Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  ‘In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies Th’ important loss, and heals our weeping eyes, Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart With equal genius, but superior art.’

  Praise can be too strong even for a poet’s digestion, and Somerville, who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.

  John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).

  In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life poetical materials in The Fleece (1757), a poem in four books of blank verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in Grongar Hill (published in the same year as Thomson’s Winter), a poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys. Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:

  ‘Yet time has seen, that lifts the low, And level lays the lofty brow, Has seen this broken pile compleat, Big with the vanity of state; But transient is the smile of fate! A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter’s day,’ Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave.’

  Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for The Country Walk, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he writes:

  ‘I am resolved this charming day In the open field to stray, And have no roof above my head But that whereon the gods do tread. Before the yellow barn I see A beautiful variety Of strutting cocks, advancing stout, And flirting empty chaff about; Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood, And turkeys gobbling for their food; While rustics thrash the wealthy floor, And tempt all to crowd the door.

  * * * * *

  And now into the fields I go, Where thousand flaming flowers glow, And every neighbouring hedge I greet With honey-suckles smelling sweet; Now o’er the daisy meads I stray And meet with, as I pace my way, Sweetly shining on the eye A rivulet gliding smoothly by, Which shows with what an easy tide The moments of the happy glide.’

  An Epistle to a Friend in Town, records his satisfaction with the country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to Dyer’s heart:

  ‘Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain We heap up in sin and in sorrow! Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain! Is not life to be over to-morrow? Then glide on my moments, the few that I have, Smooth-shaded and quiet and even; While gently the body descends to the grave, And the spirit arises to heaven.’

  Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, The Ruins of Rome (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had ‘more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,’ and Wordsworth in a sonnet, To the Poet, John Dyer, writes:

  * * * * * ‘Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced, Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still, A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay, Long as the shepherd’s bleating flock shall stray O’er naked Snowdon’s wide aerial waste; Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!’

  William Shenstone (1714-1764).

  ‘The true rustic style,’ Charles Lamb writes, ‘I think is to be found in Shenstone,’ and he calls his Schoolmistress the ‘prettiest of poems.’

  William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the Judgment of Hercules (1741), and by the Schoolmistress (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson’s quaint description, ‘to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.’ On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and ‘wild shaggy precipice,’ Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the Pastoral Ballad and the Schoolmistress.

  The ballad written in anapæstic verse has an Arcadian grace, against which even Johnson’s robust intellect was not proof. For the following lines he says, ‘if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance with love or nature’:

  ‘When forced the fair nymph to forego, What anguish I felt in my heart! Yet I thought — but it might not be so—’Twas with pain that she saw me depart. She gazed as I slowly withdrew, My path I could hardly discern; So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.

  The Schoolmistress, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character, and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.

  From the verses Written at an Inn in Henley three stanzas may be quoted. The last will be already known to readers familiar with their Boswell:

  ‘I fly from pomp, I fly from plate, I fly from falsehood’s specious grin! Freedom I love, and form I hate, And choose my lodgings at an inn.

  ‘Here, waiter! take my sordid ore, Which lacqueys else might hope to win; It buys what courts have not in store, It buys me freedom at an inn!

  ‘Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round, Where’er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.’

  Unhappily this final verse, which Johnson is said to have repeated ‘with great emotion,’ has lost its application. The modern traveller, instead of being warmly welcomed at an inn, loses his identity and becomes a number.

  Mark Akenside (1721-1770).

  Akenside, who was born at Newcastle, 1721, received his education in Edinburgh, where he was sent to prepare for the ministry among the Dissenters. He, however, changed his mind, became a medical student, and finally, though much disliked for his manners, gained reputation as a physician in London. He is stated to have been excessively stiff and formal, and a frigid stiffness marks the Pleasures of Imagination (1744), a remarkable work considering the writer’s age, since it is without the faults of youth. The poem is founded on Addison’s Essays on the subject in the Spectator, and the poet also owes a considerable debt to Shaftesbury. Akenside’s blank verse has the merits of dignity and strength. But the work is as cold as the author’s manners were said to be, and in spite of what may
be called poetical power, as distinct from a high order of inspiration, the poem leaves the reader unmoved. Pope, who saw it in MS., said that Akenside was ‘no everyday writer,’ which is a just criticism. The Pleasures of Imagination has the merits of careful workmanship and of some originality, but the interest which it at one time excited is not likely to be revived. In 1757 Akenside re-wrote the poem, and I believe that no critic, with the exception of Hazlitt, regards the second attempt as an improvement on the first. His skill in the use of classical imagery is seen to advantage in the Hymn to the Naiads (1746), and he deserves praise, too, for his inscriptions, which are distinguished for conciseness and vigour of style. The poet, it may be added, wrote a great number of odes that lack all, or nearly all, the qualities which should distinguish lyrical poetry. Not a spark of the divine fire warms or illuminates these reputable verses, but the author states that his chief aim was to be correct, and in that he has succeeded.

  David Mallet (1700-1765).

  David Mallet, a friend or acquaintance of Thomson, was contemptible as a man and comparatively insignificant as a poet. He did a large amount of dirty work, and appears to have made a good income by it. The base character of the man was known to Bolingbroke, of whose basest purpose he made him the instrument (see c. vii.). Mallet’s ballad of William and Margaret (1724) is known to many readers, and so is the inferior ballad Edwin and Emma, which was written many years afterwards. In 1728 he published The Excursion, a poem not sufficiently significant to prevent Wordsworth from selecting the same title. In Mallet’s poem on Verbal Criticism (1733), Johnson states that he paid court to Pope, and was rewarded by a travelling tutorship gained through the poet’s influence. In 1731 his tragedy, Eurydice, was acted at Drury Lane. He joined Thomson, as we have said elsewhere, in the composition of the masque of Alfred, and ‘almost wholly changed’ the piece after Thomson’s death. Amyntor and Theodora, a long poem in blank verse, appeared in 1747; Britannia, a masque, in 1753, and Elvira, a tragedy, in 1763. Mallet, who was without qualifications for the task, wrote a life of Lord Bacon. He is said to have obtained a pension for inflaming the mind of the public against Admiral Byng, and thereby hastening his execution.

  In Anderson’s edition of the poets, Mallet’s biography is related with more fulness than by Dr. Johnson, and, after frankly recording acts which fully justify Macaulay’s statement that Mallet’s character was infamous, the writer adds, ‘his integrity in business and in life is unimpeached.’

  Scottish Song-Writers.

  When the poets of England were writing satires, moral essays, and elaborate didactic treatises, the poets of Scotland were singing, in bird-like notes, songs of humour and of love. It is remarkable that the Scotch, the shrewdest, hardest, and most business-like people in these islands, should be so richly endowed with a gift shared and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. The most exquisite of English lyrics fall, where culture is wanting, on regardless ears; the songs of Ramsay and of Burns, of Lady Anne Lindsay and Jane Elliot, of Hogg and Lady Nairne, of Tannahill and Macneil, are household words in Scotland to gentle and simple. A few of the choicest songs of Scotland are due to ladies of rank, but the larger number have sprung from ‘the huts where poor men lie.’ Ramsay was a barber and wig-maker; Burns, as all the world knows, followed the plough; Tannahill was a weaver; Hogg a shepherd; and Robert Nicoll the son of a small farmer, ‘ruined out of house and hold.’

  Allan Ramsay (1686-1758).

  Allan Ramsay was, born at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, in 1686, and was therefore Pope’s senior by two years. He has been called ‘the restorer of Scottish poetry,’ and by his compilation of The Evergreen (1724), and of The Tea-Table Miscellany, published in the same year, he gathered up the wealth of song scattered through the country. The Miscellany extended to four volumes, and before the poet’s death had reached twelve editions. An undying interest belongs to both anthologies. The Evergreen was the first poetry Walter Scott perused, and in a marginal note on his copy of The Tea-Table Miscellany he writes: ‘This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught Hardiknute by heart before I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.’ The ballad Scott loved so well, I may say in passing, was written as a whole or in part by Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727), and belongs therefore either to our period or to the later years of the seventeenth century.

  In 1725 Ramsay published The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral that puts to shame the numerous semi-classical and mythological poems which appeared under that name in England. It is essentially a rural poem, in which the action and language harmonize with what we know, or think we know, of country manners and life. There is neither striking invention in the plot nor much individuality in the characters, but there is poetical harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay’s power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the High Street of Edinburgh, and finally retired to a villa which he had built for himself on the Castle Hill. A good-humoured, care-defying man, he enjoyed life in an easy way, and was not disposed to repine when his road lay down the hill. In an epistle to a friend he writes:

  ‘And now in years and sense grown auld, In ease I like my limbs to fauld, Debts I abhor, and plan to be From shackling trade and dangers free; That I may, loosed frae care and strife, With calmness view the edge of life; And when a full ripe age shall crave, Slide easily into my grave.’

  Among the Scottish song-writers of the period may be mentioned Robert Crawford (1695?-1732), whose love verses, written in a conventional strain, are not without music; Lord Binning (1696-1732), the author of a pretty song called Ungrateful Nanny; and William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754), who wrote the well-known Braes of Yarrow. The most charming of Scottish lyrics belong, however, to a later period of the century than the age of Pope.

  The student who reads the minor poets who figured, in some cases with much applause, during the years of Pope’s ascendency, will be struck by the almost total absence from their works of creative power. These rhymers wrote for the age, and illustrate it, but they did not write for all time, and a small volume would suffice to hold all their verse which is of permanent value. Too often they imagined that by the composition of flowing couplets they proved their title to rank with inspired poets. They confounded the art of verse-making with the divine art of poetry, and were not aware that the substance of their work is prose. Now and then the digger in this mine will discover a small nugget of gold, but for the most part the interest called forth by the poets mentioned in the present chapter, is more historical than poetical, and the reader in passing to the great prose writers of the age will be conscious of gain rather than of loss.

  PART II. THE PROSE WRITERS

  CHAPTER IV. JOSEPH ADDISON — SIR RICHARD STEELE.

  As essayists, the writings of Addison and of Steele are familiar to all readers of eighteenth-century literature. Their work in other departments may be neglected without much loss; but the student who disregards the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian, and some of the essay-volumes which follow in their wake, will be blind to one of the most significant literary features of the period.

  The alliance between Addison and Steele was so intimate, that to judge of one apart from the other, would be fair to neither. It may be well, therefore, after giving the leading facts in the lives of the two friends, to bring them together again while considering the work they accomplished in their literary partnership. One point, I think, will come out clearly in this examination, namely, that while Steele might, under very inferior conditions, have produced the Tatler and Spectator without
Addison, it is highly improbable that Addison, as an essayist, would have existed without Steele.

  Joseph Addison (1672-1719).

  Addison lives on the reputation of his prose works, but he thought that he was a poet, and was regarded as a poet by his contemporaries. It was by verse that he won his earliest reputation, and it was on his Pegasus that he rose to be Secretary of State. He was born on May 1st, 1672, at Milston, in Wiltshire, a parish of which his father was the rector, and was educated at the Charterhouse, where he contracted his memorable friendship with Steele. Thence, in 1687, at the boyish age of fifteen, he went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, and in a few months, thanks to his Latin verses, gained a scholarship at Magdalen, of which college ten years later he became a fellow.

  While at Oxford he acquired, after the fashion of the day, what Johnson calls ‘the trade of a courtier.’ His Latin poem on the Peace of Ryswick was dedicated to Montague, and two years later a pension of £300 a year, gained through Somers and Montague, enabled him to travel, in order that by gaining a knowledge of French and Italian, he might be fitted for the diplomatic service. Some time after his return to England he published his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), and dedicated the volume to Swift, ‘the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age.’

  Addison’s patrons had now lost their power, and he was left to his own exertions. His difficulties did not last long. In 1704 the battle of Blenheim called forth several weak efforts from the poetasters, and as the Government required verse more worthy of the occasion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the recommendation of Montague, now Earl of Halifax, applied to Addison, who, in answer to the appeal, published The Campaign, in 1705. The poem contains the well-known similitude of the angel, and also an apt allusion to the great storm that had lately destroyed fleets and devastated the country.