irritating to men whose sympathies with human suffering are unusually
strong; and the optimism of a man like Pope, vivacious rather than
profound in his thoughts and his sympathies, annoys us at times by his
calm complacency. We cannot thrust aside so easily the thought of the
heavy evils under which all creation groans. But we should wrong him by
a failure to recognise the real benevolence of his sentiment. Pope
indeed becomes too pantheistic for some tastes in the celebrated
fragment--the whole poem is a conglomerate of slightly connected
fragments--beginning,
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
But his real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was
attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed
from Bolingbroke. It is curious enough that it was precisely these
doctrines which he did not borrow. Bolingbroke, like most feeble
reasoners, believed firmly in Free Will; and though a theist after a
fashion, his religion had not emotional depth or logical coherence
enough to be pantheistic. Pope, doubtless, did not here quit his
master's guidance from any superiority in logical perception. But he did
occasionally feel the poetical value of the pantheistic conception of
the universe. Pantheism, in fact, is the only poetical form of the
metaphysical theology current in Pope's day. The old historical theology
of Dante, or even of Milton, was too faded for poetical purposes; and
the 'personal Deity,' whose existence and attributes were proved by the
elaborate reasonings of the apologists of that day, was unfitted for
poetical celebration by the very fact that his existence required proof.
Poetry deals with intuitions, not with remote inferences, and therefore
in his better moments Pope spoke not of the intelligent moral Governor
discovered by philosophical investigation, but of the Divine Essence
immanent in all nature, whose 'living raiment' is the world. The finest
passages in the 'Essay on Man,' like the finest passages in Wordsworth,
are an attempt to expound that view, though Pope falls back too quickly
into epigram, as Wordsworth into prose. It was reserved for Goethe to
show what a poet might learn from the philosophy of Spinoza. Meanwhile
Pope, uncertain as is his grasp of any philosophical conceptions, shows,
not merely in set phrases, but in the general colouring of his poem,
something of that width of sympathy which should result from the
pantheistic view. The tenderness, for example, with which he always
speaks of the brute creation is pleasant in a writer so little
distinguished as a rule by an interest in what we popularly call nature.
The 'scale of being' argument may be illogical, but we pardon it when it
is applied to strengthen our sympathies with our unfortunate dependants
on the lower steps of the ladder. The lamb who
Licks the hand just raised to shed his blood
is a second-hand lamb, and has, like so much of Pope's writing, acquired
a certain tinge of banality, which must limit quotation; and the same
must be said of the poor Indian, who
thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog will bear him company.
But the sentiment is as right as the language (in spite of its
familiarity we can still recognise the fact) is exquisite. Tolerance of
all forms of faith, from that of the poor Indian upwards, is so
characteristic of Pope as to have offended some modern critics who might
have known better. We may pick holes in the celebrated antithesis
For forms of government let fools contest:
Whate'er is best administered is best;
For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
Certainly, they are not mathematically accurate formulæ; but they are
generous, if imperfect, statements of great truths, and not unbecoming
in the mouth of the man who, as the member of an unpopular sect, learnt
to be cosmopolitan rather than bitter, and expressed his convictions in
the well-known words addressed to Swift: 'I am of the religion of
Erasmus, a Catholic; so I live, so I shall die; and hope one day to meet
you, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth, Dean Berkeley, and
Mr. Hutchinson in heaven.' Who would wish to shorten the list? And the
scheme of morality which Pope deduced for practical guidance in life is
in harmony with the spirit which breathes in those words just quoted. A
recent dispute in a court of justice shows that even our most cultivated
men have forgotten Pope so far as to be ignorant of the source of the
familiar words--
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.
It is therefore necessary to say explicitly that the poem where they
occur, the fourth epistle of the 'Essay on Man,' not only contains
half-a-dozen other phrases equally familiar--_e.g._, 'An honest man's
the noblest work of God;'[3] 'Looks through nature up to nature's God;'
'From grave to gay, from lively to severe'--but breathes throughout
sentiments which it would be credulous to believe that any man could
express so vigorously without feeling profoundly. Mr. Ruskin has quoted
one couplet as giving 'the most complete, the most concise, and the most
lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words'--
Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, whilst another's blessed.
The passage in which they occur is worthy of this (let us admit, just a
little over-praised) sentiment; and leads not unfitly to the conclusion
and summary of the whole, that he who can recognise the beauty of
virtue knows that
Where Faith, Law, Morals, all began,
All end--in love of God and love of man.
I know but too well all that may be said against this view of Pope's
morality. He is, as Ste.-Beuve says, the easiest of all men to
caricature; and it is equally easy to throw cold water upon his
morality. We may count up his affectations, ridicule his platitudes,
make heavy deductions for his insincerity, denounce his too frequent
indulgence in a certain love of dirt, which he shares with, and in which
indeed he is distanced by, Swift; and decline to believe in the virtue,
or even in the love of virtue, of a man stained by so many vices and
weaknesses. Yet I must decline to believe that men can gather grapes off
thorns, or figs off thistles, or noble expressions of moral truth from a
corrupt heart thinly varnished by a coating of affectation. Turn it how
we may, the thing is impossible. Pope was more than a mere literary
artist, though he was an artist of unparalleled excellence in his own
department. He was a man in whom there was the seed of many good
thoughts, though choked in their development by the growth of
innumerable weeds. And I will venture, in conclusion, to adduce one more
proof of the justice of a lenient verdict. I have had already to quote
many phrases familiar to everyone who is tinctured in the slightest
degree with a knowledge of English literature; and yet have been haunted
by a dim suspicion that some of my readers may have been surprised to
recognise their author. Pope, we have seen, is recognised even by judges
of the land only through the medium of Byron; and therefore the
'Universal Prayer' may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers. If so, it
will do them no harm to read over again a few of its verses. Perhaps,
after that experience, they will admit that the little cripple of
Twickenham, distorted as were his instincts after he had been stretched
on the rack of this rough world, and grievous as were his offences
against the laws of decency and morality, had yet in him a noble strain
of eloquence significant of deep religious sentiment. A phrase in the
first stanza may shock us as bordering too closely on the epigrammatic;
but the whole poem from which I take these stanzas must, I think, be
recognised as the utterance of a tolerant, reverent, and kindly heart:
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage--
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that thou art good,
And that myself am blind.
...
What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than hell to shun;
That, more than heaven pursue.
What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives--
To enjoy is to obey.
Yet not to earth's contracted span
Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round.
Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
Or deal damnation round the land
On each I judge thy foe.
If I am right, thy grace impart
Still in the right to stay:
If I am wrong, oh, teach my heart
To find that better way.
...
These stanzas, I am well aware, do not quite conform to the modern taste
in hymns, nor are they likely to find favour with admirers of the
'Christian Year.' Another school would object to them on a very
different ground. The deism of Pope's day was not a stable form of
belief; but in the form in which it was held by the pure deists of the
Toland and Tindal school, or by the disguised deists who followed Locke
or Clarke, it was the highest creed then attainable; and Pope's prayer
is an adequate impression of its best sentiment.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The remark was perhaps taken from Sir Thomas Browne: 'Thus have we
no just quarrel with nature for leaving us naked; or to envy the horns,
hoofs, skins, and furs of other creatures; being provided with reason
that can supply them all.'--_Religio Medici_, Part I. sec. 18.
[3] This sentiment, by the way, was attacked by Darnley, in his edition
of Beaumont and Fletcher, as 'false and degrading to man, derogatory to
God.' As I have lately seen the remark quoted with approbation, it is
worth noticing the argument by which Darnley supports it. He says that
an honest able man is nobler than an honest man, and Aristides with the
genius of Homer nobler than Aristides with the dulness of a clown.
Undoubtedly! But surely a man might say that English poetry is the
noblest in the world, and yet admit that Shakespeare was a nobler poet
than Tom Moore. Because honesty is nobler than any other quality, it
does not follow that all honest men are on a par. This bit of cavilling
reminds one of De Quincey's elaborate argument against the lines:
Who would not laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?
De Quincey says that precisely the same phenomenon is supposed to make
you laugh in one line and weep in the other; and that therefore the
thought is inaccurate. As if it would not be a fit cause for tears to
discover that one of our national idols was a fitting subject for
laughter!
_SIR WALTER SCOTT_
The question has begun to be asked about Scott which is asked about
every great man: whether he is still read or still read as he ought to
be read. I have been glad to see in some statistics of popular
literature that the Waverley Novels are still among the books most
frequently bought at railway stations, and scarcely surpassed even by
'Pickwick,' or 'David Copperfield.' A writer, it is said, is entitled to
be called a classic when his books have been read for a century after
his death. The number of books which fairly satisfies that condition is
remarkably small. There are certain books, of course, which we are all
bound to read if we make any claim to be decently educated. A modern
Englishman cannot afford to confess that he has not read Shakespeare or
Milton; if he talks about philosophy, he must have dipped at least into
Bacon and Hobbes and Locke; if he is a literary critic, he must know
something of Spenser and Donne and Dryden and the early dramatists; but
how many books are there of the seventeenth century which are still read
for pleasure by other than specialists? To speak within bounds, I fancy
that it would be exceedingly difficult to make out a list of one hundred
English books which after publication for a century are still really
familiar to the average reader. Something like ninety-nine of those have
in any case lost the charm of novelty, and are read, if read at all,
from some vague impression that the reader is doing a duty. It takes a
very powerful voice and a very clear utterance to make a man audible to
the fourth generation. If something of the mildew of time is stealing
over the Waverley Novels, we must regard that as all but inevitable.
Scott will have succeeded beyond any but the very greatest, perhaps even
as much as the very greatest, if, in the twentieth century, now so
unpleasantly near, he has a band of faithful followers, who still read
because they like to read and not because they are told to read.
Admitting that he must more or less undergo the universal fate, that the
glory must be dimmed even though it be not quenched, we may still ask
whether he will not retain as much vitality as the conditions of
humanity permit: Will our posterity understand at least why he was once
a luminary of the first magnitude, or wonder at their ancestors'
hallucination about a mere will-o'-the-wisp? Will some of his best
performances stand out like a cathedral amongst ruined hovels, or will
they all sink into the dust together, and the outlines of what once
charmed the world be traced only by Dryasdust and historians of
literature? It is a painful task to examine such questions impartially.
This probing a great reputation, and doubting whether we can come to
anything solid at the bottom, is especially painful in regard to Scott.
For he has, at least, this merit, that he is one of those rare natures
for whom we feel not merely admiration but affection. We may cherish the
fame of some writers in spite of, not on account of, many personal
defects; if we satisfied ourselves that their literary reputations were
founded on the sand, we might partly console ourselves with the thought
that we were only depriving bad men of a title to genius. But for Scott
most men feel in even stronger measure that kind of warm fraternal
regard which Macaulay and Thackeray expressed for the amiable, but,
perhaps, rather cold-blooded, Addison. The manliness and the sweetness
of the man's nature predispose us to return the most favourable verdict
in our power. And we may add that Scott is one of the last great English
writers whose influence extended beyond his island, and gave a stimulus
to the development of European thought. We cannot afford to surrender
our faith in one to whom, whatever his permanent merits, we must trace
so much that is characteristic of the mind of the nineteenth century.
Whilst, finally, if we have any Scotch blood in our veins, we must be
more or less than men to turn a deaf ear to the promptings of
patriotism. When Shakespeare's fame decays everywhere else, the
inhabitants of Stratford-on-Avon, if it still exist, should still revere
their tutelary saint; and the old town of Edinburgh should tremble in
its foundation when a sacrilegious hand is laid upon the glory of Scott.
Let us, however, take courage, and, with such impartiality as we may
possess, endeavour to sift the wheat from the chaff. And, by way of
following an able guide, let us dwell for a little on the judgment
pronounced upon Scott by one whose name I would never mention without
profound respect, and who has a special claim to be heard in this case.
Carlyle is (I must now say was) both a man of genius and a Scotchman.
His own writings show in every line that he comes of the same strong
Protestant race from which Scott received his best qualities. 'The
Scotch national character,' says Carlyle himself, 'originates in many
circumstances. First of all, the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but
next, and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian gospel of
John Knox. It seems a good national character, and, on some sides, not
so good. Let Scott thank John Knox, for he owed him much, little as he
dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman of his time was more
entirely Scotch than Walter Scott: the good and the not so good, which
all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him.' Nothing more
true; and the words would be as strikingly appropriate if for Walter
Scott we substitute Thomas Carlyle. And to this source of sympathy we
might add others. Who in this generation could rival Scott's talent for
the picturesque, unless it be Carlyle? Who has done so much to apply the
lesson which Scott, as he says, first taught us--that the 'bygone ages
of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols,
state-papers, controversies, and abstractions of men'? If Scott would in
old days--I still quote his critic--have harried cattle in Tynedale or
cracked crowns in Redswire, would not Carlyle have thundered from the
pulpit of John Knox his own gospel, only in slightly altered
phraseology--that shams should not live but die, and that men should do
what work lies nearest to their hands, as in the presence of the
eternities and the infinite silences?
That last parallel reminds us that if there are points of similarity,
there are contrasts both wide and deep. The rugged old apostle had
probably a very low opinion of moss-troopers, and Carlyle has a message
to deliver to his fellow-creatures, which is not quite according to
Scott. And thus we see throughout his interesting essay a kind of
struggle between two opposite tendencies--a genuine liking for the man,
tempered by a sense that Scott dealt rather too much in those same shams
to pass muster with a stern moral censor. Nobody can touch Scott's
character more finely. There is a charming little anecdote which every
reader must remember: how there was a 'little Blenheim cocker' of
singular sensibility and sagacity; how the said cocker would at times
fall into musings like those of a Wertherean poet, and lived in
perpetual fear of strangers, regarding them all as potentially
dog-stealers; how the dog was, nevertheless, endowed with 'most amazing
moral tact,' and specially hated the genus _quack_, and, above all, that
of _acrid-quack_. 'These,' says Carlyle, 'though never so
clear-starched, bland-smiling, and beneficent, he absolutely would have
no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing. He said with
emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it, "Acrid-quack, avaunt!"'
But once when 'a tall, irregular, busy-looking man came halting by,'
that wise, nervous little dog ran towards him, and began 'fawning,
frisking, licking at the feet' of Sir Walter Scott. No reader of reviews
could have done better, says Carlyle; and, indeed, that canine
testimonial was worth having. I prefer that little anecdote even to
Lockhart's account of the pig, which had a romantic affection for the
author of 'Waverley.' Its relater at least perceived and loved that
unaffected benevolence, which invested even Scott's bodily presence with
a kind of natural aroma, perceptible, as it would appear, to very
far-away cousins. But Carlyle is on his guard, and though his sympathy
flows kindly enough, it is rather harshly intercepted by his sterner
mood. He cannot, indeed, but warm to Scott at the end. After touching on
the sad scene of Scott's closing years, at once ennobled and embittered
by that last desperate struggle to clear off the burden of debt, he
concludes with genuine feeling. 'It can be said of Scott, when he
departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of
British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.
Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity, and
goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn
with care, the joy all fled from it, ploughed deep with labour and
sorrow. We shall never forget it--we shall never see it again. Adieu,
Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen; take our proud and sad farewell.'
If even the Waverley Novels should lose their interest, the last
journals of Scott, recently published by a judicious editor, can never
lose their interest as the record of one of the noblest struggles ever
carried on by a great man to redeem a lamentable error. It is a book to
do one good.
And now it is time to turn to the failings which, in Carlyle's opinion,
mar this pride of all Scotchmen, and make his permanent reputation
doubtful. The faults upon which he dwells are, of course, those which
are more or less acknowledged by all sound critics. Scott, says Carlyle,
had no great gospel to deliver; he had nothing of the martyr about him;
he slew no monsters and stirred no deep emotions. He did not believe in
anything, and did not even disbelieve in anything: he was content to
take the world as it came--the false and the true mixed
indistinguishably together. One Ram-dass, a Hindoo, 'who set up for
god-head lately,' being asked what he meant to do with the sins of
mankind, replied that 'he had fire enough in his belly to burn up all
the sins in the world.' Ram-dass had 'some spice of sense in him.' Now,
of fire of that kind we can detect few sparks in Scott. He was a
thoroughly healthy, sound, vigorous Scotchman, with an eye for the main
chance, but not much of an eye for the eternities. And that unfortunate
commercial element, which caused the misery of his life, was equally
mischievous to his work. He cared for no results of his working but such
as could be seen by the eye, and in one sense or other, 'handled,
looked at, and buttoned into the breeches' pocket.' He regarded
literature rather as a trade than an art; and literature, unless it is a
very poor affair, should have higher aims than that of 'harmlessly
amusing indolent, languid men.' Scott would not afford the time or the
trouble to go to the root of the matter, and is content to amuse us with
mere contrasts of costume, which will lose their interest when the
swallow-tail is as obsolete as the buff-coat. And then he fell into the
modern sin of extempore writing, and deluged the world with the first
hasty overflowings of his mind, instead of straining and refining it
till he could bestow the pure essence upon us. In short, his career is
summed up in the phrase that it was 'writing impromptu novels to buy
farms with'--a melancholy end, truly, for a man of rare genius. Nothing
is sadder than to hear of such a man 'writing himself out;' and it is
pitiable indeed that Scott should be the example of that fate which
rises most naturally to our minds. 'Something very perfect in its kind,'
says Carlyle, 'might have come from Scott, nor was it a low kind--nay,
who knows how high, with studious self-concentration, he might have
gone: what wealth nature implanted in him, which his circumstances, most
unkind while seeming to be kindest, had never impelled him to unfold?'
There is undoubtedly some truth in the severer criticisms to which some
more kindly sentences are a pleasant relief; but there is something too
which most persons will be apt to consider as rather harsher than
necessary. Is not the moral preacher intruding a little too much on the
province of the literary critic? In fact we fancy that, in the midst of
these energetic remarks, Carlyle is conscious of certain half-expressed
doubts. The name of Shakespeare occurs several times in the course of
his remarks, and suggests to us that we can hardly condemn Scott whilst
acquitting the greatest name in our literature. Scott, it seems, wrote
for money; he coined his brains into cash to buy farms. Did not
Shakespeare do pretty much the same? As Carlyle himself puts it, 'beyond
drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare contemplated no
result in those plays of his.' Shakespeare, as Pope puts it,
Whom you and every playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will,
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.
To write for money was long held to be disgraceful; and Byron, as we
know, taunted Scott because his publishers combined
To yield his muse just half-a-crown per line;