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Now Carmel was down in Part II to dance the Pastorale, and she ran into the house to change her Greek chiton for the dress of a Sicilian peasant. She went through the veranda and the open French window, and straight upstairs to her bedroom.
In its long complaints, speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull, but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century , There were several imitations later, such as the Accademia tusculana of Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third Prosa in his Sacrifizio pastorale; while collections of tales and facetiae such as the Arcadia in Brenta of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of the name.
Francis Beaumont did not more pleasantly recall the things that he and Ben Jonson had seen done at the Mermaid than an old Brook Farmer remembers the long walks, eight good miles in and eight miles out, to see the tall, willowy Schmidt swaying with his violin at the head of the orchestra, to hear the airy ripple of Auber's 'Zanetta, the swift passionate storm of Beethoven's 'Egmont, the symphonic murmur of woods and waters and summer fields in the limpid 'Pastorale, or the solemn grandeur of sustained pathetic human feeling in the 'Fifth Symphony. The musical revival was all part of the new birth of the Transcendental epoch, although none would have more promptly disclaimed any taint of Transcendentalism than the excellent officers of the Boston Academy of Music.
Other contributions of 1801 are two grand sonatas, the "Pastorale" in D, opus 28, the Andante of which is said to have been a favorite of Beethoven's and was often played by him, and the one in A flat, opus 26, dedicated to Prince Karl Lichnowsky and containing a grand funeral march.
In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely breathed out.
The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished, with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him. "It's the 'Pastorale," Hermione whispered.
It was the "Pastorale," and she knew who was playing it Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the old woman's to love.
When the players had finished the Pastorale and "A Mezzanotte," and had been rewarded by a long look of thanks from Miss Van Tuyn which evidently drove them over the borders of admiration into the regions of unfulfilled desire, Lady Sellingworth said she must go. And then an unexpected thing happened.
Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost mad with joy, is like Gaspare dancing the tarantella, when I think of coming up the mountain-side again with you as I came that first day, that first day of my real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale' to welcome me. And you but I seem to feel your dear welcome here, to feel your hands holding mine, to see your eyes looking at me like Sicily.
The narrative interest in the Arcadia is of the slightest. It opens with a description of the 'dilettevole piano, di ampiezza non molto spazioso, lying at the summit of Parthenium, 'non umile monte della pastorale Arcadia, which was henceforth to be the abode sacred to the shepherd-folk.
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