y Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means
a pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, with just a
little realistic detail, more of the mere conventional or more of the
realistic dominating according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a
pastoral by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of this: it
is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, detailed and balanced
impression by the cunning arrangement of a number of small effects which
the artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a kind of
little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, with distinct figures
and accessories and background, of a whole lot of little fragments
imitated from the peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of
imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the peasant's
thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of impressionist art, marred only
in rare places by an attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the
drawing and colour into caricature. The construction, which appears to
be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece; for, without knowing it, you
are shown the actors, the background, the ups and downs of temper, the
variation of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine through
the medium of the praises, the complaints, the narratives of the past,
the imaginings of the future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing
constitutes the whole poem. He, Vallera, is a well-to-do young farmer;
she, Nencia, is the daughter of peasant folk of the castellated village
of Barberino in the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all
appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that of all these
speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in blame of his indifference,
highly poetic flights and most practical adjurations to see all the
advantages of a good match, the young woman hears few or none; Vallera
is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, he is rehearsing to
himself all the things which he cannot squeeze out in her presence. It
is the long day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, of a
love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his sweetheart is at once an
ideal thing of beauty, a goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and
wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who cannot be indifferent
to sixpenny presents, and whom he cannot conceive as not ultimately
becoming the sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the mender
of his linen, the mother of his brats--a dream