These papers were sent by an unknown hand to Steele, and the irony escaping him, he communicated them to Mr. Pope, declaring he would never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another. Pope told him he was too delicate, and insisted that the papers should be published in the Guardian. They were so. And the pleasantry escaped all but Addison, who, taking Pope aside,[2] said to him in his agreeable manner, "You have put your friends here in a very ridiculous light, as will be seen when it is understood, as it soon must be, that you were only laughing at the admirers of Philips." But this ill conduct of Philips occasioned a more open ridicule of his Pastorals in the mock poem called the Shepherd"s Week, written by Gay. But though more open, the object of it was ill understood[3] by those who were strangers to the quarrel. These mistook the Shepherd"s Week for a burlesque of Virgil"s Pastorals. How far this goes towards a vindication of Philips"s simple painting, let others judge.--WARBURTON.
In 1704 Pope wrote his Pastorals, which were shown to the poets and critics of that time. As they well deserved, they were read with admiration, and many praises were bestowed upon them and upon the preface, which is both elegant and learned in a high degree. They were, however, not published till five years afterwards. Cowley, Milton, and Pope are distinguished among the English poets by the early exertion of their powers; but the works of Cowley alone were published in his childhood, and, therefore, of him only can it be certain that his juvenile performances received no improvement from his maturer studies.
The Pastorals were at last printed [1709] in Tonson"s Miscellany, in a volume which began with the Pastorals of Philips, and ended with those of Pope. It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals, which, not professing to imitate real life, require no experience, and exhibiting only the simple operation of unmingled pa.s.sions, admit no subtle reasoning or deep inquiry. Pope"s Pastorals are not, however, composed but with close thought; they have reference to the time of the day, the seasons of the year, and the periods of human life. The last, that which turns the attention upon age and death, was the author"s favourite. To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets. His preference was probably just. I wish, however, that his fondness had not overlooked the line in which the _Zephyrs_ are made _to lament in silence_. To charge these pastorals with want of invention is to require what was never intended. The imitations are so ambitiously frequent that the writer evidently means rather to show his literature than his wit.
It is surely sufficient for an author of sixteen, not only to be able to copy the poems of antiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient power of language and skill in metre to exhibit a series of versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has since had an imitation.--JOHNSON.
It is somewhat strange that in the pastorals of a young poet there should not be found a single rural image that is new; but this, I am afraid, is the case in the Pastorals before us. The ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser are, indeed, here exhibited in language equally mellifluous and pure; but the descriptions and sentiments are trite and common. To this a.s.sertion, formerly made, Dr. Johnson answered, "that no invention was intended." He, therefore, allows the fact and the charge.
It is a confession of the very fault imputed to them. There _ought_ to have been invention. It has been my fortune from my way of life,[4] to have seen many compositions of youths of sixteen years old, far beyond these Pastorals in point of genius and imagination, though not perhaps of correctness. Their excellence, indeed, might be owing to having had such a predecessor as Pope.[5] A mixture of British and Grecian ideas may justly be deemed a blemish in these Pastorals, and propriety is certainly violated when he couples Pactolus with Thames, and Windsor with Hybla.[6] Complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to cooling caverns, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece, have a decorum and consistency, which they totally lose in the character of a British Shepherd,[7] and, Theocrites, during the ardors of Sirius, must have heard the murmurings of a brook, and the whispers of a pine, with more home-felt pleasure than Pope could possibly experience upon the same occasion. Pope himself informs us, in a note, that he judiciously omitted the following verse:
And list"ning wolves grow milder as they hear
on account of the absurdity, which Spenser overlooked, of introducing wolves into England. But on this principle, which is certainly a just one, may it not be asked, why he should speak, the scene lying in Windsor Forest, of the "sultry Sirius," of the "grateful cl.u.s.ters of grapes," of "a pipe of reeds," the antique fistula, of "thanking Ceres for a plentiful harvest," of "the sacrifice of lambs," with many other instances that might be adduced to this purpose? That Pope, however, was sensible of the importance of adapting images to the scene of action, is obvious from the following example of his judgment; for in translating
Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros,
he has dexterously dropped the laurels appropriated to Eurotas, as he is speaking of the river Thames, and has rendered it
Thames heard the numbers as he flowed along, And bade his willows learn the moving song.
In the pa.s.sages which Pope has imitated from Theocritus, and his Latin translator, Virgil, he has merited but little applause. Upon the whole, the princ.i.p.al merit of these Pastorals consists in their correct and musical versification, musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable, and in giving the truest specimen of that harmony in English verse, which is now become indispensably necessary, and which has so forcibly and universally influenced the public ear as to have obliged every moderate rhymer to be at least melodious. Pope lengthened the abruptness of Waller, and at the same time contracted the exuberance of Dryden.--WARTON.
Dr. Johnson does not appear sufficiently attentive to the true character and nature of pastoral poetry. No doubt it is natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals; for what youthful heart does not glow at the descriptions of rural nature, and scenes that accord with its own innocency and cheerfulness; but although pastorals do not, in the sense of Dr. Johnson, imitate real life, nor require any great insight into human pa.s.sions and characters, yet there are many things necessary in this species of composition, more than Dr. Johnson seems to require. The chief thing is an eye for picturesque and rural scenery, and an intimate acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature, which alone can give a lively and original colour to the painting of pastoral poetry. To copy the common descriptions of spring or summer, morning or evening, or to iterate from Virgil the same complaints of the same shepherds, is not surely to write pastoral poetry. It is also difficult to conceive where is "the close thought" with which Johnson says Pope"s Pastorals are composed. They are pleasing as copies of "the poems of antiquity," although they exhibit no striking taste in the "selection," and they certainly exhibit a series of musical versification, which, till their appearance, had no precedent in English poetry. If in particular pa.s.sages, I have ventured to remark that Pope has introduced false thoughts and conceits, let us remember that we ought not so much to wonder that he admitted any, as that they were not more. Dryden"s earlier poems are infinitely more vitiated in this respect.
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 pa.s.sages. 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 pa.s.sage with pa.s.sage) 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 t.i.tle 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, a.s.sent 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 la.s.situde 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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sertion 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 cl.u.s.ters of grapes, the bounty of Ceres, and other objects connected with pastoral life, and for which the poet has himself a.s.signed 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 G.o.ds 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script t.i.tle of the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, viz., An Essay on Pastoral, and the t.i.tle 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 ma.n.u.script, "Mem. This copy is that which pa.s.sed 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. aetatis meae 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 ma.n.u.script 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 pa.s.sages to which the comments of the author and his critic relate.
There is no evidence, except the poet"s own a.s.sertion, 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.n.u.script, and which he calls "very learned and judicious," did not come out till 1717, and then bore the t.i.tle 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 surrept.i.tious edition which n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script had made this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his friend by the a.s.surance, "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 cla.s.sical 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed away; and Dryden reigned in his stead. "He is sunk in his reputation," said this ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions proper to each time of life, which Pope professes to have distinguished, are altogether overlooked. Love is the sole pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances which convey no pleasure in the repet.i.tion, 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 a.s.sists 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;
and again at ver. 37,
For her the flocks refuse their verdant food.
Widely different in life and vividness are the lines in which Thomson paints the flocks under their true wintry aspect, when the snow is falling, and has buried up the herbage.
The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist"ning earth, With looks of dumb despair.
In a verse which is not original, but which is more descriptive than usual, Pope speaks of the breezes which, in spring, blow gently among the osiers:
Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play.
This is flat by the side of the pa.s.sage in Thomson"s Spring, where he describes the effects of the lightest current of air upon the aspen:
Not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall.
The epithet "closing" is happily applied to woods just bursting into foliage, and the epithet "many-twinkling" is exquisitely appropriate to the leaves of the aspen, which, when every other tree is still, and the air can hardly be felt to stir, dance up and down incessantly, with an endless play of light and shadow, and rustle as they wave joyously to and fro. Nature scarce affords a prettier sight, or a more soothing sound. These comparisons might be extended through pages, and they are fair examples of Pope"s inferiority in a style which was unsuited to his turn of mind, and of which he had never formed adequate ideas.
Roscoe could perceive no impropriety in transferring cla.s.sical customs and mythology to the plains of Windsor. He conceived that every objection was obviated by the announcement of Pope, "that pastoral is an image of the golden age," which leaves us to infer, that during this happy interlude our British shepherds adopted the manners and religion of Greece. But the golden age was itself an exploded fable, which had lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope"s behalf; for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by one of Pope"s shepherds, a circ.u.mstance which is intended to denote the little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia"a groves as if they had been neighbouring parishes.
One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed--the peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what nature never gives the young, Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not this, and wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden"s position, but he had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered clear, that where there is not a defective ear, the softness or ruggedness of juvenile verses depends upon the model. The imitative faculty of boyhood is never more at home than in catching the trick of metrical harmony. Dryden had used the heroic measure with consummate skill, and no one who came after him could fall into the "harsh cadence"
of Oldham"s Satires, and Cowley"s Davideis, or rest satisfied with the combination of rough and smooth in the productions of Sandys and Denham.
The music of the "mighty master" was on every tongue when Pope began "to lisp in numbers." "I learned versification," he said to Spence, "wholly from Dryden"s works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."[16] What Dryden did for Pope, Pope did for the next generation, and to compose mellifluous verses became the common attainment of ordinary scribblers.
Cowper, in his Table Talk, has specially noticed this effect of Pope"s writings.
But he (his musical finesse was such, So nice his ear, so delicate his touch) Made poetry a mere mechanic art, And every warbler has his tune by heart.
In metrical skill Pope was thought by most persons to have surpa.s.sed all his predecessors. "He is the most harmonious poet," said Voltaire, "that England ever had. He has reduced the sharp hissings of the English trumpet to the sweet sounds of the flute."[17] Voltaire doubtless found this opinion prevalent in the circle he frequented during his residence in England, from 1720 to 1728; for his own knowledge of our language would not have enabled him to distinguish the nicer shades of melody.
The English critics confirm his decision. Johnson declared that the versification of the Pastorals had "no precedent, nor has since had an imitation." Warton p.r.o.nounced "that it was musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable," and Bowles admitted that Pope "had made the English couplet infinitely more smooth." To the few who "censured his poetry as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear with unvaried sweetness," Johnson replied, "I suspect this objection to be the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception; and who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works, if he had tried to relieve attention by studied discords, or affected to break his lines, and vary his pauses."[18] Bowles sided with the cavillers, as Johnson deemed them, and held that the want of breaks and of variety in the pauses produced a monotony of sound. Lord Kames, on the contrary, a.s.serted that Pope was "eminent for variety of versification," and that the variety of his pauses was the source of the "variety of his melody."[19] I agree with the dissentients who think that his metre is p.r.o.ne to a cloying mannerism, but I believe that the defect is ascribed by Bowles to the wrong cause. Any one who compares the imperial march of the metre in the Vanity of Human Wishes, with the sweet, but less majestic Deserted Village, will perceive that the swell of the heroic measure is capable of wide degrees. A poet judges of the harmony of his verses by trying them on his ear, and the tendency is to set them all to the same tune. This was Pope"s error. He has in general, though not always, intermixed the pauses, but he has not varied sufficiently the swell and movement of his lines. Dryden, "in whose admirable ear," as Gray remarks, "the music of our old versification still sounded,"[20]
rings the changes with wonderful ease and spirit, and is by turns soft and stately, lively and solemn, familiar and sonorous, while he preserves through all his transitions a freedom, a flow, and an elasticity which never flag. His negligent lines, which are often imputed to haste, have been thought by good writers to be intended to avoid the surfeit of an equable strain. "Sometimes," says Dr. Trapp, "it is not only allowable, but beautiful, to run into harsh and unequal numbers. Mr. Dryden himself does it; and we may be sure he knew when he did it as well as we could tell him. In a work intended for pleasure, variety justifies the breach of almost any rule, provided it be done but rarely."[21] There is extreme exaggeration in the language of Bowles when he states that Pope "gave the first idea of mellifluence." Lines as melodious may be counted in Dryden by the hundred. Pope only maintained a more continuous softness, or, as Johnson puts it, "he discovered, by perusing the works of Dryden, the most perfect fabric of English verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best."[22] This constantly recurring note, however attractive in itself, must always appear a retrograde system, to those who appreciate the richer music of more diversified modulations. The sameness of Pope"s metre was the reason that "every warbler had his tune by heart," and imitated it so readily. There was a complexity in the incessant rise and fall of Dryden"s lines which mechanical verse-makers could only copy imperfectly. The uniformity of Pope gave them little trouble. The repet.i.tion soon fixed the brief lesson in their minds, and the petty warblers almost rivalled their original in sound, though they were far enough from approaching the beauty of his language, the terseness of his style, the felicity of his ideas, and the weight of his sense.
As the Pastorals of Philips opened the sixth volume of Tonson"s Miscellany, De Quiucey conjectures that Pope"s Pastorals may have been placed at the end of the volume by his own desire. Both sets of verses, by this arrangement, were more likely to attract attention, and invite comparison. Pope appears not to have felt any jealousy at the outset.
Speaking of Philips"s Pastorals in a letter to Cromwell, on October 28, 1710, a year and a half after the Miscellany was published, he said "he agreed with the Tatler that we had no better eclogues in our language."
He particularly commended the lines which describe the musician playing on the harp, and added that "nothing could be objected to them, except that they were too lofty for pastoral." He changed his tone after the essays on pastoral poetry had appeared in the Guardian. These papers commenced with No. 22, and in No. 23, for April 7, 1713, some pa.s.sages are quoted from Philips to ill.u.s.trate the qualities appropriate to the pastoral style. In No. 30 there are more quotations from Philips to the same purpose, and he and Spenser are singled out as the sole cultivators of this species of composition, who "have copied and improved the beauties of the ancients." The eulogium reached its climax in No. 32, where it is a.s.serted that there have been only four true masters of the art in above two thousand years,--"Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born Philips." It is not known who contributed the essays, but it has been conjectured, without any evidence, that they proceeded from Tickell. There cannot be a question that the author had a friendship for Philips, or he would not have ranked him with Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser; and it is equally certain that he was not an admirer of the Pastorals of Pope, which are pa.s.sed over in silence, and which violate the canons laid down by the critic. "I must observe," he says, "that our countrymen have so good an opinion of the ancients, and think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pastoral writers have either stolen all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their manners and customs as makes them very ridiculous."[23]
The method of Philips is adduced in advantageous contrast. He is commended for changing the details with the scene, and introducing English ideas into English eclogues. A few months earlier similar praise had been bestowed upon him by Addison, in the Spectator for October 30, 1712. "When we are at school," said Addison in his essay, "it is necessary for us to be acquainted with the system of pagan theology, and we may be allowed to enliven a theme or point an epigram with a heathen G.o.d; but no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded in truth, or at least in that which pa.s.ses for such. If any are of opinion that there is a necessity of admitting these cla.s.sical legends into our serious compositions, in order to give them a more poetical turn, I would recommend to their consideration the Pastorals of Mr. Philips. One would have thought it impossible for this kind of poetry to have subsisted without fauns and satyrs, wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has given a new life, and a more natural beauty, to this way of writing, by subst.i.tuting in the place of these antiquated fables the superst.i.tious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country."
Addison had previously commenced the reformation by excluding pagan machinery from his Campaign. It needed but a small amount of taste to share his opinions, and the writer in the Guardian can hardly be charged with hostility to Pope for not commending Pastorals which, apart from their melodious language, were little better than a medley of unnatural compliments, and unmeaning mythology. Contemporary criticism is more often corrupted by the kindness of friendship than by the spite of enmity, but the effect is sometimes the same, and the undue exaltation of Philips increased the comparative contempt which was cast upon Pope.
He had reason to be annoyed, and it was not much compensation that the prettiest lines of his January and May were quoted in one of the papers on Pastoral, to show that fairies could be rendered attractive in verse.
The scheme Pope devised for redressing the wrong, was to send a paper to the Guardian in which he ridiculed the Pastorals of his rival and applauded his own. "With an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony," says Dr. Johnson, "though he himself has always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips." In the opening sentence of the essay Pope is described as "a gentleman whose character it is, that he takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and the least concern for them afterwards."[24] He followed his invariable habit of boasting his pre-eminence in the very virtue he was defying, and attached this vaunt to a criticism in which his morbid "concern" for his works had induced him to become his own reviewer and eulogist. He was liberal in his self-laudation, and a.s.sured the public that though his Pastorals might not fulfil the strict definition laid down in the Guardian, they were, like Virgil"s, "something better." To prove the inferiority of Philips he selected three of his worst pa.s.sages, and contrasted them with three of his own. He picked out a dozen foolish lines from his rival, and alleged that they were specimens of his ordinary manner. He subjoined some ludicrous imitations of his style, which are only not an outrageous caricature because they have no resemblance at all to the original. The faults of Philips did not require to be exaggerated. The absurdities of his satirist are different in kind, but they are not less in degree. Some defects they had in common, and as self-love is blind, Pope did not perceive that most of his comments recoiled upon himself. He objected that Philips had introduced wolves into England, where they formerly existed, and the critic forgot that the imaginary golden age, which he maintained in his Discourse was the only era of Pastoral, must be a.s.signed to a period long anterior to their extirpation. Or if the piping shepherds, who composed and chanted poems, were to be considered as existing personages, credibility was not more violated in supposing that Windsor Forest was still haunted by wolves than by heathen G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses,--in imagining the lambs to be preyed upon by a wild beast, than in picturing Christian bards employed in sacrificing them to Mrs.
Tempest with an exact observance of pagan rites. He took especial credit for having kept to the circ.u.mstances proper to a particular season of the year, and a certain time of the day, and exposed the ignorance of Philips, who, says he, "by a poetical creation, hath raised up finer beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies, and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that Philip"s Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books."
While it was admitted that "his compet.i.tor had imitated some single thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole, superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure.
In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years, and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when Tonson"s Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets.