: De Carmine Pastorali Prefixed to Thomas Creech's translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus (1684) by Rapin Ren Congleton J E James Edmund Author Of Introduction Etc Creech Thomas Translator - Pastoral poetry History and criticism; Theocritus. Idylls

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No. 3

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

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

INTRODUCTION

In France the most prominent opponent to the theory formulated by Rapin is Fontenelle. In his "Discours sur la Nature de l'Eglogue" Fontenelle, with studied and impertinent disregard for the Ancients and for "ceux qui professent cette esp?ce de religion que l'on s'est faite d'adorer l'antiquit?," expressly states that the basic criterion by which he worked was "les lumi?res naturelles de la raison" . It is careless and incorrect to imply that Rapin's and Fontenelle's theories of pastoral poetry are similar, as Pope, Joseph Warton, and many other critics and scholars have done. Judged by basic critical principles, method, or content there is a distinct difference between Rapin and Fontenelle. Rapin is primarily a neoclassicist in his "Treatise"; Fontenelle, a rationalist in his "Discours." It is this opposition, then, of neoclassicism and rationalism, that constitutes the basic issue of pastoral criticism in England during the Restoration and the early part of the eighteenth century.

The influence of Rapin on the development of the pastoral, nevertheless, was salutary. Finding the genre vitiated with wit, extravagance, and artificiality, he attempted to strip it of these Renaissance excrescencies and restore it to its pristine purity by direct reference to the Ancients--Virgil, in particular. Though Rapin does not have the psychological insight into the esthetic principles of the genre equal to that recently exhibited by William Empson or even to that expressed by Fontenelle, he does understand the intrinsic appeal of the pastoral which has enabled it to survive, and often to flourish, through the centuries in painting, music, and poetry. Perhaps his most explicit expression of this appreciation is made while he is discussing Horace's statement that the muses love the country: And to speak from the very bottome of my heart... methinks he is much more happy in a Wood, that at ease contemplates this universe, as his own, and in it, the Sun and Stars, the pleasing Meadows, shady Groves, green Banks, stately Trees, flowing Springs, and the wanton windings of a River, fit objects for quiet innocence, than he that with Fire and Sword disturbs the World, and measures his possessions by the wast that lys about him .

J.E. Congleton University of Florida

Reprinted here from the copy owned by the Boston Athenaeum by permission.

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