[From _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, May, 1851]
Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of
working-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for
conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for
sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these
two; first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary
affections of man, and under those relations which concern man's
grandest capacities; secondly, that he should treat his subject with
solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a
prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl
hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest
degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant
and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life
within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a
dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the
suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of
darkness, rushes back into the darkness with arrowy speed, and in a
moment is all over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such
shows--
It _was_, and it is not.
Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he
belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had
within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without
lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes
pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon
a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature,
such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of
flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed,
genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically,
an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional
differences between the two are written and are legible the
corresponding necessities of "utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to
truth in Dryden." Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that
if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of
falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_ from
his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure
he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their
instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very
moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any
rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a papist by apostacy; and
perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest.
Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honour;
and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which
temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in
persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a
time-server does Dryden appear on the one side! on the other, how much
of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all
that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the
apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the
pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his church, was
at his heart a traitor--in the very oath of his allegiance to his
spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her while
kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her
doctrines while suffering insults in her service.
The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where by all the
external symptoms they ought _not_ to have lain. But the reason for this
anomaly was that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of
his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities
of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel
friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet,
upon honourable scruple of fidelity to the suffering Church of his
fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism,
which often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of
truthfulness he became false. And in this particular instance he would,
at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native
constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to reconcile any
real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion.
But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false to the
quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in
earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction.
Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the
precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan.
The root and pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his
mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of
praeter-natural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of
self-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_. Horace,
in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as
upon a trophy of philosophical emancipation:
Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes:
which words Pope translates, and applies to himself in his
English adaptation of this epistle--
But ask not to what doctors I apply--
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock;
And house with Montaigne now, and now with Locke.
That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy,
any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him
in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of
momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure,
unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege
of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced by
certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were over-ruled
accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But _they_, the two
brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and the left,
obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to
some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism,
and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground
of that enormous falsehood which Pope practised from youth to age. An
eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which he assumes,
proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased
by the renunciation of all controlling principles. Having served the
towing-line which connected him with any external force of guiding and
compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand
false radiations from the true centre of rest. By his own choice he is
wandering in a forest all but pathless,
--ubi passim
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;
and a forest not of sixty days' journey, like that old Hercynian
forest of Caesar's time, but a forest which sixty generations
have not availed to traverse or familiarise in any one direction....
_Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take
for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope's
hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains
and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be too long a task
for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It would move through a
jungle of controversies.... Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing,
as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope's _personal_
falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. Truth
speculative often-times, drives its roots into depth, so dark that the
falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be
exposed to the light of day--the result is known, but not therefore
seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may easily be made to confront
its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible _shame_ of
refutation. Such shame would settle upon _every_ page of Pope's satires
and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed
with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest.
And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope
never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an
aspiration, which he would not willingly have recast, have retracted,
have abjured or trampled underfoot with the curses assigned to heresy,
if by such an act he could have added a hue of brilliancy to his
colouring or a new depth to his shadows. There is nothing he would not
have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most
pathetic memorial from his personal experience, in return for a
sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with _him_
poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was
reckless of other people's feelings; so far from _that_, he had a morbid
_facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to
suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity.
But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought
or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a
prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was
evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who
could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people
affected to call falsehood, and what they affected to call truth.