'_The two brilliant poets._' As regards Horace, it is scarcely worth
while to direct the reader's attention upon inconsistency of this
imaginary defiance to philosophic authority with his profession
elsewhere of allegiance to Epicurus; for had it even been possible to
direct the poet's own attention upon it, the same spirit of frank
simplicity which has converted his very cowardice, his unmitigated
cowardice (_relicta non bene parmula_), into one of those amiable and
winning frailties which, once having come to know it, on no account
could we consent to forego--would have reconciled us all by some
inimitable picturesqueness of candor to inconsistency the most shocking
as to the fulfilment of some great moral obligation; just as from the
brute restiveness of a word (Equotuticum), that positively would not
come into the harness of hexameter verse, he has extracted a gay,
laughing _alias_ (viz., '_versu quod dicere non est_'); a pleasantry
which is nowhere so well paralleled as by Southey's on the name of
Admiral Tchichakoff:--
'A name which you all must know very well,
Which nobody can speak, and nobody can spell.'
Vain would it be to fasten any blame upon a poet armed with such
heaven-born playfulness that upon a verbal defect he raises a triumph
of art, and upon a personal defect raises a perpetual memento of smiling
and affectionate forgiveness. We 'condone' his cowardice, to use
language of Doctors' Commons, many times over, before we know whether
he would have cared for our condonation; and protest our unanimous
belief, that, if he did run away from battle, he ran no faster than
a gentleman ought to run. In fact, his character would have wanted its
amiable unity had he _not_ been a coward, or had he _not_ been a rake.
Vain were it to level reproaches at _him_, for whom all reproaches
become only occasions of further and surplus honor. But, in fact, for
any serious purposes of Horace, philosophy was not wanted. Some slight
pretence of that kind served to throw a shade of pensiveness over his
convivial revels, and thus to rescue them from the taint of plebeian
grossness. So far, and no farther, a slight coloring of philosophy was
needed for his moral musings. But Pope's case is different. The moral
breathings of Horace are natural exhalations rising spontaneously from
the heart under the ordinary gleams of chance and change in the human
things that lay around him. But Pope is more ambitious. He is not
content with _borrowing_ from philosophy the grace of a passing sanction
or countersign, but undertakes to _lend_ her a systematic coherency
of development, and sometimes even a fundamental basis. In his
'Essay on Man,' his morals connect themselves with metaphysics. The
metaphysics had been gathered together in his chance eclectic rambles
amongst books of philosophy, such as Montaigne, Charron, and latterly
amongst the fossil rubbish and _debris_ of Bayle's Dictionary. Much
also had been suggested to his piercing intellect in conversation,
especially with Lord Bolingbroke; but not so exclusively by any means
with _him_ as the calumniators of Pope would have us suppose. Adopt
he did from all quarters, but Pope was not the man servilely to beg
or to steal. It was indispensable to his own comfort that he should
at least understand the meaning of what he took from others, though
seldom indeed he understood its wider relations, or pursued its ultimate
consequences. Hence came anguish and horror upon Pope in his latter
days, such as rarely can have visited any but the deathbed of some
memorable criminal. To have rejected the _verba magistri_ might seem
well, it might look promising, as all _real_ freedom is promising, for
the interests of truth; but he forgot that, in rejecting the master,
he had also rejected the doctrine--the guiding principle--the unity
of direction secured for the inquirer by the master's particular system
with its deep internal cohesion. Coming upon his own distracted choice
of principles from opposite angles and lines of direction, he found
that what once and under one aspect had seemed to him a guiding light,
and one of the buoys for narrowing the uncertainties of a difficult
navigation, absolutely under another aspect, differently approached
and differently associated, did the treacherous office of a _spanselled_
horse, as in past days upon the Cornish and the South Irish coast it
was employed--expressly for showing false signals, and leading right
amongst breakers. That _hortus siccus_ of pet notions, which had won
Pope's fancy in their insulated and separate existence, when brought
together as parts and elements of the same system in the elaborate and
haughty 'Essay on Man,' absolutely refused to cohere. No doctoring,
no darning, could disguise their essential inter-repulsion. Dismal
rents, chasms, hiatuses, gaped and grinned in a theory whose very
office and arrogant pretension had been to harmonize the dislocated
face of nature, and to do _that_ in the way of justification for God
which God had forgotten to do for himself. How if an enemy should come,
and fill up these ugly chasms with some poisonous fungus of a nature
to spread the dry rot through the main timbers of the vessel? And, in
fact, such an enemy _did_ come. This enemy spread dismay through Pope's
heart. Pope found himself suddenly shown up as an anti-social monster,
as an incendiary, as a disorganizer of man's most aspiring hopes. 'O
Heavens! What is to be done? what _can_ be done?' he cried out. 'When
I wrote that passage, which now seems so wicked, certainly I meant
something very good; or, if I didn't, at any rate I meant to mean it.'
The case was singular; if no friend of the author's could offer a
decent account of its meaning, to a certainty the author could _not_.
Luckily, however, there are two ways of filling up chasms; and
Warburton, who had reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's
favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special
pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the
chasms with philosophic oakum, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch,
he sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious dogmatism
and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced,
and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a
permanent result, was this--that the demurs which had once been raised
(however feebly pressed) against the poem, considered in the light of
a system compatible with religion, settled upon it permanently as a
sullen cloud of suspicion that a century has not availed to dissipate.