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When he sees his mistress she is walking in the midst of pastoral scenes where satyrs lurk behind every bush and the song of the shepherd is heard in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought in a period almost baffling in the complexity of its character.
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.
Thus the piece may be regarded as a dramatization of Sannazzaro's Salices, expanded by the free introduction of mythological characters, and bears no connexion with the real nature of pastoral, the life-blood of which, whether in the idyls of Theocritus, the Arcadia of Sannazzaro, or the Aminta of Tasso, is primarily and essentially human.
Any woman of feeling can decide correctly whether if Lucretia were guilty of the crimes with which she was charged she could have appeared as she did, and whether the countenance which we behold in the portrait of the bride of Alfonso d'Este in 1502 could be the face of the inhuman fury described in Sannazzaro's epigram. Cardinal Ferrari to Ercole, Rome, February 18, 1501.
With Arcadia for its local habitation it underwent a rebirth in the opening years of the sixteenth century in Sannazzaro's romance, and again towards the close in the drama of Tasso.
Similar in plot to this last is a fragmentary pastoral of Giraldi Cintio's published from manuscript by Signor Carducci. Another curious but isolated experiment is Cintio's Egle, in intent a revival of the 'satyric' drama of the Greeks, in substance a dramatization of the motive of Sannazzaro's Salices.
Hallam, in a beautiful passage of his "History of the Literature of Europe," has pointed out the influence of the genius of Tasso on the whole school of Bolognese painters of that time. Of Sannazzaro's poem, Mr. Hallam says, that "it would be difficult to find its equal for purity, elegance, and harmony of versification."
It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the Arcadia.
This arbiter is none other than Lodovico Sforza himself . So far the eclogues have all been in Sannazzaro's terza rima.
Elsewhere he furnishes us with an entertaining description of the various ways in which birds may be trapped, introduced possibly in pursuance of a hint from Longus. Yet, in spite of his professed love of savage scenery and his knowledge of pastoral sports, it is after all in a very artificial and straitened form that nature filters to us through Sannazzaro's pages.
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