The Fugitives

Agib and Secander, from a 1798 edition of William Collins' Poetical Works

        E C L O G U E   T H E   F O U R T H

    A G I B and S E C A N D E R; or, the Fugitives.

              S C E N E, a Mountain in Circassia.

                         T I M E,  MIDNIGHT.

   In fair Circassia, where to Love inclin'd,

Each Swain was blest, for ev'ry Maid was kind!

At that still Hour, when awful Midnight reigns,

And none, but Wretches, haunt the twilight Plains;

What Time the Moon had hung her Lamp on high,

And past in Radiance, thro' the cloudless Sky:

Sad o’er the Dews, two Brother Shepherds fled,

Where wild'ring Fear and desp'rate Sorrow led.

Fast as they prest their Flight, behind them lay

Wide ravag'd Plains, and Valleys stole away.

Along the Mountain’s bending Sides they ran,

Till faint and weak Secander thus began.

                         SECANDER

O stay thee, Agib, for my Feet deny,

No longer friendly to my Life, to fly.

Friend of my Heart, O turn thee and survey,

Trace our sad Flight thro' all its length of Way!

And first review that long-extended Plain,

And yon wide Groves, already past with Pain!

Yon ragged Cliff, whose dang'rous Path we try'd,

And last this lofty Mountain’s weary Side!

                               AGIB

   Weak as thou art, yet hapless must thou know

The Toils of Flight, or some severer Woe!

Still as I haste, the Tartar shouts behind,

And Shrieks and Sorrows load the sad'ning Wind:

In rage of Heart, with Ruin in his Hand,

He blasts our Harvests, and deforms our Land.

Yon Citron Grove, whence first in Fear we came,

Droops its fair Honours to the conqu'ring Flame:

Far fly the Swains, like us, in deep Despair,

And leave to ruffian Bands their fleecy Care.

                          SECANDER

   Unhappy Land, whose Blessings tempt the Sword,

In vain, unheard, thou call’st thy Persian Lord!

In vain, thou court’st him, helpless to thine Aid,

To shield the Shepherd, and protect the Maid,

Far off, in thoughtless Indolence resign’d,

Soft Dreams of Love and Pleasure sooth his Mind:

’Midst fair Sultanas lost in idle Joy,

No Wars alarm him, and no Fears annoy.

                            AGIB

   Yet these green Hills, in Summer’s sultry Heat,

Have lent the Monarch oft a cool Retreat,

Sweet to the Sight is Zabran’s flow'ry Plain,

And once by Maids and Shepherds lov'd in vain!

No more the Virgins shall delight to rove

By Sargis’ Banks, or Irwan’s shady Grove:

On Tarkie’s Mountain catch the cooling Gale,

Or breathe the Sweets of Aly’s flow'ry Vale:

Fair Scenes! but, ah no more with Peace possest,

With Ease alluring, and with Plenty blest.

No more the Shepherds whit'ning Tents appear,

Nor the kind Products of a bounteous Year;

No more the Date with snowy Blossoms crown’d,

But Ruin spreads her baleful Fires around.

                        SECANDER

   In vain Circassia boasts her spicy Groves,

For ever fam'd for pure and happy Loves:

In vain she boasts her fairest of the Fair,

Their Eyes’ blue languish, and their golden Hair!

Those Eyes in Tears, their fruitless Grief must send,

Those Hairs the Tartar’s cruel Hand shall rend.

                            AGIB

Ye Georgian Swains that piteous learn from far

Circassia’s Ruin, and the Waste of War:

Some weightier Arms than Crooks and Staves prepare,

To shield your Harvests, and defend your Fair:

The Turk and Tartar like Designs pursue,

Fix’d to destroy, and stedfast to undo.

Wild as his Land, in native Deserts bred,

By Lust incited, or by Malice led,

The Villain-Arab, as he prowls for Prey,

Oft marks with Blood and wasting Flames the Way;

Yet none so cruel as the Tartar Foe,

To Death inur'd, and nurst in Scenes of Woe.

   He said, when loud along the Vale was heard

A shriller Shriek, and nearer Fires appear’d:

Th' affrighted Shepherds thro' the Dews of Night

Wide o’er the Moon-light Hills, renew’d their Flight.

This is the fourth of the young William Collins' Persian Eclogues, published in 1742 when he was at Oxford. He probably wrote them in 1740, his last year at Winchester College (Joseph Warton says so), and I think the schoolboy poet tuned into something about the pastoral that felt new then but has become more obvious ever since. He saw that a pastoral world of shepherds and flocks and maids and natural beauty was defenceless, and was not something that powerful forces would leave alone, never mind actively protect, but something that in due course they would have a reason to ravage. A pastoral scene didn't signal stability, but instability. It was gold lying on the ground. It was intrinsically fugitive. 

The immediate inspiration for his Eclogues wasn't a poetic one. It was Thomas Salmon's Modern History, which was originally published monthly to fill 31 small volumes (1724-38), then reprinted as three massive ones (1739) -- specifically the section on The Present State of Persia (Volume I, pp. 305-382). 

Volume I of Thomas Salmon's Modern History, on Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Modern_History_Or_The_Present_State_of_A.html?id=f7I-AAAAcAAJ&redir_esc=y

Of course there's no requirement for the setting of a pastoral poem to have any kind of basis in fact, but this one kind of does. Collins' starting-point is Salmon's account (Vol I, pp. 318-319) of the fairly recent events leading to the downfall of Shah Sultan Hossein (=Shah Soltan Hoseyn), the indolent Persian ruler referred to in the poem. His chief opponent was "MEREWEYS" (=Mirwais Shah Hotak), who was disappointed not to have been put in charge of Kandahar province. Mirwais was "originally a Tartar" according to Salmon (actually he was a Pashtun) and he recruited "Tartar" support. He took Kandahar, styled himself Protector, and Persia was in turmoil for some years, during which Mirwais died and was replaced by his son Mahmood, and eventually the Sultan was toppled. Meanwhile "The Turk, and the Muscovite, did not fail to make their advantages of these distractions in Persia. The Muscovites surprized Derbent, and Tarki, which lay next them on the west side of the Caspian sea, and afterwards extended their arms into Gilan"....etc.  What Salmon was referring to here was the Persian Expedition of Peter the Great, in 1722-23. 

So Collins transmuted Peter the Great's expeditionary force of Russians (aka Muscovites) into his "ruffian Bands" of Tartars. (The latter term, though ultimately related to the Tatar people, was used with great vagueness by western geographers to refer, often pejoratively and fearfully, to the peoples of vast regions of central Asia about which they knew little.)

Map of the Caucasus region by Pieter van der Aa (Leyden, 1707)

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

As for the location where this all took place, Collins named it Circassia. Salmon had more correctly named it Shirvan, the northernmost Safavid province (also referred to as Daghestan). Yet Collins' usage 

can be explained by such a map as the one above, published by Pieter van der Aa in 1707, in which Circassia is shown, not just where it actually lies in the NW Caucasus bordering the Black Sea, but all the way across to the Caspian Sea in the east, including Derbent, etc. 

Some of the names mentioned in the poem are taken from Salmon (I, p. 306) and they are in Shirvan: the river "Sargis" (=Sargi), "Irwan" (=Erivan, Irvan) and "Tarkie" (=Tarku). I don't know where Collins picked up "Zabran", but it's apparently the medieval port of Shabran, to the south of Derbent. "Aly’s flow'ry Vale" might refer to the Alazani river (a name known to Strabo and Pliny) -- but perhaps I'm getting rather carried away. At any rate, he took more care than you might expect about his pastoral eclogue's geographical setting; you need to be thinking present-day Azerbaijan rather than Circassia. [Collins could have read about Circassia proper in Thomas Salmon's book (see I 406-407 on "Circassian Tartary"), but I'm not sure he did.]

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Yon Citron Grove

The Citron (Citrus medica) is a small evergreen tree, with knobbly fruit like huge rough lemons, much used in Persian cuisine. 

the Date with snowy Blossoms crown’d

The blossom of the Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) is snowy, or at least creamy. The fronds of blossom look fluffy on the male trees, and like strings of small balls on the female trees. 

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For European poets, Circassia was becoming a name to conjure with. William Collins was very keen on Fairfax's translation of Tasso, in which Argantes, the pagan adversary of Tancred, is frequently described as "the Circassian". Tasso, though his epic was supposedly about the First Crusade, was writing in full consciousness of the contemporary Ottoman threat, and in the Ottoman world there were prominent Circassians as well as Turks. 

And then there were Circassian girls, traded as sex slaves within the Ottoman and Persian empires, and sometimes attaining to the Sultan's seraglio. Of course they were rarely seen by Europeans, but it was inferred that the Circassians, both male and female, must be an exceptionally good-looking people. 

Twenty years before Collins wrote his Eclogues, Samuel Croxall anonymously published The Fair Circassian, A Dramatic Performance. This was designed as a sort of cantata-text based on The Song of Songs, and accompanied by other poems of an equally erotic nature. Croxall proposed that the heroine of Solomon's poem could not have been Pharoah's daughter, because she was patently a shepherdess. In fact, she was a favoured slave in one of Solomon's 62 seraglios, a Circassian with blue eyes named Saphira. I hope this isn't moving too fast for you! 

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Fair_Circassian_a_dramatic_performan/oQ1XAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+fair+circassian&pg=PA23&printsec=frontcover

Somehow the idea had grown that the Ottomans' Circassian slaves must be as different as possible from the black slaves that many Europeans couldn't bear to think about except with kneejerk disgust (we demonize those we wrong, not those who wrong us). Surely (it was supposed) the Circassian girls weren't really slaves in the same way, and their whiteness was emphasized. Hence they were pictured with fair hair and blue eyes, as in Collins' poem. [It's not totally wrong: Circassian people usually do have pale skin, sometimes have fair or reddish hair, and sometimes have greenish eyes.]

"Circassian" was in fact becoming a glamour-word, and it would soon be used to market beauty products. You can read more about the bizarre history of the Circassian Beauty meme on Wikipedia: I'd recommend looking at the French article as well as the English one. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_beauty

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaut%C3%A9_circassienne

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Peter the Great's Expedition in 1722-23 was an early foreshadowing of Russia's intention to expand its territory to the south. For a century from 1763 Russia was sporadically at war with the Circassians proper, and from 1810 the Russian strategy was proto-genocidal: the first to suffer were the Kabardian tribe of eastern Circassia. Some of the cleansing was directed by General Alexey Yermolov, hero of Borodino and other Napoleonic battles; more by General Grigory Zass in the 1830s, who didn't subscribe to any stereotypes about Circassian beauty. He had different stereotypes: the Circassians were "subhuman filth", a "lowly race". The atrocities he oversaw are hard to read about.

In 1857 General Dmitry Milyutin argued that the Circassians should be eliminated (expelled or exterminated); he became Minister of War in 1861. General Count Nikolay Yevdokimov saw to it that extermination was the preferred option. The conflict continued until the final collapse of Circassian resistance in 1864, and then came what might be called the great Circassian genocide. Perhaps two million people were killed in situ, and the Ottoman Empire recorded a million migrants, half of whom died on the journey. Only 150,000 Circassians were left in the Caucasus, and it's still the case today that 90% of Circassians live in other countries. 

Unhappy Land, whose Blessings tempt the Sword!

Collins was right about that. But it wasn't the "Tartars" or the "villain-Arabs" who were to be dreaded. It was the Christians. 

The Capture of Aul Gimry, 17th October 1832. 1891 painting by Franz Roubaud.

[Image source: https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Franz-Roubaud/100455/The-Capture-of-Aul-Gimry%2C-17th-October-1832.html .]

The Mountaineers leave the Aul. 1872 painting by Pyotr Nikolayevich Gruzinsky.

[Image source: Wikipedia . The artist was a Georgian working in Russia.]

Crossing the Ford. 1890 painting by Rudolf Otto von Ottenfeld.

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

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Another post on William Collins:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-bright-uncounted-powrs.html