WHERE POPE STAYED AT BATTERSEA
Coming from Chelsea by way of Battersea Bridge, you go a few yards along
the Battersea Bridge Road, then turn aside into Church Road, and presently
you pass a narrow, mean street of small houses, which is Bolingbroke Road,
and serves to remind you that the Bolingbrokes were once lords of the
manor of Battersea and proprietors of the ferry that crossed the river
hereabouts before the first Battersea Bridge was built. A little further
down Church Road, past squat and grimy houses on the one hand and gaunt
walls and yawning gateways of mills, distilleries, and miscellaneous
"works" on the other, and you come to a gloomy gateway that has "To
Bolingbroke House" painted up on one of its side-walls. Through this
opening you see a busy, littered yard; straw and scraps of paper and odds
and ends of waste blow about on its stones; stacks of packing-cases and
wooden boxes rise up against a drab background of brick buildings, and
deep in the yard, with a space before it in which men are at work and a
waggon is loading, you find the forlorn left wing--all that survives--of
what was once the family seat of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke,
whose chief title to remembrance now is that he was the friend of
Alexander Pope.
Worn and dingy with age, its stone porch stained and crumbling, and some
of its windows broken, the place has a strange, neglected look, though it
is still used for business purposes, and you have glimpses of clerks
writing at their desks in the rooms from which Pope used to gaze out on
very different surroundings.
It is difficult, indeed, to associate such a house and such a
neighbourhood as this has now become with so fastidious, finicking, and
modish a poet as Pope. All the adjacent streets are squalid,
poverty-stricken, noisy; along the main road, almost within hearing, trams
and motor-buses shuttle continually to and fro: except for a quaint,
dirty, weary-looking cottage that still stands dreaming here and there
among its ugly, mid-Victorian neighbours, and for the river that laps
below the fence at the end of the yard, there is scarcely anything left of
the quiet, green, rural Battersea village with which he was familiar; even
the church whose steeple rises near by above the mills, and in which
Bolingbroke was buried, was rebuilt a few years after his death.
Nevertheless, this weatherbeaten, time-wasted old house down the yard is
the same house that, when it stood with Bolingbroke's lawn before it and
his pleasant gardens sloping to the Thames, was the occasional home of
Pope, and numbered Swift, Thomson, and other of the great men of letters
of Queen Anne's reign among its visitors. One of the rooms overlooking the
river, a room lined with cedar, beautifully inlaid, is still known as "Mr.
Pope's parlour"; it is said to have been used by Pope as his study, and
that he wrote his _Essay on Man_ in it.
It is therefore the more fitting that Pope should have dedicated _An Essay
on Man_ to Bolingbroke, whom he addresses in the opening lines with that
exhortation:--
"Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings!"
He dedicated also one of his Imitations of Horace to--
"St. John, whose love indulged my labours past,
Matures my present, and shall bound my last."
A man of brilliant gifts, both as writer and statesman, Bolingbroke became
involved in the political intriguings of his day, and in 1715 had to flee
to Calais to escape arrest for high treason. Eight years later he was
allowed to return, and his forfeited estates were given back to him. On
the death of his father he took up his residence at Battersea, and it was
there that he died of cancer in 1751. "Pope used to speak of him," writes
Warton, "as a being of a superior order that had condescended to visit
this lower world;" and he, in his turn, said of Pope, "I never in my life
knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or more
general friendship for mankind."
[Illustration: POPE'S HOUSE. BATTERSEA.]
And on the whole one feels that this character of Pope was truer than Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu's presentation of him as "the wicked asp of
Twickenham"; for if he was viciously cruel to Colley Cibber and the poor
Grub Street scribblers whom he satirises in _The Dunciad_, he was kindness
itself to Akenside and other of his younger rivals in reading their
manuscripts and recommending them to his publishers; and if he retorted
bitterly upon Addison after he had fallen out with him, he kept unbroken
to the last his close friendship with Swift, Gay, Garth, Atterbury,
Bolingbroke, and with Arbuthnot, for whose services in helping him through
"this long disease, my life" he expressed a touchingly affectionate
gratitude. If he had been the heartless little monster his enemies painted
him he could not have felt so tireless and beautiful a love for his father
and mother and, despite his own feebleness and shattered health, have
devoted himself so assiduously to the care of his mother in her declining
years. "O friend," he writes to Arbuthnot, in the Prologue to the
Satires:--
"O friend, may each domestic bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:
Me let the tender office long engage
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 a while one parent from the sky."
All his life, Pope dwelt in London or on the skirts of it. He was
twenty-eight when, soon after the death of his father in 1715, he leased
the famous villa at Twickenham and took his mother to live with him there,
and it was from there when she died, a very old lady of ninety-three, that
on the 10th June 1783, he wrote to an artist friend the letter that
enshrines his sorrow:--
"As I know you and I naturally desire to see one another, I hoped that
this day our wishes would have met and brought you hither. And this for
the very reason which possibly might hinder your coming, that my poor
mother is dead. I thank God her death was easy, as her life was innocent,
and as it cost her not a groan or even a sigh, there is yet upon her
countenance such an expression of tranquillity, nay, almost of pleasure,
that, far from horrid, it is even amiable to behold it. It would form the
finest image of a saint expired that ever painter drew, and it would be
the greatest obligation art could ever bestow on a friend if you could
come and sketch it for me. I am sure if there be no prevalent obstacle you
will leave every common business to do this; and I hope to see you this
evening as late as you will, or to-morrow morning as early, before this
winter flower is faded. I will defer her interment till to-morrow night. I
know you love me or I would not have written this--I could not (at this
time) have written at all. Adieu. May you die as happily."
From Twickenham Pope made frequent visits to London, where he stayed in
lodgings, or at the houses of friends; and in the last four or five years
of his life, after Bolingbroke had settled down at Battersea, he put up as
often as not at Bolingbroke House. Of his personal appearance at this date
there are a good many records. One of his numerous lampooners, unkindly
enough but very graphically, pictures him as--
"Meagre and wan, and steeple crowned,
His visage long, his shoulders round;
His crippled corse two spindle pegs
Support, instead of human legs;
His shrivelled skin's of dusty grain,
A cricket's voice, and monkey's brain."
His old enemy, John Dennis, sneering at his hunched and drooping figure,
described him as "a young, short, squab gentleman, the very bow of the god
of love." He had to be laced up tightly in bodices made of stiff
canvas, so that he might hold himself erect, and, says Dr. Johnson, "his
stature was so low, that to bring him to a level with a common table it
was necessary to raise his seat. But his face was not displeasing, and his
eyes were animated and vivid." And here is Sir Joshua Reynolds's
word-picture of him: "He was about four feet six inches high, very
hump-backed and deformed. He wore a black coat, and, according to the
fashion of that time, had on a little sword. He had a large and very fine
eye, and a long, handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which
are always found in the mouths of crooked persons, and the muscles which
run across the cheek were so strongly marked that they seemed like small
cords."
[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE]
This is the queer, misshapen, pathetic little shape that haunts that
old-world house in the yard at Battersea, and you may gather something of
the life he lived there, and of the writing with which he busied himself
in the cedar parlour, from these extracts out of two of his letters, both
of which were written to Warburton:--
"_January 12, 1743-4._
"Of the public I can tell you nothing worthy of the reflection of a
reasonable man; and of myself only an account that would give you
pain; for my asthma has increased every week since you last heard from
me to the degree of confining me totally to the fireside; so that I
have hardly seen any of my friends but two (Lord and Lady
Bolingbroke), who happen to be divided from the world as much as
myself, and are constantly retired at Battersea. There I have passed
much of my time, and often wished you of the company, as the best I
know to make me not regret the loss of others, and to prepare me for a
nobler scene than any mortal greatness can open to us. I fear by the
account you gave me of the time you design to come this way, one of
them (Lord B.) whom I much wish you had a glimpse of (as a being
_paullo minus ab angelio_), will be gone again, unless you pass some
weeks in London before Mr. Allen arrives there in March. My present
indisposition takes up almost all my hours to render a very few of
them supportable; yet I go on softly to prepare the great edition of
my things with your notes, and as fast as I receive any from you, I
add others in order (determining to finish the Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot and two or three of the best of Horace, particularly that of
Augustus, first), which will fall into the same volume with the Essay
on Man. I determined to publish a small number of the Essay, and of
the other on Criticism, ere now, as a sample of the rest, but Bowyer
advised delay, though I now see I was not in the wrong."
_"February 21, 1743-4._
"I own that the late encroachments on my constitution make me willing
to see the end of all further care about me or my works. I would rest
from the one in a full resignation of my being to be disposed of by
the Father of all mercy, and for the other (though indeed a trifle,
yet a trifle may be some example) I would commit them to the candour
of a sensible and reflecting judge, rather than to the malice of every
short-sighted and malevolent critic or inadvertent and censorious
reader. And no hand can set them in so good a light, or so well turn
them best side to the day, as your own. This obliges me to confess I
have for some months thought myself going, and that not slowly, down
the hill--the rather as every attempt of the physicians, and still the
last medicines more forcible in their nature, have utterly failed to
serve me. I was at last, about seven days ago, taken with so violent a
fit at Battersea, that my friends, Lord Bolingbroke and Lord
Marchmont, sent for present help to the surgeon, whose bleeding me, I
am persuaded, saved my life by the instantaneous effect it had, and
which has continued so much to amend me that I have passed five days
without oppression, and recovered, what I have three days wanted, some
degree of expectoration and some hours together of sleep. I can now go
to Twickenham, to try if the air will not take some part in reviving
me, if I can avoid colds, and between that place and Battersea, with
my Lord Bolingbroke, I will pass what I have of life while he stays,
which I can tell you, to my great satisfaction, will be this fortnight
or three weeks yet."
In the year after writing this Pope came to the end of all further care
about himself and his works; he died at Twickenham, and lies buried under
the middle aisle of Twickenham Church.