1 86 June — Method of the Idyllists. 



should never be forgotten that they are pictures, so 

 studied and designed by their authors : they ought to 

 affect us in the same way as the bas-reliefs and vases 

 of Greek art, in which dramatic action is presented at 

 a moment of its evolution, and beautiful forms are 

 grouped together with such simplicity as to need but 

 little story to enhance their value.' * 



Although, as I have already observed, the landscape 

 pictures that can be detached are rare in the great 

 idyllists, they continually associate, as we have seen in 

 Virgil, the material of landscape with the human life, 

 which they paint in their little compositions ; and so 

 closely, that if you cannot separate the landscape from 

 the figures, so it is hardly possible, on the other hand, 

 to separate the figures from the landscape. Thus, in 

 his first idyl, Theocritus begins with a pine-tree close 

 to fountains, and speaks of its whispering or rustling, 

 yfnOvptcr/jLa, instantaneously connecting this vague music 

 with the music of a goatherd playing upon his pipe ; 

 whilst the goatherd himself, in answer, connects the 

 sound of water falling from a rock with the song of a 

 shepherd. This was distinctly the method of the idyl- 

 lists, who blended figures and landscape as closely 

 together as they possibly could, often in a way that 

 criticism might fairly blame as being too obviously 

 intentional. The simplest and most natural way of 

 doing this was by merely informing the reader that the 

 little incident narrated occurred in such or such a 



* ' Studies of the Greek Poets.' By John Addington Symonds. 

 London : Smith and Elder. 1873. 



