: A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) by Purney Thomas Wasserman Earl R Earl Reeves Author Of Introduction Etc - Pastoral poetry

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Series Two:

No. 4

With an Introduction by Earl Wasserman

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

INTRODUCTION

One of Purney's major purposes in the essay was to dignify the pastoral by demonstrating that it admits all the components generally reserved for tragedy and the epic. Most critics had considered the pastoral a minor form and consequently had narrowed their attention to a few frequently debated questions, mainly the state of rural life to be depicted and the level of the style to be adopted. All agreed that the poem should be brief and simple in its fable, characters, and style. But it was therefore a poetic exercise, no more significant, Purney complained, than a madrigal. He was intent upon investing the pastoral with all the major poetic elements--extended, worthy fable; moral; fully-drawn characters; and appropriate expression. For in his mind the poem best incorporates one of the only two true styles, the tender, and therefore warrants a literary status beneath only tragedy and the epic.

In his usual nervous manner, the critic did not confine himself to his topic, but touched on a number of significant peripheral subjects. He showed the virtue of concrete and specific imagery at a time when most poets sought the sanctuary of abstractions and universals; commented cogently on the styles of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare; anticipated the later doctrine of the power of the incomplete and the obscure to suggest and therefore to compel the imagination to create; adopted and expanded Addison's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful; and, borrowing a suggestion that he probably found in Dennis , developed a profitable distinction between the sublime image and the sublime thought by examining their different psychological effects.

But it is hardly true that Purney's "true kinship is with the romantics," as Mr. White claims, for there is a wide chasm between a romantic and a daring and extravagant neoclassicist. Rather, Purney's search for a subjective psychological basis for criticism is one of the elements out of which the romantic aesthetics was eventually evolved, and it frequently led him to conclusions that reappear later in the eighteenth century.

Earl. R. Wasserman

A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE TRUE NATURE OF PASTORAL.

PROEME.

There are originally, answer'd Sophy, no perfect and real Kinds of Writing but them two. As for the Strong Lines, 'tis supplying the want of the Sublime with the Courtly and Florid Stile; as what we usually call the Fine and Agreeable is but bastard and degenerate from the truly Tender. But yet it must be added that this suits the Populace the best.

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