Chapter III: A PURSE made either of metal (usually gold or silver), or of the (5)

But now, coming to the second question, namely, this question, _If any lecture at all, why upon Pope?_ We may see reason to think that Lord Carlisle was in error. To make a choice which is not altogether the best, will not of necessity argue an error; because much must be allowed to constitutional differences of judgment or of sensibility, which may be all equally right as against any philosophic attempts to prove any one of them wrong. And a lecturer who is possibly aware of not having made the choice which was absolutely best, may defend himself upon the ground that accidental advantages of a personal kind, such as previous familiarity with the subject, or preconformity of taste to the characteristic qualities of the author selected, may have qualified him to lecture on that theme with more effect and with more benefit, than upon a theme confessedly higher but less tractable for himself with his own peculiar preparations. Here, however, the case is different. What might be no error _per se_, becomes one if the special circumstances of the situation show it to have rested upon a deep misconception. Given the audience which Lord Carlisle had before him, the audience which he anticipated, and which he proposed to himself as the modulating law for the quality and style of his lecture, that same choice becomes a profound error which, for a different audience, more refined or more miscellaneous, would have been no error at all. I do not fear that I shall offend Lord Carlisle, so upright as he has always shown himself, so manly, and so faithful to his own views of truth, by repeating firmly that such a choice in such a situation argues a deep misconception of the true intellectual agencies by which Pope acts as a power in literature, and of the moral relations to general human sensibilities or _universal_ nature which such agencies involve. My belief is, that, if a prize had been offered for a bad and malappropriate subject, none worse could have been suggested; unless, perhaps, it had been the Letters of Madame de Sevigne, or the Fables of La Fontaine; in both of which cases the delicacies and subtle felicities of treatment are even more microscopic, more shy, and more inapprehensible without a special training and culture, than in Pope, And in this point they all agree, with no great difference amongst the three, that the sort of culture which forms the previous condition for enjoying them (a _conditio sine qua non_) is not of a kind to be won from study. Even of _that_ a mechanic artisan, whose daily bread depends upon his labor, cannot have had much. But the dedication of a life to books would here avail but litttle. What is needed must be the sort of culture won from complex social intercourse; and of, this the laboring artisan can have had none at all. Even the higher ranks, during those stages of society when social meetings are difficult, are rare, and consequently have their whole intellectual opportunities exhausted in forms and elaborate ceremonials, are not able to develope what may be called the social sense, that living, trembling sensibility to the expressions and the electric changes of human thought and feeling, so infinite as they are potentially, and as they will show themselves to be when the intercourse is free, is sudden, is spontaneous, and therefore has not leisure to be false, amongst all varieties of combination as to sex, age, rank, position, and personal accomplishments. Up to the time of James the First, society amongst ourselves wore a picturesque and even a scenical exterior: but the inner life and its pulsations had not then been revealed. Great passions were required to stir the freezing waters; so that certain kinds of comedy, in which such passions are inappropriate, could not then exist. And partly to this case it was amongst the early Romans, united with the almost Asiatic seclusion from social meetings of female influence or in any virtual sense even of female presence, that we must ascribe the meagreness of the true social interest, and of the dialogue exhibited by Plautus. Two separate frosts, during a century otherwise so full of movement as the sixteenth in England, repressed and killed all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament--not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social meetings of this period, even for purposes of pleasure, were true _solemnities_. With usage of politeness that laid a weight of silence and delay upon every movement of a social company, rapid motion of thought or fancy became in a literal sense _physically_ impossible. Not until, first, our _capital_ city had prodigiously expanded; not until, secondly, our representative system had so unfolded its tendencies as to bring _politics_ within the lawful privilege of ordinary conversation; not until, thirdly, the expansions of _commerce_ had forced us into the continual necessity of talking with strangers; fourthly, not until all these changes, gradually breaking up the repulsion which separated our ungarrulous nation, had been ratified by continual improvements applied to the construction of _roads_ and the arts of _locomotion_, could it be said that such a state of social intercourse existed as would naturalty prompt the mind to seek food for its own intellectual activity in contemplating the phenomena of that intercourse. The primary aspects and the rapid changes of such an object could not arise until the object itself arose. Satire, which follows social intercourse as a shadow follows a body, was chained up till then. In Marston and in Donne (a man yet unappreciated) satire first began to respire freely, but applying itself too much, as in the great dramatists contemporary with Shakspeare, to the exterior play of society. Under Charles II. in the hands of Dryden, and under Anne in those of Pope, the larger and more intellectual sweep of satire showed that social activities were now appreaching to their culmination. Now, at length, it became evident that a new mode of pleasure had been ripened, and that a great instinct of the intellect had opened for itself an appropriate channel. No longer were social parties the old heraldic solemnities [Footnote 4] enjoined by red letters in the almanac, in which the chief objects were to discharge some arrear of ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to _apricate_ and refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation, which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect--otherwise expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through the fine arts, and through scenic representations. A new world of pleasures had opened itself, offering new subjects of activity to the intellect, but also presupposing a new discipline and experience for enjoying them.

Precisely at this point starts off what I presume to think the great error of Lord Carlisle. He postulates as if it were a mere gift of inevitable instinct, what too certainly is the gift, and the tardy gift, of training; which training, again, is not to be won from efforts of study, but is in the nature of a slow deposition--or sediment, as it were--from a constant, perhaps at the moment, an unconscious, experience. Apparently the error is twofold: first, an oversight, in which it is probable that, without altogether overlooking the truth, Lord Carlisle allowed to it a very insufficient emphasis; but, secondly, a positive misconception of a broad character. The oversight is probably his own, and originating in a general habit of too large and liberal concession; but the misconception, I suspect, that he owes to another.

First, concerning the first. It is evidently assumed, in the adoption of Pope for his subject, that mechanic artists, as a body, are capable of appreciating Pope. I deny it; and in this I offer them no affront. If they cannot enjoy, or if often they cannot so much as understand Pope, on the other hand they can both enjoy and understand a far greater poet. It is no insult; but, on the contrary, it is often a secret compliment to the simplicity and the _breadth_ of a man's intellectual nature that he cannot enter into the artificial, the tortuous, the conventional. Many a rude mind has comprehended to the full, both Milton in his elementary grandeur and Shakspeare in his impassioned depths, that could not have even dimly guessed at the meaning of a situation in comedy where the comic rested upon arbitrary rules and conventional proprieties. In all satiric sketches of society, even where the direct object may happen to have a catholic intelligibility, there is much amongst the allusions that surround and invest it which no man will ever understand that has not personally mixed in society, or understand without very disproportional commentaries; and even in that case he will not enjoy it. This is true of such compositions as a class; but Pope, in reference to this difficulty, is disadvantageously distinguished even amongst his order. Dryden, for instance, is far larger and more capacious in his satire, and in all the genial parts would approach the level of universal sympathies; whereas Pope, besides that the basis of his ridicule is continually too narrow, local, and casual, is rank to utter corruption with a disease far deeper than false refinement or conventionalism. Pardon me, reader, if I use a coarse word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately assumes the license of a _liar_. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation is attached was to Pope's knowledge a pure fabrication, but he also cites, as weighty evidences in the _forum_ of morality, anecdotes which he had gravely transplanted from a jest-book. [Footnote 5] Upon this, however, the most painful feature amongst Pope's literary habits, I will not dwell, as I shall immediately have occasion to notice it again. I notice it at all only for its too certain effect in limiting the sympathy with Pope's satiric and moral writings. Absolute truth and simplicity are demanded by all of us as preconditions to any sympathy with moral expressions of anger or intolerance. In all conventionalism there is a philosophic falsehood; and _that_ would be more than sufficient to repel all general sympathy with Pope from the mind of the laboring man, apart from the effect of direct falsification applied to facts, or of fantastic extravagance applied to opinions. Of this bar to the popularity of Pope, it cannot be supposed that Lord Carlisle was unaware. Doubtless he knew it, but did not allow it the weight which in practice it would be found to deserve. Yet why? Suppose that the unpopular tendency in Pope's writings were of a nature to be surmounted--upon a sufficient motive arising, suppose it not absolutely impossible to bring Pope within the toleration of working-men, upon whom, however, all that is bad would tell fearfully, and most of Pope's peculiar brilliancy would absolutely go for nothing--this notwithstanding, suppose the point established that by huge efforts, by pulling and hauling, by coaxing and flattering, and _invita Minerva_, the working-man might at length be _converted_ to Pope; yet, finally, when all was over, what object, what commensurate end, could be alleged in justification of so much preternatural effort? You have got your man into harness, that is true, and in a sullen fashion he pulls at his burden. But, after all, why not have yoked him according to his own original inclinations, and suffered him to pull where he would pull cheerfully? You have quelled a natural resistance, but clearly with so much loss of power to all parties as was spent uponthe resistance; and with what final gain to any party?

The answer to this lies in the second of the errors which I have imputed to Lord Carlisle. The first error was, perhaps, no more than an undervaluation of the truth. The second, if I divine it rightly, rests upon a total misconception, viz., the attribution to Pope of some special authority as a moral teacher. And this, if it were really so, would go far to justify Lord Carlisle in his attempt to fix the attention of literary students amongst the working-classes upon the writings of Pope. Rightly he would judge, that some leading classic must furnish the central object for the general studies. Each man would have his own separate favorites; but it would be well that the whole community of students should also have some _common_ point of interest and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages. He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding controversies of the age--he is near enough to speak in a diction but slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a _moral_ poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous classes, when is it that this idea has originated? I suspect that it is derived originally from a distinguished man of genius in the last generation, viz., Lord Byron. Amongst the guardians of Lord Byron, one was the late Lord Carlisle; and Lord Byron was, besides, connected by blood with the House of Howard: so that there were natural reasons why a man of such extraordinary intellectual power should early obtain a profound influence over the present Earl of Carlisle. And the prejudice, which I suppose to have been first planted by Lord Byron, would very easily strengthen itself by the general cast of Pope's topics and pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope is _not_ in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience, might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such a question as that--_power_ undoubtedly, if he had ever been led to use his power, that is, to make up his opinion in _resistance_ to the popular impression. But to this very probably he never had any motive; and the reason why I presume to set up my individual opinion in this case against that of the multitude is, because I know experimentally that, until a man has a sincere interest in such a question, and sets himself diligently to examine and collate the facts, he will pretty certainly have no title to give any verdict on the case.

What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually happened with _him_, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his intentions by the following well-known _mot_. Having mentioned the poets, he compares them with the moralists--'the moralists,' these are his words, 'the moralists, their betters.' How, or in what sense that would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a class the 'betters' in a collation with poets as a class? It is pretty clear at starting that, _in order_ to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, 'to justify the ways of God to man.' _That_ is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine authentically a man must write a 'Paradise Lost.' The order of precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection.

But without exacting from a man so self-willed as Lord Byron (and at that moment in a great passion) any philosophic vigor, it may be worth while, so far as the case concerns Pope, to ponder for one moment upon this invidious comparison, and to expose the fallacy which it conceals. By the term _moralist_ we indicate two kinds of thinkers, differing as much in quality as a chestnut horse from horse chestnut, and in rank as a Roman proconsul from the nautical consul's first clerk at a seaport. A clerical moralist in a pulpit, reading a sermon, is a moralist in the sense of one who applies the rules of a known ethical system, viz., that system which is contained in the New Testament, to the ordinary cases of human action. Such a man pretends to no originality--it would be criminal in him to do so; or, if he seeks for novelty in any shape or degree, it is exclusively in the quality of his illustrations. But there is another use of the word _moralist_, which indicates an intellectual architect of the first class. A Grecian moralist was one who published a new _theory_ of morals--that is, he assumed some new central principle, from which he endeavored, with more or less success, to derive all the virtues and vices, and thus introduced new relations amongst the keys or elementary gamut of our moral nature. [Footnote 6] For example, the Peripatetic system of morality, that of Aristotle, had for its fundamental principle, that all vices formed one or other of two polar extremes, one pole being in excess, the other in defect; and that the corresponding virtue lay on an equatorial line between these two poles. Here, because the new principle became a law of coercion for the entire system, since it must be carried out harmoniously with regard to every element that could move a question, the difficulties were great, and hardly to be met by mere artifices of ingenuity. The legislative principle needed to be profound and comprehensive; and a moralist in this sense, the founder of an ethical system, really looked something like a great man.

But, valued upon that scale. Pope is nobody; or in Newmarket language, if ranked against Chrysippus, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, he would be found 'nowhere.' He is reduced, therefore, at one blow to the level of a pulpit moralist, or mere applier of moral laws to human actions. And in a function so exceedingly humble, philosophically considered, how could he pretend to precedency in respect of anybody, unless it were the amen clerk, or the sexton?

In reality, however, the case is worse, If a man did really bring all human actions under the light of any moral system whatever, provided that he _could_ do so sternly, justly, and without favor this way or that, he would perform an exemplary service, such as no man ever _has_ performed. And this is what we mean by casuistry, which is the application of a moral principle to the _cases_ arising in human life. A _case_ means a genuine class of human acts, but differentiated in the way that law cases are. For we see that every case in the law courts conforms in the major part to the genuine class; but always, or nearly always, it presents some one differential feature peculiar to itself; and the question about it always is, Whether the differential feature is sufficient to take it out of the universal rule, or whether, in fact, it ought not to disturb the incidence of the legal rule? This is what we mean by casuistry. All law in its practical processes is a mode of casuistry. And it is clear that any practical ethics, ethics applied to the realities of life, ought to take the professed shape of casuistry. We do not evade the thing by evading the name. But because casuistry under that name, has been chiefly cultivated by the Roman Catholic Church, we Protestants, with our ridiculous prudery, find a stumbling-block in the very name. This, however, is the only service that _can_ be rendered to morality among us. And nothing approaching to this has been attempted by Pope.

What is it, then, that he _has_ attempted? Certainly he imagines himself to have done something or other in behalf of moral philosophy. For in a well-known couplet he informs us--

'That not in Fancy's maze he lingered long, But stooped to Truth, and _moralized_ his song.'

Upon these lines a lady once made to me this very acute and significant remark. The particular direction, she said, in which Pope fancied that he came upon Truth, showed pretty clearly what sort of truth it was that he searched after. Had he represented Fancy, as often is done, soaring aloft amongst the clouds, then, because Truth must be held to lie in the opposite direction, there might have been pleaded a necessity for _descending_ upon Truth, like one who is looking for mushrooms. But as Fancy, by good luck, is simply described as roaming about amongst labyrinths, which are always constructed upon dead levels, he had left it free for himself to soar after Truth into the clouds. But _that_ was a mode of truth which Pope cared little for; if _she_ chose to go galavanting amongst the clouds, Pope, for _his_ part, was the last person to follow her. Neither was he the man to go down into a well in search of her. Truth was not liable to wet feet--but Pope _was_. And he had no such ardor for Truth as would ever lead him to forget that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his constitution.

Whatever service Pope may have meditated to the philosophy of morals, he has certainly performed none. The direct contributions which he offered to this philosophy in his 'Essay on Man,' are not of a nature to satisfy any party; because at present the whole system may be read into different, and sometimes into opposite meanings, according to the quality of the integrations supplied for filling up the chasms in the chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here, however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections of Pope's writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they will make no particular discoveries of Pope's hollowness and treacherous infidelities to the truth, whether as to things or persons; but in such a case neither will they reap any benefit. On the other hand, if they so far carry out Lord Carlisle's advice as to enter upon the study of Pope in the spirit of earnest students, and so as really to possess themselves of the key to his inner mind, they will rise from their labors not so much in any spirit of gratitude for enlarged and humanizing views of man, as in a spirit of cynical disgust at finding that such views can be so easily counterfeited, and so often virtually betrayed.

[The paper of last month, [Footnote 7] on Lord Carlisle's lecture, having been written under the oppression of a nervous illness, accompanied by great suffering, may probably enough have been found heavy. Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily _assumes_ the radical falseness, of Pope, as a notorious fact needing no evidence or illustration. To myself it _did_ not need either. But to any casual reader, whose attention had never been attracted to the circumstantialities of Pope's satiric sketches, this assumption would be startling; and it would have done him a service to offer a few exemplifications of the vice attributed to Pope, both as substantiating the charge, and as investing it with some little amusement. This it had been my intention to do at the moment; but being disabled by the illness above-mentioned, I now supply the omission.]

Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these two: first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern man's grandest capacities;--secondly, that he should treat his subject with solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such shows--

'It _was_, and it is not.'

Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically, an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional differences between the two are written and are legible the corresponding necessities of 'utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to truth in Dryden.' Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_ from his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a Papist by apostasy; and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honor; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side!--on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his Church, was at his heart a traitor--in the very oath of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her whilst kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her doctrines whilst suffering insults in her service.

The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where, by all the external symptoms, they ought _not_ to have lain. But the reason for this anomaly was, that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet, upon an honorable scruple of fidelity to the suffering church of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism, which yet often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of truthfulness he became false. And in this particular instance he would, at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to reconcile any real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion. But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false in the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction. Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan?

The root and the pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of preternatural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_. Horace, in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as upon a trophy of philosophic emancipation:

'Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor liospes:'

which words Pope thus translates, and applies to himself in his English adaptation of this epistle:--

'But ask not to what doctors I apply--
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock;
And house with Montaigne now, or now with Locke.'

That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced by sertain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were overruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But _they_, the two brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly-wings to the right and the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism, and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which Pope practised from youth to age. An eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which he assumes, proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles. Having severed the towing-line which connected him with any external force of guiding and compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand false radiations from the true centre of rest. By his own choice he is wandering in a forest all but pathless,

---'ubi passim.
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;'

and a forest not of sixty days' journey, like that old Hercynian forest of Caesar's time, but a forest which sixty generations have not availed to traverse or familiarize in any one direction.

For Horace, as I have endeavored to explain in the note, the apology is so much the readier as his intrusions into this province of philosophy are slighter, more careless, and more indirect. But Pope's are wilful, premeditated, with malice aforethought; and his falsehoods wear a more malignant air, because they frequently concern truth speculative, and are therefore presumably more deliberate in their origin, and more influential in the result. It is precisely this part of Pope's errors that would prove most perplexing to the unlearned student. Beyond a doubt the 'Essay on Man' would, in virtue of its subject, prove the most attractive to a laboring man of all Pope's writings, as most of all promising a glimpse into a world of permanence and of mysterious grandeur, and having an interest, therefore, transcendent to any that could be derived from the fleeting aspects of manners or social conventionalisms, though illuminated and vivified by satire. _Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope's hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It would move through a jungle of controversies. For, to quote a remark which I once made myself in print, the 'Essay on Man' in one point resembles some doubtful inscriptions in ancient forms of Oriental languages, which, being made up elliptically of mere consonants, can be read into very different senses according to the different sets of vowels which the particular reader may choose to interpolate. According to the choice of the interpreter, it may be read into a loyal or a treasonable meaning. Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope's _personal_ falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. Truths speculative oftentimes, drives its roots into depth so dark, that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day--the result is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may be easily made to confront its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible _shame_ of refutation. Such sharoe would settle upon _every_ page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. Apd the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he, would not willingly have recast, have retracted, have abjured or trampled under foot with the curses assigned to heresy, if by sueh an act he could have added a hue of brilliancy to his coloring, or a new depth to his shadows. There is nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with _him_ poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was reckless of other people's feelings; so far from _that_, he had a morbid _facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity. But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood and what they affected to call truth. Volumes might be filled with illustrations; I content myself with three or four.

I. Pope felt _intellectually_ that it was philosophic, and also that it wore an air of nobility, _not_ to despise poverty. _Morally_, however, he felt inversely: nature and the accidents of his life had made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite, it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty, and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty. To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway, and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since yesterday--what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For hunger, and cold, and poverty, appeared to _him_ only in the light of drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the 'Dunciad' he has occasion to mention Dennis:--

'And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged.'

Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a note, in the course of which he quotes a few sentences about Dennis from Theobald. One of these begins thus: 'Did we really know how much this poor man suffers by being contradicted,' &c.; upon which Pope thinks proper to intercalate the following pathetic parenthesis in italics: _I wish that reflection on POVERTY had been spared._' How amiable! how pretty! Could Joseph Surface have more dexterously _improved_ the occasion: 'The man that disparages poverty, is a man that--' &c. It is manifest, however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether misplaced; for '_poor_' in the quotation from Theobald has no reference whatever to _poverty_ as the antithesis to _wealth_. What a pity that a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion! Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.

At line 106 comes the flourish about Dennis's poverty. Just nine lines ahead, keeping close as a policeman upon the heels' of a thief, you come up with Pope in the very act of maltreating Gibber, upon no motive or pretence whatever, small or great, but that he (the said Gibber) was guilty of poverty. Pope had detected him--and this is Pope's own account of the assault--in an overt act of poverty. He deposes, as if it were an ample justification of his own violence, that Gibber had been caught in the very act--not of supping meanly, coarsely, vulgarly, as upon tripe, for instance, or other offal--but absolutely in the act of not supping at all!

'Swearing and _supperless_ the hero sate.'

Here one is irresistibly reminded of the old story about the cat who was transformed into a princess: she played the _role_ with admirable decorum, until one day a mouse ran across the floor of the royal saloon, when immediately the old instinct and the hereditary hatred proved too much for the artificial nature, and her highness vanished over a six-barred gate in a furious mouse-chase. Pope, treading in the steps of this model, fancies himself reconciled to poverty. Poverty, however, suddenly presents herself, not as a high poetic abstraction, but in that one of her many shapes which to Pope had always seemed the most comic as well as the most hateful. Instantly Pope's ancient malice is rekindled; and in line 115 we find him assaulting that very calamity under one name, which under another, at line 106, he had treated with an ostentatious superfluity of indulgence.

II. I have already noticed that some of Pope's most pointed examples which he presents to you as drawn from his own experience of life, are in fact due to jest-books; and some (offered as facts) are pure coinages of his own brain. When he makes his miser at the last gasp so tenacious of the worldly rights then slipping from his grasp as that he refuses to resign a particular manor, Pope forgot that even a jest-book must govern its jokes by some regard to the realities of life, and that amongst these realities is the very nature and operation of a will. A miser is not, therefore, a fool; and he knows that no possible testamentary abdication of an estate disturbs his own absolute command over it so long as he lives, or bars his power of revoking the bequest. The moral instruction is in this case so poor, that no reader cares much upon what sort of foundation the story itself rests. For such a story a lie may be a decent basis. True; but not so senseless a lie. If the old miser was delirious, there is an end of his responsibilities; and nobody has a right to draw upon _him_ for moral lessons or warnings. If he was _not_ delirirous, the case could not have happened. Modelled in the same spirit are all Pope's pretended portraitures of women; and the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction, or of revolting extravagance, do not verify themselves to our loathing incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms akimbo, saying angrily, 'But I tell you, sir, these are _not_ fancy-pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly known to me--they are my particular friends. I see them every day in the undiess of confiding friendship. They betray all their foibles to me in the certainty that I shall take no advantage of their candor; and will you, coming a century later, presume to dispute the fidelity or the value of my contemporary portraits?' Yes, and upon these two grounds: first (as to the fidelity), that the pretended portraits are delineations of impossible people; and secondly (as to the value), that, if after all they could be sworn to as copies faithful to the originals, not the less are they to be repelled as abnormal, and so far beyond the intelligibilities of nature as practically to mean nothing, neither teaching nor warning. The two Duchesses of Marlborough, for instance, Sarah and Henrietta, are atrocious caricatures, and constructed on the desperate principle of catching at a momentary stare or grin, by means of anarchy in the features imputed, and truculent antithesis in the expression. Who does not feel that these are the fierce pasquinades, and the coarse pasquinades, of some malignant electioneering contest? Is there a line that breathes the simplicity and single-heartedness of truth? Equal disgust settles upon every word that Pope ever wrote against Lady Mary W. Montagu. Having once come to hate her rancorously, and finding his hatred envenomed by the consciousness that Lady Mary had long ceased to care two straws for all the malice of all the wits in Christendom, Pope labored at his own spite, filing it and burnishing it as a hand-polisher works at the the blade of a scymitar. For years he had forgotten to ask after the realities of nature as they existed in Lady Mary, and considered only what had the best chance of stinging her profoundly. He looked out for a 'raw' into which he might lay the lash; not seeking it in the real woman, but generally in the nature and sensibilities of abstract woman. Whatever seemed to disfigure the idea of womanhood, _that_, by reiterated touches, he worked into his portraits of Lady Mary; and at length, no doubt, he had altogether obliterated from his own remembrance the true features of her whom he so much detested. On this class of Pope's satiric sketches I do not, however, wish to linger, having heretofore examined some of the more prominent cases with close attention.

My last paper on Pope has been taxed with exaggeration. This charge comes from a London weekly journal (_The Leader_) distinguished by its ability, by its hardihood of speculation, by its comprehensive candor, but, in _my_ eyes, still more advantageously distinguished by its deep sincerity. Such qualities give a special value to the courtesies of that journal; and I in particular, as a literary man, have to thank it for repeated instances of kindness the most indulgent on any occasion which has brought up the mention of my name. Such qualities of necessity give a corresponding value to its censures. And accordingly, as a point of duty, I directed my attention immediately to _this_ censure. Whatever was still unprinted I reviewed; and whatever struck me as open to objection I removed. And if the result after all has been that I do not altogether concur in the criticism of _The Leader_, the reason is because, as upon re-examination it strikes me, in the worst cases Pope has not left room for exaggeration. I do not see any actual exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is possible. But though I thus found myself unable sincerely to make the sacrifice of my own opinion, another sacrifice of a different kind I _have_ made, viz., that of half my paper. I cancelled one half--viz., that half which was occupied with cases in Pope of disingenuousness, and perhaps of moral falsehood or collusion with other people's falsehood, but not of falsehood atrociously literal and conscious; meaning thus to diminish by one half the penance of those who do not like to see Pope assaulted, although forced by uneasiness to watch the assault;--feeling with which I heartily sympathize; and meaning, on the other hand, in justification of mylelf, to throw the reader's attention more effectively, because more exclusively, upon such cases of frantic and moonstruck falsehood as could allow no room for suspense or mitigation of judgment. Of these I have selected two, one relating to the Duke of Buckingham, and the other to the history and derivation of English literature. Generally, I believe, that to a just appreciation of Pope's falseness, levity, and self-contradiction, it is almost essential that a reader should have studied him with the purpose of becoming his editor. This at one time was my own purpose; and thus it was that I became acquainted with qualities prevailing in Pope which, in the midst of my great admiration for him, would have made such a purpose difficult of execution. For in the relation between author and editor, any harshness of reproach on the part of the latter, or any expression of alienation and imperfect sympathy, seems unbecoming in one who has spontaneously assumed the office of a _patronus_ to a _client_, and are uniformly painful to the reader. On this account it is that the late Mr. Roscoe figures amongst all editors of Pope as by far the most agreeable. He has a just tenderness for the memory and merits of the great writer whom he undertakes to edit; this feeling keeps his annotations clear from the petulance of Joseph Warton and the malice of Bowles; whilst, not having happened to see Pope's errors in the same light as myself, he suffers from no conflict between his natural indulgence to intellectual splendor and his conscientious reverence for truth.

But if the reader is shocked with Pope's false reading of phenomena, where not the circumstances so much as the construction of the circumstances may be challenged, what must he think of those cases in which downright facts, and incidents the most notorious, have been outrageously falsified only in obedience to a vulgar craving for effect in the dramatic situations, or by way of pointing a moral for the stimulation of torpid sensibilities? Take, for instance, the death of the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham--a story which, in Pope's version of it, has travelled into a popularity that may be called national; and yet, the whole is one tissue of falsehoods--and of falsehoods that must have been known for such by Pope not less than to most of his contemporary readers. Suppose them _not_ known, and the whole must have wanted all natural interest. For this interest lay in the Duke's character, in his superb accomplishments and natural advantages, in his fine person, in his vast wealth, and in the admirable versatility of his intellectual powers, which made him alternately the idol and the terror of all circles that he approached, which caused Lord Clarendon to tremble with impotent malice in his chancellor's robes, and Dry den to shiver with panic under his laureate crowns. Now, wherever these features of the case were _not_ known, the story was no more than any ordinary death arising out of a fox-chase. But those to whom they _were_ known must, at the same time, have known the audacious falsehood which disfigures the story in Pope's way of telling it. _Without_ the personal interest, the incidents were nothing; and _with_ that interest, at starting, Pope's romance must have defeated itself by its fabulous coloring. Let me recall to the reader the principal lines in this famous description:--

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, 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;
_There_, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends.'