'The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,'
the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid
Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit
must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title
cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people
did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his
place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an
invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw
himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a
much softer place--the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some
persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought
to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to
write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction
the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,
'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.'
Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it
was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a
single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to
gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100
pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised
in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were
his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.
Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation
he sings:--
'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide:
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day,
The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,--
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.'
The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at
every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in
mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It
is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his
caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington
House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he
said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of
the poisoned pen.
Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor
was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath
was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed,
'Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's _Anecdotes_
there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 'Shortly before his
death, he said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very
steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great
pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision."' It may have
been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for,
who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the
Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be pronounced
religious. As Cardinal Newman has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory
Catholic.
Pope died in his enemies' day.
Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the
best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased
the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the
task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd
as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely
notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot:
'Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my
_Travels_.' This may be doubted without damage to the friendly
testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most
pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead--he was mad,
dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror and
gloomy forebodings of impending doom.
Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that
Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier
for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly
weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide; and though we
may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to
be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not
merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our
names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.
But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely
wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother,
but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a
brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With
Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,--
'Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the vault to brag of.'
The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for
ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him
forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows
but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true
poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in
that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save
glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off
summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern
Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves
down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own _Eloisa to Abelard_?
Whether, in fact, maidens in those latitudes do read _Eloisa_ before
blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have
thought they would. And they might do worse--and better.
Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations.
'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'
he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light,
'The eternal moon of love,
Under whose motions life's dull billows move,'
he knew but little.
His _Eloisa_, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the
portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most
certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it
marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be--a
love-poem it is not. Of the 'wild benefit of nature,'--
'The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'
Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff of Wordsworth in an
observation he once hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object than
a prince in his coronation robes. His taste in landscape gardening was
honoured with the approbation of Horace Walpole, and he spent 1,000
pounds upon a grotto, which incurred the ridicule of Johnson. Of that
indescribable something, that 'greatness' which causes Dryden to uplift a
lofty head from the deep pit of his corruption, neither Pope's character
nor his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a man we
must give place, and even high place, to Pope. About the poetry there
can be no question. A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and
infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his ancient homestead in
the affections and memories of his people by a rabble of critics, or even
a _posse_ of poets. As for the man, he was ever eager and interested in
life. Beneath all his faults--for which he had more excuse than a whole
congregation of the righteous need ever hope to muster for their own
shortcomings--we recognise humanity, and we forgive much to humanity,
knowing how much need there is for humanity to forgive us. Indifference,
known by its hard heart and its callous temper, is the only unpardonable
sin. Pope never committed it. He had much to put up with. We have much
to put up with--in him. He has given enormous pleasure to generations of
men, and will continue so to do. We can never give him any pleasure. The
least we can do is to smile pleasantly as we replace him upon his shelf,
and say, as we truthfully may, 'There was a great deal of human nature in
Alexander Pope.'