LORD CARLISLE ON POPE.

[1851.]

Lord Carlisle's recent lecture upon Pope, addressed to an audience of

artisans, drew the public attention first of all upon himself--_that_

was inevitable. No man can depart conspicuously from the usages or the

apparent sympathies of his own class, under whatsoever motive, but

that of necessity he will awaken for the _immediate_ and the first

result of his act an emotion of curiosity. But all curiosity is allied

to the comic, and is not an ennobling emotion, either for him who feels

it or for him who is its object. A second, however, and more thoughtful

consideration of such an act may redeem it from this vulgarizing taint

of oddity. Reflection may satisfy us, as in the present case it _did_

satisfy those persons who were best acquainted with Lord Carlisle's

public character, that this eccentric step had been adopted, not in

ostentation, with any view to its eccentricity, but _in spite_ of its

eccentricity, and from impulses of large prospective benignity that

would not suffer itself to be defeated by the chances of immediate

misconstruction.

Whether advantageous, therefore, to Lord Carlisle, or disadvantageous

(and in that case, I believe, most unjust), the first impressions

derived from this remarkable lecture pointed themselves exclusively

to the person of the lecturer--to his general qualifications for such

a task, and to his possible motives for undertaking it. Nobody inquired

_what_ it was that the noble lord had been discussing, so great was

every man's astonishment that before such an audience any noble lord

should have condescended to discuss anything at all. But gradually all

wonder subsides--_de jure_, in nine days; and, after this collapse of

the primary interest, there was leisure for a secondary interest to

gather about the _subject_ of the patrician lecture. Had it any

cryptical meaning? Coming from a man so closely connected with the

government, could it be open to any hieroglyphic or ulterior

interpretations, intelligible to Whigs, and significant to ministerial

partisans? Finally, this secondary interest has usurped upon what

originally had been a purely personal interest. POPE! What novelty was

there, still open to even literary gleaners, about _him_, a man that

had been in his grave for one hundred and six years? What _could_ there

remain to say on such a theme? And what was it, in fact, that Lord

Carlisle _had_ said to his Yorkshire audience?

There was, therefore, a double aspect in the public interest--one

looking to the rank of the lecturer, one to the singularity of his

theme. There was the curiosity that connected itself with the assumption

of a troublesome duty in the service of the lowest ranks by a volunteer

from the highest; and, secondly, there was another curiosity connecting

itself with the choice of a subject that had no special reference to

this particular generation, and seemed to have no special adaptation

to the intellectual capacities of a working audience.

This double aspect of the public surprise suggests a double question.

The volunteer assumption by a nobleman of this particular office in

this particular service may, in the eyes of some people, bear a

philosophic value, as though it indicated some changes going on beneath

the surface of society in the relations of our English aristocracy to

our English laboring body. On the other hand, it will be regarded by

multitudes as the casual caprice of an individual--a caprice of vanity

by those who do not know Lord Carlisle's personal qualities, a caprice

of patriotic benevolence by those who do. According to the construction

of the case as thus indicated, oscillating between a question of

profound revolution moving subterraneously amongst us, and a purely

personal question, such a discussion would ascend to the philosophic

level, or sink to the level of gossip. The other direction of the

public surprise points to a question that will interest a far greater

body of thinkers. Whatever judgment may be formed on the general fact

that a nobleman of ancient descent has thought fit to come forward as

a lecturer to the humblest of his countrymen upon subjects detached

from politics, there will yet remain a call for a second judgment upon

the fitness of the particular subject selected for a lecture under

such remarkable circumstances. The two questions are entirely

disconnected. It is on the latter, viz., the character and pretensions

of Pope, as selected by Lord Carlisle for such an inaugural experiment,

that I myself feel much interest. Universally it must have been felt

as an objection, that such a selection had no special adaptation to

the age or to the audience. I say this with no wish to undervalue the

lecture, which I understand to have been ably composed, nor the services

of the lecturer, whose motives and public character, in common with

most of his countrymen, I admire. I speak of it at all only as a public

opportunity suddenly laid open for drawing attention to the true

pretensions of Pope, as the most brilliant writer of his own class in

European literature; or, at least, of drawing attention to some

characteristics in the most popular section of Pope's works which

hitherto have lurked unnoticed.

This is my object, and none that can be supposed personal to Lord

Carlisle. Pope, as the subject of the lecture, and not the earlier

question as to the propriety of any lecture at all, under the

circumstances recited, furnishes my _thesis_--that thesis on which the

reader will understand me to speak with decision, not with the decision

of arrogance, but with that which rightfully belongs to a faithful

study of the author. The editors of Pope are not all equally careless,

but all are careless; and, under the shelter of this carelessness, the

most deep-seated vices of Pope's moral and satirical sketches have

escaped detection, or at least have escaped exposure. These, and the

other errors traditionally connected with the rank and valuation of

Pope as a classic, are what I profess to speak of deliberately and

firmly. Meantime, to the extent of a few sentences, I will take the

liberty of suggesting, rather than delivering, an opinion upon the

other question, viz., the prudence in a man holding Lord Carlisle's

rank of lecturing at all to any public audience. But on this part of

the subject I beg to be understood as speaking doubtfully,

conjecturally, and without a sufficient basis of facts.

The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, notoriously a man of great ingenuity,

possessing also prodigious fertility of thought, and armed with the

rare advantage of being almost demoniacally in earnest, was, however

(in some sort of balance to these splendid gifts), tainted to excess

with the scrofula of impracticable crotchets. That was the opinion

secretly held about him by most of his nearest friends; and it is

notorious that he scarcely ever published a pamphlet or contribution

to a journal in which he did not contrive to offend all parties, both

friendly and hostile, by some ebullition of this capricious character.

He hated, for instance, the High Church with a hatred more than

theological; and _that_ would have recommended him to the favorable

consideration of many thousands of persons in this realm, the same who

have been secretly foremost in the recent outbreak of fanaticism against

the Roman Catholics; but unfortunately it happened that, although not

hating the Low Church (the self-styled Evangelicals), he despised

them so profoundly as to make all alliance between them impossible.

He hated also many individuals; but, not to do him any injustice, most

(or perhaps all) of these were people that had been long dead; and

amongst them, by the way, was Livy, the historian; whom I distinguish

by name, as furnishing, perhaps, the liveliest illustration of the

whimsical and all but lunatic excess to which these personal hatreds

were sometimes pushed; for it is a fact that, when the course of an

Italian tour had brought him unavoidably to the birthplace of Livy,

Dr. Arnold felicitated himself upon having borne the air of that

city--in fact, upon having survived such a collision with the local

remembrances of the poor historian, very much in those terms which Mr.

Governor Holwell might have used on finding himself 'pretty bobbish'

on the morning after the memorable night in the Black Hole of Calcutta:

he could hardly believe that he still lived. [Footnote 1] And yet, how

had the eloquent historian trespassed on his patience and his weak

powers of toleration? Livy was certainly not very learned in the

archaeologies of his own country; where all men had gone astray, _he_

went astray. And in geography, as regarded the Italian movements of

Hannibal, he erred with his eyes open. But these were no objects of

Livy's ambition: what he aspired to do was, to tell the story, 'the

tale divine,' of Roman energy and perseverance; and _he so_ told it

that no man, as regards the mere artifices of narration, would ever

have presumed to tell it after him. I cite this particular case as

illustrating the furnace-heat of Dr. Arnold's antipathies, unless where

some consideration of kindness and Christian charity interposed to

temper his fury. This check naturally offered itself only with regard

to individuals: and therefore, in dealing with institutions, he

acknowledged no check at all, but gave full swing to the license of

his wrath. Amongst our own institutions, that one which he seems most

profoundly to have hated was our nobility; or, speaking more generally,

our aristocracy. Some deadly aboriginal schism he seems to have imagined

between this order and the democratic orders; some predestined feud

as between the head of the serpent and the heel of man.

Accordingly, as one of the means most clamorously invoked by our social

position for averting some dreadful convulsion constantly brooding

over England, he insists upon a closer approximation between our highest

classes and our lowest. Especially he seems to think that the peasantry

needed to be conciliated by more familiar intercourse, or more open

expressions of interest in their concerns, and by domiciliary visits

not offered in too oppressive a spirit of condescension. But the close

observer of our social condition will differ with Dr. Arnold at

starting, as to the facts. The ancient territorial nobility are not

those who offend by _hauteur_. On the contrary, a spirit of parental

kindness marks the intercourse of the old authentic aristocracy with

their dependants, and especially with the two classes of peasants on

their own estates, and their domestic servants. [Footnote 2] Those who

_really_ offend on this point, are the _nouveaux riches_--the

_parvenus_. And yet it would be great injustice to say that even these

offend habitually. No laws of classification are so false as those

which originate in human scurrility. Aldermen, until very lately, were

by an old traditional scurrility so proverbially classed as gluttons

and cormorants, hovering over dinner-tables, with no other

characteristics whatever, or openings to any redeeming qualities, that

men became as seriously perplexed in our days at meeting an eloquent,

enlightened, and accomplished alderman, as they would have been by an

introduction to a benevolent cut-throat, or a patriotic incendiary.

The same thing happened in ancient days. Quite as obstinate as any

modern prejudice against a London alderman was the old Attic prejudice

against the natives of Boeotia. Originally it had grown up under two

causes--first, the animosities incident to neighborhood too close;

secondly, the difference of bodily constitution consequent upon a

radically different descent. The blood was different; and by a wider

difference, perhaps, than that between Celtic and Teutonic. The

garrulous Athenian despised the hesitating (but for that reason more

reflecting) Boeotian; and this feeling was carried so far, that at

last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very

prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted

with this arrogant assumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded

the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had

been bred, or might be bred, amongst those whom they scorned:--

'Summos posse viros, et magna exempla daturos,

Vervecum in patria, crassoque sub are nasci.'

Now, if there is any similar alienation between our lowest classes and

our highest, such as Doctor Arnold imagined to exist in England, at

least it does not assume any such character of disgust, nor clothe

itself in similar expressions of scorn. Practical jealousy, so far as

it exists at all, lies between classes much less widely separated. The

master manufacturer is sometimes jealous of those amongst his

ministerial agents who tread too nearly upon his own traces; he is

jealous sometimes of their advances in domestic refinement, he is

jealous of their aspirations after a higher education. And on _their_

part, the workmen are apt to regard their masters as having an ultimate

interest violently conflicting with their own. In these _strata_ of

society there really _are_ symptoms of mutual distrust and hostility.

Capital and the aristocracy of wealth is a standing object of suspicion,

of fear, and therefore of angry irritation to the working-classes. But

as to the aristocracy of rank and high birth, either it is little known

to those classes, as happens in the most populous hives of our

manufacturing industry, and is regarded, therefore, with no positive

feeling of any kind, or else, as in the more exclusively agricultural

and pastoral districts, is looked up to by the peasantry with blind

feelings of reverence as amongst the immemorial monuments of the past--

involved in one common mist of antiquity with the rivers and the hills

of the district, with the cathedrals and their own ancestors. A

half-religious sentiment of reverence for an old time-out-of-mind

family associated with some antique residence, hall, or abbey, or

castle, is a well-known affection of the rural mind in England; and

if in one half it points to an infirmity not far off from legendary

superstition, in the other half it wears the grace of chivalry and

legendary romance. Any malignant scoff, therefore, against the peerage

of England, such as calling the House of Lords a Hospital of Incurables,

has always been a town-bred scurrility, not only never adopted by the

simple rural laborer, but not even known to him, or distinctly

intelligible supposing it were.

If, therefore, there are great convulsions lying in wait for the

framework of our English society; if, and more in sorrow than in hope,

some vast attempt may be anticipated for recasting the whole of our

social organization; and if it is probable that this attempt will

commence in the blind wrath of maddened or despairing labor--still

there is no ground for thinking, with Dr. Arnold, that this wrath,

however blind (unless treacherously misled), would apply itself

primarily to the destruction of our old landed aristocracy. It would

often find itself grievously in error and self-baffled, even when

following its first headlong impulses of revenge; but these are the

impulses that it would follow, and none of these would primarily point

in that direction. Suppose, however, that the probabilities were

different, and that a policy of conciliation were become peculiarly

needful to the aristocracy--which is what Dr. Arnold does suppose--in

that case might not the course indicated by Lord Carlisle, viz.,

advancing upon a new line of _intellectual_ communication with the

laboring classes, be the surest mode of retrieving their affections,

as most likely to flatter their self-esteem in its noblest aspirations?

One swallow, it is true, cannot make a summer; and others of the

aristocracy must repeat the experiment of Lord Carlisle before any

ground can be won for the interest of the order. Even in Lord Carlisle,

it might be added, the experiment, if it were not followed up, would

not count for more than a caprice. But, on the other hand, think as

we may of the probable results, in reference to the _purposes_ of its

author, we ought to regard it as a sufficient justification that _thus_

the ice has been broken, that _thus_ a beginning has been made, and

_thus_ a sanction established under which no man, if otherwise free

to enter upon such a path, needs ever again to find an obstacle in

rank the highest or in blood the most ancient. He is authorized by a

Howard; and though doubts must still linger about the propriety of

such a course, when estimated as a means to a specific end, yet for

itself, in reference to the prudery of social decorum, we may now

pronounce that to lecture without fee or reward before any audience

whatever is henceforth privileged by authentic precedent; and, unless

adulterating with political partisanship, is consecrated by its own

noble purposes.

Still, if it be urged that these noble purposes are not ratified and

sealed by a solitary experiment, I should answer that undoubtedly Lord

Carlisle has placed himself under a silent obligation to renew his

generous effort; or, in the event of his failing to do so, will have

made himself a debtor to public censure, as one who has planned what

he has not been strong enough to accomplish, and has founded a staircase

or a portico to a temple yet in the clouds. _Had_ he the ulterior

purposes assumed? Then, by deserting or neglecting them, he puts on

record the instability of his own will. Had he _no_ these ulterior

purposes? Then, and in that confession, vanishes into vapor the whole

dignity of his bold pretensions, as the navigator who first doubled

the Cape of Storms [Footnote 3] into an untried sea.

But against a man dealing presumably with a noble purpose we should

reckon nobly. Mean jealousies have no place in circumstances where,

as yet, no meanness has been exhibited. The exaction would be too

severe upon Lord Carlisle, if, by one act of kindness, he had pledged

himself to a thousand; and if, because once his graciousness had been

conspicuous, he were held bound over, in all time coming, to the

unintermitting energies of a missionary amongst pagans. The laboring

men of Yorkshire have not the clamorous necessities of pagans; and

_therefore_ Lord Carlisle has not assumed the duties of a working

missionary. When, by personally coming forward to lecture, he

inaugurated a new era of intellectual prospects for the sons of toil,

implicitly he promised that he would himself, from time to time, come

forward to co-operate with a movement that had owed its birth to his

own summons and impulse. But if he cannot honorably release himself

from engagements voluntarily assumed, on the other hand he cannot

justly be loaded with the responsibility of a continued participation

in the Details of the work which he has set in motion. By sympathy

with the liberal purposes of an intellectual movement, he gives to

that movement its initial impulse. Henceforward it suffices if at

intervals he continues to it such expressions of the same sympathy as

may sustain its original activity, or at least may sustain the credit

of his own consistency. It cannot be expected that any person in the

circumstances of Lord Carlisle should continue even intermittingly to

lecture. It is enough if, by any other modes of encouragement, or by

inciting others to follow the precedent which he has set, he continues

to express an unabated interest in the great cause of intellectual

progress amongst poor men.

A doubt may be raised, meantime, whether literature is the proper

channel into which the intellectual energies of the poor should be

directed. For the affirmative it may be urged, that the interest in

literature is universal, whilst the interest in science is exceedingly

limited. On the other hand, it may truly be retorted that the scientific

interest may be artificially extended by culture; and that these two

great advantages would in that case arise: 1. That the apparatus of

means and instruments is much smaller in the one case than the other;

2. That science opens into a progression of growing interest; whereas

literature, having no determined order of advance, and offering no

regular succession of stages to the student, does not with the same

certainty secure a self-maintaining growth of pleasureable excitement.

Some remedy, however, will be applied to this last evil, if a regular

plan of _study_ should ever be devised for literature, and perhaps

that may be found not impossible.

But now, coming to the second question, namely, this question, _If any

lecture at all, why upon Pope?_ We may see reason to think that Lord

Carlisle was in error. To make a choice which is not altogether the

best, will not of necessity argue an error; because much must be allowed

to constitutional differences of judgment or of sensibility, which may

be all equally right as against any philosophic attempts to prove any

one of them wrong. And a lecturer who is possibly aware of not having

made the choice which was absolutely best, may defend himself upon the

ground that accidental advantages of a personal kind, such as previous

familiarity with the subject, or preconformity of taste to the

characteristic qualities of the author selected, may have qualified

him to lecture on that theme with more effect and with more benefit,

than upon a theme confessedly higher but less tractable for himself

with his own peculiar preparations. Here, however, the case is

different. What might be no error _per se_, becomes one if the special

circumstances of the situation show it to have rested upon a deep

misconception. Given the audience which Lord Carlisle had before him,

the audience which he anticipated, and which he proposed to himself

as the modulating law for the quality and style of his lecture, that

same choice becomes a profound error which, for a different audience,

more refined or more miscellaneous, would have been no error at all.

I do not fear that I shall offend Lord Carlisle, so upright as he has

always shown himself, so manly, and so faithful to his own views of

truth, by repeating firmly that such a choice in such a situation

argues a deep misconception of the true intellectual agencies by which

Pope acts as a power in literature, and of the moral relations to

general human sensibilities or _universal_ nature which such agencies

involve. My belief is, that, if a prize had been offered for a bad and

malappropriate subject, none worse could have been suggested; unless,

perhaps, it had been the Letters of Madame de Sevigne, or the Fables

of La Fontaine; in both of which cases the delicacies and subtle

felicities of treatment are even more microscopic, more shy, and more

inapprehensible without a special training and culture, than in Pope,

And in this point they all agree, with no great difference amongst the

three, that the sort of culture which forms the previous condition for

enjoying them (a _conditio sine qua non_) is not of a kind to be won

from study. Even of _that_ a mechanic artisan, whose daily bread depends

upon his labor, cannot have had much. But the dedication of a life to

books would here avail but litttle. What is needed must be the sort

of culture won from complex social intercourse; and of, this the

laboring artisan can have had none at all. Even the higher ranks,

during those stages of society when social meetings are difficult, are

rare, and consequently have their whole intellectual opportunities

exhausted in forms and elaborate ceremonials, are not able to develope

what may be called the social sense, that living, trembling sensibility

to the expressions and the electric changes of human thought and

feeling, so infinite as they are potentially, and as they will show

themselves to be when the intercourse is free, is sudden, is

spontaneous, and therefore has not leisure to be false, amongst all

varieties of combination as to sex, age, rank, position, and personal

accomplishments. Up to the time of James the First, society amongst

ourselves wore a picturesque and even a scenical exterior: but the

inner life and its pulsations had not then been revealed. Great passions

were required to stir the freezing waters; so that certain kinds of

comedy, in which such passions are inappropriate, could not then exist.

And partly to this case it was amongst the early Romans, united with

the almost Asiatic seclusion from social meetings of female influence

or in any virtual sense even of female presence, that we must ascribe

the meagreness of the true social interest, and of the dialogue

exhibited by Plautus. Two separate frosts, during a century otherwise

so full of movement as the sixteenth in England, repressed and killed

all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst

ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened

by concurring with a national temperament--not phlegmatic (as is so

falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if

there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this

reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the

difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish

stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social

meetings of this period, even for purposes of pleasure, were true

_solemnities_. With usage of politeness that laid a weight of silence

and delay upon every movement of a social company, rapid motion of

thought or fancy became in a literal sense _physically_ impossible.

Not until, first, our _capital_ city had prodigiously expanded; not

until, secondly, our representative system had so unfolded its

tendencies as to bring _politics_ within the lawful privilege of

ordinary conversation; not until, thirdly, the expansions of _commerce_

had forced us into the continual necessity of talking with strangers;

fourthly, not until all these changes, gradually breaking up the

repulsion which separated our ungarrulous nation, had been ratified

by continual improvements applied to the construction of _roads_ and

the arts of _locomotion_, could it be said that such a state of social

intercourse existed as would naturalty prompt the mind to seek food

for its own intellectual activity in contemplating the phenomena of

that intercourse. The primary aspects and the rapid changes of such

an object could not arise until the object itself arose. Satire, which

follows social intercourse as a shadow follows a body, was chained up

till then. In Marston and in Donne (a man yet unappreciated) satire

first began to respire freely, but applying itself too much, as in the

great dramatists contemporary with Shakspeare, to the exterior play

of society. Under Charles II. in the hands of Dryden, and under Anne

in those of Pope, the larger and more intellectual sweep of satire

showed that social activities were now appreaching to their culmination.

Now, at length, it became evident that a new mode of pleasure had been

ripened, and that a great instinct of the intellect had opened for

itself an appropriate channel. No longer were social parties the old

heraldic solemnities [Footnote 4] enjoined by red letters in the

almanac, in which the chief objects were to discharge some arrear of

ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to _apricate_ and

refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation,

which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a

seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed

their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true

auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect--otherwise

expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through

the fine arts, and through scenic representations. A new world of

pleasures had opened itself, offering new subjects of activity to the

intellect, but also presupposing a new discipline and experience for

enjoying them.

Precisely at this point starts off what I presume to think the great

error of Lord Carlisle. He postulates as if it were a mere gift of

inevitable instinct, what too certainly is the gift, and the tardy

gift, of training; which training, again, is not to be won from efforts

of study, but is in the nature of a slow deposition--or sediment, as

it were--from a constant, perhaps at the moment, an unconscious,

experience. Apparently the error is twofold: first, an oversight, in

which it is probable that, without altogether overlooking the truth,

Lord Carlisle allowed to it a very insufficient emphasis; but, secondly,

a positive misconception of a broad character. The oversight is probably

his own, and originating in a general habit of too large and liberal

concession; but the misconception, I suspect, that he owes to another.

First, concerning the first. It is evidently assumed, in the adoption

of Pope for his subject, that mechanic artists, as a body, are capable

of appreciating Pope. I deny it; and in this I offer them no affront.

If they cannot enjoy, or if often they cannot so much as understand

Pope, on the other hand they can both enjoy and understand a far greater

poet. It is no insult; but, on the contrary, it is often a secret

compliment to the simplicity and the _breadth_ of a man's intellectual

nature that he cannot enter into the artificial, the tortuous, the

conventional. Many a rude mind has comprehended to the full, both

Milton in his elementary grandeur and Shakspeare in his impassioned

depths, that could not have even dimly guessed at the meaning of a

situation in comedy where the comic rested upon arbitrary rules and

conventional proprieties. In all satiric sketches of society, even

where the direct object may happen to have a catholic intelligibility,

there is much amongst the allusions that surround and invest it which

no man will ever understand that has not personally mixed in society,

or understand without very disproportional commentaries; and even in

that case he will not enjoy it. This is true of such compositions as

a class; but Pope, in reference to this difficulty, is disadvantageously

distinguished even amongst his order. Dryden, for instance, is far

larger and more capacious in his satire, and in all the genial parts

would approach the level of universal sympathies; whereas Pope, besides

that the basis of his ridicule is continually too narrow, local, and

casual, is rank to utter corruption with a disease far deeper than

false refinement or conventionalism. Pardon me, reader, if I use a

coarse word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless

where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive

by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many

instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect,

deliberately assumes the license of a _liar_. Not only he adopts the

language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly

have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation

is attached was to Pope's knowledge a pure fabrication, but he also

cites, as weighty evidences in the _forum_ of morality, anecdotes which

he had gravely transplanted from a jest-book. [Footnote 5] Upon this,

however, the most painful feature amongst Pope's literary habits, I

will not dwell, as I shall immediately have occasion to notice it

again. I notice it at all only for its too certain effect in limiting

the sympathy with Pope's satiric and moral writings. Absolute truth

and simplicity are demanded by all of us as preconditions to any

sympathy with moral expressions of anger or intolerance. In all

conventionalism there is a philosophic falsehood; and _that_ would be

more than sufficient to repel all general sympathy with Pope from the

mind of the laboring man, apart from the effect of direct falsification

applied to facts, or of fantastic extravagance applied to opinions.

Of this bar to the popularity of Pope, it cannot be supposed that Lord

Carlisle was unaware. Doubtless he knew it, but did not allow it the

weight which in practice it would be found to deserve. Yet why? Suppose

that the unpopular tendency in Pope's writings were of a nature to be

surmounted--upon a sufficient motive arising, suppose it not absolutely

impossible to bring Pope within the toleration of working-men, upon

whom, however, all that is bad would tell fearfully, and most of Pope's

peculiar brilliancy would absolutely go for nothing--this

notwithstanding, suppose the point established that by huge efforts,

by pulling and hauling, by coaxing and flattering, and _invita Minerva_,

the working-man might at length be _converted_ to Pope; yet, finally,

when all was over, what object, what commensurate end, could be alleged

in justification of so much preternatural effort? You have got your

man into harness, that is true, and in a sullen fashion he pulls at

his burden. But, after all, why not have yoked him according to his

own original inclinations, and suffered him to pull where he would

pull cheerfully? You have quelled a natural resistance, but clearly

with so much loss of power to all parties as was spent uponthe

resistance; and with what final gain to any party?

The answer to this lies in the second of the errors which I have imputed

to Lord Carlisle. The first error was, perhaps, no more than an

undervaluation of the truth. The second, if I divine it rightly, rests

upon a total misconception, viz., the attribution to Pope of some

special authority as a moral teacher. And this, if it were really so,

would go far to justify Lord Carlisle in his attempt to fix the

attention of literary students amongst the working-classes upon the

writings of Pope. Rightly he would judge, that some leading classic

must furnish the central object for the general studies. Each man would

have his own separate favorites; but it would be well that the whole

community of students should also have some _common_ point of interest

and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages.

He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding

controversies of the age--he is near enough to speak in a diction but

slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant

good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle

count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a _moral_

poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever

for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous

classes, when is it that this idea has originated? I suspect that it

is derived originally from a distinguished man of genius in the last

generation, viz., Lord Byron. Amongst the guardians of Lord Byron, one

was the late Lord Carlisle; and Lord Byron was, besides, connected by

blood with the House of Howard: so that there were natural reasons why

a man of such extraordinary intellectual power should early obtain a

profound influence over the present Earl of Carlisle. And the prejudice,

which I suppose to have been first planted by Lord Byron, would very

easily strengthen itself by the general cast of Pope's topics and

pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing

homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through

all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this

surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope

is _not_ in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own

heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet

this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience,

might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such

a question as that--_power_ undoubtedly, if he had ever been led to

use his power, that is, to make up his opinion in _resistance_ to the

popular impression. But to this very probably he never had any motive;

and the reason why I presume to set up my individual opinion in this

case against that of the multitude is, because I know experimentally

that, until a man has a sincere interest in such a question, and sets

himself diligently to examine and collate the facts, he will pretty

certainly have no title to give any verdict on the case.

What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually

happened with _him_, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He

wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever

were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his

intentions by the following well-known _mot_. Having mentioned the

poets, he compares them with the moralists--'the moralists,' these are

his words, 'the moralists, their betters.' How, or in what sense that

would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a class the 'betters'

in a collation with poets as a class? It is pretty clear at starting

that, _in order_ to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry

a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist

must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, 'to justify the ways of

God to man.' _That_ is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine

authentically a man must write a 'Paradise Lost.' The order of

precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by

Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection.

But without exacting from a man so self-willed as Lord Byron (and at

that moment in a great passion) any philosophic vigor, it may be worth

while, so far as the case concerns Pope, to ponder for one moment upon

this invidious comparison, and to expose the fallacy which it conceals.

By the term _moralist_ we indicate two kinds of thinkers, differing

as much in quality as a chestnut horse from horse chestnut, and in

rank as a Roman proconsul from the nautical consul's first clerk at

a seaport. A clerical moralist in a pulpit, reading a sermon, is a

moralist in the sense of one who applies the rules of a known ethical

system, viz., that system which is contained in the New Testament, to

the ordinary cases of human action. Such a man pretends to no

originality--it would be criminal in him to do so; or, if he seeks for

novelty in any shape or degree, it is exclusively in the quality of

his illustrations. But there is another use of the word _moralist_,

which indicates an intellectual architect of the first class. A Grecian

moralist was one who published a new _theory_ of morals--that is, he

assumed some new central principle, from which he endeavored, with

more or less success, to derive all the virtues and vices, and thus

introduced new relations amongst the keys or elementary gamut of our

moral nature. [Footnote 6] For example, the Peripatetic system of

morality, that of Aristotle, had for its fundamental principle, that

all vices formed one or other of two polar extremes, one pole being

in excess, the other in defect; and that the corresponding virtue lay

on an equatorial line between these two poles. Here, because the new

principle became a law of coercion for the entire system, since it

must be carried out harmoniously with regard to every element that

could move a question, the difficulties were great, and hardly to be

met by mere artifices of ingenuity. The legislative principle needed

to be profound and comprehensive; and a moralist in this sense, the

founder of an ethical system, really looked something like a great man.

But, valued upon that scale. Pope is nobody; or in Newmarket language,

if ranked against Chrysippus, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, he

would be found 'nowhere.' He is reduced, therefore, at one blow to the

level of a pulpit moralist, or mere applier of moral laws to human

actions. And in a function so exceedingly humble, philosophically

considered, how could he pretend to precedency in respect of anybody,

unless it were the amen clerk, or the sexton?

In reality, however, the case is worse, If a man did really bring all

human actions under the light of any moral system whatever, provided

that he _could_ do so sternly, justly, and without favor this way or

that, he would perform an exemplary service, such as no man ever _has_

performed. And this is what we mean by casuistry, which is the

application of a moral principle to the _cases_ arising in human life.

A _case_ means a genuine class of human acts, but differentiated in

the way that law cases are. For we see that every case in the law

courts conforms in the major part to the genuine class; but always,

or nearly always, it presents some one differential feature peculiar

to itself; and the question about it always is, Whether the differential

feature is sufficient to take it out of the universal rule, or whether,

in fact, it ought not to disturb the incidence of the legal rule? This

is what we mean by casuistry. All law in its practical processes is

a mode of casuistry. And it is clear that any practical ethics, ethics

applied to the realities of life, ought to take the professed shape

of casuistry. We do not evade the thing by evading the name. But because

casuistry under that name, has been chiefly cultivated by the Roman

Catholic Church, we Protestants, with our ridiculous prudery, find a

stumbling-block in the very name. This, however, is the only service

that _can_ be rendered to morality among us. And nothing approaching

to this has been attempted by Pope.

What is it, then, that he _has_ attempted? Certainly he imagines himself

to have done something or other in behalf of moral philosophy. For in

a well-known couplet he informs us--

'That not in Fancy's maze he lingered long, But stooped to Truth, and

_moralized_ his song.'

Upon these lines a lady once made to me this very acute and significant

remark. The particular direction, she said, in which Pope fancied that

he came upon Truth, showed pretty clearly what sort of truth it was

that he searched after. Had he represented Fancy, as often is done,

soaring aloft amongst the clouds, then, because Truth must be held to

lie in the opposite direction, there might have been pleaded a necessity

for _descending_ upon Truth, like one who is looking for mushrooms.

But as Fancy, by good luck, is simply described as roaming about amongst

labyrinths, which are always constructed upon dead levels, he had left

it free for himself to soar after Truth into the clouds. But _that_

was a mode of truth which Pope cared little for; if _she_ chose to go

galavanting amongst the clouds, Pope, for _his_ part, was the last

person to follow her. Neither was he the man to go down into a well

in search of her. Truth was not liable to wet feet--but Pope _was_.

And he had no such ardor for Truth as would ever lead him to forget

that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his

constitution.

Whatever service Pope may have meditated to the philosophy of morals,

he has certainly performed none. The direct contributions which he

offered to this philosophy in his 'Essay on Man,' are not of a nature

to satisfy any party; because at present the whole system may be read

into different, and sometimes into opposite meanings, according to the

quality of the integrations supplied for filling up the chasms in the

chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from

Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires

and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here,

however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which

besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the

dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections

of Pope's writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and

languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they will make

no particular discoveries of Pope's hollowness and treacherous

infidelities to the truth, whether as to things or persons; but in

such a case neither will they reap any benefit. On the other hand, if

they so far carry out Lord Carlisle's advice as to enter upon the study

of Pope in the spirit of earnest students, and so as really to possess

themselves of the key to his inner mind, they will rise from their

labors not so much in any spirit of gratitude for enlarged and

humanizing views of man, as in a spirit of cynical disgust at finding

that such views can be so easily counterfeited, and so often virtually

betrayed.

[The paper of last month, [Footnote 7] on Lord Carlisle's lecture,

having been written under the oppression of a nervous illness,

accompanied by great suffering, may probably enough have been found

heavy. Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily _assumes_

the radical falseness, of Pope, as a notorious fact needing no evidence

or illustration. To myself it _did_ not need either. But to any casual

reader, whose attention had never been attracted to the

circumstantialities of Pope's satiric sketches, this assumption would

be startling; and it would have done him a service to offer a few

exemplifications of the vice attributed to Pope, both as substantiating

the charge, and as investing it with some little amusement. This it

had been my intention to do at the moment; but being disabled by the

illness above-mentioned, I now supply the omission.]

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 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 darkness with arrowy speed, and in a

moment all is 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 apostasy;

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 honor; 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 whilst kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and

secretly forswore her doctrines whilst 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 an honorable scruple of fidelity to the suffering church

of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own

scepticism, which yet 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 in 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 the 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 preternatural 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 philosophic emancipation:

'Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,

Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor liospes:'

which words Pope thus 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, or 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 sertain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were

overruled 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 severed 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 familiarize in any one direction.

For Horace, as I have endeavored to explain in the note, the apology

is so much the readier as his intrusions into this province of

philosophy are slighter, more careless, and more indirect. But Pope's

are wilful, premeditated, with malice aforethought; and his falsehoods

wear a more malignant air, because they frequently concern truth

speculative, and are therefore presumably more deliberate in their

origin, and more influential in the result. It is precisely this part

of Pope's errors that would prove most perplexing to the unlearned

student. Beyond a doubt the 'Essay on Man' would, in virtue of its

subject, prove the most attractive to a laboring man of all Pope's

writings, as most of all promising a glimpse into a world of permanence

and of mysterious grandeur, and having an interest, therefore,

transcendent to any that could be derived from the fleeting aspects

of manners or social conventionalisms, though illuminated and vivified

by satire. _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. For, to quote a remark

which I once made myself in print, the 'Essay on Man' in one point

resembles some doubtful inscriptions in ancient forms of Oriental

languages, which, being made up elliptically of mere consonants, can

be read into very different senses according to the different sets of

vowels which the particular reader may choose to interpolate. According

to the choice of the interpreter, it may be read into a loyal or a

treasonable meaning. 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_. Truths

speculative oftentimes, 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 be easily made to confront

its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible _shame_

of refutation. Such sharoe 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. Apd 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 under foot with the curses

assigned to heresy, if by sueh an act he could have added a hue of

brilliancy to his coloring, 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 experiences,

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. Volumes might be filled with illustrations;

I content myself with three or four.

I. Pope felt _intellectually_ that it was philosophic, and also that

it wore an air of nobility, _not_ to despise poverty. _Morally_,

however, he felt inversely: nature and the accidents of his life had

made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one

sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one

insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite,

it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty,

and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty.

To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway,

and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since

yesterday--what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a

thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in

Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought

would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused

the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For

hunger, and cold, and poverty, appeared to _him_ only in the light of

drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware

that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such

feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a

philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle

distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch

him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his

nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the

'Dunciad' he has occasion to mention Dennis:--

'And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged.'

Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a note, in the course

of which he quotes a few sentences about Dennis from Theobald. One of

these begins thus: 'Did we really know how much this poor man suffers

by being contradicted,' &c.; upon which Pope thinks proper to

intercalate the following pathetic parenthesis in italics: _I wish

that reflection on POVERTY had been spared._' How amiable! how pretty!

Could Joseph Surface have more dexterously _improved_ the occasion:

'The man that disparages poverty, is a man that--' &c. It is manifest,

however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether

misplaced; for '_poor_' in the quotation from Theobald has no reference

whatever to _poverty_ as the antithesis to _wealth_. What a pity that

a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have

been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion!

Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter

as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what

follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage

to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in

his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra

kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.

At line 106 comes the flourish about Dennis's poverty. Just nine lines

ahead, keeping close as a policeman upon the heels' of a thief, you

come up with Pope in the very act of maltreating Gibber, upon no motive

or pretence whatever, small or great, but that he (the said Gibber)

was guilty of poverty. Pope had detected him--and this is Pope's own

account of the assault--in an overt act of poverty. He deposes, as if

it were an ample justification of his own violence, that Gibber had

been caught in the very act--not of supping meanly, coarsely, vulgarly,

as upon tripe, for instance, or other offal--but absolutely in the act

of not supping at all!

'Swearing and _supperless_ the hero sate.'

Here one is irresistibly reminded of the old story about the cat who

was transformed into a princess: she played the _role_ with admirable

decorum, until one day a mouse ran across the floor of the royal saloon,

when immediately the old instinct and the hereditary hatred proved too

much for the artificial nature, and her highness vanished over a

six-barred gate in a furious mouse-chase. Pope, treading in the steps

of this model, fancies himself reconciled to poverty. Poverty, however,

suddenly presents herself, not as a high poetic abstraction, but in

that one of her many shapes which to Pope had always seemed the most

comic as well as the most hateful. Instantly Pope's ancient malice is

rekindled; and in line 115 we find him assaulting that very calamity

under one name, which under another, at line 106, he had treated with

an ostentatious superfluity of indulgence.

II. I have already noticed that some of Pope's most pointed examples

which he presents to you as drawn from his own experience of life, are

in fact due to jest-books; and some (offered as facts) are pure coinages

of his own brain. When he makes his miser at the last gasp so tenacious

of the worldly rights then slipping from his grasp as that he refuses

to resign a particular manor, Pope forgot that even a jest-book must

govern its jokes by some regard to the realities of life, and that

amongst these realities is the very nature and operation of a will.

A miser is not, therefore, a fool; and he knows that no possible

testamentary abdication of an estate disturbs his own absolute command

over it so long as he lives, or bars his power of revoking the bequest.

The moral instruction is in this case so poor, that no reader cares

much upon what sort of foundation the story itself rests. For such a

story a lie may be a decent basis. True; but not so senseless a lie.

If the old miser was delirious, there is an end of his responsibilities;

and nobody has a right to draw upon _him_ for moral lessons or warnings.

If he was _not_ delirirous, the case could not have happened. Modelled

in the same spirit are all Pope's pretended portraitures of women; and

the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies

from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the

transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction, or of

revolting extravagance, do not verify themselves to our loathing

incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms

akimbo, saying angrily, 'But I tell you, sir, these are _not_

fancy-pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly

known to me--they are my particular friends. I see them every day in

the undiess of confiding friendship. They betray all their foibles to

me in the certainty that I shall take no advantage of their candor;

and will you, coming a century later, presume to dispute the fidelity

or the value of my contemporary portraits?' Yes, and upon these two

grounds: first (as to the fidelity), that the pretended portraits are

delineations of impossible people; and secondly (as to the value),

that, if after all they could be sworn to as copies faithful to the

originals, not the less are they to be repelled as abnormal, and so

far beyond the intelligibilities of nature as practically to mean

nothing, neither teaching nor warning. The two Duchesses of Marlborough,

for instance, Sarah and Henrietta, are atrocious caricatures, and

constructed on the desperate principle of catching at a momentary stare

or grin, by means of anarchy in the features imputed, and truculent

antithesis in the expression. Who does not feel that these are the

fierce pasquinades, and the coarse pasquinades, of some malignant

electioneering contest? Is there a line that breathes the simplicity

and single-heartedness of truth? Equal disgust settles upon every word

that Pope ever wrote against Lady Mary W. Montagu. Having once come

to hate her rancorously, and finding his hatred envenomed by the

consciousness that Lady Mary had long ceased to care two straws for

all the malice of all the wits in Christendom, Pope labored at his own

spite, filing it and burnishing it as a hand-polisher works at the the

blade of a scymitar. For years he had forgotten to ask after the

realities of nature as they existed in Lady Mary, and considered only

what had the best chance of stinging her profoundly. He looked out for

a 'raw' into which he might lay the lash; not seeking it in the real

woman, but generally in the nature and sensibilities of abstract woman.

Whatever seemed to disfigure the idea of womanhood, _that_, by

reiterated touches, he worked into his portraits of Lady Mary; and at

length, no doubt, he had altogether obliterated from his own remembrance

the true features of her whom he so much detested. On this class of

Pope's satiric sketches I do not, however, wish to linger, having

heretofore examined some of the more prominent cases with close

attention.

My last paper on Pope has been taxed with exaggeration. This charge

comes from a London weekly journal (_The Leader_) distinguished by its

ability, by its hardihood of speculation, by its comprehensive candor,

but, in _my_ eyes, still more advantageously distinguished by its deep

sincerity. Such qualities give a special value to the courtesies of

that journal; and I in particular, as a literary man, have to thank

it for repeated instances of kindness the most indulgent on any occasion

which has brought up the mention of my name. Such qualities of necessity

give a corresponding value to its censures. And accordingly, as a point

of duty, I directed my attention immediately to _this_ censure. Whatever

was still unprinted I reviewed; and whatever struck me as open to

objection I removed. And if the result after all has been that I do

not altogether concur in the criticism of _The Leader_, the reason is

because, as upon re-examination it strikes me, in the worst cases Pope

has not left room for exaggeration. I do not see any actual

exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is

possible. But though I thus found myself unable sincerely to make the

sacrifice of my own opinion, another sacrifice of a different kind I

_have_ made, viz., that of half my paper. I cancelled one half--viz.,

that half which was occupied with cases in Pope of disingenuousness,

and perhaps of moral falsehood or collusion with other people's

falsehood, but not of falsehood atrociously literal and conscious;

meaning thus to diminish by one half the penance of those who do not

like to see Pope assaulted, although forced by uneasiness to watch the

assault;--feeling with which I heartily sympathize; and meaning, on

the other hand, in justification of mylelf, to throw the reader's

attention more effectively, because more exclusively, upon such cases

of frantic and moonstruck falsehood as could allow no room for suspense

or mitigation of judgment. Of these I have selected two, one relating

to the Duke of Buckingham, and the other to the history and derivation

of English literature. Generally, I believe, that to a just appreciation

of Pope's falseness, levity, and self-contradiction, it is almost

essential that a reader should have studied him with the purpose of

becoming his editor. This at one time was my own purpose; and thus it

was that I became acquainted with qualities prevailing in Pope which,

in the midst of my great admiration for him, would have made such a

purpose difficult of execution. For in the relation between author and

editor, any harshness of reproach on the part of the latter, or any

expression of alienation and imperfect sympathy, seems unbecoming in

one who has spontaneously assumed the office of a _patronus_ to a

_client_, and are uniformly painful to the reader. On this account it

is that the late Mr. Roscoe figures amongst all editors of Pope as by

far the most agreeable. He has a just tenderness for the memory and

merits of the great writer whom he undertakes to edit; this feeling

keeps his annotations clear from the petulance of Joseph Warton and

the malice of Bowles; whilst, not having happened to see Pope's errors

in the same light as myself, he suffers from no conflict between his

natural indulgence to intellectual splendor and his conscientious

reverence for truth.

But if the reader is shocked with Pope's false reading of phenomena,

where not the circumstances so much as the construction of the

circumstances may be challenged, what must he think of those cases in

which downright facts, and incidents the most notorious, have been

outrageously falsified only in obedience to a vulgar craving for effect

in the dramatic situations, or by way of pointing a moral for the

stimulation of torpid sensibilities? Take, for instance, the death of

the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham--a story which, in Pope's

version of it, has travelled into a popularity that may be called

national; and yet, the whole is one tissue of falsehoods--and of

falsehoods that must have been known for such by Pope not less than

to most of his contemporary readers. Suppose them _not_ known, and the

whole must have wanted all natural interest. For this interest lay in

the Duke's character, in his superb accomplishments and natural

advantages, in his fine person, in his vast wealth, and in the admirable

versatility of his intellectual powers, which made him alternately the

idol and the terror of all circles that he approached, which caused

Lord Clarendon to tremble with impotent malice in his chancellor's

robes, and Dry den to shiver with panic under his laureate crowns.

Now, wherever these features of the case were _not_ known, the story

was no more than any ordinary death arising out of a fox-chase. But

those to whom they _were_ known must, at the same time, have known the

audacious falsehood which disfigures the story in Pope's way of telling

it. _Without_ the personal interest, the incidents were nothing; and

_with_ that interest, at starting, Pope's romance must have defeated

itself by its fabulous coloring. Let me recall to the reader the

principal lines in this famous description:--

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,

The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,

On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,

With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,

The George and Garter dangling from that bed

Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,

Great Villiers lies! Alas! how changed from him,

That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim,

Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove,

The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;

_There_, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,

And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends.'

Without stopping to examine these famous lines as to thought and

expression (both of which are scandalously vicious), what I wish the

reader to remark is, the one pervading falsehood which connects them.

Wherefore this minute and purely fanciful description of the road-side

_cabaret_, with its bedroom and bed? Wherefore this impertinent and

also fraudulent circumstantiality? It is, as Pope would tell you, for

the sake of impressing with more vivacity the abject poverty to which

the Duke's follies had brought him. The wretched bed, for instance,

is meant to be the exponent of the empty purse which could purchase

no better. And, for fear that you might miss this construction of the

passage, Pope himself tells you, in a prose note, that the Duke 'died

in a remote inn in Yorkshire, _reduced to the utmost misery_.' Being

engaged in the business of dying, it could hardly be expected that the

Duke should be particularly happy. But what Pope means you to understand

by 'misery' is _poverty_; the prose note simply reiterates the words,

'victor of _fortune_,' in the text. Now, had the truth been really so,

what moral would such a story exemplify beyond the vulgar one of

pecuniary improvidence? And yet surely this was not the cause of the

Duke's being thrown from his horse. Meantime, Pope well knew that the

whole was a ridiculous fable. The Duke had the misfortune to be fatally

injured in a fox-chase. In such an extremity, naturally, his servants

carry him into the house nearest at hand, which happens to be an

alehouse--not 'the worst,' since there was no other; nor was it possible

that, to a man of his distinction, once the lord-lieutenant of that

very East Riding, any room would be offered worse than the very best

that contained a bed. In these dreadful circumstances, it is not easy

to measure the levity which can linger upon the description of such

exquisite impertinences as the housewifely defects of the walls, the

curtains, the flock-bed, &c. But Pope was at his wit's end for a

striking falsehood. He needed for a momentary effect some tale of a

great lord, once fabulously rich, who had not left himself the price

of a halter or of a pauper's bed. And thus, for the sake of extorting

a stare of wonderment from a mob of gaping readers, he did not scruple

to give birth and currency to the grossest of legendary lies. The

Duke's death happened a few months before Pope's birth. But the last

of the Villiers family that wore a ducal coronet was far too memorable

a person to have died under the cloud of obscurity which Pope's

representation presumes. He was the most interesting person of the

Alcibiades class [Footnote 9] that perhaps ever existed; and Pope's

mendacious story found acceptance only amongst an after-generation

unacquainted with the realities of the case. There was not so much as

a popular rumor to countenance Pope. The story was a pure, gratuitous

invention of his own. Even at the time of his death, the Duke of

Buckingham was generally reputed to have sixty thousand per annum, and

chiefly from land; an income at that period absolutely without precedent

or parallel in Europe. In this there might be some exaggeration, as

usually there _is_ in such cases. But the 'Fairfax Papers' have recently

made it manifest that Pope's tale was the wildest of fictions. The

Duke of Buckingham had, to some extent, suffered from his loyalty to

the Crown, though apparently sheltered from the main fury of the storm

by the interest of his Presbyterian father-in-law; and in his own

person he had at one time been carelessly profuse. But all this was

nothing. The sting of Pope's story requires him to have been a pauper;

and yet--O heaven and incredulous earth!--a pauper hunting upon

blood-horses, in a star and garter, and perhaps in a collar of SS! The

plain, historical truth, meanwhile, survives, that this pauper was

simply the richest man in Christendom; and that, except Aladdin (Oh,

yes; always except Aladdin of the Arabian Nights!) there never had

been a richer. And thus collapses the whole fable, like a soap-bubble

punctured by a surgeon's probe.

II. Yet even this specimen of Pope's propensity to falsehood is far

from being the worst. Here were facts scandalously distorted. Falsehoods

they were; but, if it had pleased God, they might have been truths.

Next, however, comes a fiction so maniacally gross, so incoherent, and

so rife with internal contradictions, as to involve its own exposure,

literally shrinking from its own intelligible enunciation, burrowing

in sentences kept aloof from the text, and calling upon foot-notes to

cover it. The case will speak for itself. Pope had undertaken to

translate the well-known epistle of Horace to Augustus Caesar; not

literally, but upon the principle of adapting it to a modern and English

treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the

Second--a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have

been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the

travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the

expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more

propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more

strictly, as Athens. Now, by such a transformation, already from the

very beginning Pope was preparing for himself a dire necessity of

falsehood. And he must have known it. Once launched upon such a course,

he became pledged and committed to all the difficulties which it might

impose. Desperate necessities would arise, from which nothing but

desperate lying and hard swearing could extricate him. The impossibility

of carrying through the parallel by means of _genuine_ correspondences

threw him for his sole resource upon such as were extravagantly

spurious; and apparently he had made up his mind to cut his way through

the ice, though all the truths that ever were embattled against Baron

Munchausen should oppose his advance. Accordingly about the middle of

the Epistle, a dilemma occurs from which no escape or deliverance is

possible, except by an almighty falsehood. Take the leap Pope must,

or else he must turn back when half-way through. Horace had occasion

to observe that, after Rome had made a conquest of Greece by force of

arms, captive Greece retaliated upon her conqueror by another kind of

victory, namely, by that of arts: [Footnote 10]--

'Graecia capta ferum ietorera cepit, et artes

Intulit agresti Latio.'

Now, in the corresponding case (as Pope had arranged it) between England

and France, the parallel certainly held good as far as the military

conquest. England, it was undeniable, had conquered France in that

sense, as completely as ever Rome had conquered Greece or Macedon. Two

English kings had seated themselves in succession upon the throne of

France--one virtually, one formally. So far all was tight, and held

water. Nothing could disturb _that_ part of the case. But next came

the retaliatory conquest, by means of arts and letters. How was this

to be dealt with? What shadow or dream of a correspondency could be

made out _there_? What impudence could face _that_? Already, in Pope's

ears, sounded the trumpet of recall; and Pope mused a, little: but

'No,' he said in effect, 'I will not turn back. Why should I? It is

but one astounding falsehood that is wanted to set me free.' I will

venture to say that Mendez Pinto, the Portuguese liar, that Sir John

Mandeville, the traveller, that Baron Munchausen, the most philosophic

of bold adventurers into the back settlements of lying, never soared

into such an aerial bounce, never cleared such a rasper of a fence,

as did Pope on this occasion. He boldly took it upon his honor and

credit that our English armies, in the times of Agincourt and the

Regent Bedford, found in France a real, full-grown French literature,

packed it up in their baggage-wagons, and brought it home to England.

The passage from Horace, part of which has been cited above, stands

thus in the translation of Pope:--

'We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms--

Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms;

Britain to soft refinements less a foe,

Wit grew polite, and numbers learned to flow.'

Ten years then, before Joan of Arc's execution, [Footnote 11] viz.,

about 1420 (if we are to believe Pope), or even fifteen years, France

had a great domestic literature; and this unknown literature has

actually furnished a basis to our own. Let us understand clearly what

it is that Pope means to assert. For it is no easy matter to do that

where a man dodges behind texts and notes, and shuffles between verse

and prose, mystifying the reader, and designing to do so. Under the

torture of cross-examination let us force Pope to explain what

literature _that_ is which, having glorified France, became the

venerable mother of a fine English literature in an early stage of the

fifteenth century? The reader, perhaps, fancies that possibly Pope may

have expressed himself erroneously only from being a little hurried

or a little confused. Not at all. I know my man better, perhaps, than

the reader does; and I know that he is trying to hoax us. He is not

confused himself, but is bent upon confusing _us_; and I am bent upon

preventing him. And, therefore, again I ask sternly, What literature

is this which very early in the fifteenth century, as early as

Agincourt, we English found prospering in France, and which, for the

benefit of the English intellect, such men as Ancient Pistol, Nym,

Bardolph, Fluellen, Capt. Macmorris, Jamy, and other well-known literati

in the army of Henry V., transplanted (or, 'as the wise it call,'

_conveyed_) to England? Agincourt was fought in 1415; exactly four

centuries before Waterloo. That was the beginning of our domination

in France; and soon after the middle of that same fifteenth century,

viz., about 1452, our domination was at an end. During that interval,

therefore, it must have been, then, or not at all, that this great

intellectual revolution worked by France upon England was begun and

completed. Naturally, at this point, the most submissive and

sycophantish of Pope's friends would feel moved by the devil of

curiosity, if not absolutely by the devil of suspicion, humbly to ask

for a name or two, just as a specimen, from this great host of

Anglo-Gallic wits. Pope felt (and groaned as he felt) that so reasonable

a demand could not be evaded. 'This comes of telling lies,' must have

been his bitter reflection: 'one lie makes a necessity for another.'

However, he reflected that this second lie need not be introduced into

the text, where it would have the fatal effect of blowing up the whole

bubble: it might be hidden away in a foot-note. Not one person in

twenty would read it, and he that did might easily suppose the note

to be some unauthorized impertinence of a foolish commentator. Secretly

therefore, silently, stealthily--so as to draw as little attention

as possible--Pope introduced into a note his wicked little brazen

solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the

proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some

magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric,

epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France

moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope?

Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply,

'that's the very question which I was going to answer, if you wouldn't

be so violent.' 'Well, answer it then. Take your own time, but answer;

for we don't mean to be put off without some kind of answer.' 'Listen,

then,' said Pope, 'and I'll whisper it into your ear; for it's a sort

of secret.' Now think, reader, of a _secret_ upon a matter like this,

which (if true at all) must be known to the antipodes. However, let

us have the secret. 'The secret,' replied Pope, 'is, that some time

in the reign of Charles the Second--when I won't be positive, but I'm

sure it was after the Restoration--three gentlemen wrote an

eighteen-penny pamphlet.' 'Good! And what were the gentlemen's names?'

'One was Edmund Waller, the poet; one was Mr. Go-dolphin; and the other

was Lord Dorset.' 'This trinity of wits, then, you say, Mr. Pope,

produced a mountain, price eighteen-pence, and this mountain produced

a mouse.' 'Oh, no! it was just the other way. They produced a mouse,

price eighteen-pence, and this mouse produced a mountain, viz., the

total English literature.' O day and night, but this is wondrous

strange! The total English literature--not the tottle only, but the

tottle of the whole, like an oak and the masts of some great amiral,

that once slept in an acorn--absolutely lying hid in an eighteen-penny

pamphlet! And what, now, might this pamphlet be about? Was it about

the curing of bacon, or the sublimer art of sowing moonshine broadcast?

It was, says Pope, if you _must_ know everything, a translation from

the French. And judiciously chosen; for it was the _worst_ (and surely

everybody must think it proper to keep back the _best_, until the

English had earned a right to such luxuries by showing a proper sense

of their value)--the _worst_ it was, and by very much the worst, of

all Corneille's dramas; and its name was 'Pompey.' Pompey, was it? And

so, then, from Pompey's loins we, the whole armies of English

_litterateurs_, grubs and eagles, are lineally descended. So says Pope.

So he _must_ say, In obedience to his own line of argument. And, this

being the case, one would be glad to have a look at Pompey. It is hard

upon us _literati_, that are the children of Pompey, not to have a

look at the author of our existence. But our chance of such a look is

small indeed. For Pompey, you are to understand, reader, never advanced

so far as to a second edition. That was a poor return on the part of

England for Pompey's services. And my too sceptical mind at one time

inclined to doubt even Pompey's _first_ edition; which was wrong, and

could have occurred only to a lover of paradoxes. For Warton (not Tom,

but Joe) had actually seen Pompey, and records his opinion of him,

which happened to be this: that Pompey was 'pitiful enough.' These are

Joe's own words. Still, I do not see that one witness establishes a

fact of this magnitude. A shade of doubt, therefore, continues to

linger over Pompey's very existence; and the upshot is, that Pompey

(not the great, but confessedly) the doubtful, eighteen-penny Pompey,

but, in any case, Pompey, 'the Pitiful,' is the Great overriding and

tutelary power, under whose inspiration and inaugurating impulse our

English literature has blossomed and ripened, root, stem, and branch,

through the life-struggles of five centuries, into its present colossal

proportions.

Here pause, reader, and look back upon the separate reticulations--so

as, if possible, to connect them--in this network of hideous

extravagance; where as elsewhere it happens, that one villany, hides

another, and that the mere depth of the umbrage spread by fraudulent

mystifications is the very cause which conceals the extent of those

mystifications. Contemplated in a languid mood, or without original

interest in the subject, that enormity of falsehood fails to strike,

which, under circumstances personally interesting, would seem absolutely

incredible. The outrage upon the intellect actually obscures and

withdraws the outrage upon the facts. And, inversely, the affronts to

historical accuracy obscure the affronts to good sense. Look steadily

for a moment at the three points in the array of impeachments:--

I. In the Red-rose invasion of France, Pope assumes, as a matter of

notoriety, that the English invading force went from a land of

semi-barbarism to a land of literature and refinement: the simple fact

being so conspicuously the other way, that, whilst France had no

literature at all, consequently _could_ have nothing to give (there

being no book extensively diffused in the France of that period, except

the 'De Imitatione Christi,') [Footnote 13] England, on the other hand,

had so bright a jewel to offer, that to this hour the whole of

Christendom has not matched it or approached it. Even at present, in

the case so often supposed, that a man were _marooned_, that is,

confined (as regarded his residence) to one desert island, and marooned

also as to books, confined I mean (as regarded his reading) to one

sole book, his choice (if he read English) would probably oscillate

between Shakspeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Now, the Canterbury

Tales had been finished about thirty-five years before Agincourt; so

exquisitely false, even in this point, is Pope's account. Against the

_nothing_ of beggarly France was even then to be set a work which _has_

not been rivalled, and probably _will_ not be rivalled, on our planet.

II. In this comparison of the France and England then existing,

historically Pope betrays an ignorance which is humiliating. He speaks

of France as if that name, of course, covered the same states and

provinces that it now covers. But take away from the France of this

day the parts then possessed by Burgundy--take away Alsace, and

Lorraine, and Franche Compte--take away the alien territories adjacent

to Spain and Navarre--take away Avignon, &c.--take away the extensive

duchy of Britanny, &c.--and what remains of that which constituted the

France of Pope's day? But even that which _did_ remain had no cohesion

or unity as regarded any expanded sentiment of nationality, or the

possibilities of a common literature. The moral anachronisms of Pope

in this case are absolutely frightful--and the physical anachronisms

of Pope also; for the simple want of roads, by intercepting all peaceful

and pleasurable intercourse, must have intercepted all growth of

nationality, unless when a rare community of selfish interest happened

to arise, as when the whole was threatened with conquest or with famine

through foreign aggression upon a part.

III. That particular section of the French literature through which,

Pope pretends to think (for think he does _not_) that France absolutely

created our own, was the drama. Eighteen-penny Pompey belongs to this

section. Now, most unhappily, these two broad facts are emblazoned

beyond all power of impudence to darken them. The first is, that our

English drama was closing,' or actually _had_ closed, just about the

time when the French was opening. Shakspeare notoriously died in 1616,

when Corneille [Footnote 14] was yet a child of ten, and the last of

Shakspeare's great contemporary dramatists died, according to my

remembrance, in 1636; and, in 1635, one year earlier, was first

performed the first successful tragedy (the 'Medea') of Corneille.

About seven or eight years after _that_, the Puritans officially

suppressed the English drama by suppressing the theatres. At the opening

of the Parliamentary war, the elder (that is, the immortal) English

drama had finished its career. But Racine, the chief pillar of the

French, did not begin until Cromwell was dead and gone, and Charles

II. was restored. So, here we have the Asopian fable of the lamb

troubling the waters for the wolf; or, in the Greek proverb, _ano

potamon_. The other fact is, that, as no section whatever of the French

literature has ever availed to influence, or in the slightest degree

to modify, our own, it happens that the dramatic section in particular,

which Pope insists on as the galvanizing force operating upon our

seers, has been in the most signal repulsion to our own. All the other

sections have been simply inert and neutral; but the drama has ever

been in murderous antagonism to every principle and agency by which

our own lives and moves. [Footnote 15] And to make this outrage upon

truth and sense even more outrageous, Pope had not the excuse of those

effeminate critics, sometimes found amongst ourselves, who recognise

no special divinity in our own drama; _that_ would have been one great

crime the more, but it would have been one inconsistency the less. For

Pope had been amongst the earliest editors of Shakspeare; he had written

a memorable preface to this edition. The edition, it is true, was

shocking; and if the preface even was disfigured by concessions to a

feeble system of dramatic criticism, rhetorically it was brilliant

with the expression of a genuine enthusiasm as to Shakspeare, and a

true sympathy with his colossal power.

IV. Yet even this may not be the worst. Even below this deep perhaps

there opens a lower deep. I submit that, when a man is asked for a

specimen of the Agincourt French literature, he cannot safely produce

a specimen from a literature two hundred and fifty years younger without

some risk of facing a writ _de lunatico inquirendo_. Pompey the Pitiful

(or, if the reader is vexed at hearing him so called, let us call him,

with Lord Biron, in 'Love's Labor's Lost,' 'more than great, great

Pompey--Pompey the Huge') was not published, even in France, until

about two centuries and a quarter had elapsed from Agincourt. But, as

respects England, eighteen-penny Pompey was not revealed; the fulness

of time for his _avatar_ amongst us did not arrive until something

like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt.

And yet Pope's doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we

English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the

knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere,

indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of

'_correctness_' as the particular grace for which we were indebted to

France. But this will not do. In his own 'Art of Criticism,' about

verse 715, he describes 'us brave Britons' as incorrigibly rebellious

in that particular. We _have_ no correctness, it seems, nor ever had;

and therefore, except upon Sir Richard Blackmore's principle of stealing

a suit of clothes 'from a naked Pict,' it is hard to see how we need

to thank France for that which, as to us, has no existence. Then,

again, Pope acquiesced at other times in an opinion of his early

friends, that not Pompey, but himself, was the predestined patriarch

of 'correctness.' Walsh, who was a sublime old blockhead, suggested

to Pope that 'correctness' was the only tight-rope upon which a fresh

literary performer in England could henceforth dance with any advantage

of novelty; all other tight-ropes and slack-ropes of every description

having been preoccupied by elder funambulists. Both Walsh and Pope

forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by

'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside

afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two _literati_ stopped

to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical

correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which,

by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But

no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning,

or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about 'correctness' may be,

we cannot allow Pope so to escape from his own hyperbolical absurdities.

It was not by a little pruning or weeding that France, according to

his original proposition, had bettered our native literature--it was

by genial incubation, by acts of vital creation. She, upon our crab-tree

cudgel of Agincourt, had engrafted her own peaches and apricots--our

sterile thorn France had inoculated with roses. English literature was

the Eve that, in the shape of a rib, had been abstracted from the side

of the slumbering Pompey--of unconscious Pompey the Huge. And all at

the small charge of eighteen-pence! O heavens, to think of _that!_ By

any possibility, that the cost, the total 'damage' of our English

literature should have been eighteen-pence!--that a shilling should

actually be coming to us out of half-a-crown!

'Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.'