In 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton’s nephews, published his
_Theatrum Poetarum_. In his Preface and elsewhere there can be little
doubt that he reflected the æsthetic principles and literary judgments
of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year
before.[34] The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grandeur
and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems kept alive the
traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and yet
we may believe as confident as ever, of that “immortality of fame” which
he tells his friend Diodati he was “meditating with the help of Heaven”
in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had seen
Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jonson,[35] lived to see that
false school of writers whom he qualified as “good rhymists, but no
poets,” at once the idols and the victims of the taste they had
corrupted. As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal
hearing, while he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he ever
think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve? It is not
impossible; but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew’s book the
dragon’s teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century and
a half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the
restoration of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the
grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is Milton’s,
though the hand be that of Phillips: “Wit, ingenuity, and learning in
verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing;
true native poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and
spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do
not perfectly apprehend; much less is it attainable by any art or
study.” The man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly
shared, if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years
before had said that “decorum” (meaning a higher or organic unity) was
“the grand masterpiece to observe” in poetry.[36]
It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has remarked) that Joseph
Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedication to Young of
the first volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope,
published in 1756. That was the earliest public and official declaration
of war against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and
reprisals had been going on for some time. Addison’s panegyric of Milton
in the Spectator was a criticism, not the less damaging because
indirect, of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old
ballads condemned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the
drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of
nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he had an
instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that of Gray.
Thomson’s “Winter” (1726) was a direct protest against the literature of
Good Society, going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that
of one’s own mind heightened by the contemplation of outward nature.
What Thomson’s poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his having
modelled his two principal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme
altogether in the “Seasons,” and in the “Castle of Indolence” rejecting
the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside’s “Pleasures of
Imagination,” whose very title, like a guide-post, points away from the
level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and less domestic
prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the
seed of nobler births, and without it the “Lines written at Tintern
Abbey” might never have been. Three years later Collins printed his
little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice
the natural supremacy of the imagination (though he called it by its
older name of fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse-making.
The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistakably
foreshadowed, lies already in the “Ode on the Superstitions of the
Highlands.” He was the first to bring back into poetry something of the
antique fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being
classically elegant without being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of
music,[37] he rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a
harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own
words,
“The force of energy is found,
And the sense rises on the wings of sound.”
But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our poetry, we
owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, whose “Progress of
Poesy,” in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other
English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary
ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy,
it was the prevailing blast of Gray’s trumpet that more than anything
else called men back to the legitimate standard.[38] Another poet, Dyer,
whose “Fleece” was published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject
and his treatment of it gives further proof of the tendency among the
younger generation to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly
enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though there are also traces
of a careful study of Milton.
Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the acknowledged
monarch of letters, as supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and
exposure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris hastened his end a
generation later. His fame, like Voltaire’s, was European, and the style
which he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the
cultivated world. The new edition of the “Dunciad,” with the Fourth Book
added, published the year before his death, though the substitution of
Cibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his
reputation and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized head he
was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the
resounding, if somewhat uniform march, of its numbers. He had been
translated into other languages living and dead. Voltaire had long
before pronounced him “the best poet of England, and at present of all
the world.”[39] It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and technical
skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of
original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very
plenitude of his power, there was already a widespread discontent, a
feeling that what “comes nearest,” as Phillips calls it, may yet be
infinitely far from giving those profounder and incalculable
satisfactions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was
gathering strength which prompted
“The age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of virtuous liberty.”
Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a similar reaction
began to show themselves on the Continent, notably in the translation
of Milton (1732) and the publication of the _Nibelungen Lied_ (1757) by
Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, then,
that there was anything better than good sense, elegant diction, and the
highest polish of style? Could there be an intellectual appetite which
antithesis failed to satisfy? If the horse would only have faith enough
in his green spectacles, surely the straw would acquire, not only the
flavor, but the nutritious properties of fresh grass. The horse was
foolish enough to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising how
patiently it will go on, for generation after generation, transmuting
dry stubble into verdure in this fashion.
The school which Boileau founded was critical and not creative. It was
limited, not only in its essence, but by the capabilities of the French
language and by the natural bent of the French mind, which finds a
predominant satisfaction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make a
despotism, political or æsthetic, palatable with the pepper of epigram.
The style of Louis XIV. did what his armies failed to do. It overran and
subjugated Europe. It struck the literature of imagination with palsy,
and it is droll enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some knowledge
of Shakespeare, continually endeavoring to reassure himself about the
poetry of the _grand siècle_, and all the time asking himself, “Why, in
the name of all the gods at once, is this _not_ the real thing?” He
seems to have felt that there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when
poetry must be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it
must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to Voltaire, is the tenth Muse,
but how if there were difficulty in reading as well as writing? it was
something, at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were
perverse enough to feel in attempting the productions of a
pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor
old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice
was not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature which the
most perfectly manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and
passionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the
couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well in
their own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which men were
capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet,
Lear, and Othello upon the stage? Was not poetry, then, something which
delivered us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely
reconciling us with it?
A century earlier the school of the _cultists_ had established a
dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute while it lasted.
Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its
paternity,[40] had been called divine, and similar honors had been paid
in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest sense
contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly account
satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden and so widely extended. It may well
be suspected that there was some latent cause, something at work more
potent than the fascinating mannerism of any single author in the rapid
and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. It
is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men whose native
tongues had not yet attained the precision and grace only to be acquired
by long literary usage, should have learned from a study of the Latin
poets to value the form above the substance, and to seek in mere words
a conjuring property which belongs to them only when they catch life and
meaning from profound thought or powerful emotion. Yet this very
devotion to expression at the expense of everything else, though its
excesses were fatal to the innovators who preached and practised it, may
not have been without good results in refining language and fitting it
for the higher uses to which it was destined. The _cultists_ went down
before the implacable good sense of French criticism, but the defect of
this criticism was that it ignored imagination altogether, and sent
Nature about her business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom
competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely
uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. There is more than a
fanciful analogy between the style which Pope brought into vogue and
that which for a time bewitched all ears in the latter half of the
sixteenth century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was
mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common.
This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They
called everything something else. A boot with them was
“The shining leather that encased the limb”;
coffee became
“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown”;
and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of proper
names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, was the smallest
allowance. Here are four successive verses from “The Vanity of Human
Wishes”:--
“The _encumbered_ oar scarce leaves the _dreaded_ coast
Through _purple_ billows and a _floating_ host.
The _bold_ Bavarian in a _luckless_ hour
Tries the _dread_ summits of _Cæsarian_ power.”
This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the criticism which
laid at the door of the master all the faults of his pupils was unjust.
It was defective, moreover, in overlooking how much of what we call
natural is an artificial product, above all in forgetting that Pope had
one of the prime qualities of a great poet in exactly answering the
intellectual needs of the age in which he lived, and in reflecting its
lineaments. He did in some not inadequate sense hold the mirror up to
nature. His poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth; it
is not in sympathy with the higher moods of the mind; yet it continues
entertaining, in spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in a
drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and
rouged, to be sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own
way as the heroes of Homer in theirs.
For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and his sect,
circumstances had prepared the way. English literature for half a
century after the Restoration showed the marks both of a moral reaction
and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship
and cropped hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, as their
temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a
wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought back with him from exile
French manners, French morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune
makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the king so; and this, at a
time when court patronage was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to
the higher qualities of literature. That Charles should have preferred
the stately decorums of the French school, and should have mistaken its
polished mannerism for style, was natural enough. But there was
something also in the texture of the average British mind which prepared
it for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel. No observer
of men can have failed to notice the clumsy respect which the
understanding pays to elegance of manner and _savoir-faire_, nor what an
awkward sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished
worldliness. The code of society is stronger with most persons than that
of Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his fingers in
his neighbor’s pocket would forego green peas rather than use his knife
as a shovel. The submission with which the greater number surrender
their natural likings for the acquired taste of what for the moment is
called the World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however
destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society and nurse
of civility. Any one who has witnessed the torments of an honest citizen
in a foreign gallery before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it his
duty to admire, though it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt
whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of the sinner.
It is only a great mind or a strong character that knows how to respect
its own provincialism and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The
bewildered clown with his “Am I Giles? or am I not?” was but a type of
the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, and keeping step,
whether he will or no, with the company into which destiny or chance has
drafted him, and which is marching him inexorably away from everything
that made him comfortable.
The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and reserve, entailed
also that sensitiveness to ridicule which haunts pride like an evil
genius. “The English,” says Barclay, writing half a century before the
Restoration, “have for the most part grave minds and withdrawn, as it
were, into themselves for counsel; they wonderfully admire themselves
and the manners, genius, and spirit of their own nation. In salutation
or in writing they endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign
manners) to descend to those words of imaginary servitude which the
refinement (_blandities_) of ages hath invented.”[41] Yet their fondness
of foreign fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. Every
one remembers Portia’s merry picture of the English lord: “How oddly he
is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in
France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.” But while
she laughs at his bungling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in
externals, she hints at the persistency of his inward Anglicism: “He
hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian.” In matters of taste the
Anglo-Saxon mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself,
which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt or in a
pretence of admiration equally insincere. The young lords who were to
make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance
beside which the homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and
underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety was absolute upon
the stage, though license had its full swing behind the scenes. They
brought home with them to England debauched morals and that urbane
discipline of manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline
of mind. The word “genteel” came back with them, an outward symptom of
the inward change. In the last generation, the men whose great aim was
success in the Other World had wrought a political revolution; now,
those whose ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn
and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a change. Before
the end of the seventeenth century John Bull was pretty well persuaded,
in a bewildered kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and especially
that his efforts in literature showed marks of native vigor, indeed, but
of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He began to be ashamed of the
provincialism which had given strength, if also something of limitation,
to his character.
Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life out of ten lines
to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess of York, expresses the
prevailing belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his
“improvement” of the “Maid’s Tragedy” of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made
the play _reasonable_, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire
in the fact that it was refused a license because there was an immoral
king in it. On the throne, to be sure,--but on the stage! Forbid it,
decency!
“Above our neighbors’ our conceptions are,
But faultless writing is the effect of care;
Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste,
Polished like marble, would like marble last.
* * * * *
Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,
And patience had to cultivate our thoughts,
Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage
Would honor this than did the Grecian stage.”
It is a curious comment on these verses in favor of careful writing,
that Waller should have failed even to express his own meaning either
clearly or with propriety. He talks of “cultivating our thoughts,” when
he means “pruning our style”; he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or
at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect equanimity
to tell us that a nobler “rage” (that is, madness) than that of Greece
would follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never seems to
have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and
not the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his
rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on
the “Double Dealer.” He begins by stating the received theory about the
improvement of English literature under the new _régime_, but the thin
ice of sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under
his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.
“Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,
The present age in wit obscures the past;
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arm[42] and dint of wit.
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;
And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood;
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured,
Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued;
Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength;
Our builders were with want of genius curst,
The second temple was not like the first.”
There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller’s verse in the
half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on “cultivated.” Perhaps he was
at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint
of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to
hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the
heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the
exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty,
can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the
charm of his verse which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps
never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is
never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through
the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his
thought clambers like an unpruned vine,--Dryden, one of the most truly
English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring
about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in
criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in
the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to
the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French
words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in
the century and a half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas
came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit,
of our literature.
Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which
had been inherited as traditions of classicism from the preceding
generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a
very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an
English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that
Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had written a _reasonable_
tragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy
pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and
there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may
be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Voltaire
says of the English tragedians,--and it will be noticed that he is only
putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden,--“Their productions,
almost all barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have
astonishing gleams in the midst of their night; ... it seems sometimes
that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere.” _Eh bien_, the
inference is that we must try and make it so! The world must be uniform
in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we
have invented in Paris? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire
played master of ceremonies to introduce the _bizarre_ Shakespeare among
his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression
on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called
his whilome _protége_ a buffoon.
The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth
century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism
which streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in
politics and religion had been put out of joint. A generation of
materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows
over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As
always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies,
the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and
unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to
piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown
to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the
inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless
it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very
foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal
scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity
in the interest of decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did not
believe even in itself.
The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that
which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton was
willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry
of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was that
Fame
“Which the clear spirit doth raise
To scorn delights and live laborious days,”
to the crown of a good preacher who sets
“The hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire”?
Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book whose moral, if
it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were
political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than
doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures had any souls to
be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer
which Pulci’s Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in
Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the
majority of that generation:--
“To tell thee truly,
My faith in black’s no greater than in azure,
But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,
And in good wine my faith’s beyond all measure.”[43]
It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be
Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited
their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe
terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could
be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney
himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the
morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not
toward God. The very shamelessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age
of sham.
It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral
and emotional as well as the intellectual side, should be produced by
such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was.
The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and analytic than in
imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, prone to
attribute an almost magical power to the scientific regulation whether
of politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts
of society to as great perfection as was possible by the _a priori_
method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion within the magic
circle of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of careless ease and
gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal
watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the
natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, and its
first question about a sentiment was, Will it be _safe_? about a phrase,
Will it pass with the Academy? The effect of its example on English
literature would appear chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in
point and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying
conventional sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society
rather than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest where its
success had been most marked, in what was called moral poetry, whose
chosen province was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging
scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose office it was to
purify, not the manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and
terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to
me, lay in its tendency to confound what was common with what was
vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority at the expense of all
free movement of the mind.
There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves by their own
extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the
charm of some master of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept.
The influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for
true style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is always
in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps
some reform was needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy,
could write,
“My passion has no April in her eyes:
I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle;
My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle
Slight drops.”[44]
Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its own
rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to correct
those profound instincts out of whose judgments the higher principles of
æsthetics have been formulated, its success is a disaster. During the
era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline
from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from metaphor, which
fuses image and thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the
other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial
by-laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonizes, and it
is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the soul
of it should subordinate the outward parts; while the artificial method
proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey
the form.
Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the “Maid’s
Tragedy”:--
“Nor is’t less strange such mighty wits as those
Should use a style in tragedy like prose;
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.”
That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in anything
but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff’s law that a heroine can go
decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so
loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses “describe” in its Latin
sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart!
Phillips touches the true point when he says, “And the truth is, the use
of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and
liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in
rime.”[45] But let us test Waller’s method by an example or two. His
monarch made _reasonable_, thus discourses:--
“Courage our greatest failings does supply,
And makes all good, or handsomely we die.
Life is a thing of common use; by heaven
As well to insects as to monarchs given;
But for the crown, ’t is a more sacred thing;
I’ll dying lose it, or I’ll live a king.
Come, Diphilus, we must together walk
And of a matter of importance talk.”
[_Exeunt._
Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes
prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more
impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog
irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older
tragic style but the _exeunt_ at the close. Its pithy conciseness and
the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an
almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or
“suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make
few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted
barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:--
“’T was in compassion of our woe
That nature first made poisons grow,
For hopeless wretches such as I
Kindly providing means to die:
As mothers do their children keep,
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.
The indisposed she does invite
To go to bed before ’tis night.”
Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are
chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to
fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which
occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties,
rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy
precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose.
Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel
fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also
shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is
working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older
masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful
accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:--
“Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Be teachers of my story. Do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look
Like sorrow’s monument; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation.”
What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and
passionate repetitions are here!
We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an
inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible
for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his
immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over
of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical
skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was
it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he
lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English
poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer,
imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior
life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of
itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for
its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for
exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I
speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success
and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as
on native endowment. Butler asks,--
“Then why should those who pick and choose
The best of all the best compose,
And join it by Mosaic art,
In graceful order, part to part,
To make the whole in beauty suit,
Not merit as complete repute
As those who, with less art and pain,
Can do it with their native brain?”
Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is
this power of finding out what _is_ “the best of all the best.”
I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was
brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that
ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and
my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric
doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I
had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic
beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope
was called a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder
when answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could
speak English and George I. could not, “that I did not wish to be
tyrannized over in the best English that ever was spoken.” The young
demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired
nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is
later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was
a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as old
Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says, “I was once in
Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”
But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry,
and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of
it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every
letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come
to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am
at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I
have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of
expression; but as a poet he represents something more,--nothing less,
namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last
as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It
is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or
demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or
Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter.
Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A man brought up
in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast
than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French
Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement,
it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of
artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came
at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob
of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics
united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation
of having a soul in it.
But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is
happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its
nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only
good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can
produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one;
and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance
which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy,
invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there
is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any
one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no
inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is
unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be
said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age
to understand _it_; the second understands its age, and tells it what it
wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspiration in the one,
amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for
both.
The very earliest of Pope’s productions give indications of that sense
and discretion, as well as wit, which afterward so eminently
distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find
also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as
to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and
their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following
four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their
antithetic balance:--
“You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,
Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
And carrying with you all the world can boast,
To all the world illustriously are lost!”
The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of
Pope’s Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding
with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive
turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which
imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting
indifference to the world by which it would have agonized them to be
forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really
intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.
In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example in
that on the death of Mrs. Tempest:--
“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood:
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore
Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”
All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker.
Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that
sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before
making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it
were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in
inanimate things,--
“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”