De Carmine Pastorali / Prefixed to Thomas Creech's translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus (1684)

Series Two: Essays on Poetry No. 3 Rapin’s De Carmine Pastorali , prefixed to Thomas Creech’s translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus (1684) With an Introduction by J. E. Congleton and a Bibliographical Note The Augustan Reprint Society July, 1947 Price : 75c
GENERAL EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska Cleanth Brooks, Louisiana State University James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author by Edwards Brothers, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. 1947
And this must needs be a hard Task, since I have no guide, neither Aristotle nor Horace to direct me.... And I am of opinion that none can treat well and clearly of any kind of Poetry if he hath no helps from these two (p. 16).
In The Third Part, when he begins to lay down his Rules for writing Pastorals, he declares:
Yet in this difficulty I will follow Aristotle's Example, who being to lay down Rules concerning Epicks, propos'd Homer as a Pattern, from whom he deduc'd the whole Art; So I will gather from Theocritus and Virgil, those Fathers of Pastoral, what I shall deliver on this account (p. 52).
These passages represent the apogee of the neoclassical criticism of pastoral poetry. No other critic who wrote on the pastoral depends so completely on the authority of the classical critics and poets. As a matter of fact, Rapin himself is not so absolute later. In the section of the Réflexions on the pastoral, he merely states that the best models are Theocritus and Virgil. In short, one may say that in the Treatise the influence of the Ancients is dominant; in the Réflexions, good Sense. Reduced to its simplest terms, Rapin's theory is Virgilian. When deducing his theory from the works of Theocritus and Virgil, his preference is almost without exception for Virgil. Finding Virgil's eclogues refined and elegant, Rapin, with a suggestion from Donatus (p. 10 and p. 14), concludes that the pastoral belongs properly to the Golden Age (p. 37)— that blessed time, when Sincerity and Innocence, Peace, Ease, and Plenty inhabited the Plains (p. 5). Here, then, is the immediate source of the Golden Age eclogue, which, being transferred to England and popularised by Pope, flourished until the time of Dr. Johnson and Joseph Warton. In France the most prominent opponent to the theory formulated by Rapin is Fontenelle. In his Discours sur la Nature de l'Eglogue (1688) Fontenelle, with studied and impertinent disregard for the Ancients and for ceux qui professent cette espèce de religion que l'on s'est faite d'adorer l'antiquité, expressly states that the basic criterion by which he worked was les lumières naturelles de la raison (OEuvres, Paris, 1790, V, 36). It is careless and incorrect to imply that Rapin's and Fontenelle's theories of pastoral poetry are similar, as Pope, Joseph Warton, and many other critics and scholars have done. Judged by basic critical principles, method, or content there is a distinct difference between Rapin and Fontenelle. Rapin is primarily a neoclassicist in his Treatise ; Fontenelle, a rationalist in his Discours. It is this opposition, then, of neoclassicism and rationalism, that constitutes the basic issue of pastoral criticism in England during the Restoration and the early part of the eighteenth century. When Fontenelle's Discours was translated in 1695, the first phrase of it quoted above was translated as those Pedants who profess a kind of Religion which consists of worshipping the Ancients (p. 294). Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and editors in The First Part (which is so trivial that one wonders why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material), but after quoting them he does not hesitate to call their ideas pedantial (p. 24) and to refer to their statements as grammarian's prattle (p. 11). And, though at times it seems that his curiosity and industry impaired his judgment, Rapin does draw significant ideas from such scholars and critics as Quintilian, Vives, Scaliger, Donatus, Vossius, Servius, Minturno, Heinsius, and Salmasius. Rapin's most prominent disciple in England is Pope. Actually, Pope presents no significant idea on this subject that is foreign to Rapin, and much of the language—terminology and set phrases—of Pope's Discourse comes directly from Rapin's Treatise and from the section on the pastoral in the Reflections. Contrary to his own statement that he reconciled some points on which the critics disagree and in spite of the fact that he quotes Fontenelle, Pope in his Discourse is a neoclassicist almost as thoroughgoing as Rapin. The ideas which he says he took from Fontenelle are either unimportant or may be found in Rapin. Pope ends his Discourse by drawing a general conclusion concerning his Pastorals: 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 have not wanted care to imitate. This statement is diametrically opposed to the basic ideas and methods of Fontenelle, but in full accord with and no doubt directly indebted to those of Rapin. The same year, 1717, that Pope 'imitated' Rapin's Treatise, Thomas Purney made a direct attack on Rapin's neoclassic procedure. In the Preface to his own Pastorals he expresses his disapproval of Rapin's method, evidently with the second passage from Rapin quoted above in mind: