characteristic attitude. Pope is the incarnation of the literary spirit.
He is the most complete representative in our language of the
intellectual instincts which find their natural expression in pure
literature, as distinguished from literature applied to immediate
practical ends, or enlisted in the service of philosophy or science. The
complete antithesis to that spirit is the evil principle which Pope
attacks as dulness. This false goddess is the literary Ahriman; and
Pope's natural antipathies, exaggerated by his personal passions and
weaknesses to extravagant proportions, express themselves fully in his
great mock-epic. His theory may be expressed in a parody of Nelson's
immortal advice to his midshipmen: 'Be an honest man and hate dulness as
you do the devil.' Dulness generates the asphyxiating atmosphere in
which no true literature can thrive. It oppresses the lungs and
irritates the nerves of men whose keen brilliant intellects mark them as
the natural servants of literature. Seen from this point of view, there
is an honourable completeness in Pope's career. Possibly a modern
subject of literature may, without paradox, express a certain gratitude
to Pope for a virtue which he would certainly be glad to imitate. Pope
was the first man who made an independence by literature. First and
last, he seems to have received over 8,000_l._ for his translation of
Homer, a sum then amply sufficient to enable him to live in comfort. No
sum at all comparable to this was ever received by a poet or novelist
until the era of Scott and Byron. Now, without challenging admiration
for Pope on the simple ground that he made his fortune, it is difficult
to exaggerate the importance of this feat at the time. A contemporary
who, whatever his faults, was a still more brilliant example than Pope
of the purely literary qualities, suggests a curious parallel. Voltaire,
as he tells us, was so weary of the humiliations that dishonour letters,
that to stay his disgust he resolved to make 'what scoundrels call a
great fortune.' Some of Voltaire's means of reaching this end appear to
have been more questionable than Pope's. But both of these men of genius
early secured their independence by raising themselves permanently above
the need of writing for money. It may be added in passing that there is
a curious similarity in intellect and character between Pope and
Voltaire which would on occasion be worth fuller exposition. The use,
too, which Pope made of his fortune was thoroughly honourable. We
scarcely give due credit, as a rule, to the man who has the rare merit
of distinctly recognising his true vocation in life, and adhering to it
with unflinching pertinacity. Probably the fact that such virtue
generally brings a sufficient personal reward in this world seems to
dispense with the necessity of additional praise. But call it a virtuous
or merely a useful quality, we must at least admit that it is the
necessary groundwork of a thoroughly satisfactory career. Pope, who from
his infancy had
Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,
gained by his later numbers a secure position, and used his position to
go on rhyming to the end of his life. He never failed to do his very
best. He regarded the wealth which he had earned as a retaining fee, not
as a discharge from his duties. Comparing him with his contemporaries,
we see how vast was the advantage. Elevated above Grub Street, he had no
temptation to manufacture rubbish or descend to actual meanness like De
Foe. Independent of patronage, he was not forced to become a 'tame cat'
in the hands of a duchess, like his friend Gay. Standing apart from
politics, he was free from those disappointed pangs which contributed to
the embitterment of the later years of Swift, dying 'like a poisoned rat
in a hole;' he had not, like Bolingbroke, to affect a philosophical
contempt for the game in which he could no longer take a part; nor was
he even, like Addison and Steele, induced to 'give up to party what was
meant for mankind.' He was not a better man than some of these, and
certainly not better than Goldsmith and Johnson in the succeeding
generation. Yet, when we think of the amount of good intellect that ran
to waste in the purlieus of Grub Street, or in hunting for pensions in
ministerial ante-chambers, we feel a certain gratitude to the one
literary magnate of the century, whose devotion, it is true, had a very
tangible reward, but whose devotion was yet continuous, and free from
any distractions but those of a constitutional irritability. Nay, if we
compare Pope to some of the later writers who have wrung still
princelier rewards from fortune, the result is not unfavourable. If
Scott had been as true to his calling, his life, so far superior to
Pope's in most other respects, would not have presented the melancholy
contrast of genius running to waste in desperate attempts to win money
at the cost of worthier fame.
Pope, as a Roman Catholic, and as the adherent of a defeated party, had
put himself out of the race for pecuniary reward. His loyal adherence to
his friends, though, like all his virtues, subject to some deduction, is
really a touching feature in his character. His Catholicism was of the
most nominal kind. He adhered in name to a depressed Church chiefly
because he could not bear to give pain to the parents whom he loved with
an exquisite tenderness. Granting that he would not have had much chance
of winning tangible rewards by the baseness of a desertion, he at least
recognised his true position; and instead of being soured by his
exclusion from the general competition, or wasting his life in frivolous
regrets, he preserved a spirit of tolerance and independence, and had a
full right to the boasts in which he certainly indulged a little too
freely:--
Not Fortune's worshipper, nor Fashion's fool,
Not Lucre's madman, nor Ambition's tool;
Not proud, nor servile--be one poet's praise
That, if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways;
That flattery, even to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in prose or verse the same.
Admitting that the last line suggests a slight qualm, the portrait
suggested in the rest is about as faithful as one can expect a man to
paint from himself.
And hence we come to the question, what was the morality which Pope
dispensed from this exalted position? Admitting his independence, can we
listen to him patiently when he proclaims himself to be
Of virtue only, and her friends, the friend;
or when he boasts in verses noble if quite sincere--
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
Is this guardian of virtue quite immaculate, and the morality which he
preaches quite of the most elevated kind? We must admit, of course, that
he does not sound the depths, or soar to the heights, in which men of
loftier genius are at home. He is not a mystic, but a man of the world.
He never, as we have already said, quits the sphere of ordinary and
rather obvious maxims about the daily life of society, or quits it at
his peril. His independence is not like Milton's, that of an ancient
prophet, consoling himself by celestial visions for a world given over
to baseness and frivolity; nor like Shelley's, that of a vehement
revolutionist, who has declared open war against the existing order; it
is the independence of a modern gentleman, with a competent fortune,
enjoying a time of political and religious calm. And therefore his
morality is in the main the expression of the conclusions reached by
supreme good sense, or, as he puts it,
Good sense, which only is the gift of heaven,
And though no science, fairly worth the seven.
Good sense is one of the excellent qualities to which we are scarcely
inclined to do justice at the present day; it is the guide of a time of
equilibrium, stirred by no vehement gales of passion, and we lose sight
of it just when it might give us some useful advice. A man in a passion
is never more irritated than when advised to be sensible; and at the
present day we are permanently in a passion, and therefore apt to assert
that, not only for a moment, but as a general rule, men do well to be
angry. Our art critics, for example, are never satisfied with their
frame of mind till they have lashed themselves into a fit of rhetoric.
Nothing more is wanted to explain why we are apt to be dissatisfied with
Pope, both as a critic and a moralist. In both capacities, however, Pope
is really admirable. Nobody, for example, has ridiculed more happily the
absurdities of which we sometimes take him to be a representative. The
recipe for making an epic poem is a perfect burlesque upon the
pseudo-classicism of his time. He sees the absurdity of the contemporary
statues, whose grotesque medley of ancient and modern costume is
recalled in the lines--
That livelong wig, which Gorgon's self might own,
Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.
The painters and musicians come in for their share of ridicule, as in
the description of Timon's Chapel, where
Light quirks of music, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven;
On painted ceilings you devoutly stare,
Where sprawl the saints of Verrio and Laguerre.
Pope, again, was one of the first, by practice and precept, to break
through the old formal school of gardening, in which
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted Nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees,
With here a fountain never to be played,
And there a summer-house that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers,
There gladiators fight or die in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn.
It would be impossible to hit off more happily the queer formality which
annoys us, unless its quaintness makes us smile, in the days of good
Queen Anne, when Cato still appeared with a
Long wig, flowered gown, and lacquered chair.
Pope's literary criticism, too, though verging too often on the
commonplace, is generally sound as far as it goes. If, as was
inevitable, he was blind to the merits of earlier schools of poetry, he
was yet amongst the first writers who helped to establish the rightful
supremacy of Shakespeare.
But in what way does Pope apply his good sense to morality? His
favourite doctrine about human nature is expressed in the theory of the
'ruling passion' which is to be found in all men, and which, once known,
enables us to unravel the secret of every character. As he says in the
'Essay on Man'--
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
Right reason, therefore, is the power which directs passions to the
worthiest end; and its highest lesson is to enforce
The truth (enough for man to know)
Virtue alone is happiness below.
The truth, though admirable, may be suspected of commonplace; and Pope
does not lay down any propositions unfamiliar to other moralists, nor,
it is to be feared, enforce them by preaching of more than usual
effectiveness. His denunciations of avarice, of corruption, and of
sensuality were probably of little more practical use than his
denunciation of dulness. The 'men not afraid of God' were hardly likely
to be deterred from selling their votes to Walpole by fear of Pope's
satire. He might
Goad the Prelate slumbering in his stall
sufficiently to produce the episcopal equivalent for bad language; but
he would hardly interrupt the bishop's slumbers for many moments; and,
on the whole, he might congratulate himself, rather too cheaply, on
being animated by
The strong antipathy of good to bad.
Without exaggerating its importance, however, we may seek to define the
precise point on which Pope's morality differed from that of many other
writers who have expressed their general approval of the ten
commandments. A healthy strain of moral feeling is useful, though we
cannot point to the individuals whom it has restrained from picking
pockets.
The defective side of the morality of good sense is, that it tends to
degenerate into cynicism, either of the indolent variety which commended
itself to Chesterfield, or of the more vehement sort, of which Swift's
writings are the most powerful embodiment. A shrewd man of the world,
of placid temperament, accepts placidly the conclusion that as he can
see through a good many people, virtue generally is a humbug. If he has
grace enough left to be soured by such a conclusion, he raves at the
universal corruption of mankind. Now Pope, notwithstanding his petty
spite, and his sympathy with the bitterness of his friends, always shows
a certain tenderness of nature which preserves him from sweeping
cynicism. He really believes in nature, and values life for the power of
what Johnson calls reciprocation of benevolence. The beauty of his
affection for his father and mother, and for his old nurse, breaks
pleasantly through the artificial language of his letters, like a sweet
spring in barren ground. When he touches upon the subject in his poetry,
one seems to see tears in his eyes, and to hear his voice tremble. There
is no more beautiful passage in his writings than the one in which he
expresses the hope that he may be spared
To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky.
Here at least he is sincere beyond suspicion; and we know from
unimpeachable testimony that the sentiment so perfectly expressed was
equally exemplified in his life. It sounds easy, but unfortunately the
ease is not always proved in practice, for a man of genius to be
throughout their lives an unmixed comfort to his parents. It is
unpleasant to remember that a man so accessible to tender emotions
should jar upon us by his language about women generally. Byron
countersigns the opinion of Bolingbroke that he knew the sex well; but
testimony of that kind hardly prepossesses us in his favour. In fact,
the school of Bolingbroke and Swift, to say nothing of Wycherley, was
hardly calculated to generate a chivalrous tone of feeling. His
experience of Lady Mary gave additional bitterness to his sentiments.
Pope, in short, did not love good women--
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguished as black, brown, or fair,
as he impudently tells a lady--as a man of genius ought; and women have
generally returned the dislike. Meanwhile the vein of benevolence shows
itself unmistakably in Pope's language about his friends. Thackeray
seizes upon this point of his character in his lectures on the English
Humourists, and his powerful, if rather too favourable, description
brings out forcibly the essential tenderness of the man who, during the
lucid intervals of his last illness, was 'always saying something kindly
of his present or absent friends.' Nobody, as has often been remarked,
has paid so many exquisitely turned compliments. There is something
which rises to the dog-like in his affectionate admiration for Swift and
for Bolingbroke, his rather questionable 'guide, philosopher, and
friend.' Whenever he speaks of a friend, he is sure to be felicitous.
There is Garth, for example--
The best good Christian he,
Although he knows it not.
There are beautiful lines upon Arbuthnot, addressed as--
Friend to my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song.
Or we may quote, though one verse has been spoilt by familiarity, the
lines in which Bolingbroke is coupled with Peterborough:--
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;
And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines
Now farms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines,
And tames the genius of the stubborn plain
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.
Or again, there are the verses in which he anticipates the dying words
attributed to Pitt:--
And you, brave Cobham, to the latest breath,
Shall feel the ruling passion strong in death;
Such in those moments, as in all the past,
'Oh, save my country, Heaven!' shall be your last.
Cobham's name, again, suggests the spirited lines--
Spirit of Arnall! aid me while I lie,
Cobham's a coward, Polwarth is a slave,
And Lyttelton a dark, designing knave;
St. John has ever been a wealthy fool--
But let me add Sir Robert's mighty dull,
Has never made a friend in private life,
And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife.
Perhaps the last compliment is ambiguous, but Walpole's name again
reminds us that Pope could on occasion be grateful even to an opponent.
'Go see Sir Robert,' suggests his friend in the epilogue to the Satires;
and Pope replies--
Seen him I have; but in his happier hour
Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe
Smile without art, and win without a bribe;
Would he oblige me? Let me only find
He does not think me what he thinks mankind;
Come, come; at all I laugh, he laughs no doubt;
The only difference is, I dare laugh out.
But there is no end to the delicate flattery which may be set off
against Pope's ferocious onslaughts upon his enemies. If one could have
a wish for the asking, one could scarcely ask for a more agreeable
sensation than that of being titillated by a man of equal ingenuity in
caressing one's pet vanities. The art of administering such consolation
is possessed only by men who unite such tenderness to an exquisitely
delicate intellect. This vein of genuine feeling sufficiently redeems
Pope's writings from the charge of a commonplace worldliness. Certainly
he is not one of the 'genial' school, whose indiscriminate benevolence
exudes over all that they touch. There is nothing mawkish in his
philanthropy. Pope was, if anything, too good a hater; 'the portentous
cub never forgives,' said Bentley; but kindliness is all the more
impressive when not too widely diffused. Add to this his hearty contempt
for pomposities, humbugs, and stupidities of all kinds, and above all
the fine spirit of independence, in which we have again the real man,
and which expresses itself in such lines as these:
Oh, let me live my own, and die so too!
(To live and die is all I have to do);
Maintain a poet's dignity and ease,
And see what friends and read what books I please.
And we may admit that Pope, in spite of his wig and his stays, his
vanities and his affectations, was in his way as fair an embodiment as
we would expect of that 'plain living and high thinking' of which
Wordsworth regretted the disappearance. The little cripple, diseased in
mind and body, spiteful and occasionally brutal, had in him the spirit
of a man. The monarch of the literary world was far from immaculate; but
he was not without a dignity of his own.
We come, however, to the question, what had Pope to say upon the deepest
subjects with which human beings can concern themselves? The most
explicit answer must be taken from the 'Essay on Man,' and the essay
must be acknowledged to have more conspicuous faults than any of Pope's
writings. The art of reasoning in verse is so difficult that we may
doubt whether it is in any case legitimate, and must acknowledge that it
has been never successfully practised by any English writer. Dryden's
'Religio Laici' may be better reasoning, but it is worse poetry than
Pope's Essay. It is true, again, that Pope's reasoning is intrinsically
feeble. He was no metaphysician, and confined himself to putting
together incoherent scraps of different systems. Some of his arguments
strike us as simply childish, as, for example, the quibble derived from
the Stoics, that
The blest to-day is as completely so
As who began a thousand years ago.
Nobody, we may safely say, was ever much comforted by that reflection.
Nor, though the celebrated argument about the scale of beings, which
Pope but half-understood, was then sanctioned by the most eminent
contemporary names, do we derive any deep consolation from the remark
that
in the scale of reasoning life, 'tis plain,
There must be somewhere such a rank as man.
To say no more of these frigid conceits, as they now appear to us, Pope
does not maintain the serious temper which befits a man pondering upon
the deep mysteries of the universe. Religious meditation does not
harmonise with epigrammatical satire. Admitting the value of the
reflection that other beings besides man are fitting objects of the
Divine benevolence, we are jarred by such a discord as this:
While man exclaims, See all things for my use!
See man for mine! replies a pampered goose.
The goose is appropriate enough in Charron or Montaigne, but should be
kept out of poetry. Such a shock, too, follows when Pope talks about the
superior beings who
Showed a Newton as we show an ape.
Did anybody, again, ever complain that he wanted 'the strength of bulls,
the fur of bears?'[2] Or could it be worth while to meet his complaints
in a serious poem? Pope, in short, is not merely a bad reasoner, but he
wants that deep moral earnestness which gives a profound interest to
Johnson's satires--the best productions of his school--and the deeply
pathetic religious feeling of Cowper.
Admitting all this, however, and more, the 'Essay on Man' still contains
many passages which not only testify to the unequalled skill of this
great artist in words, but show a certain moral dignity. In the Essay,
more than in any of his other writings, we have the difficulty of
separating the solid bullion from the dross. Pope is here pre-eminently
parasitical, and it is possible to trace to other writers, such as
Montaigne, Pascal, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Wollaston, as well
as to the inspiration of Bolingbroke, nearly every argument which he
employs. He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems.
When Mr. Ruskin says that his 'theology was two centuries in advance of
his time,' the phrase is curiously inaccurate. He was not really in
advance of the best men of his own time; but they, it is to be feared,
were considerably in advance of the average opinion of our own. What may
be said with more plausibility is, that whilst Pope frequently wastes
his skill in gilding refuse, he is really most sensitive to the noblest
sentiments of his contemporaries, and that, when he has good materials
to work upon, his verse glows with unusual fervour, often to sink with
unpleasant rapidity into mere quibbling or epigrammatic pungency. The
real truth is that Pope precisely expresses the position of the best
thinkers of his day. He did not understand the reasoning, but he fully
shared the sentiments of the philosophers among whom Locke and Leibniz
were the great lights. Pope is to the deists and semi-deists of his time
what Milton was to the Puritans or Dante to the Schoolmen. At times he
writes like a Pantheist, and then becomes orthodox, without a
consciousness of the transition; he is a believer in universal
predestination, and saves himself by inconsistent language about
'leaving free the human will;' his views about the origin of society are
an inextricable mass of inconsistency; and he may be quoted in behalf of
doctrines which he, with the help of Warburton, vainly endeavoured to
disavow. But, leaving sound divines to settle the question of his
orthodoxy, and metaphysicians to crush his arguments, if they think it
worth while, we are rather concerned with the general temper in which he
regards the universe, and the moral which he draws for his own
edification. The main doctrine which he enforces is, of course, one of
his usual commonplaces. The statement that 'whatever is, is right,' may
be verbally admitted, and strained to different purposes by half-a-dozen
differing schools. It may be alleged by the cynic, who regards virtue
as an empty name; by the mystic, who is lapped in heavenly contemplation
from the cares of this troublesome world; by the sceptic, whose whole
wisdom is concentrated in the duty of submitting to the inevitable; or
by the man who, abandoning the attempt of solving inscrutable enigmas,
is content to recognise in everything the hand of a Divine ordainer of
all things. Pope, judging him by his most forcible passages, prefers to
insist upon the inevitable ignorance of man in presence of the Infinite:
'Tis but a part we see, and not the whole;
and any effort to pierce the impenetrable gloom can only end in
disappointment and discontent:
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.
We think that we can judge the ways of the Almighty, and correct the
errors of His work. We are as incapable of accounting for human
wickedness as for plague, tempest, and earthquake. In each case our
highest wisdom is an humble confession of ignorance; or, as he puts it,
In both, to reason right is to submit.
This vein of thought might, perhaps, have conducted him to the
scepticism of his master, Bolingbroke. He unluckily fills up the gaps of
his logical edifice with the untempered mortar of obsolete metaphysics,
long since become utterly uninteresting to all men. Admitting that he
cannot explain, he tries to manufacture sham explanations out of the
'scale of beings,' and other scholastic rubbish. But, in a sense, too,
the most reverent minds will agree most fully with Pope's avowal of the
limitation of human knowledge. He does not apply his scepticism or his
humility to stimulate to vain repining against the fetters with which
our minds are bound, or an angry denunciation, like that of Bolingbroke,
of the solutions in which other souls have found a sufficient refuge.
The perplexity in which he finds himself generates a spirit of
resignation and tolerance.
Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.