Pope is a poet whose very admirers belittle him. Mr. Saintsbury, for
instance, even in the moment of inciting us to read him, observes that
"it would be scarcely rash to say that there is not an original thought,
sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poetic
substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope."
And he has still less to say in favour of Pope as a man. He denounces
him for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility to
suggest that "perhaps ... there is a natural connection between the two
kinds of this dexterity of fingering--that of the artist in words, and
that of the pickpocket or the forger." If Pope had been a contemporary,
Mr. Saintsbury, I imagine, would have stunned him with a huge mattock of
adjectives. As it is, he seems to be in two minds whether to bury or to
praise him. Luckily, he has tempered his moral sense with his sense of
humour, and so comes to the happy conclusion that as a matter of fact,
when we read or read about Pope, "some of the proofs which are most
damning morally, positively increase one's aesthetic delight."
One is interested in Pope's virtues as a poet and his vices as a man
almost equally. It is his virtues as a man and his vices as a poet that
are depressing. He is usually at his worst artistically when he is at
his best morally. He achieves wit through malice: he achieves only
rhetoric through virtue. It is not that one wishes he had been a bad son
or a Uriah Heep in his friendships. It is pleasant to remember the
pleasure he gave his mother by allowing her to copy out parts of his
translation of the _Iliad_, and one respects him for refusing a pension
of £300 a year out of the secret service money from his friend Craggs.
But one wishes that he had put neither his filial piety nor his
friendship into writing. Mr. Saintsbury, I see, admires "the masterly
and delightful craftsmanship in words" of the tribute to Craggs; but
then Mr. Saintsbury also admires the _Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady_--a
mere attitude in verse, as chill as a weeping angel in a graveyard.
Pope's attractiveness is less that of a real man than of an inhabitant
of Lilliput, where it is a matter of no importance whether or not one
lives in obedience to the Ten Commandments. We can regard him with
amusement as a liar, a forger, a glutton, and a slanderer of his kind.
If his letters are the dullest letters ever written by a wit, it is
because he reveals in them not his real vices but his imaginary virtues.
They only become interesting when we know the secret history of his life
and read them as the moralizings of a doll Pecksniff. Historians of
literature often assert--mistakenly, I think--that Pliny's letters are
dull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a man
over-conscious of his virtues. But Pliny's virtues, however tip-tilted,
were at least real. Pope's letters are the literary exercises of a man
platitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have an
impersonality, like that of the leading articles in _The Times_. They
have all the qualities of the essay except intimate confession. They are
irrelevant scrawls which might as readily have been addressed to one
correspondent as another. So much so is this, that when Pope published
them, he altered the names of the recipients of some of them so as to
make it appear that they were written to famous persons when, as a
matter of fact, they were written to private and little-known friends.
The story of the way in which he tampered with his letters and arranged
for their "unauthorized" publication by a pirate publisher is one of the
most amazing in the history of forgery. It was in reference to this that
Whitwell Elwin declared that Pope "displayed a complication of
imposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paralleled in
the lives of professional forgers and swindlers." When he published his
correspondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that the
boyish Pope should have written with such an air of patronage to the
aged Wycherley and that Wycherley should have suffered it. We know, now,
however, that the correspondence is only in part genuine, and that Pope
used portions of his correspondence with Caryll and published them as
though they had been addressed to Wycherley. Wycherley had remonstrated
with Pope on the extravagant compliments he paid him: Pope had
remonstrated with Caryll on similar grounds. In the Wycherley
correspondence, Pope omits Wycherley's remonstrance to him and publishes
his own remonstrance to Caryll as a letter from himself to Wycherley.
From that time onwards Pope spared no effort in getting his
correspondence "surreptitiously" published. He engaged a go-between, a
disreputable actor disguised as a clergyman, to approach Curll, the
publisher, with an offer of a stolen collection of letters, and, when
the book was announced, he attacked Curll as a villain, and procured a
friend in the House of Lords to move a resolution that Curll should be
brought before the House on a charge of breach of privilege, one of the
letters (it was stated) having been written to Pope by a peer. Curll
took a number of copies of the book with him to the Lords, and it was
discovered that no such letter was included. But the advertisement was a
noble one. Unfortunately, even a man of genius could not devise
elaborate schemes of this kind without ultimately falling under
suspicion, and Curll wrote a narrative of the events which resulted in
seriously discrediting Pope.
Pope was surely one of the least enviable authors who ever lived. He had
fame and fortune and friends. But he had not the constitution to enjoy
his fortune, and in friendship he had not the gift of fidelity. He
secretly published his correspondence with Swift and then set up a
pretence that Swift had been the culprit. He earned from Bolingbroke in
the end a hatred that pursued him in the grave. He was always begging
Swift to go and live with him at Twickenham. But Swift found even a
short visit trying. "Two sick friends never did well together," he wrote
in 1727, and he has left us verses descriptive of the miseries of great
wits in each other's company:--
Pope has the talent well to speak,
But not to reach the ear;
His loudest voice is low and weak,
The Dean too deaf to hear.
Awhile they on each other look,
Then different studies choose;
The Dean sits plodding o'er a book,
Pope walks and courts the muse.
"Mr. Pope," he grumbled some years later, "can neither eat nor drink,
loves to be alone, and has always some poetical scheme in his head."
Swift, luckily, stayed in Dublin and remained Pope's friend. Lady Mary,
Wortley Montagu went to Twickenham and became Pope's enemy. The reason
seems to have been that he was more eager for an exchange of compliments
than for friendship. He affected the attitude of a man in love, when
Lady Mary saw in him only a monkey in love. He is even said to have
thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and its
three pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burst
out laughing. Pope took his revenge in the _Epistle to Martha Blount_,
where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady that
her different aspects agreed as ill with each other--
As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock;
Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task
With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask;
So morning insects, that in muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun.
His relations with his contemporaries were too often begun in
compliments only to end in abuse of this kind. Even while he was on good
terms with them, he was frequently doing them ill turns. Thus, he
persuaded a publisher to get Dennis to write abusively of Addison's
_Cato_ in order that he might have an excuse in his turn for writing
abusively of Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly taking
a revenge of his own. Addison was more embarrassed than pleased by so
savage a defence, and hastened to assure Dennis that he had had nothing
to do with it. Addison also gave offence to Pope by his too judicious
praise of _The Rape of the Lock_ and the translation of the _Iliad_.
Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which was expressed with
the genius of venom in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot._
There was never a poet whose finest work needs such a running commentary
of discredit as Pope's. He may be said, indeed, to be the only great
poet in reading whom the commentary is as necessary as the text. One can
enjoy Shakespeare or Shelley without a note: one is inclined even to
resent the intrusion of the commentator into the upper regions of
poetry. But Pope's verse is a guide to his age and the incidents of his
waspish existence, lacking a key to which one misses three-fourths of
the entertainment. The _Danciad_ without footnotes is one of the
obscurest poems in existence: with footnotes it becomes a perfect epic
of literary entomology. And it is the same with at least half of his
work. Thus, in the _Imitations of Horace_, a reference to Russell tells
us little till we read in a delightful footnote:
There was a Lord Russell who, by living too luxuriously, had quite
spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, but used to go out
with his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite. If he felt
anything of that, he would cry out, "Oh, I have found it!" turn
short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of
the finest chase. It was this lord who, when he met a beggar, and
was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost
famished with hunger, called him a "happy dog."
There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before Mr. Elwin and Mr.
Courthope edited and annotated him--though he had been edited well
before--but their monumental edition has made him of all English poets
one of the most incessantly entertaining.
Pope, however, is a charmer in himself. His venom has graces. He is a
stinging insect, but of how brilliant a hue! There are few satires in
literature richer in the daintiness of malice than the _Epistle to
Martha Blount_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_. The "characters" of
women in the former are among the most precious of those railleries of
sex in which mankind has always loved to indulge. The summing-up of the
perfect woman:
And mistress of herself, though china fall,
is itself perfect in its wit. And the fickle lady, Narcissa, is a
portrait in porcelain:
Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild,
To make a wash, would hardly stew a child;
Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer.
And paid a tradesman once, to make him stare;...
Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs,
Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres;
Now conscience chills her and now passion burns;
And atheism and religion take their turns;
A very heathen in the carnal part,
Yet still a sad, good Christian at the heart.
The study of Chloe, who "wants a heart," is equally delicate and witty:
Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,
Content to dwell in decencies for ever--
So very reasonable, so unmoved,
As never yet to love, or to be loved.
She, while her lover pants upon her breast,
Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;
And when she sees her friend in deep despair,
Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!...
Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead?
She bids her footman put it in her head.
Chloe is prudent--would you too be wise?
Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.
The _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ is still more dazzling. The venom is
passionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a
masterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations of
Addison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus: