It was a lover and his lass
    That o’er the green cornfield did pass—­

this is the essential; and we ask no more if we are wise.  The very essence, be it remembered, of the pastoral ideal is no more than ’love in vacuo.’  And this the lyric alone can give us.

* * * * *

But there is one play which more than any other illustrates the nature of the influence exerted by pastoral tradition over the romantic drama and the relation subsisting between the two.  This is As You Like It; for if in one sense Shakespeare was but following Lodge in the traditional blending of pastoral elements with those of court and chivalry, in another sense he has in this play revealed his opinion of, and passed judgement upon, the whole pastoral ideal.  This must necessarily happen whenever a great creative artist adopts, for reasons of his own, and takes into his work any merely outward and formal convention.  It was rarely that in his plays Shakespeare showed any inclination to connect himself even remotely with pastoral tradition.  The Two Gentlemen of Verona traces its origin, indeed, to the Diana of Montemayor; but all vestige of pastoral colouring has vanished, and Shakespeare may even have been himself ignorant of the parentage of the story he treated.  A more apparent element of pastoral found its way many years later into the Winters Tale; but it is characteristic of the shepherd scenes of that play, written in the full maturity of Shakespeare’s genius, that, in spite of their origin in Greene’s romance of Pandosto, they owe nothing of their treatment to pastoral tradition, nothing to convention, nothing to aught save life as it mirrored itself in the magic glass of the poet’s imagination.  They represent solely the idealization of Shakespeare’s own observation, and in spite of the marvellous and subtle glamour of golden sunlight that overspreads the whole, we may yet recognize in them the consummation towards which many sketches of natural man and woman, as he found them in the English fields and lanes, seem in a less certain and conscious manner to be striving in plays of an earlier date.  It was characteristic of Shakespeare, as it has been of other great artists, to introduce into his early writings incidental sketches which serve as studies for further work of a later period.  In much the same manner the varied, but at times uncertain, melody of the early love comedies seems to aspire towards the full sonority and magic of lyric feeling and utterance in Romeo and Juliet.