Warton's observations are very just, but he does not seem sufficiently to discriminate between the softness of individual lines, which is the chief merit of these Pastorals, and the general harmony of poetic numbers. Let it, however, be always remembered, that Pope gave the first idea of mellifluence, and produced a softer and sweeter cadence than before belonged to the English couplet. Dr. Johnson thinks it will be in vain, after Pope, to endeavour to improve the English versification, and that it is now carried to the ne plus ultra of excellence.[8] This is an opinion the validity of which I must be permitted to doubt. Pope certainly gave a more correct and finished tone to the English versification, but he sometimes wanted a variety of pause, and his nice precision of every line prevented, in a few instances, a more musical flow of modulated passages. But we are to consider what he did, not what might be done, and surely there cannot be two opinions respecting his improvement of the couplet though it does not follow that his general rhythm has no imperfection. Johnson seems to have depreciated, or to have been ignorant of, the metrical powers of some writers prior to Pope. His ear seems to have been caught chiefly by Dryden, and as Pope's versification was more equably (couplet with couplet being considered, not passage with passage) connected than Dryden's, he thought therefore that nothing could be added to Pope's versification. I should think it the extreme of arrogance and folly to make my own ear the criterion of music; but I cannot help thinking that Dryden, and of later days, Cowper, are much more harmonious in their general versification than Pope. I ought also to mention a neglected poem, not neglected on account of its versification, but on account of its title and subject—Prior's Solomon. Whoever candidly compares these writers together, unless his ear be habituated to a certain recurrence of pauses precisely at the end of a line, will not (though he will give the highest praise for compactness, skill, precision, and force, to the undivided couplets of Pope, separately considered)—will not, I think, assent to the position, that in versification "what he found brickwork he left marble." I am not afraid to own, that with the exception of the Epistle to Abelard, as musical as it is pathetic, the verses of Pope want variety, and on this account in some instances they want both force and harmony. In variety, and variety only, let it be remembered, I think Pope deficient. It has been doubted whether couplet verses ought ever to be broken. I will appeal to Pope himself. Whenever he has done so, is there a judge of poetical cadence who will not say it is harmonious? The instances are few; but where they occur, are they not beautiful? If they had been too often repeated the effect would be destroyed. But in long compositions might not a greater variety of pauses have effect? Does not the ear feel a lassitude at times? An idea has been started by some critics that "you might as well have unequal columns to your house, as unequal couplets in verse." This comparison, however, if it proves anything, proves too much; for no one will say that every two verses in a long poem should in quantity be exactly the same, the syllables the same, the pause the same. This will not hold a moment in versification. If it did, then Johnson's assertion falls to the ground; for then Dr. Darwin is a far better versifier than Pope, and a very little pains would make a much more consummate versificator than Dr. Darwin.—Bowles.
Of all Pope's various and very freely-censured writings, there are none that appear to have met with a harsher or more fastidious reception at the hands of his commentators and critics than his Pastorals. Without regarding them with a sufficient reference, either to the time of life of the author, or the objects he had in view in their composition, they have considered them as deficient in originality and strength of thought, because they do not more greatly abound in new and striking images. But to say nothing of the unreasonableness of requiring "new and striking images," on a subject which has been obvious from the earliest ages to all mankind, and has been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and language, it must be observed, that it was not the intention of Pope to rely upon the strength of his own powers, or to attempt an original style of pastoral composition. On the contrary, he informs us at the close of his discourse, that if those pastorals have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, "whose works," says he, "as I have had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate." In conceding then to Pope, that he has exhibited "the ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, in language equally mellifluous and pure," Dr. Warton has granted every thing which Pope endeavoured to accomplish; and the observation of Johnson, "that no invention was intended," is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer. Nor although the scene be laid in Windsor Forest, does there appear to be any impropriety in referring to a pipe of reeds, the clusters of grapes, the bounty of Ceres, and other objects connected with pastoral life, and for which the poet has himself assigned a sufficient reason in the following discourse. "If," he observes, "we would copy nature, it would be useful to carry this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age; so that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been when the best of men followed the employment;" to which he adds, that "an air of piety to the gods should shine through the poem, which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity, and it ought to preserve some relish of the old way of writing."—Roscoe.
The manuscript of Pope's Pastorals is still preserved among the Richardson papers. It was lent by Mr. T. B. Hollis to Wakefield, who has noted the variations from the published text with minute fidelity. Richardson has done the same in his copy of the quarto of 1717, and gives this correct description of the handwriting of the original:—"The manuscript title of the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, viz., An Essay on Pastoral, and the title of the Pastorals, are written by Mr. Pope in printing capitals so perfectly beautiful, and so exactly imitated, that one can hardly believe they are not really from the press; the same of all the words which would have been printed in italics throughout the whole, which are in common printing character, the general being in italics, beautifully formed, so as in all to imitate a printed book, but in a fine taste of type, and form of the page and margin." Pope has written upon the manuscript, "Mem. This copy is that which passed through the hands of Mr. Walsh, Mr. Congreve, Mr. Mainwaring, Dr. Garth, Mr. Granville, Mr. Southern, Sir H. Sheers, Sir William Trumbull, Lord Halifax, Lord Wharton, Marquis of Dorchester, Duke of Bucks, &c. Only the third Eclogue was written since some of these saw the other three, which were written as they here stand with the Essay, anno 1704. Ætatis meæ 16. The alterations from this copy were upon the objections of some of these, or my own." In his published list of the persons who had read the Pastorals in manuscript, Pope has added the names of Wycherley and Lord Somers, and omitted the names of Congreve, Southern, Sir H. Sheers, Lord Wharton, the Marquis of Dorchester, and the Duke of Buckingham. His chief adviser seems to have been Walsh, who, of all his admiring friends, gave him, he says, the greatest encouragement. "I cannot," Pope wrote to him July 2, 1706, "omit the first opportunity of making you my acknowledgments for reviewing these papers of mine. You have no less right to correct me than the same hand that raised a tree has to prune it." The Richardson collection contains a manuscript in which the poet has transcribed from his Pastorals the various lines he thought defective, and after stating his own objection to them, and subjoining amended readings, he referred the task of selection to Walsh, who has jotted down his decisions at the bottom of Pope's remarks. Both will be found in the notes on the passages to which the comments of the author and his critic relate.
There is no evidence, except the poet's own assertion, to prove that the Pastorals were composed at the age of sixteen. They had been seen by Walsh before April 20, 1705, if any dependence could be placed upon the letter of that date which he wrote to Wycherly, when returning the manuscript, but the letter rests on the authority of Pope alone, and there is reason to question the correctness of the date. The letter of Walsh to Wycherley concludes with the expression of a desire to be made acquainted with Pope. "If," adds Walsh, "he will give himself the trouble any morning to call at my house I shall be very glad to read the verses over with him." The next letter is from Walsh to Pope, and the opening sentence shows that his correspondence with the poet had only just commenced. It appears from what follows that they had met in London, that Walsh had carried Pope's verses into the country, and that these verses were three of the Pastorals. Walsh expresses a hope that when he returns to town, Pope will have some fresh verses to show him, "for I make no doubt," he says, "but any one who writes so well, must write more." These particulars evidently refer to the period when Walsh first became acquainted with the Pastorals, and undertook to criticise them. But the correspondence on the subject begins on June 24, 1706, whence we should infer that it was in April, 1706, and not in 1705, that Wycherley introduced Pope and his Pastorals to Walsh. The poet would have departed from his usual practice if he had not falsified dates to exaggerate his precocity. That he was past seventeen when he first exhibited his Pastorals to his friends is confirmed by a passage from the letter, in which George Granville sketches the character of Wycherley, and invites an unnamed correspondent to meet him. "He shall bring with him, if you will," says Granville, "a young poet, newly inspired in the neighbourhood of Cooper's Hill, whom he and Walsh have taken under their wing. His name is Pope. He is not above seventeen or eighteen years of age, and promises miracles. If he goes on as he has begun in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman, and this swan of Windsor sing as sweetly as the Mantuan."[9] Whatever may be the true date of the Pastorals, a portion of them certainly existed before April 20, 1706, on which day Tonson, the bookseller, wrote to Pope, "I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in Mr. Walsh's and Congreve's hands, which is extremely fine, and is generally approved of by the best judges in poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you at my shop, and am sorry I did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your poem for the press, no person shall be more careful in printing of it, nor no one can give a greater encouragement to it." Three years elapsed before the Pastorals saw the light, when Tonson became the publisher, and they appeared on May 2, 1709, in his Sixth Miscellany. The preface, which Walsh had read in manuscript, and which he calls "very learned and judicious," did not come out till 1717, and then bore the title of A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. Johnson, repeating the language of Walsh, says that it is "learned in a high degree;" whereas it was avowedly compiled from two or three recent essayists, and demanded nothing from the poet to which the term learning could be properly applied. He owed to his second-hand authorities the arbitrary and pedantic rules which were framed from the practice of the ancients, and which were employed by the mechanical critics of his day to repress the free forms of modern genius. The style would have been remarkable for its maturity, if, as Pope professed, it had been the produce of sixteen, but the Discourse was not printed till he was twenty-nine, and he certainly did not send it uncorrected into the world.
"It must appear strange," says De Quincey, "that Pope at twenty-one should choose to come forward for the first time with a work composed at sixteen. A difference of five years at that stage of life is of more effect than of twenty at a later; and his own expanding judgment could hardly fail to inform him that his Pastorals were by far the worst of his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written anything else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad."[10] "Expanding judgment" is often a feeble antidote to the partiality of an author for his own compositions, and Pope always spoke of his Pastoral effusions with fond complacency. He did, indeed, pretend to regret their publication. There was some delay in bringing out the Miscellany, and on November 1, 1708, he wrote thus to Cromwell: "But now I talk of the critics, I have good news to tell you concerning myself, for which I expect you should congratulate with me; it is, that beyond all my expectations, and far above my demerits, I have been most mercifully reprieved by the sovereign power of Jacob Tonson from being brought forth to public punishment, and [have been] respited from time to time from the hands of those barbarous executioners of the muses, whom I was just now speaking of. It often happens that guilty poets, like other guilty criminals, when once they are known and proclaimed, deliver themselves into the hands of justice only to prevent others from doing it more to their disadvantage, and not out of any ambition to spread their fame by being executed in the face of the world, which is a fame but of short continuance." Pope was in his twenty-first year, an age at which frankness commonly preponderates, and he already abounded in the ostentatious profession of sentiments he did not entertain. He had circulated the Pastorals among numerous authors, he had invited their criticisms, he had continued to correct the poems with fastidious care, he retained to the last a high opinion of their merit, and it is impossible to credit his insinuation, that he did not design them for the press, and that he only printed them to avoid a surreptitious edition which nobody gave any sign of preparing. The hypocrisy broke out again when the Miscellany had appeared. "Nothing," wrote Wycherley, May 17, 1709, "has lately been better received by the public than your part of it. You have only displeased the critics by pleasing them too well, having not left them a word to say for themselves against you and your performances. In earnest, all the best judges of good sense or poetry are admirers of yours, and like your part of the book so well that the rest is liked the worse." Pope replied, "I shall be satisfied if I can lose my time agreeably this way, without losing my reputation. As for gaining any, I am as indifferent in the matter as Falstaff was, and may say of fame as he did of honour, 'If it comes, it comes unlooked for; and there's an end on't.'" This affectation of indifference was kept up by him to the end of his days. Yet he was all the time composing, polishing, and publishing; his whole existence was passed in painstaking, and almost drudging authorship; he left no means untried, dishonest as well as fair, to sustain, extend, and perpetuate his reputation; and he pursued every person with inveterate malice who presumed to question his poetical supremacy. In spite of his boasted apathy, there cannot be found in the annals of the irritable race a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candidate for fame.
In his letter to Wycherley, Walsh remarked of Pope's Pastorals, "It is no flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." Walsh must have been thinking of Virgil's Eclogues, which are his most juvenile productions, though he is not supposed to have commenced them till he was thirty years old. Pope admired them to excess, and in his manhood he held to the belief that "it was difficult to find any fault in them."[11] His desire was to repeat, with slight variations, this ancient pattern, which he thought perfection. Virgil himself was a plagiarist, but the Eclogues have more originality than the Pastorals. The descriptions of both Virgil and Pope are artificial, but Virgil has heart-felt touches from the life, of which the Pastorals afford no trace. The taste of both was unformed, but the conceits of Virgil are accompanied by a poetic vein which was not yet equally developed in Pope. Since the Pastorals are an imitation of the Eclogues, it might be expected, as usually happens in such cases, that the copy would have the defects of the model in an exaggerated degree. Pope could not disguise from himself that his verses were the echo of an echo; and in a letter of July 2, 1706, he begged Walsh to tell him sincerely whether he had not stretched the license of borrowing too far. Walsh admitted in his answer, that some persons to whom he had shown the manuscript had made this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his friend by the assurance, "that in all the common subjects of poetry the thoughts are so obvious that whoever writes last must write things like what have been said before." Roscoe has repeated the plea, and speaks of "the unreasonableness" of expecting new images on a topic which "has been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and language." He forgot that rural scenery and life had furnished abundant novelty to Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, whose pictures are as fresh and unhacknied as if Theocritus and Virgil had never lived. "He that walks behind," said Michael Angelo "can never go before;" and originality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate pastoral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn his materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the English characters about his doors, and from the English usages and modes of thought in his own day, he would have discovered a thousand particulars in which he had not been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neglected this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so little attention upon the realities around him, that though his descriptions are confined to the barest generalities, they are not unfrequently false.
After contending that the triteness of the Pastorals was inevitable, Roscoe puts forth a second defence to save the precocity of their author. "The observation," he says, "of Johnson, that no invention was intended, is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer." This must mean that he copied from choice, and not from necessity, which is contradicted by the confession of Pope himself, who acknowledges that he leant upon his masters because he was unable to go alone.[12] Without his testimony we should have been driven to the same conclusion, since every great poet whose youthful verses have been preserved, began by imitating his predecessors, and it would be absurd, in defiance of a general law, to assume that Pope was gifted with a juvenile originality which his early works belie. If he had been capable of higher flights, it would have done him no honour to have employed his melodious verse in piecing together stale, vapid, and often paltry ideas.
Johnson, to be sure, was of opinion that Pope in his Pastorals had copied "the poems of antiquity with judicious selection," but this approbation he does not seem to deserve. A large volume might be composed consisting solely of faults which had their counterpart in works of genius. The homage Pope paid to famous names seduced his immature taste into the admiration of many a vicious passage, and he endeavoured to emulate or outdo the frigid and hyperbolical conceits of his prototypes. Throughout the Pastorals, for instance, the phenomena, which are the effects of the seasons, are ascribed to the presence or absence of the nymphs whom his minstrels celebrate. In spring, the skies mourn in showers, the birds are hushed, and the flowers are closed till Delia smiles, when forthwith the skies brighten, the flowers bloom, and the birds sing. In summer, the shepherd boasts that the breezes shall wait upon his heroine, and blow in the places where she walks; that the trees where she sits shall crowd into a shade; that the flowers shall rise up from the soil where she treads; and that vegetation shall flourish where she turns her eyes. In autumn, the birds neglect their song, the leaves fall from the trees, and the flowers droop because Delia has gone away. In winter, the heavens are obscured by clouds, the verdure has withered, the flocks refuse to graze the meadows, the bees neglect their honey, and the streams overflow with tears because Daphne is dead. This last pastoral, which was Pope's favourite, turns mainly on the notion that winter is the consequence of heaven and earth deploring the death of Mrs. Tempest. "Such," says Sandys, "is the sweetness and power of poesy, as it makes that appear which were in prose both false and ridiculous, to resemble the truth." Poetic fancy is separated from extravagance by narrow boundaries; but there must be some affinity to truth, or the understanding is repelled instead of the imagination being captivated. No ideas can have less to recommend them than the hollow rhapsodies of the Pastorals, for they are at once obvious and absurd. "Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature," and Pope's fantastic superlatives are the image of neither. They never approximate to the exaggeration of fervid passion, but both grief and love are without the semblance of genuine feeling, and only excited the derision of those who looked for a meaning beneath the glitter of words. "Pray tell me the name of him I love," wrote Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterwards the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley, "that I may sigh to the woods and groves hereabouts, and teach it to the echo. Above all, let me know whether it is most proper to walk in the woods, increasing the winds with my sighs, or to sit by a purling stream, swelling the rivulet with my tears."[13] This happy ridicule of a style of composition, which Pope acknowledged ought "to be full of the greatest simplicity, in nature," was written a few months after the Pastorals were published, and appears to have been suggested by them. The clever girl drew her notions from life, and the perceptions of the young author were sophisticated by books. Bowles believed that Pope was influenced "by the false taste of Cowley at that time prevalent." Cowley's popularity, however, had ceased for some years; the fashion he set had passed away; and Dryden reigned in his stead. "He is sunk in his reputation," said this illustrious successor in 1700, "because he could never forego any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. For this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer, and for ten impressions which his works have had in many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelvemonth."[14] The conceits in Pope's Pastorals were derived from other sources. He took little from Cowley, and borrowed none of his peculiarities.
Pope says, in his Discourse, that his Pastorals "have as much variety in respect of the several seasons as Spenser's; that 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 passions proper to each age." Johnson has in consequence accorded to the Pastorals the praise of being composed with "close thought;" but the conception was very imperfectly executed, and in part is puerile. Spring and morning, summer and noon, autumn and evening, winter and night, are coupled together, as if each season was specially characterised by a single portion of the day, selected for no other reason than because the order of succession is the same. Between the several ages of man, and the seasons, there is an obvious resemblance, which has furnished similes from time immemorial, but there is no propriety in peopling a spring scene with children, and a winter scene with the old, since all ages figure together in the world, and manifest the feelings which belong to their years, whether it happens to be winter or spring. If the plan had any merit, Pope did not conform to it. The shepherds who sing in spring are grown up. The shepherd who sings in summer is a boy. Winter is a funereal lament for a young lady who was cut off in her prime, and has not the most distant reference to old age. The different passions proper to each time of life, which Pope professes to have distinguished, are altogether overlooked. Love is the sole passion which animates the actors in Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and the shepherd in Winter celebrates the departed Daphne in the same lover-like rhapsodies which prevail throughout the three preceding poems. The rural employments proper to each season have been equally forgotten. Sheep-keeping and verse-making are the only occupations, though the poet declares he had changed the scene to suit the changing employment, and represents the first pastoral as sung in a valley, the second on the banks of a stream, the third on a hill, and the fourth in a grove. In place of the variety to which he lays claim, we have a general sameness, and if he had kept faithfully to the outline he sketched, he would, with his mode of composition, have done little towards diversifying the series. He wanted the "intimate acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature which," as Bowles says, "can alone give a lively and original colour to the painting of pastoral poetry." The scenes of his four lays,—the valley, the stream, the hill, and the grove,—are just mentioned, and nothing more. There is no attempt to depict them to the mind, and it does not contribute to variety simply to tell the reader that he is now in a valley, and now upon a hill. The seasons themselves are only marked by the superficial, notorious circumstances which convey no pleasure in the repetition, unless they are accompanied by the nice discriminating touches of an exact observer. To say that showers descend, that birds sing, that crocuses blow, and that trees put forth their leaves in spring, supplies the mind with no fresh ideas, nor assists in giving a new beauty and a more definite form to the ideas we possessed before. The genius of Pope was in another direction; and when we contrast the picturesque details of Thomson's Seasons with the blank common-places of the Pastorals, we perceive how wide is the interval between the elegant, harmonious versifier, and the genuine poet of nature. Sheep are twice mentioned in Pope's Winter, once at ver. 5,
Now sleeping flocks in their soft fleeces lie;