June — Nature of the Idyl. 185 



ever, and so heavily — heaviest of all waters — on a vale 

 not morally more impure than the Arcadia of classic 

 imagination.* 



I know that morality is not art, and that as we 

 began to talk of these things simply from the artistic 

 point of view, it is a complete change of key to pass 

 into moral criticism. But it was impossible for me to 

 speak of the old idyllic poetry at all without this pro- 

 test ; and now that the protest has got itself fairly 

 uttered I am free to return to art. 



The nature of the idyl has been accurately defined 

 by a recent English writer on Greek poetry. ' The 

 name of the idyl,' he says, 'sufficiently explains its 

 nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, 

 legends of the gods, and passages of personal experi- 

 ence, supply the idyllist with subjects. He does not 

 treat them lyrically, following rather the rules of epic 

 and dramatic composition. Generally there is a nar- 

 rator, and in so far the idyl is epic ; its verse, too, is 

 the hexameter. . . . Perhaps the plastic arts deter- 

 mined the direction of idyllic poetry, suggesting the 

 name and supplying the poet with models of compact 

 and picturesque treatment. In reading the Idyls it 



* Thus I have no hesitation in preferring the twenty-seventh idyl 

 of Theocritus to the twenty-third, notwithstanding the frank license 

 of the one and the decent language of the other. Indeed I think that 

 the twenty-third idyl of Theocritus, and some of Virgil's, are the mosi 

 essentially and perfectly abominable things, from the moral point of 

 view, in literature. Everybody knows this who has read them, but 

 somehow these authors escape the stigma of immorality because of their 

 sacred character as classics. The worst of modern literature is purity 

 itself in comparisoa 



