Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/406

 centuries did not know whether it was of earth or the infinite; and this confused judgment made it willing to look on Nature partially as a beautiful machine, its exquisite mechanism worthy of such word-pictures as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso contain, partially as a pagan god to be duly invoked only in good old pagan fashion, and partially as a perishable nullity destined to be "rolled together as a scroll"—in any case connected by no profoundly real links with man’s social and individual life.

§ 98. "If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that the pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment. To carry this resemblance yet farther, it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life." So thought and wrote Alexander Pope in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. Yet who would look for genuine sympathy with Nature from the poet of court intrigues, personal satire, well-bred criticism, and a mongrel Nature in which Sicilian muses sing on the banks of the Thames, and our Theocritean acquaintances, Daphnis and the rest, repeat the similes of the Greek in correct English couplets? Who could expect such sympathy from the disciple of a poet who in his Passage du Rhin is more troubled by the insertion of ugly names ("Quel vers ne tomberait au seul nom de Heusden?") than the description of Nature, and mistakes lifeless symbols like "Rhine, leaning with one hand propped upon his urn," or the classical Naiades, for the fresh inspiration of Nature?

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the artificial poetry of courts did nothing for Nature but surround