Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the
Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The
decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to
exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus
turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized
recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the
allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm
either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and
vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to
an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late
fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival;
the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of
strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet
to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these
men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able
wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must
have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding
of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered
kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when
Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fashion,
where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the
land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,'
there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make
Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society
of the Italian courts.
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