Arcadia

“ This is the way in Arcadia, and it has its pains and charm,—as I well know, having journeyed many seasons in that happy-go-lucky land of sun and shower, and still holding a key to one of its entrance-gates. Its citizenship is not to be shaken off, even though one becomes naturalized elsewhere. ”

“ A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The war of Troy can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest chamber. Without stirring from our firesides, we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar into realms where Spenser’s shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. ”

“ As the ancient Ægyptians presented secrets under their mystical hyeroglyphics, so that an easy figure was exhibited to the eye, and a higher notion couched under it to the judgment, so all the Arcadia is a continual grove of morality, shadowing moral and political truths under the plain and striking emblems of lovers, so that the reader may be deceived, but not hurt, and happily surprized to more knowledge than he expected. ”

“ That is all very fine, but, as it happens, there is no such place as this Arcadia, where people can frolic in perpetual sunlight the year round, and find their food and clothing miraculously provided. No, nor can you, I am afraid, give me what all maids really, in their heart of hearts, desire far more than any sugar-candy Arcadia. Oh, as I have so often told you, Kit, I think you love no woman. ”

“ LXV. Aliphera.—From the citadel, and indeed from the whole summit of the ridge, there is a glorious prospect over the valley of the Alpheus for miles and miles. All the mountains of northern Arcadia are spread out like a panorama; and through the broad valley that intervenes between them and the height on which we stand, the Alpheus is seen winding far away and far below. ”

“ There is something in the poetical Arcadia so remote from known reality and speculative possibility, that we can never support its representation through a long work. A Pastoral of an hundred lines may be endured; but who will hear of sheep and goats, and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets, through five acts? Such scenes please Barbarians in the dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life; but will be for the most part thrown away, as men grow wise, and nations grow learned. ”

“ Arcadia, after all, is a, lotos-eating Paradise of blissful ignorance, and I love the world with its pomps, vanities, and wickedness. While you, therefore, oh Corydon—don't be afraid, I'm not going to quote Virgil—are studying Nature's book, I am deep in the musty leaves of Themis' volume, but I dare say that the great mother teaches you much better things than her artificial daughter does me. ”

“ Then, indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; and for a beautiful pastoral scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of a poet who understood the cost of things, commend me to the Mausoleum Club on just such an evening. Its broad corridors and deep recesses are filled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in beautiful shimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop off sideways at every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds, too, with broad white waistcoats and little patent leather shoes and heavy faces and congested cheeks. ”

“ Alas! there never has been the Greece that we conceive; we see it under the soft, purple veil of distance, like an Alpine valley embraced by cloudy mountains; but there was the same coarse dust and débris of ordinary life there as with us. The true Arcadia lies beyond the grave. The collection of pictures is rich in historic curiosities—valuable as marking the progress of art. One Claude Lorraine here was a matchless specimen—a perfect victory over all the difficulties of green landscape painting. ”

“ Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and other literature. It was famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.
The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre by N. Poussin (1594-1665) . In part of the landscape is a tomb on which these words are written, and some young people are seen reading them. I learn, however, from King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations that the words had been previously written on a picture by Bart. ”

“ But let us contrive some other device to help us, if ye intend to land, bearing in mind the injunction of Phineus. For not even could Heracles, when he came to Arcadia, drive away with bow and arrow the birds that swam on the Stymphalian lake. I saw it myself. But he shook in his hand a rattle of bronze and made a loud clatter as he stood upon a lofty peak, and the birds fled far off, screeching in bewildered fear. ”

“ Are we really in Arcadia, when the old steward opens the door from the dark halls where the Titanic forms of the frescoed figures loom upon us through the gloom, to the garden where the brilliant sunshine is lighting up long grass walks between clipped hedges, adding to the splendour of the flame-coloured marigolds upon the old walls, and even gilding the edges of the dark spires of the cypresses which were planted three hundred years ago? ”

“ TOMB ON FISH ISLAND.
“ ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ ” said John, who stood behind me. “Do you remember that picture of the gay flower-decked Arcadians coming through a forest with song and laughter, and finding there a solitary tomb with that inscription? This is Arcadia, and we too have found the tomb.”
Strolling on down the island, we came to a long arched walk of orange-trees trained into a continuous arbor.
“What a lovely wild old place!” said Iris. “What is its history? Does any body know?”
“It has not been occupied for nearly a century, I am told,” said Aunt Diana. ”

“ Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is a lasting monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that of ‘the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old,’ peeps out once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin’s picture, in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription—‘I also was an Arcadian!’ Perhaps the best pastoral in the language is that prose-poem, Walton’s Complete Angler. ”

“ What was an innovation was the 'gentleman of Arcadia,' a character for which the Spanish romance was without doubt responsible. In the Italian pastoral proper the shepherds are themselves the aristocracy of Arcadia, the introduction of such social hierarchy as is implied in the phrase being a point of chivalric and courtly tradition. Cleobulus, however, as well as his son Philaritus, is in fact purely Arcadian in character. Among other personae we find Apollo and the Sibyls, introduced for the sake of an oracle ”

“ I present myself unto you, the most humble and miserable suppliant living, neither shall my desire be great: I seek for no more life than I shall be found worthy of. If my blood may wash away the dishonour of Arcadia, spare it not, although through me it hath indeed never been dishonoured. ”

“ Whatever Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into its distinguishing forms. ”

“ Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal. But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. ”

“ As a work of general literature, the attraction of the Arcadia is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these. ”

“ "I too, shepherds, in Arcadia dwelt." ”

“ The dwellers in that Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ever did or could behave; they belong in short to a particularly unconvincing kind of fairy-land, of which the vogue happily died out at an early stage. The Arcadia is not intrinsically a great book, nor can it be read to-day without a considerable effort; yet it must always be notable as not merely an experiment but a positive achievement in English prose style. ”

“ In a sunny land in Greece called Arcadia there lived a king and a queen who had no children. They wanted very much to have a son who might live to rule over Arcadia when the king was dead, and so, as the years went by, they prayed to great Jupiter on the mountain top that he would send them a son. ”

“ We only wish to bring forward [Pg 240] the principal facts and authorities, and to give a succint account of the genuine Arcadian system of religion and manners without attempting to refute at length the opposite views, which have been adopted by ancient and modern writers.
The peculiar Divinity of Arcadia, whose worship had a constant and manifest reference to the principal employments of the inhabitants, was Pan. Hence he is called by Virgil and Propertius “the God of Arcadia [281] .” According to Herodotus (ii. 145.) ”

“ Arcadia was, indeed, a very religious country, teeming both in its cities and on its lonelier hillsides with sanctuaries to many of the Olympian hierarchy, and especially to a strange, elusive divinity, known as the “Mistress.” But the divinities of life in the open most appealed to them. It is indicative of an important and not always recognized element in Greek character that some of the most lovely fancies of Greek mythology should have taken root where life was hard. The austerity of work and poverty was never denied by the clear-eyed Greeks. ”

“ This explains why, in certain quarters, since the Revolution, the Arcadia, both as an academy and as a symbol, has been the object of much contempt, exaggerated at the best when it is not absolutely unjust. ”

“ To the north of the great plain of Mantinea and Tegea lay another marshy plain containing three other 365important cities, Orchomenus, Pheneus, and Stymphalus. But the train from Athens sweeps far toward the south, and ruined cities slip out of mind among the “winding valleys deep-withdrawn and ridgèd crests of Arcady.” The real significance of Arcadia lay in its landscape rather than in its towns. If the country contributed few large centres and few splendid deeds to Greek history, it offered its mountains and streams to be peopled by the divine progeny of Greek imagination. ”

“ The "Arcadia" chose as its emblem the pipe of Pan with its seven unequal reeds. The fourteen founders selected as first "Custode di Arcadia", or president of the Academy, the somewhat mediocre writer, but enthusiastic votary of letters, Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni (Alfesibeo Cario) , b. in Macerata, 1663, d. at Rome, 1728, author of a history of Italian poetry and of various literary works. ”

“ We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a Bear-Artemis in {43} Attica43.1 and Arcadia; and many other examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the subject by De Visser.43.2 Later Arcadia was full of the products and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination; besides the horse-headed Demeter at Thigaleia, we hear of the worship at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as half-woman, half-fish ”

“ As the novelists make more prominent the realistic element of the narrative poems, the idyllic writers develop more plainly the pure poetic quality; in reading them one willingly assents to the enthusiasm which names their works the literature of the golden age. More than the epic or the novel, the idyl influenced the future. Arcadia is a well-known region in every great literature of Europe, and its atmosphere still hangs over the opera. ”

“ Pindar. Of the temples that once adorned the mainland and the islands of Greece only a brave few now rear columns from the ground. Among these the Temple of Apollo at Bassæ constrains the traveller to penetrate to the heart of Arcadia. The rewards of the difficult journey are many, and are enhanced by a general knowledge of the whole Arcadian territory, into which the detached impressions of a brief stay may be sympathetically fitted. ”

“ The Arcadians were men and women who loved poetry in an artificial time, took names of shepherds and shepherdesses, rhymed as best they could, met in pleasant places to recite their verses, and played that the world was young, and gentle, and sweet, and unpoisoned, just when it had declined to one of its recurring periods of vicious old age. ”

“ He became a member of the New Arcadia, a literary society founded in 1790, under the name of Elmano Sadino, but left it three years later. Though including in its ranks most of the poets of the time, the New Arcadia produced little of real merit, and before long its adherents became enemies and descended to an angry warfare of words. ”

“ Arcadia, which united the nobility and the artists, [105] in a spiritual brotherhood, counted amongst its members, Alessandro Scarlatti, Archangelo Corelli, Bernardo Pasquini, and Benedetto Marcello. [106] A similar élite society was found at the soirées of the Cardinal Ottoboni. [107] Every Monday, in the palace of Ottoboni, as at the meetings of the Arcadia, concerts and poetical recitations were given. The Cardinal Prince, Superintendent of the Pontifical chapel, had in his service the finest orchestra in Italy, [108] and the singers of the Sistine Chapel. ”