“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is but always to be blest;
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after
all, it seems, is contented with merely _being_, and whose soul,
therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the “solar
walk” (as he calls it) and “milky way” to do with the affair? Does our
hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy? Or does he mean
that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told
that it is the “untutored mind” of the savage which “sees God in clouds
and hears him in the wind,” we are rather surprised to find that the
lesson the poet intends to teach is that
“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.”
So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet
has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off
the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it
harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would
not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his
poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must
deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,--clearness. If he
did _not_, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of
sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty
would be, that Pope’s precision of thought was no match for the fluency
of his verse.
Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who
executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest.
I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron’s,
however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for
Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some
respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if
Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than _execution_, there
are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point
of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department,
and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the
department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial
care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has
received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he
deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What
can be worse than this?
“At length Erasmus, that great, injured name,
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove those holy vandals off the stage.”
It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of
confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a
great, injured name stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the
stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused:--
“Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies,
Which no one looks in with another’s eyes,
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint,
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint.”
The use of the word “applies” is perfectly un-English; and it seems that
people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not
their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his
epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad,
“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sickening stars fade off _the ethereal plain_.”
And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much
regard to fitness of imagery; in the “Essay on Man,” for example:--
“Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite;
These ’tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes man can man destroy?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure’s smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind.”
Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of
“pleasure’s smiling train” and the “family of pain.” And in the Moral
Essays,
“Know God and Nature only are the same;
In man the judgment shoots at flying game,
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found,
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground.”
The “judgment shooting at flying game” is an odd image enough; but I
think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now under ground, could be
found nowhere--out of Goldsmith’s Natural History, perhaps. An
epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something
without basis in truth, as where he ranks together “Macedonia’s madman
and the Swede,” and says that neither of them “looked forward farther
than his nose,” a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles
XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself
capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if
correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as
where he makes “Socrates _bleed_.”
But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope
deserves the praise which he himself desired:--
“Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.”
Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in
which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any
page.
“Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns,
Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns;
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight,
This quits an empire, that embroils a state;
The same adust complexion has impelled,
Charles to the convent, Philip to the field.”
Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable _this_ set off
by the inevitable _that_, and wishes antithesis would let him have a
little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional
“frown” would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages,
how admirably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half
the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading
again:--
“Peace to all such: but were there one whose fires
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease;
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise,
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike,
Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And _so_ obliging that he ne’er obliged;
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause,
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise;--
Who but must laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”
With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse
of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of
the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever
written. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider in another
place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal
weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse.
In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has ever known a
noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who ever had a mother or
sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather
degrades than elevates.
“O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,
She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear,
She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules,
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her humor most when she obeys;
Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will,
Disdains all loss of tickets or codille,
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all
And mistress of herself, though china fall.”
The last line is very witty and pointed,--but consider what an ideal of
womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his heroine for not
being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending Pope’s “Essay on
Criticism,” says, speaking of us “who live in the latter ages of the
world”: “We have little else to do left us but to represent the _common
sense_ of mankind, in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon
lights.” I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope’s merit,
and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in
the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor’s prose sentences about the
Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton’s “Comus”: “The religion of this
excellent lady was of another constitution: it took root downward in
humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a
Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair
friendships and sweetness of society.... And though she had the greatest
judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet
knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she
knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like a
fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her station
she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but
herself.” _This_ is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the elder
dramatists are not without examples of weak and vile women, but they are
not without noble ones either. Take these verses of Chapman, for
example:--
“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman’s counsel: her winged spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with noble words
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure;
The weaker body, still the stronger soul.
O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth
Makes a man’s life so nighly bound to heaven.
She gives him double forces to endure
And to enjoy, being one with him,
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense:
If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short;
If he lament, she melts herself in tears;
If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir,
She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape,
Himself divinely varied without change.
All store without her leaves a man but poor,
And with her poverty is exceeding store.”
Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal woman, for he
says at the end that she shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of
a _bourgeois_ and of the back parlor, more than of the poet and the
muse’s bower. A man’s mind is known by the company it keeps.
Now it is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as
they could be; but if God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive
the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the
influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no
age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast
and a wanderer, while there is a poet’s nature left, will never fail of
the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of
the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in
detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm.
However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true
poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad, which is even
nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift
himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One’s mind needs to
be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not
remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly
without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; and George
Wither, the author of that charming poem, “Fair Virtue,” classed among
the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his
wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to
love her was a liberal education”?
Even in the “Rape of the Lock,” the fancy is that of a wit rather than
of a poet. It might not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies
of Shakespeare; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem with
that of Drayton’s Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it,
describing the palace of the Fairy:--
“The walls of spider’s legs were made,
Well mortised, and finely laid;
(He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:)
The windows of the eyes of cats,
And, for the roof, instead of slats
’Tis covered with the skins of bats,
With moonshine that are gilded.”
In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognized.
Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept
no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he
always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was
there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural
disposition seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an
author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to
have suspected his sincerity; but artifice more than insincerity lay at
the basis of his character. I think that there was very little real
malice in him, and that his “evil was wrought from want of thought.”
When Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted
for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends the most
illustrious men of his time.
The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interesting than that
of any other eminent English poet, except that of Southey, and their
letters have the same fault of being labored compositions. Southey’s
are, on the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one
(as Pope’s certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the character of
the writer. Pope’s are altogether too full of the proclamation of his
own virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain that they were mostly
addressed to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however
carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope
leave in the reader’s mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,--of
an attempt to look as an eminent literary character should rather than
as the man really was. They have the unnatural constraint of a man in
full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring to look his best. We
never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope’s
correspondents, Swift shows in the most dignified and, one is tempted to
say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that the
letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and
straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could encounter those
terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a
revision of judgment would substitute “discomforting consciousness of
the public” for “insincerity” in judging Pope’s character by his
letters. He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, or
almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that
makes Walpole’s elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope
would seem to have kept a commonplace-book of phrases proper to this or
that occasion; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment,
nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, from one correspondent
to another, with the most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not for
this curious economy of his, no one could read his letters to Lady
Wortley Montague without a conviction that they were written by a lover.
Indeed, I think nothing short of the _spretæ injuria formæ_ will account
for (though it will not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and
showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of
caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable
armor of superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts the
more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its
sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a woman to have
had two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary
before and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope’s
conduct in this affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to
degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. Spenser
touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind who had rejected
him,
“Not, then, to her, that scornéd thing so base,
But to myself the blame, that lookt so high;
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant
To simple swain, sith her I may not love,
Yet that I may her honor paravant
And praise her worth, though far my wit above;
Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief
And long affliction which I have endured.”
In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the wall, appears
positively mean. He vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had
all been written in the interests of literature and morality, and from
no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would have
been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence but for the manifest
superiority of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison would have
been so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy
to conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt when Addison
so almost contemptuously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer
defence of _Cato_ in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done a mean
thing to propitiate a man whose critical judgment he dreaded; and the
great man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference as
impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling
that Pope’s satire is not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his
own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of one whose expressed
preferences in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds of the
satirist’s own popularity. We shall not so easily give up the purest and
most dignified figure of that somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with
Sidney and Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary
annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty of honest and
impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter. The
only justification alleged by Pope was of the flimsiest kind, namely,
that Addison regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second
edition of the “Rape of the Lock,” saying that the poem was _merum sal_
before. Let any one ask himself how he likes an author’s emendations of
any poem to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, and he
will hardly think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive for
his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope’s letters are so
good as to make us regret that he did not oftener don the dressing-gown
and slippers in his correspondence. One in particular, to Lord
Burlington, describing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the
bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor worthy of Cowper, almost worthy
of Gray.
Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on the genius and
writings of Pope, says that the largest part of his works “is of the
_didactic_, _moral_, and _satiric_; and, consequently, not of the most
_poetic_ species of _poetry_; whence it is manifest that _good sense_
and _judgment_ were his characteristical excellences rather than _fancy_
and _invention_.” It is plain that in any strict definition there can be
only one kind of poetry, and that what Warton really meant to say was
that Pope was not a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what
Johnson says in his “Life of Pope,” though he does not name Warton. The
dispute on this point went on with occasional lulls for more than a
half-century after Warton’s death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony
when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused Warton’s critical
opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new edition of
Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mistook the functions of an editor, and
maladroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate of
the author’s character.[46] Thirteen years later, Campbell, in his
“Specimens,” controverted Mr. Bowles’s estimate of Pope’s character and
position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to
Campbell on what he called “the invariable principles of poetry.” This
letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by Gilchrist in the
Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an angry and unmannerly retort, among
other things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman’s
son, whereupon the affair became what they call on the frontier a free
fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron took
part with equal relish, though with various fortune. The last shot, in
what had grown into a thirty years’ war, between the partisans of what
was called the Old School of poetry and those of the New, was fired by
Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little
logic he had. and though, in a vague way, æsthetically right, contrived
always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a
brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the
critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was
wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful
punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of
polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his own pamphlets what
was really the turning-point of the whole controversy (though all the
combatants more or less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, that
without clearness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether
in prose or verse; in other words that, while precision of phrase
presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an art as well as a
gift. Byron alone saw clearly that here was the true knot of the
question, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he was not careful
to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron’s admiration of Pope has been, it
seems to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was that
patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in
most of his contemporaries. Pope’s assailants went so far as to make a
defect of what, rightly considered, was a distinguished merit, though
the amount of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was that
his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, leaving the thought
to be as faulty as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond the
couplet, often not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore,
at its best, is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet
more often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere
trainbearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be defined as
careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was one of the first to
see this, and accordingly he tells us that “his great, I will not say
greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry.”[47]
Lessing, with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his
statement; for where Pope, as in the “Rape of the Lock,” found a subject
exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all
in all, is the most perfect poem in the language.
It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes what is still
piquant and rememberable, a century and a quarter after his death, was a
man of genius. But there are two modes of uttering such things as cleave
to the memory of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think that
Pope’s verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the abiding
presence of fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from the rank
of poet. The atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an essentially
prosaic one, the language habitual to him was that of conversation and
society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect which seems
like inspiration in the elder poets. His range of associations was of
that narrow kind which is always vulgar, whether it be found in the
village or the court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty of
Dryden in his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of
being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline us to
rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much resembles), as an
author with whom the gift of writing was primary, and that of verse
secondary. No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which is so
purely prose as his; and yet, in any impartial criticism, the “Rape of
the Lock” sets him even as a poet far above many men more largely
endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he.
A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and
not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province
he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of
individual men, rather than of human nature, if to be the highest
expression which the life of the court and the ball-room has ever found
in verse, if to have added more phrases to our language than any other
but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four generations make a man a great
poet,--then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style
of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because he used
it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of
society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found
wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled.