To steal from rainbows, ere they drop in showers, A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs, a.s.sist their blushes, and inspire their airs.
Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow To change a flounce or add a furbelow.
Prospero, threatening Ariel for murmuring, says "I will
rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails, until Thou hast howled away twelve winters."
The fate threatened to a disobedient sprite in the later poem is that he shall
Be stuff"d in vials, or transfixed with pins, Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin"s eye.
Pope"s muse--one may use the old-fashioned word in such a connection--had left the free forest for Will"s Coffee-house, and haunted ladies" boudoirs instead of the brakes of the enchanted island.
Her wings were clogged with "gums and pomatums," and her "thin essence"
had shrunk "like a rivel"d flower." But a delicate fancy is a delicate fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life; a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of human pa.s.sions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly ent.i.tles us to call Pope"s age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own descendants.
Whatever be the position rightly to be a.s.signed to Pope in the British Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts
That not in fancy"s maze he wandered long, But stooped to truth and moralised his song.
His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because they have pa.s.sed, as current coinage, through so many hands.
The proper study of mankind is man.
The saying is in form nearly identical with Goethe"s remark that man is properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed, understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope"s interpretation strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude, perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with Pope"s condemnation of the works in which
Pure description holds the place of sense.
Nearly all the works of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would disappear, Wordsworth"s pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted, and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the inverse application. Poetry, as it proves, may rightly concern itself with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut-and-dried saws of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever visited a youthful poet "on summer eve by haunted stream" are in some sense reflections of the pa.s.sions and interests that surround our daily life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly a.s.sumes that man is his proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow species of the human being. "Man" means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a long series of generations and part of the great universe of inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of the heroic age, but a clever artist whose G.o.ds and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of an artificial "machinery." Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler"s wit, and has not undergone restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not a.s.sociated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the great moving force. What he means by religion is generally not so much the existence of a divine element in the world as a series of bare metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest--the pa.s.sions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related to himself; and it may be remarked, in pa.s.sing, that if this narrows the range of Pope"s poetry, the error is not so vital as a modern delusion of the opposite kind. Because poetry should not be brought into too close a contact with the prose of daily life, we sometimes seem to think that it must have no relation to daily life at all, and consequently convert it into a mere luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful very speedily degenerates into the pretty or the picturesque. Because poetry need not be always a point-blank fire of moral plat.i.tudes, we occasionally declare that there is no connection at all between poetry and morality, and that all art is good which is for the moment agreeable. Such theories must end in reducing all poetry and art to be at best more or less elegant trifling for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the indolent; and to those who uphold them Pope"s example may be of some use. If he went too far in the direction of identifying poetry with preaching, he was not wrong in a.s.suming that poetry should involve preaching, though by an indirect method. Morality and art are not independent, though not identical. Both, as Mr. Ruskin urges in the pa.s.sage just quoted, are only admirable when the expression of healthful and n.o.ble natures. But, without discussing that th.o.r.n.y problem and certainly without committing myself to an approval of Mr. Ruskin"s solution, I am content to look at it for the time from Pope"s stand-point.
Taking Pope"s view of his poetical office, there remain considerable difficulties in estimating the value of the lesson which he taught with so much energy. The difficulties result both from that element which was common to his contemporaries and from that which was supplied by Pope"s own idiosyncrasies. The commonplaces in which Pope takes such infinite delight have become very stale for us. a.s.suming their perfect sincerity, we cannot understand how anybody should have thought of enforcing them with such amazing emphasis. We constantly feel a shock like that which surprises the reader of Young"s "Night Thoughts" when he finds it a.s.serted, in all the pomp of blank verse, that
Procrastination is the thief of time.
The maxim has rightly been consigned to copy-books. And a great deal of Pope"s moralising is of the same order. We do not want denunciations of misers. n.o.body at the present day keeps gold in an old stocking. When we read the observation,
"Tis strange the miser should his cares employ To gain the riches he can ne"er enjoy,
we can only reply that we have heard something like it before. In fact, we cannot place ourselves in the position of men at the time when modern society was first definitely emerging from the feudal state, and everybody was sufficiently employed in gossiping about his neighbours.
We are perplexed by the extreme interest with which they dwell upon the little series of obvious remarks which have been worked to death by later writers. Pope, for example, is still wondering over the first appearance of one of the most familiar of modern inventions. He exclaims,
Blest paper credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
He points out, with an odd superfluity of ill.u.s.tration, that bank-notes enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows how awkward it would be if a statesman had to take his bribes in kind, and his servants should proclaim,
Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil; Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door; A hundred oxen at your levees roar.
This, however, was natural enough when the South Sea scheme was for the first time ill.u.s.trating the powers and the dangers of extended credit.
To us, who are beginning to fit our experience of commercial panics into a scientific theory, the wonder expressed by Pope sounds like the exclamations of a savage over a Tower musket. And in the sphere of morals it is pretty much the same. All those reflections about the little obvious vanities and frivolities of social life which supplied two generations of British essayists, from the "Tatler" to the "Lounger," with an inexhaustible fund of mild satire, have lost their freshness. Our own modes of life have become so complex by comparison, that we pa.s.s over these mere elements to plunge at once into more refined speculations. A modern essayist starts where Addison or Johnson left off. He a.s.sumes that his readers know that procrastination is an evil, and tries to gain a little piquancy by paradoxically pointing out the objections to punctuality. Character, of course, becomes more complex, and requires more delicate modes of a.n.a.lysis. Compare, for example, the most delicate of Pope"s delineations with one of Mr.
Browning"s elaborate psychological studies. Remember how many pages of acute observation are required to set forth Bishop Blougram"s peculiar phase of worldliness, and then turn to Pope"s descriptions of Addison, or Wharton, or Buckingham. Each of those descriptions is, indeed, a masterpiece in its way; the language is inimitably clear and pointed; but the leading thought is obvious, and leads to no intricate problems.
Addison--a.s.suming Pope"s Addison to be the real Addison--might be cold-blooded and jealous; but he had not worked out that elaborate machinery for imposing upon himself and others which is required in a more critical age. He wore a mask, but a mask of simple construction; not one of those complex contrivances of modern invention which are so like the real skin that it requires the acuteness and patience of a scientific observer to detect the difference and point out the nature of the deception. The moral difference between an Addison and a Blougram is as great as the difference between an old stage-coach and a steam-engine, or between the bulls and bears which first received the name in Law"s time and their descendants on the New York Stock Exchange.
If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the comparative simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness of its results. We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such plat.i.tudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which damps our sympathy still more decidedly. Recent investigations have strengthened those suspicions of his honesty which were common even amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin was (very excusably) disgusted by the revelations of his hero"s baseness, till his indignation became a painful burden to himself and his readers. Speaking bluntly, indeed, we admit that lying is a vice, and that Pope was in a small way one of the most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks himself of "equivocating pretty genteelly" in regard to one of his peccadilloes.
Pope"s equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches.
His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in const.i.tution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a "long disease," should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, is indeed not surprising. But Pope"s delight in artifice was something unparalleled.
He could hardly drink tea without "a stratagem," or, as Lady Bolingbroke put it, was a politician about cabbages and turnips; and certainly he did not despise the arts known to politicians on a larger stage. Never, surely, did all the arts of the most skilful diplomacy give rise to a series of intrigues more complex than those which attended the publication of the "P. T. Letters." An ordinary man says that he is obliged to publish by request of friends, and we regard the transparent device as, at most, a venial offence. But in Pope"s hands this simple trick becomes a complex apparatus of plots within plots, which have only been unravelled by the persevering labours of most industrious literary detectives. The whole story was given for the first time at full length in Mr. Elwin"s edition of Pope, and the revelation borders upon the incredible. How Pope became for a time two men; how in one character he worked upon the wretched Curll through mysterious emissaries until the piratical bookseller undertook to publish the letters already privately printed by Pope himself; how Pope in his other character protested vehemently against the publication and disavowed all complicity in the preparations; how he set the House of Lords in motion to suppress the edition; and how, meanwhile, he took ingenious precautions to frustrate the interference which he provoked; how in the course of these manoeuvres his genteel equivocation swelled into lying on the most stupendous scale--all this story, with its various ins and outs, may be now read by those who have the patience. The problem may be suggested to casuists how far the iniquity of a lie should be measured by its immediate purpose, or how far it is aggravated by the enormous ma.s.s of superinc.u.mbent falsehoods which it inevitably brings in its train. We cannot condemn very seriously the affected coyness which tries to conceal a desire for publication under an apparent yielding to extortion; but we must certainly admit that the stomach of any other human being of whom a record has been preserved would have revolted at the thought of wading through such a waste of falsification to secure so paltry an end. Moreover, this is only one instance, and by no means the worst instance, of Pope"s regular practice in such matters. Almost every publication of his life was attended with some sort of mystification pa.s.sing into downright falsehood, and, at times, injurious to the character of his dearest friends. We have to add to this all the cases in which Pope attacked his enemies under feigned names and then disavowed his attacks; the malicious misstatements which he tried to propagate in regard to Addison; and we feel it a positive relief when we are able to acquit him, partially at least, of the worst charge of extorting 1,000_l._ from the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough for the suppression of a satirical pa.s.sage.
Whatever minor pleas may be put forward in extenuation, it certainly cannot be denied that Pope"s practical morality was defective. Genteel equivocation is not one of the Christian graces; and a gentleman convicted at the present day of practices comparable to those in which Pope indulged so freely might find it expedient to take his name off the books of any respectable club. Now, if we take literally Mr. Ruskin"s doctrine that a n.o.ble morality must proceed from a n.o.ble nature, the inference from Pope"s life to his writings is not satisfactory.
We may, indeed, take it for demonstrated that Pope was not one of those men who can be seen from all points of view. There are corners of his nature which will not bear examination. We cannot compare him with such men as Milton, or Cowper, or Wordsworth, whose lives are the n.o.blest commentary on their works. Rather he is one of the numerous cla.s.s in whom the excessive sensibility of genius has generated very serious disease. In more modern days we may fancy that his views would have taken a different turn, and that Pope would have belonged to the Satanic school of writers, and instead of lying enormously, have found relief for his irritated nerves in reviling all that is praised by ordinary mankind. But we must hesitate before pa.s.sing from his acknowledged vices to a summary condemnation of the whole man. Human nature (the remark is not strictly original) is often inconsistent; and, side by side with degrading tendencies, there sometimes lie not only keen powers of intellect, but a genuine love for goodness, benevolence, and even for honesty. Pope is one of those strangely mixed characters which can only be fully delineated by a masterly hand, and Mr. Courthope in the life which concludes the definitive edition of the works has at last performed the task with admirable skill and without too much shrouding his hero"s weaknesses. Meanwhile our pleasure in reading him is much counterbalanced by the suspicion that those pointed aphorisms which he turns out in so admirably polished a form may come only from the lips outwards. Pope, it must be remembered, is essentially a parasitical writer. He was a systematic appropriator--I do not say plagiarist, for the practice seems to be generally commendable--of other men"s thoughts.
His brilliant gems have often been found in some obscure writer, and have become valuable by the patient care with which he has polished and mounted them. We doubt their perfect sincerity because, when he is speaking in his own person, we can often prove him to be at best under a curious delusion. Take, for example, the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,"
which is his most perfect work. Some of the boasts in it are apparently quite justified by the facts. But what are we to say to such a pa.s.sage as this?--
I was not born for courts or great affairs; I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers; Can sleep without a poem in my head, Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead.
Admitting his independence, and not inquiring too closely into his prayers, can we forget that the gentleman who could sleep without a poem in his head called up a servant four times in one night of "the dreadful winter of Forty" to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought? Or what is the value of a professed indifference to Dennis from the man distinguished beyond all other writers for the bitterness of his resentment against all small critics; who disfigured his best poems by his petty vengeance for old attacks; and who could not refrain from sneering at poor Dennis, even in the Prologue which he condescended to write for the benefit of his dying antagonist? Or, again, one can hardly help smiling at his praises of his own hospitality. The dinner which he promises to his friend is to conclude with--
Cheerful healths (your mistress shall have place), And, what"s more rare, a poet shall say grace.
The provision made for the "cheerful healths," as Johnson lets us know, consisted of the remnant of a pint of wine, from which Pope had taken a couple of gla.s.ses, divided amongst two guests. There was evidently no danger of excessive conviviality. And then a grace in which Bolingbroke joined could not have been a very impressive ceremony.
Thus, we are always pursued, in reading Pope, by disagreeable misgivings. We don"t know what comes from the heart, and what from the lips: when the real man is speaking, and when we are only listening to old commonplaces skilfully vamped. There is always, if we please, a bad interpretation to be placed upon his finest sentiments. His indignation against the vicious is confused with his hatred of personal enemies; he protests most loudly that he is honest when he is "equivocating most genteelly;" his independence may be called selfishness or avarice; his toleration simple indifference; and even his affection for his friends a decorous fiction, which will never lead him to the slightest sacrifice of his own vanity or comfort. A critic of the highest order is provided with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the sham sentiments from the true. As a banker"s clerk can tell a bad coin by its ring on the counter, without need of a testing apparatus, the true critic can instinctively estimate the amount of bullion in Pope"s epigrammatic tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is as rare as poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content to take their weights and measures, or, in other words, to test their first impressions, by such external evidence as is available. They must proceed cautiously in these delicate matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid intuition, patiently enquire what light is thrown upon Pope"s sincerity by the recorded events of his life, and a careful cross-examination of the various witnesses to his character. They must, indeed, keep in mind Mr. Ruskin"s excellent canon--that good fruit, even in moralising, can only be borne by a good tree. Where Pope has succeeded in casting into enduring form some valuable moral sentiment, we may therefore give him credit for having at least felt it sincerely. If he did not always act upon it, the weakness is not peculiar to Pope. Time, indeed, has partly done the work for us. In Pope, more than in almost any other writer, the grain has sifted itself from the chaff. The jewels have remained after the flimsy embroidery in which they were fixed has fallen into decay.
Such a result was natural from his mode of composition. He caught at some inspiration of the moment; he cast it roughly into form; brooded over it; retouched it again and again; and when he had brought it to the very highest polish of which his art was capable, placed it in a pigeon-hole to be fitted, when the opportunity offered, into an appropriate corner of his mosaic-work. We can see him at work, for example, in the pa.s.sage about Addison and the celebrated concluding couplet. The epigrams in which his poetry abounds have obviously been composed in the same fashion, for that "masterpiece of man," as South is made to call it in the "Dunciad," is only produced in perfection when the labour which would have made an ode has been concentrated upon a couple of lines. There is a celebrated recipe for dressing a lark, if we remember rightly, in which the lark is placed inside a snipe, and the snipe in a woodc.o.c.k, and so on till you come to a turkey, or, if procurable, to an ostrich; then, the ma.s.s having been properly stewed, the superinc.u.mbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery, however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope"s most vigorous expressions as an indication of his strongest convictions, and check their conclusions by his personal history and by the general tendency of his writings, we might succeed in putting together something like a satisfactory statement of the moral system which he expressed forcibly because he believed in it sincerely.
Without following the proofs in detail, let us endeavour to give some statement of the result. What, in fact, did Pope learn by his study of man, such as it was? What does he tell us about the character of human beings and their position in the universe which is either original or marked by the freshness of independent thought? Perhaps the most characteristic vein of reflection is that which is embodied in the "Dunciad." There, at least, we have Pope speaking energetically and sincerely. He really detests, abjures, and abominates as impious and heretical, without a trace of mental reservation, the worship of the great G.o.ddess Dulness. The "Dunciad" does not show the quality in which Pope most excels, that which makes his best satires resemble the quintessence of the most brilliant thought of his most brilliant contemporaries. But it has more energy and continuity than most of his other poetry. The "Dunciad" often flows in a continuous stream of eloquence, instead of dribbling out in little jets of epigram. If there are fewer points, there are more frequent gushes of sustained rhetoric.
Even when Pope condescends--and he condescends much too often--to pelt his antagonists with mere filth, he does it with a touch of boisterous vigour. He laughs out. He catches something from his patron Swift when he
Laughs and shakes in Rabelais"s easy chair.
His lungs seem to be fuller and his voice to lose for the time its tricks of mincing affectation. Here, indeed, there can be no question of insincerity. Pope"s scorn of folly is to be condemned only so far as it was connected with too bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness of his judgment. The only great man whom he has seriously a.s.saulted is Bentley; and to Pope, Bentley was of necessity not the greatest of cla.s.sical critics, but the tasteless mutilator of Milton, and, as we must perhaps add, the object of the hatred of Pope"s particular friends, Atterbury and Warburton. The misfortune is that the more just his satire, the more perishable is its interest; and if we regard the "Dunciad" simply as an a.s.sault upon the vermin who then infested literature, we must consider him as a man who should use a steam-hammer to crack a flea. Unluckily for ourselves, however, it cannot be admitted so easily that Curll and Dennis and the rest had a merely temporary interest. Regarded as types of literary nuisances--and Pope does not condescend in his poetry, though the want is partly supplied in the notes, to indulge in much personal detail--they may be said by cynics to have a more enduring vitality. Of course there is at the present day no such bookseller as Curll, living by piratical invasions of established rights, and pandering to the worst pa.s.sions of ignorant readers; no writer who could be fitly called, like Concanen,
A cold, long-winded native of the deep,
and fitly sentenced to dive where Fleet Ditch
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames;
and most certainly we must deny the present applicability of the note upon "Magazines" compiled by Pope, or rather by Warburton, for the episcopal bludgeon is perceptible in the prose description. They are not at present "the eruption of every miserable scribbler, the sc.u.m of every dirty newspaper, or fragments of fragments picked up from every dirty dunghill ... equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, decency, and common sense." But if the translator of the "Dunciad" into modern phraseology would have some difficulty in finding a head for every cap, there are perhaps some satirical stings which have not quite lost their point. The legitimate drama, so theatrical critics tell us, has not quite shaken off the rivalry of sensational scenery and idiotic burlesque, though possibly we do not produce absurdities equal to that which, as Pope tells us, was actually introduced by Theobald, in which
Nile rises, Heaven descends, and dance on earth G.o.ds, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, A fire, a jig, a battle and a ball, Till one wide conflagration swallows all.
There is still facetiousness which reminds us too forcibly that
Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke,
and even sermons, for which we may apologise on the ground that
Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.