184 June — The Idyllic Shepherds. 



of the Roman eclogue, the imitation of it, is not external 

 nature ; it is the life of man in Nature, of man as an 

 animal, or lower than any other animal, with pretty hills 

 and foliage for a background, and flower-bearing, grassy 

 lands to play in. It is strange that an immorality so 

 disgusting, so inconceivable by us, should ever have 

 been united with any simple and hearty love of Nature, 

 and it is the stranger that the immorality itself was of 

 a kind completely out of harmony with natural instinct 

 and law : but the truth is, that in the measure of their 

 powers these ancient poets, when they wrote idyls, set 

 themselves to paint animal pictures with rustic back- 

 grounds, the animal being sometimes a bull, sometimes 

 a goat, but more frequently man. We have only to 

 read these poems to perceive at once how inevitable it 

 was for the ancients to arrive at the conception of the 

 satyr. The sentimental shepherds whom they celebrate 

 are morally so much beneath what we charitably hope 

 is the common human level, that it is really a relief and 

 a necessary transition to pass from them to the honestly 

 semi-bestial condition of half-animal, in which we see 

 at once that responsibility has been diminished by 

 monstrosity of organization. Had these poets simply 

 taken man as a part of Nature and described his passions 

 naturally, however frankly, we might have read their 

 descriptions with the indulgence that we feel for savages 

 in the South Sea Islands ; but their groves are like the 

 Cities of the Plain, and one desires for them, if not the 

 consuming fire, at any rate the oblivion of Asphaltites, 

 — that dreariest, bitterest of seas, whose waters lie for 



