In his usual nervous manner, the critic did not confine himself to his topic, but touched on a number of significant peripheral subjects. He showed the virtue of concrete and specific imagery at a time when most poets sought the sanctuary of abstractions and universals; commented cogently on the styles of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare; anticipated the later doctrine of the power of the incomplete and the obscure to suggest and therefore to compel the imagination to create; adopted and expanded Addison's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful; and, borrowing a suggestion that he probably found in Dennis (Critical Works, ed. Edward N. Hooker, Baltimore, 1919, I, 47), developed a profitable distinction between the sublime image and the sublime thought by examining their different psychological effects.
But, because they run counter to the accepted opinions of his age, it is Purney's comments on matters of style that are especially striking, although it must be remembered that most of them have to do with the pastoral alone and do not constitute a general theory of poetics. Perhaps his most original contribution is his attack upon the cautious contemporary styles of poetry: "strong lines," a term that originally defined the style of the metaphysical poets, but that now described the compact and pregnant manner of Dryden's satires, for example, and the "fine and agreeable," exemplified, let us say, by Pope's Pastorals or Prior's vers de société. To these Purney preferred the bolder though less popular styles, the sublime and the tender, corresponding to the two pure artistic manners that Addison had distinguished. How widely Purney intended to diverge from current poetry can be judged by his definition of the sublime image as one that puts the mind "upon the Stretch" as in Lady Macbeth's apostrophe to night; and by his praise of the simplicity of Desdemona's "Mine eyes do itch." Both passages were usually ridiculed by Purney's contemporaries as indecorous.
Equally original is Purney's concept of simplicity, which he insisted should appear in the style and the nature of the characters, not in denuding the fable and in divesting the poem of the ornaments of poetry, as Pope had argued in the preface of his Pastorals. It was this concept that also led Purney to his unusual theory of enervated diction. How unusual it was can be judged by comparing with the then-current practices and theories of poetic diction his recommendation of monosyllables, expletives, the archaic language of Chaucer and Spenser, and current provincialisms—devices that Gay had used for burlesque—as means of producing the soft and the tender.
But it is hardly true that Purney's "true kinship is with the romantics," as Mr. White claims, for there is a wide chasm between a romantic and a daring and extravagant neoclassicist. Rather, Purney's search for a subjective psychological basis for criticism is one of the elements out of which the romantic aesthetics was eventually evolved, and it frequently led him to conclusions that reappear later in the eighteenth century.
* * * * *
In addition to editing Purney's pastorals, Mr. H.O. White has published an exhaustive study of "Thomas Purney, a Forgotten Poet and Critic of the Eighteenth Century" in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XV (1929), 67-97. University of Illinois.
Earl. R. Wasserman
A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE TRUE NATURE OF PASTORAL.
The PROEME or first Chapter of which contains a SUMMARY of all that the
CRITICKS, ancient or modern, have hitherto deliver'd on that SUBJECT.
After which follows what the Author has farther to advance, in order to
carry the POEM on to its utmost Perfection.
* * * * *