The Works of Alexander Pope Part 44

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 pa.s.s that some of his Eclogues (as the sixth, eighth, and tenth, for example) have nothing but their t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sions 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.]

[Footnote 5: I cannot easily discover why it is thought necessary to refer descriptions of a rural state to the golden age, nor can I perceive that any writer has consistently preserved the Arcadian manners and sentiments. The only reason that I have read on which this rule has been founded is that, according to the customs of modern life, it is improbable that shepherds should be capable of harmonious numbers, or delicate sentiments; and therefore, the reader must exalt his ideas of the pastoral character by carrying his thoughts back to the age in which the care of herds and flocks was the employment of the wisest and greatest men. These reasoners seem to have been led into their hypothesis by considering pastoral, not in general, as a representation of rural nature, and consequently as exhibiting the ideas and sentiments of those, whoever they are, to whom the country affords pleasure or employment, but simply as a dialogue or narrative of men actually tending sheep, and busied in the lowest and most laborious offices; from whence they very readily concluded, since characters must necessarily be preserved, that either the sentiments must sink to the level of the speakers, or the speakers must be raised to the height of the sentiments. In consequence of these original errors, a thousand precepts have been given, which have only contributed to perplex and confound.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 6: Rapin, Reflex. sur l'Art. Poet. d'Arist., P. ii. Refl.

xxvii.--POPE.]

[Footnote 7: Pope took this remark from Dr. Knightly Chetwood's Preface to the Pastorals in Dryden's Virgil: "Not only the sentences should be short and smart, but the whole piece should be so too, for poetry and pastime was not the business of men's lives in those days, but only their seasonable recreation after necessary hours." The rule is purely fanciful. By continuing the same subject from week to week, a shepherd could as easily find leisure to compose a single piece of a thousand lines as ten pieces of a hundred lines each. Most of the laws of pastoral poetry which Pope has collected are equally unfounded.]

[Footnote 8: Pref. to Virg. Past. in Dryd. Virg.--POPE.]

[Footnote 9: Fontenelle's Disc. of Pastorals.--POPE.]

[Footnote 10: See the forementioned Preface.--POPE.]

[Footnote 11: [Greek: THERISTAI], Idyl. x. and [Greek: ALIEIS], Idyl.

xxi.--POPE.

Pope's definition of Pastoral is too confined. In fact, his Pastoral Discourse seems made to fit _his_ Pastorals. For the same reason he would not cla.s.s as a true Pastoral the most interesting of all Virgil's Eclogues,--I mean the first, which is founded on fact, which has the most tender and touching strokes of nature, and the plot of which is entirely pastoral, being the complaint of a shepherd obliged to leave the fields of his infancy, and yield the possession to soldiers and strangers. Pope says, because it relates to soldiers, it is not pastoral; but how little of a military cast is seen in it. The soldier is mentioned, but only as far as was absolutely necessary, and always in connection with the rural imagery from whence the most exquisite touches are derived. Pope's pastoral ideas, with the exception of the Messiah, seem to have been taken from the least interesting and poetic scenes of the ancient eclogue,--the Wager, the Contest, the Riddle, the alternate praises of Daphne or Delia, the common-place complaint of the lover, &c.

The more interesting and picturesque subjects were excluded, as not being properly pastoral according to his definition.--BOWLES.

In saying that Pope would not allow Virgil's first eclogue to be "a true pastoral," Bowles refers to the paper in the Guardian, where the design was to laugh at the strict definition which would exclude a poem from the pastoral cla.s.s on such frivolous grounds. In the same jesting tone, Pope a.s.serts that the third eclogue must be set aside, because it introduces "calumny and railing, which are not proper to a state of concord," and the eighth, because it has a shepherd "whom an inviting precipice tempts to self-destruction."]

[Footnote 12: The tenth and twenty-first Idyll here alluded to contain some of the most exquisite strokes of nature and true poetry anywhere to be met with, as does the beautiful description of the carving on the cup, which, indeed is not a cup, but a very large pastoral vessel or cauldron.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 13: In what does the great father of the pastoral excel all others? In "simplicity, and nature." I admit with Pope, but more particularly in one circ.u.mstance, which seems to have escaped general attention, and that circ.u.mstance is the picturesque. Pope says he is too long in his descriptions, particularly of the cup. Was not Pope, a professed admirer of painting, aware that the description of that cup contains touches of the most delightful and highly-finished landscape?

The old fisherman, and the broken rock in one scene; in another, the beautiful contrast of the little boy weaving his rush-work, and so intent on it, that he forgets the vineyard he was set to guard. We see him in the foreground of the piece. Then there is his scrip, and the fox eyeing it askance; the ripe and purple vineyard, and the other fox treading down the grapes whilst he continues at his work. Add to these circ.u.mstances the wild and beautiful Sicilian scenery, and where can there be found more perfect landscapes in the works, which these pictures peculiarly resemble, of Vernet or Gainsborough? Considered in this view, how rich, wild, and various are the landscapes of the old Sicilian, and we cannot but wonder that so many striking and original traits should be pa.s.sed over by a "youthful bard," who professed to select from, and to copy the ancients.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 14: He refines indeed so much, as to make him, on this very account, much inferior to the beautiful simplicity of his original.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 15: It is difficult to conceive where is the "wonderful variety" in Virgil's Eclogues which "the Greek was a stranger to." Many of the more poetical parts of Virgil are copied literally from Theocritus; but are weakened by being made more general, and often lose much of their picturesque and poetical effect from that circ.u.mstance.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 16: Rapin. Refl. on Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii. Pref. to the Ecl. in Dryden's Virgil.--POPE.]

[Footnote 17: The Aminta of Ta.s.so is here erroneously mentioned by Pope as the very first pastoral comedy that appeared in Italy. But it is certain that Il Sacrificio of Agostino Beccari was the first, who boasts of it in his prologue, and who died very old in 1590.--WARTON.

"There were," says Roscoe, "several writers of pastoral in Italy prior to those mentioned either by Pope or Warton." Roscoe mistook the question, which was, who was the first author of the pastoral _drama_?

None of the prior pastoral writers he enumerates produced a drama, and Warton was right in giving the precedency to Beccari.]

[Footnote 18: Dedication to Virg. Ecl.--POPE.]

[Footnote 19: In the ma.n.u.script Pope had added, "Some of them contain two hundred lines, and others considerably exceed that number."]

[Footnote 20: Johnson remarks that while the notion that rustic characters ought to use rustic phraseology, led to the adoption in pastorals "of a mangled dialect which no human being ever could have spoken," the authors had the inconsistency to invest their personages with a refinement of thought which was incompatible with coa.r.s.e and vulgar diction. "Spenser," he continues, "begins one of his pastorals with studied barbarity:

Diggon Davie, I bid her good day; Or Diggon her is, or I missay.

_Dig._ Her wus her while it was day-light, But now her is a most wretched wight.

What will the reader imagine to be the subject on which speakers like these exercise their eloquence? Will he not be somewhat disappointed when he finds them met together to condemn the corruptions of the church of Rome? Surely at the same time that a shepherd learns theology, he may gain some acquaintance with his native language."]

[Footnote 21: "It was from hence," the poet went on to say in his ma.n.u.script, "I took my first design of the following eclogues. For, looking upon Spenser as the father of English pastoral, I thought myself unworthy to be esteemed even the meanest of his sons, unless I bore some resemblance of him. But, as it happens with degenerate offspring, not only to recede from the virtues, but to dwindle from the bulk of their ancestor; so I have copied Spenser in miniature, and reduced his twelve months into four seasons." When Pope published his Pastorals he stated that three of them were imitated from Virgil and Theocritus, which occasioned his cancelling this pa.s.sage where he speaks as if he had taken Spenser alone for his model.]

SPRING:

THE FIRST PASTORAL,

OR

DAMON.

TO SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL.[1]

First in these fields I try the sylvan strains,[2]

Nor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful plains:[3]

Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring,[4]

While on thy banks Sicilian[5] muses sing; Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play,[6] 5 And Albion's cliffs resound the rural lay.[7]

You, that too wise for pride, too good for pow'r,[8]

Enjoy the glory to be great no more, And carrying with you all the world can boast,[9]

To all the world ill.u.s.triously are lost! 10 O let my muse her slender reed inspire, Till in your native shades[10] you tune the lyre: So when the nightingale to rest removes, The thrush may chant to the forsaken groves,[11]

But, charmed to silence, listens while she sings, 15 And all th' aerial audience clap their wings.[12]

Soon as the flocks shook off the nightly dews,[13]

Two swains, whom love kept wakeful, and the muse, Poured o'er the whit'ning[14] vale their fleecy care, Fresh as the morn, and as the season fair:[15] 20 The dawn now blus.h.i.+ng on the mountain's side, Thus Daphnis spoke, and Strephon thus replied.[16]

DAPHNIS.

Hear how the birds, on ev'ry bloomy spray,[17]

With joyous music wake the dawning day![18]