FOOTNOTES:
[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.
[2] Fontenelle's Discourse of Pastorals.—Pope.
[3] Heinsius in Theocr.—Pope.
[4] Rapin de Carm. Past., P. 2.—Pope.
[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.
[6] Rapin, Reflex. sur l'Art. Poet. d'Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii.—Pope.
[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.
[8] Pref. to Virg. Past. in Dryd. Virg.—Pope.
[9] Fontenelle's Disc. of Pastorals.—Pope.
[10] See the forementioned Preface.—Pope.
[11] ΘΕΡΙΣΤΑΙ, Idyl. x. and ΑΛΙΕΙΣ, 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."
[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.
[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.
[14] He refines indeed so much, as to make him, on this very account, much inferior to the beautiful simplicity of his original.—Warton.
[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.
[16] Rapin. Refl. on Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii. Pref. to the Ecl. in Dryden's Virgil.—Pope.
[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.
[18] Dedication to Virg. Ecl.—Pope.
[19] In the manuscript Pope had added, "Some of them contain two hundred lines, and others considerably exceed that number."
[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."
[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.