[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 class 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 class on such frivolous grounds. In the same jesting tone,
Pope asserts 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 circumstance, which seems to have escaped general
attention, and that circumstance 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
circumstances 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 passed 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
circumstance.--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 Tasso 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 manuscript 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 coarse 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
manuscript, "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 passage where he speaks as if he had
taken Spenser alone for his model.]