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THE AGE OF POPE
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THE
AGE OF POPE
(1700-1744)
BY
JOHN DENNIS
AUTHOR OF "STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE" ETC.
_ELEVENTH EDITION_
[Illustration]
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1921
First Published, 1894.
Reprinted, 1896, 1899, 1901, 1906, 1908, 1909,
1913, 1917, 1918, 1921.
PREFACE.
The _Age of Pope_ is designed to form one of a series of Handbooks,
edited by Professor Hales, which it is hoped will be of service to
students who love literature for its own sake, instead of regarding it
merely as a branch of knowledge required by examiners. The period
covered by this volume, which has had the great advantage of Professor
Hales's personal care and revision, may be described roughly as lying
between 1700, the year in which Dryden died, and 1744, the date of
Pope's death.
I believe that no work of the class will be of real value which gives
what may be called literary statistics, and has nothing more to offer.
Historical facts and figures have their uses, and are, indeed,
indispensable; but it is possible to gain the most accurate knowledge of
a literary period and to be totally unimpressed by the influences which
a love of literature inspires. The first object of a guide is to give
accurate information; his second and larger object is to direct the
reader's steps through a country exhaustless in variety and interest. If
once a passion be awakened for the study of our noble literature the
student will learn to reject what is meretricious, and will turn
instinctively to what is worthiest. In the pursuit he may leave his
guide far behind him; but none the less will he be grateful to the
pioneer who started him on his travels.
If the _Age of Pope_ proves of help in this way the wishes of the writer
will be satisfied. It has been my endeavour in all cases to acknowledge
the debt I owe to the authors who have made this period their study; but
it is possible that a familiar acquaintance with their writings may have
led me occasionally to mistake the matter thus assimilated for original
criticism. If, therefore--to quote the phrase of Pope's enemy and my
namesake--I have sometimes borrowed another man's 'thunder,' the fault
of having 'made a sinner of my memory' may prove the reader's gain, and
will, I hope, be forgiven.
J. D.
HAMPSTEAD,
_August, 1894_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I. THE POETS.
CHAP.
I. ALEXANDER POPE 27
II. MATTHEW PRIOR--JOHN GAY--EDWARD YOUNG--ROBERT BLAIR--JAMES
THOMSON 65
III. SIR SAMUEL GARTH--AMBROSE PHILIPS--JOHN PHILIPS--NICHOLAS
ROWE--AARON HILL--THOMAS PARNELL--THOMAS TICKELL--WILLIAM
SOMERVILLE--JOHN DYER--WILLIAM SHENSTONE--MARK AKENSIDE--DAVID
MALLET--SCOTTISH SONG-WRITERS 96
PART II. THE PROSE WRITERS.
IV. JOSEPH ADDISON--SIR RICHARD STEELE 125
V. JONATHAN SWIFT--JOHN ARBUTHNOT 151
VI. DANIEL DEFOE--JOHN DENNIS--COLLEY CIBBER--LADY MARY WORTLEY
MONTAGU--EARL OF CHESTERFIELD--LORD LYTTELTON--JOSEPH SPENCE 180
VII. FRANCIS ATTERBURY--LORD SHAFTESBURY--BERNARD DE
MANDEVILLE--LORD BOLINGBROKE--GEORGE BERKELEY--WILLIAM
LAW--JOSEPH BUTLER--WILLIAM WARBURTON 207
INDEX OF MINOR POETS AND PROSE WRITERS 242
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 249
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS 253
INDEX 255
THE AGE OF POPE.
INTRODUCTION.
I.
The death of John Dryden, on the first of May, 1700, closed a period of
no small significance in the history of English literature. His faults
were many, both as a man and as a poet, but he belongs to the race of
the giants, and the impress of greatness is stamped upon his works. No
student of Dryden can fail to mark the force and sweep of an intellect
impatient of restraint. His 'long-resounding march' reminds us of a
turbulent river that overflows its banks, and if order and perfection of
art are sometimes wanting in his verse, there is never the lack of
power. Unfortunately many of the best years of his life were devoted to
a craft in which he was working against the grain. His dramas, with one
or two noble exceptions, are comparative failures, and in them he too
often
'Profaned the God-given strength, and marred the lofty line.'
In two prominent respects his influence on his successors is of no
slight significance. As a satirist Pope acknowledged the master he was
unable to excel, and so did many of the eighteenth century versemen, who
appear to have looked upon satire as the beginning and the end of
poetry. Moreover Dryden may be regarded, without much exaggeration, as
the father of modern prose. Nothing can be more lucid than his style,
which is at once bright and strong, idiomatic and direct. He knows
precisely what he has to say, and says it in the simplest words. It is
the form and not the substance of Dryden's prose to which attention is
drawn here. There is a splendour of imagery, a largeness of thought, and
a grasp of language in the prose of Hooker, of Jeremy Taylor, and of
Milton which is beyond the reach of Dryden, but he has the merit of
using a simple form of English free from prolonged periods and classical
constructions, and fitted therefore for common use. The wealthy baggage
of the prose Elizabethans and their immediate successors was too
cumbersome for ordinary travel; Dryden's riches are less massive, but
they can be easily carried, and are always ready for service.
In these respects he is the literary herald of a century which, in the
earlier half at least, is remarkable in the use it makes of our mother
tongue for the exercise of common sense. The Revolution of 1688 produced
a change in English politics scarcely more remarkable than the change
that took place a little later in English literature and is to be seen
in the poets and wits who are known familiarly as the Queen Anne men. It
will be obvious to the most superficial student that the gulf which
separates the literary period, closing with the death of Milton in 1674,
from the first half of the eighteenth century, is infinitely wider than
that which divides us from the splendid band of poets and prose writers
who made the first twenty years of the present century so famous. There
is, for example, scarcely more than fifty years between the publication
of Herrick's _Hesperides_ and of Addison's _Campaign_, between the _Holy
Living_ of Taylor and the _Tatler_ of Steele, and less than fifty years
between _Samson Agonistes_, which Bishop Atterbury asked Pope to polish,
and the poems of Prior. Yet in that short space not only is the form of
verse changed but also the spirit.
Speaking broadly, and allowing for exceptions, the literary merits of
the Queen Anne time are due to invention, fancy, and wit, to a genius
for satire exhibited in verse and prose, to a regard for correctness of
form and to the sensitive avoidance of extremes. The poets of the period
are for the most part without enthusiasm, without passion, and without
the 'fine madness' which, as Drayton says, should possess a poet's
brain. Wit takes precedence of imagination, nature is concealed by
artifice, and the delight afforded by these writers is not due to
imaginative sensibility. Not even in the consummate genius of Pope is
there aught of the magical charm which fascinates us in a Wordsworth and
a Keats, in a Coleridge and a Shelley. The prose of the age, masterly
though it be, stands also on a comparatively low level. There is much in
it to attract, but little to inspire.
The difference between the Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, and the
authors of the Queen Anne period cannot be accounted for by any single
cause. The student will observe that while the inspiration is less, the
technical skill is greater. There are passages in Addison which no
seventeenth century author could have written; there are couplets in
Pope beyond the reach of Cowley, and that even Dryden could not rival.
In these respects the eighteenth century was indebted to the growing
influence of French literature, to which the taste of Charles II. had in
some degree contributed. One notable expression of this taste may be
seen in the tragedies in rhyme that were for a time in vogue, of which
the plots were borrowed from French romances. These colossal fictions,
stupendous in length and heroic in style, delighted the young English
ladies of the seventeenth century, and were not out of favour in the
eighteenth, for Pope gave a copy of the _Grand Cyrus_ to Martha Blount.
The return, as in Addison's _Cato_, to the classical unities, so
faithfully preserved in the French drama, was another indication of an
influence from which our literature has never been wholly free. That
importations so alien to the spirit of English poetry should tend to the
degeneration of the national drama was inevitable. For a time, however,
the study of French models, both in the drama and in other departments
of literature, may have been productive of benefit. Frenchmen knew
before we did, how to say what they wanted to say in a lucid style.
Dryden, who was open to every kind of influence, bad as well as good,
caught a little of their fine tact and consummate workmanship without
lessening his own originality; so also did Pope, who, if he was
considerably indebted to Boileau, infinitely excelled him. That, in M.
Taine's judgment, would have been no great difficulty. 'In Boileau,' he
writes, 'there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man
of wit (M. Guillaume Guizot); most of which seem to be those of a sharp
school-boy in the third class; the rest those of a good school-boy in
the upper division.' And Mr. Swinburne, who holds a similar opinion of
the famous French critic's merit, observes, that while Pope is the
finest, Boileau is 'the dullest craftsman of their age and school.'[1]
With the author of the _Lutrin_ Addison, unlike Pope, was personally
acquainted. Boileau praised his Latin verses, and although his range was
limited, like that of all critics lacking imagination, Addison, then a
comparatively youthful scholar, was no doubt flattered by his
compliments and learnt some lessons in his school. Prior, who acquired a
mastery of the language, was also sensitive to French influence, and
shows how it affected him by irony and satire. It would be difficult to
estimate with any measure of accuracy the effect of French literature on
the Queen Anne authors. There is no question that they were considerably
attracted by it, but its sway was, I think, never strong enough to
produce mere imitative art. While the most illustrious of these men
acknowledged some measure of fealty to our 'sweet enemy France,' they
were not enslaved by her, and French literature was but one of several
influences which affected the literary character of the age. If
Englishmen owed a debt to France the obligation was reciprocal. Voltaire
affords a prominent illustration of the power wielded by our literature.
He imitated Addison, he imitated, or caught suggestions from Swift, he
borrowed largely from Vanbrugh, and although, in his judgment of English
authors, he made many critical blunders, they were due to a want of
taste rather than to a want of knowledge.
A striking contrast will be seen between the position of literary men in
the reign of Queen Anne and under her Hanoverian successors. Literature
was not thriving in the healthiest of ways in the earlier period, but
from the commercial point of view it was singularly prosperous. Through
its means men like Addison and Prior rose to some of the highest offices
in the service of their country. Tickell became Under-Secretary of
State. Steele held three or four official posts, and if he did not
prosper like some men of less mark, had no one but himself to blame.
Rowe, the author of the _Fair Penitent_, was for three years of Anne's
reign Under-Secretary, and John Hughes, the friend of Addison, who is
poet enough to have had his story told by Johnson, had 'a situation of
great profit' as Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Prizes of
greater or less value fell to some men whose abilities were not more
than respectable, but under Walpole and the monarch whom he served
literature was disregarded, and the Minister was content to make use of
hireling writers for whatever dirty work he required; spending in this
way, it is said, £50,000 in ten years.
It was far better in the long run for men of letters to be free from the
servility of patronage, but there was a wearisome time, as Johnson and
Goldsmith knew to their cost, during which authors lost their freedom in
another way, and became the slaves of the booksellers. It is pleasant to
observe that the last noteworthy act of patronage in the century was one
that did honour to the patron without lessening the dignity and
independence of the recipient. Literature owes much to the noblest of
political philosophers for discovering and fostering the genius of one
of the most original of English poets, and every reader of Crabbe will
do honour to the generous friendship of Edmund Burke.
II.
The lowest stage in our national history was reached in the Restoration
period. The idealists, who had aimed at marks it was not given to man to
reach, were superseded by men with no ideal, whether in politics or
religion. The extreme rigidity in morals enjoined by State authority in
Cromwell's days, when theological pedantry discovered sin in what had
hitherto been regarded as innocent, led, among the unsaintly mass of
the people, to a hypocrisy even more corrupting than open vice, and the
advent of the most publicly dissolute of English kings opened the
floodgates of iniquity. The unbridled vice of the time is displayed in
the Restoration dramatists, in the Grammont memoirs, in the diary of
Pepys, and also in that of the admirable John Evelyn, 'faithful among
the faithless.' Charles II. was considered good-natured because his
manners, unlike those of his father, were sociable, and unrestrained by
Court etiquette. Londoners liked a monarch who fed ducks in St. James's
Park before breakfast; but an easy temper did not prevent the king from
sanctioning the most unjust and cruel laws, and it allowed him to sell
Dunkirk and basely to accept a pension from France. The corruption of
the age pervaded politics as well as society, and the self-sacrificing
spirit which is the salt of a nation's life seemed for the time extinct
among public men.
When Dutch men-of-war appeared at the Nore the confusion was great, but
there were few resources and few signs of energy in the men to whom the
people looked for guidance. A man conversant with affairs expressed to
Pepys his opinion that nothing could be done with 'a lazy Prince, no
Council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad,' and Pepys also
gives the damning statement which is in harmony with all we know of the
king, that he 'took ten times more care and pains in making friends
between my Lady Castlemaine and Mrs. Stewart, when they have fallen out,
than ever he did to save his kingdom.'
There was nothing in the brief reign of James, a reign for ever made
infamous by the atrocious cruelty of Jeffreys, that calls for comment
here, but the Revolution, despite the undoubted advantages it brought
with it, among which must be mentioned the abolition of the censorship
of the press, brought also an element of discord and of political
degradation. The change was a good one for the country, but it caused a
large number of influential men to renounce on oath opinions which they
secretly held, and it led, as every reader of history knows, to an
unparalleled amount of double-dealing on the part of statesmen, which
began with the accession of William and Mary and did not end until the
last hopes of the Jacobites were defeated in 1746. The loss of principle
among statesmen, and the bitterness of faction, which seemed to increase
in proportion as the patriotic spirit declined, had a baleful influence
on the latter days of the seventeenth century and on the entire period
covered by the age of Pope. The low tone of the age is to be seen in the
almost universal corruption which prevailed, in the scandalous
tergiversation of Bolingbroke, and in the contempt for political
principle openly avowed by Walpole, who, as Mr. Lecky observes, 'was
altogether incapable of appreciating as an element of political
calculation the force which moral sentiments exercise upon mankind.'[2]
The enthusiasm and strong passions of the first half of the seventeenth
century, which had been crushed by the Restoration, were exchanged for a
state of apathy that led to self-seeking in politics and to scepticism
in religion. There was a strong profession of morality in words, but in
conduct the most open immorality prevailed. Virtue was commended in the
bulk of the churches, while Christianity, which gives a new life and aim
to virtue, was practically ignored, and the principles of the Deists,
whose opinions occupied much attention at the time, were scarcely more
alien to the Christian revelation than the views often advocated in the
national pulpits. The religion of Christ seems to have been regarded as
little more than a useful kind of cement which held society together.
The good sense advocated so constantly by Pope in poetry was also
considered the principal requisite in the pulpit, and the careful
avoidance of religious emotion in the earlier years of the century led
to the fervid and too often ill-regulated enthusiasm that prevailed in
the days of Whitefield and Wesley. At the same time there appears to
have been no lack of religious controversy. 'The Church in danger' was a
strong cry then, as it is still. The enormous excitement caused in 1709
by Sacheverell's sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral advocating passive
obedience, denouncing toleration, and aspersing the Revolution
settlement, forms a striking chapter in the reign of Queen Anne.
Extraordinary interest was also felt in the Bangorian controversy raised
by Bishop Hoadly, who, in a sermon preached before the king (1717), took
a latitudinarian view of episcopal authority, and objected to the entire
system of the High Church party.
Queen Caroline, whose keen intellect was allied to a coarseness which
makes her a representative of the age, was considerably attracted by
theological discussion. She obtained a bishopric for Berkeley,
recommended Walpole to read Butler's _Analogy_, which was at one time
her daily companion at the breakfast-table, and made the preferment of
its author one of her last requests to the king. She liked well to
reason with Dr. Samuel Clarke, 'of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and
Fate,' and wished to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, but was told
that he was not sufficiently orthodox. Theology was not disregarded
under the first and second Georges; it was only religion that had fallen
into disrepute. The law itself was calculated to excite contempt for the
most solemn of religious services. 'I was early,' Swift writes to
Stella, 'with the Secretary (Bolingbroke), but he was gone to his
devotions and to receive the sacrament. Several rakes did the same. It
was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.'
A glance at some additional features in the social condition of the age
will enable us to understand better the character of its literature.
III.
It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men
by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of
genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of
art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose
writer, his 'soul is like a star and dwells apart;' but in general,
imaginative writers, are intensely affected by the society from which
they draw many of their intellectual resources. In the so-called
'Augustan age'[3] this influence would have been felt more strongly than
in ours, since the range of men of letters was generally restricted to
what was called the Town. They wrote for the critics in the
coffee-houses, for the noblemen from whom they expected patronage, and
for the political party they were pledged to support.
England during the first half of the eighteenth century was in many
respects uncivilized. London was at that time separated from the country
by roads that were often impassable and always dangerous. Travellers had
to protect themselves as they best could from the attacks of highwaymen,
who infested every thoroughfare leading from the metropolis, while the
narrow area of the city was guarded by watchmen scarcely better fitted
for its protection than Dogberry and Verges. Readers of the _Spectator_
will remember how when Sir Roger de Coverley went to the play, his
servants 'provided themselves with good oaken plants' to protect their
master from the Mohocks, a set of dissolute young men, who, for sheer
amusement, inflicted the most terrible punishments on their victims.
Swift tells Stella how he came home early from his walk in the Park to
avoid 'a race of rakes that play the devil about this town every night,
and slit people's noses,' and he adds, as if party were at the root of
every mischief in the country, that they were all Whigs. 'Who has not
trembled at the Mohock's name?' is Gay's exclamation in his _Trivia_;
and in that curious poem he also warns the citizens not to venture
across Lincoln's Inn Fields in the evening. Colley Cibber's brazen-faced
daughter, Mrs. Charke, in the _Narrative_ of her life, describes also
with sufficient precision the dangers of London after dark.
The infliction of personal injury was not confined to the desperadoes of
the streets. Men of letters were in danger of chastisement from the
poets or politicians whom they criticised or vilified. De Foe often
mentions attempts upon his person. Pope, too, was threatened with a rod
by Ambrose Philips, which was hung up for his chastisement in Button's
Coffee-house; and at a later period, when his satires had stirred up a
nest of hornets, the poet was in the habit of carrying pistols, and
taking a large dog for his companion when walking out at Twickenham.
Weddings within the liberties of the Fleet by sham clergymen, or
clergymen confined for debt, were the source of numberless evils. Every
kind of deception was practised, and the victims once in the clutches of
their reverend captors had to pay heavily for the illegal ceremony.
Ladies were trepanned into matrimony, and Smollett in his _History_
observes, that the Fleet parsons encouraged every kind of villainy. It
is astonishing that so great an evil in the heart of London should have
been allowed to exist so long, and it was not until the Marriage Act of
Lord Hardwicke in 1753, which required the publication of banns, that
the Fleet marriages ceased. On the day before the Act came into
operation three hundred marriages are said to have taken place.[4]
Marriages of a more lawful kind were generally conducted on business
principles. Young women were expected to accept the husband selected for
them by their parents or guardians, and the main object considered was
to gain a good settlement. It was for this that Mary Granville, who is
better known as Mrs. Delany, was sacrificed at seventeen to a gouty old
man of sixty, and when he died she was expected to marry again with the
same object in view. Mrs. Delany detested, with good cause, the
commercial estimate of matrimony. Writing, in 1739, to Lady
Throckmorton, she says, 'Miss Campbell is to be married to-morrow to my
Lord Bruce. Her father can give her no fortune; she is very pretty,
modest, well-behaved, and just eighteen, has two thousand a year
jointure, and four hundred pin-money; _they say_ he is cross, covetous,
and threescore years old, and this unsuitable match is the _admiration
of the old and the envy of the young_! For my part I _pity her_, for if
she has any notion of social pleasures that arise from true esteem and
sensible conversation, how miserable must she be.'[5]
Girls dowered with beauty or with fortune were not always suffered to
marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary
peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she
received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle's house, carried
off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal manner. And in
1711 the Duke of Newcastle, having become acquainted with a design for
carrying off his daughter by force, was compelled to ask for a guard of
dragoons.
Duelling, against which Steele, De Foe, and Fielding inveighed with
courage and good sense, was a danger to which every gentleman was liable
who wore a sword. Bullies were ready to provoke a quarrel, the slightest
cause of offence was magnified into an affair of honour, and the lives
of several of the most distinguished men of the century were imperilled
in this way. 'A gentleman,' Lord Chesterfield writes, 'is every man who,
with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side, and a watch and
snuffbox in his pockets, asserts himself to be a gentleman, swears with
energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat
of any man who presumes to say the contrary.'
The foolish and evil custom died out slowly in this kingdom. Even a
great moralist like Dr. Johnson had something to say in its defence, and
Sir Walter Scott, who might well have laughed to scorn any imputation of
cowardice, was prepared to accept a challenge in his old age for a
statement he had made in his _Life of Napoleon_.
Ladies had a different but equally doubtful mode of asserting their
gentility. On one occasion the Duchess of Marlborough called on a lawyer
without leaving her name. 'I could not make out who she was,' said the
clerk afterwards, 'but she swore so dreadfully that she must be a lady
of quality.'
There was a fashion which our wits followed at this time that was not
of English growth, namely, the tone of gallantry in which they addressed
ladies, no matter whether single or married. Their compliments seemed
like downright love-making, and that frequently of a coarse kind, but
such expressions meant nothing, and were understood to be a mere
exercise of skill. Pope used them in writing to Judith Cowper, whom he
professes to worship as much as any female saint in heaven; and in much
ampler measure when addressing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but neither
lady would have taken this amatory politeness seriously. Thus he writes
after an evening spent in Lady Mary's society: 'Books have lost their
effect upon me; and I was convinced since I saw you, that there is
something more powerful than philosophy, and since I heard you, that
there is one alive wiser than all the sages.' He tells her that he hates
all other women for her sake; that none but her guardian angels can have
her more constantly in mind; and that the sun has more reason to be
proud of raising her spirits 'than of raising all the plants and
ripening all the minerals in the earth.' He will fly to her in Italy at
the least notice and 'from thence,' he adds, 'how far you might draw me
and I might run after you, I no more know than the spouse in the song of
Solomon.'
This was the foible of an age in which women were addressed as though
they were totally devoid of understanding; and Pope, as might have been
expected, carried the folly to excess.
Against another French custom Addison protests in the _Spectator_,
namely, that of women of rank receiving gentlemen visitors in their
bedrooms. He objects also to other foreign habits introduced by
'travelled ladies,' and fears that the peace, however much to be
desired, may cause the importation of a number of French fopperies. But
the proneness to follow the lead of France in matters of fashion is a
folly not confined to the belles and beaux of the last century.
If a chivalric regard for women be an indication of high civilization,
that sign is but faintly visible in the reigns of Anne and of the first
Georges. Sir Richard Steele paid a noble tribute to Lady Elizabeth
Hastings when he said that to know her was a liberal education, but his
contemporaries usually treat women as pretty triflers, better fitted to
amuse men than to elevate them. Young takes this view in his _Satires_:
'Ladies supreme among amusements reign;
By nature born to soothe and entertain.
Their prudence in a share of folly lies;
Why will they be so weak as to be wise?'
and Chesterfield, writing to his son, treats women with similar
contempt.... 'A man of sense,' he says, 'only trifles with them, plays
with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly,
forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with,
serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both,
which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.... No flattery
is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the
highest and gratefully accept of the lowest.'
Nearly twenty years passed, and then Chesterfield wrote in the same
contemptuous way of women in a letter to his godson, a 'dear little boy'
of ten.
'In company every woman is every man's superior, and must be addressed
with respect, nay, more, with flattery, and you need not fear making it
too strong ... it will be greedily swallowed.'
Even Addison, while trying to instruct the 'Fair Sex' as he likes to
call them, apparently regarded its members as an inferior order of
beings. He delights to dwell upon their foibles, on their dress, and on
the thousand little artifices practised by the flirt and the coquette.
Here is the view the Queen Anne moralist takes of the 'female world' he
was so eager to improve:
'I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains in finding out
proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements
seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are
reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the
species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right
adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The
sorting of a suit of ribands is considered a very good morning's work;
and if they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy-shop, so great a
fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more
serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest
drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This I say is the
state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those
that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all
the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind
of awe and respect as well as of love into their male beholders.'
The qualification made at the end of this description does not greatly
lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison's
picture, as he is careful to tell us of 'ordinary women.' Much must be
allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women
is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for
this weakness in the 'feminine world' half his vocation as a moralist in
the _Spectator_ would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays
of the women with whom he was acquainted be to any extent a correct one,
the derogatory language used by men of letters, and especially by
Swift, Prior, Pope, and Chesterfield may be almost forgiven.
It was the aim of Addison and Steele to represent, and in some degree to
caricature, the follies of fashionable life in the Town. That life had
also its vices, which, if less unblushingly displayed than under the
'merry Monarch,' were visible enough. 'In the eighteenth century,' says
Victor Hugo, in his epigrammatic way, 'the wife bolts out her husband.
She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.'
Drunkenness was a habit familiar to the fine gentlemen of the town and
to men occupying the highest position in the State. Harley went more
than once into the queen's presence in a half-intoxicated condition;
Carteret when Secretary of State, if Horace Walpole may be credited, was
never sober; Bolingbroke, who practised every vice, is said to have been
a 'four-bottle man;' and Swift found it perilous to dine with Ministers
on account of the wine which circulated at their tables. 'Prince
Eugene,' he writes, 'dines with the Secretary to-day with about seven or
eight general officers or foreign Ministers. They will be all drunk I am
sure.' Pope's frail body could not tolerate excess, and he is said to
have hastened his end by good living. His friend Fenton 'died of a great
chair and two bottles of port a day.' Parnell, who seems to have been in
many respects a man of high character, is said to have shortened his
life by intemperance; and Gay, who was cossetted like a favourite lapdog
by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, died from indolence and good
living.
It may be questioned whether there is a single Wit of the age who did
not love port too well, like Addison and Fenton, or suffer from
'carnivoracity' like Arbuthnot. Every section of English society was
infected with the 'devil drunkenness,' and the passion for gin created
by the encouragement of home distilleries produced a state of crime,
misery, and disease in London and in the country which excited public
attention. 'Small as is the place,' writes Mr. Lecky, 'which this fact
occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the
consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the
eighteenth century--incomparably more so than any event in the purely
political or military annals of the country.'[6]
The cruelty of the age is seen in a contempt for the feelings of others,
in the brutal punishments inflicted, in the amusements then popular, and
in a general contempt for human suffering. Public executions were so
frequent that they were disregarded; and criminals of any note, like Dr.
Dodd, were exhibited in their cells for the gaolers' benefit prior to
execution; mad people in Bedlam, chained in their cells, also formed one
of the sights of London. As late as 1735 men were pressed to death who
refused to plead on a capital charge; and women were publicly flogged,
and were also burnt at the stake by a law that was not repealed until
1794. Of the heads on Temple Bar, daily exposed to Johnson's eyes in his
beloved Fleet Street, we are reminded by an apposite quotation of
Goldsmith; and Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, who died as recently as
1855, remembered having seen one there in his childhood. The public
exhibition of offenders in the pillory was not calculated to refine the
manners of the people. It afforded a cruel entertainment to the mob, who
may be said to have baited these poor victims as they were accustomed to
bait bulls and bears. Every kind of offensive missile was thrown at
them, and sometimes the strokes proved deadly.
Men who could thus torture a human being were not likely to abstain
from cruelty to the lower animals. The poets indeed protested then, as
poets had done before, and always have done since, against the unmanly
treatment of the dumb fellow-creatures committed to our care, but their
voices were little heeded, and even the Prince of Wales visited
Hockley-in-the-Hole, in disguise, to witness the torturing of bulls.
'The gladiatorian and other sanguinary sports,' says the author of the
_Characteristics_, 'which we allow our people, discover sufficiently our
national taste. And the baitings and slaughters of so many sorts of
creatures, tame as well as wild, for diversion merely, may witness the
extraordinary inclination we have for amphitheatrical spectacles.'[7]
The majesty of the law was maintained by disembowelling traitors, by
cutting off the ears, or branding the cheeks of political offenders, and
by the penalties inflicted on Roman Catholics, and on Protestant
dissenters. Men who deemed themselves honourable gained power through
bribery and intrigue. It was through a king's mistress and a heavy bribe
that Bolingbroke was enabled to return from exile; Chesterfield
intrigued against Newcastle with the Duchess of Yarmouth; and clergymen
eager for promotion had no scruple in paying court to women who had lost
their virtue.
Never, unless perhaps during the Civil War, was the spirit of party more
rampant in the country. Patriotism was a virtue more talked about than
felt, and in the cause of faction private characters were assailed and
libels circulated through the press. Addison, who did more than any
other writer to humanize his age, saw the evil of the time and struck a
blow at it with his inimitable humour. The _Spectator_ discovers, on his
journey to Sir Roger de Coverley's house, that the knight's Toryism
grew with the miles that separated him from London:
'In all our journey from London to his house we did not so much as bait
at a Whig inn; or if by chance the coachman stopped at a wrong place,
one of Sir Roger's servants would ride up to his master full speed, and
whisper to him that the master of the house was against such an one in
the last election. This often betrayed us into hard beds and bad cheer;
for we were not so inquisitive about the inn as the innkeeper; and
provided our landlord's principles were sound did not take any notice of
the staleness of his provisions. This I found still the more
inconvenient, because the better the host was, the worse generally were
his accommodations; the fellow knowing very well that those who were his
friends would take up with coarse diet and hard lodging. For these
reasons, all the while I was upon the road, I dreaded entering into an
house of anyone that Sir Roger had applauded for an honest man.'[8]
Against the party zeal of female politicians Addison indulges frequently
in humorous sallies. He assures them that it gives an ill-natured cast
to the eye, and flushes the cheeks worse than brandy. Party rage, he
says, is a male vice, and is altogether repugnant 'to the softness, the
modesty, and those other endearing qualities which are natural to the
fair sex.'
'When I have seen a pretty mouth uttering calumnies and invectives, what
would I not have given to have stopt it? how have I been troubled to see
some of the finest features in the world grow pale and tremble with
party rage. Camilla is one of the greatest beauties in the British
nation, and yet values herself more upon being the virago of one party
than upon being the toast of both. The dear creature about a week ago
encountered the fierce and beautiful Penthesilea across a tea-table; but
in the height of her anger, as her hand chanced to shake with the
earnestness of the dispute, she scalded her fingers, and spilt a dish of
tea upon her petticoat. Had not this accident broke off the debate,
nobody knows where it would have ended.'
The coffee-houses in which men aired their wit and discussed the news of
the day were wholly dominated by party. 'A Whig,' says De Foe, 'will no
more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ozinda's than a Tory will be seen at the
coffee-house of St. James's.' Swift declared that the Whig and Tory
animosity infected even the dogs and cats. It was inevitable that it
should also infect literature. Books were seldom judged on their merits,
the praise or blame being generally awarded according to the political
principles of their authors. An impartial literary journal did not exist
in the days when Addison 'gave his little senate laws' at Button's, and
perhaps it does not exist now, but if critical injustice be done in our
day it is rarely owing to political causes.
One of the most prominent vices of the time was gambling, which was
largely encouraged by the public lotteries, and practised by all classes
of the people. This evil was exhibited on a national scale by the
establishment of the South Sea Company, which exploded in 1720, after
creating a madness for speculation never known before or since. Even men
who like Sir Robert Walpole kept their heads, and saw that the bubble
would soon burst, invested in stock. Pope had his share in the
speculation, and might, had he 'realized' in time, have been the 'lord
of thousands;' in the end, however, he was a gainer, though not to a
large extent. His friend Gay was less fortunate. He won £20,000, kept
the stock too long and was reduced to beggary. The South Sea Bubble and
the Mississippi scheme of Law which burst in the same year and ruined
tens of thousands of French families, afford illustrations on a gigantic
scale of the prevailing passion for speculation and for gambling.
'The Duke of Devonshire lost an estate at a game of basset. The fine
intellect of Chesterfield was thoroughly enslaved by the vice. At Bath,
which was then the centre of English fashion, it reigned supreme; and
the physicians even recommended it to their patients as a form of
distraction. In the green-rooms of the theatres, as Mrs. Bellamy assures
us, thousands were often lost and won in a single night. Among
fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men, and the
professor of whist and quadrille became a regular attendant at their
levees. Miss Pelham, the daughter of the prime minister, was one of the
most notorious gamblers of her time, and Lady Cowper speaks in her
_Diary_ of sittings at Court, of which the lowest stake was 200 guineas.
The public lotteries contributed very powerfully to diffuse the taste
for gambling among all classes.'[9]
One of the most powerful exponents of the dark side of the century is
Hogarth, who makes some of its worst features live before our eyes. So
also do the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Differing as
their works do in character, they have the common merit of presenting in
indelible lines a picture of the time in its social aspects. It may have
been, as Stuart Mill asserts, an age of strong men, but it was an age of
coarse vices, an age wanting in the refinements and graces of life; an
age of cruel punishments, cruel sports, and of a political corruption
extending through all the departments of the State.
But it would be a narrow view of the age to dwell wholly on its gloomier
features, which are always the easiest to detect. If the period under
consideration had prominent vices, it had also distinguished merits.
Under Queen Anne and her immediate successors, home-keeping Englishmen
had more space to breathe in than they have now, and trade was not
demoralized by excessive competition. No attempt was made to separate
class from class, and population was not large enough to make the battle
of life almost hopeless in the lowest section of the community. If there
was less refinement than among ourselves, there was far less of nervous
susceptibility, and the country was free from the half-educated class of
men and women who know enough to make them dissatisfied, without
attaining to the larger knowledge which yields wisdom and content. To
say that the age was better than our own would be to deny a thousand
signs of material and intellectual progress, but it had fewer dangers to
contend with, and if there was far less of wealth in the country the
people were probably more satisfied with their lot.[10]
To glance at the century as a whole does not fall within my province,
but I may be permitted to observe that in the course of it science and
invention made rapid strides; that under the inspiring sway of Handel
the power of music was felt as it was never felt before; that in the
latter half of the period the Novel, destined to be one of the noblest
fruits of our imaginative literature, attained a robust life in the
hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; and that, with Reynolds and
Gainsborough, with Romney and Wilson, a glorious school of landscape and
portrait painters arose, which is still the pride of England. It will
be remembered, too, that many of the great charitable institutions which
make our own age illustrious, had their birth in the last. The military
genius of England was displayed in Marlborough and in Clive, her mercy
in John Howard, her spirit of enterprise in Cook, her self-sacrifice in
Wesley and Whitefield, her statesmanship in Walpole, in Chatham, and in
William Pitt. In oratory as everyone knows, the eighteenth century was
surpassingly great, and never before or since has the country produced a
political philosopher of the calibre of Burke. What England reaped in
literature during the period of which Pope has been selected as the most
striking figure, it will be my endeavour to show in the course of these
pages.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] M. Sainte-Beuve, the greatest of French critics, frankly
acknowledges his indebtedness to Boileau, whom he styles Louis the
Fourteenth's 'Contrôleur Général du Parnasse.' 'S'il m'est permis de
parler pour moi-même,' he writes, 'Boileau est un des hommes qui m'ont
le plus occupé depuis que je fais de la critique, et avec qui j'ai le
plus vécu en idée.'--_Causeries du Lundi_, tome sixième, p. 495.
[2] Lecky's _England_, vol. i. p. 373.
[3] The epithet is used in the Preface to the First Edition of Waller's
_Posthumous Poems_, which Mr. Gosse believes was written by Atterbury,
and he considers that this is the original occurrence of the
phrase.--_From Shakespeare to Pope_, p. 248.
[4] Messrs. Besant and Rice's novel, _The Chaplain of the Fleet_, gives
a vivid picture of the life led in the Fleet, and also of the period.
[5] _Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_, vol. ii. p. 55.
[6] Lecky's _England_, vol. i. p. 479.
[7] Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, vol. i. p. 270.
[8] _Spectator_, No. 126.
[9] Lecky's _England_, vol. i. p. 522.
[10] According to Hallam the thirty years which followed the Treaty of
Utrecht 'was the most prosperous season that England had ever
experienced.'--_Const. Hist._ ii. 464.
PART I.
THE POETS.
CHAPTER I.
ALEXANDER POPE.
It is not unreasonable to call the period we are considering 'the Age of
Pope.' He is the representative poet of his century. Its literary merits
and defects are alike conspicuous in his verse, and he stands
immeasurably above the numerous versifiers who may be said to belong to
his school. Savage Landor has observed that there is no such thing as a
school of poetry, and this is true in the sense that the essence of this
divine art cannot be transmitted, but the form of the art may be, and
Pope's style of workmanship made it readily imitable by accomplished
craftsmen. Although he affected to call poetry an idle trade he devoted
his whole life to its pursuit, and there are few instances in literature
in which genius and unwearied labour have been so successfully united.
It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of
life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means
he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but
the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his path commands
our admiration.
[Sidenote: Alexander Pope (1688-1744).]
Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21st, 1688. He was the only son
of his father, a merchant or tradesman, and a Roman Catholic at a time
when the members of that church were proscribed by law. The boy was a
cripple from his birth, and suffered from great bodily weakness both in
youth and manhood. Looking back upon his life in after years he called
it a 'long disease.' The elder Pope seems to have retired from business
soon after his son's birth, and at Binfield, nine miles from Windsor,
twenty-seven years of the poet's life were spent. As a 'papist' Pope was
excluded from the Universities and from every public career, but even
under happier circumstances his health would have condemned him to a
secluded life. He gained some instruction from the family priest, and
also went for a short time to school, but for the most part he was
self-educated, and studied so severely that at seventeen his life was
probably saved by the sound advice of Dr. Radcliffe to read less and to
ride on horseback every day. The rhyming faculty was very early
developed, and to use his own phrase he 'lisped in numbers.' As a boy he
felt the magic of Spenser, whose enchanting sweetness and boundless
wealth of imagination have been now for three hundred years a joy to
every lover of poetry. Something, too, he learned from Waller and from
Sandys, both of whom, but especially the former, had been of service in
giving smoothness to the iambic distich, in which all of Pope's best
poems are written. Dryden, however, whom when a little boy he saw at
Will's coffee-house--'_Virgilium tantum vidi_' records the memorable
day--was the poet whose influence he felt most powerfully. Like Gray
several years later, he declared that he learnt versification wholly
from his works. From 'knowing Walsh,' the best critic in the nation in
Dryden's opinion, the youthful Pope received much friendly counsel; and
he had another wise friend in Sir William Trumbull, formerly Secretary
of State, who recognized his genius, and gave him as warm a friendship
as an old man can offer to a young one. The dissolute Restoration
dramatist, Wycherley, was also his temporary companion. The old man, if
Pope's story be true, asked him to correct his poems, which are indeed
beyond correction, as the youthful critic appears to have hinted, and
the two parted company.
The _Pastorals_, written, according to Pope's assertion, at the age of
sixteen, were published in 1709, and won an amount of praise
incomprehensible in the present day. Mr. Leslie Stephen has happily
appraised their value in calling them 'mere school-boy exercises.' Not
thus, however, were they regarded by the poet, or by the critics of his
age, yet neither he nor they could have divined the rapid progress of
his fame, and that in about six years' time he would be regarded as the
greatest of living poets. The _Essay on Criticism_, written, it appears,
in 1709, was published two years later, and received the highest honour
a poem could then have. It was praised by Addison in the _Spectator_ as
'a very fine poem,' and 'a masterpiece in its kind.' The 'kind,'
suggested by the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace, and the _Art Poétique_ of
Boileau--translated with Dryden's help by Sir William Soame--suited the
current taste for criticism and argument in rhyme, which had led
Roscommon to write an _Essay on Translated Verse_, and Sheffield an
_Essay on Poetry_. The _Essay on Criticism_ is a marvellous production
for a young man who had scarcely passed his maturity when it was
published. To have written lines and couplets that live still in the
language and are on everyone's lips is an achievement of which any poet
might be proud, and there are at least twenty such lines or couplets in
the poem.
In 1713 _Windsor Forest_ appeared. Through the most susceptible years of
life the poet had lived in the country, but Nature and Pope were not
destined to become friends; he looked at her 'through the spectacles of
books' and his description of natural objects is invariably of the
conventional type. Although never a resident in London he was unable in
the exercise of his art to breathe any atmosphere save that of the town,
and might have said, in the words of Lessing to his friend Kleist, 'When
you go to the country I go to the coffee-house.'[11]
The use, or as it would be more correct to say the abuse, of classical
mythology in the description of rural scenes had the sanction of great
names, and Pope was not likely to reject what Spenser and Milton had
sanctioned. Gods and goddesses therefore play a conspicuous part in his
description of the Forest. The following lines afford a fair
illustration of the style throughout, and the sole merit of the poem is
the smoothness of versification in which Pope excelled.
'Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight,
Though gods assembled grace his towering height,
Than what more humble mountains offer here,
When in their blessings all those gods appear.
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned,
Here blushing Flora paints th' enamelled ground,
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand;
Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains,
And peace and plenty tell a Stuart reigns.
Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit, but his sense of
humour was small, and the descent from these deities to Queen Anne
savours not a little of bathos.
In 1712 Pope had published _The Rape of the Lock_, which Addison justly
praised as 'a delicious little thing.' At the same time he advised the
poet not to attempt improving it, which he proposed to do, and Pope most
unreasonably attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful
poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and
gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an
heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is
conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a
Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair,
much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady
also. Pope wrote the poem to remove the discord caused by the fatal
shears, but its publication, and two or three offensive allusions it
contained, only served to add to Miss Fermor's annoyance. 'The
celebrated lady herself,' the poet wrote, 'is offended, and which is
stranger, not at herself but me. Is not this enough to make a writer
never be tender of another's character or fame?' But Pope, whose praise
of women is too often a libel upon them, was not as tender as he ought
to have been of the lady's reputation.
The offence felt by the heroine of the poem is now unheeded; the dainty
art exhibited is a permanent delight, and our language can boast no more
perfect specimen of the poetical burlesque than the _Rape of the Lock_.
The machinery of the sylphs is managed with perfect skill, and nothing
can be more admirable than the charge delivered by Ariel to the sylphs
to guard Belinda from an apprehended but unknown danger. The concluding
lines shall be quoted:
'Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,
His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,
Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins,
Be stopped in vials, or transfixed with pins;
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged, whole ages, in a bodkin's eye;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
While clogged he beats his silken wings in vain;
Or alum styptics, with contracting power,
Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower;
Or, as Ixion fixed, the wretch shall feel
The giddy motion of the whirling mill,
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,
And tremble at the sea that froths below!'
Another striking portion of the poem is the description of the Spanish
game of Ombre, imitated from Vida's _Scacchia Ludus_. 'Vida's poem,'
says Mr. Elwin, 'is a triumph of ingenuity, when the intricacy of chess
is considered, and the difficulty of expressing the moves in a dead
language. Yet the original is eclipsed by Pope's more consummate
copy.'[12]
Many famous passages illustrative of Pope's art might be extracted from
this poem, but it will suffice to give the portrait of Belinda:
'On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore;
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes and as unfixed as those;
Favours to none, to all she smiles extends,
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike,
And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face and you'll forget them all.'
The _Temple of Fame_, a liberal paraphrase of Chaucer's _House of Fame_,
followed in 1715, and despite the praise of Steele, who declared that it
had a thousand beauties, and of Dr. Johnson, who observes that every
part is splendid, must be pronounced one of Pope's least attractive
pieces. Two poems of the emotional and sentimental class, _Eloisa to
Abelard_ and the _Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_ (1717),
are more worthy of attention. Nowhere, probably, in the language are
finer specimens to be met with of rhetorical pathos, but poets like
Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can touch the heart more deeply
by a phrase or couplet than Pope is able to do by his elaborate
representations of passion. The reader is not likely to be affected by
the following response of Eloisa to an invitation from the spirit world:
'I come, I come! prepare your roseate bowers,
Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers.
Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,
Where flames refined in breasts seraphic glow;
Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,
And smooth my passage to the realms of day;
See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath and catch my flying soul!
Ah no--in sacred vestments may'st thou stand,
The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand,
Present the Cross before my lifted eye,
Teach me at once and learn of me to die.'
The music or the fervour of the poem delighted Porson, famous for his
Greek and his potations, and whether drunk or sober he would recite, or
rather sing it, from the beginning to the end. The felicity of the
versification is incontestable, but at the same time artifice is more
visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of
_The Elegy_, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful
topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben
Jonson's _Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester_, a lady whose death
was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in
preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of
poetical rhetoric as can be found in Pope's verse.
'By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned!
What though no friends in sable weeds appear,
Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year,
And bear about the mockery of woe,
To midnight dances and the public show?
What though no weeping Loves thy ashes grace,
Nor polished marble emulate thy face?
What though no sacred earth allow thee room,
Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb?
Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,
There the first roses of the year shall blow;
While angels with their silver wings o'ershade
The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.'
For some years Pope had been brooding over and slowly labouring at a
task which was destined to add greatly to his fame and also to his
fortune.
In 1708 his early friend, Sir William Trumbull, had advised him to
translate the _Iliad_, and five years later the poet, following the
custom of the age, invited subscriptions to the work, which was to
appear in six volumes at the price of six guineas. About this time
Swift, who by the aid of his powerful pen was assisting Harley and St.
John to rule the country, made Pope's acquaintance, and ultimately
became perhaps the most faithful of his friends. Swift, who was able to
help everybody but himself, zealously promoted the poet's scheme, and
was heard to say at the coffee-houses that 'the best poet in England Mr.
Pope a Papist' had begun a translation of Homer which he should not
print till he had a thousand guineas for him.
He was not satisfied with this service, but introduced the poet to St.
John, Atterbury, and Harley. The first volume of Pope's _Homer_ appeared
in 1715, and in the same year Addison's friend Tickell published his
version of the first book of the _Iliad_. Pope affected to believe that
this was done at Addison's instigation.
Already, as we have said, there had been a misunderstanding between the
two famous wits, and Pope, whose irritable temperament led him into many
quarrels and created a host of enemies, ceased from this time to regard
Addison as a friend. Probably neither of them can be exempted from
blame, and we can well believe that Addison, whose supremacy had
formerly been uncontested, could not without some jealousy 'bear a
brother near the throne,' but the chief interest of the estrangement to
the literary student is the famous satire written at a later date, in
which Addison appears under the character of Atticus.[13] It is
necessary to add here that the whole story of the quarrel comes to us
from Pope, who is never to be trusted, either in prose or verse, when he
wishes to excuse himself at the expense of a rival.
Pope had no cause for discontent at his position; not even the strife of
parties stood in the way of his _Homer_, which was praised alike by Whig
and Tory, and brought the translator a fortune. It has been calculated
that the entire version of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, the payments for
which covered eleven years, yielded Pope a clear profit of about £9,000,
and it is said to have made at the same time the fortune of his
publisher. Pope, I believe, was the first poet who, without the aid of
patronage or of the stage, was able to live in comfort from the sale of
his works.
He knew how to value money, but fame was dearer to him than wealth, and
of both he had now enough to satisfy his ambition. Posterity has not
endorsed the general verdict of his contemporaries on his famous
translation. He had to encounter indeed some severe comments, and
Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have
vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty
poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as
Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its
power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness,
and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr.
Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's _Homer_
'exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of
the Father of Poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless
grandeur, his unaffected majesty,' and observes that this cannot be
totally denied. He argues, however, that even in Virgil's time the
demand for elegance had been so much increased that mere nature could be
endured no longer, that every age improves in elegance, that if some
Ovidian graces are, alas! not to be found in the English _Iliad_ 'to
have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away.' Johnson was
not aware that to add 'poetical elegances' to the words and thoughts of
a great poet is to destroy much of the beauty of his verse and many of
its most striking characteristics. As well might he say that the beauty
of a lovely woman can be enhanced by a profusion of trinkets, or that a
Greek statue would be more worthy of admiration if it were elegantly
dressed. Dr. Johnson says, with perfect truth, that Pope wrote for his
own age, and it may be added that he exhibits extraordinary art in
ministering to the taste of the age; yet it is hardly too much to affirm
that in the exercise of his craft as a translator he is continually
false to nature and therefore false to Homer.
On the other hand his _Iliad_ if read as a story runs so smoothly, that
the reader, and especially the young reader, is carried through the
narrative without any sense of fatigue. It is not a little praise to say
that it is a poem which every school-boy will read with pleasure, and in
which every critical reader who is content to surrender his judgment for
awhile, will find pleasure also. Mr. Courthope in his elaborate and
masterly _Life of Pope_, which gives the coping stone to an exhaustive
edition of the poet's works, praises a fine passage from the _Iliad_,
which in his judgment attains perhaps the highest level of which the
heroic couplet is capable, and 'I do not believe,' he adds, 'that any
Englishman of taste and imagination can read the lines without feeling
that if Pope had produced nothing but his translation of Homer, he would
be entitled to the praise of a great original poet.'
Pope's editor could not perhaps have selected a better illustration of
his best manner than this speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus, which is
parodied in the _Rape of the Lock_. The concluding lines shall be
quoted.
'Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge the soul to war,
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom;
The life which others pay let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe;
Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give.'
We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope's inability--shared
in great measure with every translator--to catch the spirit of the
original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its
merit is the more wonderful since the poet's knowledge of Greek was
extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to
earlier translations. Gibbon said that his _Homer_ had every merit
except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have
heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a
great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever
equal his.
All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to
his version of the _Iliad_. On that he expended his best powers, and on
that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains. The _Odyssey_, one of the
most beautiful stories in the world, appears to have been taken up with
a weary pen, and in putting it into English he sought the assistance of
Broome and Fenton, two minor poets and Cambridge scholars. They
translated twelve books out of the twenty-four, and so skilfully did
they catch Pope's style that it is almost impossible to discern any
difference between his work and theirs. The literary partnership led to
one of Pope's discreditable manoeuvres, in which, strange to say, he
was assisted by Broome, whom he induced to set his name to a falsehood.
Pope as we have said, translated twelve books, while eight were allotted
to Broome and four to Fenton. Yet he led Broome, unknown to his
colleague, to ascribe only three books to himself and two to Fenton, and
at the same time the poet, who confessed that he could 'equivocate
pretty genteely,' stated the amount he had paid for Broome's eight books
as if it had been paid for three. The story is disgraceful both to Pope
and Broome, and why the latter should have practised such a deception is
unaccountable. He was a beneficed clergyman and a man of wealth, so that
he could not have lied for money even if Pope had been willing to bribe
him. Fenton was indignant, as he well might be, but he was too lazy or
too good-natured to expose the fraud. Broome had his deserts later on,
but Pope, who ridiculed him in the _Dunciad_, and in his _Treatise on
the Bathos_, was the last man in the world entitled to render them.
The partnership in poetry which produced the _Odyssey_ was not a great
literary success, and most readers will prefer the version of Cowper,
whose blank verse, though out of harmony with the rapid movement of the
_Iliad_ is not unfitted for the quieter beauties of the _Odyssey_.
In 1721, prior to the publication of his version, the poet had agreed to
edit an edition of Shakespeare, a task as difficult as any which a man
of letters can undertake. Pope was not qualified to achieve it. He was
comparatively ignorant of Elizabethan literature, the dry labours of an
editor were not to his taste, and he lacked true sympathy with the
genius of the poet. Failure was therefore inevitable, and Theobald, who
has some solid merits as a commentator, found it easy to discern and to
expose the errors of Pope. For doing so he was afterwards 'hitched' into
the _Dunciad_, and made in the first instance its hero. The
"Shakespeare" was published in 1725 in six volumes quarto. 'Its chief
claim,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'to interest at the present day, is that
it forms the immediate starting-point for the long succession of Pope's
satires.... The vexation caused to the poet by the undoubted justice of
many of Theobald's strictures procured for the latter the unwelcome
honour of being recognized as the King of the Dunces, and coupled with
Bentley's disparaging mention of the Translation of the _Iliad_ provoked
the many contemptuous allusions to verbal criticism in Pope's later
satires.'[14]
A striking peculiarity of Pope's art may be mentioned here. He was able
only to play on one instrument, the heroic couplet. When he attempted
any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was
mediocrity. It was a daring act of Pope to suggest by his _Ode on St.
Cecilia's Day_, a comparison with the _Alexander's Feast_ of Dryden. The
performance is perfunctory rather than spontaneous, and the few lyrical
efforts he attempted in addition, show no ear for music. The voice of
song with which even the minor poets of the Elizabethan age were gifted
was silent in England, though not in Scotland, during the first half of
the eighteenth century, or if a faint note is occasionally heard, as in
the lyrics of Gay, it is without the grace and joyous freedom of the
earlier singers. Not that the lyrical form was wanting; many minor
versifiers, like Hughes, Sheffield, Granville, and Somerville, wrote
what they called songs, but unfortunately without an ear for singing.
In this short summary and criticism of a poet's literary life it would
be out of place to insert many biographical details, were it not that,
in the case of Pope, the student who knows little or nothing of the man
will fail to understand his poetry. A distinguished critic has said that
the more we know of Pope's age the better shall we understand Pope. With
equal truth it may be said that a familiarity with the poet's personal
character is essential to an adequate appreciation of his genius. His
friendships, his enmities, his mode of life at Twickenham, the entangled
tale of his correspondence, his intrigues in the pursuit of fame, his
constitutional infirmities, the personal character of his satires, these
are a few of the prominent topics with which a student of the poet must
make himself conversant. It may be well, therefore, to give the history
in brief outline, and we have now reached the crisis in his fortunes
which will conveniently enable us to do so.
In 1716 Pope's family had removed from Binfield to Chiswick. A year
later he lost his father, to whose memory he has left a filial tribute,
and shortly afterwards he bought the small estate of five acres at
Twickenham with which his name is so intimately associated. Before
reaching the age of thirty Pope was regarded as the first of living
poets. His income more than sufficed for all his wants. At Twickenham
the great in intellect, and the great by birth, met around his table; he
was welcomed by the highest society in the land, and although proud of
his intimacy with the nobility, 'unplaced, unpensioned,' he was 'no
man's heir or slave,' and jealously preserved his independence. 'Pope,'
says Johnson, 'never set genius to sale, he never flattered those whom
he did not love, or praised those whom he did not esteem,' and he was,
we may add, in this respect a striking contrast to Dryden, who lavished
his flatteries wholesale.
With a mother to whom he was tenderly attached, with troops of friends,
with an undisputed supremacy in the world of letters, and with a
vocation that was the joy of his heart,--if possessions like these can
confer happiness, Pope should have been a happy man.
But his 'crazy carcass,' as the painter Jervas called it, was united to
the most suspicious and irritable of temperaments, and the fine wine of
his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup. Pope could be a
warm friend, but was not always a faithful one, and even women whose
friendship he had enjoyed suffered from the venom of his satire. He was
not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a
portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to
have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham;
Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was
insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must
have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul
lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a
most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made
love,[15] cannot easily be characterized in moderate language. Lady Mary
had little delicacy herself, but the poet, who thought himself a
gentleman, had no excuse for abusing her. Excuses indeed are not easily
to be offered for Pope's moral defalcations. His life was a series of
petty intrigues, trickeries, and deceptions. He could not, it has been
said,--the conceit is borrowed from Young's _Satires_--'take his tea
without a stratagem,' and knew how to utter the loftiest sentiments
while acting the most contemptible of parts.
The long and intricate deceptions which he practised to secure the
publication of his letters, while so manipulating them as to enhance his
credit, were suspected to some extent in his own age, and have been
painfully laid bare in ours. It is an amazing story, which may be read
at large in Mr. Dilke's _Papers of a Critic_, or in the elaborate
narrative of Mr. Elwin in the first volume of his edition of _Pope_. It
will be there seen how the poet compiled fictitious letters, suppressed
passages, altered dates, manufactured letters out of other letters, and
secretly enabled the infamous bookseller Curll to publish his
correspondence surreptitiously in order that he might have the excuse
for printing it himself in a more carefully prepared form. The worst
feature of the miserable story is the poet's conduct with regard to
Swift, his oldest and most faithful friend. On this subject the writer
may be allowed to quote what he has said elsewhere.
'Years before, Swift, who cared little for literary reputation, and
never resorted to any artifice to promote it, had suspected Pope of a
desire to make literary capital out of their correspondence, and the
poet had excused himself according to his wonted fashion. After the
publication by Curll, he begged Swift to return him his letters lest
they should fall into the bookseller's hands. The Dean replied, no doubt
to Pope's infinite chagrin, that they were safe in his keeping, as he
had given strict orders in his will that his executors should burn every
letter he might leave behind him. Afterwards he promised that Pope
should eventually have them but declined giving them up during his
lifetime. Hereupon Pope changed his tactics and begged that he might
have the letters to print. The publication by Curll of two letters
(probably another _ruse_ of Pope's) formed an additional ground for
urging his request. All his efforts were unavailing until he obtained
the assistance of Lord Orrery, to whom Swift was at length induced to
deliver up the letters. There was a hiatus in the correspondence and
Pope took advantage of this and of a blunder made by Swift, whose memory
at the time was not to be trusted, to hint, what he dared not directly
assert, that the bulk of the collection remained with the Dean, and that
Swift's own letters had been returned to him. We have now irresistible
proof that the Dublin edition of the letters was taken from an
impression sent from England and sent by Pope. Nor was this all. The
poet acted with still greater meanness, for he had the audacity to
deplore the sad vanity of Swift in permitting the publication of his
correspondence, and to declare that "no decay of body is half so
miserable."'[16]
That he had many fine qualities in spite of the littlenesses which mar
his character one would be loath to doubt. Among his nobler traits was
an ardent passion for literature, a courage which enabled him to face
innumerable obstacles--'Pope,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'was as bold as a
lion'--and a constant devotion to his parents, especially to his mother,
who lived to a great age. There are no sincerer words in his letters
than those which relate to Mrs. Pope. 'It is my mother only,' he once
wrote, regretting his inability to leave home, 'that robs me of half the
pleasure of my life, and that gives me the greatest at the same time,'
and the lines expressing his affection for her are familiar to most
readers. Truly does Johnson say that 'life has among its soothing and
quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son.'
Among his lady friends the dearest was Martha Blount, the younger of two
beautiful sisters, of whom Gay sang as 'the fair-haired Martha and
Teresa brown.' They came of an old Roman Catholic family residing at
Mapledurham, and were little more than girls when Pope first knew them.
With the elder sister he quarrelled, but Martha was faithful to him for
life, and when he was dying it is said that her coming in 'gave a new
turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him.' Swift, as we have said,
was one of the warmest of Pope's friends, and his letters to the poet
are by far the most attractive portion of the published correspondence.
He visited him at Twickenham more than once, and on one occasion spent
some months under his roof. Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and
friend,' who for a time lived near to him at Dawley, was a frequent
guest, so also, in the days of their intimacy, was Lady Mary, who had a
house at Twickenham. Thomson the poet, too, lived not far off, and was
visited by his brother bard, whom Thomson's barber describes as 'a
strange, ill-formed, little figure of a man,' but he adds, 'I have
heard him and Quin and Patterson[17] talk so together that I could have
listened to them for ever.' Arbuthnot, one of the finest wits and best
men of his time, who, as Swift said, could do everything but walk, was
also a faithful friend of Pope; so was Gay, and so was Bishop Atterbury,
who, as the poet said, first taught him to think "as becomes a
reasonable creature."
James Craggs, who had been formerly Secretary of State, and was on the
warmest terms of intimacy with the poet, resided for some time near his
friend in order to enjoy the pleasure of his society. When in office he
proposed to pay him a pension of £300 a year out of the secret service
money, but Pope declined the offer. Statesmen and men of active pursuits
cultivated the society of the poetical recluse, and Pope, whose
compliments are monuments more enduring than marble, has recorded their
visits to Twickenham:
'There, my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place,
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl,
The feast of reason and the flow of soul,
And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines[18]
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines.'
Among Pope's associates was the 'blameless Bethel,'
'---- who always speaks his thought,
And always thinks the very thing he ought,'
and Berkeley who had 'every virtue under heaven,' and Lord Bathurst who
was unspoiled by wealth and joined
'With splendour, charity; with plenty, health;'
and 'humble Allen' who
'Did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame;'
and many another friend who lives in his verse and is secure of the
immortality a poet can confer.
The five volumes which contain the letters between Pope and his friends
exhibit an interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The
poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on
them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care.
Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which
give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found
in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions
of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says Horace Walpole,
'as much as the _Essay on Man_, and as they were written to everybody
they do not look as if they had been written to anybody.' Pope said
once, what he did not mean, that he could not write agreeable letters.
This was true; his letters are, as Charles Fox said, 'very bad,' but
some of Pope's friends write admirably, and if there is much that can be
skipped without loss in the correspondence, there is much which no
student of the period can afford to neglect. 'There has accumulated,'
says Mark Pattison, 'round Pope's poems a mass of biographical anecdote
such as surrounds the writings of no other English author,' and not a
little knowledge of this kind is to be gleaned from his correspondence.
In the years spent at Twickenham Pope produced his most characteristic
work. It is as a satirist that he, with one exception, excels all
English poets, and Pope's careful workmanship often makes his satirical
touches more attractive than Dryden's.
'To attack vices in the abstract,' he said to Arbuthnot, 'without
touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with
shadows;' and Pope, under the plea of a detestation of vice, generally
betrayed his contempt or hatred of the men whom he assailed. No doubt
the critics and Grub Street hacks of the day gave him provocation. Pope,
however, was frequently the first to take the field, and so eager was he
to meet his foes that it would seem as if he enjoyed the conflict. Yet
there were times when he felt acutely the assaults made upon him. 'These
things are my diversion,' he once said, with a ghastly smile, and it was
observed that he writhed in agony like a man undergoing an operation.
The attacks made with these paper bullets, not only on the side of Grub
Street but on his own, show very vividly the coarseness of London
society. Courtesy was disregarded by men who claimed to be wits and
scholars. Pope held, perhaps, a higher place in literature in his own
day than Lord Tennyson has held in ours, for the best beloved of
Laureates had noble rivals and friends who came near to him in fame,
while Pope, until the publication of Thomson's _Seasons_, in 1730, stood
alone in poetical reputation. Yet he was reviled in the language of
Billingsgate, and had no scruple in using that language himself. Late in
life Pope collected the libels made upon him and bound them in four
volumes, but he omitted to mention the provocation which gave rise to
many of them. Eusden, Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth,
and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's
pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in
tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable
notoriety to names of which the larger number were 'born to be forgot.'
In 1725 Swift had written to Pope advising him not to immortalize the
names of bad poets by putting them in his verse, and Pope replied to
this advice by saying, 'I am much the happier for finding (a better
thing than our wits) our judgments jump in the notion that all
scribblers should be passed by in silence.' How entirely his inclination
got the better of his judgment was seen three years later in the
_Dunciad_. The first three books of this famous satire were published in
1728. It is generally regarded as Pope's masterpiece, but the accuracy
of such an estimate is doubtful. So heavily weighted is the poem with
notes, prefaces, and introductions that the text appears to be smothered
by them. It was Pope's aim to mystify his readers, and in this he has
succeeded, for the mystifications of the poem even confound the
commentators. The personalities of the satire excited a keen interest,
and much amusement to readers who were not included in Pope's black list
of dunces. At the same time it roused a number of authors to fury, as it
well might. His satire is often unjust, and he includes among the dunces
men wholly undeserving of the name, who had had the misfortune to offend
him. To place a great scholar like Bentley, an eloquent and earnest
preacher like Whitefield, and a man of genius like Defoe among the
dunces was to stultify himself, and if Pope in his spite against
Theobald found some justification for giving the commentator
pre-eminence for dulness in three books of the _Dunciad_, his anger got
the better of his wit when in Book IV. he dethroned Theobald to exalt
Colley Cibber. For Cibber, with a thousand faults, so far from being
dull had a buoyancy of heart and a sprightliness of intellect wholly out
of harmony with the character he is made to assume.
That he might have some excuse for his dashing assaults in the
_Dunciad_, Pope had published in the third volume of the _Miscellanies_,
of which he and Swift, Arbuthnot and Gay were the joint authors, an
_Essay on Bathos_ in which several writers of the day were sneered at.
The assault provoked the counter-attack for which Pope was looking, and
he then produced the satire which was already prepared for the press. In
its publication the poet, as usual, made use of trickery and deception.
At first he issued an imperfect edition with initial letters instead of
names, but on seeing his way to act more openly, the poem appeared in a
large edition with names and notes.
'In order to lessen the danger of prosecution for libel,' Mr. Courthope
writes, 'he prevailed on three peers, with whom he was on the most
intimate terms, the good-natured Lord Bathurst, the easy-going Earl of
Oxford, and the magnificent Earl of Burlington, to act as his nominal
publishers; and it was through them that copies of the enlarged edition
were at first distributed, the booksellers not being allowed to sell any
in their shops. The King and Queen were each presented with a copy by
the hands of Sir R. Walpole. In this manner, as the report quickly
spread that the poem was the property of rich and powerful noblemen,
there was a natural disinclination on the part of the dunces to take
legal proceedings, and the prestige of the _Dunciad_ being thus fairly
established, the booksellers were allowed to proceed with the sale in
regular course.'[19]
The _Dunciad_ owes its merit to the literary felicities with which its
pages abound. The theme is a mean one. Pope, from his social eminence at
Twickenham, looks with scorn on the authors who write for bread, and
with malignity on the authors whom he regarded as his enemies. There
is, for the most part, little elevation in his method of treatment, and
we can almost fancy that we see a cruel joy in the poet's face as he
impales the victims of his wrath. Some portions of the _Dunciad_ are
tainted with the imagery which, to quote the strong phrase of Mr.
Churton Collins, often makes Swift as offensive as a polecat,[20] and
there is no part of it which can be read with unmixed pleasure, if we
except the noble lines which conclude the satire. Those lines may be
almost said to redeem the faults of the poem, and they prove
incontestably, if such proof be needed, Pope's claim to a place among
the poets.
'In vain, in vain,--the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls; the Muse obeys the Power.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold,
Of Night primæval and of Chaos old!
Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires,
As one by one at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off the etherial plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more;
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.'
The publication of the _Dunciad_ showed Pope where his main strength as
a poet lay. That the writers he had attacked, in many instances without
provocation, should resent the ungrateful notoriety conferred upon them
was inevitable. In self-defence, and to add to the provocation already
given, he started a paper called the _Grub Street Journal_, which
existed for eight years--Pope, who had no scruple in 'hazarding a lie,'
denying all the time that he had any connection with it.
His next work of significance, _The Essay on Man_, a professedly
philosophical poem by an author who knew little of philosophy, was
published in four epistles, in 1733-4. Bolingbroke's brilliant,
versatile, and shallow intellect had strongly impressed Swift, and had
also fascinated Pope. It has been commonly supposed that the _Essay_
owes its existence to his suggestion and guidance. The poet believed in
his philosophy, and had the loftiest estimate of his genius. In the last
and perhaps finest passage of the poem he calls Bolingbroke the 'master
of the poet and the song,' and draws a picture of the ambitious
statesman as beautiful as it is false. In Mark Pattison's Introduction
to _The Essay on Man_,[21] which every student of Pope will read, he
objects to the notion that the poet took the scheme of his work from
Bolingbroke, observing that both derived their views from a common
source.
'Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet,
argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God, and the
constitution of the world was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite
conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by
the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of
his friend's more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special
suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to
books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_
(1711), King on the _Origin of Evil_ (1702), and particularly to
Leibnitz, _Essais de Théodicée_ (1710).'
In admitting that Pope followed the impulse of a more powerful mind, Mr.
Pattison asserts as much perhaps as can be known with certainty as to
Bolingbroke's influence, but it is reasonable to believe that the close
intercourse of the two men did immensely sway the more impressionable,
and, so far as philosophy is concerned, the more ignorant of the two.
Mr. Pattison also overlooks the fact that Pope confessed to Warburton
that he had never read a line of Leibnitz in his life. That the poet
acknowledges his large debt to Bolingbroke, and that Bolingbroke
confesses it was due, is all that can be declared with certainty. That
which makes the _Essay_ worthy the reading is the fruit, not of the
argument but of the poetry, and for that Pope trusted to his own genius.
His attempt to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' is confused and
contradictory, and no modern reader, perplexed with the mystery of
existence, is likely to gain aid from Pope. Nominally a Roman Catholic,
and in reality a deist, apart from poetry he does not seem to have had
strong convictions on any subject, and was content to be swayed by the
opinions current in society. In undertaking to write an ethical work
like the _Essay_ his ambition was greater than his strength, yet if
Pope's philosophy does not 'find' us, to use Coleridge's phrase, it did
appeal to a large number of minds in his own day, and had not lost its
popularity at a later period. The poem has been frequently translated
into French, into Italian, and into German; it was pronounced by
Voltaire to be the most useful and sublime didactic poem ever written in
any language; it was admired by Kant and quoted in his lectures; and it
received high praise from the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart. The
charm of poetical expression is lost or nearly lost in translations, and
while the sense may be retained the aroma of the verse is gone. The
popularity of the _Essay_ abroad is therefore not easily to be accounted
for, unless we accept the theory that the shallow creed on which it is
based suited an age less earnest than our own.[22]
Pope has no strong convictions in this poem, but he has many moods. On
one page he is a pantheist, on another he says what he probably did not
mean, that God inspires men to do evil, and on a third that 'all our
knowledge is ourselves to know.' Nowhere in the argument does Pope seem
to have a firm standing, and De Quincey is not far wrong in saying that
it is 'the realization of anarchy.'
Read the poem for its poetical merits and you will forget its defects.
Pope was a superficial teacher, but direct teaching is not the end of
poetry. _The Essay on Man_ is not a poem which can be read and re-read
with ever-growing delight, but there are passages in it of as fine an
order as any that he has composed on more familiar subjects. Pope was,
as Sir William Hamilton said, a curious reader, and the ideas versified
in the poem may be traced to a variety of sources. Students who wish to
follow this track will find all the help they need in Mr. Pattison's
instructive notes, and in the comments attached to the poem in Elwin and
Courthope's edition. In his Introduction Mr. Pattison observes that 'the
subject of the _Essay on Man_ is not, considered in itself, one unfit
for poetry. Had Pope had a genius for philosophy there was no reason why
he should not have selected a philosophical subject. Didactic poetry is
a mistake if not a contradiction in terms. But poetry is not necessarily
didactic because its subject is philosophical.'
It is always difficult to define the themes suitable for poetry. Many
theories have been formed as to the scope of the art, and poets have
been amply instructed by critics as to what they ought to do, and what
they should avoid doing. The theories may appear sound, the arguments
convincing, until a great poet arises and knocks them on the head. In a
sense every poet of the highest order is also a philosopher and a
prophet who sees into 'the life of things.' Whether a philosophical
subject can be fitly represented in the imaginative light of poetry is a
matter for discussion rather than for decision. In the case of Pope,
however, it will be evident to all studious readers that he was
incapable of the continuous thought needed for the argument of the
_Essay_.
'Anything like sustained reasoning,' says Mr. Leslie Stephen,' was
beyond his reach. Pope felt and thought by shocks and electric
flashes.... The defect was aggravated or caused by the physical
infirmities which put sustained intellectual labour out of the
question.'[23]
Crousaz, a Swiss pastor and professor, who appears to have competed with
Berkeley for a prize and won it, attacked Pope's _Essay_ for its want of
orthodoxy, and his work was translated into English. The poet became
alarmed, but had the good fortune to find a champion in Warburton, who
for the rest of his life did Pope much service, not always of a
reputable kind. We shall have more to say of him later on, and it will
suffice to observe here that Warburton, who through Pope's friendship
obtained a good wife, a fortune, and a bishopric, was not a man of high
character. His sole object was to advance in life, and he succeeded.
The _Moral Essays_ as they are called, and the _Imitations from Horace_
are the final and crowning efforts of the poet's genius. They contain
his finest workmanship as a satirist, and will be read, I think, with
more pleasure than the _Dunciad_, despite Mr. Ruskin's judgment of that
poem as 'the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in
our country.'[24] It is impossible to concur in this estimate. The
imagery of the poem serves only to disgust, and the spiteful attacks
made in it on forgotten men want the largeness of purpose that lifts
satire above what is of temporary interest, making it a lesson for all
time.
Pope's venom, and the personal animosities which give the sharpest
sting, and in some instances a zest, to his verse, are also amply
displayed in the _Moral Essays_ and in the _Imitations_, but the scope
is wider in these poems, and the subjects allow of more versatile
treatment. They should be read with the help of notes, a help generally
needed for satirical poetry, but it should be remembered always that
editorial judgments are to be received with discretion and not servilely
followed. There is perhaps no danger more carefully to be shunned by the
student of literature than the habit of resting satisfied with opinions
at second-hand. Better a wrong estimate formed after due reading and
thought, than a right estimate gleaned from critics, without any thought
at all.
According to Warburton, who is as tricky as Pope himself when it suits
his purpose to be so, the _Essay on Man_ was intended to form four
books, in which, as part of the general design, the _Moral Essays_ would
have been included, as well as Book IV. of the _Dunciad_, but to have
welded these _Essays_, which were published separately, into one
continuous poem would neither have suited Pope's genius nor the
character of the poems; and how the last book of the _Dunciad_ could
have been included in such an _olla podrida_ it is difficult to
conceive. The poet was fond of projects, and this, happily for his
readers, remained one. The dates of the four _Essays_, which are really
Epistles, and appeared in folio pamphlets, run over several years, but
were afterwards re-arranged by Pope. That to Lord Burlington, _Of the
Use of Riches_ (Epistle IV.), was published in 1731, under the title,
_Of False Taste_; that to Lord Bathurst, _Of the Use of Riches_ (Epistle
III), in 1732; the epistle to Lord Cobham (Epistle I.), _Of the
Knowledge and Characters of Men_, bears the date of 1733; and that To a
Lady (Epistle II.), _Of the Characters of Women_, in 1735. Pope wrote
other Epistles, some at a much earlier period of his career, which
follow the _Moral Essays_ but are not connected with them. Of these one
is addressed to Addison, two are to Martha Blount, for whom the second
of the _Moral Essays_ was written; one to the painter Jervas, originally
printed in 1717; while another, a few lines only in length, was
addressed to Craggs when Secretary of State. Space will not allow of
examining each of the _Essays_ minutely, but there are portions of them
which call for comment.
The first _Moral Essay_, _Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men_, in
which Pope enlarges on his theory of a ruling passion, affords a
significant example of his incapacity for sustaining an argument, since
Warburton, to use his own words, entirely changed and reversed the order
and disposition of the several parts to make the composition more
coherent. That he has succeeded is doubtful, that he should have
ventured upon such a task shows where Pope's weakness lay as a
philosophical poet. It is the least interesting of the _Essays_, but is
not without lines that none but Pope could have written. _The Characters
of Women_, the subject of the second _Essay_, was not one which the
satirist could treat with justice. He saw little in the sex save their
foibles, and the lines with which it opens show the spirit that animates
the poem:
'Nothing so true as what you once let fall;
"Most women have no character at all,"
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair.'
The satire contains one of Pope's offensive allusions to Lady Mary, and
the celebrated portrait drawn from two notable women, the Duchess of
Buckingham and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, from the latter of whom
the poet, at one time, despite his unquestionable love of independence,
received £1,000. The story, like many another in the career of Pope, is
wrapt in mystery.
Pope took great pains with the Epistle _Of the Use of Riches_. It was
altered from the original conception by the advice of Warburton, who
cared more for the argument of a poem than for its poetry. The thought
and purpose of the _Essay_ are defective, notwithstanding Warburton's
effort to clear them, but these defects are of slight moment when
compared with the brilliant passages with which the poem is studded.
Among them is the famous description of the Duke of Buckingham's
death-bed which should be compared with Dryden's equally famous lines
on the same nobleman's character.
'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-heel, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies--alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay at council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen and their merry King.
No wit to flatter left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.'
There is also a covert attack in this Epistle upon the moneyed interest
represented by Walpole, and on the political corruption which he
sanctioned and promoted. Yet Pope knew how to praise the great Whig
statesman for his social qualities:
'Seen him I have, but in his happier hour
Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe,
Smile without art and win without a bribe.'
Epistle IV. pursues the same subject as the third, and deals mainly with
false taste in the expenditure of wealth, and with the necessity of
following 'sense, of every art the soul.' In this poem there is the
far-famed description of Timon's Villa, and by Timon Pope was accused of
representing the Duke of Chandos, whose estate at Canons he is supposed
to have held in scorn after having been, as he acknowledges,
'distinguished' by its master. That would not have deterred Pope from
producing a brilliant picture, and his equivocations did but serve to
increase suspicion. Probably he found it convenient to use some features
of what he may have seen at Canons while composing a general sketch with
no special application. The _Moral Essays_, it may be added, are not
especially moral, but they are full of fine things, and form a portion
of Pope's verse second only to the _Imitations from Horace_.
These _Imitations_ are introduced by the Prologue addressed to Dr.
Arbuthnot, a poem of more than common brilliancy, and also more than
commonly venomous. Nowhere, perhaps, is there in Pope's works so
powerful and bitter an attack as the twenty-five lines in the Prologue
devoted to the vivisection of Lord Hervey, which we are forced to admire
while feeling their malevolence; nowhere is there a more consummate
piece of satire than the twenty-two lines that contain the poet's
masterpiece, the character of Atticus; and nowhere, I may add, are there
lines more personally interesting. Portions of the poem were written
long before the date of publication, and this is Pope's excuse, a rather
lame one perhaps, for printing the character of Atticus and the lines on
his mother after the death of Addison and of Mrs. Pope.
'When I had a fever one winter in town,' Pope said to his friend Spence,
'that confined me to my room for some days, Lord Bolingbroke came to see
me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and in turning
it over dipt on the first satire of the second book. He observed how
well that would hit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he
was gone I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it
to press in a week or fortnight after. And this was the occasion of my
imitating some other of the satires and epistles afterwards.'
Bolingbroke did his friend a better service in giving this advice than
he had done with regard to the _Essay on Man_; and the six _Imitations_,
with the Prologue and Epilogue, which are among the latest fruits of
Pope's genius as a satirist, are also the ripest.
Warburton, writing of the _Imitations of Horace_, says: 'Whoever expects
a paraphrase of Horace or a faithful copy of his genius or his manner of
writing in these _Imitations_ will be much disappointed. Our author uses
the Roman poet for little more than his canvas; and if the old design or
colouring chance to suit his purpose, it is well; if not, he employs his
own without scruple or ceremony.'
This is true. Pope makes use of Horace when it suits his convenience,
but never follows him servilely, and quits him altogether when his
design carries him another way.
It was inevitable that he should exercise this freedom, since, as
Johnson has pointed out, there will always be an irreconcilable
dissimilitude between Roman images and English manners. Moreover, the
aim of the two poets was different, Pope's main object being to express
personal enmities and to give an exalted notion of his own virtue.
In the opening lines of his First Satire Pope follows Horace pretty
closely. Both poets complain that some persons think them too severe,
and others too complaisant; both take the advice of a lawyer, Horace of
C. Trebatius Testa, who gives him the pithiest replies; and Pope of
Fortescue. Both complain that they cannot sleep, the prescription of a
wife and cowslip wine being given by the English adviser, while Testa
advises Horace to swim thrice across the Tiber and moisten his lips with
wine. Throughout the rest of the satire Pope takes only casual glances
at the Roman original, and if in the Second Satire the English poet
follows Horace in the first few verses in recommending frugality, and in
the advice to keep the middle state, and neither to lean on this side or
on that, the resemblance between the poets is seldom striking, and the
spirit which animates them is different,--Horace being classical, and
therefore open to the apprehension of all educated readers, while Pope
is in a sense provincial, and, as I have already said with reference to
the _Dunciad_, cannot be fully enjoyed or even understood without some
knowledge of the time and of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The
Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to
imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its
humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan
World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether
of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever
is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is precisely
the portion which cannot be clothed in a foreign dress.
'Life,' said Pope, 'when the first heats are over is all down hill,' and
with him the downward progress began at a time when most men are still
standing on the summit. Never was there a more fiery spirit in so weak a
body. He suffered frequently from headaches, which he relieved by
inhaling the steam of coffee. Unfortunately he pampered his appetite and
paid a heavy penalty for doing so. Every change of weather affected him;
and at the time when most people indulge in company, he tells Swift that
he hid himself in bed. Although he sneers at Lord Hervey for taking
asses' milk he tried that remedy himself, and he frequently needed
medical aid. In his early days he was strong enough to ride on
horseback, but in later life his weakness was so great that he was in
constant need of help. M. Taine, whose criticism of Pope needs to be
read with caution, indulges in an exaggerated description of his bodily
condition, observing that when arrived at maturity he appeared no longer
capable of existing, and styling him 'a nervous abortion.' The poet's
condition was sad enough as told by Dr. Johnson, without amplifying it
as M. Taine has done. 'One side was contracted. His legs were so slender
that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were
drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress
himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness
made it very difficult for him to be clean.' After this forlorn
description of the poet's state it is a little grotesque to read that
his dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. A
distorted body often holds a generous and untainted soul. This was not
the case with Pope, and the sympathy he stood in so large a need of
himself, was seldom given to others.
In the spring of 1744 it became evident that the end was approaching.
Three weeks before his death he distributed the _Moral Epistles_ among
his friends, saying: 'Here I am, like Socrates, dispensing my morality
amongst my friends just as I am dying.' He died peacefully on May 30th,
1744, and was buried in Twickenham Church near the monument erected to
his parents.
Pope's standing among his country's poets has been the source of much
controversy. There have been critics who deny to him the name of a poet,
while others place him in the first rank. In his own century there was
comparatively little difference of opinion with regard to his merits.
Chesterfield gave him the warmest praise; Swift, Addison, and Warburton
ranked him with the peers of song; Johnson, whose discriminative
criticism reaches perhaps its highest level in his _Life of Pope_, in
reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether
Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry
to be found?' and adds that 'to circumscribe poetry by a definition will
only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall
exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's
contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the
Classical, allows that in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled
he is superior to all mankind.
In our century Bowles, whose edition of his works provoked prolonged
discussion, in which Campbell, Byron, and the _Quarterly Review_ took
part, places Pope above Dryden. Byron, with more enthusiasm than
judgment, regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry; Scott, with
generous appreciation of a genius so alien to his own, called him a
'true Deacon of the craft,' and at one time proposed editing his works,
a task projected also by Mr. Ruskin, who, putting Shakespeare aside as
rather the world's than ours, holds Pope 'to be the most perfect
representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind.' 'Matched
on his own ground,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'he never has been nor can be.'
And Mr. Lowell in the same strain observes that 'in his own province he
still stands unapproachably alone.'
What then is Pope's ground? What is this province of which he is the
sole ruler? To a considerable extent the question has been answered in
these pages, but it may be well to sum up with more definiteness what
has been already stated.
In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The
deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious.
He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is
not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which
the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent
unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights;
he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her
harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell.
These are defects indeed, but nothing is more unfair says a great French
critic than to judge notable minds solely by their defects, and in spite
of them Pope's position is so unassailable that the critic must take a
contracted view of the poet's art who questions his right to the title.
His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time; a lively
fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words
so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left
his mark upon the language so strongly. The loss to us if Pope's verse
were to become extinct cannot readily be measured. He has said in the
best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made
that classical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His
sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his
style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not
the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can
lay claim.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Some qualification may be made to these statements. Pope took
pleasure in landscape gardening on the English plan, as opposed to the
formality of the French and Dutch systems, and the design of the Prince
of Wales's garden is said to have been copied from the poet's at
Twickenham.
[12] Elwin and Courthope's _Pope_, vol. ii. p. 160.
[13] See the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.
[14] Elwin and Courthope's _Pope_, vol. v., p. 195.
[15] 'Lady Mary,' says Byron, 'was greatly to blame in that quarrel for
having encouraged Pope.... She should have remembered her own line,
'"He comes too near who comes to be denied."'
[16] _Studies in English Literature_, p. 47.--_Stanford._
[17] Quin (1693-1766) was the famous actor, and Patterson was Thomson's
deputy in the surveyor-generalship of the Leeward Isles, and ultimately
his successor.
[18] The Earl of Peterborough, the meteor-like brilliancy of whose
actions forms one of the most striking chapters in the history of his
time.
[19] _Life of Pope_, p. 216.
[20] 'Pope and Swift,' says Dr. Johnson, 'had an unnatural delight in
ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with
unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention.'
[21] Clarendon Press, Oxford.
[22] No doubt many distinguished foreigners who appreciated the beauty
of the poem had read it in the original.
[23] Stephen's _Pope_, p. 163.
[24] _Lectures on Art_, p. 70, Oxford.
CHAPTER II.
PRIOR, GAY, YOUNG, BLAIR, THOMSON.
[Sidenote: Matthew Prior (1664-1721).]
The ease with which the Queen Anne wits obtained office and rose to
posts of high trust through the pleasant art of verse-making, is
conspicuous in the career of Prior. His parents are unknown, the place
of his birth is somewhat doubtful, although he is claimed by
Wimborne-Minster, in Dorsetshire, and the first trustworthy facts
recorded of his early career are that he was a Westminster scholar when
the famous Dr. Busby, whose discipline was physical as well as mental,
presided over the school. His father died, and his mother being no
longer able to pay the school fees, Prior was placed with an uncle who
kept the Rhenish Wine Tavern in Westminster. His seat was in the bar,
and there the Earl of Dorset (1637-1705-6), a small poet, but a generous
patron of poets, found the youth reading Horace, and, pleased with his
'parts,' sent him back to Westminster, whence he went up to Cambridge as
a scholar at St. John's, the college destined a century later to receive
one of the greatest of English poets.
Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), the son of a
younger son of a nobleman, was also a Westminster scholar. He entered
Trinity College in 1679, and like Prior appears to have owed his good
fortune to the rhymer's craft. 'At thirty,' writes Lord Macaulay, 'he
would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable
vicarage and a chaplain's scarf. At thirty-seven he was First Lord of
the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Regent of the Kingdom.'
The literary history of the Queen Anne age has many associations with
his name. He proved a liberal patron of the wits, and of Pope among
them, by subscribing largely to his _Homer_; but the poet's memory was
stronger for imaginary injuries than for real benefits, and because
Halifax had patronized Tickell, he figures in the Prologue to the
Satires as 'full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill.'
Prior and Montague began their rhyming career early, and a partnership
production, entitled the _Hind and Panther, transversed to the story of
the Country Mouse and the City Mouse_ (1687), a parody of Dryden's
famous poem published in the same year, brought both authors into
notice. At the age of twenty-six Prior, who had previously obtained a
fellowship, was appointed Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague. After
that he rose steadily to eminence, became Secretary of State in Ireland,
and was finally appointed Ambassador at the French Court. High office
brings its troubles, and in those days was not without its perils. In
1711 Prior was sent secretly to Paris to negotiate a peace, for which,
when the Whigs came again into power, he was imprisoned and expected to
lose his head. While in prison, where he remained for two years
(1715-1717), the poet wrote _Alma_, a humorous and speculative poem on
the relations of the soul and body, and when released published his
_Poems_ by subscription in a noble folio, said to be the largest-sized
volume in the whole range of English poetry. He gained 4,000 guineas by
the publication, and with that sum and an estate purchased for him by
Lord Harley, Prior was able to live in comfort. He died in September,
1721, in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey,
under a monument for which he had had the vanity to pay five hundred
pounds.
The peculiar merit of Prior is better understood in our day than it was
in his own. We read his poems solely for the sake of the 'lighter
pieces,' which Johnson despised. The poet thought _Solomon_ his best
work, but no one who toils through the three books which form that poem
is likely to agree with this estimate. Dulness pervades the work like an
atmosphere, but it had its admirers in the last century, and among them
was John Wesley, who, in reply to Johnson's complaint of its
tediousness, said he should as soon think of calling the Second or Sixth
Æneid tedious. In the preface to the poem Prior declares that he "had
rather be thought a good Englishman than the best poet or greatest
scholar that ever wrote," a passage which does more honour to the poet
than any in the text. A far more popular piece was _Henry and Emma_,
which even so fine a judge of poetry as Cowper called 'inimitable.'
Tastes change, let us hope for the better, and possibly none but the
greatest poets remain unaffected by time. Assuredly Prior does not, and
_Henry and Emma_ affords a striking illustration of the contrast between
the poetical spirit of Prior's age and that which influences ours. The
poem is founded on the fine ballad of the _Nut-Browne Maide_. The story,
as originally told, is homely and quaint, written without apparent
effort and told in 360 lines. Prior requires considerably more than
twice that number, and his maid and her lover, instead of using the
simple language befitting the theme, employ the conventional machinery
of the age, and bring Jove and Mars, Cupid and Venus upon the scene,
with allusions to Marlborough's victories and to 'Anna's wondrous
reign.'
_Alma_, a poem written in Hudibrastic verse, which shows that Prior had
in a measure caught the vein of Butler, has some couplets familiar in
quotations. He won, too, not a little contemporary reputation for his
tales in verse, which are singularly coarse; but an age that tolerated
Mrs. Manley and read the plays and novels of Aphra Behn was not likely
to object to the grossness of Prior. Dr. Johnson would not admit that
his poems were unfit for a lady's table, and Wesley, who appears to have
been strangely oblivious to Prior's moral delinquencies, observes that
his tales are the best told of any in the English tongue. Cowper praised
him for his 'charming ease,' and this gift enabled him to write some of
the most delightful occasional verses produced in the century. There is
nothing more exquisite of its kind than his address, _To a Child of
Quality_, written when the child was five years old and the poet forty,
and one is not surprised to learn that Prior was admired by Thomas
Moore, who more than once caught his note. A reader familiar with Moore
and ignorant of Prior would without hesitation attribute the following
stanzas, from the _Answer to Chloe Jealous_, to the Irish poet:
'The god of us versemen (you know, Child), the sun,
How after his journeys he sets up his rest;
If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run,
At night he declines on his Thetis's breast.
'So when I am wearied with wandering all day,
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come;
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits, but thou art my home.
'Then finish, dear Cloe, this pastoral war,
And let us, like Horace and Lydia, agree;
For thou art a girl as much brighter than her
As he was a poet sublimer than me.'
"The grammatical lapse in these last two lines," says Mr. Austin Dobson,
"perhaps calls for correction, but many readers will probably agree with
Moore (_Diary_, November, 1818), 'that it is far prettier as it is.'
'Nothing,' he says truly, 'can be more gracefully light and gallant than
this little poem.'"
It was fancy and not imagination which conceived the following lines,
but how charming is the fancy! The poem, which is given in a slightly
abridged form, is addressed
'TO A LADY: SHE REFUSING TO CONTINUE A DISPUTE WITH ME, AND LEAVING ME
IN THE ARGUMENT.
'In the dispute whate'er I said,
My heart was by my tongue belied;
And in my looks you might have read
How much I argued on your side.
'You, far from danger as from fear,
Might have sustained an open fight;
For seldom your opinions err;
Your eyes are always in the right.
'Alas! not hoping to subdue,
I only to the fight aspired;
To keep the beauteous foe in view
Was all the glory I desired.
'But she, howe'er of victory sure,
Contemns the wreath too long delayed;
And, armed with more immediate power,
Calls cruel silence to her aid.
'Deeper to wound, she shuns the fight:
She drops her arms, to gain the field;
Secures her conquest by her flight;
And triumphs, when she seems to yield.
'So when the Parthian turned his steed,
And from the hostile camp withdrew;
With cruel skill the backward reed
He sent; and as he fled, he slew.'
Wit and a ready command of verse are the characteristics of Prior's
poetry. Both of these gifts are to be seen in his lively _English
ballad on the Taking of Namur by the King of Great Britain_, in which he
travesties Boileau's _Ode sur la prise de Namur_. As an epigrammatist he
reaped his advantage from a study of Martial, and in this department of
verse Prior is often successful. If brevity be a prominent merit in an
epigram, he sometimes excels his master, as, for example, in this
stanza:
'To John I owed great obligation;
But John unhappily thought fit
To publish it to all the nation;
Sure John and I are more than quit.'[25]
This is half the length of the original Latin, and what it loses in
elegance it gains in point.
It may be hoped that the next quotation is a libel on Bishop Atterbury;
if so, the lines have every merit but truth. The epigram is on the
funeral of the Duke of Buckingham, who died in 1721.
'I have no hopes,' the duke he says, and dies;
'In sure and certain hopes,' the prelate cries:
Of these two learned peers, I prithee say, man,
Who is the lying knave, the priest or layman?
The duke he stands an infidel confest;
'He's our dear brother,' quoth the lordly priest.
The duke, though knave, still 'brother dear,' he cries;
And who can say the reverend prelate lies?
Prior, it may be observed here, could say pointed things in prose as
well as in verse, and nothing can be happier than his reply to the
Frenchman's inquiry whether the King of England had anything to show in
his palace equal to the paintings at Versailles illustrating the
victories of Louis XIV: 'The monuments of my master's actions,' said the
poet, 'are to be seen everywhere except in his own house.'
It is always interesting to link poet with poet, and in relation to
Prior many readers will recall the pathetic incident related of Sir
Walter Scott when the wonderful intellect which had entranced the world
was giving indications of decay. Lockhart relates how, as they were
travelling together, a quotation from Prior led Scott to make another,
slightly altered for the occasion, and he adds:
'This seemed to put him into the train of Prior, and he repeated several
striking passages both of the _Alma_ and the _Solomon_. He was still at
this when we reached a longish hill, and he got out to walk a little. As
we climbed the ascent, he leaning heavily on my shoulder, we were met by
a couple of beggars, who were, or professed to be, old soldiers both of
Egypt and the Peninsula. One of them wanted a leg, which circumstance
alone would have opened Scott's purse-strings, though, _ex facie_, a sad
old blackguard; but the fellow had recognized his person as it happened,
and in asking an alms bade God bless him fervently by his name. The
mendicants went on their way, and we stood breathing on the knoll. Sir
Walter followed them with his eye, and planting his stick firmly on the
sod, repeated, without break or hesitation Prior's verses to the
historian Mezeray. That he applied them to himself was touchingly
obvious, and therefore I must quote them.
'"Whate'er thy countrymen have done,
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited;
And all the living world that view
Thy work, give thee the praises due,
At once instructed and delighted.
'"Yet for the fame of all these deeds,
What beggar in the _Invalides_,
With lameness broke, with blindness smitten,
Wished ever decently to die,
To have been either Mezeray,
Or any monarch he has written?
'"It strange, dear author, yet it true is,
That down from Pharamond to Louis
All covet life, yet call it pain:
All feel the ill, yet shun the cure;
Can sense this paradox endure?
Resolve me Cambray[26] or Fontaine.
'"The man in graver tragic known
(Though his best part long since was done),
Still on the stage desires to tarry;
And he who played the Harlequin,
After the jest still loads the scene,
Unwilling to retire, though weary."'
[Sidenote: John Gay (1685-1732).]
Gay, who enjoyed an unbroken friendship with the brotherhood of wits,
and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in
1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free
grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent,
apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial
employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his
life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,'
Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his
thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has as little foresight of age,
sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen.' His
weakness, it has been said, appealed to Swift's strength, and Swift,
Pope, and Arbuthnot were Gay's most faithful friends. They found
something in him to laugh at and to love. Ladies, too, treated him with
the kind of friendliness which has a touch of commiseration. In 1714 Gay
was appointed secretary to Lord Clarendon, a post which he owed to
Swift, but the death of Queen Anne in that year brought the Whigs into
office, and destroyed the poet's prospects. Prior to this he had been
secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without
money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was
Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly
always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have
begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to
provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through
nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was
eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: 'I
lodge at present in Burlington House, and have received many civilities
from many great men, but very few real benefits. They wonder at each
other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.'
Gay's first poem of any mark was _The Shepherd's Week_ (1714), six
burlesque pastorals, a subject proposed to him by Pope, who was then
smarting from the praise Philips had received in _The Guardian_. But if
Pope meant Gay to poke his fun at Philips in _The Shepherd's Week_, he
must have been disappointed, for the poems were accepted as genuine
bucolics, and although humorously absurd, are, to say the least, more
true to rustic life than the pastorals either of Philips or of Pope.
_The Shepherd's Week_ was followed by _Trivia_ (1715), a piece suggested
by Swift's _City Shower_. It is one of Gay's most notable productions,
not as a poem, but as a vivid description of the streets of London
nearly two hundred years ago. The great reputation he obtained as the
author of _The Fables_ (1727), and still more of _The Beggar's Opera_
(1728), the idea of which was suggested to Gay by Swift, survived him
for some years. _The Fables_ were written for and dedicated to the
youthful Duke of Cumberland, who is asked to "accept the moral lay, and
in these tales mankind survey." There is skill and ingenuity in the
poems, but higher merit they cannot boast, and young readers are likely
to prefer the illustrations which generally accompany _The Fables_ to
the letterpress. Many of Gay's allusions are beyond the apprehension of
the young, and have a political flavour. _The Beggar's Opera_ was
intended as a burlesque of the Italian opera, which had been long the
laughing-stock of men of letters, and as the play was thought to have
political significance, and the character of Macheath to be a portrait
of Walpole, it was received with enthusiasm, and acted in London for
about sixty nights. So popular did the opera become, that ladies carried
about the songs on their fans.
Eight years before, Gay had published his poems by subscription, and in
those happy days for versemen had gained £1,000 by the venture. He put
the money into South Sea stock, and lost it all. For _The Beggar's
Opera_ he received about £800. It was followed by _Polly_, a play of the
same coarse character, which, for political reasons, was not allowed to
be acted. The result was that it had a large sale, and put money in
Gay's purse. Ten thousand five hundred copies are said to have been
printed in one year, and the £1,200 realized by the sale were very
wisely retained for the poet's use by the Duke of Queensberry, under
whose roof he had at length found a warm nest. To the student Gay is
chiefly interesting as the only noteworthy poet of the period, south of
the Tweed, gifted with a lyrical capacity. Two or three of his songs and
ballads, and especially _Black-Eyed Susan_, have a charm beyond the
reach of the mechanical versifier. But the art of song is at a low level
even in the hands of Gay. The lyric which the Elizabethan and Jacobean
poets loved so well, and of which the present century has produced
specimens to be matched only by Shakespeare, may be said to have been
lost to English poetry for the first half of the last century, since
neither Prior's verse, delightful though it be, nor the songs of Gay,
have enough of the poetical element to form exceptions to this
statement.
In his _Tales_ he follows Prior in grossness, while inferior to him in
art. Like the greater number of the Queen Anne poets, Gay flatters with
a free hand. In an epistle addressed to Lintot, the bookseller, he
declares that Anacreon lives once more in Sheffield, and Waller in
Granville, that Buckingham's verse will last to distant time; while Ovid
sings again in Addison, and 'Homer's _Iliad_ shines in his _Campaign_.'
One of the liveliest and most graceful of Gay's poems is addressed to
Pope 'On his having finished his translation of Homer's _Iliad_.' It is
called _A Welcome from Greece_, and describes the friends who assembled
to greet the poet on his return to England.
Three stanzas from the Epistle shall be quoted:
'Oh, what a concourse swarms on yonder quay!
The sky re-echoes with new shouts of joy;
By all this show, I ween 'tis Lord Mayor's day;
I hear the voice of trumpet and hautboy--
No, now I see them near.--Oh, these are they
Who come in crowds to welcome thee from Troy.
Hail to the bard, whom long as lost we mourned
From siege, from battle, and from storm returned!
'What lady's that to whom he gently bends?
Who knows not her? Ah! those are Wortley's eyes:
How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends!
For she distinguishes the good and wise.
The sweet-tongued Murray near her side attends;
Now to my heart the glance of Howard flies;
Now Hervey, fair of face, I mark full well,
With thee Youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepell.
'I see two lovely sisters hand in hand,
The fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown;
Madge Bellenden, the tallest of the land;
And smiling Mary, soft and fair as down.
Yonder I see the cheerful Duchess stand,
For friendship, zeal, and blithesome humours known;
Whence that loud shout in such a hearty strain?
Why, all the Hamiltons are in her train!'
Gay's love of good living was known to all his friends. 'As the French
philosopher,' Congreve wrote, 'used to prove his existence by _cogito
ergo sum_, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is _edit ergo est_.'
For a long time his health compelled him to give up wine, and he tells
Swift that he had also left off verse-making, 'for I really think that
man must be a bold writer who trusts to wit without it.' He was
dispirited, he told Swift not long before his death, for want of a
pursuit, and found 'indolence and idleness the most tiresome things in
the world.'
Gay died in 1732 at the Duke of Queensberry's house, and Pope grieved
that one of his nearest and longest ties was broken. He was interred, to
quote Arbuthnot's words, 'as a peer of the realm,' in Westminster Abbey.
The superficial character of the poet may be seen in his couplet
transcribed upon the monument:
'Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.'
[Sidenote: Edward Young (1684-1765).]
Gay's moderate gift of song was withheld from the famous author of the
_Night Thoughts_. Yet Young was vain enough to think that he possessed
it, and wrote a patriotic ode called _Ocean_, preceded by an elaborate
essay on lyric poetry. He also produced _Imperium Pelagi_ (1729), _A
Naval Lyric written in Imitation of Pindar's spirit_. The lyric, which
was travestied by Fielding in his _Tom Thumb_,[28] reads like a
burlesque, and badly treated though Pindar was by the versemen of the
last century, there is perhaps not one of them who mocks him more
outrageously than Young. He says that this ode is an original, and no
critic is likely to dispute the assertion.
Young was born in 1684 at Upham, near Winchester, his father, who was
afterwards Dean of Sarum, being at that time the rector of the village.
Edward was placed upon the foundation at Winchester College, and
remained there until he was eighteen. He was then sent up to New
College, and afterwards removed to Corpus. At the age of twenty-seven he
was nominated to a law fellowship at All Souls, and took his degree of
B.C.L. and his doctor's degree some years later. Characteristically
enough he began his poetical career by _An Epistle to Lord Lansdowne_
(1712), who is praised for his heavenly numbers, and is said to have
been born "to make the muse immortal." His next poem of any consequence,
_The Last Day_, written in heroic couplets, and filling three books, is
correct, or fairly so, in versification, and execrable in taste. Young,
it may be supposed, wished to produce a sense of solemnity in the
treatment of his theme, and he does so by lamenting that the very land
'where the Stuarts filled an awful throne' will in that day be
forgotten. The want of taste which so often deforms Young's verse is
also seen in the imagery he employs to illustrate the fear which even
good men may have on appearing before that 'dread tribunal.'
'Thus the chaste bridegroom, when the priest draws nigh,
Beholds his blessing with a trembling eye;
Feels doubtful passions throb in every vein,
And in his cheeks are mingled joy and pain,
Lest still some intervening chance should rise,
Leap forth at once, and snatch the golden prize,
Inflame his woe, by bringing it so late,
And stab him in the crisis of his fate.'
His next poem, _The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love_, was
suggested by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford, a
subject chosen for a tragedy by John Banks (1694), by Rowe in 1715, and
treated with considerable dramatic power in our own day by Ross Neil. In
Young's hands this fine theme becomes a rhetorical exercise without
poetry and without pathos. A few lines will suffice to show the style of
the poem. Jane and Dudley, it must be premised, are imprisoned in a
gloomy hall:
'What can they do? They fix their mournful eyes--
Then Guildford, thus abruptly: "I despise
An empire lost; I fling away the crown;
Numbers have laid that bright delusion down;
But where's the Charles, or Dioclesian, where,
Could quit the blooming, wedded, weeping fair?
Oh! to dwell ever on thy lip! to stand
In full possession of thy snowy hand!
And thro' the unclouded crystal of thine eye
The heavenly treasures of thy mind to spy!
Till rapture reason happily destroys,
And my soul wanders through immortal joys!
Give me the world, and ask me, where's my bliss?
I clasp thee to my breast and answer, this."'
Verse of this quality, which might be amply quoted, is of interest to
the student of literature, since in Young's day it passed current for
poetry. But in accepting his claims as a poet the faith of the age must
have been often strained.
Walpole, who despised the whole tribe of poets, and cared nothing for
literature, had by some strange chance awarded to Young a pension of
£200 a-year, whereupon in a piece called _The Instalment_, addressed to
Sir Robert, Britain is called upon to behold
'His azure ribbon and his radiant star,'
and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:
'The streams of royal bounty turned by thee
Refresh the dry domains of poesy.
My fortune shows, when arts are Walpole's care,
What slender worth forbids us to despair:
Be this thy partial smile from censure free,
'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.'
Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in
a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part
of the Book of Job, one of the noblest poems the world possesses, and
translated in our authorized version in language not to be surpassed for
dignity and simplicity.
In 1719 his _Busiris_ was performed. _The Revenge_, a better known
tragedy, written on the French model, followed in 1721, and kept the
stage for some time. Seven years later _The Brothers_, his third and
last tragedy, was in rehearsal, but the poet, who had lately taken holy
orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full
of sound and fury, are destitute of tragic power. _The Revenge_, in
which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so,
despite much rant and fustian, has _Busiris_. Plenty of blood is shed,
of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy
is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this
happy result, _Busiris_ and _The Revenge_ are followed by indecent
epilogues, in which the speakers jest at the feelings which the plays
may have excited. For _The Brothers_ Young wrote his own epilogue. It is
decent and dull. His genius was better fitted for satire than for the
drama, and _The Universal Passion_, which consists of seven satires
published in a collected form in 1728, brought him reputation and money.
The poet Crabbe was never more surprised in his life than when John
Murray (the famous 'My Murray' of Byron) gave him £3,000 for the
copyright of his poems; Young received the same sum for work
immeasurably inferior in value, and in a less legitimate way. Two
thousand pounds, it is stated, was a gift from the Duke of Grafton, who
said it was the best bargain he ever made, as the satires were worth
£4,000. Young, it will be seen, preceded Pope as a satirist. He is more
generous and humane, and has none of the venomous attacks on living
persons by which Pope added piquancy to his verse. But he is a careless
writer, and for the most part lacks the exquisite precision, the subtle
wit, the rhythmical felicity, which make the couplets of Pope so
memorable. _The Dunciad_, the _Moral Essays_, and the _Imitations_ are
read by all lovers of literature, but _The Universal Passion_ is
forgotten. Of the six satires, the two on women are the most spirited,
and may be compared with Pope's on the same subject. The different
foibles, and faults worse than foibles of the women of that day are
exhibited with a satirist's licence, and occasionally with a Pope-like
terseness. Take the following, for example:
'There is no woman where there's no reserve,
And 'tis on plenty your poor lovers starve.'
'Few to good breeding make a just pretence;
Good breeding is the blossom of good sense.'
'A shameless woman is the worst of men.'
'Naked in nothing should a woman be,
But veil her very wit with modesty.'
It was not until he was nearly fifty that Young, disappointed of the
preferment he sought, took holy orders, and in 1730 accepted the college
living of Welwyn, in Herts, which he held till his death.
In the following year the poet married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a daughter of
the Earl of Lichfield, a union that lasted ten years. One son was the
offspring of this marriage. Lady Elizabeth had a daughter by a former
marriage, who was married to Mr. Temple, a son of Lord Palmerston, and
shortly before her own death she lost both daughter and son-in-law, who,
there can be little doubt, are the Philander and Narcissa of the _Night
Thoughts_, the earlier books of which were published in 1742. This once
celebrated poem, written in his old age, is the one effort of Young's
genius that has enjoyed a great popularity. It suited well an age which,
while far from moral, delighted in moral treatises and in didactic
verse. In the _Night Thoughts_ Young remembers that he is a clergyman,
and puts on his gown and bands. He puts on also his singing robes, and
shows the reader what none of his earlier poems prove, that he is in the
presence of a poet.
The _Night Thoughts_ is remarkable in its finest passages for a strong,
but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts
Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank
verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in
great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while
the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in
single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to
injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and
Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative
treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops
the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false
sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the
writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous
expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality
of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for
antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due
to poetical inspiration:
'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He, who made him such!
Who centered in our make such strange extremes
From different natures, marvellously mixed,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity;
A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt!
Though sullied and dishonoured still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a god!--I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: How reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man!
Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave:
Legions of angels can't confine me there.'
The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable
illustration of Young's style:
'As when a traveller, a long day past
In painful search of what he cannot find,
At night's approach, content with the next cot,
There ruminates awhile, his labour lost;
Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,
And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,
Till the due season calls him to repose;
Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men,
And dancing with the rest the giddy maze
Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career;
Warned by the languor of life's evening ray,
At length have housed me in an humble shed,
Where, future wandering banished from my thought,
And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,
I chase the moments with a serious song.
Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.'
While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor,
he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of
bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than
with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:
'This is the desart, this the solitude,
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
This is creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom,
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed.'
and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says:
'What is the world itself? Thy world--a grave.
Where is the dust that has not been alive?
The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;
From human mould we reap our daily bread;
The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes,
And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.
O'er devastation we blind revels keep;
Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel.'
[Sidenote: Robert Blair (1699-1746).]
On laying down the _Night Thoughts_ the student may be advised to read
Blair's _Grave_, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed
in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young,
and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than
upon purely poetical models.' _The Grave_, which was written before the
publication of the _Night Thoughts_,[29] abounds with poetical
felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination,
and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the
piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.
'Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity
To those you left behind, disclose the secret?
Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out,--
What 'tis you are and we must shortly be.
I've heard that souls departed have sometimes
Forewarned men of their death. 'Twas kindly done
To knock and give the alarm. But what means
This stinted charity? 'Tis but lame kindness
That does its work by halves. Why might you not
Tell us what 'tis to die? Do the strict laws
Of your society forbid your speaking
Upon a point so nice?--I'll ask no more:
Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your shine
Enlightens but yourselves. Well, 'tis no matter;
A very little time will clear up all,
And make us learn'd as you are, and as close.'
Blair, who was a Scotch clergyman, wrote also an _Elegy in Memory of
William Law_, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, whose
daughter he married. He writes in a masculine and homely style. His
imagery is often more powerful than pleasing, but some of his similes
win attention by their beauty. For example:
"Look how the fair one weeps! the conscious tears
Stand thick as dewdrops on the bells of flowers."
Among the victims claimed by the grave is
'The long demurring maid,
Whose lonely unappropriated sweets
Smiled, like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.'
And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:
'Night dews fall not more gently to the ground
Nor weary worn out winds expire so soft.'
Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler
had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of
them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are
poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins.
Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover,
Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic
distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least
significant poems.
[Sidenote: James Thomson (1700-1748).]
Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as
great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for
satire. To pass to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town
for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of _The
Seasons_, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men
back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed,
shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in
his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to
use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought
face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns
the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.
James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September
11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and
there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He
began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good
sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early
age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father,
who was a Presbyterian minister, wishing that his son should follow the
same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a
pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of
more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to
gain a tutorship in London, his companion also started for the
metropolis in search of money and fame. It was a desperate venture, and
the young poet's difficulties were increased by the loss of his letters
of introduction. Scotchmen however have always countrymen willing to
help them, and Thomson whose pedigree on the mother's side connected him
with the famous house of Home, found temporary employment as tutor to a
child of Lord Binning who belonged by marriage to the same family.
Afterwards he resided with Millan, a bookseller at Charing Cross, and
then having finished _Winter_ (1726), on which he had been at work for
some time, he sold it to the publisher for three guineas. Before long
it was read and warmly praised by Aaron Hill, then a man of mark in the
world of letters. Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, to whom the poem was
dedicated, gave the poet twenty guineas for the compliment; Rundle, the
Bishop of Derry, and several ladies of rank cheered him with their
praise, and Thomson's success was assured. It was the age of patrons,
and he practised without shame and without discrimination the art of
flattery. Each book of _The Seasons_ had a dedication, and the honour
was one for which some kind of payment was expected. _Summer_ appeared
in 1727 and _Spring_ in the year following. In 1729 the appearance of
_Britannia_ showed the popularity of the poet and of his theme, for
three editions were sold. It is a distinctly party poem, and contains an
attack upon Walpole--whom he had previously praised as the 'most
illustrious of patriots'--for submitting to indignities from Spain. The
British Lion roars loudly in it, but there is more of fustian in the
piece than of true patriotism. 'How dares,' the poet exclaims, 'the
proud Iberian rouse to wrath the masters of the main:'
'Who told him that the big incumbent war
Would not ere this have rolled his trembling ports
In smoky ruin? and his guilty stores,
Won by the ravage of a butchered world,
Yet unatoned, sunk in the swallowing deep,
Or led the glittering prize into the Thames?'
In February, 1729-30, Thomson's tragedy of _Sophonisba_, a subject
previously chosen by Marston (1606), and by Lee (1676), was acted at
Drury Lane. The play was dedicated to the queen, and on the opening
night the house was crowded, but the success of the piece was slight.
Thomson's genius was not dramatic, and while his characters declaim,
they do not act. His next play, _Agamemnon_ (1738), was not lost for
want of labour or of friends. Pope appeared in the theatre on the first
night, and was greeted with applause. The Prince and Princess of Wales
were present on another occasion, but the play did not live long. His
third attempt, _Edward and Eleanora_, was prohibited by the Lord
Chamberlain, since it was supposed to praise the Prince of Wales at the
expense of the Court. In 1740 the _Masque of Alfred_, by Thomson and
Mallet, was performed. _Tancred and Sigismunda_ followed in 1745, and
this tragedy, in which Garrick played the leading part, had at the time
a considerable measure of success. The plot is more interesting than
that of _Sophonisba_, and the characters are more life-like. Despite its
effusive sentiment, Garrick's splendid acting would, no doubt, make the
tragedy effective on the stage, but it does not add to the literary
reputation of the poet. _Coriolanus_, Thomson's last drama, was not
performed upon the stage until the year after his death.
Voltaire, who had met Thomson and liked him--the liking, indeed, seemed
to be universal--praised his tragedies for being 'elegantly writ.' 'It
may be,' he says, 'that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough,
but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the
greatest esteem.' The value of Voltaire's criticism of an English
dramatist is best appreciated by remembering his ignorant judgment of
Shakespeare.
Thomson's laurels were gained in another field of poetry. On the
production of _Autumn_ in 1730, _The Seasons_ in its complete form was
published by subscription in quarto. The four books, as we have already
said, appeared at different times, _Winter_ being the first in order and
_Autumn_ the latest. The Hymn with which the poem concludes may be
compared, and will not greatly suffer in the comparison, with Adam's
morning hymn in the fifth book of _Paradise Lost_, and with Coleridge's
_Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni_. Like them it is raised, to use the
poet's own words, to an 'Almighty Father.' A brief extract shall be
given:
'His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills;
And let me catch it as I muse along.
Ye headlong torrents, rapid, and profound;
Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze
Along the vale; and thou, majestic main,
A secret world of wonders in thyself,
Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice
Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall.
Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
In mingled clouds to Him, whose sun exalts,
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.
Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him;
Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.
* * * * *
Great source of day! best image here below
Of thy Creator, ever pouring wide,
From world to world, the vital ocean round,
On Nature write with every beam His praise.
The thunder rolls: be hushed the prostrate world;
While cloud to cloud returns the solemn hymn.
Bleat out afresh, ye hills; ye mossy rocks
Retain the sound: the broad responsive low,
Ye valleys, raise; for the Great Shepherd reigns,
And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come.'
Swift complains that the _Seasons_, being all descriptive, nothing is
doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's
best gift--imagination--and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm
of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.
Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge
observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his
account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the
ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he
observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is
faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can
be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar
scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper
shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of
description, shall be quoted from _Winter_:
'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun,
Faint from the west, emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,
Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,
And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is--
Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous of heart and hard beset
By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more unpitying men, the garden seeks
Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad-dispersed
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'
Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though
his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the
imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in _Summer_
of a sand-storm in the desert.
'Breathed hot
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide, glittering waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert! even the camel feels,
Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast.
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,
Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,
Commoved around, in gathering eddies play;
Nearer and nearer still they darkening come;
Till with the general all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise;
And by their noonday fount dejected thrown,
Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills, the caravan
Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets
The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'
The _Seasons_ was at one time, and for many years the most popular
volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage,
and passages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The
appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and
Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the
popularity of the _Seasons_ was a healthy sign, and the poem, a
forerunner of Cowper's _Task_, brought into vigorous life, feelings and
sympathies that had been long dormant.
Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its
progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and
accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all
times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely
young Lavinia' the following graceful passage is said, but on very
doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.[30] The first line, given
for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:
'Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self,
Recluse amid the close-embowering woods;
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eye,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;
So flourished, blooming and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compelled
By strong necessity's supreme command
With smiling patience in her looks she went
To glean Palemon's fields.'
Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had
won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the
poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the
Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse
on _Liberty_, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent
upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain
of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of _Liberty_, that
it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse.
Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made
Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at
Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and
lived amicably.
Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died,
and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord
Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do
so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince
of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical
posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of £100 a year. There was no
certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was
withdrawn.
_The Castle of Indolence_ (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's
life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of _The
Seasons_ in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the
poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an
enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new
light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with _The
Seasons_, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and
the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the
vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a
veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas
into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'
'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side,
With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round,
A most enchanting wizard did abide,
Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found.
It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground;
And there a season atween June and May
Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned,
A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,
No living wight could work, ne carèd even for play.'
There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear,
capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages
are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and
Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically
suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to
remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases,
since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of
prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his
successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the
'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of
'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'
of
'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'
of the summer wind
'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'
and of the Hebrid-Isles
'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'
a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth
descriptive of the cuckoo:
'Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.'
Thomson did not live long after the publication of _The Castle of
Indolence_. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended
fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a
Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her
marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die
for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat
than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits,
constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death
than Amanda's cruelty.
Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each
other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century
afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that,
like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many
friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, _The
Seasons_ and _The Castle of Indolence_, and on a song which has gained a
national reputation. Apart from _Rule Britannia_, which appeared
originally in the _Masque of Alfred_ and is spirited rather than
poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but
from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge
Thomson.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] See _Martialis Epigrammata_, book v. lii.
[26] Fénelon was Archbishop of Cambray.
[27] _The Poetical Works of Gay_, edited, with Life and Notes, by John
Underhill, 2 vols.
[28]
'I'll swim through seas; I'll ride upon the clouds;
I'll dig the earth; I'll blow out every fire;
I'll rave; I'll rant; I'll rise; I'll rush; I'll war;
Fierce as the man whom smiling dolphins bore
From the prosaic to poetic shore.
I'll tear the scoundrel into twenty pieces.'
'The reader,' Fielding adds in a note, 'may see all the beauties of this
speech in a late ode called a _Naval Lyric_.'
[29] Written but not published. The earlier books of the _Night
Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, the _Grave_ in 1743, but in a letter dated
Feb. 25th, 1741-2, Blair in transmitting the MS. of the poem to a friend
states that the greater portion of it was composed several years before
his ordination ten years previously. Southey states that Blair's _Grave_
is the only poem he could call to mind composed in imitation of the
_Night Thoughts_, but the style as well as the date contradicts this
judgment.
[30] The tradition is founded on a volume in the British Museum
containing MS. corrections supposed to be in Pope's handwriting. It is
now, however, the opinion of experts that the writing is not Pope's. If
he be the author, it is the only example of blank verse which we have
from his pen.
CHAPTER III.
MINOR POETS.
Sir Samuel Garth--Ambrose Philips--John Philips--Nicholas
Rowe--Aaron Hill--Thomas Parnell--Thomas Tickell--William
Somerville--John Dyer--William Shenstone--Mark Akenside--David
Mallet--Scottish Song-Writers.
[Sidenote: Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18).]
In Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party
feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig
physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he
appears to have been universally beloved.
Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted
a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice,
and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The _Dispensary_
(1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of
Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem,
which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it passed through
several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may
therefore be granted to the _Dispensary_. Few modern readers, however,
will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in
Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem 'is only inferior in
humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the _Rape of
the Lock_.' It would be far more accurate to say that the _Dispensary_
has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of
any kind.
The following passage upon death is the most vigorous, and is
interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his
Mother's Picture:[31]
''Tis to the vulgar Death too harsh appears,
The ill we feel is only in our fears;
To die is landing on some silent shore
Where billows never break, nor tempests roar;
Ere well we feel th' friendly stroke 'tis o'er.
The wise through thought th' insults of death defy,
The fools through blest insensibility.
'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave;
Sought by the wretch and vanquished by the brave.
It eases lovers, sets the captive free,
And though a tyrant, offers liberty.'
Addison in defending Garth in the _Whig-Examiner_ from the criticisms of
Prior in the _Examiner_, the organ of the Tory party, says he does not
question but the author 'who has endeavoured to prove that he who wrote
the _Dispensary_ was no poet, will very suddenly undertake to show that
he who gained the battle of _Blenheim_ is no general.' The comparison
was an unfortunate one. Marlborough's military reputation has grown
brighter with time, Garth's fame as a poet has long ago ceased to exist.
A literary although not a poetical interest is associated with the name
of "well-natured Garth," who, as Pope acknowledges, was one of his
earliest friends; like Arbuthnot, he lived among the wits, and as a
member of the famous Kit-cat Club he wrote verses upon the Whig beauties
toasted by its members. His name is linked with Dryden's as well as with
that of his illustrious successor. It will be remembered how, on the
death of Dryden, the poet's body lay in state in the College of
Physicians, and how, before the great procession started for
Westminster Abbey, Sir Samuel, who was then President, delivered a Latin
oration.
Garth died in January, 1717-18, and, according to Pope, was a good
Christian without knowing it. Addison, however, who visited Garth in his
last illness, told Dr. Berkeley that he rejected Christianity on the
assurance of his friend Halley that its doctrines were incomprehensible,
and the religion itself an imposture. According to another report which
comes through Pope, he actually 'died a papist.'
[Sidenote: Ambrose Philips (1671-1749).]
Ambrose Philips, who belonged, like Tickell, to Addison's 'little
senate,' was born in 1671, and educated at St. John's, Cambridge. His
_Pastorals_ were published in Tonson's _Miscellany_ (1709), and the same
volume contained the _Pastorals_ of Pope. Log-rolling was understood in
those days, and Philips's verses received warm praise in more than one
number of the _Guardian_, the writer in one place declaring that there
have been only four masters of the art in above two thousand years:
'Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to
his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born,
Philips.'
Pope's _Pastorals_ were not mentioned, and in revenge he devised the
consummate artifice of sending an anonymous paper to the _Guardian_, in
which, while appearing to praise Philips, he exalted himself. Steele
took the bait, and considering that the essay depreciated Pope would not
publish it without his permission, which was of course readily granted.
'From that time,' says Johnson, 'Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual
reciprocation of malevolence.'
Philips's tragedy, _The Distrest Mother_ (1712), a translation, or
nearly so, of Racine's _Andromaque_, was puffed in the _Spectator_. It
is the play to which Sir Roger de Coverley was taken by his friends, and
the representation supplied the good knight with an opportunity for
much humorous comment.
'When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's
importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she would
never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence,
"You cannot imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow." Upon
Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his
head, and muttered to himself, "Ay, do if you can." This part dwelt so
much upon my friend's imagination that at the close of the third Act, as
I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, "These widows,
sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray," says he,
"you that are a critic, is this play according to your dramatic rules,
as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be
understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do
not know the meaning of."'[32] Addison also inserted and praised in the
_Spectator_ Philips's translations from Sappho (Nos. 223, 229).
His odes to babes and children earned for him the _sobriquet_ of 'Namby
Pamby,' 'a term which has been incorporated into the English language to
designate mawkish sentiment. Namby was the infantine pronunciation of
Ambrose, and Pamby was formed by the first letter of Philips's surname
and that reduplication of sound which is natural to lisping
children.'[33]
Between simplicity and absurdity the line is a narrow one, and Philips
stepped over it when he wrote to a child in the nursery--
'Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling,
All caressing, none beguiling;
Bud of beauty, fairly blowing,
Every charm to nature owing.'
The longest of his baby songs is addressed to the Hon. Miss Carteret, in
which he pictures the child's progress to womanhood, and anticipates her
future loveliness and maiden reign:
'Then the taper-moulded waist
With a span of ribbon braced;
And the swell of either breast,
And the wide high-vaulted chest;
And the neck so white and round,
Little neck with brilliants bound;
And the store of charms which shine
Above, in lineaments divine,
Crowded in a narrow space
To complete the desperate face;
These alluring powers, and more,
Shall enamoured youths adore;
These and more in courtly lays
Many an aching heart shall praise.'
The inventory of the maiden's physical charms which follows includes
veiny temples, sloping shoulders, a hazely lucid eye, and cheek of
health; but in the category the only allusion to the attractions of
intellect and heart is in a couplet foretelling her
'Gentleness of mind,
Gentle from a gentle kind.'
That Philips translated _The Persian Tales_ is indelibly recorded by
Pope:
'The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown,
Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown,
Just writes to make his barrenness appear,
And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.'
But even Pope could award praise to Philips. In a letter to Henry
Cromwell, in 1710, he observes that he was capable of writing very
nobly, 'as I guess by a small copy of his, published in the _Tatler_, on
the Danish winter;' and two years later he says to his friend Caryll:
'Mr. Philips has two lines which seem to me what the French call very
_picturesque_, that I cannot omit to you:
'All hid in snow in bright confusion lie,
And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye!'
The lines, not quite accurately quoted by Pope, are from an epistle,
addressed to Lord Dorset from Copenhagen, which contains a few striking
couplets, two of which may be transcribed before bidding adieu to
Ambrose Philips:
'The vast leviathan wants room to play,
And spout his waters in the face of day.
The starving wolves along the main sea prowl,
And to the moon in icy valleys howl.'
[Sidenote: John Philips (1676-1708).]
Ambrose Philips must not be confounded with his namesake John, the
author of a clever burlesque of Milton, called _The Splendid Shilling_
(1705); of _Blenheim_ (1705), a poem which he was urged to write by the
Tories in opposition to Addison's _Campaign_; and of a poem upon _Cider_
(1706), in 'Miltonian verse,' which seems to have afforded several
suggestions to Pope in his _Windsor Forest_. It is said to display a
considerable knowledge of the subject, and in that its principal merit
consists. From _The Splendid Shilling_ a brief extract may be given:
'So pass my days. But when nocturnal shades
This world envelop, and th' inclement air
Persuades men to repel benumbing frosts
With pleasant wines, and crackling blaze of wood;
Me, lonely sitting, nor the glimmering light
Of make-weight candle, nor the joyous talk
Of loving friend delights; distressed, forlorn,
Amidst the horrors of the tedious night,
Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal thoughts
My anxious mind; or sometimes mournful verse
Indite, and sing of groves and myrtle shades,
Or desperate lady near a purling stream,
Or lover pendent on a willow tree.
Meanwhile I labour with eternal drought
And restless wish, and rave; my parched throat
Finds no relief, nor heavy eyes repose.
But if a slumber haply does invade
My weary limbs, my fancy still awake,
Thoughtful of drink, and eager, in a dream
Tipples imaginary pots of ale
In vain; awake I find the settled thirst
Still gnawing, and the pleasant phantom curse.'
'Philips,' says the poet Campbell, 'had the merit of studying and
admiring Milton, but he never could imitate him without ludicrous
effect, either in jest or earnest. His _Splendid Shilling_ is the
earliest and one of the best of our parodies; but _Blenheim_ is as
completely a burlesque upon Milton as _The Splendid Shilling_, though it
was written and read with gravity, ... yet such are the fluctuations of
taste that contemporary criticism bowed with solemn admiration over his
Miltonic cadences.'
[Sidenote: Nicholas Rowe (1673-1718).]
Nicholas Rowe had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made
Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are
without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's
_Pharsalia_, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version in 1614,
and his plays entitle him to a place, though not a high one, in our
dramatic literature.
Rowe edited an edition of Shakespeare, and should have known his author,
yet in a prologue he declares that he could not draw women--an amazing
assertion echoed by Collins, who praises Fletcher for his knowledge of
the 'female mind,' and adds that 'stronger Shakespeare felt for man
alone.'
The chronological list of Rowe's dramas runs as follows: _The Ambitious
Step-mother_ (1700); _Tamerlane_ (1702); _The Fair Penitent_ (1703);
_Ulysses_ (1705); _The Royal Convert_ (1707); the _Tragedy of Jane
Shore_ (1714); and the _Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey_ (1715). Measured by
his contemporary dramatists he is a distinguished playwright. His
characters do not live, but he could invent effective scenes, though in
some cases the poet's taste may be questioned.
For many years _Tamerlane_ was acted at Drury Lane on the anniversary of
King William's landing in England, and under the names of Tamerlane and
Bajazet the king is belauded at the expense of Louis XIV. _The Fair
Penitent_, a piece even more successful upon the stage, will still
please the reader, though he may question the high eulogium of Johnson,
that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the
fable, and so delightful by the language." Rowe has not the tragic power
which can express passion without rant, and pathos without extravagance.
In _The Fair Penitent_ Calista gives utterance to her feelings by piling
up expletives. Thus, when her husband attacks the lover who has ruined
her, she exclaims, 'Destruction! fury! sorrow! shame! and death!' and,
on another occasion, she cries out, 'Madness! confusion!' words which
give a sense of the ludicrous rather than of the tragic; and so also
does Calista's last utterance when, addressing Altamont, she says:
'Had I but early known
Thy wondrous worth, thou excellent young man
We had been happier both--now 'tis too late!'
Rowe may be regarded as the principal representative of tragedy in the
'age of Pope,' but his respectable work shows a fatal degeneration from
the 'gorgeous tragedy' of the Elizabethans.
[Sidenote: Aaron Hill (1684-1749).]
Aaron Hill, unlike Rowe, was not distinguished as a dramatist, and
succeeded only in two or three adaptations from the French. His claims
as a poet are also insignificant. He was born in London in 1684, with
expectations that were not destined to be realized, but Fortune was not
unkind to him. His uncle, Lord Paget, Ambassador at Constantinople, gave
the youth a warm welcome, supplied him with a tutor, and sent him to
travel in the East. On Lord Paget's return to England, Hill accompanied
him, and together they are said to have visited a great part of Europe.
Some time later Hill went abroad again, and was absent two or three
years. For awhile--it could not have been long--he was secretary to the
Earl of Peterborough, and at the age of twenty-six, his good star being
still in the ascendant, he married a young lady 'of great merit and
beauty, with whom he had a very handsome fortune.' Hill was then
appointed manager of Drury Lane, and he wrote a number of plays, the
very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in
his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight
books of a long and unfinished epic called _Gideon_, which I suppose no
one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he
wrote a poem on _The Judgment Day_, a theme attempted also, shortly
before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced
a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem called _The Northern
Star_, a panegyric on Peter the Great, is said to have passed through
several editions. The poem does not prove Hill to be a poet, but it
shows his command of the heroic couplet. The style of the poem, which
is an indiscriminate panegyric, may be judged from the following lines:
'Transcendent prince! how happy must thou be!
What can'st thou look upon unblessed by thee?
What inward peace must that calm bosom know,
Whence conscious virtue does so strongly flow!
* * * * *
Such are the kings who make God's image shine,
Nor blush to dare assert their right divine!
No earth-born bias warps their climbing will,
No pride their power, no avarice whets their skill.
They poise each hope which bids the wise obey,
And shed broad blessings from their widening sway;
To raise the afflicted, stretch the healing hand,
Drive crushed oppression from each rescued land,
Bold in alternate right, or sheath or draw
The sword of conquest, or the sword of law;
Spare what resists not, what opposes bend,
And govern cool, what they with warmth defend.'
Hill has the merit of having turned the tables upon Pope, who had put
him into the treatise on the _Bathos_, and then into the _Dunciad_,
where, however, the lines have more of compliment than censure, since he
is made to mount 'far off among the swans of Thames.' Irritated by a
note in the _Dunciad_, Hill replied in a long poem entitled _The
Progress of Wit, a Caveat_, which opens with the following pointed
lines:
'Tuneful Alexis, on the Thames' fair side,
The ladies' plaything, and the Muses' pride;
With merit popular, with wit polite,
Easy though vain, and elegant though light;
Desiring, and deserving others' praise,
Poorly accepts a fame he ne'er repays;
Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves,
And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves.'
In a letter to Hill Pope complained of these lines, and had the
hypocrisy to say that he never thought any great matters of his poetical
capacity, but prided himself on the superiority of his moral life. Hill
returned a masterly and incisive reproof to this ridiculous statement,
in the course of which he says:
'I am sorry to hear you say you never thought any great matters
of your poetry. It is in my opinion the characteristic you are
to hope your distinction from. To be honest is the duty of every
plain man. Nor, since the soul of poetry is sentiment, can a
great poet want morality. But your honesty you possess in common
with a million who will never be remembered; whereas your poetry
is a peculiar, that will make it impossible that you should be
forgotten.'
He adds that if Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would
have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the
writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the
wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were
unknown to you?'
Aaron Hill, though he could write a sensible letter, was not a wise man.
He was 'everything by turns and nothing long.' Poetry was but one of his
accomplishments, and we are told that he cultivated it 'as a relaxation
from the study of history, criticism, geography, physic, commerce,
agriculture, war, law, chemistry, and natural philosophy, to which he
devoted the greatest part of his time.'
As a poet Hill has the facility in composition exhibited by so many of
his contemporaries, and he has occasionally a pretty turn of fancy. His
last labour was the successful adaptation of Voltaire's _Merope_ to the
English stage (1749); sixteen years before he had adapted _Zara_ with
equal success.
[Sidenote: Thomas Parnell (1679-1718).]
Among the minor poets of the period an honourable place must be given to
Parnell, who possessed the soul of a poet, but gave limited expression
to it, for it was only during the later years of a short life that he
discovered where his genius lay. The friend of Pope, Arbuthnot, and
Swift, his biography has been written by Johnson, and more discursively
by his countryman Goldsmith.
Thomas Parnell was born in Dublin, 1679, entered Trinity College at the
early age of thirteen, and in 1700 obtained the degree of Master of
Arts. Having taken orders he gained preferment in the Church, became, in
1706, Archdeacon of Clogher, and through the recommendation of Swift
obtained also a good living. Parnell was fond of society, and was
accustomed as often as possible to join the wits in London. He was a
member of the Scriblerus Club, wrote for the _Spectator_, preached
eloquent sermons, and had the ambition of a poet. But the loss of his
wife preyed upon his mind, and he is said, though I believe chiefly on
Pope's authority, to have given way to intemperance. He died suddenly at
Chester at the age of thirty-nine in 1718.
Parnell was one of the poets whose fortunes Swift did his best to
promote. Writing in 1712, he says, 'I gave Lord Bolingbroke a poem of
Parnell's. I made Parnell insert some compliments in it to his lordship.
He is extremely pleased with it, and read some parts of it to-day to
Lord Treasurer, who liked it as much. And indeed he outdoes all our
poets here a bar's length.' And a month later he writes, 'Lord
Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily, and it is pleasant to see that one
who hardly passed for anything in Ireland, makes his way here with a
little friendly forwarding.'
_The Hermit_, the _Hymn to Contentment_, an _Allegory on Man_, and a
_Night Piece on Death_, give Parnell his title to a place among the
poets. _The Rise of Woman_, and _Health, an Eclogue_, have also much
merit, and were praised by Pope (but this was to their author) as 'two
of the most beautiful things he ever read.' The story of _The Hermit_,
written originally in Spanish, is given in _Howell's Letters_
(1645-1655), and is admirably told by Parnell, but much that he wrote,
including a series of long poems on Scripture characters, is poetically
worthless. His poems, published five years after his death, were edited
by Pope, who wisely suppressed some pieces unworthy of the poet. Then,
as now, literary scavengers were at work. In 1758 the suppressed poems
were published, and called forth the comment from Gray, 'Parnell is the
dunghill of Irish Grub Street.' To Parnell Pope was indebted for the
_Essay on Homer_ prefixed to the translation, with which he does not
seem to have been well pleased. He complained of the stiffness of the
style, and said it had cost him more pains in the correcting than the
writing of it would have done.
If Parnell's prose has the defect of stiffness, his lines glide with a
smoothness that must have satisfied the ear of Pope. The higher
harmonies of verse were unknown to him, but ease is not without a charm,
and in illustration of Parnell's gift the final lines of _A Night Piece
on Death_ shall be quoted:
'When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a king of fears am I!
They view me like the last of things,
They make and then they draw my stings.
Fools! if you less provoked your fears,
No more my spectre form appears.
Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God;
A port of calms, a state to ease
From the rough rage of swelling seas.
Why then thy flowing sable stoles,
Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles,
Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds,
Long palls, drawn hearses, covered steeds,
And plumes of black that as they tread,
Nod o'er the scutcheons of the dead?
Nor can the parted body know,
Nor wants the soul these forms of woe;
As men who long in prison dwell,
With lamps that glimmer round the cell,
Whene'er their suffering years are run,
Spring forth to greet the glittering sun;
Such joy, though far transcending sense,
Have pious souls at parting hence.
On earth and in the body placed,
A few and evil years they waste;
But when their chains are cast aside,
See the glad scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad wing, and tower away,
And mingle with the blaze of day.'
[Sidenote: Thomas Tickell (1686-1740).]
Tickell wished to be remembered as the friend of Addison, and with
Addison his name is indissolubly associated. The poem dedicated to the
essayist's memory is perhaps over-praised by Macaulay when he says that
it would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved
incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom
he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which
Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The _Prospect of Peace_, which passed
through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not
assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit of the
time The style of the poem may be judged from these lines:--
'Accept, great Anne, the tears their memory draws,
Who nobly perished in their sovereign's cause;
For thou in pity bidd'st the war give o'er,
Mourn'st thy slain heroes, nor wilt venture more.
Vast price of blood on each victorious day!
(But Europe's freedom doth that price repay.)
Lamented triumphs! when one breath must tell
That Marlborough conquered and that Dormer fell.'
His _Colin and Lucy_ called forth high praise from Goldsmith as one of
the best ballads in our language, and Gray terms it the prettiest ballad
in the world. Three stanzas from this once famous poem shall be
quoted:--
'"I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.
By a false heart and broken vows,
In early youth I die;
Was I to blame because his bride
Was thrice as rich as I?
'"Ah, Colin, give not her thy vows,
Vows due to me alone;
Nor thou, fond maid, receive his kiss,
Nor think him all thy own.
To-morrow in the church to wed,
Impatient, both prepare!
But know, fond maid, and know, false man,
That Lucy will be there!
'"Then bear my corse, my comrades, bear,
This bridegroom blithe to meet,
He in his wedding trim so gay,
I in my winding-sheet."
She spoke, she died; her corse was borne
The bridegroom blithe to meet,
He in his wedding trim so gay,
She in her winding-sheet.'
There is some fancy but no imagination in the machinery of Tickell's
long poem on _Kensington Gardens_, a title which recalls Matthew
Arnold's exquisite stanzas. But the pathetic beauty of Arnold's lines
belongs to a world of poetry wholly unlike that in which even the best
of the Queen Anne poets lived and moved.
Tickell's translation of the first book of the _Iliad_ led to the
quarrel already mentioned in the account of Pope. He wrote, also, a
rather lengthy poem on Oxford, in which there is some absurd criticism
of insignificant poetasters, and, as a matter of course, an extravagant
eulogium of Addison.
The few facts recorded of Tickell's life may be summed up in a
paragraph. He was born in 1686 at Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and entered
Queen's College, Oxford, in 1701. In 1708 he obtained his M.A. degree,
and two years later was chosen Fellow. For sixteen years Tickell held
his fellowship, but resigned it on his marriage in 1726. In a poem
addressed to the lady before marriage, he asks whether
'By thousands sought, Clotilda, canst thou free
Thy crowd of captives and descend to me?'
Praise which in those days would be regarded as fulsome secured the
friendship and patronage of Addison, who employed him in public affairs,
and when he became Secretary of State made Tickell Under-Secretary. To
him Addison left the charge of editing his works, which were published
by subscription, and appeared in four quarto volumes in 1721. In 1725 he
was made secretary to the Lord Justices of Ireland, 'a place of great
honour,' which he held until his death in 1740. The praise of
Wordsworth, a poet always chary of expressing approbation, has been
bestowed upon Tickell. 'I think him,' he said, 'one of the very best
writers of occasional verses.'
[Sidenote: William Somerville (1692-1742).]
Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a
fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote
_The Chase_ (1735), a poem in blank verse. He was born at Edston, in
Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first
family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had
the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among
other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little
about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone
writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced
to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains
of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing
to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. 'I loved him for
nothing so much,' said Shenstone, 'as for his
flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'
In _The Chase_ Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but
knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its
poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a
variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his principal poem is
written. In an address _To Mr. Addison_, the couplet,
'When panting Virtue her last efforts made,
You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'
is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom
attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together
in a way that is far from happy:
'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies
Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes,
Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart
With equal genius, but superior art.'
Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville,
who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have
remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation
of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had
to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view
his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost
universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must
have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.
[Sidenote: John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).]
In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the
Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life
poetical materials in _The Fleece_ (1757), a poem in four books of blank
verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and
intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in
_Grongar Hill_ (published in the same year as Thomson's _Winter_), a
poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the
first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition
which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His
chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by
the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with
bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys.
Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:
'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile compleat,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,'
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.'
Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for _The
Country Walk_, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into
the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn
from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he
writes:
'I am resolved this charming day
In the open field to stray,
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the gods do tread.
Before the yellow barn I see
A beautiful variety
Of strutting cocks, advancing stout,
And flirting empty chaff about;
Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood,
And turkeys gobbling for their food;
While rustics thrash the wealthy floor,
And tempt all to crowd the door.
* * * * *
And now into the fields I go,
Where thousand flaming flowers glow,
And every neighbouring hedge I greet
With honey-suckles smelling sweet;
Now o'er the daisy meads I stray
And meet with, as I pace my way,
Sweetly shining on the eye
A rivulet gliding smoothly by,
Which shows with what an easy tide
The moments of the happy glide.'
_An Epistle to a Friend in Town_, records his satisfaction with the
country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward
stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with
everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to
Dyer's heart:
'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain
We heap up in sin and in sorrow!
Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain!
Is not life to be over to-morrow?
Then glide on my moments, the few that I have,
Smooth-shaded and quiet and even;
While gently the body descends to the grave,
And the spirit arises to heaven.'
Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested
a poem in blank verse, _The Ruins of Rome_ (1740). After his return to
England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have
been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in
Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in
Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good
fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter
to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than
almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, _To the Poet,
John Dyer_, writes:
'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled
For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade
Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced,
Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,
A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay,
Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray
O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste;
Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!'
[Sidenote: William Shenstone (1714-1764).]
'The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in
Shenstone,' and he calls his _Schoolmistress_ the 'prettiest of poems.'
William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot
upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In
1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some
years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted
to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This
was followed by the _Judgment of Hercules_ (1741), and by the
_Schoolmistress_ (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his
estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 'to point
his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to
wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made
his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the
skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.'
On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical
inscriptions, its hanging woods, and 'wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone
appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante,
and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead,
and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the
_Pastoral Ballad_ and the _Schoolmistress_.
The ballad written in anapæstic verse has an Arcadian grace, against
which even Johnson's robust intellect was not proof. For the following
lines he says, 'if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance
with love or nature':
'When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt in my heart!
Yet I thought--but it might not be so--
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew,
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.
The _Schoolmistress_, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of
simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character,
and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach
by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.
From the verses _Written at an Inn in Henley_ three stanzas may be
quoted. The last will be already known to readers familiar with their
Boswell:
'I fly from pomp, I fly from plate,
I fly from falsehood's specious grin!
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an inn.
'Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me freedom at an inn!
'Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.'
Unhappily this final verse, which Johnson is said to have repeated 'with
great emotion,' has lost its application. The modern traveller, instead
of being warmly welcomed at an inn, loses his identity and becomes a
number.
[Sidenote: Mark Akenside (1721-1770).]
Akenside, who was born at Newcastle, 1721, received his education in
Edinburgh, where he was sent to prepare for the ministry among the
Dissenters. He, however, changed his mind, became a medical student, and
finally, though much disliked for his manners, gained reputation as a
physician in London. He is stated to have been excessively stiff and
formal, and a frigid stiffness marks the _Pleasures of Imagination_
(1744), a remarkable work considering the writer's age, since it is
without the faults of youth. The poem is founded on Addison's _Essays_
on the subject in the _Spectator_, and the poet also owes a considerable
debt to Shaftesbury. Akenside's blank verse has the merits of dignity
and strength. But the work is as cold as the author's manners were said
to be, and in spite of what may be called poetical power, as distinct
from a high order of inspiration, the poem leaves the reader unmoved.
Pope, who saw it in MS., said that Akenside was 'no everyday writer,'
which is a just criticism. The _Pleasures of Imagination_ has the merits
of careful workmanship and of some originality, but the interest which
it at one time excited is not likely to be revived. In 1757 Akenside
re-wrote the poem, and I believe that no critic, with the exception of
Hazlitt, regards the second attempt as an improvement on the first. His
skill in the use of classical imagery is seen to advantage in the _Hymn
to the Naiads_ (1746), and he deserves praise, too, for his
inscriptions, which are distinguished for conciseness and vigour of
style. The poet, it may be added, wrote a great number of odes that lack
all, or nearly all, the qualities which should distinguish lyrical
poetry. Not a spark of the divine fire warms or illuminates these
reputable verses, but the author states that his chief aim was to be
correct, and in that he has succeeded.
[Sidenote: David Mallet (1700-1765).]
David Mallet, a friend or acquaintance of Thomson, was contemptible as a
man and comparatively insignificant as a poet. He did a large amount of
dirty work, and appears to have made a good income by it. The base
character of the man was known to Bolingbroke, of whose basest purpose
he made him the instrument (see c. vii.). Mallet's ballad of _William
and Margaret_ (1724) is known to many readers, and so is the inferior
ballad _Edwin and Emma_, which was written many years afterwards. In
1728 he published _The Excursion_, a poem not sufficiently significant
to prevent Wordsworth from selecting the same title. In Mallet's poem on
_Verbal Criticism_ (1733), Johnson states that he paid court to Pope,
and was rewarded by a travelling tutorship gained through the poet's
influence. In 1731 his tragedy, _Eurydice_, was acted at Drury Lane. He
joined Thomson, as we have said elsewhere, in the composition of the
masque of _Alfred_, and 'almost wholly changed' the piece after
Thomson's death. _Amyntor and Theodora_, a long poem in blank verse,
appeared in 1747; _Britannia_, a masque, in 1753, and _Elvira_, a
tragedy, in 1763. Mallet, who was without qualifications for the task,
wrote a life of Lord Bacon. He is said to have obtained a pension for
inflaming the mind of the public against Admiral Byng, and thereby
hastening his execution.
In Anderson's edition of the poets, Mallet's biography is related with
more fulness than by Dr. Johnson, and, after frankly recording acts
which fully justify Macaulay's statement that Mallet's character was
infamous, the writer adds, 'his integrity in business and in life is
unimpeached.'
SCOTTISH SONG-WRITERS.
When the poets of England were writing satires, moral essays, and
elaborate didactic treatises, the poets of Scotland were singing, in
bird-like notes, songs of humour and of love. It is remarkable that the
Scotch, the shrewdest, hardest, and most business-like people in these
islands, should be so richly endowed with a gift shared and enjoyed by
rich and poor alike. The most exquisite of English lyrics fall, where
culture is wanting, on regardless ears; the songs of Ramsay and of
Burns, of Lady Anne Lindsay and Jane Elliot, of Hogg and Lady Nairne, of
Tannahill and Macneil, are household words in Scotland to gentle and
simple. A few of the choicest songs of Scotland are due to ladies of
rank, but the larger number have sprung from 'the huts where poor men
lie.' Ramsay was a barber and wig-maker; Burns, as all the world knows,
followed the plough; Tannahill was a weaver; Hogg a shepherd; and Robert
Nicoll the son of a small farmer, 'ruined out of house and hold.'
[Sidenote: Allan Ramsay (1686-1758).]
Allan Ramsay was, born at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, in 1686, and was
therefore Pope's senior by two years. He has been called 'the restorer
of Scottish poetry,' and by his compilation of _The Evergreen_ (1724),
and of _The Tea-Table Miscellany_, published in the same year, he
gathered up the wealth of song scattered through the country. _The
Miscellany_ extended to four volumes, and before the poet's death had
reached twelve editions. An undying interest belongs to both
anthologies. _The Evergreen_ was the first poetry Walter Scott perused,
and in a marginal note on his copy of _The Tea-Table Miscellany_ he
writes: 'This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of
it I was taught _Hardiknute_ by heart before I could read the ballad
myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever
forget.' The ballad Scott loved so well, I may say in passing, was
written as a whole or in part by Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727),[35] and
belongs therefore either to our period or to the later years of the
seventeenth century.
In 1725 Ramsay published _The Gentle Shepherd_, a pastoral that puts to
shame the numerous semi-classical and mythological poems which appeared
under that name in England. It is essentially a rural poem, in which the
action and language harmonize with what we know, or think we know, of
country manners and life. There is neither striking invention in the
plot nor much individuality in the characters, but there is poetical
harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest
to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. _The Gentle Shepherd_ is
the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than
his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly
without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of
service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a
successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man
of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the
High Street of Edinburgh, and finally retired to a villa which he had
built for himself on the Castle Hill. A good-humoured, care-defying man,
he enjoyed life in an easy way, and was not disposed to repine when his
road lay down the hill. In an epistle to a friend he writes:
'And now in years and sense grown auld,
In ease I like my limbs to fauld,
Debts I abhor, and plan to be
From shackling trade and dangers free;
That I may, loosed frae care and strife,
With calmness view the edge of life;
And when a full ripe age shall crave,
Slide easily into my grave.'
Among the Scottish song-writers of the period may be mentioned Robert
Crawford (1695?-1732), whose love verses, written in a conventional
strain, are not without music; Lord Binning (1696-1732), the author of a
pretty song called _Ungrateful Nanny_; and William Hamilton of Bangour
(1704-1754), who wrote the well-known _Braes of Yarrow_. The most
charming of Scottish lyrics belong, however, to a later period of the
century than the age of Pope.
* * * * *
The student who reads the minor poets who figured, in some cases with
much applause, during the years of Pope's ascendency, will be struck by
the almost total absence from their works of creative power. These
rhymers wrote for the age, and illustrate it, but they did not write for
all time, and a small volume would suffice to hold all their verse which
is of permanent value. Too often they imagined that by the composition
of flowing couplets they proved their title to rank with inspired poets.
They confounded the art of verse-making with the divine art of poetry,
and were not aware that the substance of their work is prose. Now and
then the digger in this mine will discover a small nugget of gold, but
for the most part the interest called forth by the poets mentioned in
the present chapter, is more historical than poetical, and the reader in
passing to the great prose writers of the age will be conscious of gain
rather than of loss.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Cowper's line,
'Where tempests never beat nor billows roar,'
is not an improvement upon Garth's. Tempests, it has been justly said,
do not beat.
[32] The _Spectator_, No. 335.
[33] Elwin and Courthope's _Pope_, vol. vii., p. 62.
[34] Edward Young tried his skill on the same theme in a poetical
epistle to Tickell, but his lines are leaden and his praise absurd.
Addison's glory was so great, he says, as a statesman and a patriot,
that
'It borders on disgrace
To say he sung the best of human race.'
[35] To Lady Wardlaw Dr. Robert Chambers attributed twenty-five ballads,
and among them several of the finest we possess, which are regarded as
ancient by every other authority. If the assumption were proved, this
lady would hold a distinguished and unique position among the poets of
the Pope period, but there is absolutely no ground for the theory so
zealously advocated by Chambers.
PART II.
THE PROSE WRITERS