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,