Folio, 1713.
Non injussa cano: te nostrae. Vare, myricae,
Te nemus omne canet; nec Phoebo gratior ulla est,
Quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen.--VIRG.
London: Printed for BERNARD LINTOTT, at the Cross-keys,
in Fleet Street.
The work appeared before March 9, 1713, on which day Swift
writes to Stella, "Mr. Pope has published a fine poem,
called Windsor Forest. Read it." In his manuscript Pope
says, "It was first printed in folio in ----. Again in folio
the same year, and in octavo the next." It was included in
the quarto of 1717, in the second edition of Lintot's
Miscellany in 1714, and in the four succeeding editions of
1720, 1722, 1727 and 1732.
This poem was written at two different times. The first part of it,
which relates to the country, in the year 1704, at the same time with
the Pastorals. The latter part was not added till the year 1713, in
which it was published.--POPE.
In 1713 Pope published Windsor Forest; of which part was, as he relates,
written at sixteen, about the same time as his Pastorals; and the latter
part was added afterwards: where the addition begins we are not told.[1]
The lines relating to the Peace confess their own date. It is dedicated
to Lord Lansdowne, who was then in high reputation and influence among
the tories; and it is said, that the conclusion of the poem gave great
pain to Addison, both as a poet and a politician. Reports like this are
often spread with boldness very disproportionate to their evidence. Why
should Addison receive any particular disturbance from the last lines of
Windsor Forest? If contrariety of opinion could poison a politician, he
would not live a day; and, as a poet, he must have felt Pope's force of
genius much more from many other parts of his works. The pain that
Addison might feel, it is not likely that he would confess; and it is
certain that he so well suppressed his discontent, that Pope now thought
himself his favourite.
The design of Windsor Forest is evidently derived from Cooper's Hill,
with some attention to Waller's poem on the Park; but Pope cannot be
denied to excel his masters in variety and elegance, and the art of
interchanging description, narrative, and morality. The objection made
by Dennis is the want of plan, of a regular subordination of parts,
terminating in the principal and original design. There is this want in
most descriptive poems, because as the scenes, which they must exhibit
successively, are all subsisting at the same time, the order in which
they are shown must, by necessity, be arbitrary, and more is not to be
expected from the last part than from the first. The attention,
therefore, which cannot be detained by suspense, must be excited by
diversity, such as this poem offers to its reader. But the desire of
diversity may be too much indulged. The parts of Windsor Forest which
deserve least praise are those which were added to enliven the stillness
of the scene--the appearance of Father Thames, and the transformation
of Lodona. Addison had, in his Campaign, derided the rivers, that "rise
from their oozy beds" to tell stories of heroes;[2] and it is therefore
strange that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural, but lately
censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a new
metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient. Nothing is easier than
to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock an obdurate
tyrant.--JOHNSON.
Descriptive poetry was by no means the shining talent of Pope. This
assertion may be manifested by the few images introduced in the poem
before us which are not equally applicable to any place whatsoever.
Rural beauty in general, and not the peculiar beauties of the forest of
Windsor, are here described. Nor are the sports of setting, shooting,
and fishing, at all more appropriated. The stag-chase, that immediately
follows, although some of the lines are incomparably good, is not so
full, so animated, and so circumstantial, as that of
Somerville.--WARTON.
Johnson remarks that this poem was written after the model of Denham's
Cooper's Hill, with, perhaps, an eye on Waller's poem of the Park.
Marvel has also written a poem on local scenery[3]--upon the hill and
grove at Billborow, and another on Appleton House (now Nunappleton), in
Yorkshire. Marvel abounds with conceits and false thoughts, but some of
the descriptive touches are picturesque and beautiful. He sometimes
observes little circumstances of rural nature with the eye and feeling
of a true poet:
Then as I careless on the bed
Of gelid strawberries do tread,
And through the hazels thick espy
The _hatching thrustle's shining eye_.
The last circumstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been
described by one who was a real lover of nature, and a witness of her
beauties in her most solitary retirements. Before this descriptive poem
on Windsor Forest, I do not recollect any other professed composition on
local scenery, except the poems of the authors already mentioned.
Denham's is certainly the best prior to Pope's: his description of
London at a distance is sublime:[4]
Under his proud survey the city lies,
And like a mist beneath a hill does rise,
Whose state and wealth, the bus'ness and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a _darker cloud_.
Pope, by the expression of "majestic," has justly characterised the flow
of Denham's couplets. It is extraordinary that Pope, who, by this
expression, seems to have appreciated the general cast of harmony in
Cooper's Hill, should have made his own cadences so regular and almost
unvaried. Denham's couplets are often irregular, but the effect of the
pauses in the following lines was obviously the result of a fine ear.
The language truly suits the subject:
But his proud head the airy mountain hides
Among the clouds; his shoulders and his sides
A shady mantle clothes; his curled brows
Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows,
Whilst winds and storms his lofty forehead beat!
The occasional introduction of such passages should be managed with
great care, but I appeal to any judge of poetry whether he does not feel
the effect intended to be raised by the pauses of the lines just quoted?
He who has not an eye to observe every external appearance that nature
may exhibit in every change of season, and who cannot with a glance
distinguish every diversity of every hue in her variety of beauties,
must so far be deficient in one of the essential qualities of a poet.
Here Pope, from infirmities and from physical causes, was particularly
deficient. When he left his own laurel circus at Twickenham, he was
lifted into his chariot or his barge; and with weak eyes and tottering
strength, it is physically impossible he could be a descriptive bard.
Where description has been introduced among his poems, as far as his
observation could go, he excelled; more could not be expected. It is for
this reason that his Windsor Forest, and his Pastorals, must ever appear
so defective to a lover of nature. In his Windsor Forest he has
description, incident, and history. The descriptive part is too general,
and unappropriate; the incident, or story part, is such as only would
have been adopted by a young man who had just read Ovid; but the
historical part is very judiciously and skilfully blended, and the
conclusion highly animated and poetical: nor can we be insensible to its
more lofty tone of versification.--BOWLES.
Richardson transcribed the various readings of Windsor Forest into his
copy of the quarto of 1717, and added this note:--"Altered from the
first copy of the author's own hand, written out beautifully, as usual,
for the perusal and criticism of his friends." The manuscript in
Richardson's possession did not contain the entire work, but stopped at
ver. 390. On the title-page of the manuscript was a memorandum by Pope,
which says, "This poem was written just after the Pastorals, as appears
by the last verse of it. That was in the year ----, when the author was
---- years of age. But the last hundred lines, including the celebration
of the Peace, were added in the year ----, soon after the ratification
of the treaty of Utrecht." Pope supplied the omitted dates in the octavo
of 1736, where he ascribes the former part of Windsor Forest to 1704,
and the latter part to 1710. The testimony of Pope carries little
weight, and there is no subsidiary evidence to confirm the improbable
statement that the larger portion of the poem was produced as early as
1704. The date he assigned to the remainder, in a note at ver. 1 of the
edition of 1736, and again in a note on ver. 289, must have been a slip
of the pen, or an error of the press. Warburton altered 1710 to 1713 in
the first note, and left the mistake uncorrected in the second. The
amended date was a fresh blunder, for it appears from the letters of
Pope to Caryll on Nov. 29, and Dec. 5, 1712, that the new conclusion was
then complete. Pope's memory deceived him when he stated that the end of
the poem was written "soon after the ratification of the treaty of
Utrecht." The treaty, as Mr. Croker remarks, was not signed till March
30, 1713, nor ratified till April 28, and Windsor Forest was published
before March 9. The Peace had for some months been an accepted fact, and
Pope did not wait for its formal ratification.
"Lord Lansdowne," said Pope to Spence, "insisted on my publishing my
Windsor Forest, and the motto (_non injussa cano_) shows it."[5] Pope
not only published, but composed Windsor Forest at the instigation of
Lord Lansdowne, if the opening lines of the poem are to be believed.
Trumbull, however, asserts that it was he who suggested the topic to
Pope. "I should have commended his poem on Windsor Forest much more,"
wrote Sir William to Mr. Bridges, May 12, 1713, "if he had not served me
a slippery trick; for you must know I had long since put him upon this
subject, gave several hints, and at last, when he brought it, and read
it, and made some little alterations, &c., not one word of putting in my
name till I found it in print." The apparent discrepancy may be
explained by the supposition that Trumbull proposed the earlier poem on
the Forest, and Lord Lansdowne the subsequent celebration of the Peace.
The poet tacked the new matter on to the old, and may have represented
that he sang at the command of Granville, because the ultimate form
which the work assumed was due to him.
Mrs. Delany, who was the niece of Lord Lansdowne, and lived with him in
her youth, says, in her Autobiography, that he was a man of an open
unsuspecting temper, that he had the greatest politeness and good-humour
imaginable, that he was magnificent in his nature, and wasted his
fortune to gratify his passion for display.[6] His predominant
characteristics were amiability and vanity. His love of distinction
incited him to become a dramatist, poet, and politician. He had
aspirations without ability, and in none of these capacities did he
exhibit any vigour of mind. His poetry was an imitation of Waller, "of
whom," says Johnson, "he copied the faults, and very little more."[7]
His plays reflect the worst qualities of the era of Charles II. In
tragedy he thought that to be dull and stately was to be classical; in
comedy that affected briskness of dialogue was liveliness, and indecent
double meanings wit. He made no figure in politics, and owed his posts
in the Harley administration to his wealth, family, and electioneering
influence. His literature, aided by his hereditary advantages, sufficed
to procure him a factitious fame while he lived, but his reputation was
at an end the moment his works lost the lustre they derived from his
social position.
Lord Lansdowne was at the zenith of his career when he persuaded Pope to
eulogise the Peace. A measure in itself wise had been made subservient
to the personal interests of the unprincipled faction in power. These
intriguers could not carry on the war without the commanding genius of
Marlborough, nor allow a political opponent to perpetuate his ascendancy
by a fresh series of victories. Certain that they would be driven from
office unless they could huddle up a peace, they were guilty of a
treacherous connivance with the enemy, and a flagrant breach of faith
towards their allies. They were compelled to grant terms to France which
were the boast of her minister, Torcy, and which Bolingbroke confessed
were not what policy or our successes required.[8] A man of more
enlightened views might have justly urged that hard conditions,
offensive to the pride of a great nation, were less calculated to ensure
a lengthened peace than lenient demands, which allowed the consolation
of an honourable retreat. No such plea was put forth by Bolingbroke. He
always retained the vulgar idea that France ought to have been "humbled"
and her "power reduced for generations to come." He lamented the
moderation of the treaty, and threw the blame upon the want of union
among the allies, which was itself occasioned by the knowledge that he
and his colleagues had determined to sacrifice all other interests to
their own.[9] There was a risk that a treaty which was thought
inadequate by its authors would rouse universal indignation, and prove
as fatal to their power as the continuance of the war. The Peace became
the political test of the hour, and every artifice of prose and verse
was employed to appease public opinion.
Pope did not stop with applauding the Peace; he denounced the
Revolution. He afterwards professed a lofty superiority to party
prejudices; but there were obvious reasons which might induce him to lay
aside his usual caution at this crisis. The war was directed against
Louis XIV., the champion of Roman Catholicism, and the Pretender. A
general belief prevailed that the Protestant succession could only be
secured by reducing the French king to helplessness, and that a Peace,
on the other hand, which saved him and the Harley administration from
ruin, would be propitious to the cause of tories, papists, and
Jacobites. "They fancied," says Bolingbroke, "that the Peace was the
period at which their millenary year would begin."[10] A young and
sanguine poet may well have shared a conviction in which both sides
concurred,--the ministerialists by their hopes, and the opposition by
their fears. No sooner was the treaty concluded than it became apparent
that the hopes and fears were exaggerated. The ministry was torn to
pieces by intestine divisions; its supporters--a heterogeneous body, who
had been loosely held together by a common enmity--were rapidly throwing
off their allegiance; the good will, which had been founded upon large
and vague expectations, was converted into hostility under total
disappointment; and the failing health of the Queen rendered it probable
that the accession of a whig sovereign would shortly complete the
discomfiture of the faction. After the conclusion of the Peace, says
Bolingbroke, "we saw nothing but increase of mortification, and nearer
approaches to ruin."[11]
Having been too precipitate in casting in his lot with the tories, Pope
hastened to qualify his rashness by conciliating the whigs, and
undertook to furnish the Prologue to Addison's Cato. This play was
brought out April 14, 1713, at the request of the opposition, who
intended it for a remonstrance against the arbitrary projects imputed to
the ministry. The tragedy was hurried upon the stage towards the close
of the dramatic season, lest the salutary lesson should come too late
to save the threatened constitution.[12] Pope told Spence that the
manuscript was submitted to him by Addison, that he thought the action
not sufficiently theatrical, and that he recommended the author to
forego its performance. Shortly afterwards Addison went to him and said,
"that some particular friends, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on
its being acted." He protested that he had no party purpose in the play,
commissioned Pope to convey this assurance to Oxford and Bolingbroke,
sent them the tragedy along with the message, and obtained their
encouragement. When a year and a half had elapsed, and the House of
Hanover had succeeded to the English throne, Addison published in Nov.
1714, a copy of verses to the Princess of Wales, in which he took credit
for the patriotism and daring of his muse in sending forth the play with
the express design of defeating the machinations of the government.[13]
And boldly rising for Britannia's laws,
Engaged great Cato in her country's cause.
Hurd, unwilling to condemn his hero, Addison, and accepting, without
misgiving, the statement reported by Spence, exclaims, "How spotless
must that man be, that, in passing through a court, had only contracted
this slight stain, even in the opinion of so severe a censor and casuist
as Mr. Pope."[14] But unless the conduct of Addison is misrepresented he
must have been corrupt and contemptible. The party of which he was a
prominent member urged the production of his play, at a momentous
crisis, with a political object, and it would have been mean and
treacherous to yield to their entreaties, and then privately assure the
common enemy that nothing political was intended. The baseness would
have been great indeed if, when the power passed over to the whigs, he
triumphantly declared that he had pursued the very course he disavowed
at the time, and thus endeavoured by a false boast to procure new credit
and rewards. Either Addison was unscrupulous, or Pope fabricated the
tale. Addison's version was published to the world: Pope's version was
dropped into the ear of Spence. Addison made his claim when the
circumstances were fresh, and when Pope, Bolingbroke, and Oxford were at
hand to expose him: Pope told his story after the lapse of many years,
when he had quarrelled with Addison, and the subject of his aspersions
was in the grave. Addison has never been convicted of an untruthful
word, or a dishonourable act: Pope's career was a labyrinth of deceit,
and he abounded in audacious malignant inventions. These considerations
are sufficient, but there is more direct evidence. "I have had lately,"
wrote Pope to Caryll, Feb. 1713, "the entertainment of reading Mr.
Addison's tragedy of Cato. It drew tears from me in several parts of the
fourth and fifth acts, where the beauty of virtue appears so charming,
that I believe, if it comes upon the theatre, we shall enjoy that which
Plato thought the greatest pleasure an exalted soul could be capable of,
a view of virtue itself dressed in person, colour, and action. The
emotion which the mind will feel from this character, and the sentiments
of humanity which the distress of such a person as Cato will stir up in
us, must necessarily fill an audience with so glorious a disposition and
sovereign a love of virtue, that I question if any play has ever
conduced so immediately to morals as this." Here is Pope prognosticating
that Cato upon the stage will melt, delight, and animate the audience.
He penned the words at the exact period when, according to his later
assertion, he was admonishing Addison that the play was unsuited to the
theatre, and he is self-convicted by the contradiction. One-half of his
story was false, and renders the other half worthless.[15]
In the account which Pope gave to Caryll of the first night of Cato he
said that "all the foolish industry possible had been used to make it a
party play," and complained that "the prologue writer was clapped into a
stanch whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines."[16] He
might be anxious to persuade his jacobite correspondent that he had not
been abetting a whig manifesto, and might pretend that he was annoyed at
the construction put upon the Prologue, but his verses were chiefly
devoted to enforcing the political doctrine of the play, and he must
deliberately have laid himself out to catch the applause of its friends.
His management advanced his fortunes. Windsor Forest procured him the
acquaintance and patronage of the tory leaders. Swift recommended the
poem to Stella on March 9, 1713, and in November he was heard by Dr.
Kennet "instructing a young nobleman that the best poet in England was
Mr. Pope, a papist, who had begun a translation of Homer into English
verse, for which he must have them all subscribe, 'for,' says he, 'the
author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for
him.'"[17] The other magnates of the faction joined with Swift in
befriending him. In those heated times a Roman Catholic who had won over
one party to his interests, by proclaiming his jacobite bias in verse,
would naturally have fallen under the ban of their opponents; but his
standing sponsor for the whig play, and the relations he maintained with
whig authors, kept the whigs from renouncing him. To his art in
attracting notice to his poetry through his politics, and in combining
the suffrages of embittered political antagonists, he owed the
unexampled success of the Homer subscription, which secured his
pecuniary independence. He had served both masters by turns, though in
unequal degrees, and then unreasonably complained to Caryll that some
people called him a whig, and others called him a tory.[18] He
disclaimed being either. He talked of his abhorrence of party violence,
and propounded his principles in dark unmeaning generalities from which
nothing can be gathered, except that he wished to avoid being held
responsible for any opinions whatever. He did not take up the position
that a purely literary undertaking was independent of politics. The
moment the tory cause declined he pleaded his neutrality, and seemed to
imagine that he could claim the support of all parties on the ground
that he adhered to none. The less wary patron who bespoke Windsor Forest
had to suffer for his jacobite zeal. He was arrested on Sept. 21, 1715,
and remained in the Tower till Feb. 8, 1717. Bolingbroke and Oxford were
impeached, and the selfish bargain they had brought about by
dishonourable means, that they might prolong their rule, annihilated
their power for ever.
"A person," says Warton, "of no small rank has informed me, that Mr.
Addison was inexpressibly chagrined at the noble conclusion of Windsor
Forest, both as a politician and as a poet,--as a politician, because it
so highly celebrated that treaty of peace which he deemed so pernicious
to the liberties of Europe; and as a poet, because he was deeply
conscious that his own Campaign, that gazette in rhyme, contained no
strokes of such genuine and sublime poetry."[19] This is one of those
plausible imputations which enemies propagate on the evidence of their
own suspicions, and which therefore require to be substantiated by
unexceptionable testimony. Warton had nothing better to adduce in
support of the credibility of his informant than the irrelevant
circumstance that he was "a person of no small rank." The description of
the witness declares his incompetence. It is not pretended that the
"person of no small rank" was intimate with Addison, or had any
authentic means of ascertaining his sentiments, and they are certainly
misrepresented by the assertion that he could not endure poetical
panegyrics on a Peace he disapproved, for in the Spectator of Oct. 30,
1712, he wrote up Tickell's laudatory verses, and "hoped his poem would
meet with such a reward from its patrons as so noble a performance
deserved."[20] There is not a party word added to extenuate the praise;
a tory might have endorsed the essay. Intolerance and "inexpressible
chagrin" were not at any time characteristics of Addison.
Tickell's Prospect of Peace went through six editions, and to judge by
the sale was more popular than Windsor Forest, which was published four
months later. The greater success of the far inferior poem was doubtless
owing to the eulogium in the Spectator. Pope joined in applauding
Tickell's work. He said that it contained "several most poetical images,
and fine pieces of painting," he specified certain "strokes of mastery,"
and he especially commended the versification.[21] His too liberal
praise may have been influenced by the couplet in which Tickell
exclaimed,
Like the young spreading laurel, Pope! thy name
Shoots up with strength and rises into fame.
Nearly the whole of the poem is in an equally dreary style, and this
dull mediocrity was not attained without numerous imitations of ancient
and modern authors. The insipidity did not exclude extravagance; for
both poetry and patriotism were thought to be displayed by a nonsensical
exaggeration of British beauty, valour, and power.
Windsor Forest is not free from flat passages, inflation of sentiment,
and false and puerile thoughts. Pope mixed up in it the beauties of his
manlier period with the vices of his early style. No writer clung more
tenaciously to the lifeless phantoms of paganism, nor applied the
hereditary common-places in a more servile manner. Liberty is
"Britannia's goddess;" the sun is "Phoebus' fiery car;" the sea is
"Neptune's self;" the harvest is "Ceres' gifts;" the orchard is "Pomona
crowned with fruits;" the ground is "painted by blushing Flora; "and the
flocks on the hills are attended by Pan. This last personage leaves his
innocent pastoral employment to chase, with evil intentions, "a rural
nymph" who calls on "Father Thames" for aid. Father Thames is deaf or
indifferent, and Pan is about to clutch her when at her own request she
is dissolved into a river. Before her transformation she was one of the
"buskined virgins" of Diana, what time the goddess forsook "Cynthus'
top" for Windsor, and was often seen roving there over the "airy
wastes." There was no occasion now to envy "Arcadia the immortal
huntress and her virgin train," since Windsor could boast
As bright a goddess, and as chaste a queen,
and the poet proceeds to complete the comparison between Diana and Queen
Anne,--between the virgin huntress, and a prolific mother, who was ugly,
corpulent, gouty, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler. Pope afterwards
affected a disdain of royalty; he was ready enough to flatter it when he
had his own ends to serve. He could not have devised a less felicitous
compliment. Tickell's poem was specially praised in the Spectator for
its freedom from the follies of "pagan theology." Addison laughed at the
whole tiresome tribe of gods and goddesses, and, with good-humoured
pleasantry, warned the versifiers, who were about to celebrate the
Peace, against introducing "trifling antiquated fables unpardonable in a
poet that was past sixteen." He laid stress upon the circumstance that
in a panegyric, which should be distinguished for truth, "nothing could
be more ridiculous than to have recourse to our Jupiters and Junos,"[22]
and no incongruity of the kind could be more absurd than to couple Diana
and Queen Anne. Windsor Forest was still in manuscript when Addison's
essay appeared. Pope was not at the pains to re-cast his poem, but he
must have recognised the force of the playful satire, and thenceforward
he abjured mythological trash.
The passage on the death of Cowley exemplifies, in a short compass, the
unskilful use to which Pope put the worn-out rags of antiquity:
O early lost! what tears the river shed,
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on ev'ry note expire,
And on his willows hung each muse's lyre.
"The appropriate business of poetry," says Wordsworth, "her privilege,
and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear;
not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses
and passions."[23] Since genuine emotions are often founded upon
fancies, since thoughts are not always the true reflection of outward
realities, poetasters, and even poets, have concluded that they might
represent things neither as they are nor as they appear, might neglect
nature altogether, and be unfaithful alike to the world of intelligence,
and the world of matter. To this spurious class of invention belong the
notions that a river, which had flowed for ages, was the tears of the
river-god lamenting the newly-deceased Cowley, and that all the swans on
the Thames died with grief on the day of his funeral. The mind refuses
to admit such jejune and monstrous fictions among the illusions of
imagination. The compound of mythological and biblical ideas in the
fourth line has converted a pathetic incident in the Psalms into a cold
and miserable conceit. The harp of the Jew was a reality; and when he
wept over his captivity by the rivers of Babylon he hung up his harp in
very truth because his broken spirit would not permit him to sing the
Lord's song in a strange land. There is, on the contrary, only hollow
pedantry in the pretence that non-existent muses hung up non-existent
lyres on the willows of the Thames because Cowley was dead. The passage
goes on in the same empty artificial strain:
Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung
His living harp, and lofty Denham sung?
But hark! the groves rejoice, the forest rings!
Are these revived?--or is it Granville sings?
It is an excellent remark of Bowles that there are some ideas which will
only just bear touching. The earliest poems were sung, and singing
became synonymous with poetical composition, but when a phrase, which is
now a mere figure of speech, is expanded, and the groves are said to
rejoice, and the forests to ring with the singing of Granville, the
predominant effect produced by the metaphor is a sense of its falsity
and grotesqueness. The picture called up is not that of a poet, but of a
half-crazed opera singer. This sickly vein of counterfeit pastoral is
continued, and we are told that the groves of Windsor are filled with
the name of Mira, the subject of Lord Lansdowne's amatory verses, and
that the Cupids tuned the lover's lyre in the shades.
The lines on Lord Lansdowne offend the more from the fulsomeness of the
adulation. Pope said that "flattery turned his stomach,"[24] which meant
that he could not endure his own vices in other people. He had
emphatically satirised the sycophancy which estimated literary works by
the rank of the author:
What woful stuff this madrigal would be
In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens! how the style refines!
Before his sacred name flies ev'ry fault,
And each exalted stanza teems with thought.[25]
The "sacred name" of Lansdowne imparted genius to verse which would have
been "woful stuff" in Dennis or Welsted. When Pope, in later years,
called him "Granville the polite" he characterised him correctly; when,
in Windsor Forest, he exalted him to the rank of a transcendent poet, he
said what he could not believe. He outraged candour in prose as well as
in verse. He wrote a sycophantic letter to Lord Lansdowne, boasting his
freedom from the insincerity of his "fellow scribblers" who composed
panegyrics "at random, and persuaded the next vain creature they could
find that it was his own likeness." Pope vowed he had erred in the
opposite direction, and had forborne to praise Lord Lansdowne up to the
height of his deserts out of deference to his modesty. "Whereas others
are offended if they have not more than justice done them, you would be
displeased if you had so much. Therefore I may safely do you as much
injury in my word as you do yourself in your own thoughts. I am so vain
as to think I have shown you a favour in sparing your modesty, and you
cannot but make me some return for prejudicing the truth to gratify
you."[26] Here was triple incense,--the original adulation, the
protestation that it was inadequate, and the pretence that Lord
Lansdowne, a man noted for vanity, was too modest to endure merited
praise. Pope spoke more truth than he intended when he said that he had
"prejudiced truth to gratify him."
"Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope in 1737.[27] The panegyric in Windsor
Forest was an anachronism, and he might have asked the same question in
1713. Never was an equal reputation more ephemeral. While Cowley lived,
and for a few years afterwards, the most cultivated minds in the kingdom
called him the "great Cowley," the "incomparable Cowley," the "divine
Cowley." When he died, Denham said that Death had
Plucked the fairest, sweetest flow'r
That in the Muses' garden grew.
The herd of readers vied with men of letters in applauding him, as was
shown by the sale of his works, and is implied in the couplet of Oldham:
One likes my verses, and commends each line,
And swears that Cowley's are but dull to mine.[28]
The wonder is not that he lost his pre-eminence, but that he ever
obtained it. His poetry is a puzzle from its contradictory qualities.
Some of his pieces have a gay facility which had not hitherto been
rivalled, and the greater part are harsh, heavy and obscure. He loved to
search for remote analogies, and his profusion of far-fetched similes
are constantly of a kind which debase the subject they are intended to
elevate and adorn. His language is incessantly pitched in a high, heroic
key, and then sinks in the same, or the succeeding sentence, into the
tamest, meanest phrases of colloquial prose. His verse in entire poems,
as well as in single lilies and occasional passages, is remarkable for
its tripping ease, and is more often rugged to such a degree that it is
incredible how it could pass with him for verse at all. The faulty side
in him predominates, and the general impression he leaves is that of
dullness, laboured and negligent by turns. He did not owe the whole of
his popularity to his real abilities, and the bad taste of his age. He
was a conspicuous adherent of the Stuarts, and the cavaliers adopted his
works out of compliment to his politics. The grand funeral procession,
commemorated in Windsor Forest, was a tribute paid to him by a party,
because he united the fame of a forward royalist to the celebrity of an
author. In a generation when authors and royalists were both dissolute,
his writings had at least the merit of being untainted by the prevailing
vice. Pope, describing the infidelity and debauchery of the Restoration
era, exclaims,
Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles's days,
Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.[29]
He might have remembered Milton if he overlooked Cowley, who was
nevertheless a far greater poet than Roscommon. The one had gleams of
genius, and the other had none. The contemporaries of Cowley had not
been blind to the moral merits of his productions. "I cannot," says Sir
John Denham, "but mention with honour my friend Mr. Cowley, who was the
first who of late offered to redeem poesy from that slavery wherein this
depraved age has prostituted her to all imaginable uncleanness."[30] His
request in his will, that his compositions, printed and manuscript,
should be collected by Dr. Sprat, was accompanied by a clause
"beseeching him not to let any pass (if anything of that kind has
escaped my pen) which may give the least offence in point of religion
and good manners." His life was in keeping with his writings. Evelyn
calls him that "incomparable poet, and virtuous man;" and Pepys heard
Dr. Ward, the bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Bates, the well-known
puritan, "mightily lamenting his death, as the best poet of our nation
and as good a man."[31] The king was pleased to add his testimony,
worthless if it had stood alone, and declared "that Mr. Cowley had not
left a better man behind him in England."[32]
"In Windsor Forest," says Bowles, "there is description, incident, and
history." A few remarks may still be made on it under each of these
heads. Wordsworth assigned to it the distinction, in conjunction with
Lady Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie, of containing the only "new images
of external nature" to be found "in the poetry of the period intervening
between Paradise Lost and the Seasons."[33] He limited the praise to "a
passage or two," and does not particularise the passages to which he
alluded. He must chiefly have referred to the lines from ver. 111 to
ver. 146; for the other happy "images of external nature" are borrowed.
Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he
usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the
world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple,
his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of
English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than
with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there
anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and
Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the noble
qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. His sympathies were
contracted, and strange to say there is not one word in his voluminous
writings on human kind which denotes that he had felt in the smallest
degree the loveliness of children. His main interest was in men and
women, whose names, for good or evil, were before the world, and in
speaking of them he dwelt principally upon their foibles and misdeeds.
The censure of Warton is valid when he complains that Pope's account of
field sports is deficient in characteristic details. He found a
stag-chase in Cooper's Hill, which determined him to extend, while ho
imitated, the plan of his original, and introduce hunting, fishing,
shooting, and netting into Windsor Forest, though he was not a
sportsman. The objection that his stag-chase is not as circumstantial as
that of Somerville, is fairly answered by Johnson's remark, that the
chase was the main subject of Somerville, and is only subsidiary with
Pope. More, nevertheless, was required than a description of the
impatience and galloping of the horses, and of the eagerness of the
riders. Of this single topic one half was a translation from Statius.
The fishing and shooting are superior to the hunt. The particulars are
meagre, but there is mastery in the mode of representing them. The dying
pheasant is painted in language as rich as its plumage, and the doves,
the lapwing, the lark, and the wintry landscape, could not have been
brought more vividly before the mind, or in fewer words. A gentle pathos
intermingles with the whole. The portrait of the angler would have been
perfect, in the single circumstance to which it is confined, if Pope had
not said of him, "he hopes the scaly breed." Wakefield observed that
"hope," used as an active verb, was intolerably affected, and he might
have extended the remark to the use of "scaly breed" for fish.
The "story part" of Windsor Forest is a mosaic of translated scraps from
Ovid's Metamorphoses. The fictions of heathen mythology, which had been
repeated to satiety, which exhibited no invention, and had no charm for
modern imaginations, are worse than an excrescence in the midst of
English prospects, sports, and history. The bad effect does not stop
with the puerilities themselves, but they communicate an air of weakness
and unreality to the general texture of the work.
The well-merited praise which Bowles bestowed upon "the historical part"
of the poem is inapplicable to the ill drawn character of William the
Conqueror. Pope saw in him only a devastator and a tyrant. He had not
caught a glimpse of the robust will, and masculine genius, which
conquered and consolidated a great country. The vigour, daring, and
sagacity which tempered the grosser traits in the mind of William are
suppressed, and the masterly warrior and statesman is reduced to an
inglorious spoiler of peasants, and hunter of deer. The advantages which
accrued to England from the conquest itself were unknown to Pope, who
fancied that its principal result was to destroy agriculture, and
impoverish the people. He was not aware that it introduced a more
advanced civilisation, imparted new energy to a backward stagnant
population, opened up to them a vista of grander views, and repaid
transitory suffering by vast and permanent benefits.
A fourth element in Windsor Forest is not noticed by Bowles. Pope
considered that the "reflections upon life and political institutions"
were the distinguishing excellence of Cooper's Hill. He emulated in this
respect his master's merits, surpassed him in polish of style, and fell
below him in strength of thought. Hunting the hare suggests to Pope this
poor and false conclusion:
Beasts urged by us their fellow beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo.
How much more weighty is the sentiment expressed by Denham, when the
stag endeavours to take refuge in the herd:
The herd, unkindly wise,
Or chases him from thence, or from him flies;
Like a declining statesman, left forlorn
To his friends' pity, and pursuers' scorn,
With shame remembers, while himself was one
Of the same herd, himself the same had done.
The terse satire upon Henry VIII. is a still better specimen of Denham's
moralisings. As he surveys the prospect round Cooper's Hill he is
reminded of the dissolution of the monasteries, by the sight of the
place where once stood a chapel which had shared the fate of its parent
abbey. This rouses his indignation, and he thus proceeds:
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was't luxury or lust?
Was _he_ so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Were these their crimes?--they were his own much more;
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor,
Who having spent the treasures of his crown,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own.
Thus he the church at once protects and spoils:
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.
The last couplet is a contrast between the destroying energy of Henry
VIII., and the impotence of his book against Luther.
Windsor Forest has rather more variety in its versification than is
usual with Pope. The poem opens with one of those breaks in the metre
which were incessant in the older rhymsters, and which were gradually
abjured by their successors.
Thy forest, Windsor! and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch's and the muse's seats,
Invite my lays.
This use of the full stop commonly required that the sense should be
carried on without a pause from the preceding line, whereas the theory
spread that the close of the sense should coincide with the close of the
rhymed sound, or in other words that the full stop should be always at
the end of the couplet. To keep the rhyme predominant there was an
increasing tendency to have at least the pause of a comma, even after
the final word of the first line of the couplet. Thus from a license,
which, as Prior says, "was found too dissolute and wild, and came very
often too near prose," the writers of heroics arrived at a system which
"produced too frequent an identity in the sound, and brought every
couplet to the point of an epigram."[34] Denham, according to Johnson,
was the chief reformer who "taught his followers the art of concluding
their sense in couplets,"[35] but he retained much of the primitive
freedom, and Prior says that to Dryden belongs the credit of perfecting
the innovation, and the blame of pushing it to excess. Pope went further
than Dryden. When once the change had commenced there was a constant
movement towards uniformity till the utmost verge was reached, and a
fresh reaction began. Bowles, with his fine ear, was a zealous advocate
for diversified harmony, and tuneful strength. He felt that an
occasional break, managed with skill, adds dignity to the couplet, while
the toning down of the final syllables, by sometimes running one verse
into another, is a grateful antidote to the cloying monotony of emphatic
rhymes. Imperfect rhymes offend from the impression they give of
imperfect art, but perfect rhymes softened by the continuous flow of the
pronunciation, are a relief to the ear. As the rhymed sound should be
diminished at intervals, so, at intervals, it may be advantageously
increased by the introduction of triplets. Dryden often used them with
admirable effect;[36] Pope employed them sparingly, and they were almost
entirely laid aside by his immediate imitators. With them the taste for
numerous verse was extinct.