was, everything goes to show, one of those men upon whom there rests in youth an indefinable light of promise, the same in kind if not in degree as two centuries later touched the imaginations of another group of young Cantabrigians gathered about Arthur Hallam. His death could stand, therefore, before the eye of the poet, as a type of touching unfulfillment. No one who has studied the psychology of the poetic mind will doubt the kindling power of such an abstraction. But if this pathos of mortality had not been enough (and for a spirit of Milton's martial cast it might not have been) King's death had another symbolic significance. He had been in preparation for the ministry; he was a type of the "good shepherd " who should enter the sheep-folds of the church and save the flock from hirelings and thieves. Already in Comus Milton had given a hint of his growing indignation over the corruptions of the church, and during the three years of silence which

followed the writing of that poem he had been brooding angrily upon the laxity and worldliness of the Episcopal establishment. Here was his chance to speak out. He seized upon the symbol without much regard to King's actual worth or power, broadening and dignifying the individual instance to fit the might of his denuncia

tion.

The symbolic bearing of his theme, as has been said, naturally pointed Milton to the pastoral form, which by its ideal remoteness lent itself with peculiar readiness to symbolism. It will not do, however, to press this point too far, since the fact must be borne in mind that for the expression of what was unquestionably deep personal grief, he chose, in the Epitaphium Damonis, the same general form. But between the Epitaphium Damonis and Lycidas there is this notable difference: the first is in the pure style of the early Sicilian pastoralists, and belongs, therefore, to a simple personal type of elegy; Lycidas is in the mixed rococo style of the pastoralists of the late Renaissance, and belongs to a type which had long been put to ulterior uses and overlaid with deposit upon deposit of literary second-thought. We can see, indeed, in this last particular, an additional reason why the form should have recommended itself to Milton, as well as one prime source of the wonderful beauty which gathered about the theme under his hand. For his mind was of the kind which delights to draw together into one substance the thought-material of all climes and times. Into this magic vessel of the Renaissance pastoral he gathered the mythologies of Greece and Rome, the mongrel divinities of the academic myth-makers, dim old druidical traditions, the miracles of Palestine, the symbolism of the Catholic church, the angelic hierarchies of medieval theologians, and the mystical ecstasies of the redeemed in Paradise, - all set in a frame-work of English landscape, in the midst of which a Sicilian shepherd sat

piping strains of a double meaning. Surely there was never a more strangely compounded thing than Lycidas. Surely there was never a more astonishing instance of the wizardry of the imagination than this, where at a compelling word a hundred motley and warring suggestions are swept together and held suspended in airy unity.

III

The structure of Lycidas is unique in English verse; loose analogues are to be found in the lyric choruses in Guarini's famous play of Pastor Fido, to which Milton undoubtedly gave careful study. The form stands midway between that of the strict ode, with set stanzas, lines of fixed length, and rhymes of fixed recurrence, such as we find in Shelley's Adonaïs, and the complete lawlessness of the so-called Pindaric ode invented by Cowley and familiarized to us by Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day. Though printed without stanza breaks, Lycidas groups itself into eleven distinct sections of varying length, happily termed by Professor Masson "free musical paragraphs." These are composed of iambic five-foot lines, occasionally varied by the introduction of a line of three feet, which is subtly contrived to relieve the rhythmic monotony by imparting a kind of swirl or eddy to the onward flow of the verse. The rhyme system is very free. Sometimes the lines rhyme in couplets, sometimes alternately; again, as in the eight lines at the close, they interlace themselves in the Italian form known as ottava rima. The boldest and most successful device which Milton used, however, was the prolongation of a single rhymesound through a whole passage, in rich replications and echoes. An example of

is occurs in the opening passage of the poem. Another daring innovation is illustrated by the first line of all, which stands detached, with no rhyme-word to answer it. A number of these isolated lines occur

throughout the elegy: to a sensitive ear they heighten the poignancy of the music by introducing an element of momentary dissonance or unfulfillment, which is at once lost in the wealth of concord, with an effect somewhat like that of a suspension and resolution in instrumental music.

IV

Through the succession of these "free musical paragraphs" the thought and imagery unfold themselves, capriciously, even incoherently, it would seem to the hasty glance. Let us try to trace this unfolding scheme, and to perceive the intellectual framework upon which the poet has woven his music. Such analysis is more than ordinarily needful in the study of Lycidas, because its unity is compounded of so many simples, and the thought moves from group to group of imagery through such subtly modulated transitions.

The poem opens without any warning of its pastoral character, cr of the fact that the author is concealing his personality under the figure of a shepherd plaining for his lost companion:

"Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude' ...

Just beneath the surface of the passage there is a plain autobiographic intention. For three years (since the manuscript of Comus had been sent to Lawes) Milton had written no poetry, and here he declares that only "bitter constraint" and "sad occasion dear" compel him to break silence now. From other sources we know the reason of his silence, namely, that he was "mewing his mighty youth," and strengthening himself for a flight beside which his previous efforts would dwindle into insignificance. The myrtle boughs with which he hoped one day to bind his brow were still harsh and crude, unmellowed by the long year of his preparation. But sorrow