employment.’  Shallow formalism this; but what else was to be expected from Alexander Pope at the age of sixteen?  His contemporaries, however, and successors down to Johnson, took his solemn vacuity in all seriousness.  Steele, writing in the Guardian in 1713 (Nos. 22, &c.), follows much the same lines.  He speaks of ’Innocence, Simplicity, and whatever else has been laid down as distinguishing Marks of Pastoral.’  Again, the reader is informed that ’Whoever can bear these’—­namely, certain concetti from Tasso and Guarini—­’may be assured he hath no Taste for Pastoral.’  We find the same pedantic and ignorant objections to Sannazzaro’s piscatorials as were later advanced by Johnson:  ‘who can pardon him,’ loftily queries the censor, ’for his Arbitrary Change of the sweet Manners and pleasing objects of the Country, for what in their own Nature are uncomfortable and dreadful?’ An afternoon’s idling along the cliffs of Sorento or the shore of Posilipo will supply a sufficient answer to such ignorant conceit as this.  Lastly, in the same familiar strain, but with all the pompous weight of undisputed dictatorship, we find Dr. Johnson a generation later laying down in the Rambler that a pastoral is ’a Poem in which any action or Passion is represented by its Effects upon a Country Life....  In Pastoral, as in other Writings, Chastity of sentiment ought doubtless to be observed, and Purity of Manners to be represented; not because the Poet is confined to the Images of the golden Age’—­this is a rap at Pope—­’but because, having the subject in his own Choice, he ought always to consult the Interest of Virtue.’  The one fixed idea which runs throughout these criticisms is that pastoral in its nature somehow is, or should be, other than what it is in fact[360].

This is a view which very rightly meets with small mercy at the hands of the modern historical school of criticism.  A last fragment of the hoary fallacy may be traced in Dr. Sommer’s remark:  ’Die Theorie des Hirtengedichtes ist kurz in folgenden Worten ausgedrueckt:  schlichte und ungekuenstelte Darstellung des Hirtenlebens und wahre Naturschilderung.’  It cannot be too emphatically laid down that there is and can be no such thing as a ‘theory’ of pastoral, or, indeed, of any other artistic form dependent, like it, upon what are merely accidental conditions.[361] As I started by pointing out at the beginning of this work, pastoral is not capable of definition by reference to any essential quality; whence it follows that any theory of pastoral is not a theory of pastoral as it exists, but as the critic imagines that it ought to exist.  ’Everything is what it is, and not another thing,’ and pastoral is what the writers of pastoral have made it.