sweetly as the Mantuan." Jacob Tonson, the publisher, had also seen one of these poems before April 20, 1706, on which day he wrote to Pope: "I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in Mr. Walsh's and Congreve's hands, which is extremely fine, and is generally approved of by the best judges in poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you at my shop, and am sorry I did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your poem for the press, no person shall be more careful in printing of it, nor no one can give a greater encouragement to it." Pope accepted this offer; but for one reason or another Tonson's Sixth Miscellany, in which the 'Pastorals' were published, did not appear till May 2, 1709, when Pope, who affected to have been well pleased at the delay, found his poems concluding a volume which was opened by the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips, afterwards the subject of his ironical commendations in the Guardian.' His own Pastorals' were received with an outburst of contemporary applause. "It is no flattery at all to say," writes Walsh, who may be supposed to represent the typical opinion of the day, to Wycherley, "that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." This verdict now provokes only a smile. Poetically considered, the 'Pastorals' have long ceased to excite admiration or even interest: historically, however, they are of value as a landmark in Pope's poetical progress, showing how slowly he arrived at the true meaning of the word 'Nature' on which he afterwards laid so much emphasis, and how completely, at this period, he was mastered by the forms of those models whose spirit he in time learned to embody in his own writings with such conspicuous success. In the volume of his Poems published in 1717 he prefixed to the 'Pastorals' a 'Discourse' explaining the idea which he had formed of this species of poetry, and of the manner in which it should be treated: "The original of poetry," says he, "is ascribed to that age which succeeded the creation of the world and as the keeping of flocks 1 Works of Lord Lansdown, vol. ii., p. 113. seems to have been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral. It is natural to imagine, that the leisure of those ancient shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity. From hence a poem was invented, and afterwards improved to a perfect image of that happy time; which, by giving us an esteem for the virtues of a former age, might recommend them to the present. And since the life of shepherds was attended with more tranquillity than any other rural employment, the poets chose to introduce their persons, from whom it received the name of pastoral." To which he afterwards adds: "If we would copy nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden Age." Had Pope been more fully acquainted with the history of literature, he would have seen that Pastoral, far from being one of the natural divisions of poetry, like the epic, the drama, the lyric, and the satire, was merely the product of a conventional literary tradition; and that, instead of taking its origin, as he supposed, in the Golden Age, it had always made its appearance in the late stages of artificial social civilisation, and to relieve the ennui of courtly circles. Two circumstances have chiefly contributed to the popularity of pastoralism as a species of composition: one, the exquisite grace and beauty of the forms invented by Theocritus, which furnished later poets with a poetical dress for religious, political, and complimentary matter quite alien from the life of shepherds; the other, the inevitable longing for simplicity, naturally associated with the idea of the country, which arises in every artificial state of society. The first circumstance explains the allegorical uses to which the Eclogue has been put by poets like Virgil, Mantuan, Ronsard, and Spenser the second accounts for the appearance, in the fulness of the classical Renaissance, of works like Sannazaro's prose romance 'Arcadia,' the Aminta' of Tasso, the Pastor Fido' of Guarini, the 'Faithful Shepherdess' of Fletcher—all obviously founded upon those hints of Arcadia and the Golden Age dropped in the Eclogues of Virgil-and for the spirit which, in the eighteenth century, animated the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau, and survived, even in the present century, in 'La Mare au Diable' and other similar tales of George Sand. But with this feeling, in itself largely artificial and literary, neither Pope nor the French critics, from whom he mainly derived his ideas of pastoral poetry, had any sympathy. The latter, the spokesmen of a nation following the lead of an absolute monarch bent upon the pursuit of glory, as Pope was of a nation occupied with the advancement of political liberty, were not impressed with the sentimental meaning of Pastoralism. To the French aristocracy, who had deserted their old country homes for the gay life of the Court, it was a species of polite masquerade, convenient for a fête at Le Trianon and becoming in a picture of Watteau; to Pope it was an established form of classical composition, and duly analysed as such by the French critics, whose judgment he respected. Fontenelle, in his 'Discourse on Pastoralism,' had speculated on its origin, discussed the particular feelings to which it appeals, censured Theocritus' conception of it as being too gross, and Virgil's as being often too lofty, and determined the just mean of sentiment and language which the pastoral poet ought to observe : "Ainsi nous avons trouvé à peu-près la mesure d'esprit que peuvent avoir des Bergers, et la langue qu'ils peuvent parler. Il en va, ce me semble, des Eglogues, comme des habits que l'on prend dans des Balets pour representer des Paysans. Ils sont d'étofes beaucoup plus belles que ceux des Païsans véritables, ils sont même ornés de rubans et de points, et on les taille seulement en habits de Païsans. Il faut aussi que les sentimens dont on fait la matière des Eglogues soient plus fins et plus délicats que ceux des vrais Bergers, mais il faut leur donner la forme la plus simple et la plus champestre qu'il soit possible."1 If Pope did not actually go so far as to prescribe the exact measure of wit' proper to the ideal shepherd, he was equally misled by a false idea of correctness' to lay down the rules for pastoral poetry. He imitated the external features of his classical originals without understanding their spirit. His 1 Fontenelle, 'Traité sur la Nature de l'Eglogue.' treatment of his subject is of the most conventional character, and consists in a bodily transfer of pagan mythology into English verse. All the operations of Nature are made to depend, as in Virgil and other classical poets, on the humours of the Delias and Sylvias celebrated by the shepherds: the Loves, the Graces, the winds, the woods, and the waves lament as loudly for the loss of Mrs. Tempest in the fourth 'Pastoral,' as they did for the death of Adonis in the Idyll of Bion. Pope, indeed, adds mediaval extravagance to the conceits of his Latin and Greek masters, making a stream, for instance, pause in its flow to listen to the song of a poet, or to 'swell with new passion and o'erflow with tears' for grief at the death of a shepherdess. He claims in one place to have surpassed Spenser in what he calls judgment, because he avoids the latter's error of representing wolves in England; but he has no hesitation in making roses, crocuses, and violets all bloom in the same month; in coupling the names of Garth and Phoebus; or in promising that many a lamb shall bleed for that bright goddess, the late Mrs. Tempest, in the neighbourhood of Windsor Forest. But while thus insensible to the true feeling for Nature which had inspired Theocritus, there was one poetical element in the pastoral, as it was originally treated by its Greek inventor, on which Pope fastened with the instinct of real genius. Theocritus, while refining his verse of all coarse rusticity, yet preserved the musical character which the actual contests between the Sicilian shepherds probably suggested to him; and some of his most beautiful idylls are those containing a refrain like ἄρχετε βωκολικάς, Μοῖσαι φίλαι, ἄρχετ ἀοιδᾶς. Virgil, who seems to have been chiefly impressed by the external beauties of his predecessor's work, imitated him in the Latin and Pope, also occupied with his designs of harmonising his native language, sought to repeat the same effects in the English. The 'Pastorals' are therefore to be regarded as primarily experiments in versification. Pope's imitation of the ideas of the ancients ended in the merest mechanism, but his imitation of their melody led him to something of real invention. His imagination was moved, not by the 'painted mistress or the purling stream,' of which he afterwards spoke with just contempt, but by the metrical pauses, the variety of accent, and the delicacies of alliteration, for which the traditional treatment of the Pastoral afforded opportunities. The ear of his contemporaries and of his immediate successors was at once caught with the sweetness of his numbers. Johnson declared that the harmony of the "Pastorals' "had no precedent, nor has since had an imitation;" and indeed, however ridiculous the Damons and Delias of Queen Anne's reign may now appear, he must be an insensible reader who can listen without pleasure to the music of which the Pastoral called Autumn,' by far the most beautiful of the series, affords many such instances as the following: "Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs away! As some sad turtle his lost love deplores, And with deep murmurs fills the sounding shores; Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs along! Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs away! Die every flower, and perish all but she. |