on account of the absurdity, which Spenser overlooked, of introducing
wolves into England. But on this principle, which is certainly a just
one, may it not be asked, why he should speak, the scene lying in
Windsor Forest, of the "sultry Sirius," of the "grateful clusters of
grapes," of "a pipe of reeds," the antique fistula, of "thanking Ceres
for a plentiful harvest," of "the sacrifice of lambs," with many other
instances that might be adduced to this purpose? That Pope, however, was
sensible of the importance of adapting images to the scene of action, is
obvious from the following example of his judgment; for in translating
Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros,
he has dexterously dropped the laurels appropriated to Eurotas, as he is
speaking of the river Thames, and has rendered it
Thames heard the numbers as he flowed along,
And bade his willows learn the moving song.
In the passages which Pope has imitated from Theocritus, and his Latin
translator, Virgil, he has merited but little applause. Upon the whole,
the principal merit of these Pastorals consists in their correct and
musical versification, musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly
be thought capable, and in giving the truest specimen of that harmony in
English verse, which is now become indispensably necessary, and which
has so forcibly and universally influenced the public ear as to have
obliged every moderate rhymer to be at least melodious. Pope lengthened
the abruptness of Waller, and at the same time contracted the exuberance
of Dryden.--WARTON.
Dr. Johnson does not appear sufficiently attentive to the true character
and nature of pastoral poetry. No doubt it is natural for a young poet
to initiate himself by pastorals; for what youthful heart does not glow
at the descriptions of rural nature, and scenes that accord with its own
innocency and cheerfulness; but although pastorals do not, in the sense
of Dr. Johnson, imitate real life, nor require any great insight into
human passions and characters, yet there are many things necessary in
this species of composition, more than Dr. Johnson seems to require. The
chief thing is an eye for picturesque and rural scenery, and an intimate
acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature,
which alone can give a lively and original colour to the painting of
pastoral poetry. To copy the common descriptions of spring or summer,
morning or evening, or to iterate from Virgil the same complaints of
the same shepherds, is not surely to write pastoral poetry. It is also
difficult to conceive where is "the close thought" with which Johnson
says Pope's Pastorals are composed. They are pleasing as copies of "the
poems of antiquity," although they exhibit no striking taste in the
"selection," and they certainly exhibit a series of musical
versification, which, till their appearance, had no precedent in English
poetry. If in particular passages, I have ventured to remark that Pope
has introduced false thoughts and conceits, let us remember that we
ought not so much to wonder that he admitted any, as that they were not
more. Dryden's earlier poems are infinitely more vitiated in this
respect.
Warton's observations are very just, but he does not seem sufficiently
to discriminate between the softness of individual lines, which is the
chief merit of these Pastorals, and the general harmony of poetic
numbers. Let it, however, be always remembered, that Pope gave the first
idea of mellifluence, and produced a softer and sweeter cadence than
before belonged to the English couplet. Dr. Johnson thinks it will be in
vain, after Pope, to endeavour to improve the English versification, and
that it is now carried to the _ne plus ultra_ of excellence.[8] This is
an opinion the validity of which I must be permitted to doubt. Pope
certainly gave a more correct and finished tone to the English
versification, but he sometimes wanted a variety of pause, and his nice
precision of every line prevented, in a few instances, a more musical
flow of modulated passages. But we are to consider what he did, not what
might be done, and surely there cannot be two opinions respecting his
improvement of the couplet though it does not follow that his general
rhythm has no imperfection. Johnson seems to have depreciated, or to
have been ignorant of, the metrical powers of some writers prior to
Pope. His ear seems to have been caught chiefly by Dryden, and as Pope's
versification was more equably (couplet with couplet being considered,
not passage with passage) connected than Dryden's, he thought therefore
that nothing could be added to Pope's versification. I should think it
the extreme of arrogance and folly to make my own ear the criterion of
music; but I cannot help thinking that Dryden, and of later days,
Cowper, are much more harmonious in their general versification than
Pope. I ought also to mention a neglected poem, not neglected on account
of its versification, but on account of its title and subject--Prior's
Solomon. Whoever candidly compares these writers together, unless his
ear be habituated to a certain recurrence of pauses precisely at the
end of a line, will not (though he will give the highest praise for
compactness, skill, precision, and force, to the undivided couplets of
Pope, separately considered)--will not, I think, assent to the position,
that in versification "what he found brickwork he left marble." I am not
afraid to own, that with the exception of the Epistle to Abelard, as
musical as it is pathetic, the verses of Pope want variety, and on this
account in some instances they want both force and harmony. In variety,
and variety only, let it be remembered, I think Pope deficient. It has
been doubted whether couplet verses ought ever to be broken. I will
appeal to Pope himself. Whenever he has done so, is there a judge of
poetical cadence who will not say it is harmonious? The instances are
few; but where they occur, are they not beautiful? If they had been too
often repeated the effect would be destroyed. But in long compositions
might not a greater variety of pauses have effect? Does not the ear feel
a lassitude at times? An idea has been started by some critics that "you
might as well have unequal columns to your house, as unequal couplets in
verse." This comparison, however, if it proves anything, proves too
much; for no one will say that every two verses in a long poem should in
quantity be exactly the same, the syllables the same, the pause the
same. This will not hold a moment in versification. If it did, then
Johnson's assertion falls to the ground; for then Dr. Darwin is a far
better versifier than Pope, and a very little pains would make a much
more consummate versificator than Dr. Darwin.--BOWLES.
Of all Pope's various and very freely-censured writings, there are none
that appear to have met with a harsher or more fastidious reception at
the hands of his commentators and critics than his Pastorals. Without
regarding them with a sufficient reference, either to the time of life
of the author, or the objects he had in view in their composition, they
have considered them as deficient in originality and strength of
thought, because they do not more greatly abound in new and striking
images. But to say nothing of the unreasonableness of requiring "new and
striking images," on a subject which has been obvious from the earliest
ages to all mankind, and has been the general theme of poetry in every
country, period, and language, it must be observed, that it was not the
intention of Pope to rely upon the strength of his own powers, or to
attempt an original style of pastoral composition. On the contrary, he
informs us at the close of his discourse, that if those pastorals have
any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, "whose
works," says he, "as I have had leisure to study, so I hope I have not
wanted care to imitate." In conceding then to Pope, that he has
exhibited "the ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, in language
equally mellifluous and pure," Dr. Warton has granted every thing which
Pope endeavoured to accomplish; and the observation of Johnson, "that no
invention was intended," is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the
genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer. Nor although the scene
be laid in Windsor Forest, does there appear to be any impropriety in
referring to a pipe of reeds, the clusters of grapes, the bounty of
Ceres, and other objects connected with pastoral life, and for which the
poet has himself assigned a sufficient reason in the following
discourse. "If," he observes, "we would copy nature, it would be useful
to carry this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they
call the golden age; so that we are not to describe our shepherds as
shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to
have been when the best of men followed the employment;" to which he
adds, that "an air of piety to the gods should shine through the poem,
which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity, and it ought to
preserve some relish of the old way of writing."--ROSCOE.
The manuscript of Pope's Pastorals is still preserved among the
Richardson papers. It was lent by Mr. T. B. Hollis to Wakefield, who has
noted the variations from the published text with minute fidelity.
Richardson has done the same in his copy of the quarto of 1717, and
gives this correct description of the handwriting of the original:--"The
manuscript title of the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, viz., An Essay on
Pastoral, and the title of the Pastorals, are written by Mr. Pope in
printing capitals so perfectly beautiful, and so exactly imitated, that
one can hardly believe they are not really from the press; the same of
all the words which would have been printed in italics throughout the
whole, which are in common printing character, the general being in
italics, beautifully formed, so as in all to imitate a printed book, but
in a fine taste of type, and form of the page and margin." Pope has
written upon the manuscript, "Mem. This copy is that which passed
through the hands of Mr. Walsh, Mr. Congreve, Mr. Mainwaring, Dr. Garth,
Mr. Granville, Mr. Southern, Sir H. Sheers, Sir William Trumbull, Lord
Halifax, Lord Wharton, Marquis of Dorchester, Duke of Bucks, &c. Only
the third Eclogue was written since some of these saw the other three,
which were written as they here stand with the Essay, anno 1704. AEtatis
meae 16. The alterations from this copy were upon the objections of some
of these, or my own." In his published list of the persons who had read
the Pastorals in manuscript, Pope has added the names of Wycherley and
Lord Somers, and omitted the names of Congreve, Southern, Sir H. Sheers,
Lord Wharton, the Marquis of Dorchester, and the Duke of Buckingham. His
chief adviser seems to have been Walsh, who, of all his admiring
friends, gave him, he says, the greatest encouragement. "I cannot," Pope
wrote to him July 2, 1706, "omit the first opportunity of making you my
acknowledgments for reviewing these papers of mine. You have no less
right to correct me than the same hand that raised a tree has to prune
it." The Richardson collection contains a manuscript in which the poet
has transcribed from his Pastorals the various lines he thought
defective, and after stating his own objection to them, and subjoining
amended readings, he referred the task of selection to Walsh, who has
jotted down his decisions at the bottom of Pope's remarks. Both will be
found in the notes on the passages to which the comments of the author
and his critic relate.
There is no evidence, except the poet's own assertion, to prove that the
Pastorals were composed at the age of sixteen. They had been seen by
Walsh before April 20, 1705, if any dependence could be placed upon the
letter of that date which he wrote to Wycherly, when returning the
manuscript, but the letter rests on the authority of Pope alone, and
there is reason to question the correctness of the date. The letter of
Walsh to Wycherley concludes with the expression of a desire to be made
acquainted with Pope. "If," adds Walsh, "he will give himself the
trouble any morning to call at my house I shall be very glad to read the
verses over with him." The next letter is from Walsh to Pope, and the
opening sentence shows that his correspondence with the poet had only
just commenced. It appears from what follows that they had met in
London, that Walsh had carried Pope's verses into the country, and that
these verses were three of the Pastorals. Walsh expresses a hope that
when he returns to town, Pope will have some fresh verses to show him,
"for I make no doubt," he says, "but any one who writes so well, must
write more." These particulars evidently refer to the period when Walsh
first became acquainted with the Pastorals, and undertook to criticise
them. But the correspondence on the subject begins on June 24, 1706,
whence we should infer that it was in April, 1706, and not in 1705, that
Wycherley introduced Pope and his Pastorals to Walsh. The poet would
have departed from his usual practice if he had not falsified dates to
exaggerate his precocity. That he was past seventeen when he first
exhibited his Pastorals to his friends is confirmed by a passage from
the letter, in which George Granville sketches the character of
Wycherley, and invites an unnamed correspondent to meet him. "He shall
bring with him, if you will," says Granville, "a young poet, newly
inspired in the neighbourhood of Cooper's Hill, whom he and Walsh have
taken under their wing. His name is Pope. He is not above seventeen or
eighteen years of age, and promises miracles. If he goes on as he has
begun in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may
hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman, and this swan of Windsor
sing as sweetly as the Mantuan."[9] Whatever may be the true date of
the Pastorals, a portion of them certainly existed before April 20,
1706, on which day Tonson, the bookseller, wrote to Pope, "I have lately
seen a pastoral of yours in Mr. Walsh's and Congreve's hands, which is
extremely fine, and is generally approved of by the best judges in
poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you at my shop, and am sorry I
did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your poem for
the press, no person shall be more careful in printing of it, nor no one
can give a greater encouragement to it." Three years elapsed before the
Pastorals saw the light, when Tonson became the publisher, and they
appeared on May 2, 1709, in his Sixth Miscellany. The preface, which
Walsh had read in manuscript, and which he calls "very learned and
judicious," did not come out till 1717, and then bore the title of A
Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. Johnson, repeating the language of Walsh,
says that it is "learned in a high degree;" whereas it was avowedly
compiled from two or three recent essayists, and demanded nothing from
the poet to which the term learning could be properly applied. He owed
to his second-hand authorities the arbitrary and pedantic rules which
were framed from the practice of the ancients, and which were employed
by the mechanical critics of his day to repress the free forms of modern
genius. The style would have been remarkable for its maturity, if, as
Pope professed, it had been the produce of sixteen, but the Discourse
was not printed till he was twenty-nine, and he certainly did not send
it uncorrected into the world.
"It must appear strange," says De Quincey, "that Pope at twenty-one
should choose to come forward for the first time with a work composed at
sixteen. A difference of five years at that stage of life is of more
effect than of twenty at a later; and his own expanding judgment could
hardly fail to inform him that his Pastorals were by far the worst of
his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written
anything else, his name would not have been known as a name even of
promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some
satirist or writer of a Dunciad."[10] "Expanding judgment" is often a
feeble antidote to the partiality of an author for his own compositions,
and Pope always spoke of his Pastoral effusions with fond complacency.
He did, indeed, pretend to regret their publication. There was some
delay in bringing out the Miscellany, and on November 1, 1708, he wrote
thus to Cromwell: "But now I talk of the critics, I have good news to
tell you concerning myself, for which I expect you should congratulate
with me; it is, that beyond all my expectations, and far above my
demerits, I have been most mercifully reprieved by the sovereign power
of Jacob Tonson from being brought forth to public punishment, and
[have been] respited from time to time from the hands of those barbarous
executioners of the muses, whom I was just now speaking of. It often
happens that guilty poets, like other guilty criminals, when once they
are known and proclaimed, deliver themselves into the hands of justice
only to prevent others from doing it more to their disadvantage, and not
out of any ambition to spread their fame by being executed in the face
of the world, which is a fame but of short continuance." Pope was in his
twenty-first year, an age at which frankness commonly preponderates, and
he already abounded in the ostentatious profession of sentiments he did
not entertain. He had circulated the Pastorals among numerous authors,
he had invited their criticisms, he had continued to correct the poems
with fastidious care, he retained to the last a high opinion of their
merit, and it is impossible to credit his insinuation, that he did not
design them for the press, and that he only printed them to avoid a
surreptitious edition which nobody gave any sign of preparing. The
hypocrisy broke out again when the Miscellany had appeared. "Nothing,"
wrote Wycherley, May 17, 1709, "has lately been better received by the
public than your part of it. You have only displeased the critics by
pleasing them too well, having not left them a word to say for
themselves against you and your performances. In earnest, all the best
judges of good sense or poetry are admirers of yours, and like your part
of the book so well that the rest is liked the worse." Pope replied, "I
shall be satisfied if I can lose my time agreeably this way, without
losing my reputation. As for gaining any, I am as indifferent in the
matter as Falstaff was, and may say of fame as he did of honour, 'If it
comes, it comes unlooked for; and there's an end on't.'" This
affectation of indifference was kept up by him to the end of his days.
Yet he was all the time composing, polishing, and publishing; his whole
existence was passed in painstaking, and almost drudging authorship; he
left no means untried, dishonest as well as fair, to sustain, extend,
and perpetuate his reputation; and he pursued every person with
inveterate malice who presumed to question his poetical supremacy. In
spite of his boasted apathy, there cannot be found in the annals of the
irritable race a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candidate for fame.
In his letter to Wycherley, Walsh remarked of Pope's Pastorals, "It is
no flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his
age." Walsh must have been thinking of Virgil's Eclogues, which are his
most juvenile productions, though he is not supposed to have commenced
them till he was thirty years old. Pope admired them to excess, and in
his manhood he held to the belief that "it was difficult to find any
fault in them."[11] His desire was to repeat, with slight variations,
this ancient pattern, which he thought perfection. Virgil himself was a
plagiarist, but the Eclogues have more originality than the Pastorals.
The descriptions of both Virgil and Pope are artificial, but Virgil has
heart-felt touches from the life, of which the Pastorals afford no
trace. The taste of both was unformed, but the conceits of Virgil are
accompanied by a poetic vein which was not yet equally developed in
Pope. Since the Pastorals are an imitation of the Eclogues, it might be
expected, as usually happens in such cases, that the copy would have the
defects of the model in an exaggerated degree. Pope could not disguise
from himself that his verses were the echo of an echo; and in a letter
of July 2, 1706, he begged Walsh to tell him sincerely whether he had
not stretched the license of borrowing too far. Walsh admitted in his
answer, that some persons to whom he had shown the manuscript had made
this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his
friend by the assurance, "that in all the common subjects of poetry the
thoughts are so obvious that whoever writes last must write things like
what have been said before." Roscoe has repeated the plea, and speaks of
"the unreasonableness" of expecting new images on a topic which "has
been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and
language." He forgot that rural scenery and life had furnished abundant
novelty to Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, whose pictures are
as fresh and unhacknied as if Theocritus and Virgil had never lived. "He
that walks behind," said Michael Angelo "can never go before;" and
originality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate
pastoral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn his
materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the English
characters about his doors, and from the English usages and modes of
thought in his own day, he would have discovered a thousand particulars
in which he had not been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neglected
this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so little attention upon the
realities around him, that though his descriptions are confined to the
barest generalities, they are not unfrequently false.
After contending that the triteness of the Pastorals was inevitable,
Roscoe puts forth a second defence to save the precocity of their
author. "The observation," he says, "of Johnson, that no invention was
intended, is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and
character of Pope, a decisive answer." This must mean that he copied
from choice, and not from necessity, which is contradicted by the
confession of Pope himself, who acknowledges that he leant upon his
masters because he was unable to go alone.[12] Without his testimony we
should have been driven to the same conclusion, since every great poet
whose youthful verses have been preserved, began by imitating his
predecessors, and it would be absurd, in defiance of a general law, to
assume that Pope was gifted with a juvenile originality which his early
works belie. If he had been capable of higher flights, it would have
done him no honour to have employed his melodious verse in piecing
together stale, vapid, and often paltry ideas.
Johnson, to be sure, was of opinion that Pope in his Pastorals had
copied "the poems of antiquity with judicious selection," but this
approbation he does not seem to deserve. A large volume might be
composed consisting solely of faults which had their counterpart in
works of genius. The homage Pope paid to famous names seduced his
immature taste into the admiration of many a vicious passage, and he
endeavoured to emulate or outdo the frigid and hyperbolical conceits of
his prototypes. Throughout the Pastorals, for instance, the phenomena,
which are the effects of the seasons, are ascribed to the presence or
absence of the nymphs whom his minstrels celebrate. In spring, the skies
mourn in showers, the birds are hushed, and the flowers are closed till
Delia smiles, when forthwith the skies brighten, the flowers bloom, and
the birds sing. In summer, the shepherd boasts that the breezes shall
wait upon his heroine, and blow in the places where she walks; that the
trees where she sits shall crowd into a shade; that the flowers shall
rise up from the soil where she treads; and that vegetation shall
flourish where she turns her eyes. In autumn, the birds neglect their
song, the leaves fall from the trees, and the flowers droop because
Delia has gone away. In winter, the heavens are obscured by clouds, the
verdure has withered, the flocks refuse to graze the meadows, the bees
neglect their honey, and the streams overflow with tears because Daphne
is dead. This last pastoral, which was Pope's favourite, turns mainly on
the notion that winter is the consequence of heaven and earth deploring
the death of Mrs. Tempest. "Such," says Sandys, "is the sweetness and
power of poesy, as it makes that appear which were in prose both false
and ridiculous, to resemble the truth." Poetic fancy is separated from
extravagance by narrow boundaries; but there must be some affinity to
truth, or the understanding is repelled instead of the imagination being
captivated. No ideas can have less to recommend them than the hollow
rhapsodies of the Pastorals, for they are at once obvious and absurd.
"Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature," and Pope's
fantastic superlatives are the image of neither. They never approximate
to the exaggeration of fervid passion, but both grief and love are
without the semblance of genuine feeling, and only excited the derision
of those who looked for a meaning beneath the glitter of words. "Pray
tell me the name of him I love," wrote Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterwards
the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley, "that I may sigh to the woods and
groves hereabouts, and teach it to the echo. Above all, let me know
whether it is most proper to walk in the woods, increasing the winds
with my sighs, or to sit by a purling stream, swelling the rivulet with
my tears."[13] This happy ridicule of a style of composition, which Pope
acknowledged ought "to be full of the greatest simplicity, in nature,"
was written a few months after the Pastorals were published, and appears
to have been suggested by them. The clever girl drew her notions from
life, and the perceptions of the young author were sophisticated by
books. Bowles believed that Pope was influenced "by the false taste of
Cowley at that time prevalent." Cowley's popularity, however, had ceased
for some years; the fashion he set had passed away; and Dryden reigned
in his stead. "He is sunk in his reputation," said this illustrious
successor in 1700, "because he could never forego any conceit which came
in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. For this
reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer
esteemed a good writer, and for ten impressions which his works have had
in many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely
purchased once a twelvemonth."[14] The conceits in Pope's Pastorals were
derived from other sources. He took little from Cowley, and borrowed
none of his peculiarities.
Pope says, in his Discourse, that his Pastorals "have as much variety in
respect of the several seasons as Spenser's; that to add to this
variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural
employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or
places proper to such employments, not without some regard to the
several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age."
Johnson has in consequence accorded to the Pastorals the praise of being
composed with "close thought;" but the conception was very imperfectly
executed, and in part is puerile. Spring and morning, summer and noon,
autumn and evening, winter and night, are coupled together, as if each
season was specially characterised by a single portion of the day,
selected for no other reason than because the order of succession is the
same. Between the several ages of man, and the seasons, there is an
obvious resemblance, which has furnished similes from time immemorial,
but there is no propriety in peopling a spring scene with children, and
a winter scene with the old, since all ages figure together in the
world, and manifest the feelings which belong to their years, whether it
happens to be winter or spring. If the plan had any merit, Pope did not
conform to it. The shepherds who sing in spring are grown up. The
shepherd who sings in summer is a boy. Winter is a funereal lament for a
young lady who was cut off in her prime, and has not the most distant
reference to old age. The different passions proper to each time of
life, which Pope professes to have distinguished, are altogether
overlooked. Love is the sole passion which animates the actors in
Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and the shepherd in Winter celebrates the
departed Daphne in the same lover-like rhapsodies which prevail
throughout the three preceding poems. The rural employments proper to
each season have been equally forgotten. Sheep-keeping and verse-making
are the only occupations, though the poet declares he had changed the
scene to suit the changing employment, and represents the first pastoral
as sung in a valley, the second on the banks of a stream, the third on a
hill, and the fourth in a grove. In place of the variety to which he
lays claim, we have a general sameness, and if he had kept faithfully to
the outline he sketched, he would, with his mode of composition, have
done little towards diversifying the series. He wanted the "intimate
acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature
which," as Bowles says, "can alone give a lively and original colour to
the painting of pastoral poetry." The scenes of his four lays,--the
valley, the stream, the hill, and the grove,--are just mentioned, and
nothing more. There is no attempt to depict them to the mind, and it
does not contribute to variety simply to tell the reader that he is now
in a valley, and now upon a hill. The seasons themselves are only marked
by the superficial, notorious circumstances which convey no pleasure in
the repetition, unless they are accompanied by the nice discriminating
touches of an exact observer. To say that showers descend, that birds
sing, that crocuses blow, and that trees put forth their leaves in
spring, supplies the mind with no fresh ideas, nor assists in giving a
new beauty and a more definite form to the ideas we possessed before.
The genius of Pope was in another direction; and when we contrast the
picturesque details of Thomson's Seasons with the blank common-places of
the Pastorals, we perceive how wide is the interval between the elegant,
harmonious versifier, and the genuine poet of nature. Sheep are twice
mentioned in Pope's Winter, once at ver. 5,
Now sleeping flocks in their soft fleeces lie;
and again at ver. 37,
For her the flocks refuse their verdant food.
Widely different in life and vividness are the lines in which Thomson
paints the flocks under their true wintry aspect, when the snow is
falling, and has buried up the herbage.
The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist'ning earth,
With looks of dumb despair.
In a verse which is not original, but which is more descriptive than
usual, Pope speaks of the breezes which, in spring, blow gently among
the osiers:
Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play.
This is flat by the side of the passage in Thomson's Spring, where he
describes the effects of the lightest current of air upon the aspen:
Not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall.
The epithet "closing" is happily applied to woods just bursting into
foliage, and the epithet "many-twinkling" is exquisitely appropriate to
the leaves of the aspen, which, when every other tree is still, and the
air can hardly be felt to stir, dance up and down incessantly, with an
endless play of light and shadow, and rustle as they wave joyously to
and fro. Nature scarce affords a prettier sight, or a more soothing
sound. These comparisons might be extended through pages, and they are
fair examples of Pope's inferiority in a style which was unsuited to his
turn of mind, and of which he had never formed adequate ideas.
Roscoe could perceive no impropriety in transferring classical customs
and mythology to the plains of Windsor. He conceived that every
objection was obviated by the announcement of Pope, "that pastoral is an
image of the golden age," which leaves us to infer, that during this
happy interlude our British shepherds adopted the manners and religion
of Greece. But the golden age was itself an exploded fable, which had
lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the
eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not
at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed
in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age
introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying
the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope's behalf;
for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined
era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen
Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to
the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other
incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by
one of Pope's shepherds, a circumstance which is intended to denote the
little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to
talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia'a groves as if they had
been neighbouring parishes.
One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed--the
peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to
be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence
that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He
must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he
was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate
the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he
expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he
esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and
musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in
some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to
Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic
harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden
propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what nature never gives the young,
Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not this, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden's position, but he
had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered
clear, that where there is not a defective ear, the softness or
ruggedness of juvenile verses depends upon the model. The imitative
faculty of boyhood is never more at home than in catching the trick of
metrical harmony. Dryden had used the heroic measure with consummate
skill, and no one who came after him could fall into the "harsh cadence"
of Oldham's Satires, and Cowley's Davideis, or rest satisfied with the
combination of rough and smooth in the productions of Sandys and Denham.
The music of the "mighty master" was on every tongue when Pope began "to
lisp in numbers." "I learned versification," he said to Spence, "wholly
from Dryden's works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former
poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not
he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."[16] What Dryden
did for Pope, Pope did for the next generation, and to compose
mellifluous verses became the common attainment of ordinary scribblers.
Cowper, in his Table Talk, has specially noticed this effect of Pope's
writings.
But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
In metrical skill Pope was thought by most persons to have surpassed all
his predecessors. "He is the most harmonious poet," said Voltaire,
"that England ever had. He has reduced the sharp hissings of the English
trumpet to the sweet sounds of the flute."[17] Voltaire doubtless found
this opinion prevalent in the circle he frequented during his residence
in England, from 1720 to 1728; for his own knowledge of our language
would not have enabled him to distinguish the nicer shades of melody.
The English critics confirm his decision. Johnson declared that the
versification of the Pastorals had "no precedent, nor has since had an
imitation." Warton pronounced "that it was musical to a degree of which
rhyme could hardly be thought capable," and Bowles admitted that Pope
"had made the English couplet infinitely more smooth." To the few who
"censured his poetry as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear
with unvaried sweetness," Johnson replied, "I suspect this objection to
be the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception; and
who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works, if he had
tried to relieve attention by studied discords, or affected to break his
lines, and vary his pauses."[18] Bowles sided with the cavillers, as
Johnson deemed them, and held that the want of breaks and of variety in
the pauses produced a monotony of sound. Lord Kames, on the contrary,
asserted that Pope was "eminent for variety of versification," and that
the variety of his pauses was the source of the "variety of his
melody."[19] I agree with the dissentients who think that his metre is
prone to a cloying mannerism, but I believe that the defect is ascribed
by Bowles to the wrong cause. Any one who compares the imperial march of
the metre in the Vanity of Human Wishes, with the sweet, but less
majestic Deserted Village, will perceive that the swell of the heroic
measure is capable of wide degrees. A poet judges of the harmony of his
verses by trying them on his ear, and the tendency is to set them all to
the same tune. This was Pope's error. He has in general, though not
always, intermixed the pauses, but he has not varied sufficiently the
swell and movement of his lines. Dryden, "in whose admirable ear," as
Gray remarks, "the music of our old versification still sounded,"[20]
rings the changes with wonderful ease and spirit, and is by turns soft
and stately, lively and solemn, familiar and sonorous, while he
preserves through all his transitions a freedom, a flow, and an
elasticity which never flag. His negligent lines, which are often
imputed to haste, have been thought by good writers to be intended to
avoid the surfeit of an equable strain. "Sometimes," says Dr. Trapp, "it
is not only allowable, but beautiful, to run into harsh and unequal
numbers. Mr. Dryden himself does it; and we may be sure he knew when he
did it as well as we could tell him. In a work intended for pleasure,
variety justifies the breach of almost any rule, provided it be done but
rarely."[21] There is extreme exaggeration in the language of Bowles
when he states that Pope "gave the first idea of mellifluence." Lines as
melodious may be counted in Dryden by the hundred. Pope only maintained
a more continuous softness, or, as Johnson puts it, "he discovered, by
perusing the works of Dryden, the most perfect fabric of English verse,
and habituated himself to that only which he found the best."[22] This
constantly recurring note, however attractive in itself, must always
appear a retrograde system, to those who appreciate the richer music of
more diversified modulations. The sameness of Pope's metre was the
reason that "every warbler had his tune by heart," and imitated it so
readily. There was a complexity in the incessant rise and fall of
Dryden's lines which mechanical verse-makers could only copy
imperfectly. The uniformity of Pope gave them little trouble. The
repetition soon fixed the brief lesson in their minds, and the petty
warblers almost rivalled their original in sound, though they were far
enough from approaching the beauty of his language, the terseness of his
style, the felicity of his ideas, and the weight of his sense.
As the Pastorals of Philips opened the sixth volume of Tonson's
Miscellany, De Quiucey conjectures that Pope's Pastorals may have been
placed at the end of the volume by his own desire. Both sets of verses,
by this arrangement, were more likely to attract attention, and invite
comparison. Pope appears not to have felt any jealousy at the outset.
Speaking of Philips's Pastorals in a letter to Cromwell, on October 28,
1710, a year and a half after the Miscellany was published, he said "he
agreed with the Tatler that we had no better eclogues in our language."
He particularly commended the lines which describe the musician playing
on the harp, and added that "nothing could be objected to them, except
that they were too lofty for pastoral." He changed his tone after the
essays on pastoral poetry had appeared in the Guardian. These papers
commenced with No. 22, and in No. 23, for April 7, 1713, some passages
are quoted from Philips to illustrate the qualities appropriate to the
pastoral style. In No. 30 there are more quotations from Philips to the
same purpose, and he and Spenser are singled out as the sole cultivators
of this species of composition, who "have copied and improved the
beauties of the ancients." The eulogium reached its climax in No. 32,
where it is asserted that there have been only four true masters of the
art in above two thousand years,--"Theocritus, who left his dominions to
Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was
succeeded by his eldest born Philips." It is not known who contributed
the essays, but it has been conjectured, without any evidence, that they
proceeded from Tickell. There cannot be a question that the author had a
friendship for Philips, or he would not have ranked him with Theocritus,
Virgil, and Spenser; and it is equally certain that he was not an
admirer of the Pastorals of Pope, which are passed over in silence, and
which violate the canons laid down by the critic. "I must observe," he
says, "that our countrymen have so good an opinion of the ancients, and
think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pastoral writers
have either stolen all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely
imitated their manners and customs as makes them very ridiculous."[23]
The method of Philips is adduced in advantageous contrast. He is
commended for changing the details with the scene, and introducing
English ideas into English eclogues. A few months earlier similar praise
had been bestowed upon him by Addison, in the Spectator for October 30,
1712. "When we are at school," said Addison in his essay, "it is
necessary for us to be acquainted with the system of pagan theology, and
we may be allowed to enliven a theme or point an epigram with a heathen
god; but no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can
be just which is not founded in truth, or at least in that which passes
for such. If any are of opinion that there is a necessity of admitting
these classical legends into our serious compositions, in order to give
them a more poetical turn, I would recommend to their consideration the
Pastorals of Mr. Philips. One would have thought it impossible for this
kind of poetry to have subsisted without fauns and satyrs, wood-nymphs
and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has
given a new life, and a more natural beauty, to this way of writing, by
substituting in the place of these antiquated fables the superstitious
mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country."
Addison had previously commenced the reformation by excluding pagan
machinery from his Campaign. It needed but a small amount of taste to
share his opinions, and the writer in the Guardian can hardly be charged
with hostility to Pope for not commending Pastorals which, apart from
their melodious language, were little better than a medley of unnatural
compliments, and unmeaning mythology. Contemporary criticism is more
often corrupted by the kindness of friendship than by the spite of
enmity, but the effect is sometimes the same, and the undue exaltation
of Philips increased the comparative contempt which was cast upon Pope.
He had reason to be annoyed, and it was not much compensation that the
prettiest lines of his January and May were quoted in one of the papers
on Pastoral, to show that fairies could be rendered attractive in verse.
The scheme Pope devised for redressing the wrong, was to send a paper to
the Guardian in which he ridiculed the Pastorals of his rival and
applauded his own. "With an unexampled and unequalled artifice of
irony," says Dr. Johnson, "though he himself has always the advantage,
he gives the preference to Philips." In the opening sentence of the
essay Pope is described as "a gentleman whose character it is, that he
takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and the
least concern for them afterwards."[24] He followed his invariable habit
of boasting his pre-eminence in the very virtue he was defying, and
attached this vaunt to a criticism in which his morbid "concern" for his
works had induced him to become his own reviewer and eulogist. He was
liberal in his self-laudation, and assured the public that though his
Pastorals might not fulfil the strict definition laid down in the
Guardian, they were, like Virgil's, "something better." To prove the
inferiority of Philips he selected three of his worst passages, and
contrasted them with three of his own. He picked out a dozen foolish
lines from his rival, and alleged that they were specimens of his
ordinary manner. He subjoined some ludicrous imitations of his style,
which are only not an outrageous caricature because they have no
resemblance at all to the original. The faults of Philips did not
require to be exaggerated. The absurdities of his satirist are different
in kind, but they are not less in degree. Some defects they had in
common, and as self-love is blind, Pope did not perceive that most of
his comments recoiled upon himself. He objected that Philips had
introduced wolves into England, where they formerly existed, and the
critic forgot that the imaginary golden age, which he maintained in his
Discourse was the only era of Pastoral, must be assigned to a period
long anterior to their extirpation. Or if the piping shepherds, who
composed and chanted poems, were to be considered as existing
personages, credibility was not more violated in supposing that Windsor
Forest was still haunted by wolves than by heathen gods and
goddesses,--in imagining the lambs to be preyed upon by a wild beast,
than in picturing Christian bards employed in sacrificing them to Mrs.
Tempest with an exact observance of pagan rites. He took especial credit
for having kept to the circumstances proper to a particular season of
the year, and a certain time of the day, and exposed the ignorance of
Philips, who, says he, "by a poetical creation, hath raised up finer
beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies,
and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that
in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom
together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely
mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers
of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe
feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though
Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the
anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important
charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that
Philip's Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books."
While it was admitted that "his competitor had imitated some single
thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale
depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served
a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he
is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and
these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in
polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole,
superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and
the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is
narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure.
In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of
his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years,
and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when
Tonson's Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of
Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets.
Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a competitor. The
exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation
upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity
from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his
antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and
unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for
themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher
or sink them lower than they merit.
Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the
editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted in which he had
drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and
awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously,
and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise
of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the
manuscript to the latter, and assured him that he would "never publish
any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of
another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon
Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the
wits at Button's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his
Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the
criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of
it, and that it was dictated by friendship for Philips. Small as was the
ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the
common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next
generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were
unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole
criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I
have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world
against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he
talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of
Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to
believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author
could be serious in asserting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names
agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of
Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished
friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a
different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton
says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony
was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was
defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The
satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and passages, which the
author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common
sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error
with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which
are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces Daphnis,
Alexis, and Thyrsis on British plains, as Virgil had done before him on
the Mantuan." Habit had reconciled Pope to the affectation of calling
English shepherds Daphnis and Thyrsis, but "the names," as De Quincey
says, "are rank with childishness," and the public, who felt the
practice to be absurd, concluded that the censure was real. "It may,"
said Pope, "be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, that the
words nymph, dryad, naiad, faun, Cupid, or satyr, are not once mentioned
through the whole," which was a sneer at Addison's commendation of
Philips for rejecting those dreary nonentities; but the public, who had
been nauseated with them, could not detect a covert sarcasm in the
repetition of the praise by the writer in the Guardian. The circumstance
which seemed to Warton to render the irony transparent was the remark,
that "Philips had with great judgment described wolves in England," but
the ridicule was based upon ignorance, and must have been lost upon
every one who was aware that wolves abounded in the antique period to
which the pastorals referred. Bowles, who knew that the paper was
ironical, yet imagined that Pope was serious in the opening portion,
where it is asserted that Virgil has not above a couple of "true
pastorals," and that Theocritus has scarcely more. This part, however,
of the essay was in the same sarcastic vein with the rest. The previous
critic in the Guardian had laid down the rule that a pastoral should
reflect "the golden age of innocence," and Pope, to deprive Philips of
the benefit of the definition, endeavoured to show that Theocritus and
Virgil had hardly ever conformed to it. He did not mean seriously to
admit that his competitor was a more genuine pastoral poet than Virgil
and Theocritus. His object was to throw ridicule on the definition
itself, albeit he adopted it in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry when he
was no longer engaged in disparaging Philips.
Nothing can be clearer than that Pope was instigated to write the essay
in the Guardian by his jealousy of the praise which had been bestowed
upon his rival. The course he took was discreditable, and Warburton,
without attempting a direct apology, pretends that the incident which
influenced the poet was the misrepresentations made of him to Addison by
Philips. Ruffhead adds that the calumny consisted in the assertion that
Pope was "engaged in the intrigues of the tory ministry." This would be
a good reason for his exposing the mis-statement, but would be a poor
excuse for his writing an anonymous attack upon Philips's Pastorals, and
a panegyric upon his own. The defence, which would be inadequate if it
was true, is indubitably incorrect. The account of Warburton did not
appear till Philips was dead. Pope, while Philips was living, published
an account, in the shape of a letter to Caryll, the date and contents of
which prove that Philips did not bring his charge against Pope till a
full year after the paper had been printed in the Guardian.[26] The poet
adds that when they meet he will inform Caryll "of the secret grounds of
Philips's malignity," and Warburton himself subjoins in a note "These
grounds were Mr. Pope's writing the ironical comparison between his own
and Philips's Pastorals." The strong presumption from the nature of the
case that Pope was actuated by literary envy is thus confirmed. The
criticism in the Guardian was not provoked by the malignity of Philips,
but the bitterness of Philips was the consequence of the criticism. In
1790, Mr. J. C. Walker, the Italian scholar, sent to the Gentleman's
Magazine an alleged remark of Philips to the same effect. "When the
comparison," says Mr. Walker, "between the Pastorals of Pope and
Philips appeared, Philips was secretary to Primate Boulter, and then in
Ireland. Dining one day with the officers of the Prerogative Court, the
comparison became the subject of conversation, and Philips said he knew
it was written by Pope, adding, 'I wonder why the little crooked bastard
should attack me, who never offended him either in word or deed?' This I
had from a gentleman who was present."[27] If the conversation ever
occurred, the gentleman was mistaken in supposing that the criticism was
recent, for the paper in the Guardian came out in 1713, and it was not
till more than ten years afterwards that Philips went with Archbishop
Boulter to Ireland. The story is unnecessary to prove that Pope was the
aggressor, which is sufficiently evident from independent testimony.
Unhappily for himself, he began at the outset of his career to stir up
those enmities which were the torment of his existence. By his attack
upon Dennis, in the Essay on Criticism, he invited the scurrility of
that rabid pamphleteer, and by what Bowles calls his "unmanly hostility"
to Philips he was reduced to the shame of being scared away from
Button's by the no less unmanly retaliation of his victim, who, at some
period of the quarrel, hung up a birch, and declared that he would use
it on "his rival Arcadian," if he showed his face in the coffee-room.