H.P. Lovecraft - The Despised Pastoral

H.P. LOVECRAFT

THE DESPISED PASTORAL

Written in July 1918
First published in The Conservative, Vol. 4, No. 1, July 1918

THE DESPISED PASTORAL

Among the many and complex tendencies observable in modern poetry, or what
answers for poetry in this age, is a decided but unjust scorn of the honest old
pastoral, immortalised by Theocritus and Virgil, and revived in our own
literature by Spencer.

Nor is this unfavorable attitude confined alone to the formal eclogue whose
classical elements are so well described and exemplified by Mr. Pope. Whenever
a versifier adorns his song with the pleasing and innocent imagery of this type
of composition, or borrows its mild and sweet atmosphere, he is forthwith
condemned as an irresponsible pedant and fossil by every little-wit critic in
Grub-street.

Modern bards, in their endeavour to display with seriousness and minute
verisimilitude the inward operations of the human mind and emotions, have come
to look down upon the simple description of ideal beauty, or the
straightforward presentation of pleasing images for no other purpose than to
delight the fancy. Such themes they deem trivial and artificial, and altogether
unworthy of an art whose design they take to be the analysis and reproduction
of Nature in all her moods and aspects.

But in this belief, the writer cannot but hold that our contemporaries are
misjudging the true province and functions of poesy. It was no starched
classicist, but the exceedingly unconventional Edgar Allen Poe, who roundly
denounced the melancholy metaphysicians and maintained that true poetry has for
its first object "pleasure, not truth", and "indefinite pleasure instead of
definite pleasure," intimating that its concern for the dull or ugly aspects of
life is slight indeed. That the American bard and critic was fundamentally just
in his deductions, seems well proved by a comparative survey of those poems of
all ages which have lived, and those which have fallen into deserved obscurity.

The English pastoral, based upon the best models of antiquity, depicts
engaging scenes of Arcadian simplicity, which not only transport the
imagination through their intrinsic beauty, but recall to the scholarly mind
the choicest remembrances of classical Greece and Rome. Though the combination
of rural pursuits with polished sentiments and diction is patently artificial,
the beauty is not a whit less; nor do the conventional names, phrases, and
images detract in the least from the quaint agreeableness of the whole. The
magic of this sort of verse is to any unprejudiced mind irresistible, and
capable of evoking a more deliciously placid and refreshing train of pictures
in the imagination than may be obtained from any more realistic species of
composition. Every untainted fancy begets ideal visions of which the pastoral
forms a legitimate and artistically necessary reflection.

It is not impossible that the intellectual upheaval attendant upon the present
conflict will bring about a general simplification and rectification of taste,
and an appreciation of the value of pure imaginary beauty in a world so full of
actual misery, which may combine to restore the despised pastoral to its proper
station.

THE END