The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717), by Thomas Purney

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Title: A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717)

Author: Thomas Purney

Release Date: March 10, 2005 [EBook #15313]

Language: English

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Series Two:

Essays on Poetry

No. 4

  Thomas Purney, A Full Enquiry into the
     True Nature of Pastoral (1717)

           With an Introduction by
               Earl Wasserman

         The Augustan Reprint Society
                January, 1948
               Price: $1.00

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

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

  EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
  BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska
  LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
  CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
  JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University
  ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
  SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
  ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
  JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London

  Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
  by
  Edwards Brothers, Inc.
  Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
  1948

INTRODUCTION

In the preface to each of his volumes of pastorals (Pastorals. After the simple Manner of Theocritus, 1717; Pastorals. viz. The Bashful Swain: and Beauty and Simplicity, 1717) Thomas Purney rushed into critical discussions with the breathlessness of one impatient to reveal his opinions, and, after touching on a variety of significant topics, cut himself short with the promise of a future extensive treatise on pastoral poetry. In 1933 Mr. H.O. White, unable to discover the treatise, was forced to conclude that it probably had never appeared (The Works of Thomas Purney, ed. H.O. White, Oxford, 1933, p. 111), although it had been advertised at the conclusion of Purney's second volume of poetry as shortly to be printed. A copy, probably unique, of A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (1717) was, however, recently purchased by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California, and is here reproduced. Despite the obvious failure of the essay to influence critical theory, it justifies attention because it is the most thorough and specific of the remarkably few studies of the pastoral in an age when many thought it necessary to imitate Virgil's poetic career, and because it is, in many respects, a contribution to the more liberal tendencies within neoclassic criticism. Essentially, the Full Enquiry is a coherent expansion of the random comments collected in the poet's earlier prefaces.

Purney belongs to the small group of early eighteenth-century critics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and pre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logically from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in other words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to the subjective response. These men, such as Dennis and Addison, were not searching for an aesthetics of safety, one that would produce unimpeachable correctness; Purney frequently underscored his preference for a faulty and irregular work that is alive to a meticulous but dull one. This is not to be understood as praise of the irregular: the rules of poetry must be established, but they must be founded rationally on the ends of poetry, pleasure and profit, and the psychological process by which they are received, and not solely on the practices and doctrines of the ancients. Taking his cue from the Hobbesian and Lockian methodology of Addison's papers of the pleasures of the imagination without delving into Addison's sensational philosophy, Purney outlined an extensive critical project to investigate (1) "the Nature and Constitution of the human Mind, and what Pleasures it is capable of receiving from Poetry"; (2) the best methods of exciting those pleasures; (3) the rules whereby these methods may be incorporated into literary form (Works, ed. White, p. 48). It is this pattern of thought that regulates the Full Enquiry. Perhaps more than any other poetic type, the pastoral of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century was dominated by classical tradition; the verse composed was largely imitative of the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, especially the latter, and criticism of the form was deduced from their practices or from an assumption that the true pastoral of antiquity was the product of the Golden Age. Of this mode of criticism Rapin and Pope were the leading exemplars. In opposition, Fontenelle, Tickell (if he was the author of the Guardian essays on the pastoral), and Purney developed their theories empirically and hence directed the pastoral away from the classical tradition. (On these two schools see J.E. Congleton, "Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1717," SP, XLI, 1944, pp. 544-575.) Although Purney adopted a modification of Aristotle's critical divisions into Fable, Character, Sentiment, and Diction, and took for granted the doctrine of the distinction of genres, he otherwise rejected traditional formulae and critical tenets, and began with the premise that man is most delighted by the imaginative perception of the states of life for which he would willingly exchange his own. These are "the busy, great, or pompous" (depicted in tragedy and the epic) and "the retir'd, soft, or easy" (depicted in the pastoral). From this analysis of "the Nature of the Human Mind," the characteristics of the true pastoral, such as the avoidance of the hardships and vulgarities of rural life, follow logically. Similarly, since a minutely drawn description deprives the reader's fancy of its naturally pleasurable exercise, pastoral descriptions should only set "the Image in the finest Light." Rapin, on the other hand, had determined the proper length of descriptions by examining Virgil and Theocritus. For the association of the pleasure afforded by the pastoral with the natural human delight in ease, Purney was indebted to the essays on the pastoral in The Guardian (see no. 22), from which he borrowed extensively for many of his principles, and to Fontenelle, who constructed his theory of the pastoral upon the premise that all men are dominated "par une certaine paresse." By contrast, although Pope adopted Fontenelle's premise, he tested its validity by relating it to the accepted