Chapter 17

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

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

“Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o’ertake his sins;Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins,Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin’s eye;Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain;Or alum styptics with contracting power,Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower;Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feelThe giddy motion of the whirling wheel,In fumes of burning chocolate, shall glow,And tremble at the sea that froths below!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To expatiateo’era mighty maze is rather loose writing but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,

“A mighty maze of walks without a plan”;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,The sickening stars fade offthe ethereal plain.”

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

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

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

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

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

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts 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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“O, blest in temper, whose unclouded 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;Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will,Disdains all loss of tickets or codille,Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them allAnd mistress of herself, though china fall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:The evening lamps looks=> The evening lamp looks {pg 51}Que s’oblida e s laissa cazer=> Que s’oblida es laissa cazer {pg 347}

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

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

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

FOOTNOTES:[1]The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance.[2]They made their appearance again this summer (1870).[3]One of Mr. Lincoln’s neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous.[4]The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son.[5]Apropos of his Frederick the Great.[6]Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.”[7]Publications of the Chaucer Society.London. 1869-70.Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères.ParE. G. Sandras, Agrégé de l’Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert.VonWilhelm Hertzberg. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674.Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde.VonAlfons Kissner. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.[8]Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” To these Mr. Bradshaw (and there can be no higher authority) would add “The Court of Love,” the “Dream,” the “Praise of Woman,” the “Romaunt of the Rose,” and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there is strong ground, both moral and æsthetic, for adding the “Parson’s Tale.”[9]Fauriel,Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, Vol. I.passim.[10]Allegat ergo pro se linguaOilquod propter sui faciliorem et delectabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimæ et quamplures aliæ historiæ ac doctrinæ. That Dante byprosaicumdid not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse,numeros lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92seq.and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows hisfaciliorem el delectabilioremfrom theplus diletable et comuneof his master Brunetto Latini.[11]“My ears no sweeter music knowThan hauberk’s clank with saddlebow,The noise, the cries, the tumult blownFrom trumpet and from clarion.”[12]Compare Floripar inFierabraswith Nausikäa, for example.[13]If internal evidence may be trusted, theLai de l’Espineis not hers.[14]Sir Eger and Sir Grinein the Percy Folio. The passage quoted is from Ellis.[15]I think he tried one now and then, like “eyencolumbine.”[16]Commonly printedhath.[17]Froissart’s description of the book of traités amoureux et de moralité, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. “Et lui plut très grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il é’tait enluminé, écrit et historié et couvert de vermeil velours à dis cloux d’argent dorés d’or, et roses d’or au milieu, et à deux grands fremaulx dorés et richement ouvrés au milieu de rosiers d’or.” How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together withetafteret! But two centuries earlier, while thejongleurswere still in full song, poems were also read aloud.“Pur remembrer des ancessoursLes faits et les dits et les mours,Deit l’en les livres et les gestesEt les estoireslire a festes.”—Roman du Rou.t Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.[18]One of the very worst, be it said in passing.[19]Whence came, pray, the Elizabethancommandëment,chapëlain,surëly, and a score of others? Whence the Scottishbonny, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending iny?[20]Poésies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 168.[21]Le Roman de la Rose, Tome II. p. 890.[22]Rutebeuf, Tome I. pp. 203 seqq. 304 seqq.[23]From the “Craft of Lovers,” attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but too bad even for him.[24]Here the received texts give “So pray ItoGod.” Cf. “But Reason said him.” T. & C.[25]Corrected from Kissner, p. 18.[26]Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins’s Ode.[27]London: John Russell Smith. 1856-64.[28]Literary Remains, Vol. I. pp. 259, 260.[29]Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites it as a sample of his version.[30]Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt.[31]The careless Ritson would have printed thistwynkling.[32]For example:—“And in the arber was a treA fairer in the world might none be,”should certainly read,“None fairer in the world might be.”[33]Thetois, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt’s. What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately?[34]This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.[35]Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.[36]In his Tractate on Education.[37]Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony were all musicians.[38]Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,(“The light that never was on land or sea,”)was due to Gray’s“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second—“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”—is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:—Jamquerubrumtremulis jubarignibus erigere alteCum cœptat natura.Lucret., iv. 404, 405.Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,—“On the dark level of adversity.”[39]MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire’s Correspondence.[40]Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in theRoman de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase.[41]Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.[42]Usually printedarms, but Dryden certainly wrotearm, to correspond withdint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.[43]Morgante, xviii. 115.[44]Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,—“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples downIn Abram’s bosom,in the sacred downOf soft eternity.”[45]Preface to theTheatrum.[46]Bowles’s Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ’s Hospital. Wordsworth’s prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later.[47]Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism of the “Essay on Man” (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

[5]Apropos of his Frederick the Great.

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

[7]Publications of the Chaucer Society.London. 1869-70.Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères.ParE. G. Sandras, Agrégé de l’Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert.VonWilhelm Hertzberg. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674.Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde.VonAlfons Kissner. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.

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

Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères.ParE. G. Sandras, Agrégé de l’Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert.VonWilhelm Hertzberg. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674.

Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde.VonAlfons Kissner. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.

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

[9]Fauriel,Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, Vol. I.passim.

[10]Allegat ergo pro se linguaOilquod propter sui faciliorem et delectabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimæ et quamplures aliæ historiæ ac doctrinæ. That Dante byprosaicumdid not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse,numeros lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92seq.and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows hisfaciliorem el delectabilioremfrom theplus diletable et comuneof his master Brunetto Latini.

[11]“My ears no sweeter music knowThan hauberk’s clank with saddlebow,The noise, the cries, the tumult blownFrom trumpet and from clarion.”

[11]

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

[12]Compare Floripar inFierabraswith Nausikäa, for example.

[13]If internal evidence may be trusted, theLai de l’Espineis not hers.

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

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

[16]Commonly printedhath.

[17]Froissart’s description of the book of traités amoureux et de moralité, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. “Et lui plut très grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il é’tait enluminé, écrit et historié et couvert de vermeil velours à dis cloux d’argent dorés d’or, et roses d’or au milieu, et à deux grands fremaulx dorés et richement ouvrés au milieu de rosiers d’or.” How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together withetafteret! But two centuries earlier, while thejongleurswere still in full song, poems were also read aloud.“Pur remembrer des ancessoursLes faits et les dits et les mours,Deit l’en les livres et les gestesEt les estoireslire a festes.”—Roman du Rou.t Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.

“Pur remembrer des ancessoursLes faits et les dits et les mours,Deit l’en les livres et les gestesEt les estoireslire a festes.”—Roman du Rou.

t Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.

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

[19]Whence came, pray, the Elizabethancommandëment,chapëlain,surëly, and a score of others? Whence the Scottishbonny, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending iny?

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

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

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

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

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

[25]Corrected from Kissner, p. 18.

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

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

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

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

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

[31]The careless Ritson would have printed thistwynkling.

[32]For example:—“And in the arber was a treA fairer in the world might none be,”should certainly read,“None fairer in the world might be.”

[32]For example:—

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

should certainly read,

“None fairer in the world might be.”

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

[34]This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.

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

[36]In his Tractate on Education.

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

[38]Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,(“The light that never was on land or sea,”)was due to Gray’s“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second—“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”—is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:—Jamquerubrumtremulis jubarignibus erigere alteCum cœptat natura.Lucret., iv. 404, 405.Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,—“On the dark level of adversity.”

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

was due to Gray’s

“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”

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

“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”—

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

Jamquerubrumtremulis jubarignibus erigere alteCum cœptat natura.Lucret., iv. 404, 405.

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

“On the dark level of adversity.”

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

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

[41]Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.

[42]Usually printedarms, but Dryden certainly wrotearm, to correspond withdint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.

[43]Morgante, xviii. 115.

[44]Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,—“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples downIn Abram’s bosom,in the sacred downOf soft eternity.”

“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples downIn Abram’s bosom,in the sacred downOf soft eternity.”

[45]Preface to theTheatrum.

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

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

Back to Index Next