Chapter XVII: Part 17

In his letter to Wycherley, Walsh remarked of Pope's Pastorals, "It is no flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." Walsh must have been thinking of Virgil's Eclogues, which are his most juvenile productions, though he is not supposed to have commenced them till he was thirty years old. Pope admired them to excess, and in his manhood he held to the belief that "it was difficult to find any fault in them."[11] His desire was to repeat, with slight variations, this ancient pattern, which he thought perfection. Virgil himself was a plagiarist, but the Eclogues have more originality than the Pastorals. The descriptions of both Virgil and Pope are artificial, but Virgil has heart-felt touches from the life, of which the Pastorals afford no trace. The taste of both was unformed, but the conceits of Virgil are accompanied by a poetic vein which was not yet equally developed in Pope. Since the Pastorals are an imitation of the Eclogues, it might be expected, as usually happens in such cases, that the copy would have the defects of the model in an exaggerated degree. Pope could not disguise from himself that his verses were the echo of an echo; and in a letter of July 2, 1706, he begged Walsh to tell him sincerely whether he had not stretched the license of borrowing too far. Walsh admitted in his answer, that some persons to whom he had shown the manuscript had made this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his friend by the assurance, "that in all the common subjects of poetry the thoughts are so obvious that whoever writes last must write things like what have been said before." Roscoe has repeated the plea, and speaks of "the unreasonableness" of expecting new images on a topic which "has been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and language." He forgot that rural scenery and life had furnished abundant novelty to Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, whose pictures are as fresh and unhacknied as if Theocritus and Virgil had never lived. "He that walks behind," said Michael Angelo "can never go before;" and originality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate pastoral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn his materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the English characters about his doors, and from the English usages and modes of thought in his own day, he would have discovered a thousand particulars in which he had not been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neglected this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so little attention upon the realities around him, that though his descriptions are confined to the barest generalities, they are not unfrequently false.

After contending that the triteness of the Pastorals was inevitable, Roscoe puts forth a second defence to save the precocity of their author. "The observation," he says, "of Johnson, that no invention was intended, is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer." This must mean that he copied from choice, and not from necessity, which is contradicted by the confession of Pope himself, who acknowledges that he leant upon his masters because he was unable to go alone.[12] Without his testimony we should have been driven to the same conclusion, since every great poet whose youthful verses have been preserved, began by imitating his predecessors, and it would be absurd, in defiance of a general law, to assume that Pope was gifted with a juvenile originality which his early works belie. If he had been capable of higher flights, it would have done him no honour to have employed his melodious verse in piecing together stale, vapid, and often paltry ideas.

Johnson, to be sure, was of opinion that Pope in his Pastorals had copied "the poems of antiquity with judicious selection," but this approbation he does not seem to deserve. A large volume might be composed consisting solely of faults which had their counterpart in works of genius. The homage Pope paid to famous names seduced his immature taste into the admiration of many a vicious passage, and he endeavoured to emulate or outdo the frigid and hyperbolical conceits of his prototypes. Throughout the Pastorals, for instance, the phenomena, which are the effects of the seasons, are ascribed to the presence or absence of the nymphs whom his minstrels celebrate. In spring, the skies mourn in showers, the birds are hushed, and the flowers are closed till Delia smiles, when forthwith the skies brighten, the flowers bloom, and the birds sing. In summer, the shepherd boasts that the breezes shall wait upon his heroine, and blow in the places where she walks; that the trees where she sits shall crowd into a shade; that the flowers shall rise up from the soil where she treads; and that vegetation shall flourish where she turns her eyes. In autumn, the birds neglect their song, the leaves fall from the trees, and the flowers droop because Delia has gone away. In winter, the heavens are obscured by clouds, the verdure has withered, the flocks refuse to graze the meadows, the bees neglect their honey, and the streams overflow with tears because Daphne is dead. This last pastoral, which was Pope's favourite, turns mainly on the notion that winter is the consequence of heaven and earth deploring the death of Mrs. Tempest. "Such," says Sandys, "is the sweetness and power of poesy, as it makes that appear which were in prose both false and ridiculous, to resemble the truth." Poetic fancy is separated from extravagance by narrow boundaries; but there must be some affinity to truth, or the understanding is repelled instead of the imagination being captivated. No ideas can have less to recommend them than the hollow rhapsodies of the Pastorals, for they are at once obvious and absurd. "Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature," and Pope's fantastic superlatives are the image of neither. They never approximate to the exaggeration of fervid passion, but both grief and love are without the semblance of genuine feeling, and only excited the derision of those who looked for a meaning beneath the glitter of words. "Pray tell me the name of him I love," wrote Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterwards the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley, "that I may sigh to the woods and groves hereabouts, and teach it to the echo. Above all, let me know whether it is most proper to walk in the woods, increasing the winds with my sighs, or to sit by a purling stream, swelling the rivulet with my tears."[13] This happy ridicule of a style of composition, which Pope acknowledged ought "to be full of the greatest simplicity, in nature," was written a few months after the Pastorals were published, and appears to have been suggested by them. The clever girl drew her notions from life, and the perceptions of the young author were sophisticated by books. Bowles believed that Pope was influenced "by the false taste of Cowley at that time prevalent." Cowley's popularity, however, had ceased for some years; the fashion he set had passed away; and Dryden reigned in his stead. "He is sunk in his reputation," said this illustrious successor in 1700, "because he could never forego any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. For this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer, and for ten impressions which his works have had in many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelvemonth."[14] The conceits in Pope's Pastorals were derived from other sources. He took little from Cowley, and borrowed none of his peculiarities.

Pope says, in his Discourse, that his Pastorals "have as much variety in respect of the several seasons as Spenser's; that to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments, not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age." Johnson has in consequence accorded to the Pastorals the praise of being composed with "close thought;" but the conception was very imperfectly executed, and in part is puerile. Spring and morning, summer and noon, autumn and evening, winter and night, are coupled together, as if each season was specially characterised by a single portion of the day, selected for no other reason than because the order of succession is the same. Between the several ages of man, and the seasons, there is an obvious resemblance, which has furnished similes from time immemorial, but there is no propriety in peopling a spring scene with children, and a winter scene with the old, since all ages figure together in the world, and manifest the feelings which belong to their years, whether it happens to be winter or spring. If the plan had any merit, Pope did not conform to it. The shepherds who sing in spring are grown up. The shepherd who sings in summer is a boy. Winter is a funereal lament for a young lady who was cut off in her prime, and has not the most distant reference to old age. The different passions proper to each time of life, which Pope professes to have distinguished, are altogether overlooked. Love is the sole passion which animates the actors in Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and the shepherd in Winter celebrates the departed Daphne in the same lover-like rhapsodies which prevail throughout the three preceding poems. The rural employments proper to each season have been equally forgotten. Sheep-keeping and verse-making are the only occupations, though the poet declares he had changed the scene to suit the changing employment, and represents the first pastoral as sung in a valley, the second on the banks of a stream, the third on a hill, and the fourth in a grove. In place of the variety to which he lays claim, we have a general sameness, and if he had kept faithfully to the outline he sketched, he would, with his mode of composition, have done little towards diversifying the series. He wanted the "intimate acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature which," as Bowles says, "can alone give a lively and original colour to the painting of pastoral poetry." The scenes of his four lays,--the valley, the stream, the hill, and the grove,--are just mentioned, and nothing more. There is no attempt to depict them to the mind, and it does not contribute to variety simply to tell the reader that he is now in a valley, and now upon a hill. The seasons themselves are only marked by the superficial, notorious circumstances which convey no pleasure in the repetition, unless they are accompanied by the nice discriminating touches of an exact observer. To say that showers descend, that birds sing, that crocuses blow, and that trees put forth their leaves in spring, supplies the mind with no fresh ideas, nor assists in giving a new beauty and a more definite form to the ideas we possessed before. The genius of Pope was in another direction; and when we contrast the picturesque details of Thomson's Seasons with the blank common-places of the Pastorals, we perceive how wide is the interval between the elegant, harmonious versifier, and the genuine poet of nature. Sheep are twice mentioned in Pope's Winter, once at ver. 5,

Now sleeping flocks in their soft fleeces lie;

and again at ver. 37,

For her the flocks refuse their verdant food.

Widely different in life and vividness are the lines in which Thomson paints the flocks under their true wintry aspect, when the snow is falling, and has buried up the herbage.

The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist'ning earth,
With looks of dumb despair.

In a verse which is not original, but which is more descriptive than usual, Pope speaks of the breezes which, in spring, blow gently among the osiers:

Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play.

This is flat by the side of the passage in Thomson's Spring, where he describes the effects of the lightest current of air upon the aspen:

Not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall.

The epithet "closing" is happily applied to woods just bursting into foliage, and the epithet "many-twinkling" is exquisitely appropriate to the leaves of the aspen, which, when every other tree is still, and the air can hardly be felt to stir, dance up and down incessantly, with an endless play of light and shadow, and rustle as they wave joyously to and fro. Nature scarce affords a prettier sight, or a more soothing sound. These comparisons might be extended through pages, and they are fair examples of Pope's inferiority in a style which was unsuited to his turn of mind, and of which he had never formed adequate ideas.

Roscoe could perceive no impropriety in transferring classical customs and mythology to the plains of Windsor. He conceived that every objection was obviated by the announcement of Pope, "that pastoral is an image of the golden age," which leaves us to infer, that during this happy interlude our British shepherds adopted the manners and religion of Greece. But the golden age was itself an exploded fable, which had lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope's behalf; for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by one of Pope's shepherds, a circumstance which is intended to denote the little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia'a groves as if they had been neighbouring parishes.

One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed--the peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.

O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what nature never gives the young,
Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not this, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden's position, but he had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered clear, that where there is not a defective ear, the softness or ruggedness of juvenile verses depends upon the model. The imitative faculty of boyhood is never more at home than in catching the trick of metrical harmony. Dryden had used the heroic measure with consummate skill, and no one who came after him could fall into the "harsh cadence" of Oldham's Satires, and Cowley's Davideis, or rest satisfied with the combination of rough and smooth in the productions of Sandys and Denham. The music of the "mighty master" was on every tongue when Pope began "to lisp in numbers." "I learned versification," he said to Spence, "wholly from Dryden's works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."[16] What Dryden did for Pope, Pope did for the next generation, and to compose mellifluous verses became the common attainment of ordinary scribblers. Cowper, in his Table Talk, has specially noticed this effect of Pope's writings.

But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.

In metrical skill Pope was thought by most persons to have surpassed all his predecessors. "He is the most harmonious poet," said Voltaire, "that England ever had. He has reduced the sharp hissings of the English trumpet to the sweet sounds of the flute."[17] Voltaire doubtless found this opinion prevalent in the circle he frequented during his residence in England, from 1720 to 1728; for his own knowledge of our language would not have enabled him to distinguish the nicer shades of melody. The English critics confirm his decision. Johnson declared that the versification of the Pastorals had "no precedent, nor has since had an imitation." Warton pronounced "that it was musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable," and Bowles admitted that Pope "had made the English couplet infinitely more smooth." To the few who "censured his poetry as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear with unvaried sweetness," Johnson replied, "I suspect this objection to be the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception; and who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works, if he had tried to relieve attention by studied discords, or affected to break his lines, and vary his pauses."[18] Bowles sided with the cavillers, as Johnson deemed them, and held that the want of breaks and of variety in the pauses produced a monotony of sound. Lord Kames, on the contrary, asserted that Pope was "eminent for variety of versification," and that the variety of his pauses was the source of the "variety of his melody."[19] I agree with the dissentients who think that his metre is prone to a cloying mannerism, but I believe that the defect is ascribed by Bowles to the wrong cause. Any one who compares the imperial march of the metre in the Vanity of Human Wishes, with the sweet, but less majestic Deserted Village, will perceive that the swell of the heroic measure is capable of wide degrees. A poet judges of the harmony of his verses by trying them on his ear, and the tendency is to set them all to the same tune. This was Pope's error. He has in general, though not always, intermixed the pauses, but he has not varied sufficiently the swell and movement of his lines. Dryden, "in whose admirable ear," as Gray remarks, "the music of our old versification still sounded,"[20] rings the changes with wonderful ease and spirit, and is by turns soft and stately, lively and solemn, familiar and sonorous, while he preserves through all his transitions a freedom, a flow, and an elasticity which never flag. His negligent lines, which are often imputed to haste, have been thought by good writers to be intended to avoid the surfeit of an equable strain. "Sometimes," says Dr. Trapp, "it is not only allowable, but beautiful, to run into harsh and unequal numbers. Mr. Dryden himself does it; and we may be sure he knew when he did it as well as we could tell him. In a work intended for pleasure, variety justifies the breach of almost any rule, provided it be done but rarely."[21] There is extreme exaggeration in the language of Bowles when he states that Pope "gave the first idea of mellifluence." Lines as melodious may be counted in Dryden by the hundred. Pope only maintained a more continuous softness, or, as Johnson puts it, "he discovered, by perusing the works of Dryden, the most perfect fabric of English verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best."[22] This constantly recurring note, however attractive in itself, must always appear a retrograde system, to those who appreciate the richer music of more diversified modulations. The sameness of Pope's metre was the reason that "every warbler had his tune by heart," and imitated it so readily. There was a complexity in the incessant rise and fall of Dryden's lines which mechanical verse-makers could only copy imperfectly. The uniformity of Pope gave them little trouble. The repetition soon fixed the brief lesson in their minds, and the petty warblers almost rivalled their original in sound, though they were far enough from approaching the beauty of his language, the terseness of his style, the felicity of his ideas, and the weight of his sense.

As the Pastorals of Philips opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany, De Quiucey conjectures that Pope's Pastorals may have been placed at the end of the volume by his own desire. Both sets of verses, by this arrangement, were more likely to attract attention, and invite comparison. Pope appears not to have felt any jealousy at the outset. Speaking of Philips's Pastorals in a letter to Cromwell, on October 28, 1710, a year and a half after the Miscellany was published, he said "he agreed with the Tatler that we had no better eclogues in our language." He particularly commended the lines which describe the musician playing on the harp, and added that "nothing could be objected to them, except that they were too lofty for pastoral." He changed his tone after the essays on pastoral poetry had appeared in the Guardian. These papers commenced with No. 22, and in No. 23, for April 7, 1713, some passages are quoted from Philips to illustrate the qualities appropriate to the pastoral style. In No. 30 there are more quotations from Philips to the same purpose, and he and Spenser are singled out as the sole cultivators of this species of composition, who "have copied and improved the beauties of the ancients." The eulogium reached its climax in No. 32, where it is asserted that there have been only four true masters of the art in above two thousand years,--"Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born Philips." It is not known who contributed the essays, but it has been conjectured, without any evidence, that they proceeded from Tickell. There cannot be a question that the author had a friendship for Philips, or he would not have ranked him with Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser; and it is equally certain that he was not an admirer of the Pastorals of Pope, which are passed over in silence, and which violate the canons laid down by the critic. "I must observe," he says, "that our countrymen have so good an opinion of the ancients, and think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pastoral writers have either stolen all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their manners and customs as makes them very ridiculous."[23] The method of Philips is adduced in advantageous contrast. He is commended for changing the details with the scene, and introducing English ideas into English eclogues. A few months earlier similar praise had been bestowed upon him by Addison, in the Spectator for October 30, 1712. "When we are at school," said Addison in his essay, "it is necessary for us to be acquainted with the system of pagan theology, and we may be allowed to enliven a theme or point an epigram with a heathen god; but no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded in truth, or at least in that which passes for such. If any are of opinion that there is a necessity of admitting these classical legends into our serious compositions, in order to give them a more poetical turn, I would recommend to their consideration the Pastorals of Mr. Philips. One would have thought it impossible for this kind of poetry to have subsisted without fauns and satyrs, wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has given a new life, and a more natural beauty, to this way of writing, by substituting in the place of these antiquated fables the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country." Addison had previously commenced the reformation by excluding pagan machinery from his Campaign. It needed but a small amount of taste to share his opinions, and the writer in the Guardian can hardly be charged with hostility to Pope for not commending Pastorals which, apart from their melodious language, were little better than a medley of unnatural compliments, and unmeaning mythology. Contemporary criticism is more often corrupted by the kindness of friendship than by the spite of enmity, but the effect is sometimes the same, and the undue exaltation of Philips increased the comparative contempt which was cast upon Pope. He had reason to be annoyed, and it was not much compensation that the prettiest lines of his January and May were quoted in one of the papers on Pastoral, to show that fairies could be rendered attractive in verse.

The scheme Pope devised for redressing the wrong, was to send a paper to the Guardian in which he ridiculed the Pastorals of his rival and applauded his own. "With an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony," says Dr. Johnson, "though he himself has always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips." In the opening sentence of the essay Pope is described as "a gentleman whose character it is, that he takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and the least concern for them afterwards."[24] He followed his invariable habit of boasting his pre-eminence in the very virtue he was defying, and attached this vaunt to a criticism in which his morbid "concern" for his works had induced him to become his own reviewer and eulogist. He was liberal in his self-laudation, and assured the public that though his Pastorals might not fulfil the strict definition laid down in the Guardian, they were, like Virgil's, "something better." To prove the inferiority of Philips he selected three of his worst passages, and contrasted them with three of his own. He picked out a dozen foolish lines from his rival, and alleged that they were specimens of his ordinary manner. He subjoined some ludicrous imitations of his style, which are only not an outrageous caricature because they have no resemblance at all to the original. The faults of Philips did not require to be exaggerated. The absurdities of his satirist are different in kind, but they are not less in degree. Some defects they had in common, and as self-love is blind, Pope did not perceive that most of his comments recoiled upon himself. He objected that Philips had introduced wolves into England, where they formerly existed, and the critic forgot that the imaginary golden age, which he maintained in his Discourse was the only era of Pastoral, must be assigned to a period long anterior to their extirpation. Or if the piping shepherds, who composed and chanted poems, were to be considered as existing personages, credibility was not more violated in supposing that Windsor Forest was still haunted by wolves than by heathen gods and goddesses,--in imagining the lambs to be preyed upon by a wild beast, than in picturing Christian bards employed in sacrificing them to Mrs. Tempest with an exact observance of pagan rites. He took especial credit for having kept to the circumstances proper to a particular season of the year, and a certain time of the day, and exposed the ignorance of Philips, who, says he, "by a poetical creation, hath raised up finer beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies, and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that Philip's Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books." While it was admitted that "his competitor had imitated some single thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole, superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure. In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years, and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when Tonson's Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets. Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a competitor. The exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher or sink them lower than they merit.

Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted in which he had drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously, and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the manuscript to the latter, and assured him that he would "never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the wits at Button's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of it, and that it was dictated by friendship for Philips. Small as was the ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author could be serious in asserting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and passages, which the author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces Daphnis, Alexis, and Thyrsis on British plains, as Virgil had done before him on the Mantuan." Habit had reconciled Pope to the affectation of calling English shepherds Daphnis and Thyrsis, but "the names," as De Quincey says, "are rank with childishness," and the public, who felt the practice to be absurd, concluded that the censure was real. "It may," said Pope, "be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, that the words nymph, dryad, naiad, faun, Cupid, or satyr, are not once mentioned through the whole," which was a sneer at Addison's commendation of Philips for rejecting those dreary nonentities; but the public, who had been nauseated with them, could not detect a covert sarcasm in the repetition of the praise by the writer in the Guardian. The circumstance which seemed to Warton to render the irony transparent was the remark, that "Philips had with great judgment described wolves in England," but the ridicule was based upon ignorance, and must have been lost upon every one who was aware that wolves abounded in the antique period to which the pastorals referred. Bowles, who knew that the paper was ironical, yet imagined that Pope was serious in the opening portion, where it is asserted that Virgil has not above a couple of "true pastorals," and that Theocritus has scarcely more. This part, however, of the essay was in the same sarcastic vein with the rest. The previous critic in the Guardian had laid down the rule that a pastoral should reflect "the golden age of innocence," and Pope, to deprive Philips of the benefit of the definition, endeavoured to show that Theocritus and Virgil had hardly ever conformed to it. He did not mean seriously to admit that his competitor was a more genuine pastoral poet than Virgil and Theocritus. His object was to throw ridicule on the definition itself, albeit he adopted it in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry when he was no longer engaged in disparaging Philips.

Nothing can be clearer than that Pope was instigated to write the essay in the Guardian by his jealousy of the praise which had been bestowed upon his rival. The course he took was discreditable, and Warburton, without attempting a direct apology, pretends that the incident which influenced the poet was the misrepresentations made of him to Addison by Philips. Ruffhead adds that the calumny consisted in the assertion that Pope was "engaged in the intrigues of the tory ministry." This would be a good reason for his exposing the mis-statement, but would be a poor excuse for his writing an anonymous attack upon Philips's Pastorals, and a panegyric upon his own. The defence, which would be inadequate if it was true, is indubitably incorrect. The account of Warburton did not appear till Philips was dead. Pope, while Philips was living, published an account, in the shape of a letter to Caryll, the date and contents of which prove that Philips did not bring his charge against Pope till a full year after the paper had been printed in the Guardian.[26] The poet adds that when they meet he will inform Caryll "of the secret grounds of Philips's malignity," and Warburton himself subjoins in a note "These grounds were Mr. Pope's writing the ironical comparison between his own and Philips's Pastorals." The strong presumption from the nature of the case that Pope was actuated by literary envy is thus confirmed. The criticism in the Guardian was not provoked by the malignity of Philips, but the bitterness of Philips was the consequence of the criticism. In 1790, Mr. J. C. Walker, the Italian scholar, sent to the Gentleman's Magazine an alleged remark of Philips to the same effect. "When the comparison," says Mr. Walker, "between the Pastorals of Pope and Philips appeared, Philips was secretary to Primate Boulter, and then in Ireland. Dining one day with the officers of the Prerogative Court, the comparison became the subject of conversation, and Philips said he knew it was written by Pope, adding, 'I wonder why the little crooked bastard should attack me, who never offended him either in word or deed?' This I had from a gentleman who was present."[27] If the conversation ever occurred, the gentleman was mistaken in supposing that the criticism was recent, for the paper in the Guardian came out in 1713, and it was not till more than ten years afterwards that Philips went with Archbishop Boulter to Ireland. The story is unnecessary to prove that Pope was the aggressor, which is sufficiently evident from independent testimony. Unhappily for himself, he began at the outset of his career to stir up those enmities which were the torment of his existence. By his attack upon Dennis, in the Essay on Criticism, he invited the scurrility of that rabid pamphleteer, and by what Bowles calls his "unmanly hostility" to Philips he was reduced to the shame of being scared away from Button's by the no less unmanly retaliation of his victim, who, at some period of the quarrel, hung up a birch, and declared that he would use it on "his rival Arcadian," if he showed his face in the coffee-room.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: There was only one paper.]

[Footnote 2: Warburton implies that Addison's remark to Pope was made immediately after the essay appeared in the Guardian, in which case Pope could have lost no time in avowing that he was the author of the criticism when once it was in print, for Addison had no suspicion of him from internal evidence. "He did not," says Spence, "discover Mr. Pope's style in the letter on Pastorals, which he published in the Guardian; but then that was a disguised style."]

[Footnote 3: The effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded. Gay's pastorals became popular, and were read with delight as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical dispute.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 4: Warton was master of Winchester school.]

[Footnote 5: But if Pope had no invention, and had exhibited in his Pastorals no new or striking images, how could his example have led the way to others, "in point of genius and imagination," whatever it might have done in point of correctness?--ROSCOE.]

[Footnote 6: They are not coupled but contra-distinguished, and surely the poet might draw a contrast from Greece without being chargeable with a faulty mixture of British and Grecian ideas.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 7: That such causes of complaint will more frequently occur in the Grecian climate is unquestionable; but is it necessary to make a complaint of this kind consistent that every day should be a dog-day? The British shepherd might very consistently describe what he often felt, and we have days in England which might make even a Grecian faint.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 8: "New sentiments and new images," says Johnson, in his Life of Pope, "others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity."]

[Footnote 9: Works of Lord Lansdowne, vol. ii. p. 113.]

[Footnote 10: De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 114.]

[Footnote 11: Singer's Spence, p. 162.]

[Footnote 12: Spence, p. 211.]

[Footnote 13: Works of Lady Mary Wortley, ed. Thomas, vol. i. p. 166.]

[Footnote 14: Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.]

[Footnote 15: Spence, p. 236.]

[Footnote 16: Spence, p. 212.]

[Footnote 17: Oeuvres, ed. Beuchot, tom. xxxvii. p. 258.]

[Footnote 18: Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, vol. iii. p. 136. The principle which Johnson derided in his Life of Pope he had upheld in No. 86 of the Rambler: "We are soon wearied with the perpetual recurrence of the same cadence. Necessity has therefore enforced the mixed measure, in which some variation of the accents is allowed. This, though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself, yet compensates the loss by relieving us from the continual tyranny of the same sound, and makes us more sensible of the harmony of the pure measure."]

[Footnote 19: Elements of Criticism, 6th ed. vol. ii. p. 143, 155.]

[Footnote 20: Gray's Works, ed. Mitford, vol. v. p. 303.]

[Footnote 21: Trapp's Virgil, vol. i. p. lxxix.]

[Footnote 22: Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 136.]

[Footnote 23: Guardian, No. 30, April 15, 1713.]

[Footnote 24: Guardian, No. 40, April 27, 1713.]

[Footnote 25: Life of Hannah More, vol. i. p. 301.]

[Footnote 26: Pope to Caryll, June 8, 1714.]

[Footnote 27: Nichols, Illustrations of Lit. Hist. vol. vii. 713.]

A DISCOURSE

ON

PASTORAL POETRY.[1]

There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called pastorals; nor a smaller, than of those which are truly so. It therefore seems necessary to give some account of this kind of poem; and it is my design to comprise in this short paper the substance of those numerous dissertations the critics have made on the subject, without omitting any of their rules in my own favour. You will also find some points reconciled, about which they seem to differ, and a few remarks, which, I think, have escaped their observation.

The original of poetry is ascribed to that age which succeeded the creation of the world: and as the keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral.[2] 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.

A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or narrative, or mixed of both[3]; the fable simple; the manners not too polite nor too rustic: the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and passion, but that short and flowing: the expression humble, yet as pure as the language will afford; neat, but not florid; easy, and yet lively. In short, the fable, manners, thoughts, and expressions are full of the greatest simplicity in nature.

The complete character of this poem consists in simplicity[4], brevity, and delicacy; the two first of which render an eclogue natural, and the last delightful.

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. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been; when the best of men followed the employment.[5] To carry this resemblance yet further, it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life. And an air of piety to the gods should shine through the poem, which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity; and it ought to preserve some relish of the old way of writing; the connection should be loose, the narrations and descriptions short,[6] and the periods concise. Yet it is not sufficient, that the sentences only be brief, the whole eclogue should be so too. For we cannot suppose poetry in those days to have been the business of men, but their recreation at vacant hours.[7]

But with respect to the present age, nothing more conduces to make these composures natural, than when some knowledge in rural affairs is discovered.[8] This may be made to appear rather done by chance than on design, and sometimes is best shown by inference; lest by too much study to seem natural, we destroy that easy simplicity from whence arises the delight. For what is inviting in this sort of poetry, as Fontenelle observes, proceeds not so much from the idea of that business, as of the tranquillity of a country life.

We must therefore use some illusion to render a pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries.[9] Nor is it enough to introduce shepherds discoursing together in a natural way: but a regard must be had to the subject, that it contain some particular beauty in itself, and that it be different in every eclogue. Besides, in each of them a designed scene or prospect is to be presented to our view, which should likewise have its variety.[10] This variety is obtained in a great degree by frequent comparisons, drawn from the most agreeable objects of the country; by interrogations to things inanimate; by beautiful digressions, but those short; sometimes by insisting a little on circumstances; and lastly, by elegant turns on the words, which render the numbers extremely sweet and pleasing. As for the numbers themselves, though they are properly of the heroic measure, they should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable.

It is by rules like these that we ought to judge of pastoral. And since the instructions given for any art are to be delivered as that art is in perfection, they must of necessity be derived from those in whom it is acknowledged so to be. It is therefore from the practice of Theocritus and Virgil (the only undisputed authors of pastoral) that the critics have drawn the foregoing notions concerning it.

Theocritus excels all others in nature and simplicity. The subjects of his Idyllia are purely pastoral; but he is not so exact in his persons, having introduced reapers and fishermen[11] as well as shepherds.[12] He is apt to be too long in his descriptions, of which that of the cup in the first pastoral is a remarkable instance.[13] In the manners he seems a little defective, for his swains are sometimes abusive and immodest, and perhaps too much inclining to rusticity; for instance, in his fourth and fifth Idyllia. But it is enough that all others learnt their excellencies from him, and that his dialect alone has a secret charm in it, which no other could ever attain.

Virgil, who copies Theocritus, refines upon his original;[14] and in all points, where judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master. Though some of his subjects are not pastoral in themselves, but only seem to be such, they have a wonderful variety in them,[15] which the Greek was a stranger to.[16] He exceeds him in regularity and brevity, and falls short of him in nothing but simplicity and propriety of style; the first of which perhaps was the fault of his age, and the last of his language.

Among the moderns, their success has been greatest who have most endeavoured to make these ancients their pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Tasso, and our Spenser. Tasso in his Aminta has far excelled all the pastoral writers, as in his Gierusalemme he has outdone the epic poets of his country. But as this piece seems to have been the original of a new sort of poem, the pastoral comedy, in Italy, it cannot so well be considered as a copy of the ancients.[17] Spenser's Calendar, in Mr. Dryden's opinion, is the most complete work of this kind which any nation has produced ever since the time of Virgil.[18] Not but that he may be thought imperfect in some few points. His Eclogues are somewhat too long, if we compare them with the ancients.[19] He is sometimes too allegorical, and treats of matters of religion in a pastoral style, as the Mantuan had done before him. He has employed the lyric measure, which is contrary to the practice of the old poets. His stanza is not still the same, nor always well chosen. This last may be the reason his expression is sometimes not concise enough: for the tetrastic has obliged him to extend his sense to the length of four lines, which would have been more closely confined in the couplet.

In the manners, thoughts, and characters, he comes near to Theocritus himself; though, notwithstanding all the care he has taken, he is certainly inferior in his dialect: for the Doric had its beauty and propriety in the time of Theocritus; it was used in part of Greece, and frequent in the mouths of many of the greatest persons, whereas the old English and country phrases of Spenser were either entirely obsolete, or spoken only by people of the lowest condition.[20] As there is a difference betwixt simplicity and rusticity, so the expression of simple thoughts should be plain, but not clownish. The addition he has made of a calendar to his Eclogues, is very beautiful; since by this, besides the general moral of innocence and simplicity, which is common to other authors of pastoral, he has one peculiar to himself; he compares human life to the several seasons, and at once exposes to his readers a view of the great and little worlds, in their various changes and aspects.[21] Yet the scrupulous division of his pastorals into months, has obliged him either to repeat the same description, in other words, for three months together; or, when it was exhausted before, entirely to omit it: whence it comes to pass that some of his Eclogues (as the sixth, eighth, and tenth, for example) have nothing but their titles to distinguish them. The reason is evident, because the year has not that variety in it to furnish every month with a particular description, as it may every season.

Of the following Eclogues I shall only say, that these four comprehend all the subjects which the critics upon Theocritus and Virgil will allow to be fit for pastoral: that they have as much variety of description, in respect of the several seasons, as Spenser's: that in order to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments; not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age. But after all, if they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Written at sixteen years of age.--POPE.

This sensible and judicious discourse written at so early an age is a more extraordinary production than the Pastorals that follow it. Our author has chiefly drawn his observations from Rapin, Fontenelle, and the preface to Dryden's Virgil. A translation of Rapin's Discourse had been some years before prefixed to Creech's translation of Theocritus, and is no extraordinary piece of criticism. And though Hume highly praises the Discourse of Fontenelle, yet Dr. Hurd thinks it only rather more tolerable than his Pastorals.--WARTON.

Hume had said that there could not be a finer piece of criticism than Fontenelle's Dissertation on Pastorals, but that the Pastorals themselves displayed false taste, and did not exemplify the rules laid down in the criticism.]

[Footnote 2: Fontenelle's Discourse of Pastorals.--POPE.]

[Footnote 3: Heinsius in Theocr.--POPE.]

[Footnote 4: Rapin de Carm. Past., P. 2.--POPE.]