LECTURE IXPOPE

LECTURE IXPOPE(Thursday Evening, February 6, 1855)IX

(Thursday Evening, February 6, 1855)

There is nothing more curious, whether in the history of individual men or of nations, than the reactions which occur at more or less frequent intervals.

The human mind, both in persons and societies, is like a pendulum which, the moment it has reached the limit of its swing in one direction, goes inevitably back as far on the other side, and so on forever.

These reactions occur in everything, from the highest to the lowest, from religion to fashions of dress. The close crop and sober doublet of the Puritan were followed by the laces and periwigs of Charles the Second. The scarlet coats of our grandfathers have been displaced by as general a blackness as if the world had all gone into mourning. Tight sleeves alternate with loose, and the full-sailed expanses of Navarino have shrunk to those close-reefed phenomena which, like Milton’s Demogorgon, are thenameof bonnet without its appearance.

English literature, for half a century from the Restoration, showed the marks of both reaction and of a kind of artistic vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship and short hair of the Roundheads the world rushed eagerly toward a little wickedness and a wilderness of wig. Charles the Second brought back with him French manners, French morals, and French taste. The fondness of the English for foreign fashions had long been noted. It was a favorite butt of the satirists of Elizabeth’s day. Everybody remembers whatPortiasays of the English lord: “How oddly is he suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.”

Dryden is the first eminent English poet whose works show the marks of French influence, and a decline from the artistic toward the artificial, from nature toward fashion. Dryden had known Milton, had visited the grand old man probably in that “small chamber hung with rusty green,” where he is described as “sitting in an elbow-chair, neatly dressed in black, pale but not cadaverous”; or had found him as he “used to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air.” Dryden undertook to put the “Paradise Lost”into rhyme, and on Milton’s leave being asked, he said, rather contemptuously, “Ay, he maytagmy verses if he will.” He also said that Dryden was a “good rhymist, but no poet.” Dryden turned the great epic into a drama called “The State of Innocence,” and intended for representation on the stage. Sir Walter Scott dryly remarks that thecostumeof our first parents made it rather an awkward thing to bring them before the footlights. It is an illustration of the character of the times that Dryden makes Eve the mouthpiece of something very like obscenity. Of the taste shown by such a travesty nothing need be said.

In the poems of Dryden nothing is more striking than the alternations between natural vigor and warmth of temperament and the merest common-places of diction. His strength lay chiefly in the understanding, and for weight of sterling sense and masculine English, and force of argument, I know nothing better than his prose. His mind was a fervid one, and I think that in his verse he sometimes mistook metrical enthusiasm for poetry. In his poems we find wit, fancy, an amplitude of nature, a rapid and graphic statement of the externals and antitheses of character, and a dignified fluency of verse rising sometimes to majesty—but not much imagination in the high poetic meaning of the term.

I have only spoken of his poems at all because they stand midway between the old era, which died with Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the new one which was just beginning. In the sixty years extending from 1660 to 1720, more French was imported into the language than at any other time since the Norman Conquest. What is of greater importance, it was French ideas and sentiments that were coming in now, and which shaped the spirit and, through that, the form of our literature.

The condition of the English mind at the beginning of the last century was one particularly capable of being magnetized from across the Channel. The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and religion, had been dislocated. A generation of materialists was to balance the over-spiritualism of the Puritans. The other world had had its turn long enough, and nowthisworld was to have its chance. There seems to have been a universal skepticism, and in its most dangerous form—that is, united with a universal pretense of conformity. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself. Dean Swift, who looked forward to a bishopric, could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was about as good as another, and accepted a cure of souls when it was doubtful if he thought men had any souls to be saved, or, at anyrate, that they were worth saving if they had. The answer which Pulci’sMarguttemakes toMorgante, when he asks him if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:

Margutte answered then, To tell thee truly,My faith in black’s no greater than in azure;But I believe in capons, roast meat, bouilli,And above all in wine—and carnal pleasure.

Margutte answered then, To tell thee truly,

My faith in black’s no greater than in azure;

But I believe in capons, roast meat, bouilli,

And above all in wine—and carnal pleasure.

It was impossible that anything truly great—great, I mean, on the moral and emotional as well as on the intellectual sides—could be produced in such a generation. But something intellectually great could be, and was. The French mind, always stronger in the perceptive and analytic than in the imaginative faculty, loving precision, grace, and fineness, had brought wit and fancy, and the elegant arts of society, to the perfection, almost, of science. Its ideal in literature was to combine the appearance of carelessness and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. Its influence, then, in English literature will appear chiefly in neatness and facility of expression, in point of epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional rather than universal experiences;in speaking for good society rather than for man.

Thus far in English poetry we have found life represented by Chaucer, the real life of men and women; the ideal or interior life as it relates to this world, by Spenser; what may be called imaginative life, by Shakspeare; the religious sentiment, or interior life as it relates to the other world, by Milton. But everything aspires toward a rhythmical utterance of itself, and accordingly the intellect and life, as it relates to what may be called the world, were waiting for their poet. They found or made a most apt one in Alexander Pope.

He stands for perfectness of intellectual expression, and it is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend upon conscientious and laborious finish as well as upon natural endowments.

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived, and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal.What was it to me that Pope was a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his “Freeholder” in answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that was ever spoken.” There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him by instinct, as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says: “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but, as a fact, he represents something more—nothing less, namely, than one of those external controversies of taste which will last as long as the Imagination and Understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. Menare born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists; and there is nothing more to be said of the matter. We do not hear that the green spectacles persuaded the horse into thinking that shavings were grass.

That reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that a man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one. As far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say that there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet call; but for pure entertainment it is unmatched.

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

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

You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,

Enjoy the glory to be great no more,

And carrying with you all the world can boast,

To all the world illustriously are lost.

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope’s correspondence with his friends, where Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending to disregard the lampoons which embittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting to despise the world which it would have agonized them to be forgotten by.

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

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread;

True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed,What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;

True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;

For each ill author is as bad a friend.

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

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

The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy. Whether that fancy be truly poetical or not is another matter. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

Mr. Lowell gave a detailed analysis of the poem, with extracts of some length.

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

The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not know what he was writing himself. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke—a fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or if hedidknow, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson assertsthat Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend.

Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from the “Essay on Man.” He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overthrow the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the Bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit—clearness. If we didnot, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty is that Pope’s precision of thought was not equal to his polish of style.

But it is in his “Moral Essays” and part of his “Satires” that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired—

Happily to steerFrom grave to gay, from lively to severe.Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,Intent to reason, or polite to please.

Happily to steer

From grave to gay, from lively to severe.

Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,

Intent to reason, or polite to please.

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

In his epistle on the characters of woman, no one who has ever known a noble woman will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates:

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

O blest in temper, whose unclouded ray

Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,

She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear

Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear,

She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,

Or if she rules him, never shows she rules,

Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,

Yet has her humor most when she obeys;

Let fops or fortune fly which way they will,

Disdains all loss of tickets, or codille,

Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all;

And mistress of herself though china fall.

The last line is very witty and pointed; but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter.

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

Personally, we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secret about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a pinch so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his disposition seems to have been a truly amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely fictitious as his style. I think that there was very little real malice in him.

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

To what fatuities his theory of correctness led in the next generation, when practised upon by men who had not his genius, I shall endeavor to show in my next lecture.

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