poems, the famous "Rape of the Lock." In its first form it appeared,
together with some minor poems and translations, in a volume of
"Miscellanies" published by Tonson's rival, Lintot. Its _motif_ was
the theft by a certain Lord Petre of one of the tresses of Miss
Arabella or "Belle" Fermor, and this venial larceny having somewhat
strained the relations of the two families concerned, Pope was invited
to compose matters by invocation of the Muse. The poem in its first
"Miscellany" form consisted of no more than two cantos; but Pope,
confident of his powers, and certainly with a better knowledge of his
own method than his critics could have possessed, boldly took
advantage of its success to expand it into five cantos by the addition
of a Rosicrucian machinery of sylphs and gnomes. This apparently
hazardous experiment was perfectly successful, and the "Rape of the
Lock" became what it remains, the typical example of raillery in
English verse--the solitary specimen of sustained and airy grace. If
it has faults, they are the faults of the time, and not of the poem,
the execution of which is a marvel of ease, good humor, and delicate
irony. Another of Pope's efforts at this date was "Windsor Forest," a
theme which, assuming that to be the best which lies nearest, should
have afforded material for another enduring success. But Pope, with a
matchless eye for manners, looked at nature with the unpurged vision
of his generation, and the poem, though not without dignity and beauty
of versification, is, to the modern reader, cold and conventional.
To the reader under Anne it was otherwise, for to him "verdant isles"
and "waving groves" and the whole farrago of gradus epithets were not
only grateful but indispensable. "Mr. Pope," wrote Swift to Stella
under date of March, 1713, "has published a fine poem called 'Windsor
Forest.' Read it." This is the only time Pope is mentioned in that
memorable journal (now nearing its closing pages) and it scarcely
points to any close relations. But, by and by, when Swift came back
from his Irish deanery to reconcile Oxford and Bolingbroke, he seems
to have made Pope's personal acquaintance, and to have begun the
correspondence which lasted so long. By Swift, Pope was introduced to
Oxford, to his later "guide, philosopher, and friend," Bolingbroke, to
the gentle and humane Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, to Prior and
Parnell, to Arbuthnot, best of men and physicians--some of whom he
mentions in the "Prologue to the Satires." Swift, he says:
"endur'd my rays;
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read;
Ev'n mitred _Rochester_ would nod the head,
And _St. John's_ self (great Dryden's friends before)
With open arms receiv'd one Poet more."
Closely connected with the group of Pope's connections at this time
was the famous literary association known as the "Scriblerus Club,"
the avowed object of which was to satirize the abuses of human
learning. The dispersal of its members at the death of Anne
interrupted this enterprise, which never extended beyond a first
book--a fragment which must, however, be held to have been unusually
pregnant in suggestion, since it contained the germs of "Gulliver's
Travels" and the "Dunciad." But Pope's life at this point grows too
complicated to be pursued in detail, and it will be impossible
henceforth to do more than note briefly its chief incidents.
Trumbull's counsel to him to translate Homer, and his first essay in
Tonson's "Miscellany," have already been mentioned. In a later volume
of "Miscellany" poems edited by Steele, he had printed some specimens
from the "Odyssey," and in the following year he embarked in the great
work of his middle life, the translation of the "Iliad." By 1715 the
first volume, containing four books, was issued to the subscribers,
whose roll, ennobled by the patronage of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and
extended by the imperious advocacy of Swift, included almost everyone
of importance. The only blot upon its brilliant success is the
unfortunate quarrel with Addison, which led to the portrait of
Atticus.
Early in 1716, not long after the death of Wycherley, Pope moved from
Binfield to Chiswick. His house, in what was then known as the "New
Buildings," but is now Mawson's Row, still exists down a turning off
the Mall, not very far from the old Church where Hogarth lies buried,
and from Chiswick House, the mansion of Lord Burlington, under whose
wing Pope describes himself as residing. Here, for a couple of years,
were delivered those letters, upon whose backs or envelopes, piously
preserved in the British Museum, the "paper-sparing" poet penned his
daily tale of Homeric translation, completing two more volumes of the
"Iliad" during his sojourn in Mawson's Row. At this time he was
twenty-eight, and may therefore be assumed to be accurately
represented in the portrait painted by Kneller in 1716, and
mezzotinted a year later by Smith. Here he appears as a slight,
delicate young man, wearing a close-fitting vest or tunic, and, in
lieu of a wig, the dressing or "night-cap" which took its place. His
keen, shaven face is already worn by work and ill-health, and
conspicuous for the large and brilliant eyes to which he refers, in
his "Epistle to Arbuthnot," as one of his noticeable features.
Besides the poems already mentioned, he had, in 1715, produced another
imitation of Chaucer, the "Temple of Fame," an effort which has never
taken high rank among his works. But while at Chiswick he published,
in addition to instalments of the "Iliad," two pieces of considerable
merit, although they are scarcely regarded by the critics of this age
with the enthusiasm they excited in Pope's earliest admirers. One is
the celebrated "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," which
perhaps owes some of its reputation to the difficulty experienced in
identifying the "ever injur'd Shade" intended. She is now understood
to have been a much-persecuted Mrs. Weston, who, although she suffered
many griefs, did not (as her poet implies) put an end to her own life
in consequence. The other, under the title of "Eloisa to Abelard,"
versifies the Latin letters of that distinguished amorist to her
lover. It is impossible to deny to both these works the utmost amount
of artful development and verbal finish. All that skill can do in the
simulation of sincerity Pope has done. "The Epistle of Eloisa," he
tells a correspondent, "grows warm, and begins to have some breathings
of the heart in it, which may make posterity think I was in love."
With all submission, this is precisely the illusion which is absent,
and it is perfectly possible for the most sympathetic reader to peruse
the balanced outpourings of "Fulbert's niece" without the slightest
tendency to that _globus hystericus_ which all persons of sensibility
must desire to experience. Yet it must nevertheless be admitted that
these poems are the best examples of a vein which is not native to
their writer, and that, in them, Pope comes nearer to genuine pathos
than in any other of his works. Next to these, the only literary event
of this portion of his career is his connection with the deplorable
"Three Hours after Marriage," a farce in which he was assisted by
Arbuthnot and Gay, the latter of whom bore the blame of the play's
failure. Pope's old enemy Dennis, was caricatured in it as Sir
Tremendous; but it had also the effect of adding another and abler foe
to the list of his opponents, the player and manager, Colley Cibber,
whose open ridicule of a part of this ill-judged _jeu d'esprit_ began
the feud which ultimately secured for him the supreme honors of the
"Dunciad."
But although Pope's militant nature never feared to make an enemy, his
friends were still in the majority. His "Homer," with its magnificent
subscription list, had opened a wider world to him; and his new
associates seem for the time to have partially seduced him from his
valetudinarian regime and ten hours daily study. In his varied and
alembicated correspondence we track him here and there, at Oxford or
at Bath, studying architecture with my Lord Burlington and gardening
with my Lord Bathurst or "beating the rounds" (probably only in
metaphor) with wilder wits such as my Lord of Warwick and Holland. One
of the prettiest of Pope's missives (some of them are not pretty) to
"Mademoiselles de Maple-Durham," as he styles the Blounts, describes a
visit he had paid to Queen Caroline's maids of honor at Hampton Court,
the Bellenden and Lepel of his minor verses. He dilates upon their
monotonous life of hunting, etiquette, and Westphalia ham, and then,
not (as Carruthers suggests) without oblique intention of lighting a
spark of jealousy in the fair Martha's bosom, records how he walked
for three or four mortal hours by moonlight with Mrs. Lepel, meeting
never a creature of quality but his Majesty King George I., giving
audience to his Vice Chamberlain "all alone under the garden wall."
Another epistolary idyl to Martha Blount, of which there are at least
four replicas, relates the sentimental death by lightning of the two
haymakers at Stanton Harcourt. Did Pope write this letter? or did Gay?
Or did they write it both together? This is a question which Pope's
editors have failed to settle. At all events, a similar composition
went to another of Pope's flames, the brilliant Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, now absent from England with her husband, who was ambassador
at Constantinople. Clever Lady Mary, however, entirely declined to be
subjugated by the pathetic fallacy, and sent back a matter-of-fact
epitaph for John Hewet and Sarah Drew, which, though it wound up with
a compliment to her correspondent, can hardly have gratified him. But
there is one letter of this time the sincerity of which is undoubted.
It is Pope's announcement to Martha Blount of his father's death. "My
poor Father dyed last night," it says. "Believe, since I don't forget
you this moment, I never shall. A. Pope." The antithetical touch shows
how art had become a second nature with the writer; but his attachment
and devotion to his parents is not one of the disputed points in his
story.
Alexander Pope the elder died in October, 1717. Not very long after,
the poet moved with his mother to a little villa, or "villakin" as
Swift called it, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, close to
the grotesque Gothic jumble known as Radnor House. At Twickenham or,
as he called it, "Twitnam," Pope continued to reside until his death,
his permanent house-mates being his old nurse, Mary Beach, to whom
there is a tablet on the outer wall of Twickenham Church, and his
mother, who survived her husband until 1733, only preceding her famous
son by eleven years. Pope tended her with exemplary care--a care
rendered daily more imperative by her increasing infirmities. Many
references to her occur in his correspondence, and the sedulous
inquiries made by his friends as to her health are earnest of her
son's unwearied solicitude. One or two of the old lady's simple,
homely letters to him have been preserved, with their fond messages
and faulty spelling. Now and then, it is recorded, he would gratify
her by setting her to transcribe his "Homer," an assistance of which
the advantages must have been debatable.
Many friends came and went at the pleasant little villa by the Thames,
"flanked by its two Courts" of Hampton and Kew, and often, no doubt,
the London stage, starting from the Chequers in Piccadilly, brought to
it guests bearing names familiar in the annals of the time. There are
three of his intimates who cannot be neglected in any record, however
brief. When Lady Mary came back to England she took up her residence
at Twickenham, and the hitherto epistolary adoration of the poet
became a practical fact. According to a story popularized by the
pencil of Frith, Pope at length so far forgot himself as to make a
declaration in form, to which she returned no reply but that most
exasperating of all replies, ungovernable laughter. Whether this
tradition be true or not, it is plain that she seems always to have
remembered their difference of rank, and to have been rather cold
than encouraging. The issue of the acquaintance is a sorry one. Pope
revenged himself for her scorn in his worst and most unmanly fashion
of innuendo; she, on her side, retorted with lampoons and satire as
cruel. One feels glad that she finally left England and that further
bickering was impossible. The other two persons were the already
mentioned Blounts, each of whom seems at first to have by turn
"--blossomed in the light
Of tender personal regards;"
Teresa, the elder and handsomer, becoming by degrees the acknowledged
favorite. But whether, like the lover in Prior's song, Pope "convey'd
his treasure in a borrowed name," or merely changed his mind, it is
certain that, at a later period, the younger, Martha, had proved the
"real flame," to the permanent displacement of her sister. As time
went on, Pope's attachment for Martha Blount continued to increase
until she became almost an inmate of his house. For more than fifteen
years, he told Gay in 1730, he had spent three or four hours a day in
her company; and he seems to have loved her with an affection as
genuine and as watchful as that which he showed to his parents. Like
all his connections, this, too, was marred by strange pettinesses and
curious contradictions; but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly
sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and
tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may
be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in
the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty
Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as that of Esther Johnson.
To return to Pope's works. In the first years of his Twickenham
residence the "Iliad" was finished triumphantly, and Pope was invited
by the booksellers to edit Shakespeare. The task was one for which he
had few qualifications, and his execution of it at once laid him open
to a new attack from a fresh opponent, Lewis Theobald, afterward the
Tibbald of the "Dunciad" and the "Satires." Then he followed up the
"Iliad" by the "Odyssey," in which he was assisted by Fenton and
Broome. Toward 1725 Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and in the
succeeding year Swift paid a long visit to Pope at Twickenham. These
two influences may be traced in most of Pope's remaining works. In
1726, "Gulliver's Travels" saw the light, and in 1727 were issued
those joint volumes of "Miscellanies" which contained the "Treatise on
the Bathos," a prose satire, to be supplanted in brief space by the
terrible "Dunciad." In this last, Pope entered upon a campaign against
the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a
determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of
the most gifted of his critics, the late Rector of Lincoln College,
speaks of the "Dunciad" roundly as "an amalgam of dirt, ribaldry, and
petty spite," and M. Taine brought against it the more fatal charge of
tediousness. But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that
onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as Ralph
and Oldmixon, it is impossible not to admire the surpassing skill of
the measure; and it is probable that, in spite of the "higher
criticism," the "Dunciad," swarming as it does with contemporary
allusions, will continue to hold its own with the antiquary and the
literary historian, though it has ceased to be regarded as one of the
desirable masterpieces of its class.
If Swift, who encouraged Pope in his war against Dulness, must be held
to be indirectly responsible for the attack upon its strongholds, it
was Bolingbroke who suggested the once popular epistles which Pope
dedicated to him under the title of the "Essay on Man," a work which
has this in common with the earlier "Essay on Criticism," that it is a
versification of a given theme. But Pope understood the precepts of
Rapin and Bossu better than the precepts of Leibnitz and St. John, and
the "Essay on Man," bristling as it does with axiomatic felicities and
"jewels five words long," has long been discredited as a philosophical
treatise. It is to another hint from the sage of Dawley that we owe
its author's most individual work. A chance remark of Bolingbroke set
him upon the imitations of Horace that grew into the "Satires and
Epistles." In these and the cognate "Moral Essays," which belong to
his ripest period of production, Pope's unmatched mastery over
heroics, perfected by the long probation of his Homeric translations,
and his equally unrivalled powers of satire, let loose and emboldened
by the brutalities of the "Dunciad," found their fitting field. Aimed
at the old eternal vices and frailties of humanity, they assail them
with a pungency, a force, a wit, and a directness which, in English
verse, have no parallel. Indeed it may be doubted whether the
portraits of Bufo and Sporus, of Atossa and Atticus, have been
excelled in any language whatsoever.
The first of the Dialogues known as the "Epilogue to the Satires" was
published in 1738, on the same morning as Johnson's "London," thus (in
Boswell's view) providing England simultaneously with its Horace and
its Juvenal. The second part followed in the same year. Besides these
there is little which is material to be added to the record of Pope's
work but the revised "Dunciad," in which, to gratify an increased
antipathy, he displaced its old hero, Theobald, in favor of Colley
Cibber, who, whatever his faults, was certainly not a typical dunce.
Toward the close of his life those infirmities at which Wycherley had
hinted in his youth grew upon him, and he became almost entirely
dependent upon nurses. He had not, to use De Quincey's words, drawn
that supreme prize in life, "a fine intellect with a healthy stomach,"
and his whole story testifies to that fact. As years went on his
little figure, in its rusty black, was seen more rarely in the
Twickenham lanes, and if he took the air upon the Thames, it was in a
sedan-chair that was lifted into a boat. When he visited his friends
his sleeplessness and his multiplied needs tired out the servants;
while in the day-time he would nod in company, even though the Prince
of Wales was talking of poetry. He was a martyr to sick headaches, and
in the intervals of relief from them would be tormented by all sorts
of morbid cravings for the very dietary which must inevitably secure
their recurrence. This continued battle of the brain with the ignobler
organs goes far to explain, if it may not excuse, much of the less
admirable side of his character. His irritability, his artifice, his
meannesses even, are more intelligible in the case of a man habitually
racked with pain, and morbidly conscious of his physical shortcomings,
than they would be in the case of those "whom God has made full-limbed
and tall;" and, in the noble teaching of Arthur's court, his
infirmities should entitle him to a larger charity of judgment.
Nothing in his life is more touching than the account of his last
days, when he lay wasted with an intolerable asthma, waiting serenely
for the end, but full of kindness and tender thoughtfulness for the
friends who came and went about his bed. Bolingbroke was often there
from Battersea, stirred to philosophic utterances and unphilosophic
tears, and grave Lyttleton, and kind Lord Marchmont, and faithful
Joseph Spence. Martha Blount, too, was not absent, and "it was very
observable," said the spectators, how the sick man's strength and
spirits seemed to revive at the approach of his favorite. "Here I am
dying of a hundred good symptoms," he said to one of his visitors.
What humiliated him most was his inability to think. "One of the
things that I have always most wondered at (he told Spence) is that
there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had
enough to mortify it a few days ago, for I lost my mind for a whole
day." A little later Spence is telling Bolingbroke how, "on every
catching and recovering of his mind," Pope is "always saying something
kind either of his present or absent friends," and that it seems "as
if his humanity had outlived his understanding." But the vital spark
still continued to flicker in its socket, and only a day or two before
his death he sat for three whole hours in his sedan-chair, in the
garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and
smelling of the summer he was not to see. On the 29th he took an
airing in Bushy Park, and a little later received the sacrament. On
the evening of the following day he passed away so softly and
painlessly that those who stood by knew not "the exact time of his
departure." He had lived fifty-six years and nine days, and he was
buried near to the monument of his father in the chancel of Twickenham
Church. Seventeen years afterward Bishop Warburton erected a tablet to
him in the same building, with an epitaph as idle as that which
disgraces the tomb of Gay in Westminster Abbey. It is possible that
Pope may at some time have written it, but the terms of his will prove
conclusively that he never intended it to be used.
What is Pope's position as a poet? Time, that great practitioner of
the exhaustive process, "sifting alway, sifting ever," even to the
point of annihilation, has already half answered the question. No one
now, except the literary historian or the student of versification, is
ever likely to consult the "Pastorals" or "Windsor Forest;" and men
will, in all probability, continue to quote "Hope springs eternal in
the human breast" and "A little learning is a dangerous thing,"
without the least suspicion that the one comes from the seldom-read
"Essay on Criticism" and the other from the equally seldom-read "Essay
on Man." Here and there a professor like the late Professor Conington
will praise the "unhasting unresting flow" of the translations from
Homer; but the next generation will read its "Iliad" in the Greek, or
in some future successor to Mr. William Morris or Mr. Way. Few now
re-echo the praises which the critics of fifty years ago gave to the
"Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloisa to Abelard;" nor do any but
the habitual pilgrims of the by-ways of literature devote their
serious attention to the different versions of the "Dunciad." But
there is no reason why the "Rape of the Lock" should not find as many
admirers a hundred years hence as it does to-day, or why--so long as
men remember the poems of the friend of Maecenas--the "Satires and
Epistles" should fail of an audience. In these Pope's verse is as
perfect as it is anywhere; and his subject is borrowed, not from his
commonplace book, but from his own experiences. He wants, it is true,
the careless ease, the variety, the unemphatic grace of the Roman
writer. But he has many of the qualities of his master; and it is
probable that only when men weary of hearing how Horace strolled down
the Sacred Way and met an intolerable Bore--only then, or perhaps a
little earlier, will they cease to hearken how Alexander Pope bade
John Searle bar the door at Twickenham against the combined inroad of
Bedlam and Parnassus.
[Signature of the author.]
VOLTAIRE[4]
[Footnote 4: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By M. C. LOCKWOOD, D.D.
(1694-1778)
[Illustration: Voltaire.]
In order to justly estimate the life, character, and genius of a man
it is necessary to possess some knowledge of the environments and
heredity which generated him. Any study of Voltaire which ignores
these influences will fail not only in doing him justice, but in
comprehending his unique and exceptional place in history. The most
careful examination of these, together with the voluminous
bibliography relating to Voltaire provided by French, German, and
English literature, still will leave him something of an enigma.
The stage properties and scenery were prepared for the great Frenchman
long before he appeared, as is always the case with the famous actors
in the drama of history. The time in which he was born was that of
Louis XIV., king by divine right, whose history is that of one who was
more the tinsel-robed actor, strutting in the semblance of royalty,
and less the king than many
"A poor player
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more."
Louis XIV. wore all the outward guise of regal office, in his bearing,
politeness, address, magnificence, and high-heeled dignity, but he was
sensual, ferocious, ignorant, profligate, and superstitious. His
greatness was fictitious, his splendor superficial, and his character
false. The king was the state, but his mistresses governed. A court
thus constituted led the fashions and formed the manners of the
people. It stamped the age with that type of character which belongs
to the adventurer and devotee. The splendors of the court were
maintained at the expense of the people. The glory of Versailles rose
above the darkness of the nation. The voluptuous and luxurious
pleasures of the nobility were the measure of the poverty and
suffering of the people. The aristocracy enjoyed life as if it were a
prolonged comedy, while the nation was moving toward the enactment of
its greatest tragedy.