A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral

A Full Enquiry into the Nature of
the Pastoral

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Title: A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717)
Author: Thomas Purney
Release Date: March 10, 2005 [EBook #15313]
Language: English
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Series Two:
Essays on Poetry No. 4
Thomas Purney, A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral
(1717)

With an Introduction by Earl Wasserman
The Augustan Reprint Society January, 1948 _Price_: $1.00

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_
ASSISTANT EDITOR W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of
Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska LOUIS I.
BREDVOLD, University of Michigan CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale
University JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR
FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago SAMUEL H. MONK, University
of Minnesota ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES
SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_
Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author by Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. 1948

INTRODUCTION
In the preface to each of his volumes of pastorals (_Pastorals. After the
simple Manner of Theocritus, 1717_; _Pastorals. viz. The Bashful
Swain: and Beauty and Simplicity, 1717_) Thomas Purney rushed into
critical discussions with the breathlessness of one impatient to reveal
his opinions, and, after touching on a variety of significant topics, cut
himself short with the promise of a future extensive treatise on pastoral
poetry. In 1933 Mr. H.O. White, unable to discover the treatise, was
forced to conclude that it probably had never appeared (_The Works of
Thomas Purney_, ed. H.O. White, Oxford, 1933, p. 111), although it
had been advertised at the conclusion of Purney's second volume of
poetry as shortly to be printed. A copy, probably unique, of A Full
Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (1717) was, however, recently
purchased by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the
University of California, and is here reproduced. Despite the obvious

failure of the essay to influence critical theory, it justifies attention
because it is the most thorough and specific of the remarkably few
studies of the pastoral in an age when many thought it necessary to
imitate Virgil's poetic career, and because it is, in many respects, a
contribution to the more liberal tendencies within neoclassic criticism.
Essentially, the Full Enquiry is a coherent expansion of the random
comments collected in the poet's earlier prefaces.
Purney belongs to the small group of early eighteenth-century critics
who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and
pre-established definitions of the _genres_, and to evolve one logically
from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in
other words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to the
subjective response. These men, such as Dennis and Addison, were not
searching for an aesthetics of safety, one that would produce
unimpeachable correctness; Purney frequently underscored his
preference for a faulty and irregular work that is alive to a meticulous
but dull one. This is not to be understood as praise of the irregular: the
rules of poetry must be established, but they must be founded rationally
on the ends of poetry, pleasure and profit, and the psychological
process by which they are received, and not solely on the practices and
doctrines of the ancients. Taking his cue from the Hobbesian and
Lockian methodology of Addison's papers of the pleasures of the
imagination without delving into Addison's sensational philosophy,
Purney outlined an extensive critical project to investigate (1) "the
Nature and Constitution of the human Mind, and what Pleasures it is
capable of receiving from Poetry"; (2) the best methods of exciting
those pleasures; (3) the rules whereby these methods may be
incorporated into literary form (_Works_, ed. White, p. 48). It is this
pattern of thought that regulates the Full Enquiry. Perhaps more than
any other poetic type, the pastoral of the Restoration and the early
eighteenth century was dominated by classical tradition; the verse
composed was largely imitative of the eclogues of Theocritus and
Virgil, especially the latter, and criticism of the form was deduced from
their practices or from an assumption that the true pastoral of antiquity
was the product of the Golden Age. Of this mode of criticism Rapin
and