Among the many and complex tendencies observable in modern poetry,
or what answers for poetry in this age, is a decided but unjust scorn of
the honest old
pastoral, immortalised by Theocritus and Virgil, and revived in
our own literature by Spencer.
Nor is this unfavorable attitude confined alone to the formal eclogue
whose classical elements are so well described and exemplified by Mr. Pope.
Whenever a
versifier adorns his song with the pleasing and innocent imagery
of this type of composition, or borrows its mild and sweet atmosphere,
he is forthwith condemned as
an irresponsible pedant and fossil by every little-wit critic in
Grub-street.
Modern bards, in their endeavour to display with seriousness and
minute verisimilitude the inward operations of the human mind and emotions,
have come to look
down upon the simple description of ideal beauty, or the straightforward
presentation of pleasing images for no other purpose than to delight the
fancy. Such themes
they deem trivial and artificial, and altogether unworthy of an
art whose design they take to be the analysis and reproduction of Nature
in all her moods and aspects.
But in this belief, the writer cannot but hold that our contemporaries
are misjudging the true province and functions of poesy. It was no starched
classicist, but the
exceedingly unconventional Edgar Allen Poe, who roundly denounced
the melancholy metaphysicians and maintained that true poetry has for its
first object
"pleasure, not truth", and "indefinite pleasure instead of definite
pleasure," intimating that its concern for the dull or ugly aspects of
life is slight ideed. That the
American bard and critic was fundamentally just in his deductions,
seems well proved by a comparative survey of those poems of all ages which
have lived, and
those which have fallen into deserved obscurity.
The English pastoral, based upon the best models of antiquity, depicts
engaging scenes of Arcadian simplicity, which not only transport the imagination
through their
intrinsic beauty, but recall to the scholarly mind the choicest
remembrances of classical Greece and Rome. Though the combination of rural
pursuits with polished
sentiments and diction is patently artificial, the beauty is not
a whit less; nor do the conventional names, phrases, and images detract
in the least from the quaint
agreeableness of the whole. The magic of this sort of verse is to
any unprejudiced mind irresistible, and capable of evoking a more deliciously
placid and refreshing
train of pictures in the imagination than may be obtained from any
more realistic species of composition. Every untainted fancy begets ideal
visions of which the
pastoral forms a legitimate and artistically necessary reflection.
It is not impossible that the intellectual upheaval attendant upon
the present conflict will bring about a general simplification and rectification
of taste, and an
appreciation of the value of pure imaginary beauty in a world so
full of actual misery, which may combine to restore the despised pastoral
to its proper station.
