loves and the griefs, of imaginary beings in imaginary circumstances, I think you will see that many of the criticisms passed on Pope's "Pastorals" are beside the mark. He has been censured for not doing what he could not have done without being inconsistent with his original design. Mr. Elwin, for example, Pope's truculent editor, who has examined every line in Pope with inveterate hostility, but apparently never lifted his eyes from details to consider Pope's work as a whole, says: "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 moods 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."

If Pope had acted on this advice, no doubt he might have written a much more generally interesting poem, with more of flesh and blood and passion in it, but it would not have been the kind of poem that he intended to write. Johnson's criticism is more to the point when he says that the pastoral form of poetry is "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind." This is strong criticism, but perfectly fair. Johnson was thinking more particularly of elegiac pastoral poetry-poems in which poets lamented the death of friends under the fiction that they were shepherds; and he condemned this kind of poetry as a whole, partly because it gave an air of affectation to the poet's grief, and partly because there was nothing

STEELE'S CRITICISM OF PASTORAL ELEGIES 29

new to be said. He fully recognized what the poet intended to do, but held that it was not worth doing. The same criticism had been passed on occasional pastoral elegies by Steele in the thirtieth number of the Guardian (April 15, 1713). Steele complained that

they were too much on one plan :

"I must, in the first place, observe 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. In looking over some English pastorals a few days ago I perused at least fifty lean flocks, and reckoned up an hundred left-handed ravens, besides blasted oaks, withering meadows, and weeping deities. Indeed, most of the occasional pastorals we have are built upon one and the same plan. A shepherd asks his fellow,' Why he is so pale? If his favorite sheep hath strayed? If his pipe be broken? Or Phyllis unkind?' He answers, 'None of these misfortunes have befallen him, but one much greater, for Damon (or sometimes the god Pan) is dead.' This immediately causes the other to make complaints, and call upon the lofty pines and silver streams to join in the lamentation. While he goes on, his friend interrupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows him a track of light in the skies to confirm it, then invites him to chestnuts and cheese. Upon this scheme most of the noble families in Great Britain have been comforted; nor can I meet with any right honorable shepherd that doth not die and live again, after the manner of the aforesaid Damon."

There is not room for much variety in such poetry, the personages of which are simple people with few interests and few cares. Undoubtedly Milton's "Lycidas," apropos of which Johnson made his sweeping condemnation, is an exception to the general lame

ness of these pastoral elegies. The exquisitely sweet and rich music of his verse would have redeemed the most trite and easy of conceptions. But the pastoral elegy was so common in the years between Milton and Johnson that the critic might have been pardoned a strong expression of his weariness of the poem, though this criticism of Milton is one of the aberrations of his generally sound judgment of poetry and generally true feeling for poetic excellence. At least he must be allowed to have confined his criticism to the kind of poetry which the author intended to produce. He did not censure him because he had not done what he could not have done without deviating into another kind of poetry. To have put into the golden age the manners of country folk as they were to be seen near his own doors would not have been an excellence. That the imaginary manners of a fanciful golden age can never possess deep human interest is of course true enough, and Pope's "Pastorals" cannot claim a high rank as poetry. Johnson's criticism of them shows his usual good-sense and sanity. "To charge these pastorals," he says, "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 remarks upon "the close thought" shown in the composition of the "Pastorals": "Pope's 'Pastorals' are not, however, composed but with close thought; they have reference to the times of the day, the seasons of the year, and the periods of human life." "Windsor Forest" is more open than the "Four Pastorals" to the charge of incongruously and incorrectly

GREAT RESULT OF THE CRAZE FOR PASTORALS 31

mixing up heathen deities with modern circumstances, archaic conventional fancies with modern realities. There is a cold artificiality about such lines as these: "See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd; Here blushing Flora paints th' enamel'd ground; Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand."

Pan and Pomona, and Flora and Ceres, have little life for their few English readers. Still, after discounting such lines, and the extravagant praise of Granville, and the ludicrous comparison of Queen Anne to Diana, there are many beautiful passages. Pope's observation of nature was admitted by Wordsworth, and his microscopic fidelity is remarked on by M. Taine. "Every aspect of nature," says Taine, "was observed; a sunrise, a landscape reflected in the water, a breeze amid the foliage, and so forth. Ask Pope to paint in verse an eel, a perch, or a trout; he has the exact phrase ready; we might glean from him the contents of a Gradus."

We may remark, as illustrating the close connection of one literary event with another, and the way in which literary influences are handed down, that the same craze for Pastorals which produced Pope's juvenile exercises, by one impulse after another, sending out waves in all directions as from a centre of disturbance in a pool, gave us the poetry of Burns. Kindled by the theories and the practice of the English wits and poets, Allan Ramsay wrote real pastoral poetry, exhibiting the customs, the dress, the games, the domestic sorrows, the loves, and the lives of real shepherds. And the “Gentle Shepherd" awoke the genius of Burns. This great result may excuse us for dwelling so long on Pastoral poetry in the reign of Queen Anne.

Pope professed to have written both his "Pastorals" and "Windsor Forest" in 1704 or 1705, at the age of

sixteen, only adding to the latter the passage about the Peace. Probably he had retouched them, as they lay by him. It was part of his vanity to pretend to have been even more precocious than he was, a foible that has been severely commented on.

These "Pastorals " led to one of the first of Pope's celebrated literary quarrels, which is often referred to as an example of his irritable jealousy and subtle underhand proceedings. This has been discussed at great length and in a spirit of bitter hostility to Pope by Mr. Elwin—at great length, and yet with the omission of important circumstances, if his object was to prove that Pope was the aggressor.

In the volume of Tonson's Miscellanies in 1709 in which Pope's "Pastorals " appeared, the first place was occupied by a set of Pastorals by Ambrose Philips,66 Namby Pamby,"-in every way inferior to Pope's. Four years afterward, on April 6, 1713, appeared in the Guardian, edited by Steele, the first of a series of papers on Pastoral Poetry-discussing pastoral poets from Theocritus downward, and stating the principles of the art. Really these papers were a covert puff of Philips. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for introducing Greek rural deities, Greek flowers and fruits (hyacinths and Pæstan roses), Greek names of shepherds (Damon and Thyrsis, and so forth), Greek sports and customs and religious rites. They ought to make use of English rural mythology, hob-thrushes, fairies, goblins, and witches; they should give English names to their shepherds; they should mention flowers indigenous to English climate and soil; and they should introduce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. All excellent principles, afterward followed by Allan Ramsay. But the Guardian proceeded to cite Philips as an English poet who had fulfilled these conditions, and consequently established for himself a place side by side with Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, Philips