_A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Institute_.
The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as
I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil
of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone
groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting
that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.
But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an
alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The
Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that
he had, that very day, entered an existing _bona fide_ boy upon the
school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the
twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An
illustration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less
confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are
probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better
disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere
elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips
his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we
have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in
our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great
and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him
by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he
could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift,
fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action,
'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named
French Revolution.'
The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a
century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly
communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century
which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid
materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found
little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The
lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their
hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham
pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town-
bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding
groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,'
but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor
century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It
lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it
was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do
not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom,
are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all
centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the
Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr.
Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of
thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously
inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson
and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of
completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters
of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief
chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its
vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander
Pope.
Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking
the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method
had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the
lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away
amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting
that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so
much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely
over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own _Homer_ over the body of the
slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, whose
letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's
most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle
is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to
inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are
not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would
be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently
scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of
asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the
author of the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ was
or was not a poet.
Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third-
rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st,
1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over,
mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation
of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the
poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope
was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always
more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what
he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of
the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a
relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a
tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the
first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of
Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It
is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton
and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He
made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome
times he lived in; but _his_ books have all perished. He was a Roman
Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second
wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that
the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the
poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed
it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid
from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind,
but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him
to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to
fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest
calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the
terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On
another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due
a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the
old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The
poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal
he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with
an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's
character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately
artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not
malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole
maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up
without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff
canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and
numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form.
If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was
the author of the _Dunciad_. Pope had no means of self-defence save his
wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he
tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no
Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so
behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he
knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off
upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be
intimated to him that if he did the author of _Rasselas_ would thrash him
in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked
Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied,
'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When
he denounced Macpherson for his _Ossian_ frauds, and the irate Celt said
something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that
he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a
ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence
selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a
head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of
great physical strength is no mean assistance to a straightforward life.
The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with
a friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be brought to share
the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his
acquaintances. 'Why,' he used to exclaim apologetically, 'even if I do
run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst
of it.' But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources.
We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.
Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life.
He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes
were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons
were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns.
Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another
only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that
there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful
poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected.
Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his
proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching
faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was
obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the
thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor
little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope
was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every
kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in
loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this
supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world
of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for
Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small
seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the
contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys
might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so
he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have
lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that
Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to
carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original.
Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable
that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French
translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire,
who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and
could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one
occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was
too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to
admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was
consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of
translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early
acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and
the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting,
injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It
was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in
human things.
From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year,
he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of
Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems,
against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing
distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any
other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied
that the _onus_ lay upon the critic of first proving that there is
anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted,
one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715
Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged
seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his
mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in
her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life,
came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized
thus: his _Pastorals_, 1709; the _Essay on Criticism_, 1711; the first
version of the _Rape of the Lock_, 1712; the second, 1714; the _Iliad_,
begun in 1715, was finished 1720; _Eloisa_, 1717; the _Elegy_ to the
memory of an _Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Dunciad_, 1728; the _Essay on
Man_, 1732; and then the _Epistles_ and _Satires_. Of all Pope's
biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the
best. The _Life_, indeed, like the rest of the _Lives of the Poets_, is
a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager
for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London
booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers
thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at grass, and had
no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an
amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he
knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was
not in his way. Was he not already endowed--with a pension, which, with
his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in
order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the
less--nay, perhaps all the more--for being written with so little effort,
the _Lives of the Poets_ are delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the
very best of them. {59} None knew the infirmities of ordinary human
nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he
neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity,
insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks
the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham
philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is
always on the watch, whilst talent and achievement never fail to win his
admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as best he could, the debt of
gratitude surely due to those who have taken pains to please, and who
have left behind them in a world, which rarely treated them kindly, works
fitted to stir youth to emulation, or solace the disappointments of age.
And over all man's manifold infirmities, he throws benignantly the mantle
of his stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely to miss
Johnson's approbation. Of them he writes:
'The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and
exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at the
summit of poetical reputation--till he was at ease in his fortune, and
without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or
tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and
whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has,
amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give
than such a son.'
To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be
indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.
Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold
the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray,
of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most
distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope.
The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated
more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the
light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its
merits, well basted in the _Edinburgh Review_. But Croker seems to have
made no real progress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr.
Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its
appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new
editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications
for the task,--patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of
Pope. 'To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like
madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man
you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same
effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited.
His lot--if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively
reminiscence of childhood--resembles that of an unfortunate infant being
dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest
operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the
tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can
be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a
shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web
of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was,
besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because
somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De
Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines--
'Who but must laugh if such a man there be;
Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'
De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all
directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any
difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and
now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see,
would have told a very different tale had he been in command from the
first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet
whenever he decently can. And this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's
_Life_, which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, is
certain to be a fascinating book.
It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly
repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes excite an indignation
which injurious crimes fail to arouse.
The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably
familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began
writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of
clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who
had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being
always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he
kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the
celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly,
and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning
the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly 'guiltless of his
country's blood'--for all that is now known of him is that he used to go
hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the
ends--had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had
relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for
money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a
bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been
heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by
succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the
less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was
condemned by His Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at Charing
Cross for publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed
hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs
that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon
their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others
traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed
amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in
the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen
Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob--it does not matter
which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage,
and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent
tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. {65} Ten years
earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of
him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought
Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope,
oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have
moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same
publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume.
Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against
Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to
Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had
never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the
receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true
temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been
expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however,
did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely
to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought
occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I
should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with
his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose
machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would,
and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings.
The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship
was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged
for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes
Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first
quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift,
though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every
one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted.
The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr.
Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with
his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the
extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he
kept copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as
paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He
proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified
to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to
a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an
imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to
Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without
much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he
thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a
sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the
originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the
library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with
much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr.
Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good.
The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had
retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him
doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical
Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham
correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that
he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some
disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was
as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was
offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying
the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up,
and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a
clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as
forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the
advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope
affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for
threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll,
however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of
their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's
letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of
which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted,
gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but
the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He
promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his
part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly
dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came
of the litigation I cannot say.
The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long
remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real
letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely
disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote
to Caryll as follows:--
'I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of the
reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving
my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of
satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company
of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on
the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.'
Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter
Pope was so pleased with his moonshine that he transferred the whole
passage to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of course
fictitious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so
that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter
of 1713, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and so
on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I
have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine;' and go on to find
Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you
may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date,
February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen
over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impassable
even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be
out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in
1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in
his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February
twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written
documents which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even
for a few minutes.
A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of
fragments of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary
letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter
to Caryll:--
'Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his
best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of
body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'
What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his
letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create
the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here
narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an
organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak
seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is
neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to
dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift
correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and
containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works,
and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne,
which was entitled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord
Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this
objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the
judgment, are not mere _obiter dicta_, but conclusive):
'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than
those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and
which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this
which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part,
that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally
intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very
little worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357).
I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that
Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one
notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.
Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has
always been the fashion to admire the letter which, first appearing in
1737, in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes
the death by lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An
identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton from the original,
naturally caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another man's
letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his
world-famous _Lectures_, and few literary anecdotes are better known; but
the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope's from the
beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have
it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady
Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.
When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key.
A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own
mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John
Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid--he polished and pruned.
His first draft never reached the printer--though he sometimes said it
did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when
authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds
over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below!'
Pope's translation of the _Iliad_ was his first great undertaking, and he
worked at it like a Trojan. It was published by subscription for two
guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to
collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered
into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised
the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out
of their books, but would do so out of their country. He writes to
Caryll:
'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind
metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and
there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the
manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words,
namely--"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each
of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have
composed several ready for me to set my name to.'
This is certainly much better than that trumpery walk in the moonshine.
Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed.
He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the _Iliad_. Over the _Odyssey_ he
slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do half the books; but even
after paying his journeymen he made nearly 4,000 pounds over the
_Odyssey_. Well might he write in later life--
'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'
Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of
cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their
odes into acres.
Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length.
Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old
school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking
the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:
'Ah! I see you have _Homer's_ Iliad! Well, I believe it is the best.'
And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the
second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.
Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text.
He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John
Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with illustrations
by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book
of the _Iliad_, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering
of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the
first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In
Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed
Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.
But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back
too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew
Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful.
It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom
done so. Listen to Professor Conington {76}:--
'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent
schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in
language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting,
carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born
readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the
heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as
that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'
Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a
distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical
translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope
kept this law.
Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is
hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in
which they possess this faculty of utilization. Pope's _Essay on
Criticism_, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of
wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention
of appropriation. Apart from the _limae labor_, which was enormous, and
was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in
it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his _Essay on
Dramatic Poesy_, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated
Boileau's _Art of Poetry_. Then there were the works of those noble
lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of
Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all these books greedily, and
with an amazing quick eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant
wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed and ill-set
thoughts of other men.
The same thing is noticeable in the most laboured production of his later
life, the celebrated _Essay on Man_. For this he was coached by Lord
Bolingbroke.
Pope was accustomed to talk with much solemnity of his ethical system, of
which the _Essay on Man_ is but a fragment, but we need not trouble
ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about _Clarissa Harlowe_ that the
man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say about the
poetry of Pope: the man who reads it for its critical or ethical
philosophy may hang himself. We read Pope for pleasure, but a bit of his
philosophy may be given:
'Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less?
Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade!
Or ask of yonder argent fields above
Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove!'
To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, speaking through the
mouth of Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than
his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can make no claim to be
a philosopher, and had he been one, Verse would have been a most improper
vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly fights in handcuffs
or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or
grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched
them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts were his
wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and
mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and
hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great
writer, an English classic. What is it that constitutes a great writer?
A bold question, certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a question
in public you may be certain he has provided himself with an answer. I
find mine in the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, himself,
though living, an English classic--Cardinal Newman. He says {79}:
'I do not claim for a great author, as such, any great depth of thought,
or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human
nature, or experience of human life--though these additional gifts he may
have, and the more he has of them the greater he is,--but I ascribe to
him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty of
expression. He is master of the two-fold [Greek text], the thought and
the word, distinct but inseparable from each other. . . . He always has
the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is
brief it is because few words suffice; if he is lavish of them, still
each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of
his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say, and his
sayings pass into proverbs amongst his people, and his phrases become
household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated
with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the
marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern
palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has been dead one hundred
and forty-two years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead two
hundred and seventy years, and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us,
he is the most quoted of English poets, the one who has most enriched our
common speech. Horace used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of
Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive
in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very
Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to
demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or
Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not
unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the
labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with
downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.
Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, and in the mock-
heroic. To say that the _Rape of the Lock_ is the best mock-heroic poem
in the language is to say nothing; to say that it is the best in the
world is to say more than my reading warrants; but to say that it and
_Paradise Regained_ are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in
English is to say enough.
The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are
sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to
my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more
than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong,
gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as
soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.
Pope became rather by the backing of his friends than from any other
cause a party man. Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, and
embraced things now outside its ambit--the theatre, for example, and the
opera. You remember how excited politicians got over Addison's _Cato_,
which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing at a critical time, was
thought to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages have
failed to discover amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then
connected with either party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best
letters ever written to nobody tells the story of the first night.
'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the
theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author
sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause
proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of
the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against
his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard
that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord
Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one
of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment,
as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well
against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced
this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said
Cato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a
sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is
probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to
live upon after he dies.'
Later on music was dragged into the fray. The Court was all for Handel
and the Germans; the Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility affected the
Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera
House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small
part; for, notwithstanding his _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_, he hated music
with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some
have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he
was damned for the farce of _Three Hours after Marriage_, which, after
the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in
this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of _The
Beggars' Opera_. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till
the last act, when the two lovers, having first inserted themselves
respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at one
another across the boards; then they rose in their rage, and made an end
of that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears when,
years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines--
'While all its throats the gallery extends
And all the thunder of the pit ascends,
Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep
Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'
Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and so had his hands full of
ready-made quarrels; but his period was certainly one that demanded a
satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am content to repeat, his did.
Satire like Pope's is essentially modish, and requires a restricted
range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing humanity at large I should
advise him to check his noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with his
next-door neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, which humanity
will not do. This was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom
he moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and
high and low, married and single, town and country, Protestant and
Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in it. One _could_ gamble in that
stock. The mania began in February 1720, and by the end of May the price
of 100 pounds stock was up to 340 pounds. In July and August it was 950
pounds, and even touched, 1,000 pounds. In the middle of September it
was down to 590 pounds, and before the end of the year it had dropped to
125 pounds. Pope himself bought stock when it stood so low as 104
pounds, but he had never the courage to sell, and consequently lost,
according to his own account, half his worldly possessions. The Prime
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold--as did his
Most Gracious Majesty the King--at 1,000 pounds. The age was also a
scandalous, ill-living age, and Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip and
tale-bearer, picked up all that was going. The details of every lawsuit
of a personal character were at his finger-ends. Whoever starved a
sister, or forged a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a fortune
dishonestly, or lost one disgracefully, or was reported to do so, be he
citizen or courtier, noble duke or plump alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to
know all about it, and as likely as not to put it into his next satire.
Living, as the poet did, within easy distance of London, he always turned
up in a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at least writes
a noble friend. This sort of thing naturally led to quarrels, and the
shocking incompleteness of this lecture stands demonstrated by the fact
that, though I have almost done, I have as yet said nothing abort Pope's
quarrels, which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul and leaving
out his journeys. Pope's quarrels are celebrated. His quarrel with Mr.
Addison, culminating in the celebrated description, almost every line of
which is now part and parcel of the English language; his quarrel with
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom he satirized in the most brutal lines
ever written by man of woman; his quarrel with Lord Hervey; his quarrel
with the celebrated Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ought not to be
dismissed so lightly, but what can I do? From the Duchess of Marlborough
Pope is said to have received a sum of money, sometimes stated at 1,000
pounds and sometimes at 3,000 pounds, for consenting to suppress his
description of her as Atossa, which, none the less, he published. I do
not believe the story; money passed between the parties and went to Miss
Martha Blount, but it must have been for some other consideration. Sarah
Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too well to give it away
without security; and how possibly could she hope by a cash payment to
erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or
bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then
Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said,
used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she
persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her.
As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not
writ large in the four books of the _Dunciad_? Mr. Swinburne is indeed
able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy
war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong,
'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all
blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.'
I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's
bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels,
the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a
moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened
liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy,
'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and
contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be
quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with
a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The _Dunciad_ was quite uncalled-
for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor:
'The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl.'
But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Pope did not begin
brawling first. Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine, and who begged
Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the
Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to
him: 'Take care the bad poets do not out-wit you as they have done the
good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names
to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as
well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the
difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice
was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be
Popes, but for the real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten. As it
is, only their names survive in the index to the _Dunciad_; their
indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if
the historian or the moralist seeks an illustration of the coarseness and
brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works
of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none
of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize
with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a
mere toss-up whose name you may find in the _Dunciad_--a miserable
scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an
immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe
amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be
regarded as a social purge.
Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope.
Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even
such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into
infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may,
perhaps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid Youth referred to in
the Epilogue to the _Satires_:
'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend
Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'
Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his
lordship's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who
knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of
Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The
Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'