PASTORALS, WITH A DISCOURSE ON PASTORAL. WRITTEN IN THE YEAR MDCCIV. Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes; Virgil. THE PASTORALS. No part of Pope's writings has been more disproportionately extolled, or more unjustly degraded, than the 'Pastorals.' His name long divided the critical world into two classes; one of which hailed all his performances with intrepid panegyric, while the other stamped them with equally unhesitating libel; both parties alike forgetting, in their judgment of the Pastorals, that those poems were the effort of mere boyhood, and thus incapable of being taken as the standard of either failure or fame. All the marks of boyishness are on these productions; the images sought from remote authorities, the feelings impregnated by school recollections, and even the names humbly borrowed from Greek and Roman pastoral. Daphnis responds to Damon, in Windsor's blissful plains;' and Strephon invokes Phœbus to assist his song 'with Waller's strains, or Granville's moving lays;' and promises a 'milk-white bull' for sacrifice in return. If with one shepherd 'Pactolus and the Po' yield to 'bright Thames,' the other is not less learned in his admiration; and Cynthus and Hybla yield to Windsor's shade.' Yet, with all this learning, Strephon proposes the 'royal oak' as his trial of wit, and Daphnis retorts by the triumph of the thistle over the lily in the wars of Anne and Louis. But those were the blemishes of a taste yet immature, and bewildered by models, whose true excellence had hitherto escaped his sagacity. Sylvan images, as they are among the first which strike the eye, are naturally among the first which fix themselves on the mind. The verdure of the fields, the quick lustres of sunrise, the diffusive magnificence of sunset, the solemn masses of the forest, the gatherings and groupings of the clouds, the rising or the subsiding gale, the starlight, the pleasing awe of the summer's night, with its airs, and echoes, and countless features of calm, cool, and shadowy beauty, are the elements and ministers of feeling to the mind of the young poet: but our schools teach, that Theocritus and Virgil are the authorities with whose thoughts he must think, the keepers of the keys of nature, the high-priests of the shrine where the great goddess' is alone to be approached with legitimate homage. Pope, in later years, would have felt the true power of those fine writers; and imitating, or perhaps rivalling, the brilliant simplicity of the Greek, or the voluptuous richness of the Roman, given us manners as vivid as the romance of Theocritus, or pictured loves and landscapes delicious as the dreams and bowers of Virgil. Johnson pronounces the Preface to the Pastorals 'both elegant and learned in a high degree.' Warton, more boldly, , says that, written at so early an age, it is a more extraordinary, production than the Pastorals which follow it.' With such praise, it may be fearlessly given intire to the reader. A DISCOURSE ON PASTORAL POETRY. 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 is therefore 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 that critics have made on the subject, without omitting any of their rules in my own favor: 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: 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 POPE. III. P |
