Chapter XV: Part 15

Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,
And patience had to cultivate our thoughts,
Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage
Would honor this than did the Grecian stage.”

It is a curious comment on these verses in favor of careful writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his own meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of “cultivating our thoughts,” when he means “pruning our style”; he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect equanimity to tell us that a nobler “rage” (that is, madness) than that of Greece would follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and not the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on the “Double Dealer.” He begins by stating the received theory about the improvement of English literature under the new _régime_, but the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.

“Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,
The present age in wit obscures the past;
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arm[42] and dint of wit.
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;
And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood;
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured,
Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued;
Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength;
Our builders were with want of genius curst,
The second temple was not like the first.”

There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller’s verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on “cultivated.” Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine,--Dryden, one of the most truly English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in the century and a half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, of our literature.

Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had written a _reasonable_ tragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians,--and it will be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden,--“Their productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in the midst of their night; ... it seems sometimes that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere.” _Eh bien_, the inference is that we must try and make it so! The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in Paris? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played master of ceremonies to introduce the _bizarre_ Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called his whilome _protége_ a buffoon.

The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in politics and religion had been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself.

The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton was willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was that Fame

“Which the clear spirit doth raise
To scorn delights and live laborious days,”

to the crown of a good preacher who sets

“The hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire”?

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer which Pulci’s Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:--

“To tell thee truly,
My faith in black’s no greater than in azure,
But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,
And in good wine my faith’s beyond all measure.”[43]

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not toward God. The very shamelessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham.

It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral and emotional as well as the intellectual side, should be produced by such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was. The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts of society to as great perfection as was possible by the _a priori_ method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of careless ease and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it be _safe_? about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy? The effect of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest where its success had been most marked, in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, lay in its tendency to confound what was common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority at the expense of all free movement of the mind.

There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, could write,

“My passion has no April in her eyes:
I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle;
My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle
Slight drops.”[44]

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose judgments the higher principles of æsthetics have been formulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the soul of it should subordinate the outward parts; while the artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the form.

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the “Maid’s Tragedy”:--

“Nor is’t less strange such mighty wits as those
Should use a style in tragedy like prose;
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.”

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff’s law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses “describe” in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart! Phillips touches the true point when he says, “And the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in rime.”[45] But let us test Waller’s method by an example or two. His monarch made _reasonable_, thus discourses:--

“Courage our greatest failings does supply,
And makes all good, or handsomely we die.
Life is a thing of common use; by heaven
As well to insects as to monarchs given;
But for the crown, ’t is a more sacred thing;
I’ll dying lose it, or I’ll live a king.
Come, Diphilus, we must together walk
And of a matter of importance talk.”
[_Exeunt._

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the _exeunt_ at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or “suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:--

“’T was in compassion of our woe
That nature first made poisons grow,
For hopeless wretches such as I
Kindly providing means to die:
As mothers do their children keep,
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.
The indisposed she does invite
To go to bed before ’tis night.”

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:--

“Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Be teachers of my story. Do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look
Like sorrow’s monument; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation.”

What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here!

We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks,--

“Then why should those who pick and choose
The best of all the best compose,
And join it by Mosaic art,
In graceful order, part to part,
To make the whole in beauty suit,
Not merit as complete repute
As those who, with less art and pain,
Can do it with their native brain?”

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is this power of finding out what _is_ “the best of all the best.”

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I. could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that ever was spoken.” The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says, “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but as a poet he represents something more,--nothing less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter.

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it.

But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one; and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand _it_; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspiration in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for both.

The very earliest of Pope’s productions give indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance:--

“You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,
Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
And carrying with you all the world can boast,
To all the world illustriously are lost!”

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope’s Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting indifference to the world by which it would have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.

In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest:--

“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood:
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore
Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things,--

“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”

In “Windsor Forest” we find the same thing again:--

“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung,
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue;
O early lost, what tears the river shed
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on every note expire,
And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,

“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo”;

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century.

“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves;
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,
And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade;
He lifts the tube and levels with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death;
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air.”

Now one would imagine that the _tube_ of the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,--

“Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,”

* * * * *

“They fall and leave their little lives in air,”

for example.

In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have become proverbial; such as

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”;

“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”;

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“For each ill author is as bad a friend.”

In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the singular _discretion_ which the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope’s understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.

I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called _acquired_, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.

The “Rape of the Lock” was written in Pope’s twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,--a circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the “Dispensary.” The idea was taken from that entertaining book “The Count de Gabalis,” in which Fouquè afterward found the hint for his “Undine”; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation of Pope’s fancy.

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a _great_ passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:--

“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while _it_ is not degraded, _they_ are shown in their triviality. The “clouded cane,” as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:--

“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda:--

“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
The light militia of the lower sky;
These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,
Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring.
As now your own our beings were of old,
And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould;
Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are dead;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,
And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.
For when the fair in all their pride expire,
To their first elements their souls retire;
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
Mount up and take a salamander’s name;
Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;
The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,
In search of mischief still on earth to roam;
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
And sport and flutter in the fields of air.”

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery:--

“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,
Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;
’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,
Thy eyes first opened on a _billet-doux_.”

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:--

“Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, _billet-doux_.”

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,

“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies,
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high,
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!”

And so, when the conflict begins:--

“Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air;
Weighs the men’s wits against the ladies’ hair;
The doubtful beam long nods from side to side;
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside.”

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punishments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious:--

“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 silver 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 wheel,
In fumes of burning chocolate, shall glow,
And tremble at the sea that froths below!”

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, is equally good:--

“Methinks already I your tears survey,
Already hear the horrid things they say,
Already see you a degraded toast,
And all your honor in a whisper lost!
How shall I then your helpless fame defend?
’Twill then be infamy to seem your friend!
And shall this prize, the inestimable prize,
Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes,
And heightened by the diamond’s circling rays,
On that rapacious hand forever blaze?
Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow,
And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow,
Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall,
Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!”

So also Belinda’s account of the morning omens:--

“’Twas this the morning omens seemed to tell;
Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell;
The tottering china shook without a wind;
Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind.”

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace, where

“The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,”

was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the “Midsummer-night’s Dream,” an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the “Essay on Man.” It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question,--that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness,--from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy,--lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this “Essay on Man.” For example, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than reason:--

“See him from Nature rising slow to art,
To copy instinct then was reason’s part;
Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake;--
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take;
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the birds the physic of the field;
The arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave;
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale.”

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term “nature” is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures! As if reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have already quoted from the “Rape of the Lock” he talks of _casting_ shrieks to heaven,--a performance of some difficulty, except when _cast_ is needed to rhyme with _last_.

But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke,--a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he _did_ know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton’s championship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody:--

“Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings;
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man,
A mighty maze,--but not without a plan”;

To expatiate _o’er_ a mighty maze is rather loose writing but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,

“A mighty maze of walks without a plan”;

and perhaps this came nearer Pope’s real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention _this_ variation in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:--

“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate;
All but the page prescribed, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who would suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
O, blindness to the future kindly given
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven!
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world!”

Now, if “heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” why should not the lamb “skip and play,” if he had the reason of man? Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to _our own_ future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,

“Heaven,
_Who_ sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.”

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.” It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirty-first verse: “Fear ye not, therefore, _ye are of more value_ than many sparrows.”

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one:--

“Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way:
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To _be_ contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire,
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before:--

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is but always to be blest;
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely _being_, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the “solar walk” (as he calls it) and “milky way” to do with the affair? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy? Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told that it is the “untutored mind” of the savage which “sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind,” we are rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.”

So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,--clearness. If he did _not_, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope’s precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse.

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron’s, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than _execution_, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this?

“At length Erasmus, that great, injured name,
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove those holy vandals off the stage.”

It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused:--

“Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies,
Which no one looks in with another’s eyes,
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint,
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint.”

The use of the word “applies” is perfectly un-English; and it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad,

“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sickening stars fade off _the ethereal plain_.”

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much regard to fitness of imagery; in the “Essay on Man,” for example:--

“Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite;
These ’tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes man can man destroy?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure’s smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind.”

Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of “pleasure’s smiling train” and the “family of pain.” And in the Moral Essays,

“Know God and Nature only are the same;
In man the judgment shoots at flying game,
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found,
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground.”

The “judgment shooting at flying game” is an odd image enough; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now under ground, could be found nowhere--out of Goldsmith’s Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something without basis in truth, as where he ranks together “Macedonia’s madman and the Swede,” and says that neither of them “looked forward farther than his nose,” a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as where he makes “Socrates _bleed_.”

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired:--

“Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.”

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any page.

“Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns,
Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns;
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight,
This quits an empire, that embroils a state;
The same adust complexion has impelled,
Charles to the convent, Philip to the field.”

Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable _this_ set off by the inevitable _that_, and wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional “frown” would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admirably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading again:--

“Peace to all such: but were there one whose fires
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease;
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise,
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike,
Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And _so_ obliging that he ne’er obliged;
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause,
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise;--
Who but must laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”

With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever written. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse.

In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who ever had a mother or sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates.

“O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,
She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear,
She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules,
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her humor most when she obeys;
Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will,
Disdains all loss of tickets or codille,
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all
And mistress of herself, though china fall.”

The last line is very witty and pointed,--but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” says, speaking of us “who live in the latter ages of the world”: “We have little else to do left us but to represent the _common sense_ of mankind, in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.” I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope’s merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor’s prose sentences about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton’s “Comus”: “The religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution: it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society.... And though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself.” _This_ is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. Take these verses of Chapman, for example:--

“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman’s counsel: her winged spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with noble words
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure;
The weaker body, still the stronger soul.
O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth
Makes a man’s life so nighly bound to heaven.
She gives him double forces to endure
And to enjoy, being one with him,
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense:
If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short;
If he lament, she melts herself in tears;
If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir,
She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape,
Himself divinely varied without change.
All store without her leaves a man but poor,
And with her poverty is exceeding store.”

Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of a _bourgeois_ and of the back parlor, more than of the poet and the muse’s bower. A man’s mind is known by the company it keeps.