Читать книгу The Age of Pope - John Dennis - Страница 5

It is not unreasonable to call the period we are considering 'the Age of Pope.' He is the representative poet of his century. Its literary merits and defects are alike conspicuous in his verse, and he stands immeasurably above the numerous versifiers who may be said to belong to his school. Savage Landor has observed that there is no such thing as a school of poetry, and this is true in the sense that the essence of this divine art cannot be transmitted, but the form of the art may be, and Pope's style of workmanship made it readily imitable by accomplished craftsmen. Although he affected to call poetry an idle trade he devoted his whole life to its pursuit, and there are few instances in literature in which genius and unwearied labour have been so successfully united. It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his path commands our admiration.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744).

Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21st, 1688. He was the only son of his father, a merchant or tradesman, and a Roman Catholic at a time when the members of that church were proscribed by law. The boy was a cripple from his birth, and suffered from great bodily weakness both in youth and manhood. Looking back upon his life in after years he called it a 'long disease.' The elder Pope seems to have retired from business soon after his son's birth, and at Binfield, nine miles from Windsor, twenty-seven years of the poet's life were spent. As a 'papist' Pope was excluded from the Universities and from every public career, but even under happier circumstances his health would have condemned him to a secluded life. He gained some instruction from the family priest, and also went for a short time to school, but for the most part he was self-educated, and studied so severely that at seventeen his life was probably saved by the sound advice of Dr. Radcliffe to read less and to ride on horseback every day. The rhyming faculty was very early developed, and to use his own phrase he 'lisped in numbers.' As a boy he felt the magic of Spenser, whose enchanting sweetness and boundless wealth of imagination have been now for three hundred years a joy to every lover of poetry. Something, too, he learned from Waller and from Sandys, both of whom, but especially the former, had been of service in giving smoothness to the iambic distich, in which all of Pope's best poems are written. Dryden, however, whom when a little boy he saw at Will's coffee-house – 'Virgilium tantum vidi' records the memorable day – was the poet whose influence he felt most powerfully. Like Gray several years later, he declared that he learnt versification wholly from his works. From 'knowing Walsh,' the best critic in the nation in Dryden's opinion, the youthful Pope received much friendly counsel; and he had another wise friend in Sir William Trumbull, formerly Secretary of State, who recognized his genius, and gave him as warm a friendship as an old man can offer to a young one. The dissolute Restoration dramatist, Wycherley, was also his temporary companion. The old man, if Pope's story be true, asked him to correct his poems, which are indeed beyond correction, as the youthful critic appears to have hinted, and the two parted company.

The Pastorals, written, according to Pope's assertion, at the age of sixteen, were published in 1709, and won an amount of praise incomprehensible in the present day. Mr. Leslie Stephen has happily appraised their value in calling them 'mere school-boy exercises.' Not thus, however, were they regarded by the poet, or by the critics of his age, yet neither he nor they could have divined the rapid progress of his fame, and that in about six years' time he would be regarded as the greatest of living poets. The Essay on Criticism, written, it appears, in 1709, was published two years later, and received the highest honour a poem could then have. It was praised by Addison in the Spectator as 'a very fine poem,' and 'a masterpiece in its kind.' The 'kind,' suggested by the Ars Poetica of Horace, and the Art Poétique of Boileau – translated with Dryden's help by Sir William Soame – suited the current taste for criticism and argument in rhyme, which had led Roscommon to write an Essay on Translated Verse, and Sheffield an Essay on Poetry. The Essay on Criticism is a marvellous production for a young man who had scarcely passed his maturity when it was published. To have written lines and couplets that live still in the language and are on everyone's lips is an achievement of which any poet might be proud, and there are at least twenty such lines or couplets in the poem.

In 1713 Windsor Forest appeared. Through the most susceptible years of life the poet had lived in the country, but Nature and Pope were not destined to become friends; he looked at her 'through the spectacles of books' and his description of natural objects is invariably of the conventional type. Although never a resident in London he was unable in the exercise of his art to breathe any atmosphere save that of the town, and might have said, in the words of Lessing to his friend Kleist, 'When you go to the country I go to the coffee-house.'11

The use, or as it would be more correct to say the abuse, of classical mythology in the description of rural scenes had the sanction of great names, and Pope was not likely to reject what Spenser and Milton had sanctioned. Gods and goddesses therefore play a conspicuous part in his description of the Forest. The following lines afford a fair illustration of the style throughout, and the sole merit of the poem is the smoothness of versification in which Pope excelled.

Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit, but his sense of humour was small, and the descent from these deities to Queen Anne savours not a little of bathos.

In 1712 Pope had published The Rape of the Lock, which Addison justly praised as 'a delicious little thing.' At the same time he advised the poet not to attempt improving it, which he proposed to do, and Pope most unreasonably attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the poem to remove the discord caused by the fatal shears, but its publication, and two or three offensive allusions it contained, only served to add to Miss Fermor's annoyance. 'The celebrated lady herself,' the poet wrote, 'is offended, and which is stranger, not at herself but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another's character or fame?' But Pope, whose praise of women is too often a libel upon them, was not as tender as he ought to have been of the lady's reputation.

The offence felt by the heroine of the poem is now unheeded; the dainty art exhibited is a permanent delight, and our language can boast no more perfect specimen of the poetical burlesque than the Rape of the Lock. The machinery of the sylphs is managed with perfect skill, and nothing can be more admirable than the charge delivered by Ariel to the sylphs to guard Belinda from an apprehended but unknown danger. The concluding lines shall be quoted:

Another striking portion of the poem is the description of the Spanish game of Ombre, imitated from Vida's Scacchia Ludus. 'Vida's poem,' says Mr. Elwin, 'is a triumph of ingenuity, when the intricacy of chess is considered, and the difficulty of expressing the moves in a dead language. Yet the original is eclipsed by Pope's more consummate copy.'12

Many famous passages illustrative of Pope's art might be extracted from this poem, but it will suffice to give the portrait of Belinda:

The Temple of Fame, a liberal paraphrase of Chaucer's House of Fame, followed in 1715, and despite the praise of Steele, who declared that it had a thousand beauties, and of Dr. Johnson, who observes that every part is splendid, must be pronounced one of Pope's least attractive pieces. Two poems of the emotional and sentimental class, Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717), are more worthy of attention. Nowhere, probably, in the language are finer specimens to be met with of rhetorical pathos, but poets like Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can touch the heart more deeply by a phrase or couplet than Pope is able to do by his elaborate representations of passion. The reader is not likely to be affected by the following response of Eloisa to an invitation from the spirit world:

The music or the fervour of the poem delighted Porson, famous for his Greek and his potations, and whether drunk or sober he would recite, or rather sing it, from the beginning to the end. The felicity of the versification is incontestable, but at the same time artifice is more visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of The Elegy, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester, a lady whose death was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of poetical rhetoric as can be found in Pope's verse.

For some years Pope had been brooding over and slowly labouring at a task which was destined to add greatly to his fame and also to his fortune.

In 1708 his early friend, Sir William Trumbull, had advised him to translate the Iliad, and five years later the poet, following the custom of the age, invited subscriptions to the work, which was to appear in six volumes at the price of six guineas. About this time Swift, who by the aid of his powerful pen was assisting Harley and St. John to rule the country, made Pope's acquaintance, and ultimately became perhaps the most faithful of his friends. Swift, who was able to help everybody but himself, zealously promoted the poet's scheme, and was heard to say at the coffee-houses that 'the best poet in England Mr. Pope a Papist' had begun a translation of Homer which he should not print till he had a thousand guineas for him.

He was not satisfied with this service, but introduced the poet to St. John, Atterbury, and Harley. The first volume of Pope's Homer appeared in 1715, and in the same year Addison's friend Tickell published his version of the first book of the Iliad. Pope affected to believe that this was done at Addison's instigation.

Already, as we have said, there had been a misunderstanding between the two famous wits, and Pope, whose irritable temperament led him into many quarrels and created a host of enemies, ceased from this time to regard Addison as a friend. Probably neither of them can be exempted from blame, and we can well believe that Addison, whose supremacy had formerly been uncontested, could not without some jealousy 'bear a brother near the throne,' but the chief interest of the estrangement to the literary student is the famous satire written at a later date, in which Addison appears under the character of Atticus.13 It is necessary to add here that the whole story of the quarrel comes to us from Pope, who is never to be trusted, either in prose or verse, when he wishes to excuse himself at the expense of a rival.

Pope had no cause for discontent at his position; not even the strife of parties stood in the way of his Homer, which was praised alike by Whig and Tory, and brought the translator a fortune. It has been calculated that the entire version of the Iliad and Odyssey, the payments for which covered eleven years, yielded Pope a clear profit of about £9,000, and it is said to have made at the same time the fortune of his publisher. Pope, I believe, was the first poet who, without the aid of patronage or of the stage, was able to live in comfort from the sale of his works.

He knew how to value money, but fame was dearer to him than wealth, and of both he had now enough to satisfy his ambition. Posterity has not endorsed the general verdict of his contemporaries on his famous translation. He had to encounter indeed some severe comments, and Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness, and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr. Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's Homer 'exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of the Father of Poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his unaffected majesty,' and observes that this cannot be totally denied. He argues, however, that even in Virgil's time the demand for elegance had been so much increased that mere nature could be endured no longer, that every age improves in elegance, that if some Ovidian graces are, alas! not to be found in the English Iliad 'to have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away.' Johnson was not aware that to add 'poetical elegances' to the words and thoughts of a great poet is to destroy much of the beauty of his verse and many of its most striking characteristics. As well might he say that the beauty of a lovely woman can be enhanced by a profusion of trinkets, or that a Greek statue would be more worthy of admiration if it were elegantly dressed. Dr. Johnson says, with perfect truth, that Pope wrote for his own age, and it may be added that he exhibits extraordinary art in ministering to the taste of the age; yet it is hardly too much to affirm that in the exercise of his craft as a translator he is continually false to nature and therefore false to Homer.

On the other hand his Iliad if read as a story runs so smoothly, that the reader, and especially the young reader, is carried through the narrative without any sense of fatigue. It is not a little praise to say that it is a poem which every school-boy will read with pleasure, and in which every critical reader who is content to surrender his judgment for awhile, will find pleasure also. Mr. Courthope in his elaborate and masterly Life of Pope, which gives the coping stone to an exhaustive edition of the poet's works, praises a fine passage from the Iliad, which in his judgment attains perhaps the highest level of which the heroic couplet is capable, and 'I do not believe,' he adds, 'that any Englishman of taste and imagination can read the lines without feeling that if Pope had produced nothing but his translation of Homer, he would be entitled to the praise of a great original poet.'

Pope's editor could not perhaps have selected a better illustration of his best manner than this speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus, which is parodied in the Rape of the Lock. The concluding lines shall be quoted.

We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope's inability – shared in great measure with every translator – to catch the spirit of the original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its merit is the more wonderful since the poet's knowledge of Greek was extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to earlier translations. Gibbon said that his Homer had every merit except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever equal his.

All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to his version of the Iliad. On that he expended his best powers, and on that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains. The Odyssey, one of the most beautiful stories in the world, appears to have been taken up with a weary pen, and in putting it into English he sought the assistance of Broome and Fenton, two minor poets and Cambridge scholars. They translated twelve books out of the twenty-four, and so skilfully did they catch Pope's style that it is almost impossible to discern any difference between his work and theirs. The literary partnership led to one of Pope's discreditable manœuvres, in which, strange to say, he was assisted by Broome, whom he induced to set his name to a falsehood. Pope as we have said, translated twelve books, while eight were allotted to Broome and four to Fenton. Yet he led Broome, unknown to his colleague, to ascribe only three books to himself and two to Fenton, and at the same time the poet, who confessed that he could 'equivocate pretty genteely,' stated the amount he had paid for Broome's eight books as if it had been paid for three. The story is disgraceful both to Pope and Broome, and why the latter should have practised such a deception is unaccountable. He was a beneficed clergyman and a man of wealth, so that he could not have lied for money even if Pope had been willing to bribe him. Fenton was indignant, as he well might be, but he was too lazy or too good-natured to expose the fraud. Broome had his deserts later on, but Pope, who ridiculed him in the Dunciad, and in his Treatise on the Bathos, was the last man in the world entitled to render them.

The partnership in poetry which produced the Odyssey was not a great literary success, and most readers will prefer the version of Cowper, whose blank verse, though out of harmony with the rapid movement of the Iliad is not unfitted for the quieter beauties of the Odyssey.

In 1721, prior to the publication of his version, the poet had agreed to edit an edition of Shakespeare, a task as difficult as any which a man of letters can undertake. Pope was not qualified to achieve it. He was comparatively ignorant of Elizabethan literature, the dry labours of an editor were not to his taste, and he lacked true sympathy with the genius of the poet. Failure was therefore inevitable, and Theobald, who has some solid merits as a commentator, found it easy to discern and to expose the errors of Pope. For doing so he was afterwards 'hitched' into the Dunciad, and made in the first instance its hero. The "Shakespeare" was published in 1725 in six volumes quarto. 'Its chief claim,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'to interest at the present day, is that it forms the immediate starting-point for the long succession of Pope's satires… The vexation caused to the poet by the undoubted justice of many of Theobald's strictures procured for the latter the unwelcome honour of being recognized as the King of the Dunces, and coupled with Bentley's disparaging mention of the Translation of the Iliad provoked the many contemptuous allusions to verbal criticism in Pope's later satires.'14

A striking peculiarity of Pope's art may be mentioned here. He was able only to play on one instrument, the heroic couplet. When he attempted any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was mediocrity. It was a daring act of Pope to suggest by his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, a comparison with the Alexander's Feast of Dryden. The performance is perfunctory rather than spontaneous, and the few lyrical efforts he attempted in addition, show no ear for music. The voice of song with which even the minor poets of the Elizabethan age were gifted was silent in England, though not in Scotland, during the first half of the eighteenth century, or if a faint note is occasionally heard, as in the lyrics of Gay, it is without the grace and joyous freedom of the earlier singers. Not that the lyrical form was wanting; many minor versifiers, like Hughes, Sheffield, Granville, and Somerville, wrote what they called songs, but unfortunately without an ear for singing.

In this short summary and criticism of a poet's literary life it would be out of place to insert many biographical details, were it not that, in the case of Pope, the student who knows little or nothing of the man will fail to understand his poetry. A distinguished critic has said that the more we know of Pope's age the better shall we understand Pope. With equal truth it may be said that a familiarity with the poet's personal character is essential to an adequate appreciation of his genius. His friendships, his enmities, his mode of life at Twickenham, the entangled tale of his correspondence, his intrigues in the pursuit of fame, his constitutional infirmities, the personal character of his satires, these are a few of the prominent topics with which a student of the poet must make himself conversant. It may be well, therefore, to give the history in brief outline, and we have now reached the crisis in his fortunes which will conveniently enable us to do so.

In 1716 Pope's family had removed from Binfield to Chiswick. A year later he lost his father, to whose memory he has left a filial tribute, and shortly afterwards he bought the small estate of five acres at Twickenham with which his name is so intimately associated. Before reaching the age of thirty Pope was regarded as the first of living poets. His income more than sufficed for all his wants. At Twickenham the great in intellect, and the great by birth, met around his table; he was welcomed by the highest society in the land, and although proud of his intimacy with the nobility, 'unplaced, unpensioned,' he was 'no man's heir or slave,' and jealously preserved his independence. 'Pope,' says Johnson, 'never set genius to sale, he never flattered those whom he did not love, or praised those whom he did not esteem,' and he was, we may add, in this respect a striking contrast to Dryden, who lavished his flatteries wholesale.

With a mother to whom he was tenderly attached, with troops of friends, with an undisputed supremacy in the world of letters, and with a vocation that was the joy of his heart, – if possessions like these can confer happiness, Pope should have been a happy man.

But his 'crazy carcass,' as the painter Jervas called it, was united to the most suspicious and irritable of temperaments, and the fine wine of his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup. Pope could be a warm friend, but was not always a faithful one, and even women whose friendship he had enjoyed suffered from the venom of his satire. He was not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made love,15 cannot easily be characterized in moderate language. Lady Mary had little delicacy herself, but the poet, who thought himself a gentleman, had no excuse for abusing her. Excuses indeed are not easily to be offered for Pope's moral defalcations. His life was a series of petty intrigues, trickeries, and deceptions. He could not, it has been said, – the conceit is borrowed from Young's Satires– 'take his tea without a stratagem,' and knew how to utter the loftiest sentiments while acting the most contemptible of parts.

The long and intricate deceptions which he practised to secure the publication of his letters, while so manipulating them as to enhance his credit, were suspected to some extent in his own age, and have been painfully laid bare in ours. It is an amazing story, which may be read at large in Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, or in the elaborate narrative of Mr. Elwin in the first volume of his edition of Pope. It will be there seen how the poet compiled fictitious letters, suppressed passages, altered dates, manufactured letters out of other letters, and secretly enabled the infamous bookseller Curll to publish his correspondence surreptitiously in order that he might have the excuse for printing it himself in a more carefully prepared form. The worst feature of the miserable story is the poet's conduct with regard to Swift, his oldest and most faithful friend. On this subject the writer may be allowed to quote what he has said elsewhere.

'Years before, Swift, who cared little for literary reputation, and never resorted to any artifice to promote it, had suspected Pope of a desire to make literary capital out of their correspondence, and the poet had excused himself according to his wonted fashion. After the publication by Curll, he begged Swift to return him his letters lest they should fall into the bookseller's hands. The Dean replied, no doubt to Pope's infinite chagrin, that they were safe in his keeping, as he had given strict orders in his will that his executors should burn every letter he might leave behind him. Afterwards he promised that Pope should eventually have them but declined giving them up during his lifetime. Hereupon Pope changed his tactics and begged that he might have the letters to print. The publication by Curll of two letters (probably another ruse of Pope's) formed an additional ground for urging his request. All his efforts were unavailing until he obtained the assistance of Lord Orrery, to whom Swift was at length induced to deliver up the letters. There was a hiatus in the correspondence and Pope took advantage of this and of a blunder made by Swift, whose memory at the time was not to be trusted, to hint, what he dared not directly assert, that the bulk of the collection remained with the Dean, and that Swift's own letters had been returned to him. We have now irresistible proof that the Dublin edition of the letters was taken from an impression sent from England and sent by Pope. Nor was this all. The poet acted with still greater meanness, for he had the audacity to deplore the sad vanity of Swift in permitting the publication of his correspondence, and to declare that "no decay of body is half so miserable."'16

That he had many fine qualities in spite of the littlenesses which mar his character one would be loath to doubt. Among his nobler traits was an ardent passion for literature, a courage which enabled him to face innumerable obstacles – 'Pope,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'was as bold as a lion' – and a constant devotion to his parents, especially to his mother, who lived to a great age. There are no sincerer words in his letters than those which relate to Mrs. Pope. 'It is my mother only,' he once wrote, regretting his inability to leave home, 'that robs me of half the pleasure of my life, and that gives me the greatest at the same time,' and the lines expressing his affection for her are familiar to most readers. Truly does Johnson say that 'life has among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son.'

Among his lady friends the dearest was Martha Blount, the younger of two beautiful sisters, of whom Gay sang as 'the fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown.' They came of an old Roman Catholic family residing at Mapledurham, and were little more than girls when Pope first knew them. With the elder sister he quarrelled, but Martha was faithful to him for life, and when he was dying it is said that her coming in 'gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him.' Swift, as we have said, was one of the warmest of Pope's friends, and his letters to the poet are by far the most attractive portion of the published correspondence. He visited him at Twickenham more than once, and on one occasion spent some months under his roof. Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' who for a time lived near to him at Dawley, was a frequent guest, so also, in the days of their intimacy, was Lady Mary, who had a house at Twickenham. Thomson the poet, too, lived not far off, and was visited by his brother bard, whom Thomson's barber describes as 'a strange, ill-formed, little figure of a man,' but he adds, 'I have heard him and Quin and Patterson17 talk so together that I could have listened to them for ever.' Arbuthnot, one of the finest wits and best men of his time, who, as Swift said, could do everything but walk, was also a faithful friend of Pope; so was Gay, and so was Bishop Atterbury, who, as the poet said, first taught him to think "as becomes a reasonable creature."

James Craggs, who had been formerly Secretary of State, and was on the warmest terms of intimacy with the poet, resided for some time near his friend in order to enjoy the pleasure of his society. When in office he proposed to pay him a pension of £300 a year out of the secret service money, but Pope declined the offer. Statesmen and men of active pursuits cultivated the society of the poetical recluse, and Pope, whose compliments are monuments more enduring than marble, has recorded their visits to Twickenham:

Among Pope's associates was the 'blameless Bethel,'

' – who always speaks his thought,

And always thinks the very thing he ought,'

and Berkeley who had 'every virtue under heaven,' and Lord Bathurst who was unspoiled by wealth and joined

'With splendour, charity; with plenty, health;'

and 'humble Allen' who

'Did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame;'

and many another friend who lives in his verse and is secure of the immortality a poet can confer.

The five volumes which contain the letters between Pope and his friends exhibit an interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care. Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says Horace Walpole, 'as much as the Essay on Man, and as they were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written to anybody.' Pope said once, what he did not mean, that he could not write agreeable letters. This was true; his letters are, as Charles Fox said, 'very bad,' but some of Pope's friends write admirably, and if there is much that can be skipped without loss in the correspondence, there is much which no student of the period can afford to neglect. 'There has accumulated,' says Mark Pattison, 'round Pope's poems a mass of biographical anecdote such as surrounds the writings of no other English author,' and not a little knowledge of this kind is to be gleaned from his correspondence.

In the years spent at Twickenham Pope produced his most characteristic work. It is as a satirist that he, with one exception, excels all English poets, and Pope's careful workmanship often makes his satirical touches more attractive than Dryden's.

'To attack vices in the abstract,' he said to Arbuthnot, 'without touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows;' and Pope, under the plea of a detestation of vice, generally betrayed his contempt or hatred of the men whom he assailed. No doubt the critics and Grub Street hacks of the day gave him provocation. Pope, however, was frequently the first to take the field, and so eager was he to meet his foes that it would seem as if he enjoyed the conflict. Yet there were times when he felt acutely the assaults made upon him. 'These things are my diversion,' he once said, with a ghastly smile, and it was observed that he writhed in agony like a man undergoing an operation. The attacks made with these paper bullets, not only on the side of Grub Street but on his own, show very vividly the coarseness of London society. Courtesy was disregarded by men who claimed to be wits and scholars. Pope held, perhaps, a higher place in literature in his own day than Lord Tennyson has held in ours, for the best beloved of Laureates had noble rivals and friends who came near to him in fame, while Pope, until the publication of Thomson's Seasons, in 1730, stood alone in poetical reputation. Yet he was reviled in the language of Billingsgate, and had no scruple in using that language himself. Late in life Pope collected the libels made upon him and bound them in four volumes, but he omitted to mention the provocation which gave rise to many of them. Eusden, Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth, and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable notoriety to names of which the larger number were 'born to be forgot.'

In 1725 Swift had written to Pope advising him not to immortalize the names of bad poets by putting them in his verse, and Pope replied to this advice by saying, 'I am much the happier for finding (a better thing than our wits) our judgments jump in the notion that all scribblers should be passed by in silence.' How entirely his inclination got the better of his judgment was seen three years later in the Dunciad. The first three books of this famous satire were published in 1728. It is generally regarded as Pope's masterpiece, but the accuracy of such an estimate is doubtful. So heavily weighted is the poem with notes, prefaces, and introductions that the text appears to be smothered by them. It was Pope's aim to mystify his readers, and in this he has succeeded, for the mystifications of the poem even confound the commentators. The personalities of the satire excited a keen interest, and much amusement to readers who were not included in Pope's black list of dunces. At the same time it roused a number of authors to fury, as it well might. His satire is often unjust, and he includes among the dunces men wholly undeserving of the name, who had had the misfortune to offend him. To place a great scholar like Bentley, an eloquent and earnest preacher like Whitefield, and a man of genius like Defoe among the dunces was to stultify himself, and if Pope in his spite against Theobald found some justification for giving the commentator pre-eminence for dulness in three books of the Dunciad, his anger got the better of his wit when in Book IV. he dethroned Theobald to exalt Colley Cibber. For Cibber, with a thousand faults, so far from being dull had a buoyancy of heart and a sprightliness of intellect wholly out of harmony with the character he is made to assume.

That he might have some excuse for his dashing assaults in the Dunciad, Pope had published in the third volume of the Miscellanies, of which he and Swift, Arbuthnot and Gay were the joint authors, an Essay on Bathos in which several writers of the day were sneered at. The assault provoked the counter-attack for which Pope was looking, and he then produced the satire which was already prepared for the press. In its publication the poet, as usual, made use of trickery and deception. At first he issued an imperfect edition with initial letters instead of names, but on seeing his way to act more openly, the poem appeared in a large edition with names and notes.

'In order to lessen the danger of prosecution for libel,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'he prevailed on three peers, with whom he was on the most intimate terms, the good-natured Lord Bathurst, the easy-going Earl of Oxford, and the magnificent Earl of Burlington, to act as his nominal publishers; and it was through them that copies of the enlarged edition were at first distributed, the booksellers not being allowed to sell any in their shops. The King and Queen were each presented with a copy by the hands of Sir R. Walpole. In this manner, as the report quickly spread that the poem was the property of rich and powerful noblemen, there was a natural disinclination on the part of the dunces to take legal proceedings, and the prestige of the Dunciad being thus fairly established, the booksellers were allowed to proceed with the sale in regular course.'19

The Dunciad owes its merit to the literary felicities with which its pages abound. The theme is a mean one. Pope, from his social eminence at Twickenham, looks with scorn on the authors who write for bread, and with malignity on the authors whom he regarded as his enemies. There is, for the most part, little elevation in his method of treatment, and we can almost fancy that we see a cruel joy in the poet's face as he impales the victims of his wrath. Some portions of the Dunciad are tainted with the imagery which, to quote the strong phrase of Mr. Churton Collins, often makes Swift as offensive as a polecat,20 and there is no part of it which can be read with unmixed pleasure, if we except the noble lines which conclude the satire. Those lines may be almost said to redeem the faults of the poem, and they prove incontestably, if such proof be needed, Pope's claim to a place among the poets.

The publication of the Dunciad showed Pope where his main strength as a poet lay. That the writers he had attacked, in many instances without provocation, should resent the ungrateful notoriety conferred upon them was inevitable. In self-defence, and to add to the provocation already given, he started a paper called the Grub Street Journal, which existed for eight years – Pope, who had no scruple in 'hazarding a lie,' denying all the time that he had any connection with it.

His next work of significance, The Essay on Man, a professedly philosophical poem by an author who knew little of philosophy, was published in four epistles, in 1733-4. Bolingbroke's brilliant, versatile, and shallow intellect had strongly impressed Swift, and had also fascinated Pope. It has been commonly supposed that the Essay owes its existence to his suggestion and guidance. The poet believed in his philosophy, and had the loftiest estimate of his genius. In the last and perhaps finest passage of the poem he calls Bolingbroke the 'master of the poet and the song,' and draws a picture of the ambitious statesman as beautiful as it is false. In Mark Pattison's Introduction to The Essay on Man,21 which every student of Pope will read, he objects to the notion that the poet took the scheme of his work from Bolingbroke, observing that both derived their views from a common source.

'Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet, argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God, and the constitution of the world was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of his friend's more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711), King on the Origin of Evil (1702), and particularly to Leibnitz, Essais de Théodicée (1710).'

In admitting that Pope followed the impulse of a more powerful mind, Mr. Pattison asserts as much perhaps as can be known with certainty as to Bolingbroke's influence, but it is reasonable to believe that the close intercourse of the two men did immensely sway the more impressionable, and, so far as philosophy is concerned, the more ignorant of the two. Mr. Pattison also overlooks the fact that Pope confessed to Warburton that he had never read a line of Leibnitz in his life. That the poet acknowledges his large debt to Bolingbroke, and that Bolingbroke confesses it was due, is all that can be declared with certainty. That which makes the Essay worthy the reading is the fruit, not of the argument but of the poetry, and for that Pope trusted to his own genius.

His attempt to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' is confused and contradictory, and no modern reader, perplexed with the mystery of existence, is likely to gain aid from Pope. Nominally a Roman Catholic, and in reality a deist, apart from poetry he does not seem to have had strong convictions on any subject, and was content to be swayed by the opinions current in society. In undertaking to write an ethical work like the Essay his ambition was greater than his strength, yet if Pope's philosophy does not 'find' us, to use Coleridge's phrase, it did appeal to a large number of minds in his own day, and had not lost its popularity at a later period. The poem has been frequently translated into French, into Italian, and into German; it was pronounced by Voltaire to be the most useful and sublime didactic poem ever written in any language; it was admired by Kant and quoted in his lectures; and it received high praise from the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart. The charm of poetical expression is lost or nearly lost in translations, and while the sense may be retained the aroma of the verse is gone. The popularity of the Essay abroad is therefore not easily to be accounted for, unless we accept the theory that the shallow creed on which it is based suited an age less earnest than our own.22

Pope has no strong convictions in this poem, but he has many moods. On one page he is a pantheist, on another he says what he probably did not mean, that God inspires men to do evil, and on a third that 'all our knowledge is ourselves to know.' Nowhere in the argument does Pope seem to have a firm standing, and De Quincey is not far wrong in saying that it is 'the realization of anarchy.'

Read the poem for its poetical merits and you will forget its defects. Pope was a superficial teacher, but direct teaching is not the end of poetry. The Essay on Man is not a poem which can be read and re-read with ever-growing delight, but there are passages in it of as fine an order as any that he has composed on more familiar subjects. Pope was, as Sir William Hamilton said, a curious reader, and the ideas versified in the poem may be traced to a variety of sources. Students who wish to follow this track will find all the help they need in Mr. Pattison's instructive notes, and in the comments attached to the poem in Elwin and Courthope's edition. In his Introduction Mr. Pattison observes that 'the subject of the Essay on Man is not, considered in itself, one unfit for poetry. Had Pope had a genius for philosophy there was no reason why he should not have selected a philosophical subject. Didactic poetry is a mistake if not a contradiction in terms. But poetry is not necessarily didactic because its subject is philosophical.'

It is always difficult to define the themes suitable for poetry. Many theories have been formed as to the scope of the art, and poets have been amply instructed by critics as to what they ought to do, and what they should avoid doing. The theories may appear sound, the arguments convincing, until a great poet arises and knocks them on the head. In a sense every poet of the highest order is also a philosopher and a prophet who sees into 'the life of things.' Whether a philosophical subject can be fitly represented in the imaginative light of poetry is a matter for discussion rather than for decision. In the case of Pope, however, it will be evident to all studious readers that he was incapable of the continuous thought needed for the argument of the Essay.

'Anything like sustained reasoning,' says Mr. Leslie Stephen,' was beyond his reach. Pope felt and thought by shocks and electric flashes… The defect was aggravated or caused by the physical infirmities which put sustained intellectual labour out of the question.'23

Crousaz, a Swiss pastor and professor, who appears to have competed with Berkeley for a prize and won it, attacked Pope's Essay for its want of orthodoxy, and his work was translated into English. The poet became alarmed, but had the good fortune to find a champion in Warburton, who for the rest of his life did Pope much service, not always of a reputable kind. We shall have more to say of him later on, and it will suffice to observe here that Warburton, who through Pope's friendship obtained a good wife, a fortune, and a bishopric, was not a man of high character. His sole object was to advance in life, and he succeeded.

The Moral Essays as they are called, and the Imitations from Horace are the final and crowning efforts of the poet's genius. They contain his finest workmanship as a satirist, and will be read, I think, with more pleasure than the Dunciad, despite Mr. Ruskin's judgment of that poem as 'the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country.'24 It is impossible to concur in this estimate. The imagery of the poem serves only to disgust, and the spiteful attacks made in it on forgotten men want the largeness of purpose that lifts satire above what is of temporary interest, making it a lesson for all time.

Pope's venom, and the personal animosities which give the sharpest sting, and in some instances a zest, to his verse, are also amply displayed in the Moral Essays and in the Imitations, but the scope is wider in these poems, and the subjects allow of more versatile treatment. They should be read with the help of notes, a help generally needed for satirical poetry, but it should be remembered always that editorial judgments are to be received with discretion and not servilely followed. There is perhaps no danger more carefully to be shunned by the student of literature than the habit of resting satisfied with opinions at second-hand. Better a wrong estimate formed after due reading and thought, than a right estimate gleaned from critics, without any thought at all.

According to Warburton, who is as tricky as Pope himself when it suits his purpose to be so, the Essay on Man was intended to form four books, in which, as part of the general design, the Moral Essays would have been included, as well as Book IV. of the Dunciad, but to have welded these Essays, which were published separately, into one continuous poem would neither have suited Pope's genius nor the character of the poems; and how the last book of the Dunciad could have been included in such an olla podrida it is difficult to conceive. The poet was fond of projects, and this, happily for his readers, remained one. The dates of the four Essays, which are really Epistles, and appeared in folio pamphlets, run over several years, but were afterwards re-arranged by Pope. That to Lord Burlington, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle IV.), was published in 1731, under the title, Of False Taste; that to Lord Bathurst, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle III), in 1732; the epistle to Lord Cobham (Epistle I.), Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, bears the date of 1733; and that To a Lady (Epistle II.), Of the Characters of Women, in 1735. Pope wrote other Epistles, some at a much earlier period of his career, which follow the Moral Essays but are not connected with them. Of these one is addressed to Addison, two are to Martha Blount, for whom the second of the Moral Essays was written; one to the painter Jervas, originally printed in 1717; while another, a few lines only in length, was addressed to Craggs when Secretary of State. Space will not allow of examining each of the Essays minutely, but there are portions of them which call for comment.

The first Moral Essay, Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, in which Pope enlarges on his theory of a ruling passion, affords a significant example of his incapacity for sustaining an argument, since Warburton, to use his own words, entirely changed and reversed the order and disposition of the several parts to make the composition more coherent. That he has succeeded is doubtful, that he should have ventured upon such a task shows where Pope's weakness lay as a philosophical poet. It is the least interesting of the Essays, but is not without lines that none but Pope could have written. The Characters of Women, the subject of the second Essay, was not one which the satirist could treat with justice. He saw little in the sex save their foibles, and the lines with which it opens show the spirit that animates the poem:

The satire contains one of Pope's offensive allusions to Lady Mary, and the celebrated portrait drawn from two notable women, the Duchess of Buckingham and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, from the latter of whom the poet, at one time, despite his unquestionable love of independence, received £1,000. The story, like many another in the career of Pope, is wrapt in mystery.

Pope took great pains with the Epistle Of the Use of Riches. It was altered from the original conception by the advice of Warburton, who cared more for the argument of a poem than for its poetry. The thought and purpose of the Essay are defective, notwithstanding Warburton's effort to clear them, but these defects are of slight moment when compared with the brilliant passages with which the poem is studded. Among them is the famous description of the Duke of Buckingham's death-bed which should be compared with Dryden's equally famous lines on the same nobleman's character.

There is also a covert attack in this Epistle upon the moneyed interest represented by Walpole, and on the political corruption which he sanctioned and promoted. Yet Pope knew how to praise the great Whig statesman for his social qualities:

Epistle IV. pursues the same subject as the third, and deals mainly with false taste in the expenditure of wealth, and with the necessity of following 'sense, of every art the soul.' In this poem there is the far-famed description of Timon's Villa, and by Timon Pope was accused of representing the Duke of Chandos, whose estate at Canons he is supposed to have held in scorn after having been, as he acknowledges, 'distinguished' by its master. That would not have deterred Pope from producing a brilliant picture, and his equivocations did but serve to increase suspicion. Probably he found it convenient to use some features of what he may have seen at Canons while composing a general sketch with no special application. The Moral Essays, it may be added, are not especially moral, but they are full of fine things, and form a portion of Pope's verse second only to the Imitations from Horace.

These Imitations are introduced by the Prologue addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot, a poem of more than common brilliancy, and also more than commonly venomous. Nowhere, perhaps, is there in Pope's works so powerful and bitter an attack as the twenty-five lines in the Prologue devoted to the vivisection of Lord Hervey, which we are forced to admire while feeling their malevolence; nowhere is there a more consummate piece of satire than the twenty-two lines that contain the poet's masterpiece, the character of Atticus; and nowhere, I may add, are there lines more personally interesting. Portions of the poem were written long before the date of publication, and this is Pope's excuse, a rather lame one perhaps, for printing the character of Atticus and the lines on his mother after the death of Addison and of Mrs. Pope.

'When I had a fever one winter in town,' Pope said to his friend Spence, 'that confined me to my room for some days, Lord Bolingbroke came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and in turning it over dipt on the first satire of the second book. He observed how well that would hit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he was gone I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to press in a week or fortnight after. And this was the occasion of my imitating some other of the satires and epistles afterwards.'

Bolingbroke did his friend a better service in giving this advice than he had done with regard to the Essay on Man; and the six Imitations, with the Prologue and Epilogue, which are among the latest fruits of Pope's genius as a satirist, are also the ripest.

Warburton, writing of the Imitations of Horace, says: 'Whoever expects a paraphrase of Horace or a faithful copy of his genius or his manner of writing in these Imitations will be much disappointed. Our author uses the Roman poet for little more than his canvas; and if the old design or colouring chance to suit his purpose, it is well; if not, he employs his own without scruple or ceremony.'

This is true. Pope makes use of Horace when it suits his convenience, but never follows him servilely, and quits him altogether when his design carries him another way.

It was inevitable that he should exercise this freedom, since, as Johnson has pointed out, there will always be an irreconcilable dissimilitude between Roman images and English manners. Moreover, the aim of the two poets was different, Pope's main object being to express personal enmities and to give an exalted notion of his own virtue.

In the opening lines of his First Satire Pope follows Horace pretty closely. Both poets complain that some persons think them too severe, and others too complaisant; both take the advice of a lawyer, Horace of C. Trebatius Testa, who gives him the pithiest replies; and Pope of Fortescue. Both complain that they cannot sleep, the prescription of a wife and cowslip wine being given by the English adviser, while Testa advises Horace to swim thrice across the Tiber and moisten his lips with wine. Throughout the rest of the satire Pope takes only casual glances at the Roman original, and if in the Second Satire the English poet follows Horace in the first few verses in recommending frugality, and in the advice to keep the middle state, and neither to lean on this side or on that, the resemblance between the poets is seldom striking, and the spirit which animates them is different, – Horace being classical, and therefore open to the apprehension of all educated readers, while Pope is in a sense provincial, and, as I have already said with reference to the Dunciad, cannot be fully enjoyed or even understood without some knowledge of the time and of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is precisely the portion which cannot be clothed in a foreign dress.

'Life,' said Pope, 'when the first heats are over is all down hill,' and with him the downward progress began at a time when most men are still standing on the summit. Never was there a more fiery spirit in so weak a body. He suffered frequently from headaches, which he relieved by inhaling the steam of coffee. Unfortunately he pampered his appetite and paid a heavy penalty for doing so. Every change of weather affected him; and at the time when most people indulge in company, he tells Swift that he hid himself in bed. Although he sneers at Lord Hervey for taking asses' milk he tried that remedy himself, and he frequently needed medical aid. In his early days he was strong enough to ride on horseback, but in later life his weakness was so great that he was in constant need of help. M. Taine, whose criticism of Pope needs to be read with caution, indulges in an exaggerated description of his bodily condition, observing that when arrived at maturity he appeared no longer capable of existing, and styling him 'a nervous abortion.' The poet's condition was sad enough as told by Dr. Johnson, without amplifying it as M. Taine has done. 'One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.' After this forlorn description of the poet's state it is a little grotesque to read that his dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. A distorted body often holds a generous and untainted soul. This was not the case with Pope, and the sympathy he stood in so large a need of himself, was seldom given to others.