IDYL, or Idyll (Gr. εἰδύλλιον, a descriptive piece, from εἶδος,
a shape or style; Lat. idyllium), a short poem of a pastoral
or rural character, in which something of the element of landscape
is preserved or felt. The earliest commentators of antiquity
used the term to designate a great variety of brief and
homely poems, in which the description of natural objects was
introduced, but the pastoral idea came into existence in connexion
with the Alexandrian school, and particularly with Theocritus,
Bion and Moschus, in the 3rd century before Christ.
It appears, however, that εἰδύλλιον was not, even then, used
consciously as the name of a form of verse, but as a diminutive
of εἶδος, and merely signified “a little piece in the style of”
whatever adjective might follow. Thus the idyls of the pastoral
poets were εἰδύλλια αἰπολικά, little pieces in the goatherd
style. We possess ten of the so-called “Idyls” of Theocritus,
and these are the type from which the popular idea of this kind
of poem is taken. But it is observable that there is nothing in
the technical character of these ten very diverse pieces which
leads us to suppose that the poet intended them to be regarded as
typical. In fact, if he had been asked whether a poem was or
was not an idyl he would doubtless have been unable to comprehend
the question. As a matter of fact, the first of his
poems, the celebrated “Dirge for Daphnis,” has become the
prototype, not of the modern idyl, but of the modern elegy,
and the not less famous “Festival of Adonis” is a realistic
mime. It was the six little epical romances, if they may be so
called, which started the conception of the idyl of Theocritus.
It must be remembered, however, that there is nothing in
ancient literature which justifies the notion of a form of verse
recognized as an “idyl.” In the 4th century after Christ
the word seems to have become accepted in Latin as covering
short descriptive poems of very diverse characters, for the
early MSS. of Ausonius contain a section of “Edyllia,” which
embraces some of the most admirable of the miscellaneous
pieces of that writer. But that Ausonius himself called his
poems “idyls” is highly doubtful. Indeed, it is not certain
that the heading is not a mistake for “Epyllia.” The word
was revived at the Renaissance and applied rather vaguely
to Latin and Greek imitations of Theocritus and of Virgil. It
was also applied to modern poems of a romantic and pastoral
character published by such writers as Tasso in Italy, Montemayor
in Portugal and Ronsard in French. In 1658 the English
critic, Edward Phillips, defined an “idyl” as “a kind of
eclogue,” but it was seldom used to describe a modern poem.
Mme Deshoulières published a series of seven Idylles in 1675,
and Boileau makes a vague reference to the form. The sentimental
German idyls of Salomon Gessner (in prose, 1758) and
Voss (in hexameters, 1800) were modelled on Theocritus.
Goethe’s Alexis und Dora is an idyl. It appears that the very
general use, or abuse, of the word in the second half of the
19th century, both in English and French, arises from the
popularity of two works, curiously enough almost identical in
date, by two eminent and popular poets. The Idylles héroïques
(1858) of Victor de Laprade and the Idylls of the King
(1859) of Tennyson enjoyed a success in either country which
led to a wide imitation of the title among those who had,
perhaps, a very inexact idea of its meaning. Among modern
Germans, Berthold Auerbach and Jeremias Gotthelf have been
prominent as the composers of sentimental idyls founded on
anecdotes of village-life. On the whole, it is impossible to admit
that the idyl has a place among definite literary forms. Its
character is vague and has often been purely sentimental, and
our conception of it is further obscured by the fact that though
the noun carries no bucolic idea with it in English, the adjective
(“idyllic”) has come to be synonymous with pastoral and
rustic. (E. G.)