ing the paper. This Pope was generously pleased to grant. It must be admitted that Steele's mistake is perfectly intelligible. Not only had Pope, after the manner of Defoe in his Shortest Way with Dissenters, so overdone the irony as to obscure the point, but also the poetic superiority which he intended the passages quoted from his own pastorals to show over those taken from Philips, is by no means as manifest as he thought. However, the paper duly appeared in the Guardian for April 27, 1713,1 and Philips at least was at no loss as to the purport of it. His reply was effective, although it passed the limits of literary warfare. He hung up a birch in the coffee-room at Button's, and threatened to use it upon his "rival Arcadian" if he dared to set foot in that popular resort. Certainly, the controversy as to the respective merits of Pope and Philips has lost its freshness. From the point of view taken in this essay, each had failed alike to appreciate the true conditions and to catch the proper spirit of pastoral. Yet within their own limits, one can hardly deny that the superiority rests with Pope. The contrary judgment were to confuse a rhymester with a man of genius. Pope's manner is intolerably artificial; he bears the graceless yoke of the Miltonic epithet; his matter is a mere pastiche from Virgil and Theocritus, Dryden and Spenser; but for melodious rhythm and dignity of phrase his pastorals reach a point which he never afterwards surpassed. The musical possibilities of the heroic couplet are ex 1 Guardian, No. 40. hausted in the eclogue entitled "Autumn", and though we may perhaps think the metre inappropriate to the subject, we cannot fail to be sensible of the ease and dignity of the verse. Eighteenth-century criticism occupied itself a good deal with the laws and nature of bucolic poetry. Pope, Addison, and Johnson1 contributed something to the discussion of the theme; but they all proceeded upon the impossible lines laid down by the French critic and poet Fontenelle in his Discours sur la Pastorale.2 Fontenelle's idea was to establish principles which should guide the poet in his representation of rustic life. Theocritus was too realistic, Virgil too remote from the subjects of which he treated. The proper method was to strike a middle course between the opposed dangers of barbarity and over-refinement. A very characteristic eighteenth-century doctrine, but not one calculated to afford poetical inspiration. It was the gravamen of Pope's criticism of Philips that he was too rude, that he departed from the dignity of pastoral by an attempt to paint English instead of Sicilian country life, and by introducing such English names as Hobbinol and Lobbin for the time-honoured Alexis and Thyrsis. Herein of course Philips was only following the model already set by Spenser. Pope was not content with the practical joke played in the Guardian, and devised a new means of throwing ridicule upon his enemy. He proposed 1 Pope in his Guardian paper, and in the Essay prefixed to his Pastorals; Addison in the Spectator, No. 523; Johnson in the Rambler, Nos. 36, 37, and the Adventurer, No. 92. 2 Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Poésies Pastorales avec un traite sur la Nature de l'Eglogue (1698). to Gay to write some burlesque pastorals which should parody Philips by carrying rusticality to an extravagant pitch. Gay took the hint, and in 1714 appeared The Shepherd's Week. The satirical design is evident enough in the affected use of obsolete words, in the absurd bumpkin nomenclature, Buxoma and Blouzelind, Clumsilis and Hobnelia. But Gay's poetic instinct was too much for him. He had a true insight into the picturesque elements of rural life, a wide knowledge of country customs and country superstitions. And so, though only half intending it, he produced no mere parody, but a genuine work of pastoral art, the nearest approach to a realistic pastoral which our literature had yet seen. And here the history of pastoral really closes upon a note curiously significant. The versifiers who followed in the wake of Pope are of no account. But the temper of Gay, so fantastic in his own age, is prophetic enough to us of the tendencies, revolutionary and deep-rooted, which were destined, nearly a century later, to completely transform the English conception of country life as a subject for poetry. Our modern literature is intimate with the woods and fields, conversant with the dwellers therein. You might gather a philosophy and a natural history of the peasant from George Eliot and Thomas Hardy alone. But the ideals of the past are illusions in the eyes of the present; and, save as a rare survival or a conscious archaism, the fine old art of pastoral has given way to newer and more vital modes of thought and imagination. Let the authoress of A Village Tragedy write its epitaph "Peace, Shepherd, peace! What boots it singing on? Since long ago grace-giving Phœbus died, And all the train that loved the stream-bright side In unexplored realms of night to hide. The clouds that strew their shadows far and wide Yet here, where never muse or god did haunt, 1 From Lyrics and Ballads. • By Margaret L. Woods (1889). ENGLISH PASTORALS. ROBERT HENRYSON. (1425?-1480?.) 1. ROBYN AND MAKYNE. Henryson's pastoral is the earliest to be found in Great Britain. It occurs in what is known as the Bannatyne MS. (1568). A complete edition of Henryson's poems was published by Mr. D. Laing in 1865. Robyn and Makyne is also in Percy's Reliques, in Allan Ramsay's Evergreen (1724), and in Mr. Eyre Todd's Mediaval Scottish Poetry (1892). 1 Sheep. ROBENE sat on gud greene hill, Kepand a flok of se1: Mirry Makyne said him till, "Robene, thow rew on me2; My dule in dern1 bot gif thow dill5, Robene answerit, "Be the Rude, But keipis my scheip undir yone wude, 2 Have pity. ვ Openly and secretly. 5 Temper. 4 Secret woe. 6 Without doubt I die. 7 Range in row. |