Chapter XVI: Part 16

Now it is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be; but if God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet’s nature left, will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm.

However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One’s mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, “Fair Virtue,” classed among the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to love her was a liberal education”?

Even in the “Rape of the Lock,” the fancy is that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton’s Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy:--

“The walls of spider’s legs were made,
Well mortised, and finely laid;
(He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:)
The windows of the eyes of cats,
And, for the roof, instead of slats
’Tis covered with the skins of bats,
With moonshine that are gilded.”

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognized.

Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to have suspected his sincerity; but artifice more than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. I think that there was very little real malice in him, and that his “evil was wrought from want of thought.” When Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends the most illustrious men of his time.

The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interesting than that of any other eminent English poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have the same fault of being labored compositions. Southey’s are, on the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as Pope’s certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the character of the writer. Pope’s are altogether too full of the proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain that they were mostly addressed to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader’s mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,--of an attempt to look as an eminent literary character should rather than as the man really was. They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring to look his best. We never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope’s correspondents, Swift shows in the most dignified and, one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would substitute “discomforting consciousness of the public” for “insincerity” in judging Pope’s character by his letters. He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that makes Walpole’s elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope would seem to have kept a commonplace-book of phrases proper to this or that occasion; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, from one correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not for this curious economy of his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague without a conviction that they were written by a lover. Indeed, I think nothing short of the _spretæ injuria formæ_ will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable armor of superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a woman to have had two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope’s conduct in this affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind who had rejected him,

“Not, then, to her, that scornéd thing so base,
But to myself the blame, that lookt so high;
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant
To simple swain, sith her I may not love,
Yet that I may her honor paravant
And praise her worth, though far my wit above;
Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief
And long affliction which I have endured.”

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had all been written in the interests of literature and morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would have been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence but for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer defence of _Cato_ in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man whose critical judgment he dreaded; and the great man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference as impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling that Pope’s satire is not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of one whose expressed preferences in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds of the satirist’s own popularity. We shall not so easily give up the purest and most dignified figure of that somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by Pope was of the flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second edition of the “Rape of the Lock,” saying that the poem was _merum sal_ before. Let any one ask himself how he likes an author’s emendations of any poem to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope’s letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his correspondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray.

Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part of his works “is of the _didactic_, _moral_, and _satiric_; and, consequently, not of the most _poetic_ species of _poetry_; whence it is manifest that _good sense_ and _judgment_ were his characteristical excellences rather than _fancy_ and _invention_.” It is plain that in any strict definition there can be only one kind of poetry, and that what Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what Johnson says in his “Life of Pope,” though he does not name Warton. The dispute on this point went on with occasional lulls for more than a half-century after Warton’s death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused Warton’s critical opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mistook the functions of an editor, and maladroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate of the author’s character.[46] Thirteen years later, Campbell, in his “Specimens,” controverted Mr. Bowles’s estimate of Pope’s character and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called “the invariable principles of poetry.” This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman’s son, whereupon the affair became what they call on the frontier a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, though with various fortune. The last shot, in what had grown into a thirty years’ war, between the partisans of what was called the Old School of poetry and those of the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had. and though, in a vague way, æsthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the whole controversy (though all the combatants more or less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, that without clearness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether in prose or verse; in other words that, while precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that here was the true knot of the question, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron’s admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries. Pope’s assailants went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere trainbearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be defined as careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accordingly he tells us that “his great, I will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry.”[47] Lessing, with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his statement; for where Pope, as in the “Rape of the Lock,” found a subject exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem in the language.

It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and a quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But there are two modes of uttering such things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope’s verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, the language habitual to him was that of conversation and society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range of associations was of that narrow kind which is always vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty of Dryden in his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much resembles), as an author with whom the gift of writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which is so purely prose as his; and yet, in any impartial criticism, the “Rape of the Lock” sets him even as a poet far above many men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he.

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual men, rather than of human nature, if to be the highest expression which the life of the court and the ball-room has ever found in verse, if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four generations make a man a great poet,--then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled.

THE END.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

The evening lamps looks=> The evening lamp looks {pg 51}

Que s’oblida e s laissa cazer=> Que s’oblida es laissa cazer {pg 347}

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance.

[2] They made their appearance again this summer (1870).

[3] One of Mr. Lincoln’s neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous.

[4] The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son.

[5] Apropos of his Frederick the Great.

[6] Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.”

[7] _Publications of the Chaucer Society._ London. 1869-70.

_Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères._ Par E. G. SANDRAS, Agrégé de l’Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.

_Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert._ Von WILHELM HERTZBERG. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674.

_Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde._ Von ALFONS KISSNER. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.

[8] Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” To these Mr. Bradshaw (and there can be no higher authority) would add “The Court of Love,” the “Dream,” the “Praise of Woman,” the “Romaunt of the Rose,” and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there is strong ground, both moral and æsthetic, for adding the “Parson’s Tale.”

[9] Fauriel, _Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale_, Vol. I. _passim_.

[10] Allegat ergo pro se lingua _Oil_ quod propter sui faciliorem et delectabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimæ et quamplures aliæ historiæ ac doctrinæ. That Dante by _prosaicum_ did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, _numeros lege solutos_, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 _seq._ and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows his _faciliorem el delectabiliorem_ from the _plus diletable et comune_ of his master Brunetto Latini.

[11]

“My ears no sweeter music know
Than hauberk’s clank with saddlebow,
The noise, the cries, the tumult blown
From trumpet and from clarion.”

[12] Compare Floripar in _Fierabras_ with Nausikäa, for example.

[13] If internal evidence may be trusted, the _Lai de l’Espine_ is not hers.

[14] _Sir Eger and Sir Grine_ in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted is from Ellis.

[15] I think he tried one now and then, like “eyen _columbine_.”

[16] Commonly printed _hath_.

[17] Froissart’s description of the book of traités amoureux et de moralité, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. “Et lui plut très grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il é’tait enluminé, écrit et historié et couvert de vermeil velours à dis cloux d’argent dorés d’or, et roses d’or au milieu, et à deux grands fremaulx dorés et richement ouvrés au milieu de rosiers d’or.” How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together with _et_ after _et_! But two centuries earlier, while the _jongleurs_ were still in full song, poems were also read aloud.

“Pur remembrer des ancessours
Les faits et les dits et les mours,
Deit l’en les livres et les gestes
Et les estoires _lire a festes_.”--_Roman du Rou._

But Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.

[18] One of the very worst, be it said in passing.

[19] Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan _commandëment_, _chapëlain_, _surëly_, and a score of others? Whence the Scottish _bonny_, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending in _y_?

[20] Poésies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 168.

[21] Le Roman de la Rose, Tome II. p. 890.

[22] Rutebeuf, Tome I. pp. 203 seqq. 304 seqq.

[23] From the “Craft of Lovers,” attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but too bad even for him.

[24] Here the received texts give “So pray I _to_ God.” Cf. “But Reason said him.” T. & C.

[25] Corrected from Kissner, p. 18.

[26] Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins’s Ode.

[27] London: John Russell Smith. 1856-64.

[28] Literary Remains, Vol. I. pp. 259, 260.

[29] Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites it as a sample of his version.

[30] Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt.

[31] The careless Ritson would have printed this _twynkling_.

[32] For example:--

“And in the arber was a tre
A fairer in the world might none be,”

should certainly read,

“None fairer in the world might be.”

[33] The _to_ is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt’s. What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately?

[34] This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.

[35] Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.

[36] In his Tractate on Education.

[37] Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony were all musicians.

[38] Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,

(“The light that never was on land or sea,”)

was due to Gray’s

“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”

I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second--

“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”--

is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:--

Jamque _rubrum_ tremulis jubar _ignibus erigere alte_
Cum cœptat natura.
LUCRET., iv. 404, 405.

Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,--

“On the dark level of adversity.”

[39] MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire’s Correspondence.

[40] Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the _Roman de la Rose_, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase.

[41] _Barclaii Satyricon_, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.

[42] Usually printed _arms_, but Dryden certainly wrote _arm_, to correspond with _dint_, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.

[43] Morgante, xviii. 115.

[44] Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,--

“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down
In Abram’s bosom, _in the sacred down_
_Of soft eternity_.”

[45] Preface to the _Theatrum_.

[46] Bowles’s Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ’s Hospital. Wordsworth’s prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later.

[47] Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism of the “Essay on Man” (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755.