first time illustrating the powers and the dangers of extended credit.
To us, who are beginning to fit our experience of commercial panics into
a scientific theory, the wonder expressed by Pope sounds like the
exclamations of a savage over a Tower musket. And in the sphere of
morals it is pretty much the same. All those reflections about the
little obvious vanities and frivolities of social life which supplied
two generations of British essayists, from the 'Tatler' to the
'Lounger,' with an inexhaustible fund of mild satire, have lost their
freshness. Our own modes of life have become so complex by comparison,
that we pass over these mere elements to plunge at once into more
refined speculations. A modern essayist starts where Addison or Johnson
left off. He assumes that his readers know that procrastination is an
evil, and tries to gain a little piquancy by paradoxically pointing out
the objections to punctuality. Character, of course, becomes more
complex, and requires more delicate modes of analysis. Compare, for
example, the most delicate of Pope's delineations with one of Mr.
Browning's elaborate psychological studies. Remember how many pages of
acute observation are required to set forth Bishop Blougram's peculiar
phase of worldliness, and then turn to Pope's descriptions of Addison,
or Wharton, or Buckingham. Each of those descriptions is, indeed, a
masterpiece in its way; the language is inimitably clear and pointed;
but the leading thought is obvious, and leads to no intricate problems.
Addison--assuming Pope's Addison to be the real Addison--might be
cold-blooded and jealous; but he had not worked out that elaborate
machinery for imposing upon himself and others which is required in a
more critical age. He wore a mask, but a mask of simple construction;
not one of those complex contrivances of modern invention which are so
like the real skin that it requires the acuteness and patience of a
scientific observer to detect the difference and point out the nature of
the deception. The moral difference between an Addison and a Blougram
is as great as the difference between an old stage-coach and a
steam-engine, or between the bulls and bears which first received the
name in Law's time and their descendants on the New York Stock Exchange.
If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the
comparative simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness
of its results. We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such
platitudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs
twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and
stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which
damps our sympathy still more decidedly. Recent investigations have
strengthened those suspicions of his honesty which were common even
amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin was (very excusably) disgusted by
the revelations of his hero's baseness, till his indignation became a
painful burden to himself and his readers. Speaking bluntly, indeed, we
admit that lying is a vice, and that Pope was in a small way one of the
most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks himself of
'equivocating pretty genteelly' in regard to one of his peccadilloes.
Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a
tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in
England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches.
His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely
irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might,
without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself
by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when
exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, is indeed not
surprising. But Pope's delight in artifice was something unparalleled.
He could hardly drink tea without 'a stratagem,' or, as Lady Bolingbroke
put it, was a politician about cabbages and turnips; and certainly he
did not despise the arts known to politicians on a larger stage. Never,
surely, did all the arts of the most skilful diplomacy give rise to a
series of intrigues more complex than those which attended the
publication of the 'P. T. Letters.' An ordinary man says that he is
obliged to publish by request of friends, and we regard the transparent
device as, at most, a venial offence. But in Pope's hands this simple
trick becomes a complex apparatus of plots within plots, which have only
been unravelled by the persevering labours of most industrious literary
detectives. The whole story was given for the first time at full length
in Mr. Elwin's edition of Pope, and the revelation borders upon the
incredible. How Pope became for a time two men; how in one character he
worked upon the wretched Curll through mysterious emissaries until the
piratical bookseller undertook to publish the letters already privately
printed by Pope himself; how Pope in his other character protested
vehemently against the publication and disavowed all complicity in the
preparations; how he set the House of Lords in motion to suppress the
edition; and how, meanwhile, he took ingenious precautions to frustrate
the interference which he provoked; how in the course of these
manoeuvres his genteel equivocation swelled into lying on the most
stupendous scale--all this story, with its various ins and outs, may be
now read by those who have the patience. The problem may be suggested to
casuists how far the iniquity of a lie should be measured by its
immediate purpose, or how far it is aggravated by the enormous mass of
superincumbent falsehoods which it inevitably brings in its train. We
cannot condemn very seriously the affected coyness which tries to
conceal a desire for publication under an apparent yielding to
extortion; but we must certainly admit that the stomach of any other
human being of whom a record has been preserved would have revolted at
the thought of wading through such a waste of falsification to secure so
paltry an end. Moreover, this is only one instance, and by no means the
worst instance, of Pope's regular practice in such matters. Almost every
publication of his life was attended with some sort of mystification
passing into downright falsehood, and, at times, injurious to the
character of his dearest friends. We have to add to this all the cases
in which Pope attacked his enemies under feigned names and then
disavowed his attacks; the malicious misstatements which he tried to
propagate in regard to Addison; and we feel it a positive relief when we
are able to acquit him, partially at least, of the worst charge of
extorting 1,000_l._ from the Duchess of Marlborough for the suppression
of a satirical passage.
Whatever minor pleas may be put forward in extenuation, it certainly
cannot be denied that Pope's practical morality was defective. Genteel
equivocation is not one of the Christian graces; and a gentleman
convicted at the present day of practices comparable to those in which
Pope indulged so freely might find it expedient to take his name off the
books of any respectable club. Now, if we take literally Mr. Ruskin's
doctrine that a noble morality must proceed from a noble nature, the
inference from Pope's life to his writings is not satisfactory.
We may, indeed, take it for demonstrated that Pope was not one of those
men who can be seen from all points of view. There are corners of his
nature which will not bear examination. We cannot compare him with such
men as Milton, or Cowper, or Wordsworth, whose lives are the noblest
commentary on their works. Rather he is one of the numerous class in
whom the excessive sensibility of genius has generated very serious
disease. In more modern days we may fancy that his views would have
taken a different turn, and that Pope would have belonged to the Satanic
school of writers, and instead of lying enormously, have found relief
for his irritated nerves in reviling all that is praised by ordinary
mankind. But we must hesitate before passing from his acknowledged vices
to a summary condemnation of the whole man. Human nature (the remark is
not strictly original) is often inconsistent; and, side by side with
degrading tendencies, there sometimes lie not only keen powers of
intellect, but a genuine love for goodness, benevolence, and even for
honesty. Pope is one of those strangely mixed characters which can only
be fully delineated by a masterly hand, and Mr. Courthope in the life
which concludes the definitive edition of the works has at last
performed the task with admirable skill and without too much shrouding
his hero's weaknesses. Meanwhile our pleasure in reading him is much
counterbalanced by the suspicion that those pointed aphorisms which he
turns out in so admirably polished a form may come only from the lips
outwards. Pope, it must be remembered, is essentially a parasitical
writer. He was a systematic appropriator--I do not say plagiarist, for
the practice seems to be generally commendable--of other men's thoughts.
His brilliant gems have often been found in some obscure writer, and
have become valuable by the patient care with which he has polished and
mounted them. We doubt their perfect sincerity because, when he is
speaking in his own person, we can often prove him to be at best under
a curious delusion. Take, for example, the 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,'
which is his most perfect work. Some of the boasts in it are apparently
quite justified by the facts. But what are we to say to such a passage
as this?--
I was not born for courts or great affairs;
I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers;
Can sleep without a poem in my head,
Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead.
Admitting his independence, and not inquiring too closely into his
prayers, can we forget that the gentleman who could sleep without a poem
in his head called up a servant four times in one night of 'the dreadful
winter of Forty' to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a
thought? Or what is the value of a professed indifference to Dennis from
the man distinguished beyond all other writers for the bitterness of his
resentment against all small critics; who disfigured his best poems by
his petty vengeance for old attacks; and who could not refrain from
sneering at poor Dennis, even in the Prologue which he condescended to
write for the benefit of his dying antagonist? Or, again, one can hardly
help smiling at his praises of his own hospitality. The dinner which he
promises to his friend is to conclude with--
Cheerful healths (your mistress shall have place),
And, what's more rare, a poet shall say grace.
The provision made for the 'cheerful healths,' as Johnson lets us know,
consisted of the remnant of a pint of wine, from which Pope had taken a
couple of glasses, divided amongst two guests. There was evidently no
danger of excessive conviviality. And then a grace in which Bolingbroke
joined could not have been a very impressive ceremony.
Thus, we are always pursued, in reading Pope, by disagreeable
misgivings. We don't know what comes from the heart, and what from the
lips: when the real man is speaking, and when we are only listening to
old commonplaces skilfully vamped. There is always, if we please, a bad
interpretation to be placed upon his finest sentiments. His indignation
against the vicious is confused with his hatred of personal enemies; he
protests most loudly that he is honest when he is 'equivocating most
genteelly;' his independence may be called selfishness or avarice; his
toleration simple indifference; and even his affection for his friends a
decorous fiction, which will never lead him to the slightest sacrifice
of his own vanity or comfort. A critic of the highest order is provided
with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the sham sentiments from the
true. As a banker's clerk can tell a bad coin by its ring on the
counter, without need of a testing apparatus, the true critic can
instinctively estimate the amount of bullion in Pope's epigrammatic
tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is as rare as
poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content to take their weights
and measures, or, in other words, to test their first impressions, by
such external evidence as is available. They must proceed cautiously in
these delicate matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid
intuition, patiently enquire what light is thrown upon Pope's sincerity
by the recorded events of his life, and a careful cross-examination of
the various witnesses to his character. They must, indeed, keep in mind
Mr. Ruskin's excellent canon--that good fruit, even in moralising, can
only be borne by a good tree. Where Pope has succeeded in casting into
enduring form some valuable moral sentiment, we may therefore give him
credit for having at least felt it sincerely. If he did not always act
upon it, the weakness is not peculiar to Pope. Time, indeed, has partly
done the work for us. In Pope, more than in almost any other writer, the
grain has sifted itself from the chaff. The jewels have remained after
the flimsy embroidery in which they were fixed has fallen into decay.
Such a result was natural from his mode of composition. He caught at
some inspiration of the moment; he cast it roughly into form; brooded
over it; retouched it again and again; and when he had brought it to the
very highest polish of which his art was capable, placed it in a
pigeon-hole to be fitted, when the opportunity offered, into an
appropriate corner of his mosaic-work. We can see him at work, for
example, in the passage about Addison and the celebrated concluding
couplet. The epigrams in which his poetry abounds have obviously been
composed in the same fashion, for that 'masterpiece of man,' as South is
made to call it in the 'Dunciad,' is only produced in perfection when
the labour which would have made an ode has been concentrated upon a
couple of lines. There is a celebrated recipe for dressing a lark, if we
remember rightly, in which the lark is placed inside a snipe, and the
snipe in a woodcock, and so on till you come to a turkey, or, if
procurable, to an ostrich; then, the mass having been properly stewed,
the superincumbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of
the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the
perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the
quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery,
however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought
and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his
artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope's most vigorous expressions as
an indication of his strongest convictions, and check their conclusions
by his personal history and by the general tendency of his writings, we
might succeed in putting together something like a satisfactory
statement of the moral system which he expressed forcibly because he
believed in it sincerely.
Without following the proofs in detail, let us endeavour to give some
statement of the result. What, in fact, did Pope learn by his study of
man, such as it was? What does he tell us about the character of human
beings and their position in the universe which is either original or
marked by the freshness of independent thought? Perhaps the most
characteristic vein of reflection is that which is embodied in the
'Dunciad.' There, at least, we have Pope speaking energetically and
sincerely. He really detests, abjures, and abominates as impious and
heretical, without a trace of mental reservation, the worship of the
great goddess Dulness. The 'Dunciad' does not show the quality in which
Pope most excels, that which makes his best satires resemble the
quintessence of the most brilliant thought of his most brilliant
contemporaries. But it has more energy and continuity than most of his
other poetry. The 'Dunciad' often flows in a continuous stream of
eloquence, instead of dribbling out in little jets of epigram. If there
are fewer points, there are more frequent gushes of sustained rhetoric.
Even when Pope condescends--and he condescends much too often--to pelt
his antagonists with mere filth, he does it with a touch of boisterous
vigour. He laughs out. He catches something from his patron Swift when
he
Laughs and shakes in Rabelais's easy chair.
His lungs seem to be fuller and his voice to lose for the time its
tricks of mincing affectation. Here, indeed, there can be no question of
insincerity. Pope's scorn of folly is to be condemned only so far as it
was connected with too bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as
Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he
rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this
generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel
Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is,
indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope
that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be
justified, by the correctness of his judgment. The only great man whom
he has seriously assaulted is Bentley; and to Pope, Bentley was of
necessity not the greatest of classical critics, but the tasteless
mutilator of Milton, and, as we must perhaps add, the object of the
hatred of Pope's particular friends, Atterbury and Warburton. The
misfortune is that the more just his satire, the more perishable is its
interest; and if we regard the 'Dunciad' simply as an assault upon the
vermin who then infested literature, we must consider him as a man who
should use a steam-hammer to crack a flea. Unluckily for ourselves,
however, it cannot be admitted so easily that Curll and Dennis and the
rest had a merely temporary interest. Regarded as types of literary
nuisances--and Pope does not condescend in his poetry, though the want
is partly supplied in the notes, to indulge in much personal
detail--they may be said by cynics to have a more enduring vitality. Of
course there is at the present day no such bookseller as Curll, living
by piratical invasions of established rights, and pandering to the worst
passions of ignorant readers; no writer who could be fitly called, like
Concanen,
A cold, long-winded native of the deep,
and fitly sentenced to dive where Fleet Ditch
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames;
and most certainly we must deny the present applicability of the note
upon 'Magazines' compiled by Pope, or rather by Warburton, for the
episcopal bludgeon is perceptible in the prose description. They are not
at present 'the eruption of every miserable scribbler, the scum of every
dirty newspaper, or fragments of fragments picked up from every dirty
dunghill ... equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, decency, and
common sense.' But if the translator of the 'Dunciad' into modern
phraseology would have some difficulty in finding a head for every cap,
there are perhaps some satirical stings which have not quite lost their
point. The legitimate drama, so theatrical critics tell us, has not
quite shaken off the rivalry of sensational scenery and idiotic
burlesque, though possibly we do not produce absurdities equal to that
which, as Pope tells us, was actually introduced by Theobald, in which
Nile rises, Heaven descends, and dance on earth
Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle and a ball,
Till one wide conflagration swallows all.
There is still facetiousness which reminds us too forcibly that
Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke,
and even sermons, for which we may apologise on the ground that
Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.
Here and there, too, if we may trust certain stern reviewers, there are
writers who have learnt the principle that
Index learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of Science by the tail.
And the first four lines, at least, of the great prophecy at the
conclusion of the third book is thought by the enemies of muscular
Christianity to be possibly approaching its fulfilment:
Proceed, great days! till learning fly the shore,
Till birch shall blush with noble blood no more,
Till Thames see Eton's sons for ever play,
Till Westminster's whole year be holiday,
Till Isis' elders reel, their pupils sport,
And Alma Mater lies dissolved in Port!
No! So far as we can see, it is still true that
Born a goddess, Dulness never dies.
Men, we know it on high authority, are still mostly fools. If Pope be in
error, it is not so much that his adversary is beneath him, as that she
is unassailable by wit or poetry. Weapons of the most ethereal temper
spend their keenness in vain against the 'anarch old' whose power lies
in utter insensibility. It is fighting with a mist, and firing
cannon-balls into a mudheap. As well rave against the force of
gravitation, or complain that our gross bodies must be nourished by
solid food. If, however, we should be rather grateful than otherwise to
a man who is sanguine enough to believe that satire can be successful
against stupidity, and that Grub Street, if it cannot be exterminated,
can at least be lashed into humility, we might perhaps complain that
Pope has taken rather too limited a view of the subject. Dulness has
other avatars besides the literary. In the last and finest book, Pope
attempts to complete his plan by exhibiting the influence of dulness
upon theology and science. The huge torpedo benumbs every faculty of
the human mind, and paralyses all the Muses, except 'mad Mathesis,'
which, indeed, does not carry on so internecine a war with the general
enemy. The design is commendable, and executed, so far as Pope was on a
level with his task, with infinite spirit. But, however excellent the
poetry, the logic is defective, and the description of the evil
inadequate. Pope has but a vague conception of the mode in which dulness
might become the leading force in politics, lower religion till it
became a mere cloak for selfishness, and make learning nothing but
laborious and pedantic trifling. Had his powers been equal to his
goodwill, we might have had a satire far more elevated than anything
which he has attempted; for a man must be indeed a dull student of
history who does not recognise the vast influence of dulness-worship on
the whole period which has intervened between Pope and ourselves. Nay,
it may be feared that it will yet be some time before education bills
and societies for university extension will have begun to dissipate the
evil. A modern satirist, were satire still alive, would find an ample
occupation for his talents in a worthy filling out of Pope's incomplete
sketch. But though I feel, I must endeavour to resist the temptation of
indicating some of the probable objects of his antipathy.