NOTE 3.
Some will urge the intolerance of the Greeks for Christians of the Latin Church. But that did not hinder alliances, and ambitious attempts at such alliances, with their Venetian masters in the most distinguished of the Greek houses. Witness the infernal atrocities by which the Venetian government avenged at times what they viewed as unpardonable presumption. See their own records.
NOTE 4.
It may be remarked, as a general prevailing tendency amongst the great Italian masters of painting, that there is the same conspicuous leaning to regard the gigantic as a vulgar straining after effect. Witness St.
Paul before Agrippa, and St. Paul at Athens; Alexander the Great, or the Archangel Michael. Nowhere throughout the whole world is the opposite defect carried to a more intolerable excess than amongst the low (but we regret to add--and in all but the very highest) of London artists. Many things, which the wretched Von Raumer said of English art, were abominable and malicious falsehooods; circulated not for London, but for Berlin, and Dresden, where English engravers and landscape-painters are too justly prized by the wealthy purchasers nor to be hated by the needy sellers. Indeed to hear Von Raumer"s account of our water-color exhibitions, you would suppose that such men as Turner, Dewint, Prout, and many others, had no merit whatever, and no name except in London. Raumer is not an honest man. But had he fixed his charges on the book-decorators amongst us, what an unlimited field for ridicule the most reasonable! In most sentimental poems, the musing young gentlemen and ladies usually run to seven and eight feet high.
And in a late popular novel connected with the Tower of London, by Mr.
Ainsworth, [which really pushes its falsifications of history to an unpardonable length, as e.g. in the case of the gentle victim lady Jane Grey,] the Spanish amba.s.sador seems to us at least fourteen feet high; and his legs meant for some amba.s.sador who happened to be twenty-seven feet high.
LORD CARLISLE ON POPE.
[1851.]
Lord Carlisle"s recent lecture upon Pope, addressed to an audience of artisans, drew the public attention first of all upon himself--_that_ was inevitable. No man can depart conspicuously from the usages or the apparent sympathies of his own cla.s.s, under whatsoever motive, but that of necessity he will awaken for the _immediate_ and the first result of his act an emotion of curiosity. But all curiosity is allied to the comic, and is not an enn.o.bling emotion, either for him who feels it or for him who is its object. A second, however, and more thoughtful consideration of such an act may redeem it from this vulgarizing taint of oddity. Reflection may satisfy us, as in the present case it _did_ satisfy those persons who were best acquainted with Lord Carlisle"s public character, that this eccentric step had been adopted, not in ostentation, with any view to its eccentricity, but _in spite_ of its eccentricity, and from impulses of large prospective benignity that would not suffer itself to be defeated by the chances of immediate misconstruction.
Whether advantageous, therefore, to Lord Carlisle, or disadvantageous (and in that case, I believe, most unjust), the first impressions derived from this remarkable lecture pointed themselves exclusively to the person of the lecturer--to his general qualifications for such a task, and to his possible motives for undertaking it. n.o.body inquired _what_ it was that the n.o.ble lord had been discussing, so great was every man"s astonishment that before such an audience any n.o.ble lord should have condescended to discuss anything at all. But gradually all wonder subsides--_de jure_, in nine days; and, after this collapse of the primary interest, there was leisure for a secondary interest to gather about the _subject_ of the patrician lecture. Had it any cryptical meaning? Coming from a man so closely connected with the government, could it be open to any hieroglyphic or ulterior interpretations, intelligible to Whigs, and significant to ministerial partisans? Finally, this secondary interest has usurped upon what originally had been a purely personal interest. POPE! What novelty was there, still open to even literary gleaners, about _him_, a man that had been in his grave for one hundred and six years? What _could_ there remain to say on such a theme? And what was it, in fact, that Lord Carlisle _had_ said to his Yorkshire audience?
There was, therefore, a double aspect in the public interest--one looking to the rank of the lecturer, one to the singularity of his theme. There was the curiosity that connected itself with the a.s.sumption of a troublesome duty in the service of the lowest ranks by a volunteer from the highest; and, secondly, there was another curiosity connecting itself with the choice of a subject that had no special reference to this particular generation, and seemed to have no special adaptation to the intellectual capacities of a working audience.
This double aspect of the public surprise suggests a double question.
The volunteer a.s.sumption by a n.o.bleman of this particular office in this particular service may, in the eyes of some people, bear a philosophic value, as though it indicated some changes going on beneath the surface of society in the relations of our English aristocracy to our English laboring body. On the other hand, it will be regarded by mult.i.tudes as the casual caprice of an individual--a caprice of vanity by those who do not know Lord Carlisle"s personal qualities, a caprice of patriotic benevolence by those who do. According to the construction of the case as thus indicated, oscillating between a question of profound revolution moving subterraneously amongst us, and a purely personal question, such a discussion would ascend to the philosophic level, or sink to the level of gossip. The other direction of the public surprise points to a question that will interest a far greater body of thinkers. Whatever judgment may be formed on the general fact that a n.o.bleman of ancient descent has thought fit to come forward as a lecturer to the humblest of his countrymen upon subjects detached from politics, there will yet remain a call for a second judgment upon the fitness of the particular subject selected for a lecture under such remarkable circ.u.mstances. The two questions are entirely disconnected. It is on the latter, viz., the character and pretensions of Pope, as selected by Lord Carlisle for such an inaugural experiment, that I myself feel much interest. Universally it must have been felt as an objection, that such a selection had no special adaptation to the age or to the audience. I say this with no wish to undervalue the lecture, which I understand to have been ably composed, nor the services of the lecturer, whose motives and public character, in common with most of his countrymen, I admire. I speak of it at all only as a public opportunity suddenly laid open for drawing attention to the true pretensions of Pope, as the most brilliant writer of his own cla.s.s in European literature; or, at least, of drawing attention to some characteristics in the most popular section of Pope"s works which hitherto have lurked unnoticed.
This is my object, and none that can be supposed personal to Lord Carlisle. Pope, as the subject of the lecture, and not the earlier question as to the propriety of any lecture at all, under the circ.u.mstances recited, furnishes my _thesis_--that thesis on which the reader will understand me to speak with decision, not with the decision of arrogance, but with that which rightfully belongs to a faithful study of the author. The editors of Pope are not all equally careless, but all are careless; and, under the shelter of this carelessness, the most deep-seated vices of Pope"s moral and satirical sketches have escaped detection, or at least have escaped exposure. These, and the other errors traditionally connected with the rank and valuation of Pope as a cla.s.sic, are what I profess to speak of deliberately and firmly. Meantime, to the extent of a few sentences, I will take the liberty of suggesting, rather than delivering, an opinion upon the other question, viz., the prudence in a man holding Lord Carlisle"s rank of lecturing at all to any public audience. But on this part of the subject I beg to be understood as speaking doubtfully, conjecturally, and without a sufficient basis of facts.
The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, notoriously a man of great ingenuity, possessing also prodigious fertility of thought, and armed with the rare advantage of being almost demoniacally in earnest, was, however (in some sort of balance to these splendid gifts), tainted to excess with the scrofula of impracticable crotchets. That was the opinion secretly held about him by most of his nearest friends; and it is notorious that he scarcely ever published a pamphlet or contribution to a journal in which he did not contrive to offend all parties, both friendly and hostile, by some ebullition of this capricious character.
He hated, for instance, the High Church with a hatred more than theological; and _that_ would have recommended him to the favorable consideration of many thousands of persons in this realm, the same who have been secretly foremost in the recent outbreak of fanaticism against the Roman Catholics; but unfortunately it happened that, although not hating the Low Church (the self-styled Evangelicals), he despised them so profoundly as to make all alliance between them impossible.
He hated also many individuals; but, not to do him any injustice, most (or perhaps all) of these were people that had been long dead; and amongst them, by the way, was Livy, the historian; whom I distinguish by name, as furnishing, perhaps, the liveliest ill.u.s.tration of the whimsical and all but lunatic excess to which these personal hatreds were sometimes pushed; for it is a fact that, when the course of an Italian tour had brought him unavoidably to the birthplace of Livy, Dr. Arnold felicitated himself upon having borne the air of that city--in fact, upon having survived such a collision with the local remembrances of the poor historian, very much in those terms which Mr.
Governor Holwell might have used on finding himself "pretty bobbish"
on the morning after the memorable night in the Black Hole of Calcutta: he could hardly believe that he still lived. [Footnote 1] And yet, how had the eloquent historian trespa.s.sed on his patience and his weak powers of toleration? Livy was certainly not very learned in the archaeologies of his own country; where all men had gone astray, _he_ went astray. And in geography, as regarded the Italian movements of Hannibal, he erred with his eyes open. But these were no objects of Livy"s ambition: what he aspired to do was, to tell the story, "the tale divine," of Roman energy and perseverance; and _he so_ told it that no man, as regards the mere artifices of narration, would ever have presumed to tell it after him. I cite this particular case as ill.u.s.trating the furnace-heat of Dr. Arnold"s antipathies, unless where some consideration of kindness and Christian charity interposed to temper his fury. This check naturally offered itself only with regard to individuals: and therefore, in dealing with inst.i.tutions, he acknowledged no check at all, but gave full swing to the license of his wrath. Amongst our own inst.i.tutions, that one which he seems most profoundly to have hated was our n.o.bility; or, speaking more generally, our aristocracy. Some deadly aboriginal schism he seems to have imagined between this order and the democratic orders; some predestined feud as between the head of the serpent and the heel of man.
Accordingly, as one of the means most clamorously invoked by our social position for averting some dreadful convulsion constantly brooding over England, he insists upon a closer approximation between our highest cla.s.ses and our lowest. Especially he seems to think that the peasantry needed to be conciliated by more familiar intercourse, or more open expressions of interest in their concerns, and by domiciliary visits not offered in too oppressive a spirit of condescension. But the close observer of our social condition will differ with Dr. Arnold at starting, as to the facts. The ancient territorial n.o.bility are not those who offend by _hauteur_. On the contrary, a spirit of parental kindness marks the intercourse of the old authentic aristocracy with their dependants, and especially with the two cla.s.ses of peasants on their own estates, and their domestic servants. [Footnote 2] Those who _really_ offend on this point, are the _nouveaux riches_--the _parvenus_. And yet it would be great injustice to say that even these offend habitually. No laws of cla.s.sification are so false as those which originate in human scurrility. Aldermen, until very lately, were by an old traditional scurrility so proverbially cla.s.sed as gluttons and cormorants, hovering over dinner-tables, with no other characteristics whatever, or openings to any redeeming qualities, that men became as seriously perplexed in our days at meeting an eloquent, enlightened, and accomplished alderman, as they would have been by an introduction to a benevolent cut-throat, or a patriotic incendiary.
The same thing happened in ancient days. Quite as obstinate as any modern prejudice against a London alderman was the old Attic prejudice against the natives of Boeotia. Originally it had grown up under two causes--first, the animosities incident to neighborhood too close; secondly, the difference of bodily const.i.tution consequent upon a radically different descent. The blood was different; and by a wider difference, perhaps, than that between Celtic and Teutonic. The garrulous Athenian despised the hesitating (but for that reason more reflecting) Boeotian; and this feeling was carried so far, that at last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted with this arrogant a.s.sumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had been bred, or might be bred, amongst those whom they scorned:--
"Summos posse viros, et magna exempla daturos, Vervec.u.m in patria, cra.s.soque sub are nasci."
Now, if there is any similar alienation between our lowest cla.s.ses and our highest, such as Doctor Arnold imagined to exist in England, at least it does not a.s.sume any such character of disgust, nor clothe itself in similar expressions of scorn. Practical jealousy, so far as it exists at all, lies between cla.s.ses much less widely separated. The master manufacturer is sometimes jealous of those amongst his ministerial agents who tread too nearly upon his own traces; he is jealous sometimes of their advances in domestic refinement, he is jealous of their aspirations after a higher education. And on _their_ part, the workmen are apt to regard their masters as having an ultimate interest violently conflicting with their own. In these _strata_ of society there really _are_ symptoms of mutual distrust and hostility.
Capital and the aristocracy of wealth is a standing object of suspicion, of fear, and therefore of angry irritation to the working-cla.s.ses. But as to the aristocracy of rank and high birth, either it is little known to those cla.s.ses, as happens in the most populous hives of our manufacturing industry, and is regarded, therefore, with no positive feeling of any kind, or else, as in the more exclusively agricultural and pastoral districts, is looked up to by the peasantry with blind feelings of reverence as amongst the immemorial monuments of the past-- involved in one common mist of antiquity with the rivers and the hills of the district, with the cathedrals and their own ancestors. A half-religious sentiment of reverence for an old time-out-of-mind family a.s.sociated with some antique residence, hall, or abbey, or castle, is a well-known affection of the rural mind in England; and if in one half it points to an infirmity not far off from legendary superst.i.tion, in the other half it wears the grace of chivalry and legendary romance. Any malignant scoff, therefore, against the peerage of England, such as calling the House of Lords a Hospital of Incurables, has always been a town-bred scurrility, not only never adopted by the simple rural laborer, but not even known to him, or distinctly intelligible supposing it were.
If, therefore, there are great convulsions lying in wait for the framework of our English society; if, and more in sorrow than in hope, some vast attempt may be antic.i.p.ated for recasting the whole of our social organization; and if it is probable that this attempt will commence in the blind wrath of maddened or despairing labor--still there is no ground for thinking, with Dr. Arnold, that this wrath, however blind (unless treacherously misled), would apply itself primarily to the destruction of our old landed aristocracy. It would often find itself grievously in error and self-baffled, even when following its first headlong impulses of revenge; but these are the impulses that it would follow, and none of these would primarily point in that direction. Suppose, however, that the probabilities were different, and that a policy of conciliation were become peculiarly needful to the aristocracy--which is what Dr. Arnold does suppose--in that case might not the course indicated by Lord Carlisle, viz., advancing upon a new line of _intellectual_ communication with the laboring cla.s.ses, be the surest mode of retrieving their affections, as most likely to flatter their self-esteem in its n.o.blest aspirations?
One swallow, it is true, cannot make a summer; and others of the aristocracy must repeat the experiment of Lord Carlisle before any ground can be won for the interest of the order. Even in Lord Carlisle, it might be added, the experiment, if it were not followed up, would not count for more than a caprice. But, on the other hand, think as we may of the probable results, in reference to the _purposes_ of its author, we ought to regard it as a sufficient justification that _thus_ the ice has been broken, that _thus_ a beginning has been made, and _thus_ a sanction established under which no man, if otherwise free to enter upon such a path, needs ever again to find an obstacle in rank the highest or in blood the most ancient. He is authorized by a Howard; and though doubts must still linger about the propriety of such a course, when estimated as a means to a specific end, yet for itself, in reference to the prudery of social decorum, we may now p.r.o.nounce that to lecture without fee or reward before any audience whatever is henceforth privileged by authentic precedent; and, unless adulterating with political partisanship, is consecrated by its own n.o.ble purposes.
Still, if it be urged that these n.o.ble purposes are not ratified and sealed by a solitary experiment, I should answer that undoubtedly Lord Carlisle has placed himself under a silent obligation to renew his generous effort; or, in the event of his failing to do so, will have made himself a debtor to public censure, as one who has planned what he has not been strong enough to accomplish, and has founded a staircase or a portico to a temple yet in the clouds. _Had_ he the ulterior purposes a.s.sumed? Then, by deserting or neglecting them, he puts on record the instability of his own will. Had he _no_ these ulterior purposes? Then, and in that confession, vanishes into vapor the whole dignity of his bold pretensions, as the navigator who first doubled the Cape of Storms [Footnote 3] into an untried sea.
But against a man dealing presumably with a n.o.ble purpose we should reckon n.o.bly. Mean jealousies have no place in circ.u.mstances where, as yet, no meanness has been exhibited. The exaction would be too severe upon Lord Carlisle, if, by one act of kindness, he had pledged himself to a thousand; and if, because once his graciousness had been conspicuous, he were held bound over, in all time coming, to the unintermitting energies of a missionary amongst pagans. The laboring men of Yorkshire have not the clamorous necessities of pagans; and _therefore_ Lord Carlisle has not a.s.sumed the duties of a working missionary. When, by personally coming forward to lecture, he inaugurated a new era of intellectual prospects for the sons of toil, implicitly he promised that he would himself, from time to time, come forward to co-operate with a movement that had owed its birth to his own summons and impulse. But if he cannot honorably release himself from engagements voluntarily a.s.sumed, on the other hand he cannot justly be loaded with the responsibility of a continued partic.i.p.ation in the Details of the work which he has set in motion. By sympathy with the liberal purposes of an intellectual movement, he gives to that movement its initial impulse. Henceforward it suffices if at intervals he continues to it such expressions of the same sympathy as may sustain its original activity, or at least may sustain the credit of his own consistency. It cannot be expected that any person in the circ.u.mstances of Lord Carlisle should continue even intermittingly to lecture. It is enough if, by any other modes of encouragement, or by inciting others to follow the precedent which he has set, he continues to express an unabated interest in the great cause of intellectual progress amongst poor men.
A doubt may be raised, meantime, whether literature is the proper channel into which the intellectual energies of the poor should be directed. For the affirmative it may be urged, that the interest in literature is universal, whilst the interest in science is exceedingly limited. On the other hand, it may truly be retorted that the scientific interest may be artificially extended by culture; and that these two great advantages would in that case arise: 1. That the apparatus of means and instruments is much smaller in the one case than the other; 2. That science opens into a progression of growing interest; whereas literature, having no determined order of advance, and offering no regular succession of stages to the student, does not with the same certainty secure a self-maintaining growth of pleasureable excitement.
Some remedy, however, will be applied to this last evil, if a regular plan of _study_ should ever be devised for literature, and perhaps that may be found not impossible.
But now, coming to the second question, namely, this question, _If any lecture at all, why upon Pope?_ We may see reason to think that Lord Carlisle was in error. To make a choice which is not altogether the best, will not of necessity argue an error; because much must be allowed to const.i.tutional differences of judgment or of sensibility, which may be all equally right as against any philosophic attempts to prove any one of them wrong. And a lecturer who is possibly aware of not having made the choice which was absolutely best, may defend himself upon the ground that accidental advantages of a personal kind, such as previous familiarity with the subject, or preconformity of taste to the characteristic qualities of the author selected, may have qualified him to lecture on that theme with more effect and with more benefit, than upon a theme confessedly higher but less tractable for himself with his own peculiar preparations. Here, however, the case is different. What might be no error _per se_, becomes one if the special circ.u.mstances of the situation show it to have rested upon a deep misconception. Given the audience which Lord Carlisle had before him, the audience which he antic.i.p.ated, and which he proposed to himself as the modulating law for the quality and style of his lecture, that same choice becomes a profound error which, for a different audience, more refined or more miscellaneous, would have been no error at all.
I do not fear that I shall offend Lord Carlisle, so upright as he has always shown himself, so manly, and so faithful to his own views of truth, by repeating firmly that such a choice in such a situation argues a deep misconception of the true intellectual agencies by which Pope acts as a power in literature, and of the moral relations to general human sensibilities or _universal_ nature which such agencies involve. My belief is, that, if a prize had been offered for a bad and malappropriate subject, none worse could have been suggested; unless, perhaps, it had been the Letters of Madame de Sevigne, or the Fables of La Fontaine; in both of which cases the delicacies and subtle felicities of treatment are even more microscopic, more shy, and more inapprehensible without a special training and culture, than in Pope, And in this point they all agree, with no great difference amongst the three, that the sort of culture which forms the previous condition for enjoying them (a _conditio sine qua non_) is not of a kind to be won from study. Even of _that_ a mechanic artisan, whose daily bread depends upon his labor, cannot have had much. But the dedication of a life to books would here avail but litttle. What is needed must be the sort of culture won from complex social intercourse; and of, this the laboring artisan can have had none at all. Even the higher ranks, during those stages of society when social meetings are difficult, are rare, and consequently have their whole intellectual opportunities exhausted in forms and elaborate ceremonials, are not able to develope what may be called the social sense, that living, trembling sensibility to the expressions and the electric changes of human thought and feeling, so infinite as they are potentially, and as they will show themselves to be when the intercourse is free, is sudden, is spontaneous, and therefore has not leisure to be false, amongst all varieties of combination as to s.e.x, age, rank, position, and personal accomplishments. Up to the time of James the First, society amongst ourselves wore a picturesque and even a scenical exterior: but the inner life and its pulsations had not then been revealed. Great pa.s.sions were required to stir the freezing waters; so that certain kinds of comedy, in which such pa.s.sions are inappropriate, could not then exist.
And partly to this case it was amongst the early Romans, united with the almost Asiatic seclusion from social meetings of female influence or in any virtual sense even of female presence, that we must ascribe the meagreness of the true social interest, and of the dialogue exhibited by Plautus. Two separate frosts, during a century otherwise so full of movement as the sixteenth in England, repressed and killed all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;" and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament--not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social meetings of this period, even for purposes of pleasure, were true _solemnities_. With usage of politeness that laid a weight of silence and delay upon every movement of a social company, rapid motion of thought or fancy became in a literal sense _physically_ impossible.
Not until, first, our _capital_ city had prodigiously expanded; not until, secondly, our representative system had so unfolded its tendencies as to bring _politics_ within the lawful privilege of ordinary conversation; not until, thirdly, the expansions of _commerce_ had forced us into the continual necessity of talking with strangers; fourthly, not until all these changes, gradually breaking up the repulsion which separated our ungarrulous nation, had been ratified by continual improvements applied to the construction of _roads_ and the arts of _locomotion_, could it be said that such a state of social intercourse existed as would naturalty prompt the mind to seek food for its own intellectual activity in contemplating the phenomena of that intercourse. The primary aspects and the rapid changes of such an object could not arise until the object itself arose. Satire, which follows social intercourse as a shadow follows a body, was chained up till then. In Marston and in Donne (a man yet unappreciated) satire first began to respire freely, but applying itself too much, as in the great dramatists contemporary with Shakspeare, to the exterior play of society. Under Charles II. in the hands of Dryden, and under Anne in those of Pope, the larger and more intellectual sweep of satire showed that social activities were now appreaching to their culmination.
Now, at length, it became evident that a new mode of pleasure had been ripened, and that a great instinct of the intellect had opened for itself an appropriate channel. No longer were social parties the old heraldic solemnities [Footnote 4] enjoined by red letters in the almanac, in which the chief objects were to discharge some arrear of ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to _apricate_ and refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation, which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal a.s.semblages had a.s.sumed their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect--otherwise expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through the fine arts, and through scenic representations. A new world of pleasures had opened itself, offering new subjects of activity to the intellect, but also presupposing a new discipline and experience for enjoying them.
Precisely at this point starts off what I presume to think the great error of Lord Carlisle. He postulates as if it were a mere gift of inevitable instinct, what too certainly is the gift, and the tardy gift, of training; which training, again, is not to be won from efforts of study, but is in the nature of a slow deposition--or sediment, as it were--from a constant, perhaps at the moment, an unconscious, experience. Apparently the error is twofold: first, an oversight, in which it is probable that, without altogether overlooking the truth, Lord Carlisle allowed to it a very insufficient emphasis; but, secondly, a positive misconception of a broad character. The oversight is probably his own, and originating in a general habit of too large and liberal concession; but the misconception, I suspect, that he owes to another.
First, concerning the first. It is evidently a.s.sumed, in the adoption of Pope for his subject, that mechanic artists, as a body, are capable of appreciating Pope. I deny it; and in this I offer them no affront.
If they cannot enjoy, or if often they cannot so much as understand Pope, on the other hand they can both enjoy and understand a far greater poet. It is no insult; but, on the contrary, it is often a secret compliment to the simplicity and the _breadth_ of a man"s intellectual nature that he cannot enter into the artificial, the tortuous, the conventional. Many a rude mind has comprehended to the full, both Milton in his elementary grandeur and Shakspeare in his impa.s.sioned depths, that could not have even dimly guessed at the meaning of a situation in comedy where the comic rested upon arbitrary rules and conventional proprieties. In all satiric sketches of society, even where the direct object may happen to have a catholic intelligibility, there is much amongst the allusions that surround and invest it which no man will ever understand that has not personally mixed in society, or understand without very disproportional commentaries; and even in that case he will not enjoy it. This is true of such compositions as a cla.s.s; but Pope, in reference to this difficulty, is disadvantageously distinguished even amongst his order. Dryden, for instance, is far larger and more capacious in his satire, and in all the genial parts would approach the level of universal sympathies; whereas Pope, besides that the basis of his ridicule is continually too narrow, local, and casual, is rank to utter corruption with a disease far deeper than false refinement or conventionalism. Pardon me, reader, if I use a coa.r.s.e word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect, deliberately a.s.sumes the license of a _liar_. Not only he adopts the language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation is attached was to Pope"s knowledge a pure fabrication, but he also cites, as weighty evidences in the _forum_ of morality, anecdotes which he had gravely transplanted from a jest-book. [Footnote 5] Upon this, however, the most painful feature amongst Pope"s literary habits, I will not dwell, as I shall immediately have occasion to notice it again. I notice it at all only for its too certain effect in limiting the sympathy with Pope"s satiric and moral writings. Absolute truth and simplicity are demanded by all of us as preconditions to any sympathy with moral expressions of anger or intolerance. In all conventionalism there is a philosophic falsehood; and _that_ would be more than sufficient to repel all general sympathy with Pope from the mind of the laboring man, apart from the effect of direct falsification applied to facts, or of fantastic extravagance applied to opinions.
Of this bar to the popularity of Pope, it cannot be supposed that Lord Carlisle was unaware. Doubtless he knew it, but did not allow it the weight which in practice it would be found to deserve. Yet why? Suppose that the unpopular tendency in Pope"s writings were of a nature to be surmounted--upon a sufficient motive arising, suppose it not absolutely impossible to bring Pope within the toleration of working-men, upon whom, however, all that is bad would tell fearfully, and most of Pope"s peculiar brilliancy would absolutely go for nothing--this notwithstanding, suppose the point established that by huge efforts, by pulling and hauling, by coaxing and flattering, and _invita Minerva_, the working-man might at length be _converted_ to Pope; yet, finally, when all was over, what object, what commensurate end, could be alleged in justification of so much preternatural effort? You have got your man into harness, that is true, and in a sullen fashion he pulls at his burden. But, after all, why not have yoked him according to his own original inclinations, and suffered him to pull where he would pull cheerfully? You have quelled a natural resistance, but clearly with so much loss of power to all parties as was spent uponthe resistance; and with what final gain to any party?
The answer to this lies in the second of the errors which I have imputed to Lord Carlisle. The first error was, perhaps, no more than an undervaluation of the truth. The second, if I divine it rightly, rests upon a total misconception, viz., the attribution to Pope of some special authority as a moral teacher. And this, if it were really so, would go far to justify Lord Carlisle in his attempt to fix the attention of literary students amongst the working-cla.s.ses upon the writings of Pope. Rightly he would judge, that some leading cla.s.sic must furnish the central object for the general studies. Each man would have his own separate favorites; but it would be well that the whole community of students should also have some _common_ point of interest and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages.
He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding controversies of the age--he is near enough to speak in a diction but slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a _moral_ poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous cla.s.ses, when is it that this idea has originated? I suspect that it is derived originally from a distinguished man of genius in the last generation, viz., Lord Byron. Amongst the guardians of Lord Byron, one was the late Lord Carlisle; and Lord Byron was, besides, connected by blood with the House of Howard: so that there were natural reasons why a man of such extraordinary intellectual power should early obtain a profound influence over the present Earl of Carlisle. And the prejudice, which I suppose to have been first planted by Lord Byron, would very easily strengthen itself by the general cast of Pope"s topics and pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope is _not_ in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience, might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such a question as that--_power_ undoubtedly, if he had ever been led to use his power, that is, to make up his opinion in _resistance_ to the popular impression. But to this very probably he never had any motive; and the reason why I presume to set up my individual opinion in this case against that of the mult.i.tude is, because I know experimentally that, until a man has a sincere interest in such a question, and sets himself diligently to examine and collate the facts, he will pretty certainly have no t.i.tle to give any verdict on the case.
What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually happened with _him_, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his intentions by the following well-known _mot_. Having mentioned the poets, he compares them with the moralists--"the moralists," these are his words, "the moralists, their betters." How, or in what sense that would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a cla.s.s the "betters"
in a collation with poets as a cla.s.s? It is pretty clear at starting that, _in order_ to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, "to justify the ways of G.o.d to man." _That_ is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine authentically a man must write a "Paradise Lost." The order of precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection.
But without exacting from a man so self-willed as Lord Byron (and at that moment in a great pa.s.sion) any philosophic vigor, it may be worth while, so far as the case concerns Pope, to ponder for one moment upon this invidious comparison, and to expose the fallacy which it conceals.
By the term _moralist_ we indicate two kinds of thinkers, differing as much in quality as a chestnut horse from horse chestnut, and in rank as a Roman proconsul from the nautical consul"s first clerk at a seaport. A clerical moralist in a pulpit, reading a sermon, is a moralist in the sense of one who applies the rules of a known ethical system, viz., that system which is contained in the New Testament, to the ordinary cases of human action. Such a man pretends to no originality--it would be criminal in him to do so; or, if he seeks for novelty in any shape or degree, it is exclusively in the quality of his ill.u.s.trations. But there is another use of the word _moralist_, which indicates an intellectual architect of the first cla.s.s. A Grecian moralist was one who published a new _theory_ of morals--that is, he a.s.sumed some new central principle, from which he endeavored, with more or less success, to derive all the virtues and vices, and thus introduced new relations amongst the keys or elementary gamut of our moral nature. [Footnote 6] For example, the Peripatetic system of morality, that of Aristotle, had for its fundamental principle, that all vices formed one or other of two polar extremes, one pole being in excess, the other in defect; and that the corresponding virtue lay on an equatorial line between these two poles. Here, because the new principle became a law of coercion for the entire system, since it must be carried out harmoniously with regard to every element that could move a question, the difficulties were great, and hardly to be met by mere artifices of ingenuity. The legislative principle needed to be profound and comprehensive; and a moralist in this sense, the founder of an ethical system, really looked something like a great man.
But, valued upon that scale. Pope is n.o.body; or in Newmarket language, if ranked against Chrysippus, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, he would be found "nowhere." He is reduced, therefore, at one blow to the level of a pulpit moralist, or mere applier of moral laws to human actions. And in a function so exceedingly humble, philosophically considered, how could he pretend to precedency in respect of anybody, unless it were the amen clerk, or the s.e.xton?
In reality, however, the case is worse, If a man did really bring all human actions under the light of any moral system whatever, provided that he _could_ do so sternly, justly, and without favor this way or that, he would perform an exemplary service, such as no man ever _has_ performed. And this is what we mean by casuistry, which is the application of a moral principle to the _cases_ arising in human life.
A _case_ means a genuine cla.s.s of human acts, but differentiated in the way that law cases are. For we see that every case in the law courts conforms in the major part to the genuine cla.s.s; but always, or nearly always, it presents some one differential feature peculiar to itself; and the question about it always is, Whether the differential feature is sufficient to take it out of the universal rule, or whether, in fact, it ought not to disturb the incidence of the legal rule? This is what we mean by casuistry. All law in its practical processes is a mode of casuistry. And it is clear that any practical ethics, ethics applied to the realities of life, ought to take the professed shape of casuistry. We do not evade the thing by evading the name. But because casuistry under that name, has been chiefly cultivated by the Roman Catholic Church, we Protestants, with our ridiculous prudery, find a stumbling-block in the very name. This, however, is the only service that _can_ be rendered to morality among us. And nothing approaching to this has been attempted by Pope.
What is it, then, that he _has_ attempted? Certainly he imagines himself to have done something or other in behalf of moral philosophy. For in a well-known couplet he informs us--
"That not in Fancy"s maze he lingered long, But stooped to Truth, and _moralized_ his song."
Upon these lines a lady once made to me this very acute and significant remark. The particular direction, she said, in which Pope fancied that he came upon Truth, showed pretty clearly what sort of truth it was that he searched after. Had he represented Fancy, as often is done, soaring aloft amongst the clouds, then, because Truth must be held to lie in the opposite direction, there might have been pleaded a necessity for _descending_ upon Truth, like one who is looking for mushrooms.
But as Fancy, by good luck, is simply described as roaming about amongst labyrinths, which are always constructed upon dead levels, he had left it free for himself to soar after Truth into the clouds. But _that_ was a mode of truth which Pope cared little for; if _she_ chose to go galavanting amongst the clouds, Pope, for _his_ part, was the last person to follow her. Neither was he the man to go down into a well in search of her. Truth was not liable to wet feet--but Pope _was_.
And he had no such ardor for Truth as would ever lead him to forget that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his const.i.tution.
Whatever service Pope may have meditated to the philosophy of morals, he has certainly performed none. The direct contributions which he offered to this philosophy in his "Essay on Man," are not of a nature to satisfy any party; because at present the whole system may be read into different, and sometimes into opposite meanings, according to the quality of the integrations supplied for filling up the chasms in the chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here, however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections of Pope"s writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they will make no particular discoveries of Pope"s hollowness and treacherous infidelities to the truth, whether as to things or persons; but in such a case neither will they reap any benefit. On the other hand, if they so far carry out Lord Carlisle"s advice as to enter upon the study of Pope in the spirit of earnest students, and so as really to possess themselves of the key to his inner mind, they will rise from their labors not so much in any spirit of grat.i.tude for enlarged and humanizing views of man, as in a spirit of cynical disgust at finding that such views can be so easily counterfeited, and so often virtually betrayed.
[The paper of last month, [Footnote 7] on Lord Carlisle"s lecture, having been written under the oppression of a nervous illness, accompanied by great suffering, may probably enough have been found heavy. Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily _a.s.sumes_ the radical falseness, of Pope, as a notorious fact needing no evidence or ill.u.s.tration. To myself it _did_ not need either. But to any casual reader, whose attention had never been attracted to the circ.u.mstantialities of Pope"s satiric sketches, this a.s.sumption would be startling; and it would have done him a service to offer a few exemplifications of the vice attributed to Pope, both as substantiating the charge, and as investing it with some little amus.e.m.e.nt. This it had been my intention to do at the moment; but being disabled by the illness above-mentioned, I now supply the omission.]
Whom shall we p.r.o.nounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these two: first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern man"s grandest capacities;--secondly, that he should treat his subject with solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a prophet"s burden of impa.s.sioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment"s life within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such shows--
"It _was_, and it is not."
Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by his cla.s.sification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically, an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these const.i.tutional differences between the two are written and are legible the corresponding necessities of "utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to truth in Dryden." Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_ from his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a Papist by apostasy; and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honor; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating.
How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side!--on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to p.r.o.nounce Pope!