Pope

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Title:     Pope
Author: Augustine Birrell [More Titles by Birrell]

A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Institute.

The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.

But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that he had, that very day, entered an existing bona fide boy upon the school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An illustration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift, fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action, 'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named French Revolution.'

The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town- bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,' but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal Defence of the Eighteenth Century, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.

Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own Homer over the body of the slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the author of the Rape of the Lock and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was or was not a poet.

Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third- rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st, 1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over, mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome times he lived in; but his books have all perished. He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind, but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form. If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was the author of the Dunciad. Pope had no means of self-defence save his wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied, 'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When he denounced Macpherson for his Ossian frauds, and the irate Celt said something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of great physical strength is no mean assistance to a straightforward life. The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with a friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be brought to share the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his acquaintances. 'Why,' he used to exclaim apologetically, 'even if I do run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst of it.' But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources. We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.

Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original. Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things.

From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems, against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied that the onus lay upon the critic of first proving that there is anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted, one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715 Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life, came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized thus: his Pastorals, 1709; the Essay on Criticism, 1711; the first version of the Rape of the Lock, 1712; the second, 1714; the Iliad, begun in 1715, was finished 1720; Eloisa, 1717; the Elegy to the memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the Dunciad, 1728; the Essay on Man, 1732; and then the Epistles and Satires. Of all Pope's biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the best. The Life, indeed, like the rest of the Lives of the Poets, is a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at grass, and had no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was not in his way. Was he not already endowed--with a pension, which, with his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the less--nay, perhaps all the more--for being written with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets are delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the very best of them. {1} None knew the infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is always on the watch, whilst talent and achievement never fail to win his admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as best he could, the debt of gratitude surely due to those who have taken pains to please, and who have left behind them in a world, which rarely treated them kindly, works fitted to stir youth to emulation, or solace the disappointments of age. And over all man's manifold infirmities, he throws benignantly the mantle of his stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely to miss Johnson's approbation. Of them he writes:

'The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation--till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.'

Footnote:

{1} Not Horace Walpole's opinion. 'Sir Joshua Reynolds has lent me Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, which Sir Joshua holds to be a chef d'oeuvre. It is a most trumpery performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed phrases and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.'--Letters, vol. viii., p. 26.

To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.

Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray, of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope. The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its merits, well basted in the Edinburgh Review. But Croker seems to have made no real progress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr. Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications for the task,--patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of Pope. 'To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited. His lot--if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood--resembles that of an unfortunate infant being dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was, besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines--

'Who but must laugh if such a man there be;
Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'

De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see, would have told a very different tale had he been in command from the first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet whenever he decently can. And this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's Life, which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, is certain to be a fascinating book.

It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes excite an indignation which injurious crimes fail to arouse.

The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly, and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly 'guiltless of his country's blood'--for all that is now known of him is that he used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the ends--had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was condemned by His Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob--it does not matter which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage, and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. {2} Ten years earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume. Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however, did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would, and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings. The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift, though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted. The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he kept copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good. The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up, and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came of the litigation I cannot say.

Footnote:

{2} Howell's State Trials, vol. xvii., p. 159.

The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows:--

'I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of the reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.'

Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased with his moonshine that he transferred the whole passage to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of course fictitious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter of 1713, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and so on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine;' and go on to find Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date, February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impassable even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in 1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written documents which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even for a few minutes.

A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of fragments of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter to Caryll:--

'Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'

What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works, and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne, which was entitled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the judgment, are not mere obiter dicta, but conclusive):

'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357).

I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.

Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has always been the fashion to admire the letter which, first appearing in 1737, in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes the death by lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton from the original, naturally caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another man's letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his world-famous Lectures, and few literary anecdotes are better known; but the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope's from the beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.

When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid--he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer--though he sometimes said it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below!'

Pope's translation of the Iliad was his first great undertaking, and he worked at it like a Trojan. It was published by subscription for two guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out of their books, but would do so out of their country. He writes to Caryll:

'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words, namely--"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have composed several ready for me to set my name to.'

This is certainly much better than that trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed. He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do half the books; but even after paying his journeymen he made nearly 4,000 pounds over the Odyssey. Well might he write in later life--

'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'

Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their odes into acres.

Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length. Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:

'Ah! I see you have Homer's Iliad! Well, I believe it is the best.' And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.

Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text. He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with illustrations by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book of the Iliad, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.

But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful. It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom done so. Listen to Professor Conington {3}:--

'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'

Footnote:

{3} In Oxford Essays for 1858.

Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept this law.

Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in which they possess this faculty of utilization. Pope's Essay on Criticism, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention of appropriation. Apart from the limae labor, which was enormous, and was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated Boileau's Art of Poetry. Then there were the works of those noble lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all these books greedily, and with an amazing quick eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed and ill-set thoughts of other men.

The same thing is noticeable in the most laboured production of his later life, the celebrated Essay on Man. For this he was coached by Lord Bolingbroke.

Pope was accustomed to talk with much solemnity of his ethical system, of which the Essay on Man is but a fragment, but we need not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about Clarissa Harlowe that the man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say about the poetry of Pope: the man who reads it for its critical or ethical philosophy may hang himself. We read Pope for pleasure, but a bit of his philosophy may be given:

'Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less?
Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade!
Or ask of yonder argent fields above
Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove!'

To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, speaking through the mouth of Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can make no claim to be a philosopher, and had he been one, Verse would have been a most improper vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly fights in handcuffs or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts were his wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great writer, an English classic. What is it that constitutes a great writer? A bold question, certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a question in public you may be certain he has provided himself with an answer. I find mine in the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, himself, though living, an English classic--Cardinal Newman. He says {4}:

Footnote:

{4} Lectures and Essays on University Subjects: Lecture on Literature.

'I do not claim for a great author, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life--though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is,--but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty of expression. He is master of the two-fold [Greek text], the thought and the word, distinct but inseparable from each other. . . . He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief it is because few words suffice; if he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs amongst his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has been dead one hundred and forty-two years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead two hundred and seventy years, and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us, he is the most quoted of English poets, the one who has most enriched our common speech. Horace used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.

Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, and in the mock- heroic. To say that the Rape of the Lock is the best mock-heroic poem in the language is to say nothing; to say that it is the best in the world is to say more than my reading warrants; but to say that it and Paradise Regained are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in English is to say enough.

The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.

Pope became rather by the backing of his friends than from any other cause a party man. Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, and embraced things now outside its ambit--the theatre, for example, and the opera. You remember how excited politicians got over Addison's Cato, which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing at a critical time, was thought to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages have failed to discover amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then connected with either party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best letters ever written to nobody tells the story of the first night.

'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said Cato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to live upon after he dies.'

Later on music was dragged into the fray. The Court was all for Handel and the Germans; the Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility affected the Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small part; for, notwithstanding his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, he hated music with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he was damned for the farce of Three Hours after Marriage, which, after the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of The Beggars' Opera. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till the last act, when the two lovers, having first inserted themselves respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at one another across the boards; then they rose in their rage, and made an end of that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears when, years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines--

'While all its throats the gallery extends
And all the thunder of the pit ascends,
Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep
Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'

Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and so had his hands full of ready-made quarrels; but his period was certainly one that demanded a satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am content to repeat, his did. Satire like Pope's is essentially modish, and requires a restricted range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing humanity at large I should advise him to check his noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with his next-door neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, which humanity will not do. This was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom he moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and high and low, married and single, town and country, Protestant and Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in it. One could gamble in that stock. The mania began in February 1720, and by the end of May the price of 100 pounds stock was up to 340 pounds. In July and August it was 950 pounds, and even touched, 1,000 pounds. In the middle of September it was down to 590 pounds, and before the end of the year it had dropped to 125 pounds. Pope himself bought stock when it stood so low as 104 pounds, but he had never the courage to sell, and consequently lost, according to his own account, half his worldly possessions. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold--as did his Most Gracious Majesty the King--at 1,000 pounds. The age was also a scandalous, ill-living age, and Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip and tale-bearer, picked up all that was going. The details of every lawsuit of a personal character were at his finger-ends. Whoever starved a sister, or forged a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a fortune dishonestly, or lost one disgracefully, or was reported to do so, be he citizen or courtier, noble duke or plump alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to know all about it, and as likely as not to put it into his next satire. Living, as the poet did, within easy distance of London, he always turned up in a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at least writes a noble friend. This sort of thing naturally led to quarrels, and the shocking incompleteness of this lecture stands demonstrated by the fact that, though I have almost done, I have as yet said nothing abort Pope's quarrels, which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul and leaving out his journeys. Pope's quarrels are celebrated. His quarrel with Mr. Addison, culminating in the celebrated description, almost every line of which is now part and parcel of the English language; his quarrel with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom he satirized in the most brutal lines ever written by man of woman; his quarrel with Lord Hervey; his quarrel with the celebrated Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ought not to be dismissed so lightly, but what can I do? From the Duchess of Marlborough Pope is said to have received a sum of money, sometimes stated at 1,000 pounds and sometimes at 3,000 pounds, for consenting to suppress his description of her as Atossa, which, none the less, he published. I do not believe the story; money passed between the parties and went to Miss Martha Blount, but it must have been for some other consideration. Sarah Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too well to give it away without security; and how possibly could she hope by a cash payment to erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said, used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her. As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not writ large in the four books of the Dunciad? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong, 'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.'

I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels, the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The Dunciad was quite uncalled- for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor:

'The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl.'

But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Pope did not begin brawling first. Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine, and who begged Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to him: 'Take care the bad poets do not out-wit you as they have done the good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be Popes, but for the real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten. As it is, only their names survive in the index to the Dunciad; their indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if the historian or the moralist seeks an illustration of the coarseness and brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a mere toss-up whose name you may find in the Dunciad--a miserable scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be regarded as a social purge.

Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope. Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may, perhaps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid Youth referred to in the Epilogue to the Satires:

'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend
Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'

Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his lordship's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'

Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when

'The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,'

the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a much softer place--the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,

'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.'

Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100 pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.

Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation he sings:--

'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide:
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day,
The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,--
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.'

The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of the poisoned pen.

Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed, 'Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's Anecdotes there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 'Shortly before his death, he said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision."' It may have been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for, who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be pronounced religious. As Cardinal Newman has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic.

Pope died in his enemies' day.

Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot: 'Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my Travels.' This may be doubted without damage to the friendly testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead--he was mad, dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror and gloomy forebodings of impending doom.

Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide; and though we may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.

But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother, but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,--

'Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the vault to brag of.'

The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own Eloisa to Abelard? Whether, in fact, maidens in those latitudes do read Eloisa before blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have thought they would. And they might do worse--and better.

Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations.

'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'

he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light,

'The eternal moon of love,
Under whose motions life's dull billows move,'

he knew but little.

His Eloisa, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be--a love-poem it is not. Of the 'wild benefit of nature,'--

'The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'

Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff of Wordsworth in an observation he once hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object than a prince in his coronation robes. His taste in landscape gardening was honoured with the approbation of Horace Walpole, and he spent 1,000 pounds upon a grotto, which incurred the ridicule of Johnson. Of that indescribable something, that 'greatness' which causes Dryden to uplift a lofty head from the deep pit of his corruption, neither Pope's character nor his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a man we must give place, and even high place, to Pope. About the poetry there can be no question. A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his ancient homestead in the affections and memories of his people by a rabble of critics, or even a posse of poets. As for the man, he was ever eager and interested in life. Beneath all his faults--for which he had more excuse than a whole congregation of the righteous need ever hope to muster for their own shortcomings--we recognise humanity, and we forgive much to humanity, knowing how much need there is for humanity to forgive us. Indifference, known by its hard heart and its callous temper, is the only unpardonable sin. Pope never committed it. He had much to put up with. We have much to put up with--in him. He has given enormous pleasure to generations of men, and will continue so to do. We can never give him any pleasure. The least we can do is to smile pleasantly as we replace him upon his shelf, and say, as we truthfully may, 'There was a great deal of human nature in Alexander Pope.'

[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Pope

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