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Series Two:
Essays on Poetry


No. 3


Rapin’s De Carmine Pastorali,
prefixed to Thomas Creech’s translation
of the Idylliums of Theocritus (1684)


With an Introduction by
J. E. Congleton
and
a Bibliographical Note




The Augustan Reprint Society
July, 1947
Price: 75c

GENERAL EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles


ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan
Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska
Cleanth Brooks, Louisiana State University
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London




Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
by
Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
1947

Introduction

de Carmine Pastorali: the first Part

de Carmine Pastorali: the second Part

de Carmine Pastorali: the third Part

Errata

Bibliographic Note

INTRODUCTION

Recent students of criticism have usually placed Rapin in the School of Sense. In fact Rapin clearly denominates himself a member of that school. In the introduction to his major critical work, Reflexions sur la Poetique d'Aristote (1674), he states that his essay "is nothing else, but Nature put in Method, and good Sense reduced to Principles" (Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie, London, 1731, II, 131). And in a few passages as early as "A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali" (1659), he seems to imply that he is being guided in part at least by the criterion of "good Sense." For example, after citing several writers to prove that "brevity" is one of the "graces" of pastoral poetry, he concludes, "I could heap up a great many more things to this purpose, but I see no need of such a trouble, since no man can rationally doubt of the goodness of my Observation" (p.41).

The basic criterion, nevertheless, which Rapin uses in the "Treatise" is the authority of the Ancients—the poems of Theocritus and Virgil and the criticism of Aristotle and Horace. Because of his constant references to the Ancients, one is likely to conclude that he (like Boileau and Pope) must have thought they and Nature (good sense) were the same. In a number of passages, however, Rapin depends solely on the Ancients. Two examples will suffice to illustrate his absolutism. At the beginning of "The Second Part," when he is inquiring "into the nature of Pastoral," he admits:

And this must needs be a hard Task, since I have no guide, neither Aristotle nor Horace to direct me.... And I am of opinion that none can treat well and clearly of any kind of Poetry if he hath no helps from these two (p. 16).

In "The Third Part," when he begins to "lay down" his Rules for writing Pastorals," he declares:

Yet in this difficulty I will follow Aristotle's Example, who being to lay down Rules concerning Epicks, propos'd Homer as a Pattern, from whom he deduc'd the whole Art; So I will gather from Theocritus and Virgil, those Fathers of Pastoral, what I shall deliver on this account (p. 52).

These passages represent the apogee of the neoclassical criticism of pastoral poetry. No other critic who wrote on the pastoral depends so completely on the authority of the classical critics and poets. As a matter of fact, Rapin himself is not so absolute later. In the section of the Réflexions on the pastoral, he merely states that the best models are Theocritus and Virgil. In short, one may say that in the "Treatise" the influence of the Ancients is dominant; in the Réflexions, "good Sense."

Reduced to its simplest terms, Rapin's theory is Virgilian. When deducing his theory from the works of Theocritus and Virgil, his preference is almost without exception for Virgil. Finding Virgil's eclogues refined and elegant, Rapin, with a suggestion from Donatus (p. 10 and p. 14), concludes that the pastoral "belongs properly to the Golden Age" (p. 37)—"that blessed time, when Sincerity and Innocence, Peace, Ease, and Plenty inhabited the Plains" (p. 5). Here, then, is the immediate source of the Golden Age eclogue, which, being transferred to England and popularised by Pope, flourished until the time of Dr. Johnson and Joseph Warton.

In France the most prominent opponent to the theory formulated by Rapin is Fontenelle. In his "Discours sur la Nature de l'Eglogue" (1688) Fontenelle, with studied and impertinent disregard for the Ancients and for "ceux qui professent cette espèce de religion que l'on s'est faite d'adorer l'antiquité," expressly states that the basic criterion by which he worked was "les lumières naturelles de la raison" (OEuvres, Paris, 1790, V, 36). It is careless and incorrect to imply that