." It is the neglect of this
implication which has caused the demurs. "'Natural!'" and "'true!'" they
say, "why, the Pastoral is the most frankly and in fact outrageously
unnatural and false of all literary kinds. Does not Urfe himself warn us
that we are not to expect ordinary shepherds and shepherdesses at all?"
Or perhaps they go more to detail. "The whole book is unabashedly
occupied with love-making; and love is not the whole, it is even a very
small part, of life, that is to say, of truth and nature." Or, to come
still closer to particulars, "Where, for instance, did Celadon, who is
represented as having been reduced to utter destitution when, _more
heroum_, he started a quasi-hermit life in the wood, get the
decorations, etc., of the Temple he erected to Love and Astree?" One
almost blushes at having to explain, in a popular style, the
mistakenness, to use the mildest word, of these objections. The present
writer, in a book less ambitious than the present on the sister subject
of the English novel, once ventured to point out that if you ask "where
Sir Guyon got that particularly convenient padlock with which he
fastened Occasion's tongue, and still more the hundred iron chains with
which he bound Furor?" that is to say, if you ask such a question
seriously, you have no business to read romance at all. As to the Love
matter, of that it is still less use to talk. There are some who would
go so far as to deny the major; even short of that hardiness it may be
safely urged that in poetry and romance Love _is_ the chief and
principal thing, and that the poet and the romancer are only acting up
to their commission in representing it as such. But the source of all
these errors is best reached, and if it may be, stopped, by dealing with
the first article of the indictment in the same way. What if Pastoral
_is_ artificial? That may be an argument against the kind as a whole,
but it cannot lie against a particular example of it, because that
example is bound to act up to its kind's law. And I think it not
extravagant to contend that the _Astree_ acts up to its law in the most
inoffensive fashion possible--in such a fashion, in fact, as is hardly
ever elsewhere found in the larger specimens, and by no means very often
in the smaller. Hardly even in _As You Like It_, certainly not in the
_Arcadia_, do the crook and the pipe get less in the way than they do
here. A minor cavil has been urged--that the "shepherds" and the
"knigh