Allan Ramsay

by William Henry Oliphant Smeaton

This, however, was the fashion in vogue, and to it our poet had to conform. In Richy and Sandy, in Robert, Richy, and Sandy, and in his earlier pastorals generally, we seem to see the poet struggling to rid himself of the conventional prejudices against painting rural nature in the real, and in favour of 'a golden-age rusticity' purely imaginary. Not by this is it implied that I claim for our poet the credit of first insisting on reverting to nature for the study of scenes and character. The same conviction, according to Lowell, was entertained by Spenser, and his Shepherds' Calendar was a manifestation, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, of his desire to hark back to nature for inspiration. In Keitha the same incongruity, as noted above, is visible. The poem in question, with that on the Marriage of the Earl of Wemyss, can neither be ranked as conventional pastoral nor as pure pastoral, according to Ramsay's later style. We note the 'Colins' and 'Ringans,' the 'shepherd's reeds' and 'shepherd's weeds,' and the picture of

——'the singing shepherd on the green
Armyas hight, wha used wi' tunefu' lay
To please the ear when he began to play,'

—an imitation of Milton's immortal lines in Comus, which are too well known to need quotation. All of a piece this with the 'golden-age pastoral.' In the same poems, however, occur intimations that the incongruity was perceived by the author, but that, as yet, he did not see any means of remedying the uniform monotony of the conventional form. The leaven was at work in Ramsay's mind, but so far it only succeeded in influencing but the smallest moiety of the lump.

In the Masque, written in celebration of the marriage of the Duke of Hamilton, the sentiments expressed are wholly different. Written subsequently to The Gentle Shepherd, Ramsay exhibited in it his increased technical deftness, and how much he had profitted by the experience gained in producing his great pastoral. The Masque, albeit professedly a dramatic pastoral, entirely abjures the lackadaisical shepherds and shepherdesses of conventional pastoral, and, as a poem of pure imagination, reverts to the ancient mythology for the dramatis personæ.

All these pieces, however, though they exhibit a facility in composition, a fecundity of imagination, a skilful adaptation of theme to specific metrical form, a rare human sympathy, and a depth of pathos as natural in expression as it was genuine in its essence, are only, so to speak, the preludes to The Gentle Shepherd. In the latter, Ramsay's matured principles of pastoral composition are to be viewed where best their relative importance can be estimated, namely, when put into practice.

By competent critics, The Gentle Shepherd is generally conceded to be the noblest pastoral in the English language. Dr. Hugh Blair, in his lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, styled it 'a pastoral drama which will bear being brought into comparison with any composition of this kind in any language.... It is full of so much natural description and tender sentiment as would do honour to any poet. The characters are well drawn, the incidents affecting, the scenery and manners lively and just.' And one of Dr. Blair's successors in the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh,—a man and a Scotsman who, in his day, has done more than any other to foster amongst our youth a love of all that is great and good and beautiful in our literature; a teacher, too, whose students, whom he has imbued with his own noble spirit, are scattered over the world, from China to Peru,—Emeritus-Professor David Masson, has observed in his charming Edinburgh Sketches: 'The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other: nothing so good of any kind that could be voted even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict.'

To anyone who will carefully compare the Idylls of Theocritus, the Eclogues of Virgil, and the Aminta of Tasso, with Ramsay's great poem, the conviction will be driven home,—in the face, it may be, of many deeply-rooted prejudices,—that the same inspiration which, like a fiery rivulet, runs through the three former masterpieces, is present also in the latter—that inspiration being the perfect and unbroken homogeneity existing between the local atmosphere of the poem and the characteristics of the dramatis personæ. This fact it is which renders the Aminta so imperishable a memorial of Tasso's genus; for it is Italian pastoral, redolent of the air, and smacking of the very soil of sunny Italy. The symmetrical perfection of The Gentle Shepherd, in like manner, is due to the fact that the feelings and desires and impulses of the characters in the pastoral are those distinctively native and proper to persons in their sphere of life. There is no dissidence visible between what may imperfectly be termed the motif of the poem and the sentiments of even the most subordinate characters in it. Therein lies the true essence of literary symmetry—the symmetry not alone of mere form, though that also was present, but the symmetry resulting from the harmony of thought with its expression, of scene and its characters, of situation and its incidents. Such the symmetry exhibited by Homer's Iliad, by Dante's Inferno, by Milton's Paradise Lost, by Cervantes' Don Quixote, by Camoens' Lusiad, by Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, by Tennyson's Idylls.

Frankly, it must be admitted that only in his Gentle Shepherd does Ramsay attain this outstanding excellence. His other pieces are meritorious,—highly so; but they could have been produced by many a writer of the age with equal, perhaps superior, felicity, and they shine only in the reflected light of The Gentle Shepherd; even as Scott's Lord of the Isles and Harold the Dauntless were saved from being 'damned as mediocrity' only by the excellence of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion.

The great charm of The Gentle Shepherd lies in the skilfully-balanced antithesis of its contrasts, in the reflected interest each type casts on its opposite. As in Molière's Tartuffe, it is the vivid contrast created between the hypocrisy of the title-character and the easy good-nature of Orgon, that begets a reciprocal interest in the fortunes of both; as in Balzac's Pere Goriot, it is the pitiless selfishness of his three daughters on the one hand, and the doting self-denial of the poor old father on the other, that throws both sets of characters into relief so strong: so, in The Gentle Shepherd, it is the subtle force of the contrast between Patie's well-balanced manliness and justifiable pride, and Roger's gauche bashfulness and depression in the face of Jenny's coldness; between Peggy's piquant lovableness and maidenly joy in the knowledge of Patie's love, and Jenny's affected dislike to the opposite sex to conceal the real state of her feelings towards Roger in particular, that impart to the poem the vivid interest wherewith its scenes are perused. Minor contrasts are present too, in the faithfulness of Patie to Peggy, as compared with the faithlessness of Bauldy to Neps. The whole drama, in fact, might be styled a beautiful panegyric on fidelity in love. Such passages as the following are frequent—

'I'd hate my rising fortune, should it move
The fair foundation of our faithfu' love.
If at my feet were crowns and sceptres laid
To bribe my soul frae thee, delightful maid,
For thee I'd soon leave these inferior things
To sic as have the patience to be kings.'